Article is adapted from a Homily by Fr. Gregory Walgenbach for the 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 25, 2024
Towards the end of the summer I was among a group of pilgrims put together from the Diocese of Orange who spent three powerful and life-changing days in Selma, Montgomery, and Birmingham, Alabama. Among the highlights were visiting the parsonage (house) where Rev. Dr. King and his family lived during his time as Pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the sites of the powerful organizing for justice of Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth at Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham and through the creation of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, as well as the privilege of sitting at the feet of other ‘footsoldiers’ (so named for all the marching they did) for justice who walked and organized with Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, and others.
We were able to walk on sacred ground, where blood had been spilled, and saints of the civil rights movement had walked. These people of courage spoke the truth in the face the gods of the country in which they were dwelling: white supremacy, the almighty dollar, greed and economic exploitation, a civilization of exclusion and exploitation and death rather than life.
Death in the form of lynching, bombings, cruelty, support and even eagerness for violence against blacks and other people of color (that is, those who could not become ‘white’). City commissioner Bull Connor was a bully who, along with wealthy whites ruling the city of Birmingham, deputized white folks into the enforcement of segregation and brutality. He was the one who released dogs and high powered fire hoses that ripped the skin off young people protesting. He refused to release the grip of his violent rule and when the people were able to elect a different man mayor he refused to leave office and set up a parallel city government for a time!
This violence defended greed and economic exploitation supporting massive extractive and productive industries in the form of slave labor, then convict leasing (a form of slavery defended in the 13th Amendment to the constitution), and as well as later and contemporary forms of prison labor, immigrant detention, and migrant worker exploitation. Our struggles are connected. One sign at the Legacy Museum read: “No Negroes. No dogs. No Mexicans.”
All of this resulted in and in turn perpetuated a system of white supremacy, a caste system by which wealthy whites, and the poor whites and others who allied with them, dominate blacks and others deemed to be less than human, unintelligent, inferior creatures and therefore subject to all kinds of humiliations, segregation, subjugation, and killing. It’s what allows comments from candidates for office and viral social media soundbites to find purchase in our hearts. Why are we ready to believe the outrageous and dehumanizing lies about Hatian brothers and sisters? Why do we still struggle to recognize that black lives matter?
After slavery was abolished convict leasing took its place as millions were arbitrarily imprisoned and used for their labor under the 13th amendment once again. Other forms of domination were instituted like poll taxes, forcing everyone to pay large fees to vote with express intention to keep blacks from voting. Literacy tests were also enforced in which, in addition to the kinds of questions you might find on a citizenship test today, folks would be asked how many jelly beans are in this jar, or how many bubbles in this bar of soap. Black people were systematically kept from voting.
Later, through the war on drugs, the U.S. perpetrated the mass incarceration of black men that has been labeled the New Jim Crow. Today 1 in 3 black boys can expect to be sentenced to prison; 1 in 6 latino boys; 1 in 17 white boys. We can look at similar discrepancies in maternal health, in nutrition and food, in jobs, on and on… All this is why the U.S. Bishops have called racism a life issue and a sin that we must take with the utmost seriousness and must work to overcome.
These injustices also reject and even perversely imitate the one atoning (at-one-ing) sacrifice of Jesus for the world by teaching us to become comfortable seeking peace and unity by sacrificing others. We are taught to join in scapegoating others if we think that it can achieve some kind of (false) ‘peace’ in our communities. Instead, on the cross Jesus reveals the scandal of our scapegoating, violence, sin, and death and comes all the way down in solidarity with the crucified peoples of the world.
The Eucharistic solidarity to which we are called requires sustained attention to the suffering of others, to our own suffering, and to how we can cause suffering and harm to others, both directly and in our support for unjust systems of oppression.
How can we gaze upon and receive our Crucified and Risen Lord in the Eucharist and refuse the cries of those discarded and hidden away in our prisons (disproportionately black and brown), turn our backs on migrant sisters and brothers in need, fail to offer hospitality, services, healthcare, food, and other support for women and children in need? How can we refuse to be the kind of people who take care of one another, including through social systems of support, when we find ourselves in particularly vulnerable moments, unhoused, pregnant, terminally ill, seeking asylum, leaving only death as ultimate ‘solutions’? Why do some of us seem ok with these outcomes for some while fighting for others, or perhaps mostly for ourselves or people like us/me?
Jesus refuses to leave any of us behind and would not be turned around from his love for each of us. His love, his life, his flesh he has given for the life of the world. At the Eucharistic table there is foretaste and sign of God’s life-giving food for all. The sacred mysteries we celebrate unite us in the truth of our common humanity. Sanitation workers marched with signs that said “I am a man.” At Mass we proclaim: Behold the man. Behold the Lamb.
You and I are called, even compelled today to repent from racism and all forms of injustice and to respond to the needs of our brothers and sisters in distress. We are called to be salt and light in a world where systems are not so much broken as functioning as intended to inflict harm, reject public good and social support, divide communities, exploit workers, extract wealth into the hands of a few. It doesn’t have to be this way and it can change, and it’s going to take people of courage who leave our comfort zones, our prejudices, our ideological blind spots aside, and keep our eyes on the prize: the just mercy of the Lamb who shares himself with us so that we can do the same for one another.