Eternal God, take these human words which are about to be spoken and make of them a fitting channel for your holy Word. Amen.

Unmentionable: “inappropriate, unfit, or improper for mention in polite conversation; unspeakable; something that is not to be mentioned.” (Websters) Connected to the verb “mention”, which shares etymological roots with the same term that gave us the words “memory” and “remember.” To mention is to “cause to remember something by speaking or writing of it.” (Dictionary of Word Origins) To be unmentionable, then, is to be unremembered. An unmentionable is something we would rather forget.

The two concepts I would like to address today are considered by most to be inappropriate, unfit or improper for polite conversation, things that are not to be mentioned, things that would be better off forgotten. In a day and age where a person’s sex life, drug use, acquisitive greed, personal wealth, or aspirations of power have moved from the category of unmentionables to everyday topics of conversation, what could be left as an unmentionable? What could possibly be too dangerous, too unseemly for polite conversation? There remain two unmentionables that good, polite people avoid at all costs—sin and racism. Why? Because the mention of either risks being inflammatory, insulting, alienating, accusatory, embarrassing, intolerant, insensitive, hypersensitive, threatening, self-righteous, awkward, ignorant or just plain ugly. And rather than risk saying the wrong thing, we say nothing at all, rendering them unmentionable. There is no quicker way to silence the banter at a dinner party than to strike up a conversation about race, and, except for perhaps stewardship, there is no shorter way to kill attendance at a Sunday morning Bible Study than to advertise a study on human sin.

However, sin and racism, and the weight of ideologies behind them, will neither disappear nor be forgotten simply by remaining unmentioned. In fact, silence about these two dangerous concepts often strengthens their power for destruction, because when these words are left on their own, misunderstandings can flourish. So today I’d like to tackle these two unmentionables together, because when you hold them up side by side, I find that each is helpful in illustrating and understanding the other. Looking at racism as a sin has a long history in Christianity. It began back in the abolitionist movement, as our congregational forebears framed the issue of slavery in moral terms. But today I’d like us to look at it both ways—using our Christian conception of sin to understand racism, and using the example of racism to get a clearer understanding of the Christian concept of sin.

To begin, I think sin and racism share three common misconceptions, three widely-held perceptions that are simply inaccurate.

The first misconception is a kind of all-or-nothing, good vs. evil, black or white thinking about sin and racism. Either you are a sinner or you are trying to live a Christian life. Either you are good or evil. Either you are a racist and hate people of a different skin color, or you are not, and you think we should all just get along. This polarized thinking operates in both concepts, and it reduces them both to their extremes—Osama bin Laden arranging to fly planes into the World Trade Center and kill thousands of people, that’s evil, that’s hatred, that’s sin. Hitler plotting to kill millions of Jews or the white southerners lynching thousands of black people, that’s evil, that’s hatred, that’s racism. And it is, profound evil and sin—but the case is not always so clear, and both terms need to stand for something bigger, deeper and more insidious than their most evil extremes.

When we equate sin solely with extreme evil, we cannot account for our everyday disobediences, just as when we equate racism with the extremes of racial violence, we cannot account for the daily slights and prejudices experienced by people of color. Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Alvin Poussaint calls these “death by a thousand nicks…the things you experience every day that then add up and take their toll.” This week, I participated in a meeting through GBIO with Haitian nursing home workers talking about discrimination in the workplace, and I heard a story that illustrates this point. A Haitian woman was hired to work at a local hospital. She and all the others in her orientation class took a basic skills test, where she scored a 96. A new colleague who was white showed her a copy of her test, which scored only 82. Beneath the test this Haitian woman also glimpsed a contract letter, indicating that this white colleague was getting paid at a higher rate for the same job, in spite of six months less experience and a significantly lower test score.

This Haitian woman was brave, however, and immediately excused herself from the classroom to go to the ladies room, called her supervisor on her cellular phone and demanded equal wages. The supervisor said the difference lay in the fact the white woman had a college degree, to which the Haitian woman replied that she did too—from Haiti. It was clearly listed on her application. After a series of phone calls, where she was quizzed repeatedly and the veracity of her degree questioned, the supervisor did grant her the same entry-level salary as her white colleague. This supervisor is no Hitler, but clearly there is a subtle racial prejudice operating in his decisions. This kind of racism, this kind of sin, cannot be accounted for when we only see extremes.

This story also raises the question—did that supervisor intend to discriminate against this Haitian woman on the basis of her race or national origin? It’s impossible to know—but probably not. Do his intentions matter? Whatever he intended, this Haitian woman felt the effects as racism. And there we have the second misconception shared by both sin and racism—that they require intention at all. We often believe that in order to qualify as a sinner, you must consciously decide to do bad things. In order to be a racist, you must actively intend to practice hatred and discrimination toward others. Like Adam eating the apple, or the prodigal son engaged in wild living, one must knowingly choose the path of sin. Like George Wallace proclaiming “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” one must knowingly choose the path of racial discrimination. Operating under this misconception, I believe most of us would have a hard time understanding ourselves as sinners or racists, either one. After all, we are no George Wallace, no prodigal sons and daughters. We go to church regularly and try to be good people; we even go to a liberal protestant church with a commitment to being inclusive of all people. If sin and racism require our intent, well, throughout most of our lives, we will qualify neither as sinners nor racists. And yet how many of us recognize in ourselves the same notions active in that supervisor?

Just recently there was a glaring public example of how one’s intent need not be racial hatred in order for one’s actions to contain racial prejudice. A few weeks back, Senator Hillary Clinton made a joke at a public speech about Mahatma Gandhi as an Indian gas station owner. It was a huge gaffe—a joke based on racial stereotypes. Did she intend to be racist? Did she desire to exclude or discriminate? Nothing in her long career as an advocate for racial harmony would indicate that she felt hatred against Indian Americans, or that she desired to belittle or stereotype them. But it happened, in an instant, and you could almost see her face right after the words came out of her mouth, she wanted to reach out, grab them, and shove them back in again. I do not believe she went on stage with the intent to commit the sin of racism—it was a mistake. I am confident that if we think back over our lives, each one of us has made similar mistakes, actions we wish we could undo, words we wish we could take back, racist or otherwise. We didn’t intend to do harm, but despite our best efforts at good behavior, it happened. The unintentional racist stereotype shows how sin can so often happen in spite of good intentions.

Paul’s words from Romans start to make a lot of sense in this context: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. … I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. … For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” In a sermon entitled “Unfulfilled Dreams,” Martin Luther King, Jr. himself describes this feeling as a civil war, going on inside the life of every human being, a “tension in the heart of human nature.” This is actually one of the classic definitions of sin, tracing its roots back to the Old English archery field, when “to sin” was to miss the mark, to misfire, to make a mistake. Sin, then, is not necessarily the intent to do evil, and racism is not necessarily an intention to be hateful or discriminatory. Sin is bigger than that—it takes into account the broader impact and consequences of our actions, our human mistakes and imperfections, regardless of our best intentions.

This leads to the third misconception, which is about how we respond to this sense of imperfection and fallibility—with guilt. There’s a lot of guilt associated with both sin and racism. Guilt, at its most basic definition, simply means culpability, acknowledging responsibility for our own actions, whether or not the consequences of those actions were what we intended. The misconception is that overcoming sin or overcoming racism must begin with a feeling of remorse, regret, even obligation. We misunderstand that admitting we make mistakes, that we sin, does not consign us to live always wracked with guilt, coping only by our constant engagement in good works, to make up for our guilty selves by somehow balancing the scales between our good deeds and faulty ones. Bono, the lead singer of the band U2, now famous not only for his music but for his worldwide efforts to eliminate the debts of poor countries and advocate for HIV and AIDS care and prevention, credits all his work to a sense of guilt: “I’m a spoiled rotten, rich rock star who is putting his Catholic guilt to work.” Much of the conversation among white people about racism also centers in guilt. This phenomenon of “white guilt” has some defiantly asserting they feel no guilt for acts committed by someone else before they were born, while others are so haunted by guilt about the privileges they have inherited based on the color of their skin that they cannot talk about race at all, out of embarrassment at the legacy of racism and the ways they have benefited from it. Race and racism become unmentionable.

We need to understand the ways our sin causes harm to ourselves and others, like we need to understand the ways our racial prejudices cause harm to ourselves and others. But it is not about God wanting us to feel ashamed of ourselves, nor is it about targeted minorities hoping privileged groups will be forever mired in guilt and obligation over past and present injustices. This is a misconception. But if we look at it through another classic definition of sin, it becomes clearer. Many people understand sin is separation—the actions and patterns in our lives that alienate us from God and from one another. While guilt can function as a healthy alarm bell that something is awry in our actions, that we might be causing harm in some way—when we cling to guilt or when we are overcome by it, guilt itself becomes an obstacle to closeness with God and one another, a force separating us from one another by making one party guilty and the other innocent, one good and the other bad. Shelby Steele, a Stanford University professor, talks about how white guilt causes separation instead of healing across racial lines. He defines white guilt as, “a vacuum of moral authority in matters of race, equality, and opportunity that comes from the association of mere white skin with America's historical racism,” and goes on to say that “Under this stigma white individuals and American institutions must perpetually prove a negative--that they are not racist--to gain enough authority to function in matters of race, equality, and opportunity.” In other words, they must constantly work to balance the scales, to make up for their past bad deeds with an ever-fresh supply of good ones, driven onward only by the plague of guilt. This perpetual sense of obligation only causes further separation, because of a constant fear of getting it wrong. Our understanding of sin and racism must move beyond guilt if we are to approach healing, friendship and mutuality.

Let’s recap then. First of all, sin and racism do not only occur in the form of extreme evil. To believe we are trapped by sin and racism is not to believe that God created us as evil people, it is simply to acknowledge the complexity and finitude of our own lives, the subtle ways our actions impact others. Second, neither sinful nor racist acts require our explicit intention to commit them. Just as racial stereotypes can shape our actions even when we try our best to avoid them, harmful consequences can emerge from our good intentions. Sin is a description of the bad acts we knowingly commit, but also includes the many miss-takes, blunders and gaffes that we commit, as well as the harmful consequences of our actions that we don’t even have the insight to recognize. Finally, sin, like racism, produces a lot of guilt. When we get to thinking about all these mistakes, our guilt can plague us, demanding that we compensate for our sins somehow. When we understand sin as those things that separate us from God, just as we understand racism as those prejudices that separate us from other people, we come to see that guilt too can get in the way.

So where does this leave us? I must admit, it leaves me feeling quite a bit like the man afflicted by a legion of demons, described today in Luke’s Gospel. As if seized by something outside myself, possessing me and leading me into the wilds. As if bound to the unintended, harmful consequences of my own actions. As if chained to the assumptions of racism that have been bred into me by our society, establishing cultural filters I cannot easily escape. As if haunted by words that sometimes emerge from my mouth with a voice that is not my own, expressing ideas or beliefs I would rather disavow. As if tormented by guilt over my actions, such that I should be banished from the house and live in the tombs. As if legions of my own mistakes and failings took such strong control that I lost all sense of my own beauty, goodness or worth. Who among us has not at some time or another been afflicted by demons, unable to rest for haunting guilt over an angry word, afraid to show face for lingering effects of an unwise remark? Whether it’s about race or some other mistake or sin, intended or no, who among us has not felt the pain of our own imperfections?

As Paul asks, “Who will rescue me from this bond of death?” As the demoniac cries, “I beg you, do not torment me.” But there is grace. “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord,” says Paul. The message of hope at the heart of Christianity is that we are not to be imprisoned forever by these demons. As Jesus healed the demoniac, Christ can and will heal us. While we, like all humanity, find ourselves sometimes mired in troubling circumstances, alienated from God and from one another, troubled by our imperfections, God does not leave us to our own devices. Christ comes to expel the demons by promising forgiveness of sins, grace unbounded, reconciliation and healing for all humanity. Martin Luther King, Jr. continues his sermon on the “Unfulfilled Dreams” by pointing to this sign of hope. He says, “God does not judge us by the separate incidents or the separate mistakes that we make, but by the total bent of our lives. In the final analysis, God knows that his children are weak and they are frail. In the final analysis, what God requires is that your heart is right. Salvation isn’t reaching the destination of absolute morality, but it’s being in the process and on the right road. … If you’re on the right road, God has the power, and God has something called Grace. And God puts you where you ought to be.”

It is in God’s grace that we too can move beyond our guilt over sin or racism, we can find healing from our mistakes and imperfections, we can overcome our separations from God and one another. In the space of God’s grace, even unmentionables lose their power to destroy. “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Amen.