2/14/65

Scripture: Read Matthew 19: 13-30.

Text: Matthew 19: 19b; "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

Let us begin today with one of the sayings of Jesus. A rather fine-appearing young man had asked him: "Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?" The Teacher, Jesus, enumerated several of the Hebrew commandments, concluding with the words: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." So we see that Jesus was quoting from the Old Testament Scriptures. It is a provocative statement, worth quite a bit of meditation. "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." It is not an easy saying. How is one to interpret that?

Bishop Francis Ensley [Methodist; Ohio] suggests two ways of interpreting this statement. (1) He calls the first way "quantitative," as if to read "You shall love your neighbor as much as yourself." In light of this interpretation, then I will give as much concern for the other man’s welfare as I do for my own. I will seek his happiness as earnestly as I seek my own. I shall try to shield him from hurts as truly as I seek to escape hurt myself. I must regard his well-being as being just as essential as my well-being. His good is intrinsically as valuable as my own good. The guiding principle is fifty-fifty equality all the way round.

It seems right, and laudable, then, that I should regard my neighbor’s rights to be quite as worthy of regard as my own. Of course this could mean "separate but equal" facilities! If a bi-racial community spends equal amounts, per pupil, on Negro schools and Caucasian schools, then my conscience does not need (under this interpretation) to be troubled about segregation. If the Jim Crow car on the railway is as modern and as well-furnished as my own, I, a Caucasian, do not need to ride with my Negro neighbor, nor he with me. For I tell myself that I am doing as well by him as I am doing by myself. Of course, there are those who will persist in pointing out that, actually, the facilities provided for colored folk are seldom as fully adequate as those provided for white people. But why bring that up? Right now we are discussing the theoretical ideal, are we not? If my colored brother and sister have plenty to eat, and I have plenty to eat, do we have to eat together? Obviously not, under this quantitative hypothesis.

It is an odd circumstance that the food on many a luxuriously-appointed railway dining car table is served by colored hands. It may even be cooked by a Negro chef in some cases. I have dined in a Missouri home where Negro servants served the most delicious meal imaginable! Those Southern biscuits, mixed and baked by a Negro cook, and served quietly and correctly at my left by a Negro waitress who is obviously a kind of family institution --- marvelous! --- delicious! --- satisfying! --- They melt in your mouth! Why should I get "chilly" over the foolishly-imagined thought of sitting next to that Negro woman at table and receiving the biscuit plate passed by her from her place on a dining chair? Foolish thought, in light of my quantitative thesis that, so long as she and I have equal opportunity to eat enough food, we don’t have to share the same table --- or do we? Of course we white Christians may not fully have attained to this quantitative kind of "love." But if it is Christian, we can keep gradually working toward it, can’t we? Or is this what Christ died to make real?

(2) There is a second possible interpretation of our text which the bishop calls "qualitative." "you shall love your neighbor as yourself" --- not as much as yourself, but as though he were yourself. It means tying my understanding and imagination to his life so realistically that I feel things as he does. It means experiencing the world as he does -- at least trying to. I means looking at the world through his eyes, hearing what he hears. It means trying to comprehend his reasons for doing what he does. It means tuning in on his aspirations. This kind of Christian love presupposes an imaginative sympathy with the joys, the pains, and the hopes of every man who crosses our path.

Christian love does not necessarily signify that we feel precisely the same toward every casual acquaintance as we feel toward the members of our own flesh-and-blood families. Remember that it was Jesus who was saying, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" and who even enjoined his followers to "love your enemies." And yet it hardly seems likely that, as he hung crucified on the cross, he felt the same tenderness toward the enemies who had nailed him up there as he did toward his devoted mother, weeping near his feet. Christian love does not mean that we always, or necessarily, approve the other man. It does not mean a sentiment which makes discipline or law unnecessary. Christian love does not mean that we are going out as candidates for marriage with anyone whom we meet -- "because there are, after all, no differences." Oh yes, there are differences --- but they are not necessarily all related to skin color. One of the frequently used "red herrings" that is so often dragged across the path of discussion as one expresses his views on inter-racial issues is the "clincher question": "Would you want your daughter to marry one?" (Meaning -- American Indian, Negro, Pacific Islander, Asian, Russian, or perhaps Spanish or British cockney.)

If that question were thrown at me, I might answer: "Of course I do not want my daughter, or my niece to marry a Hawaiian, or a Negro, or a South American Indian --- unless he be a very fine man! I don’t want my niece to marry a Swede --- unless he be a good man. I don’t want anyone whom I love to be involved in a marriage which will subject both parties to the abuse that is sometimes heaped upon them as the result of adverse social prejudice." But if aught of my kin or any of my friends, after careful consideration and deliberate choice, should decide that marriage, or business partnership, with one of another race or nation were the right course for them, I think I would back their decision with my own efforts to make it a happy relationship in the community of family, business or church.

Now, please do not misunderstand, or misinterpret, me. I do not go about recommending inter-racial marriages. I have too sober a view of the difficulties that such couples are often forced to endure. But I fail to see anything wrong in it per se, as some profess to see, so long as we can remember that people are people, and that the suitability of one person to another person in a family is not as dependent on racial origin as it is upon loving community of interest, ideals hopes, ambitions and goals.

When someone, knowing that I have lived more than two decades in this chiefly Caucasian community that we call Wisconsin Rapids, says to my wife, "I don’t suppose your husband ever officiated at an interracial marriage," I must hasten to set the record straight! For twelve years, I lived and worked in an interracial community. My first parish was in a community where at least four Oriental nationalities were represented, along with Polynesian, Melanesian, North American and European Caucasians and a few folk of African origin. I was a minister who solemnized numerous weddings ---- usually Japanese with Japanese, Caucasian with Caucasian, Hawaiian with Hawaiian, Korean with Korean, Chinese with Chinese , Portuguese with Portuguese, and so on. But I also had a dozen, to a dozen and a half, of marriages which were interracial; Hawaiian groom with Chinese bride; Japanese groom with Chinese bride (and they were going to have to overcome severe disapproval by the Japanese groom’s family and friends and church!); French groom and Portuguese bride; Chinese groom and Japanese bride; Portuguese groom and Japanese bride; part-Hawaiian groom and Portuguese bride; and so on. So far as I can see, the homes thus established were as good as other homes; the children as fine as other children.

I was pastor to people of half a dozen races in the same church. I tried to understand them and I hoped to be understood by them. I think we all got along with some degree of Christian love, though the differences of opinion that appear among people of all sorts sometimes appeared. I was frequently supply preacher in a Union Church where two Negro families were members along with white Caucasians, Chinese, Hawaiians and Japanese. One of the Negro men was clerk of the church. By vocation, he was a lawyer, and he served as deputy county attorney, enjoying enough popularity to be elected for term after term. His wife was a talented Chinese woman, and their children were sharp, attractive youngsters.

Well, enough of this, except to say that some of my feelings about the people of differing racial origins getting along with each other come not alone from theory but from a measure of experience.

If Bishop Ensley’s suggestion that it takes a qualitative interpretation to make real and vital Jesus’ saying, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" has merit, it points us toward a continual effort to understand how the other fellow feels, and how you or I think we would feel if we were in his circumstances. A true parent has this feeling of understanding. The parent is a distinct entity, physically apart from the child. But everything that affects that child -- his hurts, his blunders, his joys, his hopes, his disappointments, his successes -- affects the parent. A great teacher has this imaginative, understanding power. The biographer of a good professor at Harvard has said that "Copy" Copeland "never needed to be told; he always sensed his pupil’s difficulty." A great artist has this power.

And how wonderfully President Abraham Lincoln had the power of understanding --- of feeling with the other fellow! It was during the Civil War, when the Battle of Shiloh was at its height, that Lincoln hurried to the War Department for conference. There he found the brother and sister-in-law of General Lew Wallace, who was known to be in the thick of the fighting. When she saw the President, the sister-in-law exclaimed, with a sense of relief in her voice, "Oh! We had heard that a General Wallace was among those killed, and we were afraid it was our Wallace. But it wasn’t." Lincoln looked into her face with sad eyes and replied, "Ah, but it was somebody’s Wallace." Everybody’s "Wallace" belonged to Lincoln.

"You shall love your neighbor as yourself" --- love every person as if he were your own.

If we advance this "qualitative" interpretation of Christian love just now with some insistence, it is because it is so conspicuously absent when it comes to the question of race. We "feel for" the other persons of our family or circle of friends. Perhaps we have fellow-feeling for those of our club or social class or lodge. But somehow the capacity for fellow-feeling gets blunted at the color line. We are often guilty of lack of any understanding; guilty of patronizing; guilty of sheer neglect; or unwillingness to understand the burden of spirit which our Negro brethren are carrying. Have we white folk ever projected ourselves into the Negro’s place and asked how some of the experiences which are almost daily for him would feel to us?

It is not easy to do. I confess I have a hard time trying to imagine just how I would feel if I were turned away from a restaurant or a market, where I had the money to pay, just because I was not the right color to be there. Did you ever wonder how it would feel to walk past the barber shop several times, watching till no other customer was waiting for the chair, then going in to find out if the barber would be willing to cut your woolly hair --- for his regular charge, of course!?

You know that there is a certain civility and respect paid to a capable scientist when he comes to the laboratory, or when he appears as a consultant with your company. Can you imagine what it was like for the world-renowned scientist, Dr. George Washington Carver, to have to ride the freight elevator up to the floor where he was to address a learned society? [because the passenger elevators were only for white persons.] If it were Thomas Edison who was compelled to use the freight elevator, wouldn’t the society’s chagrin be almost unbearable? What must it be like to live in some sixty-year-old house that has fallen into serious disrepair, cold in the winter, and hot in the summer, conveniently located to smoking factory and smelly stockyard, because custom will not permit you to live in a suburb, even though you might be able to afford it? Can any of us comprehend the thirst for education that torments some eager souls, while others despair of being able to use the training that they could get?

There is the book and movie, "Black like me", which describes the effort of a white news writer to pass himself as black for a few weeks in order to report what it feels like. But did he do more than scratch the surface of the experience --- since he was coming back to his white status anyway?

It isn’t easy. But we white Americans must try!! Black Americans must try. And black Americans must use all of their imagination to understand what it may be like to be responsibly free of the adverse prejudices that has blighted so much of life.

Let us think a bit on what this qualitative view of Christian love means. In a way it bypasses the question of equality. There is a sense in which every Christian and every patriot ought to be striving for equality for self and for others. There is a kind of equality of opportunity, and equality of access to self-respect that should be the birthright of every soul in this nation; indeed of every citizen of the world! Lincoln sustained the truth, enunciated by others, that all men are created equal.

But there are senses in which people are not equal, nor can be. At least we are not identical (that kind of equality) in physical strength and appearance, in interests and abilities, language and traditions ---- in countless other ways. But if my heart is tinged by Christian love, I don’t ask if my neighbor is my equal, nor if I am his equal. I only try to understand how he feels as though I were in his place. I don’t ask whether the foot is equal to the hand, to use Paul’s figure. I only want to try to be sure that the hand does nothing to hurt or injure the foot, and that both function to make the body grow.

Human beings are different -- it is beside the point to think of them as equal or unequal. To ask whether white is better than brown, or black better than white, is about like asking whether Smith is intrinsically better than Jones. Is straight hair better than curly hair? I don’t know, and I doubt that anyone does, except as a matter of opinionated prejudice.

Gordon Allport, in a careful study of prejudice, says that there are two ingredients of adverse prejudice. (I frequently say that there are good prejudices and bad prejudices. Here we speak of bad prejudices, or adverse prejudices). Allport says that (1) first is the notion that other groups are not equal to our group. "After all my race is superior to the other races. They are not equal to mine." This is one ingredient. (2) The other is the belief that, within the supposed inferior group, all members are equal --- "All Indians are equally lazy;" "All Negroes are equally Negroid;" and so on. Well, a lot of Indians are not lazy. And practically no American Negro is more than fractionally Negroid. In fact the average American Negro has about as much white ancestry as African Negroid ancestry. Most white folk are mixtures, too. I may say that I am of English ancestry. But a more careful honesty admits that I am also Holland Dutch, and perhaps a bit of Scotch and possibly Welsh. My children have a trace of French ancestry and not a little of Scotch-Irish.

We are reminded that Will Rogers used to say, with a sly wink: "I’m one-eighth cigar store Indian; I have just enough white blood in me to make my honesty questionable."

Jesus did not make neighborliness dependent on uniformity or equality. He by-passed that entirely. Not only do we need to bypass the notion of equality with this qualitative concept of love; we need to bring race relations in America into line with the twentieth century.

For a couple of centuries, the black people brought to this country were kept as slaves. They had no formal education. They had opportunity to do only what they were told to do. They had no development of initiative. But this is not true of their descendants. Many of the Negro folk of today are highly trained; some are brilliantly capable. In the day of the post Civil War reconstruction, Negroes may have been an indigent class. Not now! According to the "New York Times," Negro purchasing power is now equal, in this country, to our foreign exports.

There is a Congregational church in Cleveland, mostly Negro, not far from Western Reserve University, which is acknowledged by our denominational leaders to have proportionally more highly trained people -- many of them Ph.D.s in their fields -- than any other church in Ohio. This is a new world! Time has marched on! It is time for a new national attitude! It is time for a new Christian conscience! "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." Know him for what he is.

And how shall we acquire this ability to feel with other people? (1) By "taking thought" as the Bible puts it; by asking why people do as they do; by imagining why they feel as they apparently feel. (2) Secondly, if we will love our neighbor as ourselves, we will associate with him. Association does not guarantee love. Now and then some neighbor may be hard to love. But practically all studies of prejudice show that association reduces adverse prejudice. Recent months have brought a startling realization to White Americans that we have not known our Negro brethren as we thought we knew them. Their resistance has surprised us all. Their willingness to risk danger has been a marvel. The strain in our relationship need not have developed in this way had we associated with one another rather than allowed segregation to destroy the very access we now need to save the tragedy we have been seeing.

Finally, we achieve love for others by realizing the love of God. "We love because He first loved us." [I John 4: 19]. "Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another." [I John 4: 11].

In the long run, human rights rest upon a community of feeling. The first task of the Christian is to weave a fabric of sympathy by which brethren may lose their bonds and be united in stronger fellowship. God help us!

Amen.

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, February 14, 1965.