2023.11.05 | You Have Ancestors
“You Have Ancestors”
Rev. Dr. Arlene K. Nehring
Senior Minister & Executive Director
Eden United Church of Christ, Hayward, California
All Saints Sunday, Nov. 5, 2023
Revelation 7:7-13
My dear friend, the Rev. Ann B. Day, a founding member of the UCC Coalition for Lesbian & Gay Concerns and the UCC Open & Affirming Movement, tells this story about her first experience as a child of attending a family reunion.
She recounted how multiple generations and distant relations gathered in a public park in her hometown of Richmond, Virginia.
The smell of barbeque wafted from every grill. The laughter of children was interspersed with the clanking of playground equipment while the adults readied their picnic site for the noon meal.
Several picnic tables were lined end-to-end to create the buffet line for a smorgasbord rivaling Valhalla. Participants had various reasons for attending the reunion, but all were united by the lure of home cooked foods.
After everyone had filled their plate and the dessert course was laid out, the old folks circled up their chairs for conversations about the good ol’ days, and updates on the wellbeing of those who were MIA.
The elders savored these sacred times, but little Ann—not so much. She had worn herself out on the playground, and was needing a nap.
Instead of grabbing a blanket from the car and taking a rest under a shade tree, Ann started to make a fuss--the kind that caused her grandmother to give her mother “the evil eye.”
The usual shushing didn’t work with Ann at that moment, so her mother simply looked her in the eye, and said, “Do you know what’s wrong with you?”
Little Ann was stymied by the question, and said nothing.
Her mother broke the silence with this pronouncement: “You have ancestors!”
It would be several years before Ann fully understood her mother’s remark, but those present with ears to hear knew exactly what Mrs. Day was talking about. Every person at that reunion was related and shared common ancestors. Everyone had played a role in who she had become—including her 5 year old self who needed a nap, and her maturing self who would perpetually be reflecting on her heritage and discerning what was worthy of emulation and what was in need of confession and amendment in her generation.
Just as 5-year-old Ann would have to study and learn from her heritage as a member of a particular family, so, too, we Christians have to look back at the legacy we’ve received from our ancestors in the faith, and come to terms with that history by assessing our histories, acknowledging our sins of omission and commission, and amending our behavior or charting a new course in our generation--so that we do not repeat the sins of our forebears.
II
I’ll begin with a 17th-century example from our Congregational history that illustrates the need for assessment, apology, and amendment of life for us as a people of faith. And, then, I’m going to call on our liturgist, Aisha Knowles, to share a contemporary example from our local Eden area history that illustrates the need for our assessment, apology, and amendment of life as a community.
Eden Congregational Church was gathered in the summer of 1865, the same year that the Civil War ended. Our founders aligned themselves with the Congregational denomination. Later, the Congregationalists merged with the Christian Churches in 1931 and in 1957 with two other traditions comprised of German and Swiss immigrants to form the United Church of Christ
So, in review, Eden Church traces our heritage all the way back to the Pilgrims who arrived in the so-called “New World” from England and Holland in 1620 and founded Plymouth Colony.
Most of us were taught to revere the Pilgrims for their bravery in sailing across the Atlantic and striving to build “a city on a hill” and “a light to the nations” like Jesus described in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt. 5).
Over time, and through other sources, most of us also learned that our forebears not only brought religious zeal to North America, they also brought prejudices against people they saw as “savages,” and they brought smallpox and other diseases, and weapons of war that devastated the indigenous people of this continent.
So, we as descendents of the Pilgrims have not only been taught cultural pride, we have also learned the importance of cultural humility, including the need to come to terms with the fact that our forebears weren’t always noble or kind.
The Salem Witch Trials, which took place in 1692-3, are notable examples of just how un-Christian some of our forebears in the faith proved to be, including to their own kin. That’s right, we have ancestors!
We members and friends of Eden Church have ancestors who were integral parts of the Salem Witch Trials. Some were charged with witchcraft, i.e., working for the devil. Some were making the charges, and others were judges who declared the verdicts and meted out the punishments for witchcraft, which was often execution on the gallows.
III
According to the early court records stored at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem and the Old South Church in Boston, 150 people were charged and convicted for practicing witchcraft. Twenty-five were sentenced. Nineteen of those were executed. The other six died while in prison.
The accusers and the judges all claimed to be Christians. One of the judges, Samuel Sewall, was a well known member of the Old South Church in Boston. He is remembered both as witch trial judge, and as the only judge who recanted his judgments against the witches.
Eventually, all of the judgments against the witches were overturned, but that day of reckoning came long after the dead (and their accusers and their other adjudicators) had been buried.
Early American historians today generally agree that the so-called witches in Salem were scapegoats. They were blamed for the tragedies and hardships endured by their community, such as a smallpox epidemic, a summer drought, a harsh winter, the stresses of the French-American War, and the first settlers’ fear of losing their properties to later arriving speculators.
Anxiety, fear, and unresolved grief were the real enemies of our Puritan forebears, not the people who some called witches, and who got away with the name calling, because their scapegoats were vulnerable. They were mostly women of a certain age who could think for themselves, an enslaved woman, and a man with physical disabilities.
Playwright Arthur Miller set the Salem Witch Trials in a modern context in his 1957 Broadway play, The Crucible, which was an allegory for “McCarthyism,” which was an overreaction to the fear of communism and its adherents.
Miller’s play (and recent reprises of it) has helped raise awareness in the past century about the contexts in which social hysteria can brew, and it provides examples of how vulnerable people have been scapegoated by influential leaders in the dominant culture to maintain their social power.
The rise and popularity of the 21st century Make America Great Again (MAGA) campaign is a further reminder that our nation and faith tradition continue to be vulnerable to wolves in sheeps’ clothing who scapegoat the vulnerable in order to gain or maintain social control.
Given the negative example of the Salem Witch Trials that our ancestors have provided, we would do well to study the contexts that foster our feelings of anxiety, fear, and grief, and better understand how these feelings can create a frenzy when unmuted, so that we do not repeat the scapegoating legacy that might otherwise seem buried in the distant past.
IV
We are fortunate, today, thanks to the diligent efforts of the Knowles family to be provided with a concrete contemporary example of the type of historical study, analysis, and amendment that are needed right here in the Eden Area.
So that’s why I’ve asked Aisha Knowles, who is one of our elected church leaders, and who is also chairperson of the Russell City Reparative Justice Project Steering Committee, to provide an overview of this important project, and to tell us about the film that she has helped produce, which is called The Apology.
[Aisha Knowles’ statement is on video only]
V
I’m proud to know the Knowles family, and impressed with the work that Aisha and her middle sister, Aiyana, and the whole Task Force have done—not only for the former residents and descendants of Russell City, but for the healing of the Eden Area.
We will host a viewing of The Apology here in the sanctuary, in the not too distant future.
The introduction that Aisha has shared today, the film, and the conversations that are underway are one example of the much needed reparative justice work that must be done in our community and world for our community, our nation, and our world to heal. Amen.