Sermon for September 24, 2023 - The Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost

The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation

“What is truth?” These are perhaps my most favorite words from Pontius Pilate as he interrogates a beaten and nearly broken Jesus. It is such a simple question but, given the charged situation in which it is uttered, it is also deep and complicated. “What is truth?” is a good question for us to wrestle with from time to time. Is truth purely factual divorced of experience and context? What happens when we take into consideration that truth, is inevitably filtered through the lens of our personal experience? What is your truth? What are the concrete things, your truths, upon which you confidently move about this world? For each of us it will be different, just as our experiences in this world are different. And because of that our relationships with God will be different. For those who carry suffering and trauma, our truths will be very different, as it too will color our character and our faith. And at the end of the day, when truth is spoken, when our truths are spoken, when we share our stories, then our comprehension and compassion grow as we come to know each other on a deeper level. And it's within this fertile ground that we take the steps needed towards reconciliation and bring about healing and restoration.

This is exactly what happened yesterday for me when we welcomed Renee McGurry for our educational seminar on steps towards reconciliation hosted by the Outreach Committee. For the 18 or so of us gathered, listening to Renee share a bit of her story was a way for us to unpack and understand complicated history through her experiences and the experiences of her family. Perhaps the biggest takeaway for me from our time together was to learn more, do more, and be better as we seek to support our indigenous neighbors. Essentially, get involved, and be ready to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, because confronting the horrors of the past is uncomfortable and requires courage, which is why we do this together.

And it is that first aspect of learning more that has been a central focus for me since my arrival a year ago. As an American, I was completely oblivious to the struggles and suffering of the indigenous peoples of Canada. Any discussion of colonial Canada and the impact of colonization was always in relation to exploration like the journeys of Cabot, Hudson, and Champlain or in relation to wars, specifically the French and Indian War that preceded the American Revolution. And in both cases only cursory attention was paid to the indigenous peoples. Little did I learn about indigenous cultures, traditions, spirituality, and sovereignty.

It is because of this journey that I realized just how much I didn’t know. I didn’t know about treaties or the Indian Act of 1876. I didn’t know that when the treaties were signed between the Crown and the indigenous peoples that access to education was promised. I didn’t know that the responsibility for administering that education was given by the Crown to the Church via the Indian Act. I didn’t know that there were 80 residential schools scattered across the farthest reaches of Canada that would impact nearly 150,000 children: seven generations of cyclical unrelenting trauma. I didn’t know that in these underfunded and poorly supplied church run schools the children’s names, language, dress, and culture were stripped away and given numbers, and given instruction in the morning and forced labor in the afternoons. Every family was impacted in some way. One artist’s work we were shown depicted dozens of RCMP taking children away from their families and in the corner, there was a priest in a black cassock ripping a child away from their mother. A priest. Imagine it, whole communities without children; sounds like something straight out of a Stephen King novel. These are their truths, their lived experience. These are the harsh truths that have been covered up and ignored for too long.

And the irony, for me, in all of this is that the more I learn, the more I realize that I did know this from my American experience in what happened to the enslaved Africans and the indigenous peoples of what is now the US. Same broken promises. Same inhumane treatments. Same stolen land and forced relocations. I mean seriously, what are a people, who originally lived on the Florida peninsula for generations upon generations, doing in the middle of Oklahoma? Why is the route they took now called the trail of tears? Because our human nature to be inhuman to others is so ingrained in us that we continue the cycles of violence and oppression. It is still happening in our postmodern world: genocides; violent military coups; refugee camps bursting at the seams with stateless peoples; religious violence and suppression; and it goes on and on. When will it end? When will we stop breaking God’s heart in the way we treat our neighbors?

And here is perhaps the hardest part of all of this for me, the more I learn the more my heart breaks, the more tears come to my eyes, and the angrier I become because this has all been done in the name of God. How on earth could we say that God wanted this…any of this? And then Renee said the most helpful thing; you didn’t do this, you are not part of the problem, but you can be part of the solution.

To be a part of the solution means that we, as a community of love and compassion, must continue to learn more, do more, and be better. That is our mandate by God in Jesus Christ as we are called to love our neighbors as ourselves. As Jesus says in our gospel today, the first will be last and the last will be first. In the kingdom of God, God’s mercy and love flows equally to all, even when ours does not.

So, what can we do? What will we do? How can we be the best allies we can be to all whom we meet? These are the questions we must ask ourselves as we spend the coming week reflecting upon these themes of truth and reconciliation. Let us remember the story of the orange shirt and think on all the other stories of children that will go unheard. I don’t quite know yet what our trajectory will be, however, I do know that we are on our way. And I promise you this, as long as I am serving you here, we will continue to walk this path and we will be part of the solution. Amen.