The Table Video

Rev. Mark Whitlock’s eighteen years pastoral journey began in a post-civil rights era in Orange County.  He defines love and humility by serving others, but the post-modern church continues to segregate by race, creed, and color.  He will share personal pastoral struggles, denominational rebellion, racial reconciliation, civic engagement,  and the power of God to open closed ears to love thy neighbors and thyself.

Transcript:

The title of this presentation is, I Hear You or more specifically, I hear God. And I think that’s a real challenge for us who are caught up professionally as well as romantically, spiritually in the Christian movement. How often do we hear the voice of God? God speaks to us but God’s voice is often drowned out, the noise drowns God’s voice.

For me, it was Billy’s mother telling him to stop playing with me and my kind in a sandbox in St. Louis, Missouri, that’s where it began. We were six years young and her racist noise still rings in my ears causing this deafening my ears to become deaf to other voices. It has created a spiritual cataract that I see things from a different lens based on that experience at the age of six. Most of my life, I agreed with the noise of dissent, dissemination, discrimination.

Indeed, racial discord. I became the noise, I lived out the noise I practiced speaking the same noise. I fell in love with people who dealt with negative noise. Or certainly noise that is sometimes antithetical to what Jesus was talking about. You ought to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, thy soul and thy mind, and you ought to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. I heard James Cone, the chief architect of Black Theology of Liberation teach, “The only authentic black community in America “is the black church and the black preacher “must be truth to power to free black people.”

I heard the remarkable Cornel West say, “Nihilism is a natural consequence of culture “ruled and regulated by categories that mass “manipulation mastery and domination of people and nature.” “Black preachers must move from this prosperity preaching “to empowerment of the masses “that have taken the pill “of relaxation in apathy”. I heard Jeremiah Wright, the controversial pastor in Chicago, Illinois he said, “In the 21st century, white America got “a wake up call after 911. ‘White America and the western world came to realize “that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just disappeared as the great white west kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns.”

Indeed, he said, “God damned America “for the inhumane treatment of African Americans.” I heard these voices that were similar to Billy’s mother in black face speaking to innocent children in unnamed sandboxes. Maybe that’s the challenge that the young lawyer who speaks to Jesus, indeed tempts Jesus and challenges Jesus, “Teacher, “which is the greatest commandment of the law” and in fact, we know that there were over 300 different laws in and he was saying, “I hear so many voices “that are steeped and dipped “in this religious law, these religious voices”, and Jesus comes back and says, “Thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, “with all thy soul, with all thy mind. “This is the first and great commandment “and the second is like on to it, “thou shall love thy neighbor as thy self” is easier to say it than to operationalize it, somebody say Amen.

Do we hear God? The Hebrew word [speaks in foreign language] which means to hear. The confession of faith begins with, hear oh Israel, hear oh Christians and the challenge that we face in this 21st century context, Sunday is still the most segregated day of the week. Universities still are steeped in segregated students dealing with policies that segregate us and polarize us. I’m a pastor of an AME Church.

The AME church is the oldest black denomination in America, we’re known as the church militant. Richard Allen, founder of the AME Church stood against racism in the face of slavery. Fredrick Douglass held rallies in AME Churches. Nat Turner held slave revolt meetings in AME Churches. Harriet Tubman used the AME Church as the depot station for the Underground Railroad Station for Underground Railroad for escaping slavery.

We marched with Dr. Martin Luther King. St. James AME Church in Montgomery, Alabama used offered their buses to help transport the maids and the workers who refused to take the bus in order for them to get their rights. We are the social justice ministry of the social justice Christian denomination in the United States. Our mission is to minister to the social, spiritual and physical needs of those who dare to believe. That’s who we are. That’s what I believe in.

I elected to be an AME minister following Fuller Theological Seminary and then my AME Church had the unmitigated gall to assign me to Irvine, California, the black the great black community in Orange County. [laughing] How dare you?

I’m ready to say and I’m in Orange County. Y’all don’t feel a brother. It’s obvious. I remember when I was first assigned, I went to the Tustin Mall in Orange County to pass out flyers. I made 500 and I wanted to pass them out to all the black people in Orange County. Got there at 8:30, well, the mall opens at 9:00. By 12 o’clock I passed out five flyers. [laughing] And then God spoke to me, he says “Why are you segregating my church when heaven is “fully integrated?” And I started passing out my flyer to everybody. Y’all don’t feel me yet.

Because I passed out my flyers, and some of them came to church. They look like ya’ll. [laughing] Amen. And guess what? I heard God’s voice again, he said, “Hallelujah.” He said, “Their challenges are your “challenges, they are my people like they are your “people” And I heard their pain, and their problems, and their predicaments, and their pain was no different than my pain, and the challenge is we have to come to the conclusion that we have more in common than in contrast.

And the reality is we got a few geniuses in every race, a lot of common people, and an ample sprinkling of fools in all the races. Oh, I want to talk about Donald Trump right now, but I’m not going to. [laughing] I had to confess that I was segregating God’s church. And the love of God, and the love for God cannot be divorced from love from one neighbor no matter what. By race, creed, or color. And we started preaching in our church the power of God to love, and to heal, and to help release. We started humbling ourselves to realize that’s it’s not about our intellect, but it’s about the living word of God.

We started lifting up the name of Jesus instead of scholars who dared to polarize us. We started preaching a word of God that says, we’re not a black church, we’re not a white church, we’re not an asian church, we’re not a latino church, but we are God’s church, and we must come together in spirit and in truth. [clapping] And as a result of that we moved from five members, and now we got 3200 members, and we just purchased a seven million dollar worship sanctuary that seats over 1200 people.

We own eight apartments that are valued at 400 million dollars. And we are on the battlefield for the Lord. Now you may give God a handclap of praise. [clapping] As I take my seat, I too was challenged and am challenged by the treatment of law enforcement with African American men. I come from St. Louis, Missouri. I live right next to Ferguson. I understand the Michael Browns of the world. The utter frustration of dealing in a community that fails to hear us, and in many cases fails to see us.

And I listen to Melina Abdullah say “Black lives matter, “how many more black men and boys must die at the hands “of police before the world stands up against this travesty of justice” I remember being in bible study, and in bible study I was talking to my students, and we were born on the campus of UCI, and the majority of the 100 people in that bible study were young people, the millennials, and they were all between the ages of 18 and 30. And I remember dealing with the challenges in Ferguson, and they were saying to me in a militant voice, in an angry voice that, “we must do something about it”.

And I realized that they’re feeling were a feeling of righteous indignation. So, I said, let’s have a Black Lives Matter conference. And then, the challenge of Texas where police officers were gunned down. And the challenges of police officers who have experienced great pain. And the memory of my AME Church in Charleston, SC came to place where a young man who was deranged walked in and killed 9 of us. And the members said, “We forgive you”.

I was there just two months ago, and I sat in the place where Roof decided to take 9 people’s lives. but he didn’t know that two of them were sleeping underneath dead bodies. Because, before grandmama died, she said, “you stay under me baby”. And she died and the girl was saved. And I met with the families of those victims, and they said, “As a Christian, we are commanded to forgive”

And from that point on, I said we are not going to do a Black Lives Matter, but we’re going to do a Orange County Solidarity, and march, and summit. And we brought police together, the DA together. We brought judges together, be brought Black Lives Matter together, we brought the white evangelical churches, muslims together. We bought people of all types of thought together, and we decided to march.

And it was over a 1000 of us that marched, and we marched in solidarity. And then we had a summit, and we talked about the implicit bias that exists within both races. The challenge of walking through these complex decisions. These complex problems. And at the end, you would have thought it was Peter preaching at the Pentecost. At the end, people were praying together. Jews and Muslims and Christians and police, and DA and judges were praying together. Reminded me of the subject of the topic:

All things work together for the good for those who love the Lord, and have been called according to God’s purpose. And the real challenge is, when we come out of the silos and realize that we must love one another, and we must love our neighbor as we love ourselves. Then and only then do we change these dark places, and bring people to the light of God and Jesus Christ. We are the salt of the earth, and I believe it’s time for us to start practicing it. Now I’m done.