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By the end of the second discussion (and in a few of the participants’ journals for the second cycle), a recurring call began to emerge of wondering about how to address the issues inherent in the connection between race and theology that we had been exploring together as a group for the first two cycles. Up to this point, I purposely moved the group away from any of these types of discussions of strategies and solutions. Though well-intentioned, I did not want to allow for rushing to that phase of the discussion as a means of avoiding the difficult topics raised by the aesthetic experiences and classes thus far. At this point, though, I felt it was important to move us in the direction of response, though still in the vein of the focus of this project. That is, I wanted us to specifically address: what are some of the theological resources for addressing race and racism?

One of the focuses of the previous session was how Christian practices, particularly the sacraments like Eucharist and baptism, had been distorted in the wake of the theological entanglement with race. That is, the connection between theology and race is not merely an ineffable intellectual one, but it was one that had tangible consequences across the globe,

including the liturgies, rituals, and practices of Christianity. I decided that for the third cycle, the third aesthetic experience should be liturgical in nature, to highlight both in substance and form an alternative to the theological distortions we had been studying thus far. Because the Episcopal Church follows the liturgical year, determining where our next meeting fell on the Church’s calendar was the first step. The liturgical year or cycle is a series of seasons, oriented mainly around two major feast days, Christmas and Easter. The year begins with Advent—the four

Sundays leading up to Christmas day—followed by the Christmas season, which is 12 days long and ends on the Feast of Epiphany. The season after the Epiphany lasts until the beginning of the season of Lent on Ash Wednesday, which takes places 46 days before Easter. Easter is a feast day, but also a season, which lasts for seven weeks following Easter Sunday. The seventh Sunday after Easter (or 50 days later) is Pentecost Sunday. After Pentecost, is a long season that lasts through the summer and fall until the last Sunday of the liturgical year, the feast of Christ the King. The following Sunday, the first Sunday of Advent, the cycle begins again. Each season has its own mood, colors, traditions, themes, and scripture readings.

Incidentally, our next meeting was to take place on November 30, 2017. This particular Thursday fell between the end of one liturgical year and the beginning of the next. Sunday, November 26, 2017 was the Feast of Christ the King, and Sunday, December 3, 2017 was the first Sunday of Advent. This date provided an interesting time for this third aesthetic experience in that it fell during a period of transition between the last Sunday of the cycle that emphasizes the universal reign of Jesus over all peoples and the first Sunday that moves toward incarnation, the coming of God to live among humanity as a poor Jewish child. In other words, this transition embodies the tension between the universal and the particular. This tension is at the heart of how we formulate responses to racism in that appeals to universal ideas like “common humanity” and “celebrations of difference,” while important ideals, are empty unless they take into account the injustices and inequities faced by particular groups, especially people of color (Jennings, 2010; Lloyd & Prevot, 2017; Townes, 2006). Given these connections, I decided to make this tension between the universal and the particular the theme of the aesthetic experience.

In terms of how to realize that theme, I first turned to the specifics of the format. Our meeting time was set for 7:00 p.m., so I decided to start with the liturgy that would normally take

place were we to hold a service that time of day: Evening Prayer. While there is a little flexibility in the design of this service, most of the prayers and readings are predetermined. Perhaps the greatest flexibility comes in the choice of music that follows each reading. Even though specific readings from the Bible are appointed for every day of the year, I decided to make this the part of the service that I changed the most, incorporating readings from various theological sources, as well as the Bible, that reflected this tension between the universal and the particular, specifically as applied to race and racism. Each reading would be followed by music that was related to the liturgical cycle and/or to a theme in the preceding reading. I also decided to keep the standard prayers that form the opening and closing of the service, as a way of providing a point of familiarity, but also to demonstrate how the service could be altered for a particular purpose while still keeping the overall, traditional format.

Once I had made decisions about the format, I moved to curating a set of readings and musical selections. I began reading through a collection of sermons by the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray, the first African American woman to be ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church (Murray, 2006). I looked at ones that I had read previously that I knew were specifically related to race, and I initially chose a sermon entitled, “The Dilemma of the Minority Christian,” but it did not exactly capture the tension between the universal and the particular in the way that I had wanted. However, I later came across a sermon that I had not read previously, and it was

delivered on the Feast of Christ the King. Right from the beginning, she captures the inherent tension between what she calls “the universal human condition” and the call to address the very specific needs of “strangers and outcasts.” Though race is not specifically at the forefront, it reflects both the liturgical season and theme perfectly. I decided to make it the first reading, as a kind of introduction. The excerpt I chose from that sermon is as follows:

The parable of the Last Judgment in Matthew’s Gospel text points to the climax of the Christian faith, the consummation of history, the final triumph of God’s love over the forces of dissolution that frustrate the harmony of God’s creation of a “new heaven and new earth.” Christians affirm this in the Nicene Creed when we say, “And he shall come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.”

In this story, we are confronted with the ultimate meaning of our own lives as we encounter the universal human condition. Jesus sets before us a vision of the destiny of humankind, the full realization of our human potential. He speaks of this destiny in terms of judgment that theologian Langdon Gilkey has called “the ultimate norm embodied in Jesus by which our lives are to be evaluated.” Since Jesus was fully human, he was one of us. He understood our possibilities as well as our human frailties and limitations, and he was directing us toward our higher potential. The standard he used was not our intellectual and social achievements, but the depth of his own self-giving love and compassion, his total identification with suffering humanity. His words here are among the most beloved in Scripture because they speak so directly to the human situation throughout the ages:

I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me. And then he says,

As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.

He made our actions toward strangers and outcasts the test of our love of God. By referring to the “least of these” as his brothers and sisters, he emphasized the divine potential in every human being and our responsibility before God for the well-being of the weak and powerless, the despised of the earth. He was saying that we are bound together in our relationship to one another and to God. As Bishop John Colburn once said, “There is no separation between what we do, on the one hand, in response to men [and women], and on the other, in response to God. Our response is to [humans] in society and to God at the same time.” In other words, there can be no individual salvation for us apart from our commitment to “the least of these” in whatever circumstances we find them, for when we ignore or reject them, we reject God-in-Christ.

Christ, then, is present in every aspect of the human situation, and we are enjoined from picking and choosing those whom we would accept or reject based upon our own notions of approval, desirability, or affection. We are commanded to identify at all times and in all places with the common humanity of others, to enter into their pain, sorrow, and need as if it were our own, and to do so without any thought of reward. (Murray, 2006, pp. 29- 30)

I also knew that I wanted to incorporate readings from early Christian theologians that predate the time periods we had been discussing thus far, to demonstrate that the theological resources for addressing racism are part of the tradition from an early stage. J. Kameron Carter (2008) provides an excellent resource in this regard, because even though his project is largely about the 18th _{century and beyond, he incorporates a prelude, interlude, and postlude that are based on the} work of earlier theologians. These brief sections are, in many ways, the most approachable parts of his book—especially for a layperson—so I started there. I chose two excerpts, each of which embodies the tension between the particular and the universal. The first is a selection from St. Gregory of Nyssa’s Homilies on Ecclesiastes. This fourth-century theologian provides one of the earliest and most robust abolitionist statements in the Christian tradition. He largely does so by pointing out universal humanity but also the universal common denominator that is death and judgment by God. He calls out the particularity that is the condition of slavery as being

fundamentally incompatible with Christianity by asking how one puts a price on “the likeness of God” found in fellow human beings (as cited in Carter, 2008, p. 238.) Gregory states that even God does not have the power to buy and sell human beings. The full excerpt is as follows:

You condemn man to slavery, when his nature is free and is self-determining, and you legislate in competition with God, overturning his law for the human species. The one made on the specific terms that he should be the owner of the earth, and appointed to government by the Creator—him you bring under the yoke of slavery, as though defying and fighting against the divine decree.

You have forgotten the limits of your authority, and that your rule is confined to control over things without reason. For it says Let them rule over winged creatures and fishes and four-footed things and creeping things (Gen. 1, 26). Why do you go beyond what is subject to you and raise yourself up against the very species which is free, counting your own kind on a level with four-footed things and even footless things? “You have

subjected all things” to man, declares the word through the prophecy, and in that text it lists the things subject, “cattle” and “oxen” and “sheep.” Surely human beings have not been produced from your cattle? Surely cows have not conceived human stock? But to you these things are of small account. “Raising fodder for the cattle, and green plants for

the slaves of men,” it says. But by dividing the human species in two with “slavery” and “ownership” you have caused it to be enslaved to itself, and to be the owner of itself. “I got my slaves and slave-girls.” For what price, tell me? What did you find in existence worth as much as the human nature? What price did you put on the rationality? How many obols did you reckon the equivalent of the likeness of God? How many staters did you get for selling the being shaped by God? “God said, let us make man in our own image and likeness.” If he is in the likeness of God, and rules the whole earth, and has been granted authority over everything on earth from God, who is his buyer, tell me? Who is his seller? To God alone belongs this power; or rather, not even to God himself. For “his gracious gifts,” it says, “are irrevocable” [the gift of Israel's election; Rom. 11:29]. God would not therefore reduce the human race to slavery, since he himself, when we had been enslaved to sin, spontaneously recalled us to freedom. But if God does not enslave what is free, who is he that sets his own power above God's?

Your origin is from the same ancestors, your life is of the same kind, sufferings of soul and body prevail alike over you. […] Are not [slave and owner] one dust after death? Is there not one judgment for them?—a common Kingdom, and a common Gehenna? (as cited in Carter, 2008, pp. 237-238)

The second selection taken from Carter’s book is from St. Maximus the Confessor’s Mystagogia. This seventh-century text points out that diversity is the human condition, and that all peoples, regardless of origin, are brought into a universal relationship through Christ. However, this act of forming community does not erase difference. As Carter (2008) puts it: “The work that God does in making the many one with himself but without in the act of unifying them confusing what is distinctive about the many and the work that the church does” and “without a loss of what is distinctive regarding the many as to ‘language, places, and customs’” (p. 364). In other words, Christ holds the universal and the particular together. Maximus takes it farther in saying that the Church is only successful in being an image of God when it does the same, effecting union without collapsing difference. The full excerpt is as follows:

Being all in all, the God who transcends all in infinite measure will be seen only by those who are pure in understanding when the mind in contemplative recollection of the

principles of beings will end up with God as cause, principle, and end of all, the creation and beginning of all things and eternal ground of the circuit of things.

It is in this way that the holy Church of God will be shown to be working for us the same effects as God, in the same way as the image reflects its archetype. For numerous and of almost infinite number are the men, women, and children who are distinct from one another and vastly different by birth and appearance, by nationality and language, by customs and age, by opinions and skills, by manners and habits, by pursuits and studies, and still again by reputation, fortune, characteristics, and connections: all are born into the Church and through it are reborn and re-created in the Spirit. To all in equal measure it gives and bestows one divine form and designation, to be Christ's and to carry his name. In accordance with faith it gives to all a single, simple, whole and indivisible condition which does not allow us to bring to mind the existence of the myriads of differences among them, even if they do exist, through the universal relationship and union of all things with it. It is through it that absolutely no one at all is in himself separated from the community since everyone converges with all the rest and joins together with them by the one, simple and indivisible grace and power of faith. “For all,” it is said, “had but one heart and one mind” [Acts 4:32]. Thus to be and to appear as one body formed of different members is really worthy of Christ himself, our true head, in whom says the divine Apostle, “there is neither male or female, neither Jew nor Greek, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision, neither foreigner nor Scythian, neither slave nor freeman, but Christ is everything in all of you” [Gal. 3:28; Col. 3:11]. It is he who

encloses in himself all beings by the unique, simple, and infinitely wise power of his goodness. As the center of straight lines that radiate from him he does not allow by his unique, simple, and single cause and power that the principles of beings disjoined at the periphery but rather he circumscribes their extension in a circle and brings back to himself the distinctive elements of being which he himself brought into existence. The purpose of this is that the creations and products of the one God be in no way strangers and enemies to one another by having no reason or center for which they might show each other any friendly or peaceful sentiment or identity, and not run the risk of having their being separated from God to dissolve into nonbeing.

Thus, as has been said, the holy Church of God is an image of God insofar as it effects the same union of the faithful with God. As different as they are in such distinctives as language and from other distinctives as regards where they are from and manners and customs, they are yet brought into a unity by the church through faith. God realizes this union among the natures of things without confusing them, but in lessening and bringing together their distinction, as was shown, in a relationship and union with himself as cause, principle, and end. (as cited in Carter, 2008, pp. 363-364)

After these selections, I knew I wanted to go even further back, to the Bible itself,

because up to this point in the class, we had not really discussed the Bible as it relates to race and