Practicing Systemic or Cultural Humility
Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Pastor Bob Henry
June 11, 2023
Good morning, Friends and welcome to Light Reflections. Today, at the Meetinghouse we are celebrating Friends Educational Fund Sunday. For those not familiar with The Friends Education Fund, it is a Quaker college scholarship program for African American students, which was created in the mid-1940s by several members of our Meeting who were the surviving governing board of the only orphanage for African American children in the state of Indiana.
The orphanage was also created by First Friends members after the Civil War. By the 1920s, when it was closed, the orphanage had provided care for over 3,000 African American children.
In the beginning the educational program was funded by the assets which remained following the closing of the orphanage. These included a bequest from John Williams, a former slave, who was a successful farmer and tanner in 1860s Washington County, Indiana. In his will he requested that his assets be used to educate “poor Negro children” and, after his death, his assets were transferred by the courts to the Friends orphanage in Indianapolis. The 1940s decision for educational scholarships was influenced by this bequest.
First Friends invested the orphanage assets and used the proceeds to assist African American students. Since that time the directors have continued to invest and use the income generated to provide nearly $500,000 in scholarships to over 1,000 students since its beginnings.
We are honored this morning to be granting scholarships to 35 African American young adults from Indianapolis. If you want to make a donation to this great cause, go to our website indyfriends.org and look for the Friends Education Fund.
The text that I chose for this morning is from Ephesians 4:1-3 from the Message version.
In light of all this, here’s what I want you to do. While I’m locked up here, a prisoner for the Master, I want you to get out there and walk—better yet, run!—on the road God called you to travel. I don’t want any of you sitting around on your hands. I don’t want anyone strolling off, down some path that goes nowhere. And mark that you do this with humility and discipline—not in fits and starts, but steadily, pouring yourselves out for each other in acts of love, alert at noticing differences and quick at mending fences.
Today, I am wrapping up my sermon series on systemic priorities. I want to briefly review where we have been over the last several weeks. We have looked at the systemic nature of goodness, integrity, joy, and service as it relates to our spirituality and our lives together in the Kingdom of God.
Some of these priorities have been easier than others to wrestle with, but in the end they all must come together to make a unique and concerted effort for greater change. And that leaves us with one last, and very important, and I would even say, key aspect to what I have been talking about - that being systemic or what some have labeled cultural humility.
I am sure most of us are familiar with the idea of being humble. To be humble is to demonstrate “humility” which is commonly defined as “freedom from pride or arrogance.” Yet, let’s be clear, humility has nothing to do with meekness or weakness. And neither does it mean being self-effacing or submissive.
Rather, humility is an attitude of spiritual modesty that comes from understanding our place in the larger order of things. This is why I consider it a systemic priority.
One of the people that has embodied this humility and who taught it at a systemic level was the late Desmond Tutu. He once said,
“When the humility of someone is undermined, whether I like it or not mine is undermined as well.”
Tutu goes into much greater detail of what this looks like in his classic The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World. Just listen to what he said,
We are able to forgive because we are able to recognize our shared humanity. We are able to recognize that we are all fragile, vulnerable, flawed human beings capable of thoughtlessness and cruelty. We also recognize that no one is born evil and that we are all more than the worst thing we have done in our lives. A human life is a great mixture of goodness, beauty, cruelty, heartbreak, indifference, love, and so much more. We want to divide the good from the bad, the saints from the sinners, but we cannot. All of us share the core qualities of our human nature, and so sometimes we are generous and sometimes selfish. Sometimes we are thoughtful and other times thoughtless, sometimes we are kind and sometimes cruel. This is not a belief. This is a fact.
If we look at any hurt, we can see a larger context in which the hurt happened. If we look at any perpetrator, we can discover a story that tells us something about what led up to that person causing harm. It doesn’t justify the person’s actions; it does provide some context...
No one is born a liar or a rapist or a terrorist. No one is born full of hatred. No one is born full of violence. No one is born in any less glory or goodness than you or I. But on any given day, in any given situation, in any painful life experience, this glory and goodness can be forgotten, obscured, or lost. We can easily be hurt and broken, and it is good to remember that we can just as easily be the ones who have done the hurting and the breaking.
We are all members of the same human family...
In seeing the many ways we are similar and how our lives are inextricably linked, we can find empathy and compassion. In finding empathy and compassion, we are able to move in the direction of forgiving.
Ultimately, it is humble awareness of our own humanity that allows us to forgive:
We are, every one of us, so very flawed and so very fragile. I know that, were I born a member of the white ruling class at that time in South Africa’s past, I might easily have treated someone with the same dismissive disdain with which I was treated. I know, given the same pressures and circumstances, I am capable of the same monstrous acts as any other human on this achingly beautiful planet. It is this knowledge of my own frailty that helps me find my compassion, my empathy, my similarity, and my forgiveness for the frailty and cruelty of others.
There is not only a wisdom in Desmond Tutu words, but also a transcendence as well - a transcendence to be able to see the bigger picture of humanity and a sincere humility to recognize the flaws within himself and within us all.
What I believe he is practicing is what the National Institute of Health calls “cultural humility.”
They define it this way,
“A lifelong process of self-reflection and self-critique whereby the individual not only learns about another’s culture, but one starts with an examination of her/his own beliefs and cultural identities.”
Desmond Tutu did this while considering the different cultures of South Africa during apartheid. In the same way, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did this while considering the culture identities of Mahatma Gandhi’s India during the American Civil Rights Movement. From it, King embraced non-violent protests because of the positive effects he saw Gandhi having on India.
Late in high school, I began this process with the cultures of First Nations people when I searched for the burial ground of Chief Little Turtle in Fort Wayne, Indiana - which ironically, I found in the shadow of the mock fort that told a much different story. 35 years later, I am still gleaning wisdom and trying to process with Native Friends the pain our First Nations siblings suffered.
25 years ago, at the King Center in Atlanta, Georgia, I found myself alone and in tears trying to wrap my mind around the cause and effects of the American Civil Rights Movement. Since that day, my wife and I have made it a priority to educate and take my own family to Civil Rights sights and help them enter this process of self-reflection and critique as they relate to their own beliefs and identities and the change we can be.
I remember a couple of years ago, standing with my family among the National Monument for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama utterly broken trying to grasp the horror of “racial terror” on people of color in our country. I realized while at the monument that our own John Williams’ name was missing and should be included in this monument as his life was taken in a moment of racial terror. Several of us are working on getting his name included. I remember getting in our car after walking through the monument – my family was silent and all we could say was how we were humbled – because we still have so much to learn about our place in the larger order of things.
I sense our American culture is greatly suffering from this lack of awareness.
So, what might we do to improve our cultural and systemic humility?
I have a few suggestions:
1. Engage people who are different than you on a personal level.
2. Be curious and empathetic about others’ life experiences who are different than your own.
3. Learn about the important people in someone’s culture such as artists, musicians, dancers, philosophers, and writers, not just their foods or holidays.
4. Learn to pronounce their names correctly.
5. Share your culture, so people from other cultures don’t think they’re the only ones who are different.
6. Talk openly about racisim, sexism, and classism, and believe them when they speak about their experiences.
7. Be prepared when someone brings up your ethnicity and what it means to them. Listen nondefensively.
8. Approach improving your cultural competence with a beginner’s mind.
9. Show interest, appreciation, and respect for other cultures.
I think this may be a bit more detailed way of saying what the Apostle Paul was trying to say to the people of Ephesus in his day from our scriptures. Listen once again to how Eugene Peterson so masterfully interpreted it:
I want you to get out there and walk—better yet, run!—on the road God called you to travel. I don’t want any of you sitting around on your hands. I don’t want anyone strolling off, down some path that goes nowhere. And mark that you do this with humility and discipline—not in fits and starts, but steadily, pouring yourselves out for each other in acts of love, alert at noticing differences and quick at mending fences.
To the scholars who could not be with us this morning in-person, in the fall you will literally be getting out there on the road that God has called you to travel. I pray (as do your families I’m sure) that your path will be going somewhere. But I guarantee that if you are willing to pour yourself out in humble acts of love, seeking to understand and even mend the differences among all the diversity of the people you meet, you will be making a huge and impactful difference in our world.
And that call is not just for our scholars this morning – if everyone watching, today is willing to get out of our comfort bubbles and head out on that path where God is leading – get to know at least one person different than us – yes, it is going to be awkward, we are going to stumble, we may even say something inappropriate on occasion, but through humility we will grow into a greater understanding of our place in the larger order of things
So, let’s get out there, walk…run…do whatever we need to do to get on the path God is calling us to travel!
Now, as we enter a time of waiting worship, let us take a moment to ponder the following queries:
1. Do I believe that we are all members of the same human family and if not, why?
2. Who is one person I should engage this week that is different than me?
3. What “comfort bubbles” do I need to pop in order to understand my place in the larger order of things?