A sermon preached in Upstate New York, June 2023

Sermon text: Matthew 7:1–5, 12

A couple weeks ago, I saw a story in the news about the play-by-play announcer for the Oakland A’s being fired after more than twenty years of broadcasting for the team. Apparently, the afternoon before his last game, Glen Kuiper visited the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. He got an extensive tour of the place, and he was so impressed with the museum and the history of the barriers Black baseball players endured, and the depth to that history that he didn’t know—even though he worked in baseball—that he wanted to talk about it during the baseball game. Unfortunately, though, when he started talking about his experience, he fumbled the name of the museum, and it came out sounding an awful lot like the other N-word that no one should say in private, let alone over a broadcast.

The reaction was swift and furious, just as you’d expect, and in came the calls for Kuiper to be fired. Kuiper insisted that he did not mean to say the wrong word, he just got tongue-tied—an explanation that seems plausible to me, someone else who spends much of his profession in public speaking. Sometimes my brain and my mouth don’t communicate effectively, and what my brain wants to say does not come out the way I thought it. And sometimes, in situations less wrought than this one, in an effort to make sure I don’t say something a certain way, I get so focused on avoiding that construction that my brain sends that signal and I end up saying it precisely the way I was trying to avoid. (I do that with names all the time.) I can imagine that Kuiper, a White man, was already feeling a little funny saying the word “Negro,” because even though it’s in the name of the museum, in a lot of other contexts it is not a positive word to use to refer to Black persons. So even that hyper-sensitivity could have caused him to misspeak.

In any event, Kuiper insisted that he did not mean to say the word it sounded like he said. He apologized on the broadcast and after it, but people called for him to be fired. The director of the museum, himself a Black man, acknowledged the injury that even an accidental utterance of that word causes but nonetheless forgave the broadcaster and reminded everyone of the righteous thing he was trying to do when he uttered his transgression: bring awareness to a museum about Black baseball players. But the director’s advocacy didn’t push the needle, and in fact the director began to get hateful voicemails for his defense of the broadcaster. Within hours, Kuiper’s previously unblemished 20-year career with the Oakland A’s was over; he was suspended and then eventually fired.

Cancel culture strikes again. The examples are becoming too numerous to recount. Hollywood entertainers and directors blacklisted because of jokes they told or views they held decades ago, even though they have since repudiated them. Speakers at colleges and universities—my own notoriously included—shouted down or banned because of their controversial viewpoints. And in case we are tempted to think that cancel culture is something only liberals do, I have two words for you: Bud. Light. Conservatives are canceling an entire brand because they had the audacity to embrace a progressive perspective on gender identity—if only for marketing reasons—that some conservatives find objectionable. A couple of decades ago, The Chicks (formerly Dixie Chicks) also discovered that conservatives know how to do cancel culture too.

Cancel culture isn’t a liberal or conservative thing. Instead, it reflects this moment of extreme intolerance and mutual suspicion in which we live. We turn mistakes, disagreements, and differences into reasons to distrust or even hate one another. We treat fellow citizens as enemies; even relationships with family and friends are strained these days by our unwillingness to see other people as more than the opinions or politics we don’t like. And so we cancel them: we refuse to interact with them or even acknowledge them as family, friends, citizens, or human beings.

Cancel culture is the exact opposite of one of the fundamental convictions of Christian faith: the doctrine of grace.

Cancel culture is deeply entrenched in contemporary American politics and culture, and sadly it is increasingly a feature of church in the United States. We Presbyterians have seen this firsthand in the last ten years, as congregation after congregation has left the PCUSA because the majority has made decisions about the ordination and marriage of gay and lesbian persons that others don’t agree with. The underlying principle behind the exodus of these congregations is that if you disagree with us, you can’t be real Christians, so we’re going to find a denomination that really is Christian.

Cancel culture is the practice of denying any interaction with those with whom we disagree. It is the assumption that the other is nothing more than the worst we ascribe to them. But cancel culture is also profoundly anti-Christian! It is the exact opposite of one of the fundamental convictions of Christian faith: the doctrine of grace.

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus warns those who will follow him: “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.” This connection between the grace we receive from God and the grace we are expected to practice with other people is the heart of the Gospel. In Romans, the Bible says, “Do you imagine, whoever you are, that when you judge those who do such things [as you consider wrong] and yet do yourself, you will escape the judgment of God? Or do you despise the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience?” (Romans 2:3–4). We’ve made judgment of others an American pastime, but the Bible reminds us that we are all worthy of judgment. We all have sinned and fallen from the expectations of God, and yet God, in God’s unending mercy, refuses to relate to us as our worst mistakes. Instead, God extends to us “kindness and forbearance and patience.” God sent Christ into the world to ensure us that God loves us and considers us so much more valuable to him than our worst moments. That’s grace. That’s God looking past our worst and saying, “You matter to me. You are valuable. You are loved.”

Grace is the heart of the Christian message! But grace is more than reassurance of God’s saving love. Grace is also a responsibility that God passes on to us. We acknowledge grace as our responsibility too, every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer and say “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” The responsibility to practice the grace that God shows to us is why Jesus calls his hearers “hypocrites” in today’s Gospel lesson; they are fixated on the speck in someone else’s eye when, from God’s perspective, we all have a gigantic something in our own eyes! Work on your own improvement first, says Jesus, and then if you have any time leftover, you might be in a position to help someone else live more faithfully. In the meantime, “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” Or, as the Letter to the Colossians puts it, “Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive” (Colossians 3:13).

Forbearance means loving one another, talking with one another, respecting one another, and being church with one another even if we deeply disagree on important aspects of faith and living.

Bear with one another, Scripture says. A couple years ago, I wrote a book on this idea of Christians bearing with one another in love. I called the book Forbearance: A Theological Ethic for a Disagreeable Church, and I argued that recapturing this biblical ethic of forbearance, which is all over the New Testament, is the secret to us in the church learning how to live together despite differences. I defined forbearance as “the active commitment to maintain Christian community through disagreement, as an extension of virtue and as a reflection of the unity in Christ that binds the church together” (p. 9). Forbearance means loving one another, talking with one another, respecting one another, and being church with one another even if we deeply disagree on important aspects of faith and living. And I argued that this commitment to forbearance is essential if we are to live up to our responsibility to protect the unity of the Body of Christ and witness to the caustic culture around us of a better way of dealing with difference.

Forbearance is the practice of grace, after all, and grace is the heart of Christ’s Gospel. Graceful forbearance is the central ethic of being church; it is how we should live together in Christian community. Graceful forbearance is also an important social witness to the world. If evangelism, or social witness, means proclaiming the truth of the Gospel to the world beyond the church, then this is the truth our world needs to hear right now: that all have fallen short of the glory of God, but in the grace of Christ, God claims us and loves us anyway. Everyone has value, everyone is a child of God, everyone deserves respect—even if they are very different from us or hold very different convictions, even if they make mistakes from time to time. Because God first loved us, God gave us the gift of Christ, and those of us who know Christ are charged with living the way Christ taught us. The way of Christ is grace, forgiveness, respect, and love. The way of Christ is everything cancel culture is not.

“Do not judge, so that you may not be judged” by the One who stands in judgment on all of us. Do not judge, but forgive and forbear and struggle to live with even those who most challenge you. May we in the church figure out the virtue of graceful living to the point that we can help the world around us do the same. In that way, grace will become our social witness to a culture that currently fails to respond to difference and disagreement in any other way than with intolerance, mutual suspicion, and (increasingly) violence.

Friends, this is my charge for you today, as Christians and citizens of this nation: help stem the tide of intolerance! Help stem the tide of distrust and disrespect, of online echo chambers, one-sided TV networks, and constant verbal warfare. Help stem the tide of cancel culture! Be the antidote to the caustic ethos that is killing our democracy. Be witnesses to grace in this graceless American moment.

Let us Christians stand up against cancel culture, its liberal and its conservative forms. Let us Christians instead practice and preach an ethic of forgiveness and forbearance, of second and third chances, of honoring people’s dignity and regarding others as more than what we consider to be their worst mistakes. Let us practice and preach a gospel of Christian grace, for our own good and the good of the world. Amen.