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Sermon for Service of Repentance, Healing & Reconciliation
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Clay Center, Kansas
September 20, 2015 – 3 p.m.
“Imagine”
“Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can. No need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood
of man. Imagine all the people, sharing all the world. … Some people say I’m a dreamer.” Immortal,
inspiring words from the great John Lennon. According to Wikipedia – so you know it’s right, right?
– the words of this best-selling hit of his solo career were meant to encourage people to imagine a
world at peace, without barriers that divide and separate us.
Let’s take just a moment to rest with that idea… to imagine a community, a culture, a
society, a world… living in harmony. At peace. As God imagined. What would that look like?
[PAUSE]
Lennon’s words remind me of the words of Jesus:
“Sell all you have and give it to the poor. Then come and follow me.”
“Love one another as I have loved you.”
“Inasmuch as you have done it to the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you have done
it to me.”
Give. Love. Serve. That is what Jesus calls us to do as his disciples – from way back at the
beginning of the Christian era all the way up to today – including the time in the first half of the
1900s when Elizabeth May DeKonza lived and worshipped at St. Paul’s.
The time when we failed her, when we forgot our baptismal vow to “respect the dignity of
every human being,” when we turned our backs on the essential truth that God loves all God’s
children – without any barriers of skin color or economic status; no dual, “separate but equal”
systems; no cultural taboos about “mixing.” Jesus calls us to love as he loves. To notice and care for
one another, including – and especially – those who are the most vulnerable among us. Like Mai
DeKonza.
We’re not sure when Mai first came to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, but we know she was
confirmed here in 1900, at about age 30. She attended services when she was able to (and often, she
wasn’t, due to various infirmities and crippling injuries later in life). Mai lived mostly in the south
end of town, in poor housing, and she walked eleven blocks to church – in the heat and in the cold,
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on crutches. Extreme cold weather posed a particular challenge that most of us don’t think about: A
person using crutches cannot wear gloves, so her bare hands were exposed to the elements.
We know all this because Mai told us. She possessed a sharp, active mind and seems to have
been a tireless writer. She wrote numerous poems, hymns, and plays, many of which were
performed – some she performed herself. She gave lectures on racial and political topics in Abilene
and was active in politicking in the 1908 presidential election. We might guess that she wrote a lot of
letters to a number of people, but we have learned the most about Mai from a set of letters she
wrote to the Bishop of Kansas, James Wise, between 1927 and 1946.
Mai DeKonza had only an eighth-grade education. Yet she completed a stenography course
at a business school in Kansas City, and she mastered music composition and harmony through
correspondence studies. She is listed in the Encyclopedia of American Biography and The Poets and Poetry of
Kansas, 1894. Mai most certainly had a creative imagination – one that allowed her to imagine the
possibilities for herself and for her church and society. A world without barriers that divide people by
race or class.
You have heard some excerpts from her letters to Bishop Wise. Let me share a couple more
that show her unflagging spirit:
Church members were not happy when they discovered Mai was carrying on a
correspondence with the Bishop, “daring to interest him in me,” she wrote, “when I ought to be content to have
food, shelter and clothes, as old and disabled as I am. [Yet] I am remaining in the invisible church, loving
Christ as my Savior.”
“If I were a supernatural being, I would actually like to turn coal-black some of the
Southern lily-whites who are ever seeking a way to Jim-Crow Kansas colored people: for I believe if they could
live as blacks only for thirty days and have to face all the obstacles which Southern race-prejudice provides,
they would become converted whites, when going back to white.”
She never lived to see that day. But Mai was able to imagine it.
Today, we express our sorrow for the actions and inactions of those good Christian people
who worshipped in this congregation in that era of “Jim Crow church,” as Mai described it. I am
sorry for that – I expect we all are. But I am most sorry that those who came before us here missed
the opportunity to really know Mai DeKonza and to hear her wisdom, benefit from her insights, and
enjoy her company. Her letters show her to be bright, humble, determined, and very spirited. Can
you imagine the gifts she had to share? Can you imagine what they (and we) have missed because she
was marginalized?
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Thankfully, Mai did leave us a legacy – and that we celebrate today. Surely, there were
hundreds, probably thousands, of blacks and other people of color who endured the same
indignities and insufficiencies Mai did. People who were rejected by the “professed leaders” of their
communities, as the county attorney described them at Mai’s incompetency hearing in 1942. But
those others didn’t write letters, or if they did, their letters or diaries have been lost or buried. And
perhaps there was no Bishop Wise, who kept the letters in his files, so they would one day be
archived in the papers of the Episcopal Diocese of Kansas. And there was no Jim Beck, who
appeared at the right time and place, in 2015, with his curiosity and caring spirit (and his research
skills) and the time to dig around to more fully uncover Mai’s story.
It is an amazing and touching story. But it is more than that. It does more than face us with
the need for redemption. One hundred years later, Mai is offering us the gift of her experiences and
feelings and hopes and dreams, and challenging us to imagine the possibilities in our time. To imagine
the world as God dreams it to be. To open our hearts and minds and eyes to neighbors in need. To
live and work as if God’s reign has already begun (as indeed it has). Can you imagine that?
What we do here today is not about us. And it is not the end. It is the beginning… as we
seek to imagine the possibilities. To challenge ourselves to learn and understand the hopelessness
and lost opportunities that result from systemic racism and other oppressions. This is the time to
rededicate ourselves to noticing, caring for, and walking with the Mai DeKonzas we meet here and
now. Mai’s message to us, in her own words, is: “Hate begets hate just as truly as love begets love.”
Our Bishop, Dean Wolfe, offers us an invitation: “Today, let us repent of the sins of prejudice and
racism and strive to be the inviting, loving people God has called us to be.”
Despite the small minority of people of color in Clay Center, the signs of racism and other
barriers of difference still exist here. Can you imagine ways we could work together to bring change?
To foster greater harmony and opportunity?
Imagining the possibilities is how we begin. Jesus then calls us to respond… in love. What
can we – you and I – do to help achieve God’s dream? What would the world would be like if we
did? What would Mai DeKonza think if she could see it? Can you imagine?
Amen.