There’s a memorable line from Robert Frost’s famous poem, North of Boston, The Mending Wall. It goes:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen ground swell under it,
And spills its upper boulders into the sun…

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. And yet today, in the Holy Land there is a wall that cuts through the city of Jerusalem, the city that Jesus wept for upon entering in the final week of his earthly life. And just as Jesus wept for that walled city two thousand years ago, Jesus still weeps today. You see, it’s the so-called “security wall.” A wall that was designed to provide a much needed and much deserved security for the citizens of Israel. But if history is any guide at all, all walls that are borne out of hostility and conflict ultimately fail. Those walls have to come down because the walls cannot ultimately separate peoples.

We know even from antiquity, in the ancient scripture of the Hebrew bible, we find early on in the book of Genesis the Tower of Babel, the first skyscraper, as it were, in human civilization. It was to be a monument and a temple for human pride and achievement. God tore down those walls and in the process confused the common language of all human beings, resulting in many different languages and civilizations. It’s almost as if God were saying, “My creation will be marked by diversity not sameness. I desire unity not uniformity.” The Tower of Babel had to come down.

Also in the city of Jericho. In that walled city, the people of God went to it but they couldn’t enter it because of the wall built out of fear and insecurity. So they marched around the city, forming an army of choir members who sang songs of liberation and freedom. The walls of Jericho came tumbling down. They always do, from the ancient Hadrian’s Wall in England to the Great Wall of China. Walls of hostility and conflict never ultimately stand.

It is true even today. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan, at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, said to the then head of the Soviet Union: “Mr. Gobachev, tear down this wall!” And the Berlin Wall, separating East from West, came tumbling down. Not by violence or bullets or bombs, but by the will of people who wanted to see unity instead of disunity.

Of course these are all physical walls but they are physical manifestations of an inner wall, a more invisible and insidious and dangerous wall. I refer now, of course, to the walls of injustice, of hatred, and of bigotry.

In South Africa the walls of apartheid came tumbling down, apartheid being that unjust system of separating rich and poor and black and white based on law. Those walls came tumbling down, again not by violence but by people singing and marching and saying this wall must come down.

And even in our own country in the Civil Rights era, there were many who marched and sang and prayed—the walls of slavery and Jim Crow laws and segregation—that these walls would come down. Those walls had to come down because a wall of conflict and separation was not the intention of our Creator God. I am now bishop of Maryland, the first African American bishop of a diocese that was born in slavery. The wall of segregation came down in Maryland. All walls do.

In ancient times, St. Paul, writing a letter to a divided faith community in the city of Corinth, in his second letter in the fourth chapter, said: “If anyone is in Christ”—that is, if anyone is in this new reality of asserting again and again God’s intention—“there is a new creation. Everything old has passed away and, behold, everything is becoming new.”

“All this,” he wrote, “is from God, whom in Christ is reconciling the world to God’s self and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.” That is, wherever that reconciling work is done, no matter what faith community, when people do so they are doing the work of God.

In my last trip to the Holy Land, I did not take many pictures. I was too discouraged. It was a very discouraging situation, political and religious, there. But in the last day I did take one photograph in the city of Bethlehem. Yes, the city of David where the Prince of Peace was born, it is now a walled city. It is very difficult to enter or leave that city because of the checkpoints, especially for the citizens, most of whom are Palestinian Christians. But there our pilgrimage group had spent its last day. We went to a section of the wall that had bisected the once main commercial strip in that city and we were trying to support the local economy by buying things. But I had my chance to go to the foot of that massive wall. And there I saw spray painted on the bottom of that wall these words, undoubted by a young Palestinian Christian. It said, “Jesus will tear down this wall.” And Jesus will. That wall will come down one day because all walls must.

As an excerpt from Georgia Douglas Johnson’s famous poem, “Interracial,” puts it:

Let’s build bridges here and there
Or sometimes, just a spiral stair
That we may come somewhat abreast
And sense what cannot be exprest,
And by these measures can be found
A meeting place, common ground
Nearer the reaches of the heart
Where truth revealed, stands clear, apart:
With understanding come to know
What laughing lips will never show:
How tears and torturing distress
May masquerade as happiness:
Then you will know when my heart’s aching
And I when yours is slowly breaking.
Commune, the altars will reveal.
We then shall be impulsed to kneel
And send a prayer upon its way
For those who wear the thorns today.
Oh, lets build bridges everywhere
And span the gulf of challenge there.

Conversation with Eugene Sutton

Daniel Pawlus: Gene, thanks for joining us again today. It’s a pleasure to see you.

Eugene Sutton: Thank you, Dan.

Pawlus: In your message you talked about reconciliation quite a lot and I want to start by asking, does the idea of people having false perceptions play a major role in the process of reconciliation? You gave us a lot of examples, but this came to mind as you were talking about this.

Sutton: Yes. False perceptions. And the chief false perception is that I and my people, my way, my customs, my civilization, are really the way for everybody and there’s no appreciation for diversity or the interplay of the different cultures that God has set into motion. I think that’s the chief misconception that we have and the misperception that others are wrong or they’re mistaken or somehow they’re “less than” because they’re not like us. They don’t talk like us, they don’t act like us, they don’t believe like us. I think it’s a present day Tower of Babel and that needs to be brought down again.

Lillian Daniel: I often find it easier to identify the walls in our history like, for example, the issues of the abolitionist movement or the walls in somebody else’s country, South Africa or Israel. But what’s the big present day wall in our country right now that you see?

Sutton: I live in the city of Baltimore, the See city of my diocese, and there are walls there every bit as real as those ancient walls that I spoke of, although they aren’t physical ones. It’s the wall between rich and poor, between the haves and the have-nots, between the highly educated and the poorly educated, in my city and throughout the state. The state of Maryland now, by per capita income, is the richest state in the Union and yet I see a lot of boarded up houses and communities, drug infested and crime ridden communities where people don’t have any access to the riches of the rest of the state. There are walls there that are every bit as real and people don’t cross those walls. The rich don’t go into rural and urban poor areas. And the poor are trapped just as they were in ancient walled cities. There is a lot of work yet to be done and reconciliation in our day.

Pawlus: What can be done on the church level, or for you as the bishop now leading the flock in the Maryland area? How do you begin to address some of these things and talk about them and get that conversation out there?

Sutton: Well, I’m a follower of Jesus. Obviously I’m a Christian. And one of the reasons I love being a religious and spiritual leader is I get to work full-time at doing something that I think is true for everyone. The work of reconciliation begins right here in the human heart. It’s hard to reconcile with others when we’re not at peace with ourselves. We’re not at peace within ourselves and we’re not a peace with our Creator God. So the first thing I like for people to do is to be at peace with themselves through the work of spiritual formation. And, again, this is done in many, many religions. Then we can begin the work of reconciling people in our own households, in our families, in our neighborhoods, our communities, and ultimately the nation and the world. So it begins in the heart. It’s a spiritual problem. Then from the heart it seeps out into the work of the hands. We actually have to—and I should say the feet, as well—walk across the walls and we have to be willing to shake hands with people on the other side and say, “What can I learn from you and how can I help you?”

Daniel: Ideally it should be our faith communities that would lead the way in reconciliation and we would have in our faith communities models of reconciliation and people crossing walls, when in reality so often it’s in our faith communities where we have some of the hardest struggles and there are so many walls there. I know your own denomination, the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion, is really wrestling with the question of the ordination of gays and lesbians and there are walls. Are you experiencing those walls in the church now and what promise do you have for that?

Sutton: Yes, but not as much in my diocese. You see, historically, you are exactly right. Religions which are supposed to be the biggest force for good in the world in the breaking down of walls are all too frequently ones that build up the walls. In the Christian church, this same movement that has cared for the poor and the oppressed, that builds schools and hospitals, and won over a whole civilization, the Roman Empire, because of the way that it loved and how we loved everyone, unfortunately in its history has too often been the agent of—because you’re a woman you can’t do as much as I can, because you’re a different race you can’t be as I can. The church was wrong, I believe, about women. It was wrong about the Crusades. It was wrong whenever it stuck its head in the sand with scientific revelations. It was wrong on slavery. It was wrong on civil rights. And it’s wrong when it tries to build a wall between those who are oriented to the same sex and those who aren’t. But those walls are rapidly coming down. Not everybody is there yet, but I believe it’s the work of God. We need to get beyond that.

Pawlus: I was going to say, the things you talk about, Gene, seem to be the challenges that people have with the institutional church in several different denominations. It’s not that they don’t want to be a part of a faith community or be a believer, but the stances that the institutions are taking on some of these issues are very challenging for folks.

Sutton: Oh yes.

Pawlus: I think that, as you said, continuing the conversation and time has shown in many instances that the different walls do eventually fall.

Sutton: That’s right. We’ve got to hang in there in the confrontation. Hey, listen, as an African American, I’m in a denomination whose first bishop in the diocese of Maryland and many of the Episcopal clergy owned my ancestors. We never gave up on the church because we thought it was our calling by God to help the church become what it was supposed to be. That would be my advice to all those now who find themselves oppressed and shut out by the church. Don’t give up on us yet because the church can be an agent for positive good, and it is in many of its parts and it is in the diocese of Maryland. We’re working full steam ahead with a truth and reconciliation commission in our own diocese. We’re setting up communities where people can talk about reconciliation. We’re also working to build our communities and dealing with the urban poor, dealing with the degradation of the environment. All of this comes from a religious impulse. If I can give any plug for religion today is that the good religious impulse heals the world, it does not divide it.

Daniel: Where did you get this passion for reconciliation? It’s obvious that you have it and you have a calling to this. Was there something that happened to you in your childhood where the church was a part of reconciliation or you experienced grace through that?

Sutton: Well, of course, I was raised in the Church but by high school, unlike everyone else, I fell away! I went through a period where I was so angry at the church. I only thought of it as a tool for oppression. And it was only as I began to experience religious people actually doing the work, and I did in my hometown of Washington, D.C. It was the people by their actions that drew me back to the church. Earlier this year I was at the National Prayer Breakfast where President Obama was. And he, as president’s do, gave, in a sense, his journey of faith. He talked about not being raised in a religious home. But he came to Chicago to work on the Southside in community organizing and what he said at that prayer breakfast was he began to notice that those who are making the most difference in that community, those who are feeding the poor and clothing the naked, those who are at the forefront of providing for all people and their needs, they were church people. He said, “I better go to church and find out what these people are up to.” He became a Christian, baptized with his family, because he found a community of reconciliation.

Daniel: Maybe it’s not so much what people say they believe but what they actually do.

Sutton: Absolutely.

Pawlus: Well, we’re glad that you’ve joined us again today, Gene, and many congratulations on your new role. We hope you continue to enjoy that, as well.

Sutton: I hope to continue to enjoy it, too!

Pawlus: Thank you for being here.