I hope you had a meaningful Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Among the many challenges in 2020, the issue of racism reared its ugly head again. Sparked by the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and others, the conversation around racism heated to a boiling point.
As citizens of the Kingdom of God, the issue of racism ought to be personal to each one of us. The early church struggled over the issue of racism between Jews and Gentiles. We can trace the challenge through the book of Acts as well as Paul’s letters. Paul tells us that in Christ, the “dividing wall of hostility” has been “broken down” in Jesus Christ, who is “our peace” (Eph 2:14). John shares with us a multi-racial picture of the new heavens and the new earth, where those “From every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” gather in worship at Jesus’ throne (Rev 7:9). Our ethnicity will not dissolve in heaven, but rather, God will delight in our ethnic diversity gathered before him in praise.
The events of 2020 challenged me to consider how I can participate better in Christ’s reconciling work. With a heart toward growing in understanding and empathy, I spent a significant amount of time listening to various voices: some Christian, some not. While I learned from everyone, I was particularly grateful for Christian brothers and sisters who have written on this area.
What I have discovered traces the following path: learning, navigating hurt, creating gospel friendships, and working to undo injustice.
Learning
While education is never the ultimate answer really for anything, it is an important entry point. Eric Mason in Woke Church says, “One of the most difficult things for me to deal with is the refusal for many evangelicals to acknowledge the truths about what has happened in our country. Our history has been hard for people of color, and the church must be willing to acknowledge those hard truths if we are to move toward healing. Much of our history is shrouded in darkness because it is hard to talk about and even harder to understand from our vantage point today.”
Jemar Tisby in The Color of Compromise concurs, “The failure of many Christians in the South and across the nation to decisively oppose the racism in their families, communities, and even in their own churches provided fertile soil for the seeds of hatred to grow. The refusal to act in the midst of injustice is itself an act of injustice. Indifference to oppression perpetuates oppression.”
The church won’t be the church that Christ has called us to be until we understand our sin-soaked history. The solution of a colorblind theology will not do. Eric Mason tells us that, “Colorblind theology denies Christ’s power to heal racial divisions, disparities, and injustices by ignoring their ongoing impact. Colorblind theology undermines unity in the church by refusing to acknowledge significant ethnic differences or address significant problems.”
Navigating Hurt
From this place of understanding, forgiveness and reconciliation can enter in. In Be the Bridge, LaTasha Morrison says, “Forgiveness and healing cannot begin until we become aware of the historical roots of the problem and acknowledge the harm caused.” Our understanding of the harm ought to move us to lament, which “allows us to connect with and grieve the reality of our sin and suffering. It draws us to repentant connection with God in that suffering. Lament also serves as an effort to change God’s mind, to ask him to turn things around in our favor. Lament seeks God as comforter, healer, restorer, and redeemer. Somehow the act of lament reconnects us with God and leads us to hope and redemption.”
Creating Gospel Friendships
Having acknowledged the hurt, we are invited to build bridges. LaTasha Morrison says that, “Bridge builders don’t deny hurt. They experience it. Sit in it. Feel it. But they don’t stay in that pain. They don’t allow those who’ve wounded them to control them or constantly drive them back to anger and resentment. Instead, they allow that pain to continually push them into forgiveness.” When we lean into reconciliation, we lean into relationships. Eric Mason agrees. He says, “The gospel is supposed to bring people together who wouldn’t naturally be together.” What is a clearer demonstration of the gospel than diverse people united by the cross?
Working to Undo Injustice
A Christian knows that true repentance doesn’t merely mean acknowledging wrongs done, it means changing course and acting in line with the character and purposes of God. Eric Mason argues that righteousness is an active, not static attribute of God’s. He argues that for us to understand the righteousness of God, we have to understand that God’s righteousness works itself out in the world. As Christians we don’t merely throw up our hands in resignation knowing that God will one day make everything right. There is an active call for us today in God’s righteousness.
In Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson says that “The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving. It’s when mercy is least expected that it’s most potent—strong enough to break the cycle of victimization and victimhood, retribution and suffering. It has the power to heal the psychic harm and injuries that lead to aggression and violence, abuse of power, mass incarceration.” The hope of the gospel is not just the hope of changed minds, it is the hope of changed lives.
The Secular Solution
Let me make one side note before I close. I read several books from a secular perspective, including the White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo and How to Be Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, both bestsellers. The contrast between Christian and secular responses to the issue is stark. DiAngelo and Ibram offer different paths forward, but both are dead-ends. The best DiAngelo can offer is to try to be less white. She says, "I cannot deny that I am white but I can strive to be less white." In other words, internalize your guilt, learn more, and shift power, but nothing will really fix these intractable issues.
Kendi suggests power-shifts are the only solution to what is (in his estimation) ultimately a power problem. He says, “One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an antiracist.” Justice, in other words, must wrest power from the privileged and give it to the oppressed.
Awake, O Sleeper
A Christian theology ought to acknowledge that systems and structures are necessarily influenced by sin, both because they're created and inhabited by human beings, but also because we believe that "all of creation groans" because of the fall. By acknowledging issues with power, structures, and systems, doesn't mean that we reduce issues to the structures. For a Christian, people are part of the problem. For a Christian, repentance and reconciliation must be part of the solution.
Ultimately, as a Christian, I am more concerned about transformation in the church than the culture. That isn’t to say I dismiss our obligation to promote justice culturally, but my hopes are not placed there. My hope is in our Jewish Savior who opens the door of salvation through his shed blood.
The details of how this might play out culturally are challenging to me to wrap my head around. They might involve active work on behalf of the unborn, involvement in adoptive care, participation in helping reform our justice system and the massive incarceration problem we have as a country.
On a personal and local level, the issue becomes demystified. How do I listen better to those from different ethnic backgrounds? How do I make sure that I am creating genuine friendships across ethnic lines? How do I make sure that I steward those with leadership gifts from other ethnicities in our congregation?
In Eric Mason’s Woke Church, Mason draws from Paul’s language in Ephesians, “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” I pray alongside Mason that the church in the US would indeed wake from its slumber and become a place where the dividing wall of hostility is torn down and in so doing, feel the light of Christ and become the light to the nations it is called to be.
Photo by Henry & Co. on Unsplash
Links are Amazon Affiliate commission links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.