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April 13 - May 5, 2023
Genuine diversity, which flies at a higher altitude than a silence hijacked by political correctness, is messy as divergent groups settle in with one another.
Jackie and all parties must commit to seeing it through, to settling in, if you will.
ideology as a concoction of perspective and power. The ideologue is never satisfied with the submission of their opinion as merely one to consider in a buffet of many, but it must be infused with a sense of power that seeks to coerce people into its image.
Politics has become for many an idol in our culture. There are several guaranteed ways to exhume the idols of our hearts, but one must ask what disproportionately triggers your emotions. If something brings you more euphoria than Jesus, it’s probably an idol. If something depletes you of your joy, it’s probably an idol. When I find myself being more devastated over the victory of Donald Trump than the sin in my own heart, I’ve just placed my finger on the pulse of my idol. And if my political party wins and I express more elation and happiness over this than over the victory won by Jesus
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Our insistence on titles and church hats was not an attempt on our part to work out any perceived low self-esteem issues as much as it was a defiant shaking of the fist to a world that had tried its best during the week to bankrupt us of our dignity.
Jesus is God enough to have overcome his temptations and yet human enough to relate to mine. This is why Christianity is attractive to me. We serve a Jesus who can sympathize.
the primary way God works in this world is through other people.
Missional is primarily used by white Christians who harbor messianic imaginations of saving the marginalized.
Contextualization without the punch line of the gospel leads to compromise.
If every time someone lets us down we choose to moonwalk away from them, setting up our little boundaries, we will never know the joys of long-term, deep, sustained friendship. Community must have the water and sunlight of go again.
The impetus to heed such a herculean call is to remember the context. Hosea’s marriage to Gomer is a mirror of God’s marriage with us. God is not calling Hosea to do something he has not already done himself. If we are Gomer, then we are perpetual adulterers, violators of the marriage covenant to our God. And yet each day, numerous times throughout the day, God goes again with us. Every act of sin is covered by God’s refusal to wipe his hands clean of us and by his delightful obligation to go again and again and again with us. This is how we know he loves us. He goes again. To be like God, we
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She is set free and accepted before she submits.
Justification only requires the act of faith (given by God).
“Fairness is not always sameness.”
Leaving the African-American church is hard, due to the deep, abiding attachments to it in places like Memphis. Those few hours on Sunday morning are the rare moments where one feels like they’re at home, an oasis in a week dominated by venturing into visiting stadiums like work and school. It’s tiring to always play the part of a stranger. We long for home.
the only ones who have the capacity to eulogize the home field advantage of the ethnic home team are members of the ethnic home team with the home field advantage.
Silence is not an option when it comes to wiping out ethnic home field advantage.
empowering an ethnically different leader.
If I want to make my white siblings angry, I should talk about race in such a way that there is a hint of culpability on their part.
Power and position are not always synonymous. A powerless position is a token.
We just don’t know each other well. Read the comments section on any blog or social media post dealing with race, and what you’re bound to discover are not only differences of opinion but also incredible hostility. Genuine multiethnic friendships are a rarity, and we are suffering because of it.
these friendships must be genuine, and if they are, then there will be moments of robust discourse where variant viewpoints are expressed.
Love is not paralyzed by political correctness. It’s not healthy for minorities to commandeer the conversation and vent while our white siblings just sit back and take it, never expressing how they feel as well. We will know we are journeying deeper into the kingdom Jesus desired—one made of people from every nation, tribe, and tongue—when some of our white friends feel so secure in that multiethnic friendship that they say, “I actually think Donald Trump is doing a great job.”
Ethnic tribal warfare begins when we allow our primary identity to be found in our race and not in our Christ. When being black matters more than being Christian, or when being Korean matters more than being a follower of Jesus, we have ventured into idolatry.
we have made whiteness a benchmark for our identity. Don’t you see? To some, the closer one is to what they perceive as whiteness, the less black they actually are. And yet others believe the further one is from whiteness, the more authentically black they are. The maddening factor to all of this is that many African Americans have unwittingly empowered the very thing they want to dismantle in their identity formation—whiteness.
People of color need to be redemptively free of the approval of others as validation for who they are and for the endeavors they steward. Yes, people occupying historic positions of power need to seek opportunities to empower, but I cannot press pause on the call of God on my life in the hopes that I get noticed and called on.
