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June 13 - December 30, 2021
When we lack historical understanding, we lose part of our identity. We don’t know where we came from and don’t know what there is to celebrate or lament. Likewise, without knowing our history, it can be difficult to know what needs repairing, what needs reconciling.
They equated working hard with success, and they dismissed the reality of systemic issues that create barriers for people of color.
“Love,” I said, “brings freedom, and slaves didn’t have freedom or choice. Family doesn’t leave family in bondage.”
The truth is that each ethnicity reflects a unique aspect of God’s image. No one tribe or group of people can adequately display the fullness of God. The truth is that it takes every tribe, tongue, and nation to reflect the image of God in his fullness.
The truth is that race is a social construct, one that has divided and set one group over the other from the earliest days of humanity. The Christian construct, though, dismantles this way of thinking and seeks to reunite us under a common banner of love and fellowship.
In Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.3
This does not mean that we take a color-blind approach to community. Too many Christians believe that the ultimate goal should be seeing the world without color, and some even pretend to already be in this “holy” place. But Paul wasn’t suggesting that aspects of our gender or racial identity aren’t important, that we should all meld together into one indistinguishable throng. In fact, Paul emphasized that unity can be found in diversity. We all have been given different gifts; we all are different parts of the same body.4
In the love of the family of God, we must become color brave, color caring, color honoring, and not color blind. We have to recognize the image of God in one another. We have to love despite, and even because of, our differences.
If we avoid hard truths to preserve personal comfort or to fashion a facade of peace, our division will only widen.
Jesus can make beauty from ashes, but the family of God must first see and acknowledge the ashes.
Forgiveness and healing cannot begin until we become aware of the historical roots of the problem and acknowledge the harm caused.
To lament means to express sorrow or regret. Lamenting something horrific that has taken place allows a deep connection to form between the person lamenting and the harm that was done, and that emotional connection is the first step in creating a pathway for healing and hope. We have to sit in the sorrow, avoid trying to fix it right away, avoid our attempts to make it all okay. Only then is the pain useful. Only then can it lead us into healing and wisdom.
our avoidance of lament to a culture of triumphalism. He wrote that, as Americans, we love to focus on praise, comfort, thanksgiving, and worship—anything but lament.
God doesn’t want our masks; he wants all of us, all our emotions, even our sorrow, our despair, and our grief. He wants to hold us close, wants to wipe every tear from our eyes. He cares about the parts of us that are burdened and weary. He wants to use our sorrow and anguish to draw us closer to him, and in that closeness, he wants to change us, change our hearts, and send us out to do his work.
Our Western society is highly individualized, and our measure of morality is based on individual guilt or innocence. We’ve all heard the justification: Why should I repent of racism? I never owned slaves. But in the Bible, guilt and shame aren’t described in such a narrow individualistic sense. In the Bible, guilt and shame are often communal and point to the need for corporate repentance.
Although communal shame and guilt brought both Ezra and Daniel great personal distress, their response highlights the redemptive arc of Scripture. For them, experiencing shame and guilt provided an opportunity to recognize the ugly reality that had led to their current situation and initiate communal restoration. As members of a group, they assumed the responsibility to confess and seek reconciliation on behalf of that group.
Though she’d never lynched anyone, though she’d never owned a slave, she recognized how she’d been afforded better educational opportunities, increased access to services, and increased earning power. She says, “My current reality isn’t untethered from my family’s past and from everyone benefiting from systems of injustice. And so it’s okay to feel connected to the sins of the past.”
“Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results.”3 James seems to imply that only through confessing our sins against each other to each other can we find true healing, true reconciliation.
Have you ever looked down on others because of their ethnicity, their race? Have you ever thought less of them because of the way they looked? Have you ever played zero-sum games as it relates to those of other ethnicities, believing their opportunities came at the cost of yours? Have you ever been afraid of someone just because of the color of his or her skin? If you have, whether you’re White, Black, or Brown, you have confession work to do. And if you don’t do this work of confession, you’ll shortchange your healing and the healing of others. You’ll undercut the work of racial
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Maybe he couldn’t understand how true forgiveness, reparative forgiveness, can be experienced only when we first make space to feel the weight of grief, mourning, and lamentation and then, in the face of all of it, offer forgiveness. Maybe he couldn’t see that so many of us needed time.
confessed that her ancestors dehumanized, kidnapped, murdered, tortured, raped, and lynched people of color. And though she hadn’t participated in these atrocities directly, she’d learned to take a more communal view of sin.
I am still fighting the internalized individualism and ‘innocence’ of whiteness.
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of
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A. W. Tozer, who wrote, Let us beware of vain and overhasty repentance, and particularly let us beware of no repentance at all…. A man can believe in total depravity and never have any sense of it for himself at all. Lots of us believe in total depravity who have never been wounded with the knowledge that we’ve sinned. Repentance is a wound I pray we may all feel.8
Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death. See what this godly sorrow has produced in you: what earnestness, what eagerness to clear yourselves, what indignation, what alarm, what longing, what concern, what readiness to see justice done.10
Isaiah 1:15, in which God said to his people through the prophet, “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.”13
“justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream.”
