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May 28 - May 30, 2020
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.
If you’re White, if you come from the majority culture, you’ll need to bend low in a posture of humility. You may need to talk less and listen more, opening your heart to the voices of your non-White brothers and sisters. You’ll need to open your mind and study the hard truths of history without trying to explain them away. You’ll need to examine your own life and the lives of your ancestors so you can see whether you’ve participated in, perpetuated, or benefited from systems of racism.
The more I embraced my ethnic identity, the greater the chance I’d be rejected by those White parents—seen as unsafe, angry, and likely to make trouble.
“Love,” I said, “brings freedom, and slaves didn’t have freedom or choice. Family doesn’t leave family in bondage.”
The truth—historical, sociological, psychological, and spiritual—should not be up for debate, especially among Christian people. In Ephesians, Paul wrote, “Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist.”1 The gospel of John records Jesus’s prayer: “Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth.”2
The truth is that each ethnicity reflects a unique aspect of God’s image.
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 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.
Race, as we know it, is a political and social construct created by man for the purpose of asserting power and maintaining a hierarchy.
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.
What is the purpose of lament? It 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.
The church will not be a leading example in racial healing until we feel the weight of communal guilt and shame and then allow it to push us into the truth. We won’t be agents of reconciliation until, like Ezra and Daniel, we take on the guilt and shame of our community and let it propel us toward confession.
Confession of our entanglement in racism and systemic privilege is essential for complete healing and restoration. And none of us is off the hook.
It turns out it’s one thing to have a Constitution and another thing entirely to make sure its guarantee of equal protection is applied justly for all image bearers.
Martin Luther King Jr. said it best: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
The answer to white supremacy isn’t black supremacy. The answer to colorism within the majority systems is not corresponding colorism among non-White groups. Any supremacy, any colorism, should be acknowledged and confessed if we’re to find hope of healing. In fact, all forms of racism and bigotry—using racist slang, laughing at racist jokes, entertaining the privileges of color—must be confessed before we can move together toward lasting reconciliation.
I came to understand the surprising truth: forgiveness wasn’t a gift to those who’d hurt me; it was a gift to myself.
C. S. Lewis wrote, “To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”
Only when we’ve made space for our emotions, when we’ve honestly evaluated them, can we move into true Christlike forgiveness.
to forgive as Christ forgave, we’ll need to receive the help and grace of God.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “Forgiveness is not an occasional act; it is a permanent attitude.”
But consider the words of pastor and author 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.
We cannot fulfill the command of God if we aren’t as committed to our neighbor as we are to ourselves.
If this book serves to highlight just one truth, I hope it’s that real beauty can come from the ashes of our country’s history with racism. So we continue to spread the message. As the apostle Paul declared, “Because we understand our fearful responsibility to the Lord, we work hard to persuade others.”4 We keep inviting people into the work because we’ve come to know that race is a social and political construct that has no place in the kingdom of God.
