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February 28 - March 10, 2021
This is what frightened Herod—the possibility that the advent of God’s reign through Jesus might upset his own.
A populace that believed that God was on the verge of
breaking in was dangerous. Rome ramped up security every Passover because Passover always threatened to rekindle the memory of God’s mighty act to save. It was precisely inasmuch as Jesus was obedient to his Father and rooted in the hopes and dreams of Israel that Jesus revealed himself to be a great danger to the rulers of his day.
Jesus shows that those Christians who have called out injustice
Isaiah was not rejected simply because he told Israel to worship Yahweh. He was rejected because Isaiah realized that true worship of Yahweh had implications for
how one treated their neighbor.
Jesus’ statement about Herod was not some spur of the moment criticism of a political figure that he did not like. Jesus saw his ministry as a part of a tradition of Israel’s prophets who told the truth about unfaithfulness to God that manifested itself in the oppression of the disinherited.
Therefore, those Black Christians who see in those same prophets the warrant for their own public ministry have Jesus as their support.
The political, economic, and social policies of unredeemed rulers, then, are a manifestation of evil powers that are opposed by God. These powers (along with the problem of human sin) are the enemies God sent his son to defeat. For this reason, our modern delineation between spiritual and political evil when read back into Paul’s thought is an anachronism.
When Paul calls this age evil and says that we are rescued from it, it is a statement that we are no longer bound to order our lives according to the priorities, values, and aims of this age.
King said that the current practices throughout the North and the South were a manifestation of the kingdom of darkness and that the kingdom of the beloved son called for a different way.
Protest is not unbiblical; it is a manifestation of our analysis of the human condition in light of God’s own word and vision for the future. His vision may await an appointed time, but it is coming (Hab 2:1-4).
God judges Babylon for their pretensions to be in the place of God (Is 14:13) and for the resulting oppression of the nations and lands under its thumb. In the same way, John looks at the moral life of Rome and says that she is doomed for destruction.29 This destruction is plainly the result of its socially and politically immoral culture.
John, then, composed a letter read aloud to churches that condemns the economic policies inscribed in law (slavery). He says that these immoral activities along with persecution of Christians (Rev 18:24) will bring about God’s eschatological judgement.
To mourn involves being saddened by the state of the world. To mourn is care. It is an act of rebellion against one’s own sins and the sins of the world.34
Mourning calls on all of us to recognize our complicity in the sufferings of others.
A theology of mourning never allows us the privilege of apathy.
To think that more is possible is an act of political resistance in a world that wants us to believe that consumption is all there is.
Hungering and thirsting for justice is nothing
less than the continued longing for God to come and set things right.
To hunger for justice is to hope that the things that cause us to mourn will not get the last word.
do with the public witness of the church? Jesus asks us to see the brokenness in society and to articulate an alternative vision for how we might live.
does mean that we see society for what it is: less than the kingdom. We let the world know that we see the cracks in the facade.
the cessation of hostilities between nations and individuals as a sign of God’s in-breaking kingdom.
Peacemaking, then, cannot be separated from truth telling. The church’s witness does not involve simply denouncing the excesses of both sides and making moral equivalencies. It involves calling injustice by its name. If the church is going to be on the side of peace in the United States, then there has to be an honest accounting of what this country has done and continues to do to Black and Brown people.
The call to be peacemakers is the call for the church to enter the messy world of politics and point toward a better way of being human.
Therefore the work of justice, when understood as direct testimony to God’s kingdom, is evangelistic from start to finish.
White supremacy, even when practiced by Christians, cannot overcome the fact of the resurrection.
But I do not believe that the triune God revealed in the Old and New Testaments shows a lack of concern for Black lives or justice.
Luke’s place in the canon is a testimony to God’s value of all ethnic groups.
Luke’s Gospel argues that God always intended to create an international, multiethnic community for his own glory.
According to Absalom, God’s plan is revealed in all its glory in the conversion of African men and women.
This place as sons and daughters in God’s kingdom trumps any attempt by lesser kingdoms to make us second-class citizens. We are God’s children. The United States (or any other country) has no say in determining our value.
Zechariah and Elizabeth, then, were directly involved in making theological sense of Israel’s status as oppressed people under the thumb of the Roman Empire.
I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that I have heard a sermon on the meaning of religion, of Christianity, to the man who stands with his back against the wall. It is urgent that my meaning be made crystal clear. The masses of men live with their backs constantly against the wall. They are the poor, the disinherited, the dispossessed. What does our religion say to them?
Black suffering from injustice is not simply corporate; it is deeply personal. It invades the homes, bedrooms, schools, churches, and delivery rooms of Black families.
it situates the Jesus story in the middle of the pain of Israel, which includes the large-scale tragedy of exile and disinheritance along with the personal traumas each individual Israelite must face. In other words, Luke begins with the issue of injustice as a central concern.
he was a God who frees from slavery—his fundamental character as liberator marked him out as trustworthy, even when they had yet to experience it.
Black Christians who came to Christ surrounded by the false Gospel
given to them by their slave masters were right to see in the exodus narrative a G...
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If the God of Israel could defeat the gods of Egypt, might he defeat death itself so that all might share in the promised inheritance
God’s acts of redemption work forward and backward, throwing fresh light on all our stories.
For the African American Christian the miracle is the Black church born of truly miraculous circumstances and whose witness to Jesus has served as something of a forerunner preparing America to accept a truer and fuller gospel.
In this very risk, this yes to God, Mary stands in for Black (and all other) Christians who are called to give the entirety of themselves, their very bodies for a future that they cannot see.
Mary is
the patron saint of faithful activists who give their very bodies as witnesse...
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Is this not the hope of every Black Christian, that God might hear and save? That he might look upon those who deny us loans for houses or charge exorbitant interest rates in order to cordon us off into little pockets of poverty and say to them your oppression has been met with the advent of God? This is Mary’s claim, that God reveals himself in glory by turning his attention towards those that the world deems unworthy and lifting them up to a place of honor.
Israel learned something fundamental about God in the exodus event. He is the God who liberates. When they looked forward to what God might do in the future, they looked back to the exodus event and said that whatever happened it had to be in keeping with that revelation of God’s character.
The exodus is fundamental and in it Black Christians found a God who grants us liberation and a whole life to live before him.
The testimony of Mary is that even in the shadow of the empire there is a space for hope and that sometimes in that space, God calls us from the shadows to join him in his great work of salvation and liberation.
