Some of this guilt is appropriate; a Godly sorrow that helps me
reflect annually on the recent past of the country I call home that legalized
and promoted the kidnap, sale and abuse of fellow humans for the sake of
profit. It does no good to hide behind the often-quoted cliché “I didn’t have
slaves.” America’s history of racism is my history inasmuch as the history of
slavery is the history of blacks in America. Indeed, this is our history; the history of our
relating. The fact that I live in the same town as blacks today is a reminder
that there was a time when their relatives were taken from their home by my
relatives (whether literally or not). I empathize with those who urge our society to simply move on,
move forward, and move past the stains on our relational record. Unfortunately,
I typically only hear this from other whites.
For the past 6 months I have been meeting weekly with a group of
black students on our campus, 6 of the 20 or so, to talk about race. Our
conversations have ranged from music to food, but mostly it is a time for them
to share with me about their struggles as a minority in an almost exclusively
white world here in North Georgia. I have learned about their culture, I have
learned about their heroes, I have learned their stories and I have come to
understand some of the deepest differences between blacks and whites.
Differences that still manage, as Dr. King once said, to keep the hour we spend
worshiping God each week more segregated than nearly any other hour in America.
As followers of Christ we have dreamed about what it means to be the “beloved
community.”
These
conversations, and the quiet internal wrestling in a month dedicated to
drudging up the past has forced me to reflect anew on some important
theological truths that need some more air time. From the earliest Jewish
prayer books, as early as the first millennium, we find the command for Jewish
men to pray three blessings daily:
“thank you God
that I am not a gentile, a woman, or a slave.”
When Jesus
arrives to usher in the Kingdom of God this prayer is turned on its head
inspiring the Apostle Paul to later write:
“There is neither Jew nor Greek,
there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are
all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).
Paul did not mean
that when we come to Christ we somehow lose our ethnicity, our gender or our profession.
What he did mean, emphatically, is that our identity as a follower of Jesus
Christ, trumps all other identities. Any other way that we would seek to
identify ourselves, even as a male or female, is secondary to our identity as a
follower of Christ. The old is gone, the new is come.
Black History is
important, but it is a deficient history unless it also tells the story of the
greatest injustice the world has ever known. The story of the Creator of the
world who allowed his only son to enter earth as a Jewish carpenter, and die
the death of a common criminal so that, even after slave owners treated people
like property, they could be forgiven…and even after people were treated like
property, they could forgive.
