How to Preach a Dangerous Sermon, xv.
46. Bruggemann, Prophetic Imagination, 65.
47. John Paul Lederach, The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 29.
Just a Few Thoughts (Questions, Really) on Race 1
What is race? A thing to run? If so, then, how?
A thing to which we run to as a shelter for safety, literally a roof under which our identity may dwell secure, a ground on which our integrity, the maintenance of that identity, may stand?
Or do we run to race simply, but no less significantly, as a source of pride in our presence and progress, our survival and success, as in those still heard phrases in many places, Black or White or (choose a color) power?
Or do we run to race so to run through race, to get to the other side, to stand with the other, so to see one another through the lens of the commonality of our humanity, as in that generation ago liberal-minded goal of a color-blind society? (A laudable ideal in theory, the pursuit of which, however, is beset by an insoluble real-world problem: even when color-blind, we all still see Black and White. It seems that we can’t run through race to some mythological place of total color unconsciousness.)
What is race? A thing to run? If so, then, how?
A thing if—or, if not, depending on one’s point of view—to run to, then also to run from in fear? Fear of rejection and isolation by prejudice, which negatively prejudges us without benefit or burden of knowledge of us. Hence, a thing to run from, as in “I refuse to be identified by my race” or “I seek to pass,” pretending by appearance or affect or other accouterment or action to be a member of another, preferably the politically, economically dominant race
Or do we run from race, indeed, from the other in fear of what we’ve been taught, of what we’ve learned and so believe as true about the other, about them, about those people?
Or do we run from race in fear of facing our own deep and abiding prejudice; how so quickly we judge the other based on evidence other than that which we attain by personal, individual encounter?
Race. A thing to run? No. Rather a thing to be as an expression of diversity. A diversity, as seen both from a theological perspective of divine intention and from an anthropological point of view of the created order itself, and, paradoxically, best shown and seen as one. For there is but one race, whose name is holy. And that race is wholly human.
Much the same point of Jesus’s parabolic reply to that lawyer’s testy question about eternal life.2 An essential element of abundant, authentic life is our knowing and honoring our neighbor—who is anyone—and our being a neighbor to everyone.
Then why, O why, do we still divide ourselves, one from another, color by color? The color of fear. The fear of color, whether other than our own or our own. Despite our highest ideals and our best intentions, our history and sociology continually trump our theology and anthropology.
Let us pray and struggle still that we may find a more excellent way.
1. In conjunction with the viewing and discussion of the video, The Color of Fear, Lee Mun Wah, April 30, 1994, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0484384/.
2. Luke 10:25–37.
A CHRISTMAS MESSAGE TO THE UNION OF BLACK EPISCOPALIANS
I don’t know about you, but my heart is very troubled this Christmas. Recently an article that included photos of my participation in a march for Black lives in 2012 came to my attention. Looking at the picture, I realized that I am still troubled as a Black man—a husband, father, uncle, and grandfather. I am also troubled as a Black man who claims the Christian faith. I look around me and I see Black-on-Black gun violence, and blatant police violence on young men and women of my community. I see Black domestic violence yoked with entrenched poverty.
I see a political-economic system of school to prison tracking of our Black youth. And even with (if not because of) a Black man in the White House, I see a growing constitutional movement to reverse many hard-won civil rights and protections. I think many of us feel as insecure as did our ancestors during the days of the Fugitive Slave Act. We are not safe from racist violence on our streets and highways, nor even in our houses of worship. In my heart I feel deeply the protest chant, “NO JUSTICE! NO PEACE!”
Yet, I am a person of Christian faith—a faith that calls me to a heart of peace even in the midst of injustice.
Our Lord Jesus said, “But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person” (Matt. 15:18–20).
Yes, I know in my heart that Christians must seek inner peace, lest, in the struggle for justice, we become the evil against which we struggle.
I am a Christian. But even more, I am an inheritor of the Black Christian tradition—a theological tradition that transcends denominations. One cannot listen to the words and melodies of the spirituals and not recognize that our slave ancestors’ struggle for freedom was anchored in an inner spiritual peace. One cannot think of the civil rights movement, its songs and sermons, and not recognize that the strength to face and overcome Jim Crow’s evil was drawn from an ancestral understanding of the King of Peace: “Ride on, King Jesus.” We call this “Soul Theology,” which means we shall overcome only by keeping our souls anchored in the peace of Christ, even before justice comes. In this sense, the protest motto, “No Justice! No Peace!” is inverted to “NO PEACE! NO JUSTICE!” “Soul Theology” understands the essential divine truth that peace must be a matter of the individual heart before it is a social, cultural, and political reality. Keeping one’s soul anchored is for us both a divine truth and ancestral witness.
The greatest contemporary witness of this
