A New Community, Black Lives Matter, and The Fierce Urgency of “Now”
In a society and world that continues not to value Black life, is there truly a community that holds and can embody a powerful vision for our flourishing and hope for us all?
So imagine a community where everyone — across every conceivable human construct (ethnicity, gender, class, etc) — was invited to be a part of, as equal members?
Where there is such a solidarity that the burdens of one part of this community is carried by the rest of this community — even across geopolitical and national boundaries?
Where there was a willingness to suffer greatly even at deep personal cost for the well-being and flourishing of one another?
Where those who have wealth and properties regularly re-distribute these to those who have nothing?
Where the poor are lifted up and the rich are humbled?
Where members of this community practiced radical hospitality to strangers?
Where those who used to be committed to stealing and theft are now focused on giving to those who are in need and restoration?
Where people find redemption and forgiveness for the things that no one knows and keeps them up at night?
Where its members are often visiting the incarcerated and seeking to serve them?
Where those who didn’t have a home were given one, and those without a family are brought into one?
Where those who were abandoned found refuge?
Where husbands were told that sacrificial love and service and not abuse or asserting absolute dominance were the way to win the heart of their wives?
Where the paradigms of honor-shame culture are completely flipped upside down and re-imagined?
Where the members are regularly pleading and working to see justice done in the world?
Where the members of this community worked to increase literacy rates?
Where arguably their most esteemed and important communal ritual was simply enjoying a good meal and drink with one another no matter their background?
Where in the first few years of this community, they regularly put their lives on the lines to care for those in need and suffering, even during pandemics, plagues, and famines — and out-did their neighbors in care?
Where in contrast to many traditional schools and systems of thought and human organizations that regarded women were inferior, had little schooling, and discouraged from speaking in public — that at the very start of this group they were leaders, encouraged to educate themselves, and spoke publicly?
Where outsiders observing this community, according to an early African leader, would regularly say “See how they love one another!”
Where members of this community from time to time report to be the means of but also experience miraculous healings from diseases and afflictions, some of which that is so horrific that it could be appropriately called “demonic”?
Where death is mourned, but not in the exact same way as others and somehow even with a powerful sense of hope?
Where the first formal message that the originator of this community, a Palestinian brown-skinned Jew, gave was centered around
- good news to the poor,
- release of the captives,
- recovery of sight to the blind
- setting the oppressed free
- grace given to those outside their circles — and this ironically got him kicked out of his hometown?
Where one of the greatest messages given by the leader was to love your enemies and do good to those who despise you?
Where the founder of this community could offer a framework to understand suffering and that through the work he would begin, the world would slowly start to become and one day become a radically different place due to his efforts?
Where the originator of this community blessed infants and children in a world that considered them nuisances and told the first members of this community that becoming like them is the way forward?
Where the founder of this community associated and spent so much time with the lives of the marginalized and those considered to be morally corrupt, that his adversaries called him as a “friend of sinners”?
Where the founder of this community went around restoring and declaring forgiven all kinds of people, particularly those who were reputed as flagrant “sinners” — an act of which that was usually granted through going to a temple and offering animal sacrifices in the presence of its priests?
Where the founder in his day told corrupt religious and civil leaders that “their time was up”, they were being called to account, and the Kingdom he would begin would deeply offend their sensibilities?
Where the founder of this community lived such a blameless and exemplary life that his adversaries had to make up charges against him to get him in trouble?
Where the author of this community stood accused before a powerful political ruler of his time and told this person that they would have no power unless it was given to them from above and that the type of kingdom he was bringing was very different than what the ones who would often leave their violent, exploitative, and dehumanizing marks?
Where the founder of this community was executed publicly in front of his friends and mother on a instrument of death that was used by the powers that be to maintain power, execute criminals, and silence the opposition — this being an event brought together by a collaboration of corrupt religious leaders and the ruling empire, and rather than everything falling apart, the community actually exploded and grew rapidly?
Where the greatest and strangest occurrence in the history of this community that they swore — indeed to their graves and in spite of great opposition — happened to the founder and was reported to have been witnessed by women, not men, in a culture that regarded the testimony of women as not permissible in court?
Where one of the inaugural events of the formation of this community took place on an ordinary morning around 9am where crowds of people from all across the world spontaneously heard exhilarating messages in their own languages from members of this community?
Yes, this is the story of Jesus the Messiah and his vision for his (imperfect) people called the Church.
The church of Jesus is the international multi-ethnic community across space and time that abounds in love, justice, grace, joy and a new kind of solidarity radically centered around Jesus. He lived the perfect life, pointed to the coming Kingdom of God, died for the sins of every single human being, and rose again from the dead, and promises to return again to set all things right, while in this in-between time has given us his Spirit to be apart of making all things right.
If Black lives are indeed in disarray due to injustice and oppression (and they are), then this is an area that the Church should join in and continue to be a part of out of love for humanity and in view of God’s plan to make all things right one day.
Now don’t get it twisted. We haven’t always lived up to this calling. In fact:
When we who are called Christians
have abandoned Jesus’ vision for the Church, abused and distorted God’s Word, and followed our own lusts and greed, we have found ourselves:
- working as slave-traders and complicit merchants as part of a larger exploitative economic system built on the dehumanization and commodification of Black people
- building orphanages, houses, and government buildings on the backs of enslaved Africans
- advancing the myths of white supremacy and racism
- waging ferocious wars that God NEVER told us to wage in his name
- closing our eyes to sexual abuse because of the love of money and status
- embracing promises of political and economic power from crooked leaders and as a result sacrifice faithfulness, goodness, mercy, and even our own Black brothers and sisters and other people for that end
- choosing a flag — a simple piece of cloth that was created for the express commitment to slavery — over the rights, bodies, and dignities of Black human beings
- pronouncing God’s blessings on colonialist regimes and expansionist agendas and even being a powerful force of strengthening the false teachings of “The Doctrine of Discovery” towards that end,
- clutching firm to Jim Crow laws and segregation,
AND in our present day find ourselves critiquing current movements for justice that would NOT be as necessary if much of the Church said “No” and chose differently in prior centuries.
(Watch “The Color of Compromise” Video Study Series by Jemar Tisby for more on this in further detail)
BUT when we who are called Christians
strive to be that “salt and light” that Jesus has called us to be, what the Apostle Paul calls “the Body of Christ” in the world,
practice what Frederick Douglass affectionately called “The Christianity of Christ”
recapture what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called “that sacrificial spirit of the early church” and indeed start to become that “beloved community” (4),
live out the power of the Kingdom of Jesus to break into the present,
we can, in addition to what was previously stated, be apart of pointing to a new way and contributing to human flourishing like
- creating hospitals, building libraries, schools, promoting literacy and education,
- contributing to the arts and the sciences
- starting abolitionist movements against slavery, sex-trafficking, and petitioning for better working conditions
- strengthening families and neighborhoods, providing hope to the hopeless, and establishing a intricate vision for personal and societal change
- establishing another basis for solidarity beyond just my own group so even the struggles and pains of communities in Islamabad, Pakistan could be deeply engraved on the heart of a 24-year old Nigerian-American man in the suburbs of Indianapolis, or a 70 year-old woman living in rural Kentucky.
- contributing to efforts of reconciliation and justice like the Archbishop Desmond Tutu played a pivotal role in South Africa during the apartheid era
- providing arguably the strongest ontological basis for human rights and dignity
- challenging systems of inequity that crush orphans, the poor, the marginalized
and so much more!
Lately, I have been reflecting on the legacy of slavery in the history of the Church and the consequences of that in the world. One interesting fact that I learned recently is that the first recorded sustained critique against slavery as an institution in the ancient world and antiquity was by Gregory of Nyssa, a renowned Christian leader in the 300s from Cappadocia in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) .
Here is a portion of what Gregory says , in a sermon on Ecclesiastes 2 :
‘I got me slave-girls and slaves.’ For what price, tell me? What did you find in existence worth as much as this human nature? What price did you put on rationality? How many obols did you reckon the equivalent of the likeness of God? How many staters did you get for selling that being shaped by God? God said, Let us make man in our own image and likeness.
If he [all humanity] is in the likeness of God, and rules the whole earth, and has been granted authority over everything on earth from God, who is his buyer, tell me?
Who is his seller? To God alone belongs this power; or, rather, not even to God himself. For his gracious gifts, it says, are irrevocable. God would not therefore reduce the human race to slavery, since he himself, when we had been enslaved to sin, spontaneously recalled us to freedom. But if God does not enslave what is free, who is he that sets his own power above God’s?
If we identify ourselves as “Christian”, then we can be better. We can do more. We have more to say than just
“Not THAT way.” “NOT NOW!” . “Wait till heaven, the sweet by and by.”
So much more.
And to my white brothers and sisters:
When you continue to find ways to dismiss the collective historical testimonies and continual experiences of Black people in regards to racial injustice, legacy of white supremacy, it is a SHAME and DISGRACE.
The current apathy, indifference, or opposition does more to discredit Jesus than anything else.
But Jesus, whom we call the Risen King, calls us to BECOME more, BE more and DO so much more.
And he has given us his Spirit to empower us to be a part of his plan to bring healing, redemption, and justice to the world.
Don’t dismiss or castigate people bringing up continual systemic racism, failures and breakdown in policing, and racial disparities in healthcare, housing, government, and education. All lives do indeed matter. The question has always been do you even believe that? What needs to be said right now and acted upon right now is that
BLACK LIVES MATTER. ALL BLACK LIVES MATTER.
Many have been about this life, many more have been waking up, but so many are still asleep.
Here is a starting point by one of my favorite pastors, Dr. Eric Mason, with his book Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice.
