Living Our Faith
For Christians to respond to the reality of racism in our lives and in our congregations, we must first move beyond denial. In classic Christian terminology, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” But such confession is done in hope. “If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”[i] A congregation that desires to overcome the sin of racism that bogs down and distorts their experience of the faith must begin with confession. Such a confession, however, must be seen as a positive step. It is a significant step towards the healing of a major division among humanity.
Of course, just because you confess, forgiveness by the victimized humans is not inevitable. Desmond Tutu relates a story of the cost to the victim that will not forgive. “A recent issue of the journal Spirituality and Health had on its front cover a picture of three U.S. ex-servicemen standing in front of the Vietnam memorial in Washington, D.C. One asks, ‘Have you forgiven those who held you prisoner of war?’ ‘I will never forgive them,’ replies the other. His mate says: ‘Then it seems they still have you in prison, don’t they?’”
Tutu continues, “In forgiving, people are not being asked to forget. On the contrary, it is important to remember, so that we should not let such atrocities happen again. Forgiveness does not mean condoning what has been done. It means taking what happened seriously and not minimizing it; drawing out the sting in the memory that threatens to poison our entire existence.”[ii] One of the powerful discoveries in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa was the power of truth-telling. There was healing in the victims finally having someone listen to their story of suffering and honoring their pain. Desmond Tutu notes, “It may be, for instance, that race relations in the United States will not improve significantly until Native Americans and African Americans get the opportunity to tell their stories and reveal the pain that sits in the pit of their stomachs as a baneful legacy of dispossession and slavery.”[iii]
CONFESSING WE ARE RACIST
For a White congregation to move to the step of confessing that they are racist is neither an easy step nor does it, in itself, solve the problem of racism. To draw upon the truth discovered in Alcoholics Anonymous, White people and White congregations are always “recovering racists.” That is as much a given of our context as being an alcoholic is a given of their constitution. We did not create the history that shaped us, but we cannot escape it either. A critical step in our healing, however, is acknowledgment of the problem.[iv]
In God’s economy, we are saved to community. We not only need to confess, but we need someone to listen to our confession. Picture the power of members of a White congregation taking the sin of racism so seriously that they are willing to sit before a Black congregation and speak of their own complicity in the sin of racism as well as listen intensely to the pain that their African-American neighbors experience in their lives. “True forgiveness deals with the past, all of the past, to make the future possible.”[v]
Such confession is not a single act but a process. We continue to need the dialogue made available through community. While individual congregations may be of predominantly one race, the Body of Christ is diverse. Thus God’s gift of the church to humanity is to provide humanity with that community of faith that transcends human divisions and provides it a context for such a dialogue.
Continuing with the model provided for us by Alcoholics Anonymous, the second step of the process is to admit our helplessness to control this disease and our dependence on a higher power. While education is important, we cannot educate ourselves out of racism. While laws to protect the community are important, we cannot legislate the end of racism. The history of racism makes it clear that racism will not be defeated by human agency alone.
Our hope lies in the redemptive power of God that has been revealed in the cross. The cross revealed that God is not defeated by evil and can use the experience of evil redemptively. Not even racism can defeat God’s reconciling purpose for humanity. If racism is our cross, the rebellious act by which we defy the intention of God, our hope is that God can use this cross as part of God’s redemptive purpose.
It is important to emphasize that this is not an attempt to justify the evil of racism or to suggest that it is good in disguise. Evil is evil, but God is neither restrained nor defeated by it. As Christians have learned through the ages, however, we must turn and face the cross if we are to experience its redemptive power. “Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon you? It is my treason, Lord that has undone you. ‘Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied you; I crucified you.”[vi] We not only do not need to deny the corporate history of racism in our nation and in our church and the ways that we have benefited from it, but it is important that we turn and acknowledge it for our own salvation.
IDENTIFYING THE PRIVILEGES THAT ARE
PART OF BEING WHITE
By identifying the types of privileges that have come to us by virtue of our being white, we can share in the search for the signs of God working redemptively in those very areas. It is not the pattern of God’s saving work only to speak through the pure in heart; frequently, the opposite is the case. Jesus followers held clear prejudices. “The disciples rebuked those who brought the children for Jesus’ blessing (Matt.19:13). They were surprised to see Jesus speaking to a Samaritan woman (John 4:27). These same twelve beseeched Jesus to send the woman of Canaan away when she sought healing (Matt. 15:23). Prejudice toward children, Samaritans, and Canaanites influenced the disciples’ response in each instance.”[vii] Yet Jesus worked through them to heal the oppression of prejudice. It is easy to demonstrate, through the history of the church, that we continue to be filled with prejudice. When Jesus is quoted in Luke as saying, “For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost,”[viii] it is important for the church not to shy away from the truth that Jesus is referring to us.
If the process of confession and forgiveness between Black and White congregations takes place, God can then liberate them to seek signs of God’s redemptive power at work in the whole Body of Christ. Economic benefits and societal acceptance, for example, are strengths that can be utilized for the good of the whole. Could not such economic privileges, political power, managerial abilities, and shared theological truths contribute to a strategy by which the structures of racism in the larger society might be confronted?
Of course trying to address the demonic power of racism in the society is not an easy task. This is where it is important that the believers be joined together in community and be well-grounded in the faith. God’s story, as revealed in the cross, is an invitation to the privilege of sacrifice and will likely include both great effort and not a little measure of suffering. It was not pleasant for Jesus to go to the cross. His invitation to his followers to take up the cross and follow him[ix] was not meant to be an invitation to luxurious comfort. Jesus deliberately chose the path of the suffering servant and invites us to participate in this path by which God is glorified.
SUFFERING FOR A GREATER PURPOSE
However, it was not an invitation to suffering for suffering’s sake. What lifts this type of suffering beyond mere pain is that it is a suffering for a greater purpose. Many people in the course of their lives have experienced the nobility of suffering for a greater purpose. Athletes strain their body in order to achieve a team victory. Soldiers sacrifice their lives for their country. Scientists spend long hours seeking to make a discovery that will benefit others. Jesus offers us the opportunity to devote ourselves to the greatest purpose of all. We are invited to participate in the life of the suffering servant and share in the reconciliation of the world.
Using the cross and the resurrection as our template for how God works in our world, congregations are invited to face the evil of the cross of racism, trusting that God is not defeated by such evil, and to search for ways that God can use even the reality of racism redemptively.
It is important to approach this search for the redemptive power of God with a combination of faith and humility. The Gospels recount that Jesus told his disciples three times that he would be crucified and would be raised from the dead.[x] Despite Jesus having said this, it is clear that the disciples did not understand what this meant.[xi] They had to live the truth of the resurrection before they could understand it. We can believe that racism will be used redemptively, but we must live the truth of God’s redemptive power to discover its full meaning.
One aspect of God’s reconciling work may involve the issue of reparation. Desmond Tutu, in speaking about the struggle to overcome racism in South Africa, speaks of the challenge of reparations. To “put the past behind us” and act as if an act of confession clears the tables of justice and allows us to “get on with life” is to trivialize the pain of the past. Part of our painful past is the fact that our constitution clearly states that our ancestors were fully aware of the economic value of slave labor in building a prosperous country.[xii] Historically, both Native Americans and African Americans paid a heavy price for the economic prosperity of this country. There is no way that one could calculate the value to African Americans in lives and wealth that racism has cost their ancestors. While there may be efforts to make symbolic economic reparation, as we have done with respect to Native Americans and to the Japanese Americans that we imprisoned during World War II, it would not be feasible to actually restore to a current generation that which has been taken from their ancestors. However, if we fully explored the various dimensions of that cost together, [xiii] could God use our confession of sins redemptively in raising our awareness as to how to respond to the challenge posed by the new wave of immigration in our country?
PSYCHOLOGICAL COST OF RACISM
There is also no clear way to calculate the psychic cost passed down through generations of African Americans with respect to the heritage of slavery that was imposed on them. The issue of the disproportionate incarceration of African-American males in our society might well be the result of a combination of the current prejudice of courts, police, and others and the historic psychic cost in which victims begin to accept the judgment of the dominant society. If Black and White congregations were willing to explore that reality together, perhaps another form of reparation might be the focus of energy on the redemption of those who are in prison in our society. It would be a way that the Body of Christ could embody Jesus’ statement about his own ministry, “He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”[xiv]
To approach the problem of racism from the perspective of a redemptive God is to both acknowledge our sins and be open to God’s saving activity. The Scriptures continually report that God is full of surprises from a human perspective. Redemptive Theology anticipates the exciting possibility that God might use the very troubling experience we have had with racism as an opportunity to advance the reconciling possibilities in our world. In taking this path, we are learning to live with the diversity of God’s creation in a way that enhances all of its parts. Our model is the Trinity. Each part is distinctive, all are equal, and each contributes to the good of the whole. As we evolve in our capacity to live in the rich diversity of the world, we prepare ourselves to experience communion with the God who created all of us and calls us home.
[i] 1 John 1:8-9
[ii] Ibíd., Tutu, page 271.
[iii] Tutu, Ibíd., p. 279 “If we are going to move on and build a new kind of world community, there must be a way in which we can deal with a sordid past. The most effective way would be for the perpetrators or their descendants to acknowledge the awfulness of what happened and the descendants of the victims to respond by granting forgiveness, providing something can be done, even symbolically, to compensate for the anguish experienced, whose consequences are still being lived through today
[iv] “The victim, we hope, would be moved to respond to an apology by forgiving the culprit. As I have already tried to show, we were constantly amazed in the commission at the extraordinary magnanimity that so many of the victims exhibited. Of course, there were those who said they would not forgive. That demonstrated for me the important point that forgiveness could not be taken for granted; it was neither cheap nor easy.”
[v] Tutu, Ibíd., p. 279
[vi] “Ah, Holy Jesus,” verse 2
[vii] Enter the River: Healing Steps from White Privilege Toward Racial Reconciliation; Jody Miller Shearer; Herald Press; 1994; page 52-53.
[viii] Luke 19:10.
[ix] Mark 8:34
[x] Mark 8:31; 9:31; and 10:34 (See parallels in other Gospels).
[xi] Mark 9:32.
[xii] Slaves were calculated as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of counting them. Like the new wave of immigrants today, the dominant community both needed their contributions and needed to dehumanize them in order to justify their actions.
As usual, this hits the proverbial “nail on the head.”