Have a listen!
TheMIghtyLCUCC
Church, we need to talk.
I invite you to pull up and ear, open your hearts, and listen. Take a breath. Breathe in the Holy Spirit of Love everlasting. Breathe out all preconceived notions. Let us talk.
Howard Thurman reminds us that the spirit of Christmas is a year around affair. Even as we take down the decorations and put away the tree, Christmas is an all the time mind set of empathy and caring. Sometimes, all too often maybe, we forget to carry the spirit of Christmas with us throughout the year.
When the song of the angels is stilled When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins: To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among brothers,
To make music in the heart.
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is celebrated each year on his birthday. All too many times, in too many places and spaces, folks bring out his I Have a Dream speech and forget about the history of racism and white supremacy that led to that speech. All too many times, in too many spaces we forget about his dream of the Beloved Community. We try to forget about the history of racism that grew and continues to prosper and stems from a white supremacist world view.
I gave a sermon a few weeks ago and expressed to those gathered that a bullet may have killed Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. but white supremacy, backed by a white supremacist theology, loaded the gun and pulled the trigger. In many instances the violence that befell Martin Luther King Jr., along with hundreds of thousands of others, is the natural violent end when white supremacy is challenged, especially when that challenge comes from Black Indigenous People of color.
Church. We need to talk!
We must wrestle with our past complacency with racism and white supremacy. We need to reckon with our past racism if we are ever to realize God’s dream of human unity, or the Beloved Community that Martin spoke about and what we ask, yearn for, in our Lord’s Prayer: Thy Kingdom/Kindom come on earth as it is in heaven. In this heaven to come, which we pray breaks through in our time and place in history, racism doesn’t exist.
In heaven, if all humanity is united in peaceful harmony, if we ask God to break in, now, how can we imagine that we are called to be a white supremacist creation. If heaven is a place of beauty and harmony, if heaven is the beloved community, then how do we work to sustain, ignore, and even create a white supremacist, racist, and violent community? How dare we? How dare we be so arrogant to deny the Image of God in all of creation?
Let Us make them in Our Image, in Our Image let Us make them.
Church. We need to talk!
We do not need to be active in creating, sustaining, or defending a white supremacist world view, nor do we need to be actively violent in our racism. But to deny our racism and the history of white supremacy in our churches is to be complacent and complacency only allows racism to flourish, and a white supremacist theology continues to infect our churches and communities.
We are all being infected with the poison of racism. Either we believe a white supremacist world view and work to sustain it, even to point of violence, or we are being oppressed and killed, or we are complacent, or we are actively doing antiracism work. The more we are complacent, the more white supremacy and racism flourish, and people are dying due to racist policies and theology.
Racism is the poisonous water which is poisoning our collective soul. We all, especially followers of Jesus, must do the difficult and courageous work of confronting racism in ourselves, in the institutions where we reside, pray, and work.
It is only through visiting the physician of truth that we may be healed.
Alas Jesus tells us that we are not left alone in our work: Remember, I Am with you always, to the end of the age. These are the last words spoken to the Disciples of Christ as reported in the Gospel of Matthew.
God joins us in this co-creation of the beloved community so that all of humanity, each an expression of the Divine image, regardless of our outwardly expression, may thrive.
It is only in the truth telling, that we may be healed.
It is only in the healing that we may live as one humanity.
It is only living as one humanity that the Beloved Community, Thy King/Kindom may come, and may be realized in our here and now of history.
May we remember that the work of Christmas is a year around affair, a way of life, a way of empathy and care for ever more.
May we join in the co-creating, with God, the beloved community.
May we hold tight to the hand of Jesus, lean on and into the Divine Christ in our midst.
May we follow the Spirit of God towards human unity: one humanity created in the Image of the Divine.
May we honor the Divine Spark in others as we honor the Divine Spark in us.
May it be so!
Ashe.