On Saturday evening, I watched Bill Hybels share his MLK message at Willow Creek. You can find it here: https://willowcreek.tv/sermons/south-barrington/2018/01/mlk-a-history-shaper/
Like Hybels, I too found the book Divided by Faith to be an education that has worked over my lens and perspective regarding race in America. It helped open my eyes more widely to the systemic nature of racism, but more than that, it helped me better understand why the white evangelical church collectively has been so slow to join with people of color in the work toward racial justice and reconciliation throughout history right into the present. Chapters 8 and 9 prophetically expose the dynamics of "stuck-ness" for the white evangelical church, which, if examined, also help point to ways to move past the stuck-ness of status quo, complicity, silence.
One of the best ways out of stuckness toward movement as an individual is to listen from different places and to connect in different ways. As a white person, my racial education and experiences have come down from a racialized society that has shaped my views and beliefs and actions deeply. According to one of my favorite books, Reconciling All Things by Katangole and Rice, I am in need of the practice of lament by unlearning speed, distance, and innocence.
Unlearning speed: "So often we prefer to work superficially and move quickly to 'solutions' that only mask our brokenness." "Lament in local places is a reminder of the long journey to tear down walls and become different people." Unlearning speed requires us to consider the past seriously and to recognize the fragile and lengthy pursuit toward healing and peace. It's an intentional, but slow journey.
Unlearning distance: Here, "lament is about location, location, location." "Why are those who are named 'oppressed', 'poor', and 'the least of these' so prominent throughout Scripture? Perhaps to show us that God draws very near to the most vulnerable- not because they are any less sinful, but because they are the most sinned against. They are the ones most likely to be lamenting. By telling the truth about brokenness, we too learn to lament. When we draw near to those who are most sinned against, our call is not first 'to make a difference' but to allow the pain of that encounter to disturb us." It's an incarnational journey; a journey alongside.
Unlearning innocence: "..learning to see and name the truth about the brokenness of the church itself is such an achievement. Otherwise 'the way things are' is accepted as exactly that: the natural, acceptable and even inevitable way things have to be. The more we become intimate with a terrain of profound difference and division, the longer we remain there, the more it reveals our complicity and how much we resist transformation. Learning lament involves not only seeing the church as broken but also seeing our own complicity, how 'I' am also part of the problem." It's a journey of confession and repentance.
Though lamenting through the unlearning of speed, distance, and innocence is painful and costly, it is also the way forward out of stuck-ness toward hope, freedom, new creation.
Hybels recommends giving one hour this week in honor of MLK. How might we each continue taking steps toward unlearning speed, distance, innocence?
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