Our Questions Are Invitations
In my experience, it’s hard to tell what throws a person into the reality that racism exists today. It’s like getting a splinter. Many people, and honestly for many white people, it can be like rubbing our hand across a piece of wood a thousand times never thinking twice about it. We don’t notice anything until something clicks and the pain is lodged into us.
We hear something.
We learn something.
Or we experience something.
And once it grabs our attention, it won’t let us go. The question that then lies in our hearts, which is the title of this episode, is “What do I do about racism?” How do you hold onto it as it holds onto you? How do you move beyond just thinking differently, recognizing history, or talking in circles about it?
As I’ve been walking through my own journey of discipling racism out of my heart, I’ve learned the voice of Jesus is beneath each of these questions. Each time we ask these questions, we are opening the door for Jesus to ask us, “Would you follow me?”
Following Jesus means living into images given to us by Jesus. Images are powerful. Images can heal. Images can also harm. (Anyone who has wrestled through pornography knows this to be true). In this blog I’d like to offer you an image. An image I myself have stepped into to let God begin the healing process in me in order for me to bring the healing process he’s bringing through so many right now.
In the beginning of my journey I thought it was about identifying one root problem. Now, I’ve come to see it’s not about understanding one problem but a lack of posture that helps us see the complexity of problems that still keep the brutality of racism alive today.
I invite you to walk with me through my walk with this image. Where I’ve let the light of Christ break through in the crevices of my heart. And maybe, just maybe, it may shine some light on things for you as well.
Imagine A Crowd
The image I’d like to share is one that helps us begin to restore the image of God to others. The image is one of a story found in the Bible. It’s often titled, “The Woman Caught In Adultery.”1 It begins with a few people trying to get Jesus caught in his words. They bring a woman before him and ask him to affirm the tradition of a punishment in response to her actions.
The punishment?
Stoning.
Although it seems archaic to us, it would have been commonly accepted (and is still accepted in parts of the world) in their day due to the law. Stoning has a unique element about it though, because it’s not the easiest or quickest way to punish a person by death. It is unique because of its communal nature.2 It’s an act a whole community participates in. It’s also an act that aids in carrying out a hideous action without any one person taking full ownership for the result.
What’s interesting is the response of Jesus. He doesn’t ignore it. He doesn’t dodge it. Jesus doesn’t even launch a five part Twitter thread critiquing the reaction. To Jesus, there is a much simpler step that will help provide the next couple of steps.
He speaks directly to the crowd. He prompts them as a community to think individually about their own life and the inconsistency that would prompt such an action.3 After each person reflects on their own life, they individually, or as the text says “one by one,” drop their stones and walk in a different direction.
This image is one that is bringing healing because it’s begun to be a picture of our activity alongside God towards the racism that exists in this world. It’s not a process of yelling. It’s a process of healing. It’s an image of what to do when caught up in a crowd that isn’t treating someone as a living and breathing image of God.
A Moment of Reflection
This image doesn’t necessarily translate if our focus stays on the woman. In the context of this story, she is a minority, but is pulled into the story because of her actions. Racism in our day pulls in people of color not because of any action on their end but their mere existence. To be Black, Asian, Native American, or any other race is not a problem. The problem is with the sin of our history that is still creating problems for people of color and it is still today bruising, hurting, or even killing them.
In recognizing this necessary caveat, I’d like to turn our direction to a secondary picture given in this story.
Our attention, and God’s healing work, is found through how Jesus does crowd control. His interaction speaks volumes to God’s interaction with the world today. Lest we need to be reminded, crowds are powerful.
Crowds are powerful because people will do communally what they will never do individually. Crowds are powerful because they form our moral conscious whether we intentionally know it or not. Crowds are powerful and they are also dangerous. Just ask Jesus. Depending on where you flip to in Jesus’s story, he is either being protected by a crowd or killed by one.
The powerful work of Jesus is how he gets this crowd to no longer think like a crowd. He asks a crowd of people to pause and reflect as individuals. Crowds make it easy to group think. Think like a left-wing crowd. Think like a right-wing crowd. Jesus on the other hand empowers us to not think with a crowd mentality.
Jesus is powerful because he can show anyone in a crowd how the real stones we hold are our hearts. And when our hearts are hardened, it has the ability to not only hurt others but kill others.
Now, I invite you to climb into this image and look around with me.
I am in this crowd.
Crowds aren’t just crowds. Crowds are communities. I’m living and breathing in a crowd as we speak. I’ve actually inherited several crowds. Along my journey I’ve kept some crowds and left others. And since I’m white, I’ve also inevitably inherited a crowd and a way of seeing and interacting with the world. I stand in a lineage of people who stood here before me who at one point believed they could own a person or remove someone from their home to create their own home. Before I try to distance myself, I remember that even if that’s 500 years ago, it’s not like everything is fixed and damage no longer exists because of policy changes. It takes more than rules to change the ways of the heart. Time doesn’t always heal.
When I listen to the crowd, I hear many saying racism is a thing of the past. There is nothing else to be done. To accept this reality is to continue the shrapnel of the rocks thrown before me.
When I listen to Jesus, my Savior of color, I hear a different voice. As I read the scriptures of many people of color who wrote these precious words, I come to be unsettled with the individual defense being, “I’m not a part of this.” Those who mourn and hurt are precious to God. Don’t I want to be closer to God? And if voices of color today are saying there are still rocks, still hurts, and still deaths, doesn’t that mean there is still work to do?
Awareness, Relationships, & Commitments
Throughout my process of evaluating myself individually, I’ve found the work of Jamar Tisby, How To Fight Racism, to be an extremely helpful conversation partner in my individual reflection. It’s helped me drop rocks I never knew I was holding onto in my life. Many authors have given me breadcrumbs of where to go with discipling out racism, but Tisby has given me the whole loaf in his latest book.
The three lanes he’s given me to talk to Jesus about are awareness, relationships, and commitments.4 These are the biblical handlebars in evaluating what we’ve inherited, where I’m at, and what may be a different direction God is calling us to walk in.
Jesus and I have sat in each of these lanes as I ask…
“Am I conscientious of what it’s like for other people of color to walk into the same rooms that I don’t think twice about? Am I aware of my race and history and how it is affecting others?”
“Do I care about what my friends of color care about even when it has nothing to do with me?”
“Am I committed to repairing the world with God since I confess before God that generations before me damaged the world?”
These questions reveal more than I thought I could know. I need Jesus to clean the dust of the stones off of my hands. I need Jesus to point out how I’ve asked my friends of color to hold the stones of the past. And I’ve even become convicted of the ways some of my money and energy sharpens rocks for other people to still throw rocks.
Crowds make great concerts. They never make great Saviors. As a matter of fact, they killed our Savior. The extinction of racism will only come about if we as an entire community help make it extinct. Organizations and ways of life don’t just change with individuals, but can start with individuals. If you’re a follower of the Way (not the Mandalorian way), then I encourage you to evaluate your ways.
“I’m not racist” isn’t the finish line of this journey. It’s the beginning. It’s the beginning of asking what we have inherited, what are our crowds doing, and how can we join what God is already doing amongst people who have very different experiences than us? This is the work of loving God and loving others. It’s the work of not following the crowd.
Figure out your rocks. Figure out your crowds. It’s crucial work. If we don’t, we must remember the words of Albert Tate who spoke about the weight of relationships in being Black in America:. “If you cannot see my burden, you will unintentionally become a part of my burden.”5
Jesus, help us not be a burden, but to cast ourselves before You.
References
1John 8:1-11
2Zahnd, Brain. The Unvarnished Jesus (Spello Press, 2019), 86.
3Zahnd, The Unvarnished Jesus, 86.
4Tisby, Jamar. How To Fight Racism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2021), 4.
5Albert Tate is the lead pastor of Made For Fellowship Church. You can follow him on Instagram @alberttate.