Admit it. If you are still following this site, the question has run through your head by now.
Why is this dude ALWAYS writing about race?
It’s fine. I get it. Not a lot of funny posts lately. Fewer Star Wars themed rants. The pace has changed*. There are reasons.
*It’s not as though I’ve lost my sense of humor. If you follow me on the Twitter, you know that there is a lot of redonk flowing through my mind still.
If you are feeling me, great. If you’re not, this is the post that ties some things together. It sums up a stream of thought that started to develop in Seminary and got some legs as I worked and lived in the urban core. Now I have the time and space to begin to process and express what theology and experience have been teaching me.
American Christians would be well-served to be more acutely in touch with the stories of injustice that have happened and continue to happen in our society.
I’m sure that someone out there smarter than me (probably Walter Bruggemann) has already pointed out that the subject and audience of the Bible is predominantly the societal underdog. Admittedly, there was a period of time when Israel’s kingdom was at the top of the food chain. But that wasn’t always the case. They were slaves in Egypt. They were dispersed by the Babylonian Empire. They had to operate under the thumb of the Roman Empire. The early church had the same position, as well as the complication that it was a growing yet vulnerable movement during the time that the New Testament was written. You’d have to do some math to get a solid number, but my guess would be that at least 2/3 of the Bible was written to/from a place of vulnerability.
And yet, most of our theology and religious perspective these days comes from a place of power. It’s a projection of the voice of the privileged (a group that I consider myself a part of). We are learning about and experiencing God through that 1/3 lens. We aren’t in touch with the voices from our history that were enslaved, dispersed and toiling in vulnerability. The light shinning on those accounts gets dimmer and dimmer, and I would argue that there are far too many Christians that are hostile toward those narratives and realities.
I’m not saying you can’t love Jesus and be a “good Christian” (whatever the heck that means) if you aren’t in touch with the stories of the African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics and Asians (yes, our country put our Asian brothers and sisters in internment camps at one point in our history). I’m just saying that binding ourselves to those stories can give us a more robust understanding of who God is and how God has worked through history. Those stories look far more Israel than they do Egypt. They look far more Israel than they do Babylon. They look far more Israel than they do Rome. The dominant narrative of our country that we tend to hold to looks very much the inverse. We aren’t completely missing the point, but we also aren’t getting a robust view of the point. The non-brown narratives are not unimportant. I just think there is a need for us to broaden the story.
I, for one, refuse to let myself forget what I saw and experienced in Kansas City. I refuse to let myself become numb or deaf to the realities of injustice in our society. I refuse to be some farking hipster who talks about justice but cannot name a writing or speech of MLK aside from “I Have a Dream”. I refuse to have a bookshelf of theology books where all of the authors look the same.
And as long as people are within hearing distance, I’m going to remind them of these narratives. I feel as though they have moved me to a healthier understanding and praxis in regard to my orientation to God. I aopologize if you find this annoying and/or redundant.
Actually, no. No I don’t.
Renew and Resotre
