writing the journey
Loving your neighbor does mean holding them accountable to our common principles and common humanity, and it does mean that there is a time when the consequences of violence and terror and destruction will be paid by those who commit the acts.
Warning your neighbor away from the actions is a way to show love by warning them away from the consequences.
Seeing change in people will take time, sometimes far more time than we have patience for.
We just do not allow Black people in America to just exist. To be. To be learning and growing. To make mistakes and then figure out the way forward. To be children who are innocent and who love fun, who are mischievous and scared and reluctant to admit they’re scared. To boast and exaggerate, to hide and crawl away. To try new things and even reject them. Or to discover their talents and pursue their interests to become fulfilled in life.
Some seventeen years ago now a man I didn’t much know but with whom I sparred asked a question of me that changed the course of my life: “You do know that I’m Black?”
I felt so slow and ignorant. I’m not that advanced, not at all, and I am a slow learner who is just not going to get much further along than I am. I’m feeling so discouraged.
If you see Haiti and you have the urge to “help,” I would suggest that Haitians don’t really need you to come help them. Haitians, like all humans, have great intelligence, drive, creativity, and their own sense of self-worth. If you want to help, find and support Haitians who are doing that work. It doesn’t give you a place to be centered and it won’t provide photo opportunities of you “helping” Haitians.
But it will help Haitians by letting them do for themselves.
How do I make my faith work anymore (and maybe it never did) when such a very Christian nation seems incapable of seeing the violence we are initiating, celebrating, and dismissing, often while claiming the name of Jesus?
You want to terrify politicians? Take away their signs of power which are “respect” and obedience and decorum and complacency. Trip them up, make a point to oppose them at every turn, continuously point out their failures, and continuously refuse to accord them the power to silence you.
Rather than seek to deny the humanity of gay people and trans people, what about using your religion to help you decide to know more about them so that you can love them better?
That Good Samaritan did a good thing to someone in distress, and if the story stops there, then we have learned a good lesson, right?
But what the story doesn’t tell us in the background, and doesn’t tell us “the rest of the story.”
There is a glass bubble around white people in America and elsewhere, a bubble that lets us see through to the lives of others, but that protects us from questioning the wisdom laid down in our schoolrooms and homes and churches about what events “really mean.”
Let me bring in a little history for you today. Let’s talk about Haïti . . . Haïti was once … More
If you want to build your faith up so that you honor Jesus and you draw people to Jesus in your lives, might I suggest you do it the way that Jesus did?
Perhaps white people’s thoughts and prayers and good intentions aren’t enough when their Black friends are asking for love and dignity.
As America evolved as an independent nation freeing itself from certain connections with Britain such as political and economic control, so did the church, centering itself in the power and people of America who ran the nation, and inescapably represented their cultural values through religious language and theology.
White people, do not go into Black spaces to help change the conversation or add your very important opinion. It is just not the time and place for that.
“Making good trouble” means stirring things up so that we do not become complacent about our situation and resigned to injustice
Wyte people can’t be accused of bias or wrong unless there is exceedingly overwhelming “proof,” and even then we will go down fighting and insisting that we were not wrong
The vision of Jesus for empire Christianity in our Sunday Schools and sermons and theologies is really an irrelevant Jesus who does not match the Jesus of the texts.
For the vast, vast majority of people, “deconstruction” is a good thing. Deconstruction can result in something far different and, in my opinion, far better than, white Evangelical Christianity.
The history of the church is our confidence in rightly understanding until we realize how terribly wrong we’ve misunderstood everything.
Betty White, a white woman in an industry that empowered only white men, stood up for what’s right. It cost her the job that she loved. But she did it, not “anyway,” but “because.” She did it because of her own moral integrity.
Whatever your beliefs are about redemption and salvation and even universalism—Jesus was always with those who are most despised and feared by Evangelicals. They’re the people he had meals with. Their homes were his resting place. They were whom he wept for.
The Jesus of the texts doesn’t encourage harm for others—and the opponents of health protocols aren’t demonstrating the person of the texts.
CRT is about systems, not individuals. Systems are developed as shortcuts for lengthy processes so that we don’t spend all our time trying to figure out how to hand multiple situations and not have disparate outcomes.
Jesus gets to the heart of the matter, which is simply you can’t follow Jesus if you have more important things than Jesus.
Much ink will be spilled in the next few months or even years about the topic of Critical Race Theory (CRT), both by those who think they support it and those who think they oppose it
