05 Jun Faith To Remain In The Tension

Remember when there was only a global pandemic and the threat of imminent economic collapse to be concerned about?

I’m joking a bit, of course, but the truth is, some of us do remember that, and some of us don’t.

And here’s what I mean:

For many of our black and brown brothers and sisters, what the world now sees in our headlines is what they have carried for a lifetime, along with COVID worries and job insecurity:

the pain of not being able to feel that their lives are worth as much as a white person’s, nor their full humanity acknowledged.

And so, yes, when we have an already anxiety-soaked culture drowning in fear of disease and job loss, a string of racially charged killings is going to be like a match on gasoline. Our nation is struggling- how can we process it?

I’d like for you to read the entirety of this email, as I offer three encouragements to help us process this cultural moment well, and then end with a question.

1. Remain in the Tension

When I, as a white person, first began to dive into uncomfortable spaces and conversations around race and privilege (please don’t be thrown by that word- it’s simply an acknowledgment of the truth, which is that white Americans have had the privilege, or unique “gift” of not having faced race as an obstacle to success. Using this term does not deny anyone else’s incredible pain, grinding poverty, horrific loss or dark abuse. It just names an uncomfortable “truth on the table”), all I wanted was for the tension to be over. All I wanted was for uncomfortable feelings to go away.

And you know what? As a culture, that’s what we have done, repeatedly.

Every generation has just “wanted it to go away”:

After slavery ended, and the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution was passed, people who had not experienced racism thought racism had “gone away.”

After Reconstruction, with “40 acres and a mule” gifted to ex-slaves, those same people thought surely racism had “gone away.”

But it hadn’t. It just reared its head again through Jim Crow laws and white supremacy groups and racial terror of all kinds.

But when Jim Crow was overturned, and the Civil Rights Act was passed, many people thought surely racism had “gone away.”

After Rodney King and reforms to the LAPD, many people thought surely racism had “gone away.”

But it hasn’t. While I am grateful for every reform, law, and amendment that protects humans made in the image of God, the truth is, racism, while at times less overt, still lingers in our nation, in the hearts of far too many people, too many Christians, too many pastors, and too many police officers and those in positions of power.

Because of God’s grace and mercy in my life, I have also had another kind of privilege- the privilege of seeing the lives of countless black brothers and sisters up close. I’ve led many black people to Christ, done many a black wedding (a gift, I tell you!), dedicated countless black babies and eaten countless meals with black people. I’ve marched with, sung with, prayed with and been led and pastored by unbelievably godly, humble, Spirit-filled black people, and here is what I want to tell you, and it is the truth:

Every single one of them has had a deeply painful racist, if not a string of deeply racist, interactions with white people over the course of a lifetime.

Please believe me, fellow beautiful white Christian, made and loved by God.

Please don’t chalk these experiences up to some other factor. Please don’t do to others what you would not want them doing to you. Please don’t divert this into another conversation about another problem, or that other atrocity. I know God cares about all of those, but He cares about this one, too, and it seems He wants us to focus on it.

My dear friend Donnell Jones, a pastor of a multiethnic church in Washington D.C.–many of you know him because he has ministered to you and preached here multiple times– shared with me yesterday that his string of humiliations at the hands of white people and police officers has been too many to count. He was recently stopped by police and interrogated while out on a walk with his wife in his own neighborhood, because he “fit a profile.” He asked a white neighbor woman this week–if you did not know me, and saw me walking down the street–tell me the truth–would you be afraid? She said yes, honestly admitting what was in her heart.

He is a man of impeccable character and integrity, he was not angry, he was not bitter, but as we talked he wept at a lifetime of pain that the death of George Floyd triggered and the shame he felt at having to act in ways that would get white people to like him.

Another friend, James Lowe, a black pastor in Nashville, sobbed on the phone with me for the same reasons. He said he lost count of the times police have pulled a gun on him, both as a young man in Detroit and as a pastor ministering in inner city environments. This week, as he was delivering a trunk full of food to people in East Nashville, another gun was pulled on him and his 16 year old son. He pastors a multiethnic church, loves white people, longs for peace, preaches the Bible and is as conservative as they come, but for him, this has been too much. As he saw George Floyd, in specific, he could barely get the words out through his tears, with George Floyd’s funeral on in the background: “I know that could have been me.”

And these are but two of the countless stories I could tell you of people over the last week, many of whom are black members of our church, who love our church, love Jesus, love our country, but who have sat across a desk or a screen from me and wept.

Do you believe them? When you’re me, and you’ve heard the same story over and over and over from people you know love Jesus, love his church, love all people–the truth begins to dawn on you: we have a problem.

Racism has not gone away.

What can I do? I’ve asked, repeatedly. And consistently, I’ve heard two things:

Just stay with us in the pain, they’ve said. Don’t just get to the hope part yet, don’t just move on to the happy Jesus part yet. I know the Resurrection is coming, but sit with me in a Good Friday moment.

Church, remaining in the tension, refusing to look away, is the very definition of what it means to “bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.”
(Galatians 6:2).

Let’s not move on. Let’s sit and listen and learn and allow this to shape us and help us do better, and be better.

While my “flesh” may want the tension to go away, my head and my heart know that remaining in this tension, at least for white Americans, is the best thing that can happen.

We love the words, “liberty and justice for all”-and hanging out right here helps us get closer to what we say we aspire to.

But the second thing I have repeatedly heard is this:

2. Please Show Up for Your Friends

That is, refuse to rest until everyone is safe. One of my black pastor friends this week, again through tears, said, “Morgan, I’d love it if white Christians would say to me– You can just sit this one out; we’ve got your back.

I know I’ve asked myself over the years, if I had been alive in the 1960s, if I had been a pastor/preacher during the Civil War, what would I have done?

Far too many Christian pastors, preaching out of the Bible, and you can read their sermons (I have), justified slavery, justified white supremacy, justified segregation, justified Jim Crow, and attacked, through the power of their pulpit, those who raised their voices in favor of change, quoted verses about God being “a God of order,” charging them as “disturbers of the peace”–all the while forgetting that that is exactly what those who founded this country were called, and that is exactly what the first Christians in Acts were called.

Surely, those who did that then, and those who do that now, are the embodiment of Jesus’s words in Matthew 23: “You strain out a gnat to swallow a camel,” that is, you have missed the point.

Was Jesus a disturber of the peace when He flipped that table in the temple? Or did He see something that those in charge couldn’t: that the system was in need of repair.

Showing up for your friends goes like this (among other things): Sending them a gift, sending them dinner, saying something publicly, being willing to risk relationships for what we all know is right.

Can we look at our black brothers and sisters and simply say: You sit this one out, we’ve got it? We’re going to listen, acknowledge and begin to act differently.

Carrie and I have told our children we expect them to speak up, not because we say so, but because God says so.

3.) Do Not Give in to Hate

…and this one may be the hardest of them all. We cannot hate, if for no other reasons than these:

a.) Jesus tells us not to.

b.) Hate destroys us from the inside out, no matter if we wish it weren’t the case.

It’s okay to be angry at evil (please read Psalm 137), to wonder where God is (please read Psalms 13 and 88, among others), and to ask for God to do something violent, because if He doesn’t, you feel like you just might (Psalm 10). But hate is an internal cancer that must be fought.

As a pastor of the most amazing, courageous, beautiful, glorious, Holy Ghost-empowered, disciple-making, gloriously worshipping multiethnic church in the United States (I’m bragging, but WHATEVER), I have only experienced a mere fraction of the pain that many of my brothers and sisters have, but I have learned two things:

a. Especially in this area, it’s easy to begin to hate. After losing countless friends, being accused of perverting the Gospel, and being shut down by fellow pastors in the city over the desire to talk more and do more, the real resentment grows, and forgiveness is hard.

b. Whenever I allow myself to really feel what my brothers and sisters feel, I feel the most connected to, and catch a glimpse of, the very center of the heart of God. And then I remember: this is what I was made for.

So church, let’s hang in the tension- didn’t Jesus do that for us? Stretched between heaven and heart, between God and people, He hung. And because he didn’t come down, because He didn’t tap out, quit, eject Himself, or take an easier path, He accomplished for us our salvation.

May the same be said of us.

So again, if you’ve ever wondered, if I would have been there, in the past, what would I have done?

Now’s your chance to answer.

Morgan