Need for a Resurrection Rant

This morning before the sun came up, I was reading and pondering a variety of things. The biblical text spoke to resurrection, the book of African American prayers pleaded with God to save them from White Christians (the prayer was written in 1829), and Thomas Merton spoke of love. So here are my meandering thoughts with no punctuations, so with apologies for those who are inclined to edit.  Yes, myself included.

And, if resurrection is a theme, my black people are in need of a resurrection from the deaths and traumas and brutality of lost years and anxious nights lived out of fear and anxiety and worry that my white people would come bearing guns and machine guns with big cars and big lights to take their house and their land and all that they had fought for away from them and give it to someone else or perhaps sell it on the auction block like the powerful men with whips and guns and chains had done with their ancestors years ago because the years had passed but the realities of it had not passed, and now we wonder why Kolin K protested. He is calling out this country and its powerful citizens to unite to eradicate injustices and police brutality. I know people who have experienced brutality. It is ugly and it is more animalistic than it is human because those who do so do so out of imagined good intentions or malevolent intentions and out of intentions of putting the land in the hands of those who can do the best with it, and those people that they deem could do the best with it look curiously enough like them. Smell like them. Dress like them. They may even go to the same church. They are friends. They know what’s going to happen because of the off-the-record conversations and decisions. That is brutality. Saw it too often in Kansas, Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Mississippi, and the list of states goes on and on.

We all need a resurrection. First, though, we need to die to our old, racist ways of considering ourselves and our places in the world. Can’t rise without being dead and can’t be dead and resurrected without being buried. Can’t be dead and buried without no life in this human psyche carcass. Only the Holy One of Israel can resurrect us as individuals and a society from the deadness that creeps into our pores when we treat other children of God in ways that are sure to make Him unhappy. 

So, this morning I am also thinking about Romans 6, and death burial and resurrection of Jesus and how the believer metaphorically and physically does the same thing and how even those of us whose theology is different can arise from the swamps of our own self-imposed and societally-imposed disregard for people and from the stench of that emotional and relational exile from people also loved by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and you and me.