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.
