Silent...

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." -MLK, Letter from a Birmingham Jail

"I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh." -Ezekiel 36:26

By nature, I don't post much about current events. I usually say it's because conversations rarely breathe life on Facebook. I believe that with all my heart, but the truth is it's likely a result of cowardice. I don't like offending. I hold it as a deep sense of pride that I have friends from all across the country of unique backgrounds and worldviews and upbringings and political perspectives. I like to celebrate the diversity of my friends. I happen to think it makes my life richer. However, we've unfortunately so structured the world that everything is forced to fit into a "this" or a "that," an "either" or an "or," an "us" or a "them." And in a world like that, offending feels unavoidable. Problems feel unsolvable. So I often stay silent.

But I'm recognizing that that is an unsustainable approach. I don't know how to avoid the gridlock of partisanship, but I know that as someone who follows Jesus, silence is no longer optional.

I tell my students often that we usually miss the mark when it comes to talking about faith. We usually talk about faith as an idea we agree with. We talk about faith as belief. If we believe, that makes us a Christian and so the story goes. But we've so missed the invitation Jesus offered. Jesus invited followers, not believers. The word we often translate as "faith" in the Old Testament is a Greek word pistis. Pistis didn't mean some kind of intellectual assent, like believing that 2+2=4. Pistis was a faith that re-oriented action. It's an idea rooted in trust, like crossing a rope bridge over Niagara Falls and having faith that it will hold.

That's why, when Jesus met some fishermen, he invited them to follow. He didn't invite them to believe in an idea. He invited them to re-orient their lives around the reality of the Kingdom of God. He invited them to do what he did, knowing that in the fullness of that trust, they could. To follow Jesus means to surrender to the Kingdom of God and to the life-changing reality that it invites us into.

And let's be clear, that work isn't easy. LOTS of people backed away from that invitation. I'm beginning to think that it's because being like Jesus is a harder proposition than most of us like to acknowledge. The entire existence of Jesus is rooted in the movement of a God apart from the action and suffering of God's creation into its messiness. To be like Jesus, to follow Jesus, means to spend time with people like Jesus, which isn't comfortable very often. To be like Jesus is to oppose the systems that were built to dehumanize and marginalize. To be like Jesus is to reimagine who is in and who is out, and you'll find that very, very few were out with Jesus. To be like Jesus is to sacrifice and surrender for the good of those who couldn't help themselves. To be like Jesus is to grieve and lament the pain in the world and participate in hope springing eternal. To be like Jesus is to work towards downward mobility. To be like Jesus is to fight for the inefficiencies inherent in agape love. That's not an invitation most of us run towards.

In light of another shooting of an unarmed black man by police in America, to follow Jesus means that we can no longer remain silent, innocent bystanders trying to look away. Nowhere in the four gospels do we find a prescription for institutionalized American racism, as if we can simply take what Jesus says and shift them into policy plans. But to follow Jesus is to re-imagine family. And when I see my Black brothers and sisters have to strive harder for half the reward, when I see the disparities in education and work opportunities between Black and White communities, when I see Black men and women shot because they "look more dangerous," my heart breaks for my family. When I see my brothers and sisters hurting, my heart hurts. My family is hurting.

This isn't a Republican or Democrat problem. The truth is Jesus wouldn't have supported either party. I find it hard to believe Jesus would've ever participated in a system where one group is raised above the other. No party holds an exclusive claim on Jesus, primarily because Jesus didn't seek power, but gave it up to uplift others. Power seeks to keep power, and Jesus surrendered his. Jesus found the "least of these" and ran towards them in full force. No, this is a human problem that demands we reignite the latent empathy in our souls. It demands the same resurrection that Ezekiel cried out for, that our hearts of stone would be cracked and replaced with a heart of flesh, capable again of love and the ability to sacrifice for the good of our neighbors.

I don't know what the "right" ways to protest are. I usually don't know know what to "do." I really don't know how to be a part of this work and I certainly don't have the right solutions to the depths of these problems. How do you work against systems so entrenched that they don't even seem like problems anymore? The honest truth is I don't know. But I do know that following Jesus means asking questions to figure out the answers. I do know that following Jesus means participating in the work. I do know that following Jesus means spending more time in the kind of community Jesus imagined in the early church, one that broke down the lines of gender, race, and background. I do know that following Jesus means getting some skin in the game and risking rejection. I do know that following Jesus means restoring humanity to those we fear or rage against.

I pray. It's become easy to lambast the offering of thoughts and prayers in moments of tragedy. I suppose that sentiment, tweeted out from the comfort of a couch, can seem trite. And yet, I've found that miracles happen more often when people are praying than when they're not. I've found myself more drawn into the invitation of Jesus to participate when I'm praying. I've found myself more connected to the struggles and people I'm praying for when I pray.

I believe in building bridges. I've rarely been on the frontlines, and I'm not sure that I'll start finding myself there at all times. But what I am certain of is that the work of those who follow Jesus is to participate in making this world more like the one Jesus is calling into being. I am certain the work will likely involve surrender and sacrifice by me. But I'm all the more certain today that my silence is no longer sustainable, no longer faithful. Racism is sin, my friends, and our question as people following Jesus isn't whether or not to fight it, but why we aren't.

forever unfinished...