At various points in my life, I have come to a crossroads of faith. In those times, events internal and external have caused me to reexamine the whole foundation of my trust in God.
When I am in such moments, I long for simpler days of believing. But in the long run, these wrestling spells are pure gold for my soul. For they force me to face the truth of both my faith and my response to that faith – how I live out what I believe.
This day is a momentous one in the history of my home country, America. And yet I am intrigued, ok, confused by the response of so many of my brothers and sisters in Christ. Many are choosing at best to downplay the significance of President Obama’s inauguration, at worst to boycott it by literally and purposefully tuning it out. Generally political differences of the campaign season are put aside at the inauguration in respect of the office, but this time that “putting aside” feels embarrassingly anemic.
My spiritual siblings may have reasons for doing so – political differences, concerns about moral positions, other misgivings. But in so doing, their responses pull back the curtain on one of the core sins in the history of American Evangelicalism over the past century. The American Evangelical church has a horrible history on race relations, a heritage Twenty-first Century believers by and large conveniently forget or refuse to own.
For me, this issue is a personal one, not because I am a man of color, for I am not. I’m as white as they come. But because for me this issue, the default Evangelical response, has confronted me like a bad dream at each of these critical crossroads of faith.
For a while as a young man India’s great statesman, Gandhi, lived in South Africa. While there he sought to visit a Christian church. He himself was Hindu, but he had heard much good about Jesus. However, when he came to the church, there was a sign outside which read “No dogs or Indians allowed”, the “dogs” referring to blacks. He was embarrassed and confused and never got over that slap in the emotional face. Years later, he told his good Christian missionary friend, E. Stanley Jones, that he thought Jesus a great moral leader, one he deeply admired, but that the followers of Jesus hindered him from getting closer.
It is not enough to have faith, the Apostle James wrote. You have to live out that faith. In fact, he went so far as to say, show me your actions and I’ll tell you what you believe.
Anyone growing up inside the church has stared hypocrisy dead on, for the church as the embodiment of those who follow Jesus is far from perfect. We do well not to walk away from Jesus because of what we see in the lives of others who are redeemed. Rather, such imperfection can show us that we too are welcome even though we are not perfect. But when the church as a body has been unfaithful to the high calling of her Lord, it bodes well for that Body to repent of her sins and to do so thoroughly and publicly.
Repentance is not merely crying big tears or washing the feet of those who have been victimized; repentance is leaving behind the behavior that so pains the heart of God and embracing the new order of the Age of the Spirit. There have been times when specific Evangelical church bodies and leaders have shared publicly their repentance and repudiation of past sins, including racial sins. But rarely do we learn our history lessons as well as we should, and the sin of racism is a glaring example.
That the Evangelical world has been so slow to capture this historic moment in American life shows that we as believers, particularly white believers really do not understand the implications of our own history. Whatever actions Barak Obama does or does not take in his time as president, he, simply by taking the oath of office, has smashed one of the ugliest idols in American spiritual life. We do well to glorify God that this day has come at last. It does not mean the end of racism, but it is a significant milestone, one we as believers all can and should celebrate.
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