REPARATIONS AND HOPE (#2)

To draw upon the truth discovered in Alcoholics Anonymous, White people and White congregations are always “recovering racists.” We did not create the history that shaped us, but we cannot escape it either. A critical step in our healing is an acknowledgment of the problem.^[i]

In God’s economy, we are saved to community. We not only need to confess, but we need someone to listen to our confession. Picture the power of members of a White congregation taking the sin of racism so seriously that they are willing to sit before a Black congregation and speak of their own complicity in the sin of racism as well as listen intensely to the pain that their African American neighbors experience in their lives. “True forgiveness deals with the past, all of the past, to make the future possible.”

While individual congregations may be of predominantly one race, the Body of Christ is diverse. Thus, God’s gift of the church to humanity is to provide humanity with a community of faith that transcends human divisions and provides it a context for such a dialogue.

Continuing with the model provided for us by Alcoholics Anonymous, the second step of the process is to admit our helplessness to control this disease and our dependence on a higher power. While education is important, we cannot educate ourselves out of racism. While laws to protect the community are important, we cannot legislate the end of racism. The history of racism makes it clear that racism will not be defeated by human agency alone.

Our hope lies in the redemptive power of God that has been revealed on the cross. The cross revealed that God is not defeated by evil and can use the experience of evil redemptively. If racism is our cross, the rebellious act by which we defy the intention of God, our hope is that God can use this cross as part of God’s redemptive purpose.

This is not an attempt to justify the evil of racism or to suggest that it is good in disguise. Evil is evil, but God is neither restrained nor defeated by it. As Christians have learned through the ages, however, we must turn and face the cross if we are to experience its redemptive power. We not only do not need to deny the corporate history of racism in our nation and in our church and the ways that we have benefited from it, but it is important that we turn and acknowledge it for our own salvation.

By identifying the types of privileges that have come to us by virtue of our being white, we can share in the search for the signs of God working redemptively in those very areas. It is not the pattern of God’s saving work only to speak through the pure in heart; frequently, the opposite is the case. Jesus’ followers held clear prejudices. It is easy to demonstrate, through the history of the church, that we continue to be filled with prejudice. When Jesus is quoted in Luke as saying, “For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost,” it is important for the church not to shy away from the truth that Jesus is referring to us.

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