Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and shew my people their transgression, Isaiah 58:1….
I posted this earlier but before another series of Sunday services I feel compelled to post it again. This is a message and a word of correction for some of my Apostolic, Pentecostal, Evangelical and Fundamentalist brothers and sisters in Christ. I won’t waste time discussing my disgust with all the feminist “allies”-and no, orange is NOT the new black, or my disdain for all the LGBT “allies”-because gay marriage is NOT like black civil rights or my disappointment in all the POC immigration advocates insisting upon our shared interests. I’m not even going to address celebrities who appropriate and/or pimp blackness when it’s cool and safe and profitable. These are not collectives of people claiming Christian courage or discernment; they do not profess to walk in the light. No, my disappointment is quite specific and narrowly proscribed.
How, literally in the name of Jesus Christ, can so many of us who “profess Christ and Him crucified” stand publicly silent in the wake of the harassment, assaults and murders of black people in this country? Where is the seemingly universal outcry about the sanctity of life? Where are the prayers so freely offered for the persecuted church around the world? How does all this global compassion not extend to black Americans? Where is the outpouring of moral outrage that flows forth when issues of homosexuality are on the table? Where is the intersectionality of faith and constitutional politics exhibited when 2nd Amendment rights are addressed? Are the constitutional rights to life and liberty less salient viz-a-viz black Americans? And this cacophony of inconsistency doesn’t just rest with my Caucasian-White brothers and sisters in Christ. I have about a gazillion FB friends and associates and many of them are professed followers of Christ. Yet far too often that public profession extends no further than the defense of Duck Dynasty and the posting of scriptures and praise videos. Which brings me to my title point “Silence and our ineffective Witness.” Our silence as individual Christians and the silence of our most prominent preachers in the wake of this violence that I wish I could describe as “unprecedented” works to make our witness for Christ an ineffective mockery.
And before you try to dismiss this as one more example of growing humanism, secularism, or good old-fashioned, worldly church bashing, here are my bona fides: I grew up in Holiness, 4th generation in the same sanctified church my great-grandparents joined over 100 years ago. My late husband of 36+ years, our 3 sons all in their 30s, my 1 daughter-in-love and I-all of us baptized in the name of Jesus and all received the in-filling of the Holy Ghost, evidenced by speaking in other tongues as the spirit of God gave utterance, Acts 2:4. I attend weekly Bible Study and Sunday services and teach Sunday School “Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another:…” Hebrews 10:25. So yeah, I’m all in and more than qualified and worthy to give this word of correction.
Every time I post a blog piece with scriptural references (which you know I do all the time!) I get polite private messages pointing out the gap between my seemingly sincere professions of faith in the revolutionary nature of Jesus Christ and the collective silence in the face of racial and social evil by so many of His loudest and most prominent followers. So the next time the lament goes forth about the challenge of our witness and how “the devil mad y’all-he don’t folks to get saved!” before one more “dare” as in “I dare you to praise Him!”, before one more insulting “I guess He ain’t done nothing for you!” I’m going to direct my own thoughts and those of any one within ear shot to this Word right hera…
Isaiah 59:4, No one calls for justice; no one pleads a case with integrity. They rely on empty arguments, they utter lies; they conceive trouble and give birth to evil. Isaiah 30:12-13 Because ye despise this word, and trust in oppression and perverseness, and stay thereon: Therefore this iniquity shall be to you as a breach ready to fall, swelling out in a high wall, whose breaking cometh suddenly at an instant.
Maybe that’s what Thomas Jefferson, one of our many slave-holding Founding Fathers, meant when he said “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.” And he wasn’t talking about Roe V. Wade, same-sex marriage or prayer in school! Sure, some of us are following the prescriptions of Matthew 5: 13-15 “Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men. Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.” Some of us are doing more than singin’ and dancin’, some of us are really asserting ourselves in our quest for peace and justice in the world , but we need to do better…a lot better!