Daily Lesson for August 20, 2014

Today's Daily Lesson is a continued reflection on the state of race relations in America as seen in Ferguson, MO.

What has for me been reflected over these last weeks following the shooting death of black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO and the subsequent responses both in Ferguson and social media is the tribalistic reality of America even in the 20th century. Any time an event happens and lines are drawn and they seem always to be along the colorline - signifying our racial tribes. A half century following the end of segregation we are still a tribalistic nation. 

Let me tell you a story to illustrate this.  When my wife Irie and I got married in 2005 in Durham, NC it was a wonderful occasion - a beautiful day with a rainbow diversity of guests in the church where I had been ordained two months before and then right down the road a joyous reception at the bed and breakfast owned by a friend. Since she is black and I am white and our families enjoy very different types of music, we squared on music that would take both sides by surprise - we hired a mariachi band!  It was a beautiful thing.  After the wedding Irie and I drove to the Outer Banks for a brief but happy honeymoon.

And then we came back to reality. On the morning after we got back from the honeymoon we awoke to the almost unbelievable news that large crosses had been burned at three different locations in downtown Durham. At one of the locations yellow flyers were left behind purporting to be from the KKK. The flyers made threats against the black community and alluded to some high-profile and racialized incidents which had been plaguing the city in recent months. The burning of the cross was a tribal act. It was one tribe warning another tribe to police itself lest the two have to go to war yet again. 

I have often reflected on what I felt that morning. Until that day burning cross had never threatened me. It had always been about another people; that cross had been about somebody else. But that morning -- the first morning back in the real world after the honeymoon was over -- the cross was now about me and my family. My tribal affiliation had changed.

But it had not changed altogether.  That night a vigil took place at the downtown library at the site where one of the crosses had been burned. Because Irie and I were still supposed to be honeymooning, we arrived an hour early to see the site and reflect on and pray over what we were experiencing. 

We were sitting on some public benches out front of the library when two black men came and set down adjacent from us. They were carrying backpacks and appeared to be perhaps homeless. Whatever they were it was obvious they were not there for the vigil as they stared angrily at me.  You could have cut the tension with a knife on that late May evening. It was obvious to that I had become the object of their scorn.  I embodied something to them. I was the white man. I had taken something that belonged to them. I belonged on the other side of the line but had somehow come to close and tried to cross over. To them I was poaching. They were protecting their turf and "their woman". They continued to stare hard and silent at me until one of them finally spoke, "The KKK ain't the only ones who can kill," he said.

Others began to arrive for the vigil and the two men got up and walked away. But the point had been made; their tribe had spoken.

We see the same tribalism playing out over and over again in America anytime there is an event with even a tinge of race. The color line is drawn and the dividing walls go up. It is so pervasively sickening that half of America roots for a an actual officer of the law to be found indictable of wrongful death while the other half of America hopes for a positive toxicology report to prove that the young man who was killed was a "thug" and therefore likely to have warranted killing. Blind and impartial justice becomes a secondary victim. And so too does truth.

Where do we to from here?  What we really need is more people willing to cross the color line. Churches, which are notoriously segregated by race at 11:00am on Sunday, must learn to cross over. Individuals must cross over. Educators, and volunteer mentors, and adoptive parents must cross over. And in doing so -- in getting beyond our tribes -- we all will discover what I discovered, that though there is something terrifying about seeing a threatening cross and it suddenly being about you, there is also something very Christian about it also. And then, in having crossed over we begin to see the world differently and come to realize that Jesus himself was wrongly killed by Roman law enforcement. And then we come to realize that though he was being crucified -- a first century lynching -- he did not call for vengeance; he called for love and for forgiveness -- even from his cross.  And then we begin to see full the meaning of the words in Ephesians 2:

"14 For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, 15 by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, 16 and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility."

The body and blood of Christ is the end of tribalism and the beginning of a new humanity. We as a nation must learn to cross over into this new humanity, lest we miss the whole meaning of the cross.