Yes, we protest but not without prayer, and like the psalmists, overwhelmed by the “roar of the waterfalls … the waves and the breakers” our protests are expressed in our prayers of lament. We are ASKing of God in lament, not with worldly sorrow but godly sorrow, which means it is expressing the grief of the heart of God, in the midst of a global pandemic and a global reaction to racism, provoked by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, United States. Our ASKing cannot but be global. Our mission statement at ASK NETWORK declares that we gather to ASK for “all nations” and if ever there was a time to do so, this is the time.
Two weeks ago I was on a Zoom gathering with 70 pastors in our city of Washington D.C. after the killing of George Floyd in a political context that has seen the uncovering of our nation. We have been meeting together regularly for some time now, building relationships and seeking God’s good for our city. It’s make-up is probably 60% African-American and 40% Hispanic, Asian and Caucasian. We realized that our commitment to relationship over the last five years or so had prepared us for the necessary and hard conversations that we are now having that specifically deal with repentance from racism, and what God is asking of us in terms of holy action in Washington D.C. The next Sunday after the protests began, we saw our churches marching to the Capitol and the White House on a prayer walk, with worship that extolled God’s righteousness and therefore His just character. The question is, will this be just a short-lived reactive or responsive event, or will it be a holy movement of obedience to God’s righteousness and justice, which are the foundations of His throne (Psalm 89:14). When we ASK, this is the throne of grace that ASK Network comes to, ASKing with an open Bible that tells us how to ASK, according to His perfect will, not according to an unrighteous agenda. We ASK according to the Word that God has already spoken about His judgments on evil and wickedness, as well as His resources to obey His commands and be reconciled.
The pastors at that gathering generally agreed that the term ‘racial reconciliation’ needs to be re-exegeted given its assumptions. You can only have a reconciliation if there is something in the past that was good and that was then broken and can now be reconciled. There is no past racial relationship of that kind given the historic roots of the United States with its 400 years-old race problem, and racial alienation still experienced by millions. Our history bears so much shame and racism: with Native Americans (genocide, treaty breaking); with African Americans (only people brought here against their will); with Asians (cheap labor, citizenship exclusions); with Hispanics (vulnerability to exploitation). The reservoir of woundedness is deep, with limited will to sluice the pain and dereliction. Talking of racial disparities exposed by the global pandemic, there is a serious disparity between God’s vision for us and our present social reality, and of course, there is plenty of evidence for the church’s role in racialization, given that the majority of religious groups are racially homogenous.
What usually happens is that there is a necessary response to racial crisis, and we think our response is reconciliation but it is actually conciliation, which does not mean repentance and restoration, but is about pacifying and placating. This is not God’s kind of peace. It explains why there is no healing and consequent change. Thus Ferguson becomes New York, and then Baltimore … and then … and then Minneapolis … and then Atlanta. There is a temporary response to an event and it is not a movement of repentance and repair, either personally or locally, either in the church or in the public square of the nation. We return to practiced responses in the face of systemic and systematic racism. We minimize and marginalize it. We individualize it, blind to the collective and institutionalization of it, and we popularize it with simplified repetitions of misguided assumptions. We stigmatize it, defending ourselves by blame shifting and deflecting the attention away from necessary confession and repentance. We vaporize it with a selective and convenient memory that hardens into national amnesia.
“Contempt is becoming a cultural phenomenon. It’s seeping into every banal aspect of our lives. Not just anger, though there’s plenty of that, too. No, I mean pure, unabashed, undignified contempt for fellow humanity. This is so toxic.” This quotation is an example of the way that even secular cultural commentators are beginning to realize the horror of it. Contempt is the characteristic demonic response to the presence and purposes of God, to the commands and character of God. The enemy has always opposed our experience of the presence of God with contempt: for Christ, for ourselves, for others. This results in our despising of God, others and self. What was the opening satanic volley in the record of scripture? “Has God really said?” (Genesis3:1) Contempt is the first manifestation of the diabolic subversion of God’s presence which led to the expulsion from Eden and the loss of “the sound of the Lord God as He was walking in the garden.”
Healing begins with the confession of contempt. White supremacy and superiority is a principality and power, rooted in contempt that is demonically and satanically energized to throw back into God’s face the demeaning and despising of the imago dei, the image of God. The gospel emphasizes the need for ALL of us to experience healing for all of our false identities, and healing from the consequences of the loss of God’s creational order in our personal lives, ethnicities and societies.
There are three main constituent elements of contempt:
Condemnation and consequent judgment: someone or something has failed to meet our privatized standards for behavior or whatever are our self-preferred, self-chosen social, cultural, racial, emotional, intellectual or even spiritual norms. The more we elevate our unquestioned individualism and sense of personal rights, the more we idolize our preferences and particularities, then the more we have to condemn and hold in contempt.
Superiority and consequent separation (segregation) and distance because we’re better than someone. It’s all about hubris, vanity, pretension, conceit, disdain, condescension, insolence, pretentiousness, presumption, pomposity, aggression, narcissism, brazenness, incivility, shamelessness, and any of self-love’s progeny like self-admiration, self-exaltation, self-confidence, self-assurance, self-reliance, self-righteousness – it’s about superiority and supremacy.
Hostility and consequently the desire for someone to be removed, whether from sight, the public square, the relationship, or the job. There are plenty of ways for the hostility of contempt to remove someone, including just ignoring them. But murder? That’s taking it too far. I’d never do that, we say. That’s a bit extreme! Not according to Jesus when he redefined our understanding of murder in Mt. 5: 21-26. Jesus describes the separation and distance of contempt as equivalent with murder that separates someone’s life irremediably from all relationship and guarantees reconciliation will be irrecoverable. Listen to Jesus: “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with their brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother ‘Raca!’ is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.” What do you make of that? ‘Raca’ was an Aramaic term of malicious contempt, imposing inferiority on the one so named. Isn’t it interesting that Jesus’ teaching on reconciliation with a brother or someone to whom you are indebted (unreconciled accounts) follows this warning about contempt – the great cause of irreconciliation and the great barrier therefore to reconciliation. This is evil name calling, as all name-calling is evil. Why? Because it removes the significance of the real name, of personhood and personality, of creational uniqueness. To call someone Raca or Fool was to strip them of their identity and impose on them a false identity. Contempt is identity theft. It makes someone what they are not, and thus we dehumanize and demonize, as we determine what is and is not human. Genesis 9:6 tells us why murder is so heinous: “for God made man in His image.” So if contempt is equivalent to murder then you now know why God takes it so personally and judges it so severely: it is primarily against Him, His image, before it is against that person or that race. These elements alone give us an analysis of the present state of the civic soul.
Contempt is the nature of the devil and all that is diabolic (‘diabolos’ means hurler of slander); of evil; of pride in particular; of the root of sin; of all falsehood, heresy, division and schism. It is the nature of the last days. And nowhere does this contempt more masquerade than in the relational divisions and racial irreconciliations of our nations. Whether violator or victim, we have our own infected and infested systemic corruptions of viral contempt for God, for others and for self, deeply embedded in a history past, despicably maintained in a history present, and seemingly doomed to continue in a history future. ‘Prejudice’ is just not strong enough a word. We need to come to terms with the darkness of our acidic, deforming contempt – deforming of self, and others, and thus of the image of God. Prejudiced? We are contemptuous. To destroy God’s image is to erect our own in its place which makes us idolaters of the most egregious kind, while we mouth “in God we trust”. There cannot be transformation without the excising of the deformation of contempt. The words of Jesus Himself should be our warning and our motivation to get reconciled. The contempt that wants someone to be removed, to disappear, to become persona non grata, to become invisible in the system, to vaporize in color-blindness, is the sin of murder.
This may seem like a lot of bad news. However, if we have been cut down by any kind of despising, personal or corporate, familial, parental, or racial – God happens to specialize in choosing despised things (1 Corinthians 1:28) and forgiving and changing despising people. God specializes in removing reproach, removing the roots that cause us to despise others; removing the garments of reproach with which others may have clothed our characters and spirits. From Genesis 30:23 onwards God says, “I have rolled away the reproach of Egypt.” How has God done this? How has he absorbed all despising that we may be absolved of it? The answer is the core of the gospel: in His own body on a tree. He became the toxic waste dump of the world’s despising. He was “despised and rejected of men … He was despised and we did not esteem Him” (Isaiah 53:3). No one was ever more drained of esteem than Jesus, or held in more contempt. One of the most often quoted psalms in the gospels, with reference to the cross, not surprisingly has this emphasis: “I am a worm … a reproach of men and despised by the people … All those who see me ridicule me … They shoot out the lip … He trusted in the Lord … Let him rescue him” (Psalm 22: 6-8). And after this concentrated horror of despising comes an unbelievable delivering truth: “God has not despised the suffering of the afflicted.” When anyone is moved to repent of the ways they have despised Him and not esteemed Him, God takes the repentant response as personally as He took the sin of despising: “a broken and a contrite heart I will not despise.” There is forgiveness for our despising, there is deliverance from its bondages and healing from its defacements of identity and spirit.
What we will celebrate next time we take communion, in whatever setting, in whatever nation, regardless of tribe, language or people, is nothing less than revolutionary. It is not even about ‘integration’ of our old selves, or about social diversity – it is about becoming one “new man.” What meets at communion is not a variety of races, but one race, one church. Within that race are many different faces, dances and songs, traditions, regalia, tastes – but as Revelation shows us, when they are all gathered around the throne (including some really weird looking creatures!) there is no self-consciousness, as the work of Jesus has flushed out the beauty and brilliance of our creational individuality, surrendered to God, and there is no room anymore for the rights and claims of our individualism and our identities. So often we seek, well-meaningly, to resolve our sins in the context of brotherhood. In the racially divided church, we live as if we have a common mother (the church) but a different Father. A recovery of a common Fatherhood, of our equal sonship and daughterhood, is biblically necessary if there is going to be change. When Father runs the table that we meet at, no elder-brother spirit is going to control the conversation or the consequences. Racial justice does not begin first in our brotherhood, but in God’s Fatherhood, and thus we ask Father for a revelation of His heart that wills that every ethnicity and nationality will be at that throne. Racial justice does not begin from the ground up, but from the throne down as we ask “Let your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.” Amen.
Use these scriptures to meditate and ASK for racism to stop in all our nations:
So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise. Galatians 3:26-29
My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one—I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. John 17:20-23
Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. 1 John 4:2