Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and shew my people their transgression, Isaiah 58:1….
I posted this many months ago, but here we are again, with two more extra-judicial murders and several more refusals to indict yet when I look to the church too often I hear ***crickets***. So, because iron sharpens iron, Proverbs 27:17, this is a message and a word of correction for some of my Apostolic, Pentecostal, Evangelical and Fundamentalist brothers and sisters in Christ.
How, literally in the name of Jesus Christ, can so many of you who “profess Christ and Him crucified” stand publicly silent in the wake of the harassment, assaults and extra-judicial murders of black men, women and children in this country? Where is the outcry about the sanctity of life? Where are the prayers so freely offered for the persecuted church around the world? Where is the concern expressed for those under the oppressive arm of ISIS or North Korea? How does all this global compassion and the demands for human rights not extend to black Americans? Where is the outpouring of moral outrage when issues of homosexuality are on the table? Do you really think the thought of gay marriage is more offensive to Jesus than the state-sanctioned brutalization of fellow citizens? Where is the intersectionality of faith and constitutional politics exhibited when 2nd Amendment rights are addressed? Why is that conversation muted when the person(s) holding a toy gun(s) are black? Where are the seeming thousands of vociferous joint biblical/constitutional law scholars when the 1st Amendment right to freely assemble is being assailed? 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, Black, White, Asian, Hispanic and Bi-Racial and many of them are professed followers of Christ. Yet far too often that public profession extends no further than the defense of silliness like Duck Dynasty, random relationship advice 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.
Every time I post a blog piece with scriptural references (which you know I do all the time!) I get polite private messages from my atheist and agnostic FB buddies pointing out the Grand Canyon sized 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!” 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. And 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! So lest I be a stumbling block and tempt someone to respond with some mindless bromide like “I guess you don’t really know Him” 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 (as my great grandmother used to say “back when being in Holiness meant something!) My parents, my siblings, 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, even when I don’t feel like it- 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. Selah!