We Shall Do This!

Tribalism. We are faced with tribalism daily in America: the behavior and attitudes that stem from strong loyalty to one's own tribe or social group. This word seems antithetical to what we think of as the mission of Jesus Christ: to unite all peoples as one and make us one with our Creator. Others have summed it up in words like, “May we know that we are of You, may we know that we are in You, may we know that we are one with You, together one.” [John Philip Newell, Praying with the Earth, p28] But then there is this from Matthew’s Jesus: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.

For I have come to set a man against his father,

and a daughter against her mother,

and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;

and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.” [Matthew 10:34-35]

Naturally, we want to know what’s up. How does this all square with the Lord’s deep desire for unity and oneness? As I shared with a Bible Study group the other morning: The Bible does not try to be consistent; it aims to be true. For these words setting family members against one another come directly from the prophet Micah, chapter seven, not long after the most famous words from Micah: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”  [Micah 6:8]

What the prophet Micah does is describe the situation on the ground: corruption in Jerusalem has dissolved all socially productive relationships into parties and tribalism some 8 centuries before Jesus. Any cursory reading of the gospels reveals that things have not changed that much: tribalism in the sense of competing political and religious parties was again rampant, further complicated by the occupation by Caesar’s Rome. Jesus remembers Micah’s warning.

Since last Sunday, we wake up almost every day to find another Black man or woman has been hung from a tree or a lamppost and ruled “no foul play.” This is set against the backdrop of American tribalism with White Privilege being challenged by the Black Lives Matter movement, energized by a series of police killing several unarmed black citizens during the time of the current pandemic – and throughout history. Although White Supremacist movements adopt symbols of the Church on their costumes and iconography, and might even seize upon this passage in Matthew as justification for their violence and brutality against People of Color, it’s plain to see by anyone who reads the Bible that none of this appropriation of Biblical warrant for Racism stands up against a serious reading of the texts from Genesis through Revelation!

What Jesus, and Micah before him, is saying is that one cannot live with the good news of the kingdom of God in one compartment of one’s life, and at the same time leave everything else in another compartment unchanged by the Gospel of Christ. The Good News is not a “salve,” writes Thomas G. Long, “it is a sword that pares away all that is not aligned with the kingdom… it shakes up values, rearranges priorities, reorients goals.” [Thomas Long, Matthew, p. 122] So, when does this sword begin to do its work? When does it begin to pare away all that is not aligned with the kingdom? When does it begin to shake up our values, rearrange priorities, and reorient goals?

Can we even begin to imagine this sword of the kingdom like a sharp paring knife on an apple slicing away the continued violence and discrimination against People of Color? There go Jim Crow Laws falling to the floor. Another slice around and away go segregated schools and the more modern so-called Christian Academies that prohibit People of Color from attending. Another slice of his mighty sword and all inequality in school systems across the country disappear. There goes red-lining housing mortgages and small business loans for minorities. Slicing deeper into the fruit of White Privilege and Racism, and there fall the bricks they hurled at Martin Luther King Jr as he walked the streets of Cicero, Illinois. Then fall all kinds of Police Brutality aimed against African American men and women like Fred Hampton and Breonna Taylor who, decades apart, were shot while they were still in bed. Falling to the floor are more slices that represent naming towns, streets, and erecting statues to honor those who sought to dissolve the US, and building a bridge in 1940 to honor Edmund Winston Pettus, a former Confederate brigadier general, U.S. senator, and Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, which became the site of Bloody Sunday on March 7,1965. The sword of the Lord lops off all the times I stood by as classmates referred to African Americans as apes, coons, jungle bunnies, the N-Word and worse, eventually leading to eight long years calling the President of the United States and the First Lady apes, coons, jungle bunnies, the N-Word and worse, denying their personhood, denying that they were even American. Watch as His terrible swift sword lops off voter suppression, the horrors of reconstruction and founding of the Ku Klux Klan in the name of Christ; the theft of much of Mexico, the enslavement of Asians to build the railroad, the internment of Japanese Americans in camps all over the US; the depravities of Manifest Destiny and claims that it was God’s will to push out and eliminate the Native Peoples of this continent. His sword slices away at generations of slavery and the trading of human beings as mere commodities like cotton and wheat, and those Christian Clergy arguing that God, Jesus, Paul and the Bible support the very idea of slavery. Another slice and that part of the Constitution that says a Black man and woman only count as 3/5^ths of a person is gone, sliced right down to the core where once in a bold declaration to the people of the world we the people said that all men are created equal. Among the seeds in the core are the words of Jesus, Moses, the Prophets, and the Lord God himself expressing a deep desire that we all be one with God and one with one another. And when I look at the peelings on the floor I see a Black man running in the morning as I do every day get chased by men of My White Tribe in their pick-em-up trucks and shoot him and crow about it with laughter and pride. I can still see a Black man on the ground with the knee of a policeman of My White Tribe on his neck for almost nine minutes while the immortal words of “I can’t breathe” are heard once again throughout the Land of the Free and the Home Brave. And I ask myself, what have I done or said that could have made a difference, that could reconcile race relations, that could bring us closer to the vision, values and life of the Christ my White Tribe claims as its own – as if God in Jesus Christ is a commodity to be exploited, not a person who came to free people, all people, even White People, from their bondage to Sin.

And I weep, and I feel shame,

And I wish My White Tribe had never ever crossed the ocean to this New World,

And I pray that one day My White Tribe might stop, look at itself, shut up and

Listen to Jesus as if for the first time, and learn what it means to Love God and Love Neighbor,

And put an end to what must make our Lord and Savior look down on us from heaven

And weep, incredulous, that after all He has done our internecine tribalism still persists.

“He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” We can do this. We must do this. We shall do this. Amen. This is true. It is so. Amen.