By Their Strange Fruit

Thursday, March 28, 2013

Friday Fruit (03/29/13)

On Fridays, BTSF offers links to other discussions about race & Christianity. It's an opportunity for you to read about racial justice & Christianity from other perspectives, and for me to give props to the shoulders on which I stand...

Weekly Round Up:

Listening well as a person of privilege: Communicate on their terms, not your own

What's Wrong With the Term 'Person of Color'

This... is White Privilege

A Day in Immigration Court

Thanks for the rec, John!

To Chinua Achebe, With Love

Number of Asian and Latino Writers for TV Are Up

These are some of BTSF's links of interest this week. What are yours?

Feel free to contribute your own links in the comments section, or submit items you feel should be included during the week. Self-promotion is encouraged.

Sunday, March 24, 2013

Resurrection and Reconciliation

As Easter approaches, let us reflect on the miracle of Christ's resurrection--a resurrection that reconciled us to God the Father in a way that we could never have done for ourselves.

You see, I know I have messed up in my life. I may not have killed anybody or committed grand theft auto, but I know I have hurt people, both intentionally and unintentionally. Sure, I am 'basically a good person' when I am well rested and not pressed for time, but I have lied when cornered, and wished ill for someone when I wanted to get ahead. I have thought I was better than so-and-so at such-and-such. I have had thoughts in my heart that I wouldn't want to share with my closest friends, let alone a holy powerful God, in any sort of intimate way.

And I know God loves me profoundly, but He also loves the people I have been disrespectful to, or have been scornful of. And He kinda wishes I hadn't done those hurtful things to His children and He would like it if I would make it right with them.

If only there were a way that I could apologize for all of those things, or pay some sort of compensation, so that when I saw God in heaven, I wouldn't be so embarrassed. Some way that when He reflects on the times I have been cruel to my siblings on earth, I could say "yeah, but I did X hours of community service to make up for it!"

But how many hours would be enough? And what happens when, as soon as I finish them, I have another angry outburst at my husband, or become jealous of my next door neighbor. And so I have to compensate for those new hurts too...Ad nauseum. There are simply not enough hours in a day, or days in a lifetime to keep covering my tracks.

Enter scene: Jesus. A guy with all the love of the Father, but all the personal experience of the struggles here on earth. He lived His life without accumulating a list of errors and oops that we all collect, which meant that by the time He died, He had no apologies to make, no compensation He needed to pay for His wrong-doings. He could stand before God, totally unhindered and unembarrassed.

Yet when the time came, He reflected on my failed attempts to apologize for myself, and said to God "blame me for the things she has done. Treat her as though she had lived her life perfectly, and let me spend the rest of eternity writing her apology notes, and repaying the hurts she caused. Let us trade places in Your eyes so that she need not feel the weight of her mistakes, but instead can enjoy her time with You, totally guilt free."

And so that is what they did: Jesus took the blame, and I got the promise that, if I want to, I can spend the rest of my existence enjoying an uninhibited relationship with the One who knows me, and loves me, the best.

Reconciliation: With one hand,
He holds to the Father,
and with the other, he holds to us
as we make the journey

Jesus, in the mean time, is a lot stronger, faster, and more powerful than I am. He managed to take the blame for my issues, and deal with all of the consequences of my mistakes, yet sill make it home in time for Easter dinner. Not only mine, but everyone elses's as well.

Without any mistakes of His own, and having the power and wisdom of the Father, He was ideally suited to take care of business. So much so, that having accomplished it, He too can now stand before God, unhindered and unembarrassed. It was His resurrection that demonstrated this ability, this power, to accomplish what I could not do on my own.

It is this miracle that we celebrate on Easter. It is this trading-places that makes me eternally grateful. It is why I follow Him, and try to take His advice on how to live my life. It was on the first Easter that Jesus reconciled us to God, so that we need not feel shame, regret, or humiliation, only bathe in God's love and caring:

"But now He has reconciled you by Christ's physical body through death to present you holy in His sight, without blemish and free from accusation" (Colossians 1:22)

"All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation." (2 Corinthians 5:18-19)

Sisters and brothers, now that we have vertical reconciliation with God, let us work for horizontal reconciliation with each other: "Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." We must continue to Stand in the tragic gap, between what is and what could be. We must remember how Jesus forgave even as He was on the Cross, and learn to forgive one another, be reconciled to one another.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Friday Fruit (3/22/13)

Listening well as a person of privilege: Solidarity first, collaborative problem-solving later

Kimani Gray

Black President. Latino Pope. Evangelicals Are You Paying Attention?

Urban Legends: Rethinking Inner-City Ministry

If March Madness Were Based on Black Grad Rates, Who Would Win?

Why Jail Is Not the Answer for Youth Crime [Video]

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Kiss me! I’m an Immigrant

Please welcome back Rev. Marty Troye r, pastor of Houston Mennonite Church, on whose site the original version this post was published. In honor of St. Patrick's Day, he takes us through some reflections on how 'minority status' has changed over the past 200 years in the United States:

We’ve come a long way, haven’t we?

Every year, St. Patrick’s Day parades all across the country kick-off revelry surrounding all things Irish. The day began as a religious holiday for Christians to celebrate the life of one of our saints, Patrick. But now everyone’s going green: leprechauns, pinching, luck, Guinness, kissing, wearing green. But it certainly hasn’t always been this way.

In the 1800’s Irish immigrants weren’t celebrated, though their hard working hands did the manual labor “we” were unwilling to do. Rather, they were derided, threatened, opposed and run out of town in every state in the union. Unwelcome in America because of their religion, non-whiteness (yes, the racial category of “white” was much narrower at the time) and slowness in assimilation (the previously mentioned St. Patrick’s Day celebrations empowered Irish immigrants to survive in a hostile culture), the Irish were the target of a nativist, xenophobic movement known as the Know Nothings, or, ironically “The Native American Party.”

Perhaps we haven’t come so far after all. Arizona’s SB 1070 (and copycat laws in other states) has been made into law. Congress is has had hearings on terrorism by American Muslims thanks to Peter King from New York. The message is clear: you are unwelcome in America because of your religion and slowness to assimilate. They follow Prime Ministers Angela Merkel of Germany and David Cameron of the UK, who said in recent years that the multicultural experiment has utterly failed.

This anti-immigrant fervor advocates for a “melting pot” approach where racial/ethnic/religious minorities must assimilate into the dominate culture mythically referred to as “we.” But who is this “we” anyway? And why are “we” so sure “they” aren’t part of “us”? And since when does Representative King get to decide who “we” are?

The 'Know Nothing' party’s
nativist “ideal”

Jesus ran into this same exclusivist attitude many times. In fact, Luke says his first public sermon nearly got him killed just for mentioning God’s acceptance of the “outsider.” The “they” in Jesus culture, more than anyone, were an ethnic-religious minority group known as the Samaritans. And when Jesus was once asked who our neighbors are that we’re supposed to love, he answered with a story. The story unmasks two insiders who have no regard for human suffering or rights even for another insider; but it highlights an outsider Samaritan who embodies what it means to be a good neighbor. Where once animosity and hatred separated the “we” from the “they,” the essence of Jesus’ mission and ours is to break barriers and form friendships.

The Bible we Christians read is clear on this point, we are to love the stranger among us because we were once strangers. And who among us, except of course the true Native Americans, wasn’t once a stranger in this new world?

So I’ve got a couple invitations for you this week. Let’s see St. Patrick’s Day as a reminder of our collective ability to turn from exclusion to embrace. Let’s celebrate that the “they” who were once “they” are now part of our “we.” And this week, I invite you to tune out the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-neighbor rhetoric and listen instead to a familiar voice of reconciliation and welcome: Saint Patrick’s.

When he was fourteen, Patrick was victim of the unthinkable tragedy of being kidnapped from his home and stolen away to Ireland. He later escaped his captors and returned home. Within several years he responded to Christ’s call on his life and returned to Ireland not to seek revenge but for reconciliation with his captors. He lived the rest of his days sharing Christ’s love for all people in Ireland.

To all the Christian readers in this amazing country of beautiful multicultural diversity: “Go and do likewise.” Perhaps our political leaders don’t believe in diversity of cultures, but our God does. Wouldn’t it be great if we Christians were known not for our exclusivity, but for our ability to “love the stranger as you love yourself”?

To all my Muslim and Latino/a (and Irish!) readers I say welcome home! This land is your land, this land is my land. Forgive us for our sins, we don’t know what we’re doing. I so deeply regret that you have been shaken by being “vilified, questioned and even legislated against” by people who claim to worship the prince of peace. But stay strong in your faith, and together we’ll get it right. This Christian pastor is glad you’re here.

Note: I’m actually not Irish, I’m Swiss/German through and through. As a Mennonite with Germanic roots, this story could just as easily be told through the lens of our own stories of immigration.