I’m trying to get the audio on my talk from Friday loaded, which means, sadly, me learning how to do something new with a computer. Also, I was going back through it trying to see if what was on the page is what I really said, and I was distracting myself at the same time, and so found this tragic piece over at the Washington Post.
I didn’t say anything about it in the talk, but the whole time I was writing and trying to think about the cross cultural nature of the gospel itself–which is what my talk is basically about–I was circling quietly in my own mind about Black Lives Matter.
America is a peculiar place that I am still trying to understand, and the race and class issues seem to shift and change not only by region of the country, but also by time period. Indeed, ethnicity and cross cultural trouble might be said to be at the heart of this election season in a new and different way with immigration being the roiling issue that it is.
Now, as I’ve said here and there, I’m a political conservative, and so I understand that that makes me a hater who needs to creep quietly into a corner to repent of my sins of bigotry, that many loud and shouting people think that I’m the problem and the only way to be part of the solution is to disappear or vote democrat. But, while that’s going on, in my corner of the fading, crumbling rust belt, I do actually fret a great deal about the poor in my community, the school system, the growing heroine scene, and more than all that, about a couple of women who I know personally, who are caught in an impossibly ridiculous system from which, by their own choice in many cases, they cannot escape, no matter what I do practically to help them.
So depression and suicide is a thing in the black activist community? I’m not surprised at all. Sad and heartbroken? Yes, but not surprised. Because the very basic futility of the task that they are undertaking, and the very wrong foundation upon which it is built, means that depression and mental illness are always going to be stalking round the perimeter, ready to devour.
Black Lives Matter, whose motivations I am not particularly interested in questioning, who I am sure are trying to do good and not evil, I believe suffer from the same particularly American error that the Prosperity movement propagates. Only, in the prosperity movement, the people at the top don’t suffer much, what with all the money rolling in, it’s the people at the bottom, so desperate for healing and happiness. But in Black Lives Matter, the suffering is everywhere, rank, file and celebrity. Why is that?
The error in both is theological and it’s as old as humanity, and as simple. And that is, that the task of “salvation” rests on you. It’s all on you to change whatever it is that needs changed. But for the prosperity follower, that task is confined to the troubles of your own individual life. That is a big enough burden as it is, but at least it is a well defined one. For Black Lives Matter, on the other hand, it is the whole world. And, worse off, whereas the prosperity preacher doesn’t have to convince anyone that something is wrong, the Black Lives Matter activist has to convince everyone.
Furthermore, for the Black Lives Matter person, everything has to be changed, now. Injustice, sin (however it is defined), racism, death–all of it, it needs an immediate, worldly end, now. And that is quite a heavy and impossible task, as well as a futile and discouraging one. I cannot imagine how anyone could carry that responsibility for more than a short while without coming undone at the psychic seams.
It’s why the gospel really does need to be preached to America once more, and why the substance of that gospel really matters. An entire arm of the American family is being hacked off in painful increments, and the only real solution is believed to be too hateful to even be spoken of in the public square. I know it is beating an old tired drum, but you can’t have abortion, that is death, at the center of your cultural landscape, and have one segment of the population participating in it more than all the others, and come away with anything but the shadow of death looming over the living. Abortion is to the black community like the prosperity gospel is to the white. The willing dupe. No one forces you into that clinic with a gun, no one compels you to write that check and send it in–in both cases, you do it yourself, “willingly”.
But the center of the gospel is that your will is broken, that you Cannot do what is right, and that God came to save both you and the world, when you failed. We cannot do other than sin. We cannot do other than embrace the terrible lie that we are what we have been waiting for, that if we just remove circumstances and other people’s bad behavior, everything will be restored to a heavenly state. The fact, however hateful it may sound, is that on earth there is not a single sinless person, black nor white nor Hispanic, no not one. All have turned aside and together we have become worthless. And the sign of our worthlessness is our corporate death grip on death itself.
We have to have the gospel come to these young people who are burdened by a task they have set out for themselves, a task too big and too difficult to bear. They need to put their trust and hope in Jesus. Jesus bore in himself the due penalty of our worthlessness and failure. His resurrection is the only chance at life that any person has, whatever their color and culture. The black life does matter, each and every single one. But it matters because God himself was willing to come and die and bear the eternal weight of sin instead of that life bearing it. He is the solution, both temporally and eternally. It is the depth of tragedy that that message isn’t on the table as a solution to any of these problems.
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