Saturday, April 4, 2009

Dr. King, Race and the Gospel



Forty-one years ago today the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
As the son of white middle class parents, I have never really had to deal with racial prejudice being exercised against me. As an activist, I've heard horror stories from men and women mistreated because of their ethnicity. As a follower of Jesus Christ, I can not stomach the antics, tactics and slogans of so many white Americans when it comes to the racial divide in America. I desperately want to connect people's lives to the good news of Jesus Christ, and how the Gospel changes the way you look at the people around you.
One of the books I've recently been reading, "Gracism: the Art of Inclusion" by David A. Anderson, has been helping me work through how, as a Christian, I respond to racism and the different tensions between ethnicities. He said something as an African-American that caught my attention.
"As much as I love the black church and at times miss it, there will be no black church in heaven. There will be one church and it will be multicultural. One Bride, not a harem, is what Jesus is coming back for"
Did you get that? This idea our culture has propagated, that all Christians should worship with only their ethnicity, is dead wrong. You will not find any single ethnicity church anywhere in the New Testament. Why? Because Christ came to save people of every ethnicity. We've got to remember that the universal community of faith is just that Universal. Lets not forget the millions of believers around the world who don't look like us.
As we think about the life and death of the Rev. King, it is my prayer that we would make our communities more like heaven will one day be.
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1 comment:

Alan Cross said...

Thanks, Tim. Good words for sure. I've been writing along the same lines for some time now and our church is trying to move forward in this area. Sacrificial love is the answer. You should write more.

I blog at downshoredrift.com if you ever want to connect.

April 13, 2009 at 12:22 AM

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The Vision?

The vision is Jesus: obsessively, dangerously, undeniably Jesus.
The vision is an army of young people.
You see bones? They are an army.
And they are free from materialism. They laugh at the markets.
They hardly care! They wear clothes like costumes:
to show and to tell, but never to hide.
They know the meaning of the Matrix; the way the West was won.
They are mobile like the wind; they belong to the nations.
They need no passport.
People write their addresses in pencil and wonder at their strange existence.
They are free, yet they are slaves of the hurting and dirty and dying.

What is the vision?
The vision is holiness that hurts the eyes.
It makes children laugh and adults break and cry.
It scorns the good and strains for the best. It is dangerously pure.
This is an army that will lay down its life for the cause.
A million times a day its soldiers choose to lose that they might win, one day
the great "Well done" of faithful sons and daughters.
Such heroes are as radical on Monday morning as Sunday night.
They don't need fame from names. Instead they grin quietly upwards
and hear the crowds chanting again and again: "COME ON!"

And this is the sound of the underground
The whisper of history shaping
Foundations shaking
Revolutionaries dreaming once again
Mystery is screaming in whispers
Conspiracy is breathing...
This is the sound of the underground.

And the army is disciplined.
Young people who beat their bodies into submission.
Every soldier would take a bullet for his comrades at arms.
The tattoo on their backs boasts "For me to live is Christ and to die is gain."
Sacrifice fuels the fire of victory in their eyes.
Winners. Martyrs. Who can stop them?
Can failure succeed? Can fear scare them or death kill them?
And this generation prays like a dying man with groans beyond
talking, with warrior cries, sulphuric tears
Waiting. Watching: 24 - 7 - 365.
Whatever it takes they will give: Breaking the rules.
Shaking mediocrity from its cozy little hide.
Laying down their rights and their precious little wrongs,
laughing at labels, fasting essentials.

The advertisers cannot mold them.
Hollywood cannot hold them.
Peer-pressure is powerless
to shake their resolve
Material clothes matter not
Would they surrender their image or their popularity?
They would lay down their very lives,
swap seats with the man on death row;
guilty as hell.
A throne for an electric chair.
With blood and sweat and many tears,
with sleepless nights and fruitless days,
they pray as if it all depends on God
and live as if it all depends on them.


Their words make demons scream in shopping malls.
Don't you hear them coming?
Here come the frightened and forgotten, with fire in their eyes.
Their prayers summon the hounds of heaven and invoke the ancient dream of Eden.

And this is the sound of the underground
The whisper of history shaping
Foundations shaking
Revolutionaries dreaming once again
Mystery is screaming in whispers
Conspiracy is breathing...
This is the sound of the underground.