BLOG 10/4/15. RACISM, RECONCILIATION, AND HOSPITALITY

A couple of questions have come to me recently that elicit my engaging the whole theme of racism as an insistent one in our society, and especially for the church. One came from an older person wondering why our church was having a six-week encounter with the subject—wondering in all innocence what it had to do with the church. The other questioner was a dear, dear friend, and renowned black civil rights leader with whom I have ministered over many years. His question was how I became so ‘progressive’ having grown up in the segregated South?

This sort of inquiry has been back on our doorstep recently, what with the shooting inside the historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Racism is also not a southern phenomenon. It may be more overt in South what with its notorious history, and more clandestine in the North, but it is an everywhere reality. Prejudice in not new. In the early church, and through the centuries there has been that conflict between Jew and Gentile, and anti-Semitism is present right down into too much of our social discourse. It runs deep and is not easily expunged. Having grown up in a South in which everything was segregated, even though I have long since repented of it, there lurk deep in my sub-consciousness those attitudes and responses programmed there in my early life. This is a two-way street.

Racism is not resolved by political decrees, or progressive journalism. The Emancipation Proclamation eliminated the legality of slavery, …but it did not remove pathological racism. Historic tragedies such as the Ku Klux Klan exacerbated the existing racism for decades. Harry Truman’s eliminating segregation in the armed forces didn’t remove racism. Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights bill was a great step, but it didn’t terminate racism. The election of the gifted Barak Obama was an encouragement that we might have been making progress, but it only deepened the smoldering racist resentment of a visible segment of the electorate. Large church bodies have made impressive declarations on behalf of racial equality, but those were pretty much simply showpieces, window-dressing, and certainly did not change many hearts.

So let me come back of my own biographical pilgrimage and draw what I think to be a Biblically helpful proposal. I never had any serious one-on-one discourse with an adult black person until I was in my mid-twenties. I was ordained in 1954, the summer after the Brown-vs-the Board of Education declaration by the Supreme Court. I was in campus ministry at North Carolina State. Our Presbyterian students from the several colleges and universities in the state held an annual weekend conference. My first eye-opener was that there were almost no church-owned conference centers that allowed for integrated gatherings. When we found one (somewhat decrepit) I found myself bunking in a big dormitory room with black students from a couple of schools. Let me underscore that. That was the first time in my life I had ever had significant conversations with adult blacks, or been able to sit at table with them, or get into heartfelt discussions with them. It was there that my own racism became obvious to me. But don’t leave yet. Those of us who became thus ‘progressive’ were accused of all kinds of liberal-communistic tendencies and held suspect. In the intervening years I have found that the very most effective way to become ministers of reconciliation (to which all Christians are called) is in the ministry of hospitality, i.e., sitting across the table with each other, drinking coffee/beer with one another, having one another in each others’ homes. It is in such hospitable contexts that we, black and white brothers and sisters, can unburden ourselves to one another, can confess our sins and or racism to one another, and become authentically reconciled to one another in love. It will not happen in a study course or a pronouncement of some kind. Reconciliation that begins to heal our racism comes in our ministry to one another in the ministry of hospitality (frequently mentioned gift in the New Testament). It can be painful, and it can be slow, but I guarantee you . . . it is effective. Try it!