Racism and History, Gmail and Sunspots

A couple weeks ago our IV chapter co-sponsored an event where we brought in the president of the North Carolina NAACP to speak. His challenge was that it was easy to look at the presenting problems regarding race in our country (who's in jail, who makes the money, etc.) and make what would appear to be logical conclusions. But those conclusions would be incorrect because we can't understand today's problems in a vacuum. In order to deal with today's problems, he argued, we have to know our history.

A week and a half ago I took the plunge: the Juno account I've had for about eight years is now forwarding to my super-cool new Gmail account. My students were ecstatic. However, upon first switching everything was running super-slow. I couldn't send any e-mails for a while. Then I could send stuff but couldn't send attachments. Then my whole internet started slowing down. Curse that Gmail and a pox upon the students who sold me on it! I'm going back to Juno!

Then I heard something on the radio: sunspots were disturbing transmissions of all sorts. This could cause disruption for people who were listening on-line as well as those who plucked the signals out of the air. Could it be that Gmail wasn't single-handedly destroying my DSL internet connection after all?

Indeed, two days later I was up and running and as fully functional as I ever get. Without context, Gmail seemed to be the culprit. Given the fullness of the facts, I found that there was more to the story.

It is easy for those of us who are in the majority to dismiss calls to know our history as living in the past. But we must take that call seriously if we're ever to move forward. If we don't understand the context of the problem, we cannot actually begin to address the problem.

For Christians, there are two histories we need to grapple with: our own country's and the story of the church. The church was among the first ever inter-racial communities in history. Most of us are Christians because Jews went cross-culture to bring the gospel to us.

Yet the church has abdicated it's leadership responsbilities in this arena and thus everyone suffers: the church is segregated and our culture's well-intended attempts at bringing racial healing fall short. It's impossible for the culture to succeed where only the church can. Only the church can offer the Holy Spirit to go along with dialogue and education. Only the gospel can genuinely and deeply transform hearts and attitudes.

So let's get to know our history and move forward with boldness and humility to bring the fullness of the gospel to bear on this issue. Otherwise, we'll all just end up dropping Gmail because of sunspots.