Too Nerdy For Sunday Morning Consumption

So on Sunday we're looking at a story of King David before he becomes king.  At one point he has an opportunity to kill the reigning king, King Saul, to take his 'rightful' place as king of Israel. He decides not to do so, citing the fact that Saul is still "the Lord's anointed." 

If the Lord's anointing on him is his ground for assuming the kingship, he will not trespass the Lord in reaching for the kingship.  The Lord's anointing is his raison d'etre (I've always wanted to use that phrase, never quite sure I knew what it meant. I think I got it right.)

So I was going to use this illustration ons Sunday, but it's too nerdy for general consumption. This is why you have a blog!

Here's the illustration


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When I was in college I did a little bit of study around post-modern literary theory and philosophy--I think I understood some of it, I’m kind of nerdy but this was super-nerdy stuff, beyond my nerd-dom

But one of the core tenants of post-modernity was that we’re all so stuck inside our own heads that real actual communication and understanding was pretty much impossible

That you might have got something you want to say to me but I’ve got so much noise inside my head and my own preconceptions and assumptions and frameworks that really there’s no way I can ever fully understand or connect with you

And so these philosophers would write these long books talking about communication was impossible

They’d write long books. Full of long words. Trying to communicate how it was impossible to communicate and words were useless.

They’d write books and hold lectures. Using words to talk about how we can never understand each other using words

And this is why most of you have never heard much of post-modern literary theory, at least that version of it. It never took off, it never caught traction more broadly

In part because it had within it this ridiculously self-destructive, self-undermining characteristic to it—you can’t use words to say that words don’t work, that undermines any authority you might have had.

This is why David doesn't kill Saul, even when he has the chance to do so. If his authority is going to come from the Lord, then he cannot and will not undermine that authority by going against the Lord's anointed.  The Lord will dispose of Saul when the Lord decides it is time. David, meanwhile, will wait, even though it will cost him many, many more miles of heartache and running and seemingly wasted time.

Restoration Software

So one of the most compelling themes for me recently has been the Jesus-following idea of restoration.  Restoring something generally implies taking something that was formerly glorious and majestic but has fallen into disrepair and making it glorious again.

We restore old beautiful houses and old beautiful cars all the time.  What does it mean to restore human beings?

The original description of humanity in the beginning is utterly glorious: made in God's image.  I think that the Genesis creation story communicates the core of who God is and who we are, regardless of what we might think about the literal-ness of it all.

God creates everything, and it's all good, good, good and good. And then creates human beings made in his image to be sub-rulers, managers, sub-creators.  He places them in a beautiful place, a perfect place, and he calls them to go to work making it more beautiful, more perfect, more glorious.

Who were we in the beginning? Image-bearers of the most high God.  What does it mean to bear God's image? It means that in every word, every relationships, every project undertaken, every laugh, every hobby, every email, every time we drove a car, every text message, and in every blog post, something of God's enormously good character would be introduced into the world in a fresh way.

A classic way the work of preaching has been described is "truth poured through personality." In the beginning, all image-bearers did this work in every single thing that they did.  Truth, love, grace, creativity, flourishing, generosity, ingenuity, perseverance, resilience, beauty, wisdom, light, justice, holiness all poured through the grand variety of image-bearers personalities who live in this place, all day, every day.

Of course in the biblical story it is sin that corrupts this original calling. We still have this authority over the earth and the ability to either bless it and each other or further corrupt it and each other.  The ruinous results of sin hijacking the power of image-bearing are well-documented in any history book. We are now the run-down houses and cars, weary, decaying, over-run with thorns and thickets and parasites. We were originally glorious, we are now in need of restoration.

Jesus shows us what perfect image-bearing was intended to be from the beginning. He takes up that rightful place as the perfect image of the invisible God. He represents God perfectly in every interaction as he comes up against all the chaos and pain and pride that darkness might throw at him. He reclaims the role of image-bearer that all of us were created to take up in the beginning.

And in his death and resurrection, he makes the way for fallen image-bearers to be restored. Restoration means for fallen image-bearers to re-take their rightful place in the order of the cosmos as people who are alive in this moment, for this day, to pour something of God's eternally wondrous character into this fallen and broken world.

I am a restored image bearer put here in this moment to have God's character be poured through me as I go to work with him creating shalom in this place.  All aspects of my personality, schedule, tasks, and my very being have been purchased by Jesus on the cross that I might once again take my rightful place on this planet. 

That's the restoration software being reloaded into my heart, mind, body, and spirit, to make me more alive and enabling me to participate in the life-giving restoration mission of Jesus. 

A White People's Brief Introduction to Systemic Racism Part 2

So all of this is really a vicious cycle, and here's how the order of operations flows:

1. Overtly racist white people create...

2. Overtly racist systems and structures--everything from banking to voting to running for office to owning real estate to education to religious institutions were defined by fixed racial boundaries for a couple hundred years which creates THE MACHINE which...

3. Severely hinders the full flourishing of a fixed set of people made in God's image for many generations that ripples down for generation after generation. 

(I heard about a race workshop at a school where they played a game of monopoly where the white teachers weren't allowed to play until a full hour into the game.  They all lost, many of them quit in extreme frustration and exasperation.) 

4. This machine also produces more racist people.  History is littered with white people who point to the minorities struggling under the oppressive weight of the machine and declare, "Look! They're not flourishing! Must be something wrong with them!"

5. And this machine becomes the moving walkway that does not require active participation in order to perpetuate it's highly predictable results. 

America is, in many ways, a wonderfully unique place with a wonderfully unique history. And in other ways, America is just like every other empire. Every empire has a body count--ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, the British Empire, China, Russia, all of them.  The American empire is no different.  What's unique about us is the loftiness of our aspirations and then the extent that we have to bend and ignore history to pretend like we've lived up to those aspirations.

And ultimately no empire is the fullness of what Jesus talked about: the kingdom of God. In fact, every empire, by virtue of being an empire, will at points come in conflict with the perfect kingdom of God taught by Jesus and ushered in by Jesus.

One of the greatest challenges for many of us Jesus-following white folks will be the question of allegiance: when the kingdom of the United States of America comes in conflict with the Kingdom of God, which one will we choose?  When the road forks and we are required to be prophetic towards a nation and neighbors that we love, will we have the courage to do so?

Will we be willing to be so committed to the Kingdom of God that we would even lobby for policies that might not benefit us white folks? Would we be willing to make changes to the machine so that it was a more just and equitable and kingdom-of-God-like democratic capitalism?

The machine has a ton of freight and momentum behind it at this point. There are some who understandably believe the American democratic/capitalistic experiment to be a lost cause, unredeemable. But I think of all the broken systems (and they all are broken) this is the best one with the most potential.

But my oh my how far short we've fallen of that magnificent potential.

Why "But I'm Not a Racist" Doesn't Solve the Problem: A Brief Introduction to Systemic Racism for White People, Part 1

So I'm a Jesus person.  So I believe in miracles.

But even if every person in America woke up tomorrow and miraculously had zero racism or prejudice in their hearts, it would not fix the racial problem in our country.

My goal with these next couple of posts is to give the briefest of introductions to systemic racism.  This is written particularly for white folks who honestly don't understand why race is still such a charged issue even when everyone they know seems to genuinely be a nice, non-racist-type person.

My proposal is that the American political, social, and economic machine has been finely tuned over hundreds of years to produce consistently racially skewed outcomes that have been and will continue to be self-perpetuating. At this point it is a moving walkway that does not require actively racist participation to continue.  All it requires is that no one re-make the machine that has been carefully curated over centuries to produce with astounding predictability the exact results it was created to produce in the beginning.

Below is only the briefest skim over several hundred years of legislation that will illustrate how the machine got built.  There are literally thousands more examples that could be talked about at the national, state, and local levels. but hopefully this will get us started.

(Note: I'm deeply grateful for the good work of the Racial Equity Institute workshops, the mini-series "Race, the Power of An Illusion" and the podcast "Seeing White" for their great work in helping to educate this white guy and put these pieces together).

1640: The John Punch Case

A black man named John Punch together with two white men run away from their indentured servitude. Punch is given a life sentence, the two white men are merely given an extension to their servitude.  This is recognized by some people as the first slave in the American colonies.

The back story: the vast majority of Americans at this point are poor. The small number of wealthy white elites know that if the poor people band together they would be powerless to stop any uprising.

So they systematically work to break up the poor people by race.  Wealthy whites tell poor whites, "You might be poor but you are one of us and you will have more rights as a poor white person than any other poor person will have.  There will always be black people beneath you on the social ladder."

This promise keeps poor whites from bonding with poor blacks and other ethnic minorities to destabilized the established wealthy, white power structure.  This alluring promise is repeated throughout the generations to keep poor white people at bay.

(Aside: it might be worth asking the question how poor white folks are doing here in 2018 on the other side of this bargain).

Late 1600's: "What is a white man?"

The notion of a 'white race' that would control power and access to land and wealth originated in Virginia as the House of Burgesses debated "What is a white man?" in the late 1600's.  This is when whiteness formally becomes invented by people who to this point had thought of themselves as English or Irish or...

This conversation runs for approximately 250 years with each generation defining and re-defining white-ness to make sure that only white people get access to land and wealth and power for generations.

Late 1700's: Skull Studies Rank Races

In a prime example of how our presuppositions shape what we 'discover,' there are dozens of skull studies done by European and American scientists determined to rank all the races of the earth. Of course "Caucasoid" continually comes up first (the biggest noggins) with Africans last.

This supposedly scientific discovery becomes a key plank in justifying slavery.

1785: The Land Ordinance Act

Simple: 640 acres offered at $1 per acre exclusively to white people.

This pours gasoline on the wealth gap from generation to generation as whites pass along large plots of land that are exponentially increasing in value.  Ethnic minorities will continue to be boxed out of land ownership (a primary way that wealth gets passed along from generation to generation) for almost 200 more years.

1787: The 3/5th's Compromise

The demon of racism gets formally written into our nation's founding documents with cataclysmic results. We have never recovered.  This formally and officially puts people made in God's image in the "not-fully-human" category (the fuel that all ethnic hatred runs on).  At the same time, this ensures that southern white slave-holding interests will have disproportionate power in Congress.

1830: The Indian Removal Act

The president is authorized to 'negotiate' and exchange lands with native peoples. In reality, this encouraged the president to seize Native American lands and remove them from land that had been theirs.

1877-1950's: The Jim Crow Era

Merely 75 years of domestic terrorism, lynchings, and dehumanizing treatment with zero recourse for anything resembling justice.

1896: Plessy v. Ferguson

Separate but equal facilities are ruled constitutional, consigning black students to poorer educational experiences and perpetuating the already well-established cycles of poverty.

1933: The New Deal

This made approximately $120 billion in loans available nearly exclusively to white people.  That would be worth approximately $1 trillion today.

1944: GI Bill

In another of the largest government handouts in history, $95 billion was given away exclusively to over 2 million white people.

(Aside: who has benefited the most from government handouts over our nations history? Not 'needy minorities.'  White folks. From hundreds of acres of land ridiculously cheap to college tuition totally paid for, white people have benefited from government handouts more than any other people group.

Perhaps there is nothing wrong with receiving government assistance. But when white folks complain or object to government assistance to non-white Americans, they can only do so from a lack of knowledge about our own history.)

1945-1960: Redlining Housing Practices

A black community was marked as 'black and undesirable' and whites are steered into the suburbs, leaving black communities with little to no tax base and feeding cycles of poverty which continue to plague us today.

Even when such practices were outlawed, de facto racial steering continued.

1980's: War on Drugs

Not surprisingly, the predominantly poor black inner-cities (the outcome the machine had been designed to produce) become communities rife with any number of societal ills.  In a classic example of addressing the symptom rather than the root cause, the war on drugs accelerates a new era of disproportionate numbers of black males imprisoned.

Today

In every measure of human health and well-being, black people are disproportionately represented at the bottom: high school drop-out rates, infant morality rates, heart disease, economic well-being, family stability, unemployment, percentage of population in jail, life expectancy, etc. etc. etc.  Every. single. one.

This is not about one person making bad decisions.  This is about a machine designed over centuries to keep a certain subset of people from having access to all the options available to white people.

This is about an American political and economic and social machine where generations of people were steered into racially and economically stratified prescribed paths in order to produce these racially stratified results with black and brown people disproportionately on the losing end.

And all of this is in motion whether you're a 'good white person who isn't racist' or not. The machine goes on and on.

That (in the very briefest of terms) is what is meant by systemic racism.

The Problem of Conflating Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Restoration

In season two, episode six of Netflix's hit t.v. show "The Crown," Queen Elizabeth wrestled deeply with whether it was her "Christian duty" to forgive her ne'er-do-well uncle by giving him a position in her government--Billy Graham even makes an appearance to offer his wisdom.

There's confusion here that I think is pretty common: forgiveness, reconciliation, and restoration are three distinct things. This leaves room for us to do the crucial soul-cleansing work of forgiveness while keeping healthy boundaries.

For some of us who are Jesus-followers, conflating all three together has kept us from engaging in the work that we're required to do (forgiveness) because we assume doing that work includes doing the other two things as well.  Thankfully, it doesn't.

Forgiveness
Forgiveness is the emotional and spiritual work that is, indeed, the required work of those of us who follow Jesus.

But forgiveness does not require the other person's participation.  Some of us need to forgive someone who is dead and gone. Some of us need to forgive people that we need to keep far away from us for our emotional or physical safety.

Jesus forgives us. And then we in turn forgive as we have been forgiven (and sometimes it's a long, long process) regardless of the merit or contrition of the offending party. The 'location' of this work is largely internal, spiritual, and psychological. Of course, a public expression of some sort often helps us to seal the work, but it's not essential to the process.

And, of course, centuries of spiritual wisdom have been confirmed by nearly every modern psychological study: forgiveness is life, un-forgiveness is death.  Dallas Willard: "Jesus isn't just nice. He's brilliant."

Reconciliation
Reconciliation is the personal relational re-connection which isn't always wise or possible. Perhaps the person is narcissistic, abusive, totally unrepentant or (again) simply no longer with us. We must forgive, but we do so without giving unhealthy people entree into our lives again.

Jesus is always biased towards reconciliation, but he regularly had broken, un-reconciled relationships with the religious leaders of his day.  He could forgive them (ultimately on the cross) without being reconciled to them.

Restoration
Whereas reconciliation is personal and relational, restoration is entrusting or re-positioning the person into an equivalent place of responsibility or authority.  Again, this may or may not be wise or possible.

So you might forgive the cousin that you hired who stole money from your company, you might even enjoy his company at the family reunion (reconciliation) but you might not give him his old job back.  That would be the final step of restoration that is reserved, again, for those who have put some intentional energy into the work of repair, repentance, renewal, making amends, and addressing wrongs done.

Given her uncle's rather smug and self-important disposition, Queen Elizabeth would be much better served doing the important internal work of forgiveness, perhaps beginning steps towards reconciliation (not that he was especially interested), but in no way should she give him a position in her government.  This is actually the conclusion that she comes to, but she feels guilty about it.

Keeping forgiveness, reconciliation, and restoration separate frees us to do the essential soul-work of forgiveness while maintaining healthy, wise, reasonable boundaries required for navigating a world full of broken people.

Piebald Awaken?

So I'm thinking about re-booting Piebald Life.

It's been hibernating for about 8 years and somehow the interwebs continued without my five-days-a-week ramblings. And, alas, nobody blogs any more (except for the five people who have all the readers) but I think I might have the inclination to re-find my groove here, maybe just a couple times a week. 

I'm trying to find a pithy analogy to the tree falling in the forest and nobody being around to hear it does it make any noise kind of a thing--but I'm not sure I can quite make it work: if a blog is updated and there's nobody around to read it, does it make any difference? I think you dear reader, if you're out there, might get what I'm trying to say.

I'll post this and work up another post or two and then perhaps alert my Facebook friends in the next week or so that there are a couple posts up. 

After all, everyone needs a hobby...