I recently conducted an informal Facebook poll asking who in the Bible really seemed to “fit the part” of a messenger of God, based on projected norms of their time. (I realize this is far from an approved standard for research, but a range of biblical scholars did chime in.) From our collective knowledge, we came back with two characters: Nathan and Isaiah. I’m sure I could dig a bit more and find others who embody the projected norms for their time about what a follower of God is supposed to look like. But on the whole, it strikes me that of all those in the Bible who deliver God’s message, who challenge systemic evils and call out empty worship, and who embody God’s hope in the world, so few of them actually look like people would expect a messenger of God to look.
While we are only told that Nathan was sent by God, Isaiah’s call story is particularly interesting when viewed through this lens. Isaiah sees the Lord enthroned, surrounded by winged creatures singing their hosannas. With the smoke of God’s glory filling his nose, Isaiah’s response isn’t joy or even fear, but mourning. “Woe is me!” Isaiah says, “I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isaiah 6:5). The contradiction between what he has witnessed and what he knows of himself brings him to his knees. His confession invites a visit from one of the winged creatures, carrying a burning coal – a purifying fire – right to the source of Isaiah’s confessed uncleanliness. His guilt departs; his sins are forgiven, and he is ready to respond when God asks who will go and carry the holy message into the world. “Here I am; send me!” (Isaiah 6:8b).
Isaiah’s story is perfect for anyone who has experienced the contradiction between their own sinfulness and God’s holiness. Which, as Presbyterians, I assume is a thing we have all experienced a time or two, particularly as we seek to be the Body of Christ in a world brimming with tension, fear and violence. It is a time for radical honesty, and for the courage to face the things many of us have been taught to ignore.
Being honest about our past
Over the last several years, my mom has done a lot of genealogy research. She discovered that some of our people – my people – came over on the Mayflower. Suffering for too long under the weight of religious discrimination, they hopped on a ship and sailed into the unknown in search of land, anticipating the nation they’d build — the beacon on top of a hill they were certain they’d been ordained to settle and to lead.
Looking around today, it’s tempting to think this cannot be the nation my ancestors imagined when they climbed off the Mayflower, or when they later penned the Declaration of Independence asserting the self-evident truths “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Surely this is not the future they envisioned, is it? A world where children are kept in cages, where black lives still don’t matter, where native lands and lives are desecrated, where the government is actively prosecuting against the protections of its citizens. Surely this can’t be what they had in mind.
Yet, if I am honest and take off the lens of manifest destiny my ancestors wore so boldly, I can see that this is exactly the United States they envisioned. My ancestors, determined as they may have been, were shortsighted. They were arrogant and misguided in their understanding of what it meant to follow God, corrupted by the power they felt they were entitled to have and the land they saw as divinely ordained to be theirs. Armed with the word of God and an assuredness of their chosen status, they held lofty ideas about what this country would be, but failed to understand that if they weren’t set on making a better life for everyone, they weren’t making a better life for anyone. And they were using the very texts we as Presbyterians hold as sacred as their justification for doing so.
Last year marked the 400th anniversary of the first ship carrying people from Africa to Virginia with the purpose of enslaving them. For the centuries that followed, millions of people were shuttled across the Atlantic and sold as property, as chattel. Though there was dissent among abolitionists, the practice of buying and selling human beings was largely accepted by white folks as a way of life. And it was supported by many parts of the church, including many Presbyterians. Robert Dabney who, from 1853-1883, taught theology at what is now Union Presbyterian Seminary (my alma mater) and is largely understood to be the author of the theological justification for slavery, argued that while all people are created equal, this equality of nature shouldn’t translate to civil equality. Dabney argued: “The scriptural argument for the righteousness of slavery gives us, moreover, this great advantage: If we urge it successfully, we compel the Abolitionists either to submit, or else to declare their true infidel character.” If we are going to be serious about addressing the brokenness of our present, we’ve got to be honest about our past. If we, as a church, are committed to being the Body of Christ in the world, we have to be willing to look at the ways the church became a bulwark for the atrocities of chattel slavery.Being honest about our present
While many of us have longed and worked to see the world as a more just place than it was when those first people were put on ships and ripped from their homes 400 years ago, looking around today, we are still so far from living into the people we were created to be. White progressive people – my people – struggle with this in a particular way. We see the mess and we want to fix it — of course we do! We want to clean up the mess of injustices around us, to calm the collective anxiety or guilt we may hold about the sins of our ancestors. We see racism as an invasive weed and seek to pull it from the soil whenever a new sprout appears. We create programs meant to level the system, but stay quiet or even balk at discussions of reparations. We weaponize our tears or shut down completely when conversations get uncomfortable. We lift up diversity as a goal, but then expect everyone to conform to our ways of being. We tell our children the same white-washed history many of us were told or avoid uncomfortable conversations all together. We see racism as a problem only for people of color, while side-stepping the self-examination into the ways we, too, have been malformed by white supremacy. In our desire to separate ourselves from the sins of racism, we remain willfully blind to our complicity in supporting a system that continues to push people of color to the margins of society. We miss that racism isn’t an invasive weed, it’s the soil.
We often talk of reconciliation within the church. The good news made visible in the Gospels is that, through the life, death and resurrection of Christ, we are reconciled not only with a God whose every act is done in love, but also within ourselves, with our tradition, and with one another. To reconcile, though, means we must first be honest about the ways in which we are fractured, and then trust that God will give us the resources we need, individually and collectively, to get us where we need to go.
Being honest about our shared history
Several years ago, while I was still working as youth programs director at Side by Side, an organization that works with LGBTQ youth, we took the youth leadership group on a field trip to Manchester Docks and the Richmond Slave Trail in Virginia. As the historical marker database notes: “In the late 1700s, newly captured Africans walked the mile-and-a-half route from the docks to the slave jails near 15th and Franklin Streets.” The trail is narrow, best walked single file, and our guide suggested we walk with our arm on the shoulder of the person in front of us. Because our group met in the evening, our tour began around sunset. As we shuffled together like a human chain, we heard about the history of the ground on which we walked — about how ships docked here and emptied hundreds of people taken from their homes in Africa, who were chained at the neck and legs and marched in at night to avoid offending the local citizens with the oozing sores, filth and stench they’d carried from the long journey. By the time we’d walked the mile or so to our designated endpoint, we were quiet and still, the silence heavy on our shoulders as we absorbed together the weight of our shared history.
Two of the other group leaders and I were tasked with walking to the van and driving it back to the rendezvous point where we could retrieve the youth. Rather than simply backtracking, we opted for a wider trail that ran parallel to the one we’d just taken. After a while, though, we started to wonder if we’d made a mistake. The trail that had seemed so wide now ran narrow. The palpable anxiety rose among us, nervous laughter eventually giving way to silence as we sought to stay the course, the weight of the evening’s events still heavy on us. My companions, two black women, were friends with whom I’d had many conversations about white supremacy and the ways it skews our vision of the world and one another. Many of these conversations were painful for me — not only because I heard about the weight these women I cared for so deeply carried every day, just by virtue of the bodies they were born in, but also because on more than one occasion they’d each held me to account for something I’d said dismissing or trivializing their pain. As we walked and prayed individually, I felt a sense of solidarity and community. At one point, one of my friends commented that she knew we’d be all right, that the ancestors were looking out for us and would get us to the van safely.
I chuckled a bit and said, “I’m not so sure your ancestors are really looking out for me.”
My friend paused and turned, facing me directly. With her face dappled by the moonlight breaking through the trees, she said: “No, Jess. They’ve got you, too.”
And they did, because within a minute or so, the trees opened up and we saw the van.
This moment has stayed with me in the years since, and I hope it’s one I never lose. As surely as their ancestors were looking out for my friends, they were also looking out for me.
It was my ancestors who wouldn’t be looking out for them. Even more, it was my ancestors, my flesh and my bone, who distorted the liberating message of the Bible to justify the genocide of native people and the enslavement of millions of others. It is this same legacy that justifies putting children in cages today. It’s the legacy that wants me to stay polite, to stay silent, even when I know my voice could have an impact. It’s a legacy that has justified the brutality of so many black and brown bodies in favor of the comfort of my white body. It has given me a malformed sense of self built upon lies. And, as difficult as the conversations about white supremacy can be, every time I engage in one I feel a small step closer to freedom — freedom to accept the promise offered at my baptism that God’s grace is given to me even when I do not have the capacity to ask for it and freedom to live into the fullness of who I was created to be.
The world is a mess. I don’t know what the next few years are going to be like, but I believe things are going to get worse before they get better. I don’t know what the journey from here to the other side of chaos looks like, but I believe we can get there. And I believe a first step in healing is being honest with ourselves about our history, our complicity. It means naming our shame, being vulnerable with one another, and trusting that God will be God. Over time, this will increase our capacity to engage in the difficult work of reconciliation. Even more, we will also begin to see that we are woven together by a God whose infinite love refuses to give up until we can look at ourselves and one another honestly, seeing each other in the fullness of not only our humanity, but also as bearers of divinity.
Jess Cook is the program and communications manager for More Light Presbyterians, and lives in Richmond, Virginia.
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