we need to listen. and shut our mouths.

The other day while driving to my oldest son’s baseball game, this story came on the radio.  It’s about the producers memories of going on a tour of The National Great Blacks In Wax Museum in Baltimore, Maryland.  She recalls with audible disturbance, the traumatic memory she has from her school tours through the museum which depicts lynchings and a slave ship as well as segregation and slavery.  Its one of the few times everyone in the car was silent.  Three white males in the car 47, 14, and 12. And myself a white woman.  It really hit us all.  My pubescent sons’ mouths were gaping and at one point my youngest announced, “This is horrible!  Why would people do that?”  I turned the volume down and asked the boys to imagine that they were born and raised in a country where in recent history white people were segregated, lynched, abused, treated like animals and made to be slaves?  That’s the history that my black friends in the U.S. live with.

People like me and my husband and sons we have no idea what that feels like.  That’s what “white privilege” means.  It doesn’t me we get a hand out or hand up.  It means we don’t live with a history of oppression against people who look like us in the country we call home.

I know folks are upset about NFL players taking a knee during the national anthem.  And I know people are quick to defend police officers (so am I… I’m married to one).  But we white folks need to listen.  We need to listen to stories like this.  And to the stories of our black neighbors and co-workers and friends.  We need to listen.  And shut our mouths.  We may have good arguments.  But especially those of us who call ourselves Christians need to put our hands over our mouths and listen.

I have nothing but respect and prayers for our veterans and military servants.  I love my country.  But my country has a history of sinful oppression of people of color.  What we hear in the news and see on T.V. and post in our social media is not going to stop the blood of the slaves from crying out in their descendants. We need to lay down our lives and listen. We need to stop being Job’s friends to those who are bearing a bitter burden.  We need to love our black neighbors.  And give our lives for their restoration to wholeness.

This is the way of Christ, our God and Savior who wasn’t white.  This is the way of the God who calls peoples of every tribe, tongue and nation to be his children.  This is the way of Jesus, who drove out the proud money-changers and proclaimed, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer for all nations”? And you have turned it into house of robbers!

 “For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.” -2 For. 5:18-19

Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger… -James 1:19 

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Advent meditation: It’s for freedom that he set us free

For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. …For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. – Galatians 5:1,13

I’ve been thinking about this a lot today.  I used to read these verses and sort of feel lost.  “It’s for freedom Christ has set us free”???  Ok.  What does that mean?  I mean, yeah, I’d agree that Christ set us free from the condemnation coming against us, but free?  Free from what?  Doesn’t God restrict, not free?  If Christ has set us free are we “free” to do whatever we want?  And if we’re not, is that really freedom?  

If I’m honest those questions have gone through my head many times over the years.  But today, after pouring my heart out to one that I love, I heard those verses in my head and it made total sense!  Sin is slavery.  Christ’s blood bought freedom.  Freedom from sin!  He didn’t die to serve us our favorite, chosen sin on a silver platter.  He died to give us the power to kill sin, to break free from it’s chains, to turn to him when we find ourselves in a sin.  He didn’t come to leave the dead, dead and the sick, sick and the broken, broken.  He came to give life to the dead, heal the sick and restore the broken.

Until we see him face to face we will be in a battle to fight sin with faith.  We have been given the power to look the slave driver of sin in the face and say, “NO MORE!  I will not give myself over to you!”  And when we fail, and we will fail, we have been given the grace to cut off the arm that causes us to sin and turn our minds and hearts back to the One who died to set us free.

Freedom in Christ is freedom to no longer be poisoned by the lies of sin.  It’s the freedom to be sober again, to see clearly the beauty of God in Christ and realize we’ve been feasting ourselves on vomit and rottenness and poison.  When we have that freedom we recognize sin for what it is and we hate it and we fight it and we turn from it when we find ourselves in it.  And we can do that now, because Christ has come and purchased with his own blood the ability for us to taste the goodness of God and despise the putridness of sin.  He bore or sins in his body to free us to love God and love one another not to turn ourselves back over to the destructive things that he had to die to free us from in the first place!

So when I read these verses now I exclaim, “Yes! Yes! Yes he really has freed me.”  Now I hate the thing I used to think he was unfairly keeping me from.  I now know he’s freed me from the thing that was keeping me from really loving Him and really serving and loving others.

And because of all this, this Advent, I’m thinking a lot about my longing for the coming again of Christ.  Until that day he’s freed me to fight the fight of faith.  To stand.  To change my thinking.  To turn to him.  And when he comes and I see him face to face, the fight will be over.  Until then I cling to the promise that he came to set me free and I press on to fight the good fight of faith in who He is and what He teaches me to do.

Quieted,
Sheila