This past week, we followed the story of how Simon Peter, a Jew by blood and faith, violated his peoples' law by going to the house of a Roman, and then baptized him even though he had not been circumcised. Judaism is first and foremost a faith and system of belief, to which anyone could subscribe, as Cornelius the Roman centurion had apparently done. But the Jewish people were also a people of common blood. And any male who had come to believe in the one God of Israel still had to be circumcised, in a time with no anesthesia and no understanding of the need for sterility to avoid fatal infections. However small, one's skin still determined whether you belonged.
"Peter began: ‘I now understand how true it is that God has no favourites, but that in every nation those who are god-fearing and do what is right are acceptable to him'" (Acts 10:34-35, Revised English Bible). Peter learned that, and it is past time for all white Americans to learn that. To be fair, many have learned that over the last sixty years, but not enough. In my previous parish in N.E. Alabama, my parishioners and townspeople struggled with the influx of Hispanic people from Mexico and Central America. I was told that in its past, there had actually been a sign at the edge of town saying that if you were Black, you had better not be here after dark. Whether or not it was really that explicit, the message had gotten through. I saw no African-Americans in the downtown area when I first visited. But I did see lots of signs in Spanish.
Almost as soon as I arrived, the backlash began. I could understand the frustration of seeing our government either unable or unwilling to secure our border. But in truth, that was not the only reason for the backlash. More than one parishioner was aware of the year 2040, when it is forecasted that white Americans will become a minority in the country that many of their ancestors founded. It was the first time that this town had to live with large numbers of brown skinned people.
The backlash lasted for most of the four years I lived there. In 2011, state leaders passed a cruel law intended to make the lives of unauthorized immigrant families so miserable that they would leave Alabama. Of course, there were reports of legal immigrants being singled out by those who felt empowered by the law to target those who looked different from them. The town police chief would later admit that the residents in the Hispanic neighborhoods stopped reporting crimes for fear of being deported. Eventually, the federal courts threw out most of the law. The city leaders who had led the backlash lost the election. And the town leaders I spoke to before I left gave the clear impression that they were ready to move on and learn to live together, finding a new unity in diversity.
Diversity vs. Tribal Survival
The acceptance of diversity was what Peter began to learn in his encounter with Cornelius. That would take him, and other Jewish Christians, to places that they did not anticipate and would not have preferred not to go. But go they did. And so must we as Americans. To be fair, I understand how difficult that will be. Recently I came to understand that even within myself.I have now been in Springfield for over a year. I love it here. Springfield has arts, culture, history, restaurants, and entertainment, but still feels like a small town, in which you can get to wherever you want to go within a half hour. It is not, however, very diverse. Springfield is one of the least ethnically diverse cities for its size in the United States. In May, my wife and I traveled to the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C., where we had lived most of our adult lives and where we had raised our son, who attended a high school where nearly a dozen languages were spoken. We had lived comfortably in this large and diverse suburban area for more than twenty years.
On our first full day there, I drove to a behemoth shopping center in Northern Virginia to meet our son for lunch. As I walked through the mall, I was suddenly shocked to realize that I was conscious of the large numbers of brown-skinned people around me in a way that I could not recall ever having been before. Even in Alabama, I had regularly interacted with my Hispanic neighbors and friends. But I had spent nearly a year in a city that is almost entirely white, and I had gotten used to interacting solely with people who looked like me. After several minutes, that consciousness of difference had passed on, and I went about my remaining days in "NoVa" as I had for years, in fellowship with all of God's children.
But that experience has taught me that we are hard wired to look out for those who seem "different," or "like me" as a survival mechanism, and that perceptions of skin color are a part of that hard wiring. But as believers who trust a God who made all human beings in their image, we are called to rise above our hard wiring, and respect the diversity of God's creatures. And as we slouch towards 2040, we should start by dealing with our original diversity, however painful.
Accepting Diversity when it Hurts
As someone who has lived most of his adult life in the Washington area, I am a fan of the Washington Redskins. But whether or not I mean an offense by the use of the "R" word, the reality is that many natives of this land, which white people took from them because they could, are offended by that term, and who am I to tell them not to be offended, or to stop bringing up old history? History can't be undone. But neither will that history be undone by an honest admission that whatever good has been done for the world by the United States of America, that good was made possible by the stealing of land simply because our ancestors couldn't be stopped from doing so. This was the original diversity of America, and it must be accepted.We must also accept the diversity that was so painfully displayed on our TV screen a few weeks ago from Ferguson, Missouri. I have a hard time understanding how the theft of some cigars and jaywalking led to the killing of Michael Brown. But police officers have every right to defend themselves when they have a reasonable fear for their lives. I hope and pray that enough evidence will emerge to determine whether or not the shooting of Brown was justified. But when, in a forum on race relations in the area, a white teenager related how his black friend was frequently stopped by police while riding his bicycle in a white neighborhood on the suspicion that the bike wasn't his; the truth that too often black Americans are assumed to be criminals is one that I cannot in good conscience ignore.
Whether it's listening to Native Americans, Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, etc., I as a White American, am called to acknowledge my own hard wiring toward those of my "race," and join all my fellow Americans in a hard conversation. Jewish Christians found themselves in a hard conversation after Peter's baptizing of a Roman, and Paul's preaching to Gentiles. That conversation would go in directions they would never have gone on their own. But as disciples of Jesus Christ, and members of Christ's mystical body the Church, they could do no other.
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