Tuesday 30th August 2005
‘God is black’ read the graffiti in the church porch. ‘If he was, they would have killed him’, someone else had scribbled underneath.
This was in the porch of the church where I served my title in South London. I looked at it many times and preached on the text many times: God in Christ was born into a people set apart by its own history and religion, and they were misunderstood and persecuted by others. And Jesus was killed. The scribbled riposte underneath was meant to be funny, but actually revealed a profound and desperate truth. We are frightened of people who are different. The asylum seeker living over the road is not an angel visiting us unawares but a demon who might destroy us; and so we shun the stranger, scapegoat the foreigner, fear those whose colour and culture is different from our own, and end up killing the Christ who is in our midst.
Racism does not begin with our response to others but with a failing to respond properly to ourselves and to God. We are all made in his image. Our beautiful diversity enriches our common humanity. But, in failing to recognise the common inheritance of our God-given humanity, we quickly start to fear others, and then to hate them, and then to decide that perhaps they are not really human at all.
Jesus himself shared the experience of this sort of racial discrimination and race hatred and he was outraged by it. Indeed, he made the hero of his most famous story a despised heretic. The Good Samaritan translates into our culture as the Good Asylum Seeker or the Good Immigrant. Who is the person you most fear? Who is the person you perceive as a threat? This is the person through whom, God will be revealed to you. This is the person through whom you will receive service and by this action you will discover a human solidarity that disregards the ancient boundaries or race and colour.
In Christ there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female (Galatians 3. 28). This was Paul’s profound reflection on the impact of Christ upon humanity. When will we ever learn to live this way? That nation, religion, colour, status, class or gender no longer count. That in Christ we are a single humanity.
September 11 is Racial Justice Sunday; a chance for us to reflect upon these great truths which lie at the heart of our faith. Racism is not just an affront to those who are different from us. It is a denial of what is most basic about the Christian faith, that ‘in Christ Jesus you who were far off have been brought near… no longer strangers and aliens, but citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.’ (Ephesians 2. 13 & 19)
I recently revisited that church where I served my title. I looked in the porch to see if the graffiti was still there. Someone had cleaned it away. Oh, that the same could happen to the racist attitudes and actions that poison our humanity and turn us against each other. In a world where we are getting ever more fearful of each other it is incumbent upon Christian people to live as those who enjoy, not just a common humanity, but a desire to behold Christ in friend and stranger.