“Church, someone is coming after our family.”

I don’t have nightmares often, but last night I woke up with a start, knowing there was no way I was going back to sleep for a while. I grabbed my laptop and decided I’d catch up on what was happening with my online friends, since I’d spent the past two days in cars or in meetings.

Bad idea.

Here’s what I saw.

Lord have mercy.

Now, this last fire may have been caused by lightening, not hatred. We don’t know yet. But how interesting that this very church was burned down 20 years ago by the KKK. Call me paranoid, but I’d say someone or something is out to get it.

Church, Sharon is right. 

Church, someone is coming after our family. 

And we are astonishingly silent about it.

That, or obnoxious. Seriously, if we spent half as much energy listening to people who are suffering as we do explaining how we’re not racist, half the time praying and fasting for solutions as we do insisting that the real problem is that black people aren’t doing it right (whatever “it” is), well, at least we’d have a start in the right direction.

How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. -Luke 6:42

How hurtful our silence is. How hurtful our naive and sanctimonious opinions are. How incredibly, incredibly hurtful.

I spent the last two days at the Wisconsin District Conference of the Wesleyan Church.

They have this thing called two-minute drills, where a representative from every church comes up a shares a little bit about what has been going on in their church.

Most of it was familiar–small town churches talking about small town joys and concerns.

But then the representative from Transformation City in Milwaukee stood up and talked about how one of their neighbors had been murdered last night.

She talked about how our brothers and sisters blood is staining the streets, and the churches, and the playgrounds.

The blood that Jesus shed his blood to redeem.

And then she pleaded, with desperation in her voice, that we don’t let them stand alone in the city.

“Don’t let us stand alone in the city.”

Well church? Are we going to let them stand alone in the city?

If we honestly thought of them as our brothers and sisters, as “us” instead of “them,” would we let them stand alone in the city?

Or would we be raising heaven and fighting for our kin with everything in us?

Church, it’s time to stop tsk-tsking from the sidelines.

It’s time to stand up and fight.

 

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