I’ve been thinking about Jonah, since last Sunday. Specifically how Jonah being swallowed by the big fish wasn’t God’s judgment. God’s judgment was the storm and Jonah’s death by being bound and thrown over-board. The fish, as Bill taught us, was God’s salvation.
One of the profound realizations I took from last Sunday is how easy it is to confuse the means of God’s salvation as being his judgment. I do this a lot in my marriage, parenting, pastoring, and friendships. Once the romance and emotion wears off they all feel like death to me because of the heavy price I have to pay in giving up my selfishness, my personal preferences, and taking hits to my ego. However, all of these are actually the means of God’s salvation for me. They are the tools the Lord uses to change me into the image of Christ.
I think about this idea of confusing the form of salvation with judgment when I think about race and racism.
I have never known racism. I’ve been harassed and embarrassed in my life by being called Jew-boy and Christ-killer; but those were isolated moments not the norm. Ironically, there is a reflex to apply this same conclusion to others who may have had to endure more, but it’s still just part of being in a fallen world. But I have to remind myself that it is impossible for me who grew up in the majority to know what it is like to be on the outside. I can’t treat others people’s experiences as being the same as mine because unlike my experience theirs weren’t occasional exceptions or merely isolated, personal tragedies.
Knowing this, and knowing that some form of racism is almost universal for non-white races, forces me to confront some facts. For me, the individual is everything to the point where is not “white” identity, only individual merit and achievement. Where I think about the people around me without questioning the rules and economics about who can and can’t live around me. Where “market forces” are just a snazzy, evangelically friendly form of what a previous generation justified as “Social Darwinism.” I find myself looking for the simplest solution or sound bite to a complex problem like race and division.
I think about my desire to be fully immersed and conformed to the image of Christ. But what if my “full immersion” isn’t into Christ? What if it is full immersion into a middle-class, white version of Christ? If it is into “whiteness” how would I, a Christian who is middle class and white, be able to tell the difference? Only by talking with those who love the Lord and who have the blessing and the vantage point of being outside of my category. By being outside they can help guide me and direct me from compromising my faith by mixing it with things in our culture and world that don’t belong.
Thinking about these things I find myself back in the belly of a big fish. But rather than a cloying prison of kelp and fish guts, it is my salvation-that-looks-judgment. I’m wrestling with reality I know (the world I am apart of) and the reality I am learning about (friends who have endured scorn, shame, threats, and derision because of what they look like). I have been a part of this problem. Even if I claim it has only been by omission (not doing something) instead of commission (doing the worst thing – actively hurting others) I have still have some complicity.
I think he is showing me this because the Lord is calling us to something profoundly different than everyone come to church and act white (but we’ll call it Christian). I’m not sure what “profoundly different” is yet. But I hope that the Lord will take all of us together into his salvation and spew out something that more resembles his will.
