The Birth of Beloved Community
It seems to be our lot to live in a time characterized by racial strife and cultural division. I suspect that just by reading the words racial strife and cultural division, a torrent of headlines and images from recent years has flooded into your mind.[1] Sadly, there seems to be little hope on the horizon as the issues appear to be intractable. Our North American culture is stuck spinning its tires in the mud of this cultural quagmire. Think back with me to the appointment of Amira Elghawaby, a journalist and human rights activist, by the federal government to be Canada’s first special representative on combating Islamophobia. Her appointment was followed by a swift backlash. It turns out that, in addition to some ill-advised Tweets, she wrote a column in 2019 criticizing the adoption of Bill 21 by the Quebec legislature.[2] The Bill prohibits the wearing of religious symbols by public servants―a clear indication, in Elghawaby’s mind, of Quebec’s entrenched Islamophobia. As might be expected, the Premier of Quebec along with the province’s political class did not take well to being labelled as racists. They, in turn, responded by charging Elghawaby with being “anti-Quebec” and failing to acknowledge the suffering of the French speaking minority under British colonial rule and the continuing challenges to preserving their distinct Quebecois culture amid the sea of Anglophiles which is the Canadian Confederation.[3]
Or take the death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of a highly militarized detachment of the Memphis Police called the Scorpion Unit;[4] another example of the ongoing systemic persecution and oppression of African Americans in the United States at the hands of the police. However, on this occasion there was a complicating factor in that the perpetrators of Tyre’s ghastly murder were all African Americans themselves. The television pundits and talking heads tied themselves in knots trying to come to grips with this development. On the night that the sickening video of the beating was released, I heard one commentator remark that this beating of a black man by black police officers is further evidence of the power of systemic “whiteness” to make “white” all who participate in it. Now, I think there may be some truth to what the commentator was trying to express but talking of “black” white men and “white” black men is a rather tortuous way of speaking.
With respect to the problem of race relations, we see two predominant philosophies on display in contemporary culture, each promising solutions to all that ills contemporary society.[5] The first, often associated with the political right, could be encapsulated by the term “colourblindness.” This ideology “posits the best way to end discrimination is by treating individuals as equally as possible, without regard to race, culture, or ethnicity.”[6] It is exemplified by the claim, “I don’t see race when I look at another person.” In some ways this ideology appears to resonate with Martin Luther King’s famous remarks during his speech at the March on Washington: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”[7]
The problem with this colorblind ideology, which is not at all what MLK was advocating for, is that it seemingly ignores the long history of systemic injustice that has brought our societies to the places they are at today and continues to impact the lives of those communities living under the shadows of their dehumanizing legacies. The Mississippi pastor and community organizer John Perkins liked to draw attention to this reality by reframing a famous proverb. The proverb says, “If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.” That’s all well and good, Perkins would say, but it doesn’t get us anywhere until we’ve answered the question, “Who owns the pond?”[8]
The category of race is a relatively recent invention in human history. It’s not mentioned in the Bible, which only speaks of ethnē―nations or people-groups. Furthermore, the modern scientific study of genetics has demonstrated that when it comes to human beings there is no such thing as different races.[9] There is only the human race.[10] The idea of race emerges hand-in-glove with European colonialist expansion. Categorizing people into different “races” of varying worths served as useful means of rationalizing an economic system already profiting from environmental exploitation and the oppression and degradation of human beings.[11] To claim not to see race, then, is to ignore the long history of racial injustice that has contributed to the vast inequalities that characterize key segments of Western societies.
For this reason, there are those, largely on the political left, that maintain that the proper response to racism is not colorblindness but anti-racism. Out of their laudable desire to address the systemic abuses of the past and present, these anti-racists ironically end up doubling down on the category of race. For them, identity politics becomes the name of the game and personal identities are reducible to the category of race and perhaps the intersection of race with one or two other cherished markers. Rather than overcoming the racialized framework of the colonizers, it simply takes that existing framework and turns it on its head. So, for example, once you know that I am a straight, white male, you know all that you need to know about me. Without learning anything else about me, you are now free to cast me out into the outer darkness to share with the “privileged” in their weeping and gnashing of teeth. In this way identity politics participates in the same objectifying and dehumanizing logic of the colonial slave master. The anti-racist practitioner of identity politics has failed to recognize that “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”[12]
Neither the doctrine of colourblindess nor the identity politics of anti-racist ideology are ultimately capable of dragging us out of the mess we’re in. Instead of bringing reconciliation and life, both ideologies ultimately leave us captive to the alienating and death-dealing forces that enslave us. The temptation at this point might be to think that we need to find a better set of ideas, a more expansive ideology. In thinking this way, we might be in a similar space to that occupied by our old friend Nicodemus when he came to Jesus under the cover of darkness looking to talk with the upstart rabbi about the issues of the day.[13] The fact that Nicodemus addresses Jesus as a fellow teacher is perhaps indicative of his desire to engage in an intellectual exchange of ideas. But Jesus is having none of it! He has no time for an abstract arm’s length discussion. Instead of offering a ‘hot take’ on the latest intellectual theory put forward by the rabbinical elite, Jesus redirects the conversation by bringing the earthliest of metaphors together with the most personal direct address. “Very truly, I tell you,” Jesus says to Nicodemus, “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above” (John 3:3).[14]
Nicodemus, like many other figures in the Gospel of John thought that he was entering into a philosophical or theological dialogue with Jesus about the truth, but it turns out that Nicodemus was being claimed by the One who is the Truth. Nicodemus thought that he needed more information, but Jesus knew that it was really a matter of formation.[15] Nicodemus, citing the miracles he had observed, thought that the Kingdom of God was all about sight, but Jesus knew that what is more important is insight. Nicodemus thought he needed to get his ideas right; Jesus knew that Nicodemus himself needed to be set right. He had to be birthed by God, reborn from above.
Nicodemus demonstrates his own spiritual blindness by confusing Jesus’ talk of being born from above with being born again. (In Nicodemus’s defense, the Greek adjective that is used here can be taken either way on purely lexical grounds.)[16] “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” (John 3:4), Nicodemus asks. Despite being a teacher of the Jews, Nicodemus does not yet realize that true life can only come from above―from God.[17] At this point in the dialogue, we cannot help but hear echoes of words from the opening chapter of John’s Gospel: “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13). God desired that Jesus would be the firstborn of many brothers and sisters representing every tongue and tribe.
Martin Luther King Jr. had a phrase to describe this spiritual reality. He called it “beloved community.” In an address entitled, “Non-Violent Procedures to Inter-racial Harmony” King observed, that his approach “does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding.”[18] King writes, “The non-violent resistor must often voice his protest through non-cooperation or boycotts, but he realizes that non-cooperation and boycotts are not ends within themselves; they are merely means to awaken a sense of moral shame within the opponent. The end is redemption and reconciliation. The aftermath of non-violence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.”[19] King could speak of the “beloved community” because his civil rights activism flowed organically out of his calling as a pastor within the African-American Baptist Church.[20] King knew that the end must be “beloved community” because there is only one family of God and that we all enter that family not on the basis of our privilege or victimization, nor on the basis of the initials after our name or the numbers of zeros on our paycheck, but only through the grace of God that rains down from heaven bringing new birth and life to all in its wake.
No one enters the family of God through clever reasoning or crafty theological argumentation. Nor can beloved community be imposed through enforcing ideologies or policing political boundaries. Rebirth into beloved community, entrance into the newness of life, can only come from above. For, “What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6). The coming of this Spirit is like water being poured out on parched and cracked prairie soil. It brings forth shoots of life from what was previously only dry and dusty ground. The pouring out of the Holy Spirit marks the dawning of the new creation and points towards the day when peoples from all the nations of the world will bring their unique cultural treasures through the gates of the holy city.[21]
The coming of this Spirit is like wind blowing over the Southern Manitoba plains. We hear its sound, but we do not know where it comes from or where it goes (John 3:8). The fact that there could even be a figure like Martin Luther King Jr. speaks to the freedom and fidelity of the Spirit.[22] King did not set out to be a civil rights activist. He thought he would have a quiet career following in the footsteps of his father as a local Baptist pastor. But the Montgomery bus boycott found him, and King was soon swept up by a gust of the Spirit into a new vocation. But it wasn’t easy being the face of the civil rights movement. King encountered a barrage of death threats arriving in the form of letters and telephone calls. On January 27, 1956, King received a call in the middle of the night that particularly unnerved him. Unable to go back to sleep, King put on a pot of coffee and sat down at the kitchen table to pray. He prayed, “Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right … But I am afraid … I must confess … I’m losing my courage.” It was then that King heard an inner voice saying to him, “Martin Luther, stand up for truth. Stand up for justice. Stand up for righteousness. I will be at your side.”[23] Without the birthing and nurturing of the Holy Spirit there would be no MLK. Nor for that matter would there be any Fannie Lou Hamer or John Perkins. There would not be any Desmond Tutu or William Wilberforce. The Spirit moves in mysterious ways. We cannot see the wind or capture the wind, but we can see the effects of the wind in the lives of all whose lungs it fills.
At this point, we might be tempted to join with Nicodemus in asking, “How do you know this? How can this be?” The temptation for us at this point might be to turn back to intellectual debate and attempt to craft a convincing apologetical argument for faith in Jesus. But this too, would be a mistake.[24] Notice that Jesus does not answer Nicodemus’s question, or at least he doesn’t answer the question on Nicodemus’s terms. As the theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas likes to say, “If you think you need a theory of truth to underwrite the conviction that Jesus was raised from the dead, then worship that theory – not Jesus.”[25]
The answer that we are to give to those who ask for the hope that is within us is not framed in terms of apologetics, but of testimony. Testimony to the testimony of the one who has descended from heaven and made God known. He is not merely a teacher, but the very Word of God through whom all things were made now clothed in Palestinian Jewish flesh. He is the Life who has come to bring life. For “just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:14-15).
Now I’ll admit that with this reference to a strange story about poisonous snakes from the book of Numbers in the Old Testament, I’ve got a little explaining to do. The story Jesus is referencing took place during Israel’s time of wandering in the wilderness after they had been delivered from slavery in Egypt, but before they had entered into the Promised Land. It’s recounted in chapter 21 of the book of Numbers. The people had become impatient with how slowly things were progressing, so they began to murmur against God and against Moses. “Why have you brought us out of Egypt simply to die in this awful wilderness?” In response, the LORD sent poisonous snakes among his rebellious people, whose venomous bites sent many Israelites to their death. The people repented and pled with Moses to intercede for them. The Lord instructed Moses to make a serpent of bronze and lift it up on a pole. From that day forward, whenever anyone in the camp was bitten by a poisonous snake they would look to the serpent of bronze and live.
It is an unusual story. Yet the bronze serpent on a pole makes for an illuminating comparison with the Son of Man suspended upon a cross. What did the people of Israel see when they looked upon the serpent? They saw the very representation of their rebellion against God and their enslavement to the powers of terror and death. What do we see when we look to the cross? Not the ornate golden crosses that hang around our necks, but the brutal instrument of execution upon which the religious people and the state, with the approval of the crowds, conspired to hang the Son of God. When we look to the cross, we see our rebellion on full display. For when the Word of God became flesh and walked among us, we whipped him and beat him and pinned him to a tree to die. The reality of our responsibility is captured in the Palm Sunday liturgies of some traditions which place the words of the crowd “Crucify Him!” in the mouths of the congregation. In the dehumanizing death of the Son of God upon the tree, we see the “strange fruit” of our rejection of God and our desire to be our own gods inevitably mingled with the dehumanizing desire to objectify and dominate others.[26] For wherever God is not recognized, the image of God in humanity will not be recognized either. And wherever the image of God is denied in the human creature, the true God has been exchanged for a counterfeit.
The cross of the rabbi from Nazareth is the lens through which we behold the true reality of our sin. There we see a striking similarity between the wood upon which our Lord was hung and the lynching trees of the American South.[27] We also come to perceive a similarity between the tomb in which Jesus body was laid after it was crushed by the colonial power of its day and the unmarked graves that continue to be discovered at the previous sites of Canadian residential schools.[28] Looking upon the cross requires us to reckon with our sin, to take stock of the terrible consequences of our efforts to live as if we were our own masters. Looking upon the cross forces us to acknowledge the terrible abuse and exploitation which human beings are capable of inflicting upon one another and which we all in various ways participate. It was seeing through the lens of the cross that led Martin Luther King to expand his vision towards the end of his life. In his later years, King came to recognize that the suffering of African Americans in the United States could not be separated from the suffering of the working class under an unjust economic system and from the suffering of people in other countries due to America’s imperial ambitions. King’s criticisms of American capitalism and the war in Vietnam made him extremely unpopular with his fellow citizens. It was while in Memphis to support a sanitation workers’ strike that King was assassinated.[29]
It is profoundly counterintuitive, to put it mildly, to think that life―true life―is found in looking towards the cross. Perhaps this is why the apostle Paul could write that “the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:18). In the cross, the true ugliness of the inhumanity of humanity and the waywardness of our own hearts are exposed. But this revelation occurs not for the sake of our condemnation or our eternal cancellation, but for the sake of reconciliation and life.[30] In the cross, we see that life is found by looking squarely into the face of the worst that humanity can do and seeing that it has been absorbed in the depths of God’s love. I realize that I run the risk of sounding overly pious when I say that the solution to all that ails us is ultimately found in the cross. But saying, “look to the cross” is ultimately the most political statement I can make. For the cross testifies to the politics of the Kingdom and makes known the economy of salvation. The politics of the cross is a politics governed by love. The economy of the cross is an economy based upon sheer gift. This is so because the cross is our entryway into the beloved community of the Trinity, where through the enlivening Spirit we are all joined to our brother Jesus and given the privilege of calling upon God as our Father. This is the good news of the Gospel: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16).
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NOTES
[1] The origins of this essay lie in a sermon I preached at Prairie Presbyterian Church in Winnipeg, MB in February 2023. The juxtaposition of Black History Month and the events described in the above paragraph with the assigned lectionary reading from John 3 proved to be the stimulus for some important theological reflection on some of the cultural struggles facing Western cultures today.
[2] Amira Elghawaby and Bernie Farber, “Quebec’s Bill 21 Shows Why We Fear the Tyranny of the Majority,” Ottawa Citizen, July 11, 2019, https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/elghawaby-and-farber-quebecs-bill-21-shows-why-we-fear-the-tyranny-of-the-majority.
[3] See, for example, Rachel Gilmore, “Quebecers Are ‘Not Racists,’ Trudeau Says amid Amira Elghawaby Backlash,” Global News, February 1, 2023, https://globalnews.ca/news/9451403/amira-elghawaby-quebec-racists-trudeau/.
[4] For a retrospective look at the incident on the first anniversary of the Nichol’s death, see Emily Cochrane and Rick Rojas, “The Questions That Remain a Year After Tyre Nichols’s Death,” The New York Times, February 14, 2024, sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/article/tyre-nichols-memphis-police-dead.html.
[5] Jonathan Tran incisively dissects the weaknesses of what he calls “identarian anti-racism” and “postracial color blindness” in his book Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022). Tran’s heady and heavy book is a must read for all determined to theologically wrestle with our current cultural struggles surrounding race.
[6] Monnica T. Williams, “Colorblind Ideology Is a Form of Racism,” Psychology Today, December 27, 2011, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/culturally-speaking/201112/colorblind-ideology-is-form-racism.
[7] Martin Luther King Jr., “Read Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech in Its Entirety,” NPR, January 16, 2023, sec. Race, https://www.npr.org/2010/01/18/122701268/i-have-a-dream-speech-in-its-entirety.
[8] John M. Perkins, With Justice for All: A Strategy for Community Development, 3d ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2007), 206.
[9] This argument has been advanced in recent years by many different voices in the scientific community. For one such account by a leading evolutionary biologist, see Joseph L. Graves, The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America (New York: Penguin, 2005).
[10] John Perkins has been powerfully making this point throughout his life and ministry. For his mature articulation of this reality, see John Perkins, One Blood: Parting Words to the Church on Race and Love (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2018), 43–56.
[11] The Yale theologian Willie Jennings convincingly demonstrates this claim in his masterful The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).
[12] I’m riffing on a famous saying of the self-described “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” Audre Lorde. Admittedly, I am perhaps somewhat provocatively employing it to deconstruct the current strategy of identitarian anti-racism. Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, (London: Penguin Books, 2018).
[13] The following account of Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus is indebted to Adam Neder’s reading of the Johannine passage in his remarkable book Theology as a Way of Life: On Teaching and Learning the Christian Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019), 92–96. Neder’s reading is, in turn, shaped by Karl Barth’s engagement with the text.
[14] All biblical citations are from the NRSV.
[15] For a helpful contrast between our modern tendency to read the Bible for information as opposed to allowing it to shape us into the form of Christ see my colleague Joshua Coutts’ essay “Formed by the Word in an Age of Information: Recovering a Biblical Approach to Scripture,” Didaskalia 31 (2024 2023): 2–18.
[16] A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed., s.v. “Anōthen.”
[17] In Jesus’ time, “above” was a standard Jewish circumlocution for God. Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, vol. 1 (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2003), 539.
[18] Martin Luther King, “Non-Violent Procedures to Inter-Racial Harmony,” October 16, 1956, https://nyscu.org/AM_brochures/MLK1956_text.pdf.
[19] King, “Non-Violent Procedures.”
[20] Stanley Hauerwas has forcefully advanced this point against those who would claim that “Christianity was in no way determinative of the politics of Martin Luther King, Jr.” Stanley Hauerwas, “The Only Road to Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nonviolence,” ABC Religion & Ethics, January 19, 2015, https://www.abc.net.au/religion/the-only-road-to-freedom-martin-luther-king-jr-and-nonviolence/10098678.
[21] For Old Testament references to the eschatological pilgrimage of the nations to Jerusalem, see, for instance, Isaiah 2:2-4, 60:4-7; Micah 4:1-4.
[22] For a theological and homiletical exploration of King’s life and ministry, see Richard Lischer, The Preacher King: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Word that Moved America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
[23] To hear Martin Luther King Jr. recount this experience in his own voice, watch MLK’s Kitchen Table Experience with God, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg15HWpBicw.
[24] Commenting on Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus, the missiologist Lesslie Newbigin writes, “to experience the kingship of God as a present reality (not merely a future hope) can only be the result of an act of God himself. It is always a miracle, a mystery, and action ‘from above.’ It is not and can never be the direct result either of the reasoning of the theologian or of the technique of the ‘successful’ evangelist.” Lesslie Newbigin, The Light Has Come: An Exposition of the Fourth Gospel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 37.
[25] Stanley Hauerwas, A Cross-Shattered Church: Reclaiming the Theological Heart of Preaching (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2009), 144.
[26] “Strange Fruit” was the title of a song recorded by the African American jazz singer Billie Holiday. The term refers to the bodies of lynched African Americans swaying from trees in the American South. James Cone discusses Holiday’s rendition of “Strange Fruit” in James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, N.Y: Orbis Books, 2011), 134–38.
[27] James Cone evocatively presses this point in The Cross and the Lynching Tree.
[28] James Milloy’s study of the history of the residential school system in Canada, A National Crime, is essential reading for understanding the scope and depth of this tragic period of Canadian history. John Sheridan Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986, Anniversary edition (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2017). Amid a plethora of misinformation circulating on both the left and the right, it is crucial that Christians, and Canadians more generally, learn to speak honestly and precisely about what transpired in the residential schools.
[29] For an attempt to trace out King’s developing critique of America throughout his lifetime, see James H. Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare, 20th anniversary edition (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2012).
[30] I have wrestled with our cultural challenges surrounding remembering rightly and the temptation to cancellation in a Remembrance Day sermon preached at St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Winnipeg, MB. Robert Dean, “Remembering Rightly: A Sermon for Remembrance Sunday,” Thinking After (blog), November 9, 2021, http://thinkingafter.com/remembering-rightly-a-sermon-for-remembrance-sunday/.
