The "Bi-Racial" Jesus
There exists a pervasive loneliness to those of us busy about the work of what’s been called racial reconciliation. This is what I believe Edward Gilbreath was alluding to when he likened us to bridges, and exhaled how it is the nature of bridges to be stepped on.
James Baldwin, the pen of the civil right’s movement, discovered this on the evening of July 16th, 1961. Seated to the left of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad in the leaders Chicago mansion, Baldwin reflected on how he had to endure a dinner filled with venomous references to our anglo siblings as “white devils”. For Muhammad and his thousands of followers known as the Nation of Islam, there was but one alternative to the legacy of racism exacted upon the Negro- rejection and separation. Elijah’s “white devil” laced conclusions were met with a chorus of amen’s by all but one at the crowded dinner table. The lone voice of silence that evening was ironically Baldwins, the famous soon to be author of, The Fire Next Time. Even though James had received more than his share of hate from whites in response to his many writings and public speeches, he held out hope that there were whites who could be redeemed; whites, “who were struggling as hard as they knew how, and with great effort and sweat and risk, to make the world more human” (James Baldwin, see, The Fire is Upon Us, page 144).
Standing on the steps of that Chicago mansion post dinner, Baldwin had to have felt a loneliness, an I-can’t-win-for losing sense of hope-filled despair.
There are several things that Chicago dinner table teaches us, and one lesson is for those of us engaged in the work of reconciliation there is the constancy of loneliness, of never feeling totally at home. Oh yes, I along with an army of racial reconcilers know that feeling all too well. Among one group we push too hard; and among another we don’t push hard enough. One ethnicity deems us to be liberals, and the other sell-outs. All at once we are considered gospel heretics, and not gospel enough. We are too theologically dark skinned for one crowd, and too theologically light skinned to another. How can one person be both sociologically and theologically black and white all at the same time?
Jesus had to have experienced this. His was a theological and sociological “bi-racial” ethic; and by bi-racial I am not positing some new theory of his ethnicity. Nor am I being glib with my language, since I am the father of “tri-racial” children. Instead what I mean is this sense that wherever Jesus went, the setting did not reflect the totality of who he was. He was too conservative for the Zealots, and too liberal for the Pharisees. The crowds rushed to crown him king, while others sought to kill him because he threatened their kingship. And to be an instrument of reconciliation is to follow in the footsteps of this “bi-racial” Jesus, where no one setting encompasses the totality of our aspirations or call.
Like Jesus, I too have caught it from both sides. Every time I’ve preached on race some of my white brothers and sisters have walked out over the perception of me being too radical. And when I have called out the lack of love which exists among some of my ethnic kin, I’ve been dismissed, raked over the coals and have had the veracity of my blackness questioned and even attacked. Like Baldwin, I’ve sat silently in private settings where “grilled white devils,” have been served for dinner, trying my hardest not to join in on the festivities.
To catch it on both sides…to be theologically and sociologically “bi-racial,” is to be like Jesus.
And yet, what kept Baldwin from participating in the hate that Chicago evening? Love. For Baldwin, love refuses to stay in what he called, “social ease”. This higher ethic of love, among other things, is to be wielded in such a way that it disturbs the southern white contemporary who was comfortable with Jim Crow, as well as the leader of the Nation of Islam and his followers who had chosen the path of rejection and separation. In his famous Christian inspired essay, Down at the Cross, Baldwin wrote of the importance of love and race relations, “Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we- and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create the consciousness of the others- do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world”.
Amidst the racial turmoil of his milieu, Baldwin held onto love, and this love filled him with hope even on lonely Chicago nights.
But the Chicago table also cautions us against the septic nature of bitterness. Homogenous settings like that July table tend to expose the rancor in our hearts. Those of us in the lonely work of racial reconciliation must not give into bitterness, for bitterness is what happens when the spirit loses hope and love. Bitterness joins in the chorus of look-alike dinner tables spewing epithets of our oppressors. Bitterness is what contaminated Jonah’s spirit as he preached to the ethnically other people of Nineveh, and then sulked when God loved them to himself. Jonah shows us it’s possible to challenge the status quo and not truly love.
What we are in need of is a prophetic, “bi racial” kind of love, the kind seen in Jesus. This kind of love is equitable in its scope, calling out homogenous dinner tables in inner city settings, as well as those found in gated communities. Love doesn’t laugh at the awkward racial joke, but chooses instead to create an awkward moment of its own by calling it out. Yes, Baldwin, love jolts people out of their social ease, the same way the Messiah- an incarnated Jew- jolted the Samaritan woman out of her moral ease by calling out her immorality.
And when we do this, we will catch it from both sides. But take heart, this is a sign we are following in the lineage of Jesus.
