Tag: Acts 17:26

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Equal in God’s Sight

Monday will be Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in the United States. His memory is honored in America and around the world because of his leadership in the Civil Rights Movement. He influenced many Americans to better understand the plight of their neighbors who experienced racial prejudice every day simply because their skin was black.

As a pastor, I preached against racial prejudice. I tried to show from the Bible that God welcomes the worship of people of all  races and cultures. The apostle John wrote about the heavenly scene and the multitude assembled around the throne of God: “from every nation, tribe, people and language” (Revelation 7:9). If God accepts them, how can we reject them? If God loves them, how can we hate them?

Yet as a boy growing up in the South in the 1950s, I accepted the institutionalized racism that was a way of life in my city. African Americans were allowed to attend the church in which I was reared, but they were relegated the back rows of the balcony. In the department store downtown I drank from a water fountain labeled “Whites Only.” Black people were required to sit in the back of city buses. Their children had to attend inferior schools.

I knew these things but as a boy I did not have the wisdom or the vocabulary to understand or oppose racism. White supremacy was everywhere. It was the air I breathed. The adults in my life did not so much indoctrinate me in the belief, as they passively accepted the prevailing cultural assumptions of racial bias.

The closest they came to undermining it was to teach us the Sunday School song “Jesus Loves the Little Children of the World. Red, and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight.”

The Civil Rights Movement under Dr. King became a social force that influenced the attitudes of many Americans. Some whites became hardened in their opposition to integration in public schools, voting rights, and equal opportunity in the workplace for black Americans.

Some opposed the Civil Rights Movement with violence. I remember when, in 1963, white supremacists bombed a church in Birmingham, Alabama, on a Sunday morning killing four young girls as they attended Sunday School, and injuring 20 other black worshipers. Whites infected with racial hatred murdered many civil rights activists, including Dr. King himself.

Others, myself included, began to better understand the plight of our African American neighbors who lived under white supremacist ideology. I began to actively oppose racial discrimination. I hope I have outgrown the attitude that one’s skin color has anything to do with one’s value, intelligence, dignity, or human potential. I fervently believe that racism is not only sinfully wrong, it is stupid.

Some of the people I knew  as I was growing up in the 1950s tried to use the Bible to teach that people of some races were meant to be slaves (the curse on Ham; the fact that slavery was allowed in Hebrew law; the fact that Paul did not teach against the institution of slavery in the Roman empire).

In view of this, it is amazing that so many enslaved people and their descendants became Christians. Could it be that they saw in Jesus the one who took on himself the form of a bond slave and died to save us (Philippians2:7)? Could it be that they felt in him the love and acceptance they did not feel from their bigoted white neighbors?

Throughout my ministry as a pastor I taught against racial prejudice. I called attention to what the Bible says in Acts 17:26– “From one man (Adam) he (God) made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live.”

Since all humans are descended from one man, they are equal in God’s sight. This cancels any theory of inherent racial superiority. God’s word tells us not to show partiality (James 2:1). Peter rightly learned that “God does not show favoritism, but accepts men from every nation” (Acts 10:34). Because this is God’s attitude, I want it to be my attitude toward people of other races.

I will have these things on my mind as I remember Dr. King on Monday.

Pastor Randy Faulkner

 

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Black History – Still Learning

Black History – Still Learning

Black History Month was created for people like me who need to be educated about the cultural experience of my fellow citizens who are black. I understand February was chosen because it is the birth month of the great emancipator Abraham Lincoln, and the famous abolitionist Fredrick Douglass.

It should be obvious that learning about black history is useful. It introduces young people to the persons of influence who led in the struggle for civil rights for African Americans. It reminds the nation of events in our history we never want to see repeated. It helps folks who were born to white privilege to understand the points of view of those who have not been so privileged.

Benjamin Watson wrote, “The solution to the problem of race in America will be found only by ordinary people… looking inside themselves, being honest about the assumptions and biases that have formed, and beginning to change what’s in their hearts.” In that spirit, I want my life and ministry to contribute to racial understanding and reconciliation.

Some time ago Connie and I attended a seminar at the Oklahoma History Center near the State Capitol. It featured the stories of Oklahoma’s historically black towns founded by and for the “freedmen,” ex-slaves of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole tribes. We heard about the racial tensions that accompanied the allotment of land to these ex-slaves after the civil war, tensions that carried over into the twentieth century and Oklahoma statehood.

In fact, according to an article in the current (Jan./Feb.) issue of Oklahoma Today, published by the Historical Society, the very first piece of legislation passed by the newly-formed Oklahoma Senate was a law requiring the racial segregation of public transportation and schools. The legislature also passed, in 1916, a clause denying black people the right to vote.

The article describes the “legalized discrimination in housing, employment, transportation, education, and voting restrictions” endured by Americans of African descent in Oklahoma. It briefly tells about the massacre of black citizens when angry white mobs set fire to the Greenwood District of Tulsa in 1921. Over three hundred black people were killed and 10,000 were made homeless.

Can we who are white understand and appreciate the deep spiritual and psychic scars inflicted on subsequent generations by mob violence, systemic racism, and abuse of police power? I, for one, have a lot to learn.

The article tells how Oklahoma teacher and civil rights activist Clara Luper organized students to peacefully protest racial segregation in Oklahoma City in the 1950s. this was before the national civil rights movement of the 60s. She was a pioneer of the movement.

It relates the story of Ida Lois Sipuel Fisher, the first black female graduate, in 1952, of the Oklahoma University College of Law. This was even before the famous Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court case that led to the end of racial segregation of schools in 1954. Ida Lois Sipuel Fisher is remembered proudly for her determined opposition to racial bigotry and exclusion in higher education.

As a white boy growing up in the segregated South, I knew about white supremacy and racial prejudice from the other side. In my youth I did not have the wisdom, the courage or the vocabulary to challenge the systemic racism that was our southern way of life in the 1950s. I am grateful that God has forgiven me for the stupid and sinful attitudes of my boyhood. I am grateful for the grace that has been extended to me by African American brothers in Christ. As I grow older, I want to continue to learn about their cultural history and their determination to overcome injustice.

Clara Luper is reported to have said, “My biggest job now is making white people understand that black history is white history. We cannot separate the two.” This agrees with the apostle Paul who preached that God created all races of people and “he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth” (Acts 17:26).

     –  Pastor Randy Faulkner