The Country We're Living In.

I heard a story about a young Black woman, just after the 2016 election, very disappointed about the results, bitterly complaining to her mother, who just shook her head, and said, "Did you forget what country you're living in?"

As an old white guy I am continually having to learn what country I am living in.  It is not the same country as Americans who are Black, Latino, or Indigenous, or women, or LGBT.  But my reaction of surprise and righteous indignation to the Rittenhouse verdict shows that I am not over this expectation that America is about "liberty and justice for all."  I continually tend to forget that I am really living in a country in which a white boy with an illegally obtained gun is able with impunity to enter a city and kill unarmed people whom he claims "threaten" him. 

I have been reading Isabel Wilkerson's book, Caste, about race relations in the United States over the last four centuries.  It is so full of horrendous and tragic stories that I can only get through a few pages at a time before having to pause from heartbreak and nausea over the casual cruelties inflicted on Black Americans by white people enforcing their supremacy.   

Occasionally I am pleasantly surprised, like when a jury in Georgia actually convicted three white men who murdered an unarmed Black man whom they claimed "threatened" them.  That would most certainly not have happened 50, or even 10, years ago.  (Indeed, it almost didn't happen this time as the DA failed to take up the case until forced by a viral video to do so.)

People pining for "the way it was" and hoping to restore American "greatness" need to open their eyes and look at what was actually happening back then.  All this sordid and violent injustice and abuse was effectively hidden from comfortable, privileged, white people, who were able to live in an imaginary wholesome country characterized by piety, patriotism, prosperity, peace, and nice, happy families.

I have heard about this country from people in every church I served over the last 40 years.  The nostalgia for it and the anger over its "loss," and identifying people to blame, and the fear of a lawless, chaotic future (featuring prominent non-white people) was often palpable.  Indeed, only recently someone mentioned to me how good it is that the local school is once again going to celebrate Columbus Day.  Because forcing children to learn lies will somehow make America more comfortable for white people, I guess.  

That self-righteous longing for a time when we innocently feasted on the produce of oppression is utterly opposed to the Spirit and Word of God.  It has kept the Church crippled and separated from her Lord for centuries.  It is the most effective and debilitating barrier to discipleship.  Indeed, it sullenly and petulantly gives the finger to Jesus Christ, who explicitly identifies with the people who were systematically brutalized and exploited to feed our pathological, rosy delusions about White Christian America.            

The thing is, the more we realize that the country we are living in is founded on and sustained by injustice and violence against Native, African, and poor people, not to mention the Earth itself, the more we find ourselves able to understand the Bible better.  Because the Bible was written by, for, and to people who knew oppression, injustice, violence, marginalization, and defeat.  And if we do not read it from that perspective we don't understand it at all.  

Repentance means waking up to the truth about what country we are really living in... and at the same time becoming aware of the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God that the Lord Jesus announces.  The true greatness of a nation is found, not in the fantasies it tells itself and enforces with cruelty and carelessness, but, he says, in justice and equity, compassion and forgiveness, simplicity and sharing, inclusion and kindness.

That Kingdom is waiting to emerge among us.  But that won't happen for us as long as we remain narcotized in self-serving lies about what country we're living in.  Those lies will continue to crumble and collapse.  We can be pointlessly angry about that.  Or we can look for the new heaven and a new earth as it emerges with, within, and among us. 

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