The past couple of weeks have
seemed like a sort of déjà vu back
to my childhood. Being raised in the
tumultuous 1960’s, I remember a lot of events that were very similar to what
has been happening around our nation recently.
And as a native Californian, I was living near many of these events –
although admittedly I was protected by my parents and not fully aware of the importance
or impact until later in life. As a
person with white privilege, my
parents were able to make choices to protect me because their lives were not
ruled by the fear my non-white schoolmates’ families experienced.
I remember watching President
Kennedy’s funeral on television when I was 5 years old. The year I turned ten there were two more
prominent assassinations just two
months apart – Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. When I was almost seven (and living in
southern California), rioting
occurred for several nights in the Watts district of Los Angeles. A few years later, while living in the San
Francisco Bay area, the Summer of Love
brought 100,000 young people to the Haight-Ashbury district of the city; and
riots in that area also occurred. In
1965, Malcolm X was assassinated, and the Black Panthers were formed in Oakland
(across the bay from where I lived) in 1966.
In the southern U.S. (far from where I lived), sit-ins, marches, and police brutality were regular
occurrences in the 1960’s. There were
many other similar events happening all over the country – all fueled by people
feeling the need for changes in social policy and government decisions and
regulations.
It appears that King Solomon was
right: there really doesn’t seem to be anything new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9). Although it has been over 50 years since
these events from my childhood, there sadly seems to have been little change in our capacity as humans to
treat each other with respect. I am
struck by the fact that people like George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery (and others)
weren’t even born during that previous time, yet not much has improved. How can we properly honor their memory and
try to understand what life is like for people without white privilege?
Since the beginning of time, there has always been a mixture of human
responses to those who are different from us, as well as mixed reactions to
instances of injustice. Sometimes
the responses are peaceful, and sometimes they are violent. In the Old Testament, when the Israelites
sent spies into the Promised Land to check it out, only two returned with a
true story based on faith in God. Guided
by fear, the other ten exaggerated the size and capabilities of the people in
the land who were different than them.
Around the time of Jesus (and before), there were different reactions to
the oppressive Roman rule in Israel. The
Essenes peacefully withdrew by themselves and lived like a community of
hermits, while the Zealots were always trying to stir up violent insurrections
against the government. In the 1960’s,
some Americans staged silent sit-ins and marches, while others used violence
and force to get their message across.
In 2020, we still have the same varied options available to us. And we have seen every option played out over
the past couple weeks. This is not an American problem; it is a human problem.
In the Old Testament, God told us
what we need to do in order to stop repeating this history, and Jesus confirmed
it again in the New Testament: “Love your
neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus
19:18 & Luke 10:27). It’s that simple, and it’s that hard. But here’s what I find interesting: in both
passages, “neighbor” is defined not as
someone who looks like us, acts like us, or shares our same beliefs – but precisely
those that do not. When God spoke
these words to the Israelites, it was in preparation of entering the Promised
Land where the Canaanites who inhabited the land were by definition very “different”
than God’s chosen people. And Jesus
spoke these words to first century Roman-ruled Jewish people in a land filled
with other Gentiles as well. In fact,
the context of Jesus’ words includes the parable of the Good Samaritan in order
to answer the question that was asked, “Who is my neighbor?” It
might be easier to love the neighbors that are more like us, but we are called
specifically to love those neighbors that are NOT like us. We are even told to love our enemies (Matthew 5:44).
I am only one person, and it is
easy to feel helpless with the current state of the world. But it seems that what the world needs the most really is love, and God’s way has
always been to work through individual people in seemingly small ways to change
the world for his kingdom. Change starts
when each of us chooses to love our neighbors as ourselves – one day at a time,
one person at a time. Especially the
neighbors that we find the most difficult to love. And we
can start today – even if we have failed miserably in the past. We can all choose to be part of the solution
instead of part of the problem.
“What the world needs now is love, sweet
love
It’s the only thing that there’s just too
little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love
No not just for some, but for everyone.”
