It’s impossible to heal a disease you don’t understand. Take cancer for example. The history of cancer treatment has slowly advanced as thousands and thousands of hours of careful research have been poured into understanding the causes and possible cures. Racism is a stubborn cancer on the soul of our nation. Many feel it’s absolutely incurable. Many see some signs of hope, places where healing has happened. Still others pretend it doesn’t even exist. “I don’t feel the pain – so how can I be sick?”

Healing the racial divides that are still with us today will take an enduring effort on everyone’s part regardless our socio-economic status. We can’t simply preach a sermon on it and walk away. We can’t attend a class then feel like we’ve done our part. We can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. We can’t give up either – refusing any medical attention just because we have cancer. There is hope. There is progress as long as God’s people are willing to engage in the healing process. It takes a tenacious willingness to learn, repeated attempts at solutions, reinventing the strategies, realigning the priorities and always being willing to admit mistakes and try again.

Here are a few links to some important resources we’re talking about in the class Healing the Racial Divide:

1. The Kingdom Color Map of places of historic interest in North Omaha. The map will show you locations of significant events and landmarks each with a pop-up description when you click on it. If you’re not familiar with North Omaha, poke around on the map a little, find a couple of places you’d like to see and drive there with a friend.
2. The Kingdom Color Podcast is an audio interview of several community leaders describing Omaha’s cultural landscape in historic terms.
3. The Kingdom Color Feature Video is a report from the Justice Journey several of us staff went on in the spring of 2009. A group of 25 white pastors and a group of 25 black pastors toured three cities in the south looking at significant civil rights locations, deepening our understanding and trust.

Keep building your understanding of what has happened. Keep building key relationships along the way. Keep engaging the context you live in – those of us here in Omaha have a rich field of possibilities on all these fronts.

Back to my Encourage One Another note. Part of the frustration we feel in taking about social justice issues is how messy it can get. Many who have tried and tried to make an impact get tired of talking about it… get tired of trying things and seeing little results… get tired of all the guilt that surfaces when we focus on it.

Colorblindness is a messy word to toss around in the conversation. On the one hand if a person means that how we judge each other should not be based on color, that’s a true statement. We need a whole lot of that in our world to get anywhere in the discussion. We need a healthy sense of overlooking the distinctions in order to get along, in order to work together, in order to address issues and build a better tomorrow.

However, colorblindness as our only strategy for figuring out what’s going on is actually dangerous! If in response to the disparities that still exist in our city, we simply say “It doesn’t matter what color you are,” then you just sweep the picture under the rug and move on. You have to ask the color question otherwise you don’t do anything about the fact that the vast majority of those stuck in poverty in our city are of a specific ethnic identity. You also blur the lines between those who are still hurting and those who are living a relatively advantaged experience. In the book of Acts chapter 6, the ethnic identities of widows being overlooked mattered a great deal to God and the early church. It was such a big deal that the ministry of God’s word was literally shut down over it. Colorblindness did not help the early church solve that critical impasse.

The second reason colorblindness is a false lure is that it does an injustice to the diversity which God creates. Why would God create such diversity only to tell us to ignore it! We’re to enjoy it! If we’re too quick to sweep cultural differences under the rug we may be saying “I don’t care about the diversity God’s created – it’s too hard to appreciate and relate to. I’ll take my world monochrome, thank you!”

I really don’t think God is colorblind. He loves what he creates. He creates in titanic proportions of diversity. He creates diversity and redeems it in his son Jesus. That’s what Kingdom Color is about!

 The above “Note of Encouragement” wound up in my mailbox on Monday morning in response to our Kingdom Color Series and my message in particular. They tell preachers to never gage how they feel about ministry on Monday mornings. I suppose this kind of note is why that’s the case. I’ll let you read it here. We’ll talk about it in my next post. I think the person responding like this has missed more than one critical point of my message. I’m curious if you have a reaction to it. Here’s what my nameless brother wrote me in case you can’t read the writing in the image:

Tim,
That was the most depressing liberal message, that I have ever heard at this church. Thank you for the condemning messages the last two weeks. MLK taught that we should judge each other by their conduct, not by the color of their skin. God doesn’t view us based on the color of our skin.”

Maybe we should change the header on our comment cards…

Yesterday we concluded a three week message series entitled Kingdom Color exploring the theme of racial reconciliation. I thought it would be good to post a few things I mentioned the message and flesh some ideas out a little more. I used a few Martin Luther King Jr quotes that I’ll list and give the references to. There are tons of resources we churned through in the last month of preparing these messages. I’ll get those posted as well. Stay tuned!

If you haven’t seriously thought about where our world is headed and how the church should be responding, I urge you to jump into the opportunities that are staring us in the face! Christians can get so concerned about having the right answers for tough questions like the problem of evil. But if we could show the world that our faith actually has the power to bring healing to our city’s biggest problems, we just might be more believable to a skeptical world.