The Amazing Invitation of This Moment

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By Jake Kircher

My initiation into the important conversations about race started a little over 8-years ago as my wife and I made our way out of Hartford Hospital with our (eventually adopted) foster son. Like many new parents, we were both excited and nervous about what was ahead, and yet bringing this amazing brown (as my son prefers to be described) boy into our family changed my life in numerous ways. That day began a crash course (that I am still in the middle of) of seeing the world from a different perspective and doing everything I can to learn and grow so that I can help my son face the world.

The news over the last couple of weeks has brought such a mix of emotions. To see the world responding so loudly to George Floyd’s death and coming together at this moment has been moving and hopeful as the father of a black son. However, at the exact same time, I have found myself wrestling with doubt and questions about what this will mean practically. Without specific actions and changes to accompany the protests and memorials, they will simply fall into the category of more “thoughts and prayers” and become a nice gesture that lacks any sort of depth or meaning.

Changes have to be rooted in a foundation of understanding that all people are created equal and that at the core of that belief is our spirituality. A sole evolutionist perspective allows and encourages the survival of the fittest and creating a hierarchy to the world. However, when you look at the creation narrative laid out in the first book of the Scriptures, there is an invitation into something deeper. When God created the world, God declared that it was all very good and then God looked at humankind and blessed it. The story of faith doesn’t begin with being broken and sinful; it starts with being blessed and bearing the image of God.

Within my tradition of Christianity, this is something that the work of Jesus calls back to through his public ministry, as well as his death and resurrection. The religious and secular systems of the day had created guidelines to who was in and who was out, and yet Jesus ignored those cultural rules altogether. He constantly was spending time with the people who were “out”, and would have been deemed unclean, and more so, those were the very people he invited to follow him, as Jewish students would have followed their Rabbi. Jesus then showed them how to truly live life to the fullest: by giving up his life for them and inviting them into a resurrection life that sought to make all things new.

That invitation from Jesus extends to all of us today; that we would live our lives as Christ did and, “in humility count others more significant than yourselves…[and] look not only to [our] own interests, but also to the interests of others.” (See Philippians 2:3b-4) This is the same invitation that spoke to me as I brought my son home from the hospital and as I parent him every day. And it’s the same invitation that speaks to each one of us as we mourn what happened to George Floyd and as we cry out for things still today to be made new.

The invitation of this moment is asking all of us to lean in, to learn, to ask questions, to better understand the world from a perspective that those of us who are white honestly don’t. This moment is asking all of us to look at the people of color who are suffering and hurting and to come alongside them in their grief and ask why. Asking questions is the first step to learning, so humbly open yourself up to listening to a person of color tell their story and listen to them as a fellow brother or sister in God who was given the same God-given blessing and image that you have within you. Then we have the opportunity to live like Jesus and take action for our fellow human beings who have been oppressed and mistreated by laying down our privilege and preferences and sacrificing for the sake of making the world a better place.

How can you participate in a resurrection life today? What would it look like for you to respond to the invitation to do God’s work of making all things new?

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