Op-ed: Change must come
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This weekend a large number of churches from various Christian traditions will observe Trinity Sunday; a celebration of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who are one God yet three distinct Persons. One of the sacred texts that will be read and/or preached from on this holy day will be the creation story found in the first chapter of Genesis, where the triune God says "let us make humanity in our image," and after doing so declares it "very good." Thus, every single human being that ever has been or will be born bears God's image -- a reflection of the Divine on earth. Every human being is of sacred worth and value, endowed with infinite dignity, and is "very good" in God's eyes.
This conception of God and humanity forces us to ask what is a person? It leaves us no alternative but to answer a child of God. This resonates today perhaps more so than any other time since the Civil War. Now more than ever, Christians must ask how we affirm the humanity and dignity of all.
This is the question then-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin and his three colleagues failed to answer correctly while squeezing the life from George Floyd's body, and in countless other such killings, such as the most recent occurrences with Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. This is the question that strikes at the very root of America's original sin, one with which we still are grappling 400 years after the first enslaved Africans were brought to these shores, seen as something other than people, something other than children of God. Seen as objects. Property. Dehumanized and devalued. Destroyed. In that Minneapolis moment, the weight of 400 years of White Supremacy kneeling on the neck of Black America came to its culmination point, with the result being an entire people screaming we can't breathe.
400 years of black lives not mattering to America boiled over.
But black lives matter to God. So too must they matter to all of us. Therefore we must stop and listen to the pain and anguish of those marching in the streets for justice. We must hear the cries echoing the psalmist of "how long, O Lord?" and understand what we are witnessing is a response to 400 years of collective black trauma -- 400 years of failure to hear. 400 years of a rejection of black somebodyness. Is it any wonder Dr. King said rioting is "the language of the unheard" and asked "what is it that America has failed to hear?" We have not heard people of color pleading simply to be seen. To be heard. To be valued.
Until black lives matter, all lives cannot matter.
Amidst the fierce urgency of now, change must come. And it must begin with those of us, specifically those of us that are white, belonging to the household of faith. The answer to "how long, O Lord?" comes when the contemporary followers of the dark-skinned Galilean preacher that led a revolution of love end our silence. When we stand in solidarity with our black and brown siblings telling the world to recognize God's image in them and their sacred worth and equal value. When we affirm their humanity and collectively say until all get free, none are free.
When we emphatically say enough is enough.
Only then will forgiveness and healing of the still-open, festering wound of systemic racism come. Only then will justice roll down like a river and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Writing from the Birmingham Jail at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. King said "the contemporary church is often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound...the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent and often vocal sanction of things as they are." May we be silent no more, but vocally assert that things can no longer remain as they are. Say it powerfully. Say it boldly. Affirm dignity, sacred worth, and value for all. Affirm the somebodyness of all humanity that is created in God's image.
Black lives matter. Let the church, and America, say amen.
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Rev. Bradley G. Davis is pastor of Parkersburg's Logan-Memorial United Methodist Church. Founded in 1866, it is the oldest historically black church in the West Virginia Conference of the UMC. He also pastors Seventh Street UMC of Parkersburg.