June 10, 2020
When I was a little girl about seven or eight, I remember my parents were throwing a party to celebrate us moving into my grandparent’s old house and I got to invite some friends.
My favorite person at the time was a large black man we called Beetle who worked with my mom at the grocery store and drove a bright yellow Volkswagen Bug which is why we called him Beetle, I don’t even know what his real name was.
But of course, I had to invite Beetle to the party, he was my friend. He mattered to me and always talked to me at the grocery store and was a big part of my life.
Beetle came to the party, and he stood out in the crowd of all white faces. I remember being out in the yard walking towards the community picnic shelter nearby we had rented for the party, when someone started yelling at me.
It was my uncle who was visiting from far away.
He wanted me to get away from that strange man, I remember being confused. He yelled ugly words at Beetle, he called him a word I had never heard before. I remember it escalating and Beetle leaving the party, I remember the ugly things my uncle said about Beetle after he left.
It was the first time I became aware of racism. Though I didn’t know what it was at the time.
We didn’t see Mr. Beetle much after that, our friendship suffered because the choice someone made to judge him because of the color of his skin and to assume that as a black man with a young white girl his intentions could only be bad. Our relationship changed because someone didn’t see Mr. Beetle as created in the image of God, which indeed he was.
We all have stories like this, where we have seen racism at work right in front of us and been unable to act.
God’s grace is for us even when we have been complicit and complacent in these moments of racism. But now that we are aware of the brokenness the systemic pain racism has caused all over the world, it’s time for us to be brave.
It’s time for us to speak up and advocate in these situations, it’s time for us to work on the stereotypes, and things we assume about our black neighbors. It’s time for us to say hard things to our white community when they say racists things, make a joke that doesn’t need to be said, or use a word that is inappropriate.
It’s time for us to get to work repairing this brokenness.
And it will not be easy work sometimes we won’t know what to say, but may these words of Jesus from our upcoming Gospel text this week give you the courage, the boldness, and the love in your heart to speak up in the face of injustice. Jesus says in Matthew 9:19-20, “Do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say; for what you are to say will be given to you at that time; 20 for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.” It’s time for us to live out our Baptismal promise to strive for justice and peace in all the earth by speaking out against the injustice—the sin of racism and all the pain and harm it has caused.
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