Dear Redeemer Family,
On the afternoon of February 23, 2020, Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed 25-year-old African-American man, was fatally shot after being pursued and confronted by Travis McMichael and his father Gregory McMichael, who were armed and driving a pickup truck.
Some of you may have followed this story in the news recently. If this is unfamiliar to you, you can read more about it here.
Friends, this atrocity is sickening… it makes us both nauseous with grief and livid with rage. So many people are asking, “Why does this keep happening?” “When will this kind of racist violence end?”
This week, as I was praying for the Arbery family and reflecting on the ongoing racial strife in our nation, I was also (by necessity) preparing for the sermon for this coming Sunday. We are in the midst of a series on the Lord’s Prayer and the phrase for this coming Sunday is “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” Some translations of the last part of that line read “deliver us from the evil one.” As I reflected on both this tragedy, the evil of our time, and this phrase that the Lord Jesus taught us to pray - I happened to stumble upon a chapter in a book that addressed all of these together. Rather than attempt to summarize what I read, I’ll just quote it verbatim. The following was written by the Rev. Dr. Wesley Hill, Professor of New Testament Studies at Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, PA.
“One of the fascinating developments in recent science, both in the hard sciences as well as the social sciences, has been the focus on how human beings are at all times at the mercy of powers greater than themselves. Contrary to sunny notions of free will and self-expression, we all are shaped by powers as small as microscopic biochemical forces, some of which are microbial interlopers in our bodies, to those as large as inherited notions of what constitutes acceptable gender performance.
Think, for instance, of how racism makes itself manifest in a society. Older generations of white Americans may have more readily thought, “So long as I am paying my black employee a fair wage and greeting her warmly each day, I’m not a racist.”
But racism operates more covertly and insidiously than that. In a recent experiment, for instance, a sociologist asked participants to stare at a screen on which a series of black and white faces flashed. These images appeared and disappeared so quickly that the viewers were not even consciously aware of having seen them. Immediately after seeing a black or white face, the participants were then shown a picture of a gun or a tool. These images were quickly removed from the screen but not quite as quickly as the facial images, so as to allow the participants to register having seen them.
It turned out that when participants viewed a black face followed by a tool, they were more apt to remember the tool as having been a gun than they were when the image of a tool followed that of a white face. The racialized tendency to associate black faces with a violent weapon, the sociologist concluded, “requires no intentional racial animus, occurring even for those who are actively trying to avoid it.” People are, in a very real way, enslaved to something outside of their control. As one theorist has put it, racism has “a life of its own.”
So modern Western minds actually might be catching up with the inspired wisdom of Scripture rather than the other way around. Evil is not just what we do, but—more hauntingly—it is what we suffer, what we are mired in and encrusted with. And if that is the case, we are unable to extricate ourselves from it by any direct action.
No amount of good intentions—to return to our example from above—can cause a white person to disassociate black skin from the threat of harm. The prince of racism—and of so many other forms of evil—hinders even the most virtuous white people from ending their own racist habits of mind by sheer decision.
Stronger medicine is needed. And that is what Jesus urges us to pray for: we must, in the end, appeal to God to deliver us from the grip of the Evil One. Christians who worship whiteness don’t just need education; we need exorcism.”
—
“Stronger medicine is needed.
Christians who worship whiteness don’t just need education;
we need exorcism.”
—
I think fellow Anglican pastor the Rev. Dr. Hill is absolutely right. The past racial wounds and the ongoing racial malevolence here in the city of Richmond and in the United States of America will not be healed by mere education (or by even the best material, social, financial, relational efforts). These are all a good start, but they are just that - a start. We dwell in a time and place of far deeper spiritual oppression that cannot be accurately described as anything other than demonic.
Therefore, when we hear the stories of Ahmaud Arbery, or Breonna Taylor, or Oscar Grant - we, the church, must fall to our knees and (with the words of the Lord Jesus on our lips) pray for our nation, for our culture, for our neighbors, and even for ourselves,, “Deliver us from the evil one.” We pray this for Ahmaud, for his family, for his friends and community, for the black community in Brunswick and all over the nation.
We must also pray this for the McMichael family. Though we are tempted to hatred, we must pray for their souls - that they would be delivered from the evil that has made them instruments of death.
As we pray these Jesus words, we must then get up off our knees and go about the Jesus work of loving and serving our neighbors, our city, and even our nation.
Jesus’ words and Jesus’ work always go hand in hand - and the church must be a people of both. In the face of such blatant racism, we must pray the Lord’s Prayer and then we must live the Lord’s Prayer.
Dear church family, the days are troubled - may Christ deliver us from evil. Amen.
In the Father’s love,
Dan
