In Seminary I had to take a class called “The Church in the Social Context” I enjoyed that class because of the professor, Dr. Magdellanes and the material he had us review. We watched this video where they took the Mitochondrial DNA of different people. The Mitochondrial DNA is the DNA passed down through the mothers side, it was interesting because when two white people would compare their DNA, or two black people, they thought they would have a common ancestor, but it turns out that that the people had more ancestry in common with people that did not look like them then those who did. White, black, brown, didn’t matter, the DNA was putting all kinds of people together and they had no idea. There are other services out there, Ancestry.com, 23 and Me, etc, that will trace your DNA and let you know just how far up your family tree goes. Taking a test like that will let you know that we all have common ancestors. Just like we look at our physical ancestry we look at a royal ancestry that we have and that is one of God. We are all God’s children. Today’s lectionary passage is for Trinity Sunday and covers the creation story, I only want to talk about 2 parts of it today. But the cliff notes version of my view on the other scriptures that go with the passage is that I don’t see the seven days in the story as seven 24 hour segments of time. God is powerful enough to do it but did not have to. The bible says in
2 Peter 3:8 New King James Version (NKJV)
8 But, beloved, do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
Faith is not against science, they are two separate disciplines, teachings, systems, whatever you want to call it, God’sv time is not our time, God’s ways are not our ways. The most important part of that whole creation story to me is the part that says in the beginning, God. God was there from the beginning and that is all that matters to me. Next part that is important to me is the ‘Let us make man” plural on purpose, you won’t find the word Trinity in your Bible only passages of scriptures that allude to it. Let us make man in Genesis, In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and was God in the gospel according to John, and others. But the text I read for you before preaching today says let us make man in our image. Man is for mankind, as some translations put it. Either way in our image, we are made in the image of God, that is the common royal ancestor we all share. The same one who breathed life into Adam and breathes life into all of us. That is why it hurts my heart to see how people are acting these days. Some of the problems we have had are because we refused to see the God in others. They can’t be my brother or sister, their skin color is different. They don’t believe that we are all made in God’s image.
I know I can yell, I especially yell when I talk about Jesus. There are times I had to go out my way to temper my tone because I didn’t want to be viewed as an “angry black man.” A few years back I went to vote, showed up with my voter registration card and ID in hand, the lady at the desk said I was not in the system and tried to give me a provisional ballot, I showed her my card, she said I still wasn’t in the system, asked me to stop yelling and put her hands up. I wasn’t raising my voice, never did, but the perception was there the moment she saw me. I have to walk around wearing a mask.
We Wear the Mask
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
People have set images in their mind and what doesn’t fit gets dismissed. That’s why we can have people online doing the “George Floyd challenge” taking pictures kneeling on their friends necks making fun of a man killed by a police officer but people are more mad about Colin Kaepernic kneeling during the national anthem. People dismiss the claims of racism.
There are those who will try to say the issue is not race but education.
Study after study shows that Black children received harsher punishments for offenses than their white classmates
I have colleagues and former coworkers who have to deal with their children being called names like black dirt, and the student doing the name calling goes unpunished, or just gets a talking to, while the same student that just got called the names will be officially written up for talking in class. I have worked with the NAACP for students who are suspended because “they smelled like weed” the teacher somehow smelled the child on the other side of a basketball court and the school district upheld the suspension even though the boy passed 3 drug tests.
There are those who will say the issue is not race but economics.
Imani Rose, a young lady I met while working with the Drama Ministry at my home church has grown up to have several business. I saw her instagram post where she was in tears. Imani has been vocal in about the protest on her social media page. Imani was crying because someone gave her money and told her to clean up her Instagram page, and be a builder not tear people down. This customer was trying to pay Imani to shut up.
Black Wall Street, 99 years ago, because of segregation an all black area of town in Tulsa Oklahoma started to thrive, they called it Black Wall Street, Black owned Doctors offices and Real Estate Businesses all in the Greenwood area of Tulsa. On May 30, 1921, Dick Rowland, a young African American shoe shiner, was accused of assaulting a white elevator operator named Sarah Page in the elevator of a building in downtown Tulsa. The next day the Tulsa Tribune printed a story saying that Rowland had tried to rape Page, with an accompanying editorial stating that a lynching was planned for that night. That evening mobs of both African Americans and whites descended on the courthouse where Rowland was being held. When a confrontation between an armed African American man, there to protect Rowland, and a white protestor resulted in the death of the latter, the white mob was incensed, and the Tulsa riot was thus ignited.
Over the next two days, mobs of white people looted and set fire to African American businesses and homes throughout the city. Many of the mob members were recently returned World War I veterans trained in the use of firearms and are said to have shot African Americans on sight. Some survivors even said they saw people in airplanes dropped incendiary bombs.
The narrative tries to get changed but Lebron James gets his own house spray painted with the N word, and when he starts trying to speak on racial inequality, they say he hasn’t experienced racism because he is rich. Then they tell him to “shut up and dribble.” But when Drew Brees is asked in the height of the country protesting, about those who kneeled or will kneel during the national anthem and he says something to fit the conservative narrative, the same people who told Lebron James to “shut up and dribble” say that Drew Brees "is allowed to have an opinion”
When people protest police brutality people make it about the flag, say that they have "relatives that served” I have relatives that served too, and when they came home from the military, they were not treated as good as yours were guaranteed. I have members of this church who served and got called names when they came back home from war. I have members of this church that were beaten by police during the Texas Southern University riots, police shot up the campus and arrested all the black men on campus because they thought one of them had shot a policeman, turned out that policeman was shot by another police officer.
I could go on, Micheal Taylor in Indianapolis, when I was in elementary school he was 15 years old, handcuffed in the back seat of a squad car, the police said he shot himself in the head, twice. Took close to 20 years for justice, Robbie Tolan whose mother my wife and I worked with in the media ministry at our home church, accused of stealing his own car, is handcuffed face down in his momma driveway while his mother is getting slammed up against the garage door is shot and has his professional baseball career ruined by the Bellaire Police department.
57 officers in Buffalo resigned from their unit after two of their colleagues were suspended for pushing down a 75 year old man, another officer tried to help him up and the officers pushed him aside.
Don’t tell people how to protest. Stop bringing up Martin Luther King Jr. in some sort of condescending tone. I’m watching people try to tell MLK’s children about him like they knew him better than his kid did. People love Martin Luther King Jr. now, but according to Gallup in 1966 more than 60 percent of people had an unfavorable opinion of him, and even more had an unfavorable opinion of the peaceful march on Washington.
The problem is that we are all made in the image of God but some people refuse to see it.
If all lives mattered we wouldn’t be here. But we see the image of God others, and we prop them up.
Give me liberty or give me death. Manifest destiny, from sea to shining sea, even though there were already people on this land. We speak ill of looters, but then go to Museums full of artifacts. People are chastising the destruction of property but when a boat at a dock had some tea on it, that tea ended up in the water. England loyalists tarred and feathered during the revolutionary war. We have slave owners on our money, streets named after them. The same people that penned the words “all men are created equal", and “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” owned other human beings. There are confederate soldiers statues that people fight to keep erected. The daughters of the confederacy rebranded the civil war as the war of northern aggression.
Gaslighting to call you racist for pointing out racism, I’ve walked in my own neighborhood had people trying to take pictures of me, and when I posted the issue online. I got called racist, along with stupid, a crybaby, race baiter, then my mailbox got filled with firecrackers. I have called the police and still had a gun pointed my direction, I have had conversations with people about a video shoot, and a police walk up in the conversation because she heard me say the word shoot. The effect of repeatedly being treated as less than weighs on you. You’ve never experienced it so it’s crazy to you.
Black lives matter, blue lives matter, all lives matter if you have problem with the first one but not the other two, you problem is with the black part of it. That’s why people can tear gas and shoot rubber bullets at peaceful protesters to clear the way to a church for a Bible photo op. Because you don’t see the God in others. The same breath breathed into Adam by God was breathed into me, I am made in Gods image.
The phrase made in our image is a call back to the Kings of the time of the writing. When the kings ruled the land they would make sure to have statues of themselves put all over the land they ruled so you can see whose land this was and who was in charge. These images were literal representations of the ruler. When you wanted to know who the king was you looked at the image, when you wanted to know what the king looked like you looked at the image. If you want to know who our King is, look at the image, if you want to know who our king loves, look at the image. God made me, God, loves me, God cares for me even if you don’t.
That breath of life is in me and I am made in the image of God. But we need others to see that we are made in the image of God too, it is not enough, to just not be racist, you must help confront the oppression as well. It is not enough to “not see color” which has problems in itself, God made me black, if you don’t see color you overlook me, I need you to see me and recognize the uniqueness and appreciate it. Speak out against racism, speak out against oppression. Truly act like you see God in others and not just in those who look like you or act the way you want them to act.
Genesis can’t be just words on a page, we truly have to believe that we are all made in God’s image, that we all carry the breath of God in us. He loved us so much he made us in his image and he loved us so much that even when we failed, he sent his son to save us.
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