Meditation for Racial Reconciliation Sunday

My church will celebrate Racial Reconciliation Sunday tomorrow.  Here's a meditation I wrote for our church newsletter:

On a Sunday devoted to racial reconciliation, it's wise to take a very wide view and to remember that racial reconciliation isn't just about U.S. slavery and its impacts. We live in a world surrounded by the consequences of the disastrous impacts of colonial incursions and conquests. We live in a world that both celebrates history, but often doesn’t learn the harder lessons of history. We live in a world of strange juxtapositions.

Recently, I wrote an essay for my Old Testament class, an essay that looked at the arrival of Israelites to the Promised Land and their interactions with people who already lived there, like Rahab, the prostitute. I worked on this paper in the week before Thanksgiving, a holiday that celebrates the arrival and survival of Europeans in North America. Some see this history as ordained by God while others see as an indigenous genocide. During my Thanksgiving travels, the verdicts of two court cases came back, with one defendant (Kyle Rittenhouse) found innocent of murder during racial unrest and three white defendants who killed Ahmaud Arbery, an African-American jogger, found guilty. These cases that show that our culture still suffers from the aftermath of this colonial conquest that divided the world into insiders and outsiders. These cases show that when we classify the world by way of who belongs and who is outsider, people end up dead. Sadly, it’s a lesson that humanity needs to learn over and over again, as cultures can’t seem to leave behind or heal from the damage that colonialization does.

Some people would argue that the ancient story of Rahab has nothing to do with us in the 21st century. It’s easy to feel that way if we feel like we’re part of the group who controls the story and the resources.
I was reminded of the cyclical nature of these societal conflicts when my Thanksgiving travels took me to the State House grounds of Columbia, South Carolina, grounds which include a statue honoring the women of the Confederacy. Decades ago, when I was in graduate school at the nearby University of South Carolina, I would walk to the State House to visit this monument. Even as I understood the disasters that came from centuries of slavery and the time after the Civil War, I found the statue moving as I contemplated women in wartime helping their communities survive. Courage restored, I would go back to my graduate studies, a setting that wasn’t always welcoming to women.

In much the same way as Confederate women during the Civil War, Rahab is a hero, saving her family and making a way where no way seems to exist, while at the same time, she’s problematic. Like Confederate white women, Rahab enables genocide. How do we process these facts?

As we consider many of the people in the Bible, and people from more recent history, we see a similar mixture of heroic and lesser attributes mingled in one person. We see how in the best of circumstances, that mix can set a people free. In other narratives, we might see a cautionary tale. And since we’re still in need of both inspiration and caution, these story still have value to all of us today as we resist modern powers of colonialization and try to heal the wounds caused by past conquests.