Unarmed Empire Revisited #3

A Welcoming, Hospitable People

We are storied people. That is, the way we make our way through the world, the way we understand ourselves, and Gove meaning to our lives is through the stories we believe and tell ourselves.

At the heart of Christian misadventures throughout history has been a misplaced story, the ways we have misunderstand what God was up to in the world. Unarmed Empire begins with an attempt to rescue the Christian story. With the help of my friend, Jonathan Storment, the launching point of Unarmed Empire is a sermon which traces the biblical narrative of, well, race.

While race isn’t the subject of Unarmed Empire, race does give us a window to how God views persons. This is particularly true in the New Testament church where the central issue is the Jew/ Gentile tension and debate. In short, how do we treat the historically racial and spiritual other. Both Scot McKnight’s "A Fellowship of Differents, and NT Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God do a powerful job of articulating the central role that ethnicity played in early Christianity.

The church in Paul’s time had an excuse. They did not have the witness of the New Testament church nor the New Testament to inform their way of being in the world. Contemporary churches are without excuse. Yet the problem of difference remains, and the Western church still does not know how to tell the difference between the difference that make a difference and the differences that don’t make a difference.

Having recently read Eddic S. Glaude’s Democracy in Black, Philip Gorski’s and Samuel L. Perry’s The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy, and Robert P. Jones’ White Too Long, I am more convinced now that ever that races the demon that haunts the witness of the church in the West. Not only that (and I encourage you to read these data based books), white Christians are near the heart of the lingering White Supremacy which both withers Christian witness and has and is fraying America. On this point, I think, what I wrote in Unarmed Empire was too mild and too centrist…but, of course, much has changed in the 5 years since I initially wrote it.

There are many voices in the Western choice which quickly, and mockingly, call any acknowledgment of racism and the way racist systems continue to deny people of color their full humanity as “woke.” All naming calling is a substitute for a genuine argument. They name call isn an effort to maintain a racial status quo. This status quo is contrary to scripture; contrary to the Spirt of God; and contrary to the vision of the Kingdom of God.

Everything else is a lie. All you need to know that is read our own story.