Introduction
So… if you’re a Facebook friend or you follow me on Instagram or Twitter (@ericthelutheran), you may have noticed that I was recently in Detroit when I posted a photo or two.
No big deal, it was just me and 30,000 of my closest friends. This is just what we do — swamp a city, love the people there, leave the place a little better than we found it, and discover that we’re also a little better than the people of that city found us because we’re changed for the better by the stories we hear and the way we build community there.
This is the real face of the Gathering.
Our theme this year at the ELCA Youth Gathering was Rise Up Together, and it was focused on the idea that we’re called out of our comfortable homes and into a world that’s vivid and diverse; a world overflowing with God’s love and presence.
We’re called to join in with what God’s up to where we are, and join in with what God’s already been doing. In a world where we seem to be pushed farther and farther apart, the driving force of the Holy Spirit drives us into community and into the communities around us.
Hello Me, Meet Me
On Wednesday June 15, 2015, it was the first night of our ELCA Youth Gathering.
As 30,000 of my brothers and sisters in Christ and I gathered at Ford Field, I was overwhelmed by a lot of things: the crush of the crowd; the noise of 30,000 Youtherans packed together into one space; and the energy that gave the sense that the Spirit was at work and moving among us! I was just floored by speaker after speaker, the talent of the musicians, and by variety and competency of everyone doing everything. As I left that evening, I was flying high and ready for a week of service, worship, and growth.
I was also feeling uncomfortable, which was odd.
As we left the field I started to think about what was making me uncomfortable.
It wasn’t the music, I knew the music for the most part or could fake what I didn’t.
It also wasn’t the content; that was straight down the middle theologically and ethically. We heard advocacy for Social Justice not as the cause of our identity as Christians, but Social Justice because of our identity as disciples of Jesus. This is the right way to advocate for Social Justice, and it’s a message that I find very compelling.
I was puzzled about why I felt so…off about the whole thing.
Then it occurred to me that in a crowd of 30,000 mostly white faces (though there was incredible diversity there), and in a denomination that’s an overwhelmingly white denomination because we hail from European ancestors and Lutheranism in the US tends to be as much a cultural denomination as it is a theological one, only three people on stage that I could remember the whole night were white. This realization stunned me.
I realized this, and it felt like the world was shifting back to its normal axis as I identified that it is normal for Lutheran events to have mostly anglo leaders, and abnormal for the vast majority of leaders at an event to be non-white.
Was this really what was bothering me?
Not enough white faces?
Thinking it through, I initially decided that really what was bothering me wasn’t the fact that there were so many non-white people there, but that there weren’t a representative number of white people on the stage. We’re a mostly white denomination, after all; is it out of bounds to think that we should have a representative sample up there of people who look like Lutherans?
People who look like Lutherans.
There is was, naked and ugly.
People who look like Lutherans.
This wasn’t discomfort, this was the voice of my prejudice telling me that these weren’t the “right” people to choose because they don’t look like Lutherans.
This wasn’t a passing notion, it was the voice of my privilege telling me that so many non-white people on stage wasn’t normal at an ELCA gathering — even if it is the National Gathering. We have a right to be the majority, right?
This wasn’t just a random thought from my subconscious anymore because I’d been feeding it with my internal dialogue until I was able to recognize my casual carefree relationship with racism that wanted to reassure me that it’s really an okay thing for me to feel this way because the world is supposed to cater to my preferences. To be really honest, it feels good when the world’s geared to work in your favor. When it doesn’t, it’s amazing how quickly the feelings of indignation come to the surface.
This — this was the breaking of my heart under the weight of my bondage to Sin, as the part of me that has ears to hear and eyes to see answered the Gospel directive to hold up a mirror for my head and heart.
I heard the voice of God calling me to stare deeply and know that what is reflected back to me in this moment is the unreformed, unconvinced part of my head and heart that believe completely that not only am I the normal one and they are not, but cheers on the fact that Society believes this too.
I didn’t oppress anyone and I didn’t hurt anyone; but in this moment I understood so clearly how otherwise rational and reasonable people could stay so quiet in the face of injustice.
It’s so much more comfortable for me to just let the feelings pass and go on my way pretending that I’m okay and you’re okay, and that it’s not really indicative of anything more pervasive in my own consciousness or present in society — just another isolated incident.
But I know my heart and my head, and I know that this unwelcome and uninvited certainty that they aren’t normal is a part of me, just as certainly as my craving for oxygen, water, and love.
Later on, I confessed this to a fellow pastor who was with me. “Confessed” may be a strong word, I told him about it and we discussed it a bit. It made this something that’s real, and it forced me to look at it head on.
Head on is the only way we can face this.
When we see our lives in color — when we learn to love ourselves and everyone else in all our complexity and brokenness rather than as the two-dimensional caricatures that are so much more comfortable, we begin to unravel the power that prejudice, privilege, and racism have in our lives.
Love shines a light on the heart and cleanses it, and in the light we can see ourselves and each other in the full spectrum of the truth — that we are at once saint and sinner, beautiful and ugly on the inside — and when we see ourselves and each other in full color, the power of the lies we embrace erodes little by little, leaving behind something more real.
It’s scary to have our woundedness out in the light, but once it’s revealed it loses its power over us; we can finally get over ourselves and make the world a better place in the process.
(Updated to remove mention of the plan to do this as a multi-part series, which didn’t happen.)
Loveseescolor 
Consider this: Overly focusing on the color of one’s skin (not your own) is a type of racism in reverse. No, I was not there. I watched it streaming. It seemed in segments that there was a pointed effort to focus on the color of one’s skin as the only aspect of how we are to be diverse and accepting (which in itself is racism). Yes, get over the color of one’s skin ad the ethnicity. But diversity is about so much more than skin color–from socioeconomic class to what part of the tiny town we live in. Yes, we are racist. Yes, we are not diverse. Yes, deal with it head on. Yes, we are all broken. But don’t make race the only side of diversity. Love your neighbor as yourself stuff–whether the neighbor is poor or rich or somewhere in between, a rainbow of color, the meanest redneck in town, or the nicest grandma around. Sometimes it is almost easier to focus on skin color to love rather than all the other stuff–but them we are back to racism, human nature and sin, but then thankfully we have God’s grace.
I’m not convinced that getting over our ethnicity is the takeaway; or at least it isn’t my own takeaway (and I know that’s an oversimplified reduction of your comment).
Part of the point of Love Sees Color is to work against the notion that color is something we have to “get over”.
The primary characteristic that informs my own identity is Baptism. In the second tier, race is one of a cluster of characteristics that informs our deepest identity as individuals, and is one of the defining characteristics of how we experience the world and how the world experiences us.
For me, one of the most difficult obstacles I’m called to struggle with is the perception/belief that “what I am is normal, what I’m not isn’t”. In this, I agree 100% that the issue goes much deeper than the color of our skin, and that it applies to the other characteristics that cause prejudice as well. Part of our response to these things is to learn to love each other in our brokenness, even those who are unrepentant about the things that make us angry, as you said very well.
Where “getting over it” fails for me is that it allows me to continue to live in the illusion that I’m the normal one and that people different than I am aren’t. I can condescend to let them exist despite their shortcomings of being different in terms of race, religion, politics, nationality, or what have you and maintain the illusion of my own superiority because I fit the mold of what’s normal. I struggle with and recognize the notion that “normal” isn’t what we need to protect; we’re called to protect and accept people — people who God loves and claims — people who God created with great diversity.
Instead of a call to get over the differences of others, we instead answer a call to embrace each other as God has made us, and by doing this we get over our own notions that there’s something inherently wrong with being different.
What makes this difficult for me is that most of the time I have to cut through my own bullcrap to get to the point where I can deal with it head on. I’m very capable when it comes to rationalizing my own brokenness.
We all are very good at rationalizing–and I never meant to imply that what I am or anyone else is normal. In the world, there is no real “normal.” The “getting over it” part relates more to using one’s skin color as the only aspect of diversity.
Here’s the famous “I wasn’t trying to imply that you were trying to imply what you thought I thought you were implying” comment!
My reply was an effort to reflect on what your comment brought to mind, and process my own reactions to it. I thought your comment was great, and thanks for clarifying what you were really driving at.
This is complicated stuff because it’s a topic that causes anxiety. Not for me of course, but for other people……..
Okay, nice to know. Not offended.