Your Faith is too Small

            I attended the New Baptist Covenant, gathering of Baptists black and white.  We assembled in Atlanta, Georgia in 2018, the heart of the President Trump era in a racially divided America. NBC, began as a vision of Former President Jimmy Carter in 2008.  He was unhappy with divides – the many divides among Baptists in America, and the racial divide that has tortured our country for centuries.  He dreamed of remedying both by bringing together Baptists of all races around topics of justice, unity, and love.

            I first attended the NBC summit in Atlanta in 2016 and was back this time around with a lot of guilt in my heart.  Every time I hear a speaker say something to the effect that our world is run by “white men,” and that is not a good thing, I hear myself being counted among the worst of racists.  I possess every advantage: healthy?  Check.  White?  Check.  Male?  Check.  Educated?  I have a bachelors, masters, and doctorate degrees.  Economically, I qualify as middle to upper middle class.  I am heterosexual and married.  I lived with every conceivable privilege.  In the past 5 years, the scales have fallen from my eyes as I have learned of my own privilege as well as the institutional prejudice that once rendered even benefits like the GI bill inaccessible to African Americans. 

            I carry guilt.  When I attend events like the Racial Equity Institute’s phase 1 anti-racism training or I read books like Austin Channing Brown’s I’m Still Here, I expect to be hit by a tidal wave of blame for problems.  Injustice in America is mostly, if not entirely, the result of the racism of white men.  I expect to be hit with this and I expect to take it because there is much truth in it. 

            That guilt rode me heavy in Atlanta.  Additionally, I contemplated the rhetoric of the most ardent supporters of President Trump, whites who rally to preserve Confederate monuments and deny the inherent racism of the Confederacy.  “It’s not about slavery or racism,” they say, “It’s about heritage and culture.”  “OK,” I respond, but what is the content or substance of the culture you want to preserve?  It’s white supremacy.”  Defenders of southern culture, whatever that phrase means, know that what they’re standing for is unabashedly white hegemony, yet they don’t explicitly acknowledge it.  Or worse, they do.  An alarmingly high number of white Americans are happy to call all brown skinned people potential terrorists, and to look on all black people with disdain.  The division seems utterly unbridgeable. 

            I sat in the reflection group wearing my cloak of guilt and my coat of hopelessness.  And that’s when the group leader hit me with something I wasn’t expecting; grace and invitation.  Rev. Kasay Jones, formerly a pastor in Washington DC and now on staff with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship Global welcomed me as a brother in Christ.  She is an African American woman, and she did not see me, a white man, as a bearer of guilt.  She saw me as a fellow Christ follower, a part of her family. Thank you God!  She offered what I needed, but dare not ask for.  I was grateful. 

            Dr. Patricia Murphy of the American Baptist Home Mission Society, an African American woman, could see I was struggling with the topics being discussed as I listened in the breakout session she led.  She looked right at me and said, “You’re safe here.”  I have tried so hard to convey that very message to people who come to our church.  I didn’t realize how much I needed to hear someone say those words to me.  She gave me space to work out how I understand my participation in unity and racial justice from my perspective as a white man.  Thank you God!  She, like Rev. Jones, let me know I am not the enemy.  I am with her in Christ.  And that’s where I want to be.

            Those invitations meant the world to me, but I still felt overwhelmed as I envisioned trying to be a peacemaker with whites who are perfectly happy to live in their privilege while pretending they aren’t tremendously privileged or insisting privilege doesn’t exist.  I felt like, we were a few hundred people in Atlanta talking about this, and the millions in that one city, let alone all of America, did not know or care that we were there.  Sure, I had my own epiphany, but how could such a small group make any difference.

            My Bible reading for the final morning of the event was Matthew 17.  I didn’t seek that passage out.  It was just the next reading up in the journal I’m keeping, Matthew 17:14-23.  In this passage, the disciples are perplexed that they cannot drive out a demon.  Jesus drives it out.  Why couldn’t they, they wonder.  His answer to them is His answer when I bemoan that we black and white Baptists are not enough to make any kind of waves in the cause of the Kingdom of God and racial unity and racial justice.  Jesus said (to me), “Your faith is too small.  What I’m about to tell you is true.  If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, it is enough.  You can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move.  Nothing will be impossible for you” (17:20-21).

            As a pastor, you’d think I know that.  But let me let you in on something.  Pastors aren’t any holier than you are.  Pastors do not have a “hotline to heaven.”  Pastors get discouraged.  In many ways, this year after my Sabbatical of 2017 has been the hardest, most discouraging years of my career.  Some of it has been professional.  Some personal.  Much of it has been around the issue of race in America and the tendency of white America to deny realities and work to maintain status quo.  Some days, it feels like the discouragements pile up. 

            And then I went to Atlanta.  And two sisters in Christ, well credentialed ministry professionals opened their hearts to me and invited me in and told me it was safe and I wasn’t the enemy. 

            And Jesus said to me, “I conquered death.  I can face racism.”  And Jesus said to me, “Rob, you are going to face racism and evil because my Holy Spirit is in you.”

            Now I am back from Atlanta, back into the normal rhythms of life.  There are good days and bright spots as well as disappointments and times of ennui.  That’s true in just about any season of life.  But now, I cannot wilt and hide in my white guilt or my white fragility.  I have been invited by Christ and His church to be a bearer of good news and a worker for justice and love and peace.  I cannot say the problem is too big or too hard.  I have been given mountain-moving faith.  It’s time to live it.