Race. Grace. Justice. Jesus. Sýnishorn

This is us

It was supposed to be another great date. My wife was dropping off our daughters at my parents’ place while I changed clothes, cologned up, and picked a place for dinner. After a few minutes, I was looking as good as this slightly-wrinkled-but-still-trying almost-forty-year-old guy can get, and my bride still wasn’t home. So I pulled out my phone and habitually opened social media.

And that’s when I saw the video.

I bet you’ve seen (or at least heard about) the video too. A white police officer with his knee pressing down on the neck of a black man. I gasped as he gasped for air. I wept as he whimpered for mercy. I watched in horror as he died in front of my eyes. When my wife walked through the door a few moments later, I couldn’t find the words to describe to her what I had seen.

The weeks that followed that tragic event pushed me as a person and as a pastor. Staying silent seemed wrong, even though I felt it would be better to listen than to speak. Yet what should I say? What would be true and right and beautiful and beneficial and hopeful? What would do justice to the injustice our culture had witnessed without giving in to half-truths, fear, or a lack of faith?

Maybe you’ve wrestled with those same questions too. As a follower of Jesus, you want to be as full of grace and truth as your Savior was, refusing to give into the extreme reactions that emotions so often bring. If so, I want to take you on a journey through the Bible, stopping at key truths to help us process and make progress in our faith and love.

And there’s no better place to begin than in the beginning.

In the beginning, God created us. And by “us,” I mean all of us. Through Adam and Eve, God would fill the earth with the diversity we see today. Although people seem so different, we have an immense amount in common. The apostle Paul, a Jewish man from Tarsus, taught a group of Gentiles from Athens: “From one man [God] made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth” (Acts 17:26).

If you’ve ever recited one of the classic Christian creeds (statements of faith), this truth is where they all begin: “I believe in God the Father almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.”

We believe that our Father is the ultimate cause of the color of our skin. We believe that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made,” a truth recorded by David, a Middle Eastern man who may or may not have shared the color you see in the mirror (Psalm 139:14). That means that we, despite our ethnic diversity, share a common ancestry. The color of my black friend’s skin or the culture of the Hmong family who live two houses down the block might feel so different, but our roots all go back to the same soil that God scooped up when he made man. So when we see someone, face to face or online, this is us. That man, that woman, that cop, that whoever. That’s us. That’s our people.

The devil, whose PhD is in division, would love to dismiss that. Once he pits “us” versus “them” or “me” versus “you,” he has undone page 1 of the Bible, a lie with consequences that are historically tragic.

So, today, believe where the Bible begins. When you see the face of ___________, whisper to yourself, “This is us.” Whether that blank is filled with someone who looks like you or not, someone whose life is like yours or isn’t, force yourself to remember the very beginning, the origin story that unites us all.

If we truly want things to be different, we must remember what makes us the same.

“In the beginning God created” (Genesis 1:1).