100 Sermon Illustrations on Racism

Application to the coming down of the Berlin wall.

1. Berlin wall comes down.

2. Biblical walls come down. (Jericho, Jerusalem)

3. Biblical imagery of collapsing walls.

4. Why people put up walls.

a. Barriers in society. (Money, religion, racism)

b. Barriers in relationships. (Silence, hatred, unforgiveness)

5. Jesus takes down barriers.

a. Between God and man.

b. Between people.

6. Christians should also take down barriers.

Relativism in ethics usually justifies sin and puts down conventional morality. Our souls tell us this is wrong.

I have vivid memories of a photograph I saw years ago. It appeared in a newspaper during the racial turmoil that swept the United States in the 1960's.

The picture is of a black American with his hands tied behind his back. A chain was looped around his neck and fastened to a tree limb.

As he hung there, members of the Klan took a butane torch and burned the initials KKK into his chest. They kept burning him, slowly, until he died.

As a Christian, I feel that what they did was wrong.

If situation ethics is true, then what they did might be wrong. Or it might be O.K. It all depends.

(From an anonymous Letter to Diognetus, possibly dating from the second century.)

“For Christians are not differentiated from other people by country, language or customs; you see, they do not live in cities of their own, or speak some strange dialect, or have some peculiar lifestyle.

This teaching of theirs has not been contrived by the invention and speculation of inquisitive men; nor are they propagating mere human teaching as some people do. They live in both Greek and foreign cities, wherever chance has put them. They follow local customs in clothing, food, and the other aspects of life. But at the same time, they demonstrate to us the wonderful and certainly unusual form of their own citizenship.

They live in their own native lands, but as aliens; as citizens, they share all things with others; but like aliens, suffer all things. Every foreign country is to them as their native country, and every native land as a foreign country.

They marry and have children just like every one else; but they do not kill unwanted babies. They offer a shared table, but not a shared bed. They are at present “in the flesh” but they do not live “according to the flesh”. They are passing their days on earth, but are citizens of heaven. They obey the appointed laws, and go beyond the laws in their own lives.

They love everyone, but are persecuted by all. They are unknown and condemned; they are put to death and gain life. They are poor and yet make many rich. They are short of everything and yet have plenty of all things. They are dishonored and yet gain glory through dishonor.

Their names are blackened and yet they are cleared. They are mocked and bless in return. They are treated outrageously and behave respectfully to others. When they do good, they are punished as evildoers; when punished, they rejoice as if being given new life. They are attacked by Jews as aliens, and are persecuted by Greeks; yet those who hate them cannot give any reason for their hostility.

To put it simply -- the soul is to the body as Christians are to the world. The soul is spread through all parts of the body and Christians through all the cities of the world. The soul is in the body but is not of the body; Christians are in the world but not of the world.”

________

(used with modification on Sept 29, 1991, in Serm91zg.pco)

Sermon in Leviticus series.

"WHO IS UNCLEAN?" Leviticus 11:41-47

I. The meaning of cleanness.

A. How many are clean this morning?

B. Cleanness is a critical principle in OT religion.

C. As we prepare for communion, are we clean this morning?

II. Laws on cleanness had a dividing effect on people.

A. God's holiness demanded they live differently. Lev 20:24-26

B. The moral emphasis was soon lost, but not the dividing line.

III. Modern societies are not much different.

IV. What Jesus thinks of uncleanness.

A. He was severely criticized for his views.

1) His disciples ate with hands that were not clean.

2) He associated with unclean people. Luke 17:14; John 4:9

B. People can definitely be unclean. Mark 7:18-23

1) But not due to outward circumstances like food, illness.

2) Uncleanness due to inner sin, which finds outward expression.

V. The task of the Church is to declare God's cleansing power.

A. Peter's vision: no group of people is unclean. Acts 10:14f

B. The Church should be a focus of cleansing today.

1) The OT food laws are replaced by "love laws." Rom 14:15-20

2) No one is beyond God's grace.

3) Cleansing is not just for other people.

VI. Cleaning us up is no easy task. Hebrews 10:22-24

Sermon in Acts series. Cornelius: Accepting people like God does.

Acts 10:25-36

===========

THEM, TOO??

===========

I. Sad schisms.

A. "Crown Heights" tragedy: from accident to hatred.

B. Acts 10 is about the breaking down of barriers.

II. Jesus came to make things different.

A. He reached out to despised foreigners, degenerates and outcasts.

B. Jesus' kingdom is of a new sort. Rev. 7:9-10

C. Church should model this acceptance of others here on earth.

III. The captivity of the church.

A. Churches are often captives of their surroundings.

B. Are you shaped by your culture, or by Jesus?

IV. Look to the heart.

A. People are quick to label others.

B. How God sees people.

V. The gospel is for all people.

A. Are you open to sharing Christ with everyone who touches your

life?

B. Be a model of reconciliation in your life, and in this church.

********************************************

ARTICLES on racism:

"A Call to Respect God's Image," Vernon Grounds, CT, 4/5/85, p. 14.

"Fixing History," (editorial), Kenneth Kantzer, CT, 9/5/86, p. 16.

"Lingering Racism," (editorial), Lyn Cryderman, CT, 3/6/87, p. 14.

"The Gospel in Black & White," Barbara Thompson, CT, 3/4/88, p. 18.

"The Mirror of God," Stanley Inouye, CT, 3/3/89, p. 26.

"Confessions of a Racist," Philip Yancey, CT, 1/15/90, p. 22.

"The Education of Matthew Wangerin," Walter Wangerin, CT, 5/27/91,p. 16.

#2534

*

Sermon on Martin Luther King, Jr., Sunday.

Revelation 5:9-10

======================

THERE IS STILL A DREAM

======================

I. Leading of the Spirit.

II. The man who dreamed.

A. Young Baptist minister, affiliated with ABC.

B. His personal flaws are well-known.

C. Yet King called nation to its moral center.

III. Barriers and bigotry.

A. People have always divided themselves.

B. It's nothing new: Bigotry in Bible. Luke 9:52-56

IV. Does God approve of barriers?

A. The non-distinction between races.

B. "Chosen people" may imply others are not chosen.

C. The only valid distinction is based on our relation to Jesus.

V. Jesus came to take down barriers. Eph 2:14

A. All are one in Jesus Christ. Gal 3:28

B. People have to change from the inside out.

C. The ministry of reconciliation.

VI. A committed life.

Spencer Perkins, who is white, stopped at a McDonald's in Florida and got a Happy Meal for his 5-year-old daughter. They got a white Barbie, which she already had, so they exchanged it for a black one. The black girl taking their order seemed delighted that they wanted a black doll. He asked her how many kids requested black Barbies. She lowered her voice to almost a whisper. "No white kids ever ask for the black Barbie," she said, her lower lip quivering. "In fact, I've seen several kids cry if a black doll ends up in their meal." It was obvious that this subtle rejection hurt her. But she cleared her throat, forced a smile, and politely asked the next person in line, "May I take your order please?"

How to help your children be comfortable with people of other races or socioeconomic groups:

1. Be intentional.

a. Watch movies and videos together.

b. Take them on an inner-city missions trip.

c. Visit an inner-city church.

d. Develop unlike relationships.

e. Practice what you preach.

2. Make Kingdom choices.

a. Our lifestyle choices can compromise our witness.

b. We must deliberately include other races in our lives.

On a normal Misssissippi Sunday afternoon last August, members from several Southern Baptist churches braved the summer heat and joined several hundred other churchgoers for a picnic. The crowd consumed dozens of hot dogs and hamburgers, kids sat still long enough to have their faces painted and families laughed together in a shaded park pavilion as they listened to Christian music over a portable tape player.

By all external appearances, this was a normal church picnic -- except for the black and white faces sitting side by side.

The picnic purposefully brought together African American and white Christians from a variety of churches and denominations throughout Jackson for one simple reason: Christian unity.

The multi-church picnic is just one example of how Mission Mississippi is helping the state change these days in regard to racial matters. Three years ago, Mission Mississippi rallied across racial and denominational lines to launch a ministry committed to reconciliation. Local residents call the group's efforts nothing short of "radical."

Their vision of unity encourages black and white Christians to come together "so that the message of Christ can be better seen in our communities throughout Mississippi," according to Lee Paris, chairman of Mission Mississippi's state board of directors.

"Reconciliation and unity does not happen by rallies," says Jarvis Ward, Mission Mississippi's executive director, "but rather, by right relationships -- first people who are rightly related to the one living and true God through faith in Jesus Christ alone, and then to each other."

To help foster such relationships, Jarvis and his staff of volunteers organize a variety of creative gatherings throughout the year, including weekly prayer meetings at one of the 100-plus churches participating in Mission Mississippi, 50 percent of which are African American and 50 percent white, representing a dozen denominations.

Each Thursday morning, an average of 30 to 50 pastors, leaders and supporters gather for prayer, devotions, fellowship and breakfast. If participants miss the Thursday morning meeting, they are invited to a Friday morning prayer meeting at the Salvation Army headquarters.

"The first Thursday morning prayer breakfast was held May 6, 1993," says Portia McGehee, co-chair of the Mission Mississippi prayer committee. "Since that time, we have prayed in 50 locations. Alternating between black and white churches has been enriching."

In addition to the interracial prayer breakfasts, Mission Mississippi holds an annual citywide rally in Jackson. Last Oct. 18-19, for example, 6,000 Christians from throughout the state attended the third annual, worship- oriented Mission Mississippi Reconciliation Rally at the Mississippi Coliseum. Black pastor E.V. Hill of Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, called by Time magazine as "one of the most outstanding preachers in the United States," addressed the interracial crowd, along with Frank Pollard, pastor of Jackson's First Baptist Church.

The Baptist pastors shared messages focusing on grace and brotherly love. Pollard discussed how Christ's journey to the cross and his subsequent death are the key reasons how he can love his brother, E.V. Hill, as he did. "Our friendship is based on Christ and grounded in his love," Pollard said of his long friendship with Hill.

Hill's message centered on his early racist attitudes and how God removed his hatred of white people through the unconditional love of one man. "If God could break my heart, there is no person that God could not change," he said. Hill then called the audience to stand and repent of any racist attitudes they had ever had. Hundreds confessed their sin and accepted the challenge to meet with someone of another race on a regular basis.

The interracial Mission Mississippi Mass Choir sang at the rally, under the direction of a host of local choir leaders. Mississippi First Lady Pat Fordice even admonished the audience to stay involved in politics and to pray for their governmental leaders. "We cannot afford to lose this great nation," she said. "We must pray for God to heal our land."

Along with contemporary recording artist, Kathy Trocolli, motivational speaker Joseph Jennings, a former gang leader and drug addict, spoke to Jackson youth in local schools and at the rally services. "I understand the extremes of desperation induced by drugs, crime and illicit sex," said the 6-foot-11-inch, 280-pound Jennings who kept the attention of the teen-agers.

According to Gary Maze, Mission Mississippi youth committee chairman, more than 260 youth recorded decisions for Christ as a result of a featured youth night. Organizers are planning a similar reconciliation rally for youth and families next fall and each year after until, says Paris, "Mississippi is known for its love."

But annual rallies and weekly prayer meetings aren't the only thing Mission Mississippi is about. In addition to several interracial, multi-church picnics with free food and family entertainment, each Christmas participants are invited to their City Wide Christmas Party for food, music and fellowship. Throughout the year, supporters are encouraged to attend cross- denominational Bible studies as a part of the mission's efforts to promote racial harmony. They also are encouraged to go out to dinner with friends of a different race to help build relationships; consequently, a dozen local restaurants have even begun giving "Mission Mississippi" discounts.

Individual congregations also are challenged to build relationships across cultural lines. For instance, Cade Chapel Missionary Baptist Church, a predominantly African American church in inner-city Jackson, worshiped with Crossgates Baptist Church, a predominantly white church in Brandon, a suburb just outside of Jackson. The exchange was a natural event for the two pastors who had been meeting for lunch regularly during the past few years.

Horace Buckley, Cade Chapel's pastor, and Barry Clingan of Crossgates Baptist have been building a unique friendship in their common desire to see the body of Christ unite. Their churches' "Pulpit Swap" Sunday was sponsored by Mission Mississippi, and several other churches have followed suit. And last August, the Crossgates church made to a surprise offering Cade Chapel's building program.

The efforts of Mission Mississippi have so impressed local residents and political representatives that Mississippi Gov. Kirk Fordice even declared October as Mission Mississippi Month.

Local and national press coverage has highlighted Mission Mississippi's efforts perhaps, says Ward, because "a model is being built to be a blessing from Mississippi to the entire nation."

For this to take place, Christians must draw from that source, Jesus Christ, who "alone reconciles sinners to God and who has given to the church the 'ministry of reconciliation,'" Ward says, citing the words in Scripture from 2 Corinthians 5:19.

=======================

Kadlecek is a free-lance writer in Jackson, Miss., and is coauthor with John Perkins of "Resurrecting Hope: Powerful Stories of How God Is Moving to each Our Cities," published by Regal Books.

Copyright (c) 1996 Baptist Press RNbp6103mrjB6103c614r

AWAKENING TO THE POWER OF RACISM

Many South African Christians were deeply affected by the Soweto uprising of

1976. Among Baptists, a growing desire to ameliorate or change the

conditions of apartheid in society was not always accompanied by a dawning

awareness of the pervasive racism and inequity in the churches. For many

years Baptists had been divided along many racial and ethnic lines. In the

context of an increasingly intense and violent struggle to overthrow or to

defend apartheid, Baptists were unable to overcome this bitter legacy in

order to share a united witness to Jesus Christ with their neighbors. When

attempts to discuss a possible merger of the Baptist Union and the Baptist

Convention broke down in 1987, it became clear that something more powerful

than a merger was needed: not mere merger, but real healing and

reconciliation. "Not revision," as Hoffmeister put it some years later, "but

new vision."

CRISIS UPON CRISIS

In 1989, the Baptist Union Annual Assembly was held in a military barracks of

the South African Defense Force. In protest, Desmond Hoffmeister led a walk-

out; later that year he joined the Baptist Convention. An "Awareness

Campaign" among black and colored Baptists quickly followed, at which

Hoffmeister stated: "We have not lived THE TRUTH.... We have lived a lie and

have been part of the problem.... We are living in a land of blatant

racism.... Everybody who belongs to the Baptist Convention or the Baptist

Union has a part in the crisis."

THE NEED FOR TRUTH AND GRACE

Now the Republic of South Africa has abolished apartheid, elected Nelson

Mandela president in a free election, and embarked on the building of a new

nation. A "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" chaired by Archbishop Desmond

Tutu has provided an essential tool for this task as it has provided useful

information and the opportunity to confront the past face to face. Over the

past year, more than 10,000 victims of human rights abuses have testified and

some 6,000 perpetrators have requested amnesty, in exchange for telling the

truth. "Much pain and anguish was caused during the apartheid years when

people were separated on the basis of race," writes Terry Rae. "The Truth

and Reconciliation Commission, headed by Bishop Desmond Tutu and the Rev.

Alex Borain, has allowed people from both sides of the struggle, who have

suffered greatly, the opportunity of telling their story of facing those who

persecuted their families, who planted bombs and laid ambush during the

freedom struggle. It has been heart wrenching to watch.... The Truth and

Reconciliation Commission has allowed people to begin the healing process."

RESISTANCE AND PERSISTENCE IN THE CHURCH

It is not surprising that those seeking reconciliation and healing for the

Baptist churches have encountered resistance, denial; and bitter

disappointment along the way, and that every gain has exacted its price in

pain. Nevertheless, theirs is a story punctuated with joy and praise to God,

a story from which we can learn.

TIME, DETERMINATION, AND FAITH

Terrence Rae writes: "The Baptist Union and the Baptist Convention begin our

journey on the road to reconciliation, facing the sins of the past and moving

toward healing between our two bodies. Reconciliation... has already begun

between individuals on the leadership of both Union and Convention and needs

to... (reach)... all the pastors, leaders and members of our churches."

THE WHOLE BODY OF CHRIST

As Paul wrote so many years ago: "Just as the body is one and has many

members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is

with Christ.... If one member suffers, all, suffer together with it." (1

Corinthians 12)

In November of 1995, the Baptist World Alliance sent a reconciliation team to

South Africa. The team's presence in joint meetings of Union and Convention

leadership helped to uncover the many challenges, issues and differences in

perspective so that true dialogue could move forward. When these

conversations between the two Baptist bodies broke down last spring,

missionaries proposed a joint prayer conference, to which the parties

reluctantly came. That prayer meeting brought about a breakthrough in true

understanding and a renewed commitment to seek reconciliation. This was

quickly followed by the Kempton Park conference in which missionaries again

played a helpful role. Southern and American Baptists were among those

involved in these prayer conferences. On such a journey as this one,

companionship with others in the body of Christ is essential.

THE ROLE OF PRAYER

After the Kempton Park conference, Denton Lotz, General Secretary of the

Baptist World Alliance, made this observation: "The journey has begun because

brothers and sisters prayed together and studied, the word together ... they

are on the road with Christ who wants to guide our feet into the way of

peace! Baptists all over the world need to join in this journey, in their

own homes, churches, conventions and nations."

THE ROAD AHEAD

"God has begun a work and will bring it to completion," writes Terry Rae. He

recently identified these challenges and hopes for the future, as the Baptist

Union sees it:

1) Reconciliation and healing between individuals and groups where much

hurt has been caused by our division.

2) The opportunity to meet the desperate needs of people in our country.

3) The desperate need in a growing population for church planting and

church growth.

4) Evangelism: reaching people with the Gospel of Christ and seeking to

meet their social needs, that is, the love of Jesus proclaimed and

demonstrated.

5) The need to give women their proper place in society and the church,

where gifts and abilities given by God can be exercised freely.

"'Heal our nation' is our prayer and cry as we seek to proclaim Jesus Christ

as Lord."

"VISION JUBILEE 2010"

The Baptist Convention of South Africa has set a l5-year plan in motion for

establishing an Afro-centric, holistic witness to the Gospel. Education,

economic development, leadership training, empowerment, and responsibility

all play a role in the strengthening of the churches and the rebuilding of

the nation. Hoffmeister has described this vision as "a fundamental

restructuring and reorientation of Baptist witness in the South African

context." The renaming of the convention's "Baptist House of Studies" to

"Baptist Theological College of South Africa" symbolizes a rapid coming of

age for the convention. As the pastor who proposed the name change stated,

"No one wants to graduate from a house." Several economic development

projects are up and running. American Baptist missionaries Dan and CaSandra

Cole have been assisting the convention in pursuing this vision.

=================

ROOTS OF DIVISION

1820 Colonizers from Britain and Holland come to South Africa.

1877 British and German Baptists form the Baptist Union of Southern

Africa "to reach the Xhosas"

1927 South African Baptist Mission Society forms a Convention to reach

indigenous people; black churches later removed to form Bantu

Baptist Churches

1948 Apartheid adopted as official national policy; Baptist Union

protests.

1940-1970: Baptist churches formed a variety of groupings along ethnic

lines: 2 Indian groups; the Alliance (colored group, disbanded in

1969);

1970: Baptist Convention of South Africa (predominantly blacks)

REAPING THE WHIRLWIND

1976 Soweto Uprising.

1976 Liaison Council tries to break down effects of apartheid.

1978 Baptist Union (predominantly white) calls for Baptists of all races

to join the Union 1980's & 1990's: Repressive security measures

and human rights abuses increase.

1982 Baptist Convention leaders call for conversation with leaders of the

Baptist Union.

1987 Merger talks between the two Baptist bodies end in failure.

Baptist Union holds assembly in military barracks; Desmond

Hoffmeister leads a walkout in protest, and later joins the

Baptist Convention.

1990 First American Baptist missionary, Mildred Archie, appointed to

South Africa to work with Baptist Convention.

ROAD TO RECONCILIATION

1994 Apartheid abolished; Nelson Mandela freed and elected President of

South Africa

1995 Baptist World Alliance Friendship Tour includes joint meeting

with Baptist Convention and Baptist Union leaders.

1996 SPRING: Talks break down; Convention and Union leaders reach an

impasse.

SUMMER: Southern Baptist missionaries call for a prayer

conference. Convention and Union leadership gather,

reluctantly, at Wigwam in August; prayer meeting leads to a

breakthrough in dialogue. Follow-up meeting set for

November.

OCTOBER: Convention leadership brings a message of good will to

the Baptist Union Assembly.

NOVEMBER: Kempton Park Tembisa Conference results in the

drafting of a joint resolution and a renewed commitment to

seek a shared future.

DECEMBER: Baptist Union representatives' goodwill visit to the

Convention Assembly.

South African Baptists are determined to seek the future God has planned

for them.

#4215

*

"A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is out of harmony with the moral law."

It was with these very words, in his memorable Letter from the Birmingham Jail, that Martin Luther King, Jr., threw down the gauntlet in his great Civil Rights crusade. King refused to obey what he regarded as an immoral law that did not square with the law of God.

All across America today, millions of people are celebrating the birthday of this courageous man, and deservedly so. He was a fearless battler for truth, and all of us are in his debt because he remedied past wrongs and brought millions of Americans into the full riches of citizenship.

In schools and on courthouse steps, people will be quoting his "I Have a Dream" speech today. It is an elegant and powerful classic. But I would suggest that one of Dr. King's greatest accomplishments, one which will be little mentioned today because it has suddenly become "politically incorrect," is his advocacy of the true moral foundations of law.

King defended the transcendent source of the Law's authority. In doing so he took a conservative Christian view of law. In fact, he was perhaps the most eloquent advocate of this viewpoint in his time, as, interestingly, Justice Clarence Thomas may be today.

Writing from a jail cell, King declared that the code of justice is not man's law: It is God's law. Imagine a politician making such a comment today? We all remember the controversy that erupted weeks ago when George W. Bush made reference to his Christian faith in a televised national debate.

But the figure we celebrate today is a man who built his whole case on the argument, set forth by St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, that "An unjust law is no law at all." To be just, King argued, our laws must always reflect God's Law.

This is the great issue today in the public square: Is the law rooted in truth? Is it transcendent, immutable, and morally binding? Or is it, as liberal interpreters have suggested, simply what courts say it is? Do we discover the law, or do we create it?

Ever since Dr. King's day, the United States Supreme Court has been moving us step-by-step away from the positions of this great Civil Rights leader. To continue in this direction, as I have written, can only lead to disastrous consequences -- indeed, the loss of self-governing democracy.

So I would challenge each of us today to use this occasion to reflect not just on his great crusade for Civil Rights but also on his wisdom in bringing Law back to its moral foundations.

Many think of King as some kind of liberal firebrand, waging war on traditional values. Nothing could be further from the truth. Dr. King was a great conservative who stood on the shoulders of Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, striving without apology to restore our heritage of justice.

This is a story I tell in my book, How Now Shall We Live?: a great moment in history when a courageous man applied the law of God to the unjust laws of our time, and made a difference. And that is the lesson we should teach our kids on this holiday. It is not just another day off from school or a day to go to the mall.

Read through King's letter with you kids: It's the most important civics lesson they'll ever get.

___________________

Copyright (c) 2000 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

*

THE BIRTHDAY PRESENT

"I have a dream my four little children will one day live in a nation

where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the

content of their character..."

Martin Luther King Jr.

Editors' Note: This story was penned in 1969.

A week after my son started first grade, he came home with the news that Roger, the only African American in the class, was his playground partner. I swallowed and said, "That's nice. How long before someone else gets him for a partner?"

"Oh, I've got him for good," replied Bill.

In another week, I had news that Bill had asked if Roger could be his desk partner.

Unless you were born and reared in the Deep South, as I was, you cannot know what this means. I went for an appointment with the teacher. She met me with tired cynical eyes. "Well, I suppose you want a new desk partner for your child, too," she said. "Can you wait a few minutes? I have another mother coming in right now."

I looked up to see a woman my age. My heart raced as I realized she must be Roger's mother. She had a quiet dignity and much poise, but neither trait could cover the anxiety I heard in her questions: "How's Roger doing? I hope he is keeping up with the other children? If he isn't, just let me know."

She hesitated as she made herself ask, "Is he giving you any trouble of any kind? I mean, what with his having to change desks so much?" I felt the terrible tension in her, for she knew the answer. But I was proud of that first-grade teacher for her gentle reply: "No, Roger is not giving me any trouble. I try to move all the children around the first few weeks until each has just the right partner." I introduced myself and said that my son was to be Roger's new partner and I hoped they would like each other. Even then I knew it was only a surface wish, not a deep-felt one. But it helped her, I could see.

Twice Roger invited Bill to come home with him, but I found excuses. Then came the heartache that I will always suffer.

On my birthday Bill came home from school with a grimy piece of paper folded into a very small square. Unfolding it, I found three flowers and "Happy Birthday" crayoned on the paper and a nickel.

"That's from Roger," said Bill. "It's his milk money. When I said today was your birthday, he made me bring it to you. He said you are his friend, because you're the only mother who didn't make him get another desk partner."

__________________

By Mavis Burton Ferguson, from Chicken Soup for the Unsinkable Soul, by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen and Heather McNamara

Copyright 1999 by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen

*

"Oh, the worst of all tragedies is not to die young, but to live until I am seventy-five and yet not ever truly to have lived." -- Martin Luther King Jr.

=============================================

From 1929 to 1968 is only 39 short years.

Too short to gather the fruits of your labor

Too short to comfort your parents when your brother drowns

Too short to comfort your father when mother dies

Too short to see your children finish school

Too short to ever enjoy grandchildren

Too short to know retirement Thirty-nine years is just too short. From 1929 to 1968 is only 39 short years, yet it's

Too long to be crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination, it's

Too long to stand in the quicksand of racial injustices, it's

Too long to receive threatening phone calls, often at the rate of forty per day, it's

Too long to live under the sweltering heat of continuous pressure, it's

Too long, 39 years is just too long. From 1929 to 1968 is only 39 short years, yet it's

Long enough.

It's long enough to journey all the way to India to learn under a great teacher how to walk through angry crowds and keep cool.

It's long enough to be chased by police dogs and lashed by the rushing waters from the fireman's hoses because you are dramatizing the fact that justice has a way of eluding me and my brother.

It's long enough to spend many days in jail while protesting the plight of others.

It's long enough to have a bomb thrown into your home.

It's long enough to teach angry violent men to be still while you pray for the bombers.

It's long enough.

It's long enough to lead many men to Christianity.

It's long enough to know it's better to go to war for justice than to live in peace with injustices.

It's long enough to know that more appalling than bigotry and hatred are those who sit still and watch injustices each day in silence.

It's long enough to realize that injustices are undiscriminating and people of all races and creeds experience its cruel captivity sooner or later.

It's long enough.

It's long enough to know that when one uses civil disobedience for his civil rights, he does not break the laws of the Constitution of the United States of America - rather he seeks to uphold the principles all men are created equal; he seeks to break down local ordinances that have already broken the laws of the Constitution of the United States.

It's long enough.

It's long enough to accept invitations to speak to the nation's leaders.

It's long enough to address thousands of people on hundreds of different occasions.

It's long enough to lead 200,000 people to the nation's capital to dramatize that all of America's people are heirs to the property of rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It's long enough to enter college at 15.

It's long enough to finish and earn several degrees.

It's long enough to earn hundreds of awards.

It's long enough to marry and father four children.

It's long enough to become a drum major for peace.

It's long enough to earn a Nobel Peace Prize.

It's long enough to give the $54,000 prize money to the cause of justice.

It's long enough to visit the mountain top. It's certainly long enough to have a dream.

When we note how much Martin Luther King packed into 39 short years, we know it's long enough for any man who loves his country and his fellow man so much that life itself has no value - unless all men can sit at the table of brotherhood as brothers. Thirty-nine years is long enough - for any man to knowingly flirt with death each day of his life - because to spare himself heartaches and sorrow meant two steps backward for his brother tomorrow.

Martin lived for several centuries, all rolled into 39 short years. His memory will live forever. How wonderful it would be if we could all live as well.

Martin, like all others, would have welcomed longevity - yet when he weighed the facts, he said, "It's not how long a man lives, but how well he uses the time allotted him."

And so we salute and honor the memory of a man who lived in the confusion of injustice for all his too short, too long, long enough 39 years- "For He's Free At Last."

______________________

By Willa Perrier from A 2nd Helping of Chicken Soup for the Soul, Copyright 1995 by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen

There was great fanfare over the decision by Congress earlier this month [June 2021] to establish Juneteenth as a federal holiday. The president acknowledged that it was long overdue (and indeed, it was).

But many within the Black community lamented that the move was a symbol without substance; and as we approach the annual July 4th celebrations of America’s so-called “Independence Day,” that yawning gap between symbol and substance will be in sharp relief.

Much of the lament was focused on the fact that while Congress went to great parliamentary lengths to put Juneteenth on the books as a federal holiday, Congress has proved incapable of passing either of the two voting rights bills (For the People Act and the John Lewis bill) that have been before it for months now.

But July 4th presents us with an inconsistency that could be much simpler — (sarcastic) wink, wink — to resolve: Why are we celebrating two independence days in the same year, in fact, in the same 30 day period, in the same country?

This is where the reason for the symbol-without-substance quagmire becomes clear: We’re still struggling to figure out what unites us. No Congressperson in their right mind would have injected this question into the debate over Juneteenth because of the risk that it would have derailed smooth passage and turned that motion into the type of fight Congress once endured over the effort to establish Martin Luther King’s birthday as a national holiday.

But now that the noble deed is done, let’s confront the stark truth: One nation cannot have two independence days.

If you talk to people who grew up in Black communities throughout this country, they will tell you that most folks did not really celebrate July 4th. They focused their jubilation and commemoration on Juneteenth, because they understood that Black people in this country were not in any way liberated by the Declaration of Independence or the defeat of the Loyalists. In fact, our cause of freedom was better served by the very Brits who the colonists were set to defeat, as I pointed out in a column one year ago.

The T-shirts you may have seen earlier this month tell the story: Black people have been free-ish since 1865. The fight for full freedom still continues, and part of that battle will require us to go further and further down the road of reconsidering what dates and which “heroes” we celebrate as a united people.

Does anyone reading this still believe that July 4th has any credibility as a day to celebrate “independence?” Does anyone reading this really believe that marking the day that propertied white men decided to lay formal claim to founding a slaveholding republic on stolen land is worthy of national celebration?

I suppose some would insist, “It’s part of our heritage,” as the defenders of Confederate monuments have done. What we must admit is that the heritage it celebrates is our nation’s original sin that nearly broke this country apart before it could mark 100 years of union.

More than a dozen years before the first Juneteenth, Frederick Douglass indicted the nation with a straightforward question and a scathing answer: “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”

This is the true legacy of July 4th, “Independence Day” celebrations, and the reason why so many Black people celebrate Juneteenth instead of (and not in addition to) it. As Douglass stated concisely: “This Fourth (of) July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.” If the American people are really waking up to the sober truth of our history, then shouldn’t we all mourn? Shouldn’t we all declare that if this day was not for every American, then it really should not be celebrated by any American? That seems pretty American to me.

There will be those who will read this and suggest that I am engaging in the politics of division. But let us remember that truth never divides; it simply reveals. Then we have to make the decision — personally, and then collectively — about how we are going to respond to that truth. We can accept it, embrace it and try to come to terms with the changes we should make because of it. Or, we can deny it, reject it, rebuke it and then retreat to the dark corners of self-deception.

We decide whether or not to be united or divided by truth.

If it’s any consolation, I’ll still be singing along to Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to be an American,” next weekend just because I am a sucker for that song, and I grew up singing along to it while watching the Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular in New York City. But I know now that nobody who looked like me got free on that day. Our independence day has past.

So maybe as a nation, it’s time for us to pick (the right) independence day for all of us, and plot a new path forward together, as we strive to be one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

________

Paul Robeson Ford serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church (Highland Avenue) in Winston-Salem, N.C.

“I have a dream,” declared Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as he addressed a crowd of several hundred thousand gathered on the Mall around the Lincoln Memorial. The date was August 28, 1963, and America was a cauldron of social unrest.

Civil rights leaders had called for the March on Washington in order to force the nation to deal with the so-called “race problem.” As the event drew to a close, all eyes were on the final speaker. The crowd standing in Washington's sweltering heat waited for the man they knew would be the “closer” of the event.

Most Americans recognized the name, face, and voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. He had appeared on the nation's front pages and news broadcasts, having led major protests and movements in Montgomery, Birmingham, and other cities. And yet, King was an enigma to many white Americans. What would he say?

Interestingly, the most famous words of his speech were not included in his manuscript. King had arrived in Washington the day before and had prepared his speech in a room at the famous Willard Hotel. In “The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Speech That Inspired a Nation,” author Drew D. Hansen provides a parallel text of Dr. King's manuscript and his actual words. When he reached the pinnacle of his oratory, King simply departed from his prepared text and launched his speech into history.

“I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.”

Dr. King spoke of a dream “that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.” More personally, “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.”

In the midst of a nation torn by racial strife and social unrest, Dr. King painted an indelible picture of America as it could be and should be. His oratory was soaring, his imagery was vivid, and his cause was right. His cadences, inflections, and biblical allusions gave the speech its memorable structure. His powerful argument gave the speech its moral weight. The speech is as much a part of our national memory as Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

Speaking to a generation poised to reject the American dream as a lie, Dr. King challenged them to make it their own. He rejected claims that America could never be reformed or called to its moral senses.

We do well to look back to 1963 and remember the reality. In the South, Jim Crow laws enforced segregation. Separate motels, restaurants, schools, and water fountains marked the moral landscape. In the North, the absence of Jim Crow laws did not mean that the races were integrated. North and South, black and white Americans inhabited different worlds. African-Americans were routinely denied access to accommodations, higher education, and the voting booth.

Those standing on the nation's Mall that day could not have known that years of struggle, frustration, violence, and tragedy lay ahead. Observing America in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “I do not imagine that the white and black race will ever live in any country upon an equal footing. But I believe the difficulty to be still greater in the United States than elsewhere.” His words proved an understatement.

Obstructionists attempted to block racial progress at every turn. Some white Americans just could not abide the idea of racial equality and full integration. On the other hand, Stanford University professor Shelby Steele traces how many of the civil rights leaders traded moral consciousness for racial consciousness, and abandoned the vision of racial equality for identity politics.

Still, America is a very different nation now. Racial discrimination is prohibited by law. Statements of prejudice are now socially unthinkable and politically incorrect. Black America can now claim the nation's Secretary of State and the world's leading golfer. Poverty still holds many in its grip, but the majority of African-Americans are in the middle class. Nevertheless, much ground remains to be recovered.

Southern conservatives bear a special burden, especially as Christians. I was not yet four years old on August 28, 1963. I have no memory of hearing Dr. King deliver his famous address. A white boy raised in the South, I had not seen any black persons at close hand. I had seen black workers, field hands, and children, but all at a distance. I had no black friends, no black neighbors, and saw no black faces at school or at church. To the best of my knowledge, I attended segregated schools until the fifth grade.

Later, living in a major metropolitan area, I attended integrated middle high schools with hundreds of black students. I came to know black teenagers at school, work, Boy Scouts, and other activities. I considered several of these as friends, but I never really entered their lives. It now dawns on me that I have no idea where they may be living, or what they may be doing.

Now, I know many African-Americans as cherished friends and treasured colleagues. I cannot imagine a world in which this is not normal, nor can our children. But honesty compels me to admit that this is more because my black friends have entered my world, than that I have entered theirs.

Christians must begin with the affirmation that all human beings are equally created in the image of God. But we also realize that we are sinners, and sin is the fundamental problem on the issue of race. Sin is so interwoven in our lives and institutional structures that we often cannot even see it. The only real remedy for the problem of racial prejudice is the transforming power of the Lord Jesus Christ. His atonement for sin is the only cure, and the only real picture of true racial reconciliation is that found in Revelation 7:9-12, where we read of the redeemed people of God as “a great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation and all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the Lamb.” The Lamb will make us one.

There is much work to do. We struggle in a fallen world until Jesus comes. By God's grace, we know that real progress is possible and that we are accountable. The church must show the world that the new community of Jesus is called to demonstrate His glory in calling us together.

August 28, 1963 seems like a very long time ago. We still do not know what to do with Martin Luther King, Jr. He was a complex person, and the cracks in his personal character have become more evident over time. We admire his courage and the clarity of his conviction, even as we are troubled by his flirtations with liberal theology. We simply do not know what he may have done or how he would have led, had he not been assassinated in 1968. We cannot fully enter into the mind of any man -- much less a man who died nearly four decades ago.

This much is clear. When Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke that day from the Lincoln Memorial, he demonstrated true moral courage and spoke as a prophet. His dream was the right dream. His dream must be our dream. Our response to that dream reveals the true content of our character.

_____________

R. Albert Mohler Jr. is president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. This column first appeared in his weblog at www.Crosswalk.com.

*

[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #19122]

A Chinese man and a Jewish man were eating together. Suddenly, without warning the Jew gets up, walks over to the Chinese fellow and smashes him in the mouth, sending him sprawling. The Chinese man picks himself up, rubs his jaw and asks, “What in the world did you do that for?” And the answer comes back: “For Pearl Harbor!”

His response is total astonishment: “Pearl Harbor? I didn't have anything to with Pearl Harbor. It was the Japanese that bombed Pearl Harbor!” The Jew responds, “Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese -- they're all the same to me.

With that they both sit down again, and before too long the Chinese man gets up, walks over to the Jew and sends him flying with a hard slap to the jaw. The Jew yells out, “What did you do that for?” And the answer comes back: “The Titanic.”

“The Titanic? Why, I didn't have anything to do with the Titanic!”

Whereupon the Chinese man replies, “Goldberg, Feinberg, Iceberg -- they're all the same to me!”

Volume 24, No. 24 June 20, 1999

Cross Fire

~~~~~~~~~~~~

In June 1866, six veterans of the defeated Confederate

army met at a law office in Pulaski, Tennessee and the Ku

Klux Klan was born out of ruin and resentment.

What began as nothing more than a social club soon took

on ominous overtones when the members attracted a growing

following and began riding the countryside at night,

covering themselves in sheets and shame. To frighten

newly-freed slaves, hooded Klansmen pretended to be the

ghosts of Confederate dead. There was little violence at

first, but that soon changed.

Wrapping hatred in a perverted sense of piety,

patriotism and racial superiority, the KKK began its

infamous cross burning ritual in 1915, always accompanied by

the playing of Amazing Grace. In a typical cermony held not

long ago, a Klan leader intoned, "Out of darkness came the

light. But the whole world does not understand the plan.

We are for the white race, the white race only... One light

became many lights, the eternal light. The eternal light is

the KKK."

As the cross burned, he led a zealous cheer: "For God,

for the white race, for our children -- white power!"

All of this calls to mind the spiritual battle that

rages around and within us. We are the freshly-freed

slaves, loosed from the shackles of sin and the bondage of

self by the emancipation act played out on the coarse cross

of Calvary. The Liar who resents our liberty seeks to put

us back in our place by sending his servants garbed in the

guise of ghosts from our past. They haunt us with fears that

our former lives will never stay buried. Anxious about what

was, and what might be, we find ourselves caught in the

spiritual crossfire. Sometimes just the threat of harm is

enough to scare us off. Other times, the attacks upon us

are real.

If Satan can't re-enslave us with insecurity, he'll use

the opposite tactic and appeal to our pride. We must be

especially vigilant that we're not deluded into twisting the

message of the Cross by claiming exclusive rights to its

power and glory, relying on the amazing grace of Christ but

denying it to anyone who isn't just like us. When our rites

and righteousness replace His giving and forgiveness, we

don't illuminate the Cross with our lives, we light it, in a

blaze of pride and prejudice that dishonours God and

deceives our children. The arrogance of "right" supremacy

is the spiritual equivalent of white supremacy and just as

evil. But there's hope.

Yes, racism and resentment are alive today across the

continent. But KKK membership -- officially, at least --

has shrunk from the 3 million of 1922 to less than 5,000

today. On the Pulaski building where the Klan was founded,

a plaque marks the occasion. But the owner has turned the

plate over so its inscription cannot be read. So, too, the

ranks of the rancorous are dwindling. One day the Owner of

the church will overturn the shameful legacy of spiritual

pride and lovelessness and its message will be reversed

forever.

-- by Rick Gamble, published in Cross Current, Brantford,

Ontario, Canada. Publish at will.

When Oklahoma State Sen. Gene Stipe and civil rights activist Wade Watts walked into a restaurant in the late 1950s, a waitress confronted them at the door and told Watts, an African American, that the restaurant did not serve Negroes.

With a smile, Watts replied, “I don't eat Negroes. I just came to get some ham and eggs.”

Not amused, the waitress refused to seat Watts.

As the two Oklahomans walked out the door, Stipe turned to Watts and asked, “Wade, if God gave you one wish, what would that wish be?”

Watts was silent for a long time. He finally said, “Gene, if the Good Lord was to grant me one wish, I believe I'd wish to meet the leader of the Ku Klux Klan.”

A strange wish for a black man to want to meet someone who's thrust was to create an all-white world.

But what happened after Watts got his wish was even stranger.

A ROUGH START

The story begins with a young boy named Johnny Lee Clary whose father filled him with prejudice against blacks.

The young Clary lived in an unstable home in Del City, Oklahoma -- his father was an alcoholic, and his mother cheated on his father. Even worse, his father committed suicide in front of Clary, firing a .45-caliber pistol to his head. Later, abused by his stepfather, Clary was sent to live with his sister in California. Things were so bad there that Clary, then 14, was considering suicide. But his outlook changed after tuning in to a television program that had David Duke, grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, repeating the hate Clary had heard from his father.

Clary sent for information and was visited by a Klansman, who emphasized that the Klan was a Christian organization. This connected with Clary; he had accepted Jesus as his Savior as a boy of 9 at Carter Park Baptist Church in Del City but had not grown in his knowledge or relationship with Christ.

The Klansman told Clary that God meant the races to be separate and never intended blacks and whites to live together on the same continent. “What he was doing was twisting the Bible around,” Clary recalled. “But I immediately joined the Klan, and during the next 16 years worked my way up the ladder to the Klan's top national position of grand wizard.”

A CONFRONTATION

Watts, who served for 16 years as leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Oklahoma, got his wish to meet the leader of the KKK when he debated Clary on an Oklahoma City radio station in the 1970s. Watts was a target of the Klan, and Clary said he called Watts “every name in the book,” but Watts always responded with “God bless you, son; Jesus loves you.”

Clary and Watts were leaving the radio station, when the Klansman met Watts' wife and their half-black, half-white adopted baby girl in the lobby. “Watts turned to me and said, 'Just look at this baby. How can you hate her?'“

“When I looked into that baby's eyes,” Clary admitted, “I knew I could never hate her.”

THE ENCOUNTER

Shortly thereafter, Clary began to feel that something was missing in his life. He began to realize the KKK talk about Christianity, their claims that their beliefs were based on the Bible, was “a bunch of garbage.”

“When they started talking about a white revolution and starting race riots, I knew I couldn't go along with that philosophy,” he said.

Clary again reached a point of thinking about taking his life, but he had a life-changing encounter with the truth. He saw a Bible on a table and remembered the happiest times of his life were the years he spent at Carter Park Baptist Church.

“I picked up the Bible and began looking at it, thinking I should pray and ask Jesus for forgiveness and rededicate my life to him,” Clary said. “I don't believe it is a coincidence that the first place I turned to was Luke 15, the story of the Prodigal Son. As I began to read, I realized that no matter what I had done, the Lord had never left me nor forsaken me.”

After praying for forgiveness, “I felt like 1,000 pounds had been lifted off my shoulders.

“I wouldn't tell you all the hate and prejudice left right then because hatred is a learned response just like love is,” Clary explained. “I had to learn to do something I had never done. I had to get into God's Word and find out what it has to say about love.”

A CHANGED LIFE

In a miraculous turn of events, God called Clary to preach in 1991.

“I asked the Lord what I should do, and he put it in my mind to call Wade Watts,” Clary recounted.

“When I asked Watts if he remembered 'John Clary', he said, 'Remember you, son? I've been praying for you for years.'“

Clary told Watts his prayers had been answered, how in 1989 he had resigned from the Klan and gotten his heart right with God, and how he had decided to serve the Lord the rest of his life.

Watts asked Clary if he had preached anywhere yet. When Clary said no, Watts invited Clary to do him the honor of preaching in Watts' all-black church.

When he asked Watts for directions to the church, Clary said Watts replied, “You ought to know. You tried to burn it down!”

(The KKK targeted Watts' church for burning, twice, because Watts spearheaded the civil rights movement in Oklahoma.)

“Watts loved all people,” Clary reflected. “His philosophy was if you want to play beautiful music, you have to play the white and black keys together. The Klan hated that because they believed in a separate society. Watts was powerful, and we thought by burning his church, making hate calls and threatening his family, we could shut him up. But it didn't work. His voice was heard, just like the voice of freedom will always be heard.”

At the end of Clary's first-ever sermon, a girl about 15 years old came down the aisle during the invitation at Watts' McAlester, Okla., church.

“She was crying and said she wanted to know this same Jesus I knew,” Clary said. “Then I heard someone else crying, and saw Watts getting to his feet.

“'Johnny Lee,' he said, 'You remember that little baby I showed you when we debated years ago at that radio station, and I asked you how you could hate the baby? Johnny Lee, that's that baby.'

“I just froze,” Clary said. “I thought there was something familiar about those eyes.”

Watts had 13 children and four of them still had not been saved when Clary came to preach that morning. After “that baby” made her decision, the other three unsaved children came forward to make professions of faith in Jesus.

“Rev. Watts hugged me and said, 'Who would have ever believed God would take an old Ku Klux Klansman, have me pray for him all these years, and he would come down here and lead my unsaved kids to the Lord?'“ Clary said. “That day, a friendship was born between two men who can truly call each other brother.”

KEEPING THE DREAM ALIVE

On Dec. 16, 1998, Clary joined Sen. Gene Stipe and Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating in giving eulogies at the funeral of Watts, who had died three days earlier at the age of 79.

Hundreds of black people at the funeral gave Clary a standing ovation as he walked to the microphone, where he related a conversation he had with Watts the day before his death.

Clary recounted that Watts told him he had been a longtime friend of Martin Luther King Jr., and when King was killed, his friends said, “They killed the man, but they aren't going to kill the dream. Dr. King had a dream that one day black children, white children, Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Gentiles would all be able to join hands and sing 'Free at Last.'“

Clary continued to share Watts' last words: “After they killed Dr. King, we got together with other civil rights leaders to keep the dream alive. I did what I could. I called you here today because my evening sun is sinking fast, and this old race is done. I gotta go, but I couldn't think of a better person to take this ministry than you. In the Bible, there was Elijah and Elisha. Elijah taught Elisha everything he knew, and when Elijah got ready to go, he passed it on to Elisha and Elisha went on to do even greater things than Elijah did. So I'm going to hand it to you.”

“He held out his hand which was shaking, and put it in my hand and said, 'Johnny, I want you to promise me that you'll keep the dream alive and promise you'll fight racism until the setting of your sun.’ I squeezed his hand, looking down at the black hand and the white hand together, and I said, 'I promise. I'll keep it alive.'“

EPILOG

After Clary left the room, Watts' daughters came in and found their father saying, “Thank you, sir, thank you.”

The daughters asked whom he was talking to, and Watts said, “I'm talking to Jesus. He was standing right here. He said, 'Wade, the race is over. In my Father's house are many mansions. I've gone and prepared a place for you that where I am you can be there too. I want you to say goodbye to your children. I'm coming back to get you tonight.'“

Just then a nurse walked into Watts' room, asking what he wanted for breakfast the next day. Watts said, “Honey, it don't matter what you bring me for breakfast. I won't be here to eat it. I'm having breakfast with Jesus in the morning.”

With that, Watts closed his eyes. The next morning, a message flashed across the screen on CNN News, “Former civil rights activist Wade Watts passes away at the age of 79.”

*

[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #11636]

“You're a good boy,” the genteel 92-year-old woman said with just a trace of weariness in her voice as she smiled gently and patted her bus driver on the hand. It was the end of a long summer day her group had spent touring Oregon's Willamette Valley farmlands.

The driver's jaw twitched, but he let the unintended insult pass. He hadn't heard her speak earlier of moving to the West from her native North Carolina in the early 1920s, but he didn't need to. In his early 60s, the bus driver was old enough to remember when it was commonplace to call even elderly men “boy” -- if they were of African descent.

Until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, and even more recently, it was commonly thought that people of African ancestry reached the extent of their intellectual capabilities by the time they were 12 to 15. Men were called “boy” and women, “Missy” -- either to ridicule or to remind them of their once-subservient role and the needed to be cared for.

Michael Laney, now associate professor of telecommunications and director of the Lee University's communication & the arts department in Cleveland, Tenn., wanted to take the “college prep” academic track in high school. His guidance counselor told him he couldn't, that genetically he didn't have the mental capacity for college. The year: 1974.

People of African descent also were thought to have just a thin veneer of civilization, behind which was an unbridled jungle savagery that knew neither right nor wrong, but only “I want, I take,” according to a physician's 1865 book that touted the supremacy of the white race.

Women were said to lose all interest in their offspring once they were weaned, the book said, in the same way that a bird shoves its offspring out of the nest and expects it to learn on the way down how to fly. What might a woman be capable of, if she didn't care more than that for her own child?

During the early 1980s, a young woman from Montana lived off-campus while a student at Oklahoma Baptist University. She invited a friend over to study for an exam. A scant minute after the friend left, a knock was heard on the door.

It was the 75-year-old landlady, trembling with fear. She'd been watching the apartment the whole time from behind her kitchen curtain, she said. She made her tenant promise to never again bring a “colored” person on the property.

“You just never know what they'll do,” she said, her voice shaking.

“But she's just a girl,” the student protested.

“She probably has brothers,” the landlady said. “I know you don't understand. You didn't live through that time. We were all afraid for our lives.”

There doesn't seem to be much historical evidence to support a white woman's fear of people of African descent, but J.H. Van Evrie, a physician, postulated a reason for it in the 1865 book, “White Supremacy and Negro Subordination.”

“The negro, forced from his normal condition [inferior to white] and into unnatural relation to the white man [equality], must relapse into his African habits,” Van Evrie wrote, at which time “civilization itself will utterly perish, and the great heart of the continent be surrendered to African savagism!”

In other words, beyond protecting their womenfolk from what they saw as the barely restrained sensuality of men with an African ancestry, and seeking retribution for the unwarranted and ill-founded demands for equality that had “caused” the Civil War and the South's abject defeat, some whites felt the need to protect the nation from their fears of anarchy and destruction.

They did so from the 1860s to the 1960s. They did so with a series of segregationist laws, racist social customs, and burning crosses designed to keep people of African descent feeling inferior, afraid and “in their place.”

Between 1918 and 1921, “racial hatred had escalated into open warfare between American blacks and whites, but it was a war that Negroes could never win,” wrote Tim Madigan in a penetrating series on racism that appeared in the Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram last October. “Whole communities of blacks in Chicago, East St. Louis, Mo., Tulsa, Okla., and other places were overrun and occasionally obliterated by marauding whites.

“Across the South, hundreds of blacks were strung up -- some in the Army uniforms they had worn during World War I -- for crimes usually more imagined than real,” Madigan continued. “The worst atrocities tended to happen in the Deep South - 1,633 lynchings [between 1900 and 1921] -- 1,258 of them against blacks.”

It was the lynching of veterans after World War II, and the blinding and crippling of others, that galvanized President Harry S. Truman in 1946 to establish a civil rights committee that laid the groundwork for Truman in 1948 to formally integrate the military and the federal civil service.

Michael Gardner, in “Harry Truman and Civil Rights: Moral Courage and Political Risks,” recounted that the president wrote to his attorney general, Tom Clark, in September 1946 to ask about an incident in South Carolina where a “negro Sergeant, who had been discharged from the Army just three hours, was taken off the bus and not only seriously beaten but his eyes deliberately put out, and the Mayor of the town had bragged about committing this outrage.”

The sheriff was arrested at the attorney general's instruction and, within two months, brought to trial, where the sheriff admitted using excessive force on the uniformed vet that resulted in one eye being gouged out and the other too damaged to use. An all-white jury deliberated 30 minutes and found the sheriff not guilty.

“Their history as a nation within a nation left most black people with both a deep sense of alienation from the society of their birth and an intense longing for full and equal citizenship,” wrote Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin in “America Divided.” “They demanded equality under the law -- to be judged as individuals and not as members of a minority race.”

A few pages later, Isserman and Kazin noted that “most white southerners had always treated black people as their social inferiors and saw no reason to change. ... When greeting a white person, black southerners were expected to avert their eyes. ... A large number of fiercely guarded prohibitions and exclusions defined the Jim Crow order. Whites and blacks were not supposed to drink or dine together, in private homes or in restaurants. They did not attend the same schools or churches or live in the same neighborhoods. Public toilets and drinking fountains were restricted by race. And in nearly every industry, there were strict lines dividing 'white' jobs from 'black' ones.”

How did all this get started?

First there was slavery -- more than 250 years of it; at least 14 generations of it.

As early as the 1660s, laws were written that restricted the liberty of slaves. The 1776 Declaration of Independence -- that all men are created equal -- apparently did not include slaves because slavery was legal in each of the 13 founding states.

Slaves were considered property, valued in Article I of the U.S. Constitution at three-fifths the worth of a citizen, for taxation purposes. The Constitution became the law of the land in 1788.

Countless books have been written on the innumerable indignities heaped on people of African descent who lived and worked and suffered beatings and family breakups at the whims of their masters. But worse times were coming.

“[F]rom 1820 down to the time of the Civil War nearly one out of every two people in the Black Belt -- Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana -- was slave,” wrote Leslie Howard Owens in “This Species of Property.” “In South Carolina in 1850, 57.6 percent of the total population was slave.”

Just as Pharaoh in the Bible turned the whole of his government against the growing Israelite “problem,” so the U.S. legal system was used in the 1800s. In 1857, the Supreme Court, in the Dred Scott case, ruled that Americans of African descent -- whether slave or free -- were not citizens and did not have civil rights protected by the U.S. Constitution.

Abraham Lincoln was elected president three years later. Over the following five months, 11 southern states left the Union. The first shots of the Civil War rang out in April 1861 at Fort Sumter, S.C.

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation -- announced after a major Union victory -- was hailed as a watershed for the abolition of slavery but had no real effect as it was directed at states “in rebellion” (over which he had no control) and specifically did not free slaves in southern territory held by the Union army.

Congress passed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution banning slavery. The amendment became law in December 1865, eight months after Lincoln's assassination and the Confederate army's surrender.

Then came Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 which, that same year, was underscored by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution prohibiting states from depriving citizens of their rights. The 15th Amendment in 1869 protected voting rights of all citizens.

But even as lawmakers codified a social order that had radically changed seemingly overnight, people struggled to live in it. What was proper? What was expeditious? What was tolerable?

“African Americans enjoyed a period when they were allowed to vote, actively participate in the political process, acquire the land of former owners, seek their own employment, and use public accommodations,” according to African American Odyssey's website. “Opponents of this progress, however, soon rallied against the former slaves' freedom....

“The vote proved elusive and civil rights began to vanish through court action,” the website continues. “Lynching, racial violence, and slavery's twin children -- peonage and sharecropping -- arose as deadly quagmires on the path to full citizenship. After Reconstruction ended in 1877, the federal government virtually turned a deaf ear to the voice of the African American populace.”

The civil rights of people of African descent were systematically removed through one court action after another.

African Americans were expected to “know their place” and not be “uppity.” Separate water fountains, restaurants, hotels, significantly lower wages, ridicule and disrespect were the norm. Eye contact could trigger a beating, rape or worse.

“A century of systematic racial exclusion and discrimination, and disfranchisement in the South, followed nearly 250 years of slavery,” wrote Michael Keith Honey in “African-American Workers Remember,” published in 1999.

The “system” also relegated African Americans to “their own” churches, some of which became prominent, including Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., from which Martin Luther King Jr. rose to national prominence during the 1950s and '60s.

The us/them separation of the races was not only convenient and comfortable -- for some whites, anyway -- it was the law. In 1896 the U.S. Supreme Court legitimized the principle of “separate but equal” with its Plessey V. Ferguson decision regarding separate rail car accommodations.

The Supreme Court took that a step further with their 1899 decision that affirmed Anglo-only schools without requiring comparable schools for African Americans.

Regardless of society's restrictions, care and concern for African Americans was expressed repeatedly in resolutions and reports during various SBC annual meetings.

“In my travels over the Southern Baptist Convention I have talked with many leaders, Caucasian and colored, and all agree that the best way for us to help the Negroes is for us to help train their leaders who can do far more with their own people than we can do for them,” wrote Guy Bellamy in 1951 in his Report on Negro Work, which was part of the then-Home Mission Board's report to the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention.

“Their own people” is a particularly repugnant phrase to people of African descent today, said James Coffee, a Southern Baptist pastor in Santa Rosa, Calif., who keeps his congregation and his community focused on reconciliation of blacks and whites. To blacks, inherent in the concept of “separate” is “you're not good enough to be included,” he explained.

The us/them way of whites relating to blacks came to a head in 1995 at the 150th anniversary celebration of the Southern Baptist Convention's founding. Two years in the development, a formal apology was made by the SBC to African Americans for the denomination “condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our lifetime.”

Baptist Press, in a June 21, 1995, article, noted, “The resolution is not the first stance against racism adopted by the SBC, the most recent being 1989, but it is the first to address African Americans specifically and the first to confront the slavery issue in the SBC's history.”

More than the apology, it was the response of the messengers at the SBC the following year to a report on the arson burnings of numerous black churches that got the attention of African American congregations across the nation.

“There was a spontaneous response from the convention floor that netted more than $700,000 for the arson fund,” said Sid Smith, the Florida Baptist Convention's director of African American ministries. “It represents a genuine outpouring of concern and care.

“I think we're moving in the right direction and that, to me, is the valuable thing that we need to capture, recognize and share with people rather than the problems of racism,” Smith said. “We know they still exist in some places and with some people, but to me the encouraging part of the story is that we are making progress, and that's the good news.”

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Shakespeare, Melville, Chaucer and Dickens may be on the way out in San Francisco, where school board officials are considering a proposal that up to 70 percent of school reading should be books by “authors of color”.

San Francisco Board of Education officials said Tuesday the proposed change would force high school teachers to select up to seven books by non-white authors for every three traditional classics by white writers.

“Most of us feel this is long overdue,” said board member Steve Phillips, co-author of the multicultural initiative due for a final vote on March 24.

Phillips said the proposal was aimed at making schoolwork more “relevant” to young people in San Francisco's public schools, where whites make up only 11.8 percent of the student body.

“We recognize that public education has been failing African-American and Latino students,” Phillips said. “Part of the reason is that the curriculum is not engaging them. Students get more interested in reading and language when they see themselves in the curriculum.”

Other board members said the proposal would address a number of problems with traditional high school reading lists, which they said perpetuated outdated concepts.

“Mark Twain's 'Huckleberry Finn,' for instance, has a bias against African Americans,” board member Dan Kelly told the San Francisco Examiner. “And Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales,' while a great work, has an economic bias. It characterizes people based on their class.”

The Examiner said the measure appeared to have the necessary votes for approval, and is supported by the Board of Education president.

If passed, the school superintendent would issue a list of “appropriate” books developed by a curriculum committee of teachers, administrators and parents.

Some teachers oppose the plan, however, saying it would put their students at a disadvantage when competing against traditionally-educated young people.

Denise Chandler, chair of the English Department at George Washington High School, attacked the proposal as “silly, offensive and ridiculous,” the Examiner said.

“Quality literature doesn't glorify Europe or any other geographical place; it explores the human condition,” Chandler said.

REUTERS@

Malcolm X is a very controversial figure. Born into a Christian family, he committed crimes and ended up in jail. There he discovered the faith of the Black Muslims. Black Muslims taught that all whites are devils and Malcolm X had no trouble accepting this - he despised whites and advocated the violent overthrow of our racist society. Toward the end of his life, Malcolm X began to change; his religious beliefs grew closer to mainstream Islam. A pilgrimage to Mecca played a significant part in this. During this journey he wrote about his experiences:

Never have I witnessed such sincere hospitality and overwhelming spirit of true brotherhood as is practiced by people of all colors and races here in this ancient Holy Land. There were tens of thousands of pilgrims, from all over the world. They were of all colors, from blue-eyed blondes to black-skinned Africans. But we were all displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and non-white. America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem.

Here in the Muslim world, I have eaten from the same plate, drunk from the same glass, and slept on the same rug - while praying to the same God - with fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the blondest of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white. And in the words and in the deeds of the white Muslims, I felt the same sincerity that I felt among the black African Muslims of Nigeria, Sudan and Ghana.

We were truly all the same (brothers) - because their belief in one God had removed the white from their minds, the white from their behavior, and the white from their attitude. With racism plaguing America like an incurable cancer, the so-called 'Christian' white American heart should be more receptive to a proven solution to such a destructive problem.

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Was Malcolm X correct? Every American Christian needs to pay attention to his rebuke.

Southern Baptist “Top Gun” Richard Toliver found freedom in the cockpit, from which he had dodged missiles and anti-aircraft fire while flying 446 combat missions in Southeast Asia during his twenty-six-year Air Force career. He also battled racism.

Toliver’s idyllic childhood was spent in multi-racial California — ”paradise,” as he remembers it — during the early 1940s. He dreamed of flying airplanes like those that flew overhead from nearby Oxnard Naval Training Base. That dream shattered when his family returned to his segregated birthplace in the South after wartime jobs ended.

“I hated the next ten years living in the South,” Toliver told SBC Life. “I was trapped in a prison. Everywhere there were barriers of poverty, color, hopelessness, despair, and vicious name-calling.”

Today, Toliver at eighty-two years old has held key positions at Apollo Baptist Church, an SBC congregation in Glendale, Arizona. He also is president of the local chapter of the Tuskegee Airmen, active in the Red River Valley Fighter Pilots Association, and a nationally known motivational speaker.

In his nearly five-hundred-page memoir — An Uncaged Eagle: True Freedom — Toliver gives credit to the many people who encouraged him throughout his life. He writes of his courageous mother, family relatives, and a white man who was a “ray of light” in the darkness of racism. That man provided Toliver, a Black high school graduate, with a scholarship to study at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, now University. There he met and learned from the Tuskegee Airmen who broke the military’s color barrier in World War II, who “inspired, motivated, and prepared” Toliver for an Air Force career, he said. Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., fellow Air Force officers, and in the 1990s, presidential candidate Ross Perot were others who impacted Toliver’s life.

More than anyone else apart from God, Toliver credits his wife Peggy’s Christian life for his success. Married fifty-eight years, she dazzled Toliver and the Air Force community with her gracious attitude, warmth, and servant’s attitude while successfully parenting the family’s three biological and five fostered or adopted children.

Toliver’s disciplined character and Peggy’s background as an educator and stalwart Christian kept their children on the right path, the retired colonel said. They were also aided by Peggy’s mom, Elsie Hairston, who lived with the Tolivers for twenty-seven years after his father-in-law died.

“The most important part of my life’s experience was discovering that God is in control of everything,” Toliver said. “He allowed me to become all that I am today.”

After years of putting God off and making “deals” he failed to keep, Toliver had what he calls a “Damascus Road” experience at high altitude in clear air. The F-15 he was piloting was struck by lightning. After safely landing the crippled jet, Toliver heard a voice that said, “How long are you going to keep up this charade? How long are you going to refuse to settle your debt with me?”

Toliver wrestled with those questions over the next few days. “Even the family dog avoided me!” he said. He found himself spiritually and mentally on trial. There was a “Prosecutor,” who listed even his sins from childhood and declared him “guilty.” However, an abiding “Presence” stood in Toliver’s defense, and “the hand of Jesus reached down and grasped my outstretched hands,” Toliver writes of his gripping salvation experience in his book.

Toliver, the first fully qualified African American F-15 pilot and successful in hundreds of combat missions, once acquired the nickname “Black Baron.” This was in deference to the acclaimed German “Red Baron” of WWI. After Toliver’s conversion, others started using “Preacher” as his call sign as a recognition of the pilot’s frequent scripture-based remarks and lifestyle void of previous colorful language and behavior.

Working out his salvation took much longer than his initial capitulation to Christ, Toliver said. He had to deal with the incessant anger that burned within him whenever faced with adversity, setbacks, and real or perceived racism. “I was committed to allowing the Lord to guide my path, but ‘self’ kept getting in the way,” he said.

Through Bible study and prayer, Toliver eventually came to realize that achieving success in the Air Force had become an idol for him. Ultimately it was in the person-by-person forgiving of people who had wronged him that Toliver first glimpsed true freedom. He had to forgive his father for leaving his mother with six children to struggle for themselves in the Deep South. Next it was his brother-in-law for his mistreatment of Toliver’s sister.

“Only then did the healing begin for past hurts caused by racial prejudice, slights, disappointments, and other emotional barriers,” Toliver wrote. “I finally found my freedom. The cage of despair had to be opened from the inside, and the path to freedom was through the door of forgiveness.”

After hearing a base chaplain preach that parents needed to allow Jesus Christ to be the perfect model for their children, Toliver called his family together. He told them he was flawed, and they needed to look to Jesus as their example. “A tremendous burden was lifted from my shoulders,” he said after his family reiterated their love for him even though they recognized he was not perfect.

Toliver retired from the Air Force in 1988, four years after being promoted to Colonel. Consulting jobs led to political activism, which in time resulted in being introduced to Ross Perot, the U.S. presidential candidate for the Reform Party in 1996. In Perot’s introduction to Toliver’s book, the billionaire wrote, “Dick spent his formative years overcoming incredible obstacles during some of the most challenging racial times of the Deep South. ... His personal struggle and eventual freedom serve as a roadmap for anyone who feels trapped by life’s circumstances.” Toliver’s bottom line: “True freedom ... enables us to act selflessly, forgive all injuries, love unconditionally and humbly serve without expectation of rewards. It is the spiritual state that reaches the very presence of our Creator.”

There has been an ongoing attempt in our culture to look at human nature apart from any transcendent accountability. Once that feeling of alienation from God is etched upon our consciences, we are alienated not only from God, but even from our fellow human beings and, ultimately, from ourselves.

I don't know how many of you heard the great tennis player Arthur Ashe interviewed when it first became public knowledge that he had contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion. He was one of my favorites. Tragically, Ashe had felt the sting of racism throughout his life. This mild-mannered gentleman looked into the eyes of the reporters and said, "As painful as it is to know that I have this dreaded disease, nothing could be as painful as the rejection I have endured all my life because of racial prejudice."

Think of the agony encased in those words. Think about it. That a man so respected, so talented, so gentlemanly could express such pain endured over a lifetime of personal rejection because of someone else's capacity to hate. That is very sobering. As we look across the globe today, there are few things as deeply volatile as this issue - the tragedy and the hell of bigotry and racism. The pain of rejection by reason of birth alone is one of the deepest pains a person can ever experience.

In our day we have tried to do away with prejudice apart from God, seeking solutions by rewriting laws, by reeducating ourselves. Yet, who among us can say that we have succeeded in eliminating the victimization of people? If anything, our society constantly stands at the brink of conflict as violence erupts suddenly if there is even a hint of discriminatory judgment.

I am convinced that all our attempts to change laws and to reeducate people are merely Band-Aid solutions for a fatal hemorrhage. The system will never change because our starting point is flawed. The secular view of man can neither give the grandeur that God can give, nor can it see the evil within the human heart that God alone can reveal and cure. Naturalism implicitly denudes each individual of the grand image that God has imprinted upon his creation.

You see, if we can acknowledge that God is the author of life, then we lose any claim we may have made to superiority. If we can acknowledge that there is evil in our hearts, then God can transform us through His Son. If we want to right our social situation, we must start vertically with God.

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Copyright © 2002 Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM). Reprinted with permission. "A Slice of Infinity" is a radio ministry of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

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Not long after the recent terrorist attacks, bricks came flying through the window of an Islamic bookstore in Alexandria, Virginia. Ugly, racist notes were attached.

The next day, fifteen bouquets of flowers arrived for the store's manager, a Palestinian immigrant. An anonymous well-wisher paid for a new window. Local ministers and a rabbi came to offer support.

We've seen the same loving response to hate all over the country. For every brick thrown, an avalanche of love has been poured out on our Muslim neighbors.

To many it's an illustration of how well America's experiment in democracy is working. We're showing the world that, by and large, citizens of different faiths and backgrounds can live together in harmony. The great ideological brawls of the past century are over and American ideals have triumphed over tyranny.

But, Princeton philosopher Robert George warns, if we're not careful, tyranny might still win out.

More than any other form of government, democracy defends the fundamental moral equality of citizens. In his new book, THE CLASH OF ORTHODOXIES, George reminds us that this moral equality is not automatic: It is achieved only when all submit to the moral law.

When the institutions of a democracy are manipulated in such a way that we lose the meaning of "right," they no longer can assure human dignity. And when this happens, George notes, democracy's institutions "become mechanisms of injustice and oppression, thus defying the moral law" to which they are subject.

Christianity is not alone in teaching this. People of all faiths and no faith believe that a nation's law must bow to universal standards of justice.

It's a tragic irony that democratic institutions can and do devolve into tools of oppression. America's history is pockmarked by court decisions that trampled fundamental human rights -- often in the name of protecting them. It happened 150 years ago, when the Supreme Court held that blacks were non-persons, and twenty-eight years ago, when the Supreme Court decreed that mothers could murder their unborn children. More recently, federal courts have tossed out laws prohibiting physician-assisted suicide.

Through these decisions, the courts betrayed the principle of equal worth and dignity that forms the moral linchpin of democracy. As George puts it, democracies degenerate into tyrannies when their laws expose "the weakest and most vulnerable members of the community ... to private lethal violence or other forms of oppression."

Such laws cannot, and should not, bind the conscience of all citizens. Disobedience to an unjust law is obedience to God, Augustine argued.

Americans are justly proud of how we treat neighbors who don't share our faith. We're proud that our values are copied around the world. But the sobering truth is that our democracy is vulnerable whenever our institutions, especially the courts, ignore the moral law. If we want to keep our democracy, we must reassert the case for moral truth. ...

No democracy can survive unless it is willing to preserve the common good -- by protecting fundamental human rights.

For more information:

Robert George, THE CLASH OF ORTHODOXIES (Intercollegiate Studies Inst., 2001).

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Copyright © 2001 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. 'BreakPoint with Chuck Colson' is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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I love the story of the fellow that walked into a bookstore, approached the lady manager and asked if she could tell him where the book, “Man, the Superior Sex,” was located. She smilingly said, “Yes, it’s upstairs in the Science Fiction Department.”

As soon as all of us clearly understand that there is no superior sex, that there is no superior race, we will have laid the foundation for building winning relationships with all people everywhere. To begin with, the five people who have had the most impact on my life were all women. Think what I would have missed out on had I been sexist! Three Native Americans had a huge impact on my life — one on my sales career, one on my speaking career, and yet another on my spiritual walk. An elderly black lady who spent the weekend in our home on July 4, 1972, is the reason I am a Christian today. My closest friend for the last 35 years is a Jew. My beautiful daughter-in-law is from Campeche, Mexico. Our Director of Training and International Operations is from India. I shudder to think what I would have missed out on had I been racist!

According to the Department of Labor, 46% of all the people who voluntarily leave their jobs do so because they do not feel respected and appreciated. Reality says that we treat people like we see them, and if you have a tendency to look down on someone, or if you internally feel that you are better than another in any way, don’t think for one moment that the other person does not know that. As a result, these are the ones who voluntarily leave their jobs.

In our tight labor market, when good help is difficult to come by, to lose a valuable employee for this reason is not only morally reprehensible but it is also financially quite expensive. To replace that individual requires advertising, interviewing, testing and then bringing that new employee up to speed-when it all could have been avoided simply by having the right attitude and respect towards his or her predecessor.

There is a new book out entitled “One Blood.” It’s a fascinating book. The authors report that it has been validated through DNA that Eve really is the mother of us all, so that individual you’re working with-regardless of his or her color, ethnic origin or background-is truly a “blood brother.” This is confirmed in the Scriptures. Acts 17:26 (NKJ) says this: “And he has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined at their pre-appointed times the boundaries of their dwellings.” Neither the original King James Version, nor the New King James Version, uses the word “race” in reference to the differences in people in the entire Bible.

All of this to say that I truly hope in the days, weeks and months ahead we will put behind us Darwin’s incredible theory of evolution in which he described the “survival of the fittest,” clearly indicating that he was racist. Many scholars today believe that our ongoing racial problems have escalated because of this erroneous belief. Personally, as I’ve already indicated, my life and the lives of my family have all been enriched by virtue of the fact that we are all one blood, and we treat each other accordingly.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright's theology generated much controversy during the 2008 presidential campaign. Rev. Wright has raised questions that go far beyond the political campaign. Specifically, he is a proponent of black liberation theology, a radical movement that emerged some 40 years ago.

One of the founders of black liberation theology is a mentor of Rev. Wright. He is James Cone, author of a 1969 book titled BLACK THEOLOGY AND BLACK POWER. The book presents Jesus as a liberator who identified with poor and oppressed peoples. Cone links the Christian faith with the African-American struggle for full equality.

Among Cone’s more radical teachings: God is against white people. My friend Mike Gerson, the columnist, quotes Cone as saying, “Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy.” Jesus, Cone declares, did not come for all, but only for the poor and the oppressed.

Clearly, these beliefs are inconsistent with biblical teaching. Jesus was concerned, of course, about the rights of the oppressed, but He also made it clear that the Good News is for everybody — male and female, Jew and Gentile, and even the Roman soldiers who nailed Him to the cross.

I had always written off black liberation theology as a movement embraced only by isolated radicals. You can imagine how surprised I was to read in the New York Times this week that perhaps a quarter of all black pastors are followers of this movement.

Black liberation theology parallels the liberation theology within the Catholic Church. A few years ago, many believed that the impoverished masses of Latin America would embrace liberation theology with its Marxist promises of justice and redistribution of wealth. But the people wanted none of it. Why not? Because their governments had become so corrupt that they would not put their trust in them.

What South Americans chose instead, as I write in my book THE FAITH, was a reinvigorated faith in Christ, orthodox Bible-preaching churches. Women love this because they saw the results: Their husbands came home to be with their families at night instead of hanging out in bars. The Church spread.

It is hard for me to believe the New York Times is correct about all this. But if it is, I hope African-American leaders will recognize liberation theology for what it is: Marxism that failed everywhere it has been tried; and a theology that brings about not reconciliation, but further alienation.

Now, as a white man, I obviously cannot understand all the feelings in the black community. But having worked in the prisons with so many African-Americans and with so many black pastors over 30 years, I do have some appreciation for the anger and resentment they feel over America’s treatment of their ancestors and of them — rightly so. But their hope should be in the orthodox Gospel, not a chimera like liberation theology.

If the Times is correct, this is sad and frightening news. Black liberation theology is no more than secular liberalism once again invading the Church — and, like all such movements, it will only end up betraying its followers.

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Copyright (c) 2008 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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