01 - Russell Moore - Black and White and Red All Over Why Racial Justice Is a Gospel Issue

good afternoon my name is Russell Moore and I'd like to call our attention to the word of the Living God in Gospel of Matthew chapter 23 Matthew 23 and could we begin reading with verse 29 and read on down through verse 39 Matthew 23 29 to 39 and would you please join me in standing out of reverence for the word of the Living God Holy Spirit says through the mouth of Jesus woe to you scribes and Pharisees hypocrites for you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous saying if we had lived in the days of our fathers we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets thus you witness against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets fill up them the full measure of your father's you serpents you brood of vipers how are you to escape being sentenced to hell therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes some of whom you will kill and crucify some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town so that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth from the blood of righteous abel to the blood of zechariah the son of berechiah whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar truly I say to you all of these things will come upon this generation o Jerusalem Jerusalem the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it how often I would have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings and you were not willing see your house is left to you desolate for I tell you you will not see me again until you say blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord may God bless his word to us today you may be seated there's a wreath at the Lorraine Motel I have no doubt of that there probably many wreaths of flowers and arrangements that are being placed at the Lorraine Motel today tomorrow and the rest of this week and that's a beautiful thing because those flowers signify that a nation remembers this week one of the greatest Americans an American prophet a half-century after his assassination right here in this city those wreaths and arrangements can be misleading though because dr. Martin Luther King jr. preached a beloved community but he was not a beloved preacher in an awful lot of communities as a matter of fact it's all too easy for us to think right now that the hatred directed toward dr. King and his message was limited to that bullet that that felled him at the Lorraine Motel but that's not the case dr. king came into Memphis embattled he was here because sanitation workers were existing under unsafe conditions and unjust working conditions he had been speaking out on the Vietnam War and and other issues in American life and even some of his own allies thought he was going too fast confusing issues by speaking to too much and some of his allies thought he was going too slow in speaking of non-violence and speaking of love and among white Americans the approval rating for Martin Luther King jr. 50 years ago were just below that of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and what of the evangelical movement black evangelicals stood largely with dr. King but the power structure of white evangelicalism did not as a matter of fact those you white evangelical leaders who stood up and said the message that dr. King is preaching and teaching is just and right weathered withering criticism when my predecessors JD Wetherspoon info' Valentine stood up and said very simply that all human beings are created in the image of God and that the system of Jim Crow is an offense in the eyes of God there was backlash against them letters were sent in one Louisiana Baptist lay leader wrote in and warned that if the Commission quote did not cease its sinister maneuvers against southern traditions we can repeal the Commission itself at the local level by being less cooperative with our cooperative program in quote when Southern Seminary invited dr. King to preach in Chapel Baptist churches embargoed donations dr. Duke McCall who was president of Southern Seminary at the time recalled that after dr. King preached that he heard of a Baptist layman a member of the First Baptist Church of Dothan Alabama at the time who was raising $50,000 for a mass mailing to all Southern Baptist Convention churches to fire dr. Duke McCall as president dr. McCall said to the layman that's a stupid thing to do just give me $25,000 and I'll resign you can have it and historian Charles Marsh writes about his father who was a pastor who talked about how all of the official statements that would come out of the denominational entities would often hit a roadblock at the at the local level and he said this is what happens in churches he's it's an easy thing to summarize what it's like in the life of a local congregation because he says this if you are a Baptist preacher and you want to be successful you better size up the people quickly if they want aqua colored carpet instead of the standard maroon you'll take a sudden liking for aqua if they root for Ole Miss over the Crimson Tide you'll not want to say too much about your fondness for Bear Bryant and if they want you to keep quiet about Negroes you'll put a lid on your uneasy conscience and no bishop or presbyter will come to your defense the local church is free to do its own thing governed by the contingencies of race class and custom by whatever idiosyncrasies prevail in the 1960s Congregational polity turned out to be the southern way of life baptized by immersion input this is exactly what dr. King was talking about when he was writing from Birmingham jail to Christian evangelical pastors who were saying go slow don't say too much don't expect too much don't go too fast and dr. King says as I stand here in the Bible Belt I see steeples everywhere and as he said when I look at those steeples over and over again I have found myself asking what kind of people worship here who is their God where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett dripped with the words of interposition and nullification where were they when governor Wallace gave a clarion call for defiance and hatred where were their voices of support when bruised and weary negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest dr. King looked at the steeples and wondered who is their God and where is their voice and now there are wreaths at the Lorraine Motel and in many ways we are here bringing a kind of wreath to the Lorraine Motel honoring the life and legacy of dr. King and yet that is a dangerous thing for us to do because often we can fool ourselves into believing that somehow history itself will take care of problems of racial and justice that somehow inevitably these things will work themselves out that's the reason why sometimes when we see a Charlottesville when we see a church arson sometimes we will say it's 2018 as though 2018 itself can solve this injustice and pastors sometimes can address issues of human dignity and fellowship and unity together and yet when congregations start to change inevitably those pastors will often have people saying to them we're leaving because we just don't feel at home pastors and leaders can address racism as long as it is undefined enough to be interpreted only as external hostility in the heart but the minute one starts to speak of the shooting of unarmed black young men or the minute that one begins to speak of the rise of nativism around the world the mood changes we remember the name of Martin Luther King but how many remember the names of the sanitation workers who were crushed death here whose death precipitated the strike that brought him to Memphis we know the name of Martin Luther King but how many of us remember the names of those little girls who were blown apart by a bomb in Birmingham we know that there were pastors who were fired for saying that churches should not be segregated and yet many of those churches still are it's not permissible to say so without someone saying that the pastor is getting too political or that the pastor is not political enough so here we are still in a broken world still in an unjust society still in a splintered and segregated Church and there are wreaths at the Lorraine Motel and as we stand here we hear hard words from Jesus and Jesus here speaks of two things that ought to be very familiar to any follower of Jesus Christ and those two things are repentance and faith notice first of all that Jesus here speaking to the religious leaders says the problem is that you come and you decorate the tombs of the prophets he says you come and you recognize Jeremiah and you recognize Isaiah and you recognize Samuel and you recognize Ezekiel and you recognize Elijah and yet the reason that you are so comfortably able to honor them is because they cannot speak to you any longer [Applause] you honor them because they don't disrupt the power that you have or the social order that you have this is why this is so significantly important brothers and sisters we have been given the gospel of Jesus Christ that is to come against the voice of the serpent that has said to us from almost the very beginning you shall not surely die the gospel says otherwise but if someone stands up and begins to speak to the depth of the sin and the wickedness and the injustice that is present in issues racism there are going to be some who will say why don't you stick to preaching gospel and why are you speaking to something that is social or something that is political brothers and sisters you should recognize that because that is the response that will come in some way or other when you preach about any sin whatever idol I want to protect whatever sin I want to cherish my response is going to be how dare you meddle in my life living in a time when you can quote dr. King's I have a dream speech in commercials to shell to sell flavored fizzy water non-controversial and yet at the root of all of that there is a deep hypocrisy because Jesus is reminding the religious leaders that God hears and God sees God heard the size of his people when they were in bondage under Pharaoh and what Jesus recognizes what dr. King was pointing to is that there is something awful that happens to the conscience of a person who is able to sing oh how I love Jesus and then rapes enslaved women there is something awful that happens to a conscience that is able to sing Amazing Grace how sweet the sound and then to quip enslaved men the just penalty the scripture says for such sin and such injustice is hell and as rabbi Abraham Heschel who marched with dr. King said it is sad to be a slave of Pharaoh but it is horrible to be Pharaoh in the antebellum era the churches debated the issue of slavery but as many have pointed out they often acted as though the problem was the debate over slavery rather than slavery itself and those who would stand up and say this is an injustice in the sight of God were often told don't be divisive you want to maintain unity and as one abolitionist preacher said in the years living up to the Civil War they call for unity is often a call to keep us unified in our sin but the issues of racial injustice are about the goddness God and the humanists of humanity Jesus says you honor the prophets and yet what the prophets said to you was from God and the prophets told the people of God that they could not serve bail and God bail the fertility God existed to prop up the status quo to bring prosperity to the people on their own terms the God of Abraham and the god of Isaac and the God of Jacob though is not a useful God he is Lord and yet time and time and time again when told they could not serve both the people of God tragically often chose to worship Bale but to rename him God and time and time again in the white American Bible Belt the people of God had to choose between Jesus Christ and Jim Crow because you cannot serve both and tragically many often chose to serve Jim Crow and to rename him Jesus Christ but the signs that were in this city 50 years ago I am a man sit a double message that's true at both ends I am a man I am created in the image of God I am bearing the dignity that comes with an image bearer of God I am not invisible I am not disposable but those signs also point out to those who are looking on you are just a man you are just a human being you are not a god you are a creature Jesus says this is a dangerous place to be because he says religious leaders you're able to come here to these tombs and to these monuments and say if I had lived in the days of my father's I would not have murdered them as my father's did your father's Jesus says would not have minded the prophets either if the prophets were dead your fathers would not have minded the prophets either if the prophets would not speak and now that there is no need to worry that they will say anything else it is easy to honor them Martin Luther King is relatively non-controversial in American life because Martin Luther King has not been speaking for 50 years it is easy to look backward and to say if I had been here I would have listened to dr. King even though I do not listen to what is happening around me in my own community in my own neighborhood in my own church [Applause] but Jesus Christ is not dead anymore dr. King 50 years ago this week stood up and said I have read somewhere constitutional guarantees in the Declaration of Independence that says that all men are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights and you are not living up to what you say you believe that is true of America it is even more true of the Church of Jesus Christ why did people not listen to the message that was coming about the injustice is all around them it's because of a herd mentality no one wants to be expelled from one's tribe no one wants to go against the stream and when we are silent in a world like this where sanitation workers are still imperiled where african-american young men are shot so often that we're not even shocked by it anymore and we see it on the news most people don't say the n-word too polite for that most people's bedsheets don't have eye holes in them too civilized for that most people don't March with Confederate battle flags but what we do want to do is to retreat to the merely personal and to save only we would be more polite to one another this would go away this is not a skin problem this is a sin problem and if we simply only talk about vague generalities about Christian Brotherhood that somehow this will just automatically disciple people together and yet we as people who have a Bible ought to be those who understand that the personal and the systemic go together Josef's brothers cannot claim that they are innocent because they acted together in a group and what is Jesus's reaction he says what is happening around you is judgment not that you are headed toward judgment but you are in judgment because God is giving you over to who you really are because God sees the blood of Abel when Cain says I don't know who you're talking about I don't know where he is am I my brother's keeper all the way over to the blood of Zechariah who is murdered Jesus says between the altar and the temple desecrating the holy place of God the call that Jesus continually gives to his church is take up your cross and follow me and so when we live in a world of racial and justice when we live in a world of hatred and bigotry the answer is not to rebrand but to repent sometimes we will say if only we could have multi-ethnic churches the church is multi-ethnic the church is headed right now by a middle-eastern homeless man so why is American evangelicalism so white and middle-class why are we not cultivating the future why are we not bearing one another's burdens it's because the American evangelical movement needs to be more evangelistic yes but the American evangelical movement also needs to be more evangelized Jesus speaks and he says why are you seeking to avoid this why do we rightly pay attention when someone who's not with us when someone is is with us when it comes to justice issues that we care about but when it comes to issues that affect our black and brown brothers and sisters in Christ white evangelicals why do we say that doesn't matter why is it the case that we have in church after church after church young evangelical Christians who are having a crisis of faith it is because they are wondering if we really believe what we preach and teach and sing all the time the answer to that is not just more manifestos the answer to that is not just more gatherings the answer to that is the kind of lament that comes from a people who are able to say Oh God we do not know what to do but eyes are on you we are willing to confess where we stand here and to ask you by your spirit to raise up leadership to move us forward but that repentance that Jesus calls us to if it leads only to despair will lead to more sin Ezekiel said that the people of God who were left behind in Jerusalem were able to say well God has left us God has left us so he doesn't see the idols that we put up in the temple if there is despair without hope this breeds more sin more injustice more wickedness dr. King said that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice he was not talking about inevitability he was talking about hope and he was speaking to consciences this is what it can look like this is what the future can be this is the kind of repentant person you can be if we lament together if we weep together if we recognize that in American evangelicalism we so often like to think of ourselves as courageous culture warriors we can boast that we're battling the culture but what happens when we're fighting God answer Jesus says its glory Jesus says you will not hear from me again Jerusalem until you say blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord I would have gathered you as a hen gathers her chicks you would not come but Jesus speaks to a future when God is putting all things back together Jesus will build his church and his church will be a sign to the principalities and powers of the reconciliation that comes through the blood of Jesus Christ that will happen the question is whether that will happen with us and that I don't know God does not need an American evangelical movement God does not need a Southern Baptist Convention God does not need a Presbyterian Church in America God does not need a gospel coalition all of these things are good and right so far as they are lined up with the purposes of God but even if they do not God is building his church look at what's happening in Africa look at what's happening in Asia Aslan is on the move the question is whether we will join ourselves to what God is doing in the world as the people who have enough faith to say blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord which means we recognize him as Lord which means we cannot say we want your blessing God but don't disturb us too much we want your blessing God but don't change our order of worship we want your blessing God but don't change our institutions of power we want your blessing God but don't change our systems we instead say God is doing something and we want to join him in that so we gather and say the one who has spoken to us in Jerusalem in the first century is the one who will return to Jerusalem in triumph and power and we want to be on his side and that's through the cross if you really speak about issues racial injustice racial unity you will be unpopular the Apostle Paul is unpopular in Galatia but he says I did not yield to them for a moment to those who would change the gospel why so that the gospel would be preserved for you sometimes your ability to preach the gospel in the long run means that in the short run your exiled into a muddy well or in the short run your fleeing into the desert from a hab or in the short run your sawing in to by the powers that be or in the short run your shot death on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel but are you able to look beyond your ministry right now and see those who will be asking in the future did you really believe the Word of God that came to you were you really looking for the people that Jesus says God cares and God knows were you able to look beyond your comfort of the moment to be able to see the cross where justice and peace meet together where justice and love meet together were you able to see the glory there such that in the cross of the crucified Christ and in the building out of his church you are able to say mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord a crucified glory of Jesus who bore the curse for us so why then can we treat lightly sins for which Jesus died why can we not respond in repentance and faith in freedom we're free to love each other or free to listen to each other we're free to be led by one another we're free to serve one another we're free to be the Church of Jesus Christ and if we have to change our worship styles let's crucify our worship styles if God's Way upsets our political alliances let's crucify our political alliances to be a gospel people means that we don't seek cheap reconciliation but a cross reconciliation it means that as gospel people we will have conscience --is alive we will have conscience --is that are alive listening to the people that some would tell us ought to be invisible to be a gospel people means that we will grown at the wreckage of a fallen world around us at the ways that even in our own Souls and our own hearts we decorate the tombs of the prophets while convincing ourselves well if I had been there I wouldn't have been the kind of people who would silence the prophets though we cried God have mercy cleanse from sin forgive sin but also make me whole Martin Luther King has been dead for 50 years his message still speaks though and even more importantly the gospel still saves though the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward Jesus humanity is still hurtling toward health but the cross is still the power of God unto salvation the tomb in Jerusalem is conspicuously empty the eastern skies will one day erupt with glory the Church of Jesus Christ will one day be whole [Applause] the gospel is alive God is at work but for now there are wreaths at the Lorraine Motel [Applause] you

Channel: Jono Brooks

Views: 9,541

Rating: 4.3000002 out of 5

Keywords: 2018 Conference, Together for the Gospel, TGC, MLK50

Id: qUoEIP4mgFw

Length: 35min 27sec (2127 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 14 2018