Grace heals racism from the inside*

Historians tell us that two of the most significant moral and spiritual events of this country were the freeing of slaves in the 1860s, and the civil rights movement exactly a hundred years later. We live in a land where the oppression of other people is recognized as being wrong and unacceptable, because some brave leaders had the courage to stand against it until it was defeated.

Having been raised in the old Jim Crow South, racism was so much a part of my young life that it took years for me to notice how ugly it was, and how demeaning it was for both black and white. Some of my father’s relatives had membership in the KKK, and they tried to get him to join. “Why didn’t you?” I once asked him. He said that he “just didn’t feel like it.” It was the only answer he ever gave me.

I had a religious conversion in my teenage years, and after a time in the military I entered a college for the purpose of learning the Bible and theology. The college was in Birmingham. It was the mid-sixties. Our way of life was changing right before us, and there was much resistance. You know the story- people who just wanted to be treated as equals were beaten bloody with sticks; the police knocked them down with water from the fire hoses; police dogs mercilessly attacked helpless people. Many who had done no wrong except stand up for their own dignity were put in jail. One Sunday morning on Sixteenth Street four little girls went to Sunday school and never came back alive, because of a bomb that had been planted in their church.

Looking back at those times, I wish so much that I had been different. I would like to be able to say that I had been there, standing with my brothers as they marched against oppression and inequality. I wish that I had sung with them, encouraged them, and suffered with them. It would be nice to know that I had at least spoken up to try to stop the hatred and the violence. After all, I was in Birmingham at the same time, and these events were happening less than two miles away from me. And I was there to try to learn the ways of the Lord! But I did not stand up, and I don’t personally know anybody who did. Not one of our teachers or “ministers of the Word” had anything to say, except to tell us to “stay out of it”, “mind our own business”, and to have nothing to do with these “agitators” who had come to our city.

According to popular opinion at the time, the policemen with their dogs and clubs and fire hoses were not the agitators. It was not the angry racists throwing rocks and setting bombs who were the agitators. It was the people who simply wanted equal treatment under the law who were called agitators. Why, they were doing such terrible things! They wanted to sit at the same lunch counters, drink from the same fountains, sit wherever they could find a seat on a public bus, and to be able to vote. How horrible they were! So our Christian ministers told us to stay away from such “troublemakers.”

I find it strange that I never felt guilty about my non-involvement in this conflict. As years went by, elements of racism continued to be a part of my life, even as I preached sermons and did church work. I sincerely prayed and worked and served, never realizing how hypocritical was my entire way of life.

Fast-forward (please!) to a single day when I bought two books that soon changed my entire way of thinking forever. Little did I know how graceless my soul had been until that day. The two books were not actually books about racism or social issues at all. They were books about the grace of God. One was “The Ragamuffin Gospel” by Brennan Manning. The other book was “What’s So Amazing About Grace?” by Philip Yancey.

I promise you that I did not “enjoy” the books when I first read them. I cried like a baby through every chapter. For the first time in my life I saw what grace was really about - how extreme, unreasonable, radical, and wonderful it is! Reading those two books, I finally saw the truth of how undeserving I was, and am, and always shall be. All of my pride, any sense of worthiness or righteousness of my own was obliterated forever. I saw myself as so much worse than I had ever imagined that I was, and at the same time I realized that somehow I was loved completely and unconditionally.

As I thought upon the truths of grace, I began to think back on the years when we white Americans felt some sense of “superiority”, and it sickened me. It literally made me physically ill. Disgusted and ashamed, I prayed for and found forgiveness.

Not long ago, I participated in a march to honor those who back in the sixties had stood for grace, non-violence, and freedom from oppression. The newspapers reported that I was there to “atone” for my past. They were wrong. I can’t atone for anything!

But I can be a different kind of man, if only because of grace.