For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) and find out what pleases the Lord. Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. It is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. But everything exposed by the light becomes visible—and everything that is illuminated becomes a light. This is why it is said:
“Wake up, sleeper,
Rise from the dead,
And Christ will shine on you.”
Ephesians 5:8-14
Well, here we are again.
If you enjoy cognitive dissonance, 2021 has been spectacular.
If you thrive on the weaponization of ideas, you might feel full of purpose and vision and ready to do battle.
If you are afraid that your way of life is under siege, you might feel ready to stand and fight.
If you feel hopeless and overwhelmed and struggle to make sense of it all, you are in good company.
THERE IS SO MUCH NOISE.
What is true? What is good? Where are the goalposts right now? Whose team am I on? How do I know I’m not being duped?
Last night I had the chance to be part of a group that fielded some really big and complex questions from many of the amazing, beloved students of our valley. I was encouraged by how many kids are wanting to learn how to discern what God’s voice sounds like, among all the competing voices of the world. I’m excited that they are eager to learn how to know what is true and what is not. I sense the same hunger exists in so many of us as adults, but we struggle to find places to hash it out and seek to find what is most true.
Instead we’ve become siloed off and settled into camps where we have to figure out who our enemy is because the stakes feel so high. Unfortunately we often forget (me included!) that our enemy is NOT flesh and blood.
The amount of contempt and hate that has fomented toward the “other” lately has been seriously disheartening.
One area that I’m seeing this in the church, is in the slamming of people as “woke”. This is used as a pejorative in attempt to write someone off as having sold out to liberal politics and perhaps departing from the true Gospel.
I just can’t square this.
A brief excerpt from Wikipedia to help put “woke” into context:
FiveThirtyEight's Perry Bacon Jr. writes that as of 2021, woke is mainly a pejorative used by centrists and conservatives to denote progressive politics that emphasize race or identity, often alongside the idea that critics of "woke" ideas are the victims of cancel culture.[69] Bacon connects this "anti-woke posture" to the Republican Party's longstanding promotion of backlash politics, such as white backlash and conservative backlash in response to political gains by African Americans and changing cultural norms respectively.”
So I see that, and I understand how that language is weaponized in politics and culture.
But in the Church?
“Wake up, sleeper,
Rise from the dead,
And Christ will shine on you.”
When I read scripture, the common theme seems to be that the light of Christ is the great revealer. When darkness is revealed, we have some options. If we have been part of the darkness, we can allow the kindness of God to lead us to repentance. Or we can start projecting blame onto other people and making up new names for darkness that make it appear to not be sin.
For example, here is an excerpt explaining how a Christian in the time of American slavery was able to make the biblical case for it:
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Fuller’s Fatal Flaw
But Fuller’s fatal flaw was not finally his bad hermeneutic. It was his bad theology. He failed to see his black brothers and sisters as divine image-bearers. He commended himself for educating his slaves, giving them good medical care, and keeping them well fed. But he saw them all as fundamentally inferior to whites like himself. Because of his racism, Fuller believed he had a moral right to be a slaveholder.
Mark Noll assesses the situation correctly: “It was acceptance of black racial inferiority that defended American slavery by appeal to Scripture.” In other words, appealing to the faulty biblical hermeneutic of men like Fuller misses the point: their biblical exegesis masked their racist hearts.
Fuller wasn’t alone.
Presbyterian theologian James Henley Thornwell believed, without biblical warrant, that God separated the Africans into a different class, a lower class of people. It was their inferior status that made their enslavement, in his eyes, “normal.”
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Full article here: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/how-and-why-did-some-christians-defend-slavery/
Just as in the time of slavery and a Christian apologetic attempting to prop up an institution that denigrated Image Bearers of God, we have a modern movement of the Church that attempts to use flawed hermeneutics in an attempt to silence the cries of the oppressed who are still saying “Something’s not right!”
Like Fuller, is our biblical exegesis masking our racist hearts?
We have some choices:
- We can weaponize and demonize and set up camps and decide who has bad theology/ideology and then write them off as “woke”
- We can tap out because this is is hard territory to navigate and it’s too mentally and emotionally expensive.
- We can respond to the invitation of Jesus to wake from our sleep and become a light.
Option 1 is easy and we can find ample support and even co-mingle with political causes that are not of the church in order to build our sense urgency and militancy
Option 2 is also easy and completely understandable and if you land there, just keep following Jesus and listening to scripture and the Holy Spirit, and he will move you where He wants you to go. The church is a body, we don’t all have the same function, and there is great freedom and flourishing in each of us doing the thing God has called us to do.
Option 3 is hard. Darkness hates light. If you put your life, your voice, your reputation, and your very body in the position of being infused with the light of Jesus and casting that light into the world, the darkness will not go quietly.
Whichever of these options we go with, my plea is this: be less concerned with preserving your own life and way of life, and be more concerned with following Jesus all the way to the cross and laying your life down for others, as He did. If this makes you “woke” so be it.
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