The (Im)partial Church : Episode 12 | The Bigger Problem
February 05, 2023
This episode highlights the gap between God's love of all people and our own relative unwillingness to champion the needs of minority groups. We look to Scripture as our precedent and explore what God's Word says about His character and how to reflect it. If this conversation inspires further questions feel free to reach out to us at theimpartialchurch@lhm.org.
The (Im)partial Church
Episode 02-02-12
Rev. Dr. Gerard Bolling: Hey, everybody. How are you doing? Janine, how are you? How are things with you?
Professor Janine Bolling: I'm good. As you know, I just celebrated my birthday. I'm a woman of a certain age now. So yeah, yeah.
Gerard: Yeah. And Janine celebrated in Miami.
Janine:(singing)
Gerard:(singing)
Janine: Yo. I'm on a birthday high.
Gerard: Was it really hot?
Janine: I was on the floor. I was melting. So that was a good experience.
Gerard: Yeah. I was waiting for my birthday invite. It never came. So it's interesting. Maybe the mail system was off. Never received an invite.
Janine: Okay.
Gerard: Did send a gift. Did send a gift. So anyway, last episode was our first episode after a bit of a break, everybody, and we talked about the format for the new season. We delved into Scripture. We talked about how God sees His people for who they are and reveals His heart for His people. It was a good episode.
Janine: It was. It was. We introduced everybody to some research that we'll be exploring this whole season with our friends at Barna. And we also discovered some unsettling realities that are present in the church today.
Gerard: Yeah.
Janine: While practicing Christians believe that the church has a major role to play in improving race relations, when surveyed, almost the same number of Christians felt unmotivated to address the issue themselves.
Gerard: Not to mention, between 2019 and 2020, the portion of Christians who felt unmotivated increased by 13 percent.
Janine: Ooh.
Gerard: I know.
Janine: Wow!
Gerard: That's not good. It's not good.
Janine: Wow!
Gerard: If you're like me and you pay attention to the podcast titles, you may have noticed that last week's episode was called "The Problem." And while you may feel like our general lack of conviction to improve race relations is a problem, maybe the bigger problem is that we take a passive position over acting in direct conflict with the desires of our Heavenly Father.
Janine: And that's why this episode is called "The Bigger Problem."
Gerard: And if you're confused as to why, just stick around. And that's why we'll be looking into this on this episode of The (Im)partial Church.
Gerard: Hey, y'all. I'm Gerard.
Janine: And I'm Janine.
Gerard: I'm the big brother.
Janine: But I'm the older sister, and we are brother and sister in Christ.
Gerard: We grew up in Brooklyn, New York.
Janine: I'm still living in Brooklyn, but I serve in the Bronx.
Gerard: I'm a professor at Concordia University in Texas and a pastor at a congregation in St. Louis.
Janine: It's been said Sunday morning is the most segregated time in America.
Gerard: Issues with race and culture still plague our communities and our churches.
Janine: But what can we do about it? Should we see color?
Gerard: Or be colorblind?
Janine: What's our responsibility in bringing about unity in our neighborhoods and in our church pews?
Gerard: It's a delicate topic, but one we must tackle with grace.
Janine: So pull up your chair to the table as we bring Jesus to the center of this conversation of—
Gerard: The (Im)partial Church.
Janine: Okay. So when I look at this research, something stands out to me.
Gerard: Okay, go ahead.
Janine: How is it possible that virtually the same percentage of Christians that feel the church has a role to play in improving race relations simultaneously don't feel compelled to do so themselves. So you want something to improve, but it's like, "Not me."
Gerard: Yeah.
Janine: Somebody should do it, but not me. But someone should.
Gerard: Yeah. It goes back to that bystander theory, the assumption that somebody else is going to do it, and if somebody else does it, then it doesn't have to be me, and whatever, and let's forget about it. I think it might be an identity issue, too. Sometimes Christians see the church as a place that they go and not a people that they are. We learned in Sunday School, again, the church is not the steeple, but it's the people. Right? But do we really believe it is what I kind of think. You're doing the actions, okay, the church, yeah.
Janine: Yeah.
Gerard: Still know how to make the steeple.
Janine: Yeah.
Gerard: But I mean, the church has been around for a long time. But you forget that in the beginning, people didn't go into a physical building and sit in physical pews and open up books that smelled like books. The old church never had any of that, right? The church was the people.
Janine: Absolutely. And I think when we think about what it means to be the church, I also go back to the invisible and the visible church. So what we always have to remember when we're thinking about those two terms, the visible church is who we see, that's who shows up on Sunday, that's who shows up early, who shows up late, who shows up in the middle, goes outside, goes on their phone in the bathroom, and then pops back over for Communion, right?
Gerard: Yeah.
Janine: Those are the visible church people, and they could be anybody.
Gerard: Yeah.
Janine: But the invisible church, this is the church triumphant, right?
Gerard: Yeah.
Janine: So this is the church for those who have passed on before us, and those will pass on after us. Those are people only God knows, but those who understand and know who Jesus is, who have been redeemed in their Baptism and continue to believe in the promises of God—all the way through to the end.
Gerard: Yeah.
Janine: And those are our brothers and sisters. And those may be people who ain't there on Sunday either.
Gerard: They might be.
Janine: Those may be people who think, well, those may be the "St. Mattress folks."
Gerard: They might be.
Janine: Those may be the people who work overnight.
Gerard: They might be.
Janine: And they can't make it on Sunday, but they might come on Wednesday sometimes. Those may be the people who never come at all, because they've been hurt. But the invisible church is the church that are our brothers and sisters in Christ, rooted in Christ, and continue to grow in Christ. And those are who we must always think about when we say, "Well, I don't see the church doing this. And do you remember when the church did that? And well, there's this church on my block who does this."
Gerard: Yeah.
Janine: That's visible church. Invisible churches, those believers who last over the ages.
Gerard: Yeah, and who actually believe and trust in Jesus and have faith. I think it's also important though to understand the view. Remember, that Luther says, "We should not be searching for the invisible church outside of the visible church necessarily." Right?
Janine: Yeah.
Gerard: That there could be people that are outside of the visible church that are in the invisible church. But for the most part, the invisible church is found within the community of believers. You brought up the church triumphant. We have these other ideas of the church militant, which is everybody who is physically in church on earth, who is doing the work here. The church triumphant is those who have gone before us. I mean, in the Lutheranism, we call that our saints that have gone before. They believed and trusted in Jesus, we have a special day in November to commemorate them, and they're now with the Lord.
The coolest thing though is sacramentally, and this is why we have to go back to the way that the church used to be, too, mentally. Sacramentally, what binds us together is when we go and we receive the gifts of the church, the body, and the blood and the bread and the wine all together and within and under one another. When we're receiving that gift, we're receiving it as the church militant, with the church triumphant, as the visible church, and the invisible church as well. It all connects together. And you know, the thing about the early church too, Janine, is it wasn't homogenous, right?
Janine: Yeah.
Gerard: It wasn't all one type of person or kind of person.
Janine: Right.
Gerard: Many, many writings of church fathers have a common thread of encouraging unity and how to navigate different differences, right?
Janine: Yeah.
Gerard: In the Acts church, we see them in Greek, talking to Greek-speaking converts and electing leaders to advocate for vulnerable populations. And we see that there is differences amongst members in the early church. They also taught what it meant to be the church in the early church.
Janine: Yes.
Gerard: In 1 Peter 2:9 it says, "But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God's possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy." Isn't that a beautiful verse? I mean, I say that all the time whenever I baptize a person in my congregation; we use a portion of that: "Called you out of darkness into His marvelous light." But when you put it in the rest of the context, you really see what it's getting at in the unity piece.
Janine: So if we go back in 1 Peter 2:9, it says, "But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for His own possession." So rather than God having us wonder what the church is supposed to be in, who we are supposed to be in, what our identity is, He gives it to us, He tells us. So this can be something that feels like a burden at times, but when we grow in our faith, we understand that it's actually a blessing. So when He calls us a "chosen race," here, we think about all of the things that we've heard inside God's Word about what it means to live on earth. So to be a person of the world and have people see you a certain way, or treat you a certain way, or understand certain things about you, the diversities that exist within us, within each and every one of us, from anywhere from the country that we are from, to the state that we grew up in, to the city that we're in now, right?
Gerard: Yeah.
Janine: But God says that for us, He wants us to be the church. He wants us to be one. And He recognizes that even though that we have those differences from within one another, within our own selves, this is something that's going to make us stronger as one body in Christ.
Gerard: Yeah.
Janine: So when we look to the verse from Revelation, where He talks about many nations and many tongues and many tribes all praising His Name, or we think about from Galatians 6, where He talks about neither slave nor free, when we think about even the story of the creation account in Genesis 1, where He's creating all different kinds of birds, all different kinds of plants, all different, every single thing that He creates in nature has variety. And human beings are no exception. But what God wants us to see is that together, with these differences, He makes us one, and He makes us the church, and that we're called to do certain things with certain blessings attached.
Gerard: Yeah. I mean, in addition to that, the hard part about when everybody is different is that there's some messiness that comes with that, right?
Janine: Yeah.
Gerard: Because we have to be mindful of the differences between us. But our differences make us, us, and we get to navigate that together as the church. I love seeing this as a pastor week to week in my people, navigating through messiness of just being different, and from us being created different and learning how to be in relationship with one another. It also reminds me of this part of 1 Peter that says, "We are God's possession." It reminds me of my cat and my dog. Particularly my cat though, because everybody has a sound that they make in order to get their cat or their dog to come, right?
Janine: Yeah.
Gerard: So for my cat, it's (makes clucky sound). You have that sound. Do you do a sound like that? Like a (cluck). It's like a (cluck). But for my dog, it's like (kiss sound).
Janine: Like more for a horse.
Gerard: No. For my cat, it's like (cluck). Or it's (clucky sound). That's a very natural cat sound.
Janine: Yeah. Classic cat.
Gerard: But for my dog, it's more of like a (kiss sound). Right? It's just two kisses, and then they'll come. When I think of God calling us out of darkness into His marvelous light, I think of us knowing the sound of our Shepherd's voice, of God's voice, and Him literally calling us when we've gotten into mischief, like pets tend to do. If you don't have pets, they get into mischief. Him calling us out, and us understanding that that's the voice of our Owner, our God who possesses us. I think that there's a beautiful thing to that. We live in a society and in a world sometimes where we don't want to be owned by anything or anybody. There is nothing safer, there is nothing more beautiful, there is nothing more genuine than being owned by God Himself, and for Him to be able to call you to who He's created you to be out of from what you were, or what you're getting into. And there's a beautiful thing in that. There's also beauty in the way that He's created you, on purpose. We talked about this last season.
Janine: Yeah.
Gerard: Remember, Revelation 7:9, as we think of many tribes and many tongues, and different languages, and many groups of people all bowing before the same King, when we think about that beautiful image and that picture of the church, you see so many differences in that text, but you see similarities. They're waving the same palm branches; they're dressed in the same white robes that have marked them as redemptive creatures of God Himself. They're worshiping the same King, even though that there's all these differences about them, it is a beautiful thing to be God's own pets, His own possession, that He calls to Himself.
Janine: I think if you were a pet, you would be a bulldog.
Gerard: Okay. You know what? I think if you were a pet ... what would you be? I don't know. It depends on what your hair was.
Janine: I think I would be probably like a gazelle, or a flamingo.
Gerard: I don't know.
Janine: You know?
Gerard: I mean, Janine just had this red hair that she put in recently. If her hair ... (big laugh), I won't go there, I won't.
Janine: But as we look really deeply into the Scripture, we also think about where it says that we proclaim the excellencies of Him who called you out of darkness into this marvelous light.
Gerard: Yeah.
Janine: And this is something that I think that we miss a lot. We take these chances in Christian culture, but one that we could take more. And this has to do with proclaiming the excellencies of God, which is essentially a testimony, right?
Gerard: Yeah.
Janine: Talking to people about what God has brought you to, what God has brought you through, and where God is taking you.
Gerard: Exactly.
Janine: So when we share this with one another, as the church, this is how people find out who the church is and what the church does in action.
Gerard: Yeah.
Janine: When we see in Scripture from the book of John that they will know that we are Christians by our love, this is where this really comes into play, in proclaiming the excellencies of what God has done in our lives and what God has done with the gifts that He's bestowed upon us.
Gerard: Yeah.
Janine: We're going to be further nuancing why it's important, why it's really important for us to, not only care about solving race issues, but to actively be a part of the solution. Because as we think back to that statistic that we opened with, there's a problem, someone should solve it. What we're seeing here is that it might be you, it might be us. We're the solution, right?
Gerard: Yeah.
Janine: So we're a part of the solution.
Gerard: Yeah.
Janine: But there does need to be some action on our part.
Gerard: Exactly. And remember, God has already given us the Holy Spirit to lead us and guide us, but we're going to need to explore the missiology of Jesus, and what He wants for His ecclesia, what He wants for His church. And for the record, missiology is the study of mission work. And just like I said, ecclesia, the Greek word for "church."
Janine: Wow. How many languages do you speak?
Gerard: I speak many, actually. So ...
Janine: Okay. Well, I'm really excited to see this Greek popping out.
Gerard: Yeah.
Janine: Lots of pastors forget Greek, but I'm glad to see that you remember it.
Gerard: I know. And Janine does have a little bit of a flex. Janine took Greek in college, and she slayed all of the pre-sem guys in Greek, and people were coming to her for tutoring. But she didn't know how to tutor them, because the language came naturally to her.
Janine: Well, we've grown from that point. But let's touch on the five reasons that God's people should take part in the restorative work of racial reconciliation.
Gerard: Okay.
Janine: So the first reason, the first one, God calls us to become people who care. So there are countless verses in Scripture that speak to the kind of people that God wants His children to be. Again, when we talk about identity, it's really difficult. Because in our world, we are taught to develop our own identity and explore it and see who we are. But one of the things that really helps us to see who that is, is knowing where we came from and whose we are. And that's really what God gives us in His Word.
So in Deuteronomy 10:12, it says, "And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all His ways, to love Him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul." Similarly, in Micah 6:8, "He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God." So what I see in these two verses here, that's really exciting, Gerard, is the word "require."
Gerard: Yeah.
Janine: As an educator, one who works in schools, we're always talking about the list of requirements or we like to say, "expectations."
Gerard: Yeah.
Janine: But what this list of requirements, it says, "What does God require of us? What does the Lord require of us?" And the two words that I see in common here are "walking."
Gerard: Yeah.
Janine: Walking in His ways and walking humbly alongside of Him. So as we think about becoming people who care, what it's going to take is someone to model yourself after. And this is where we have the mentorship piece of God at play here. So what does the Lord require of you? "Walk where I walk, do what I do, listen to what I listen to. Be humble, be open." So these are two things that really help on our journey.
Gerard: Yeah. I mean, I know these are Old Testament texts, but I think of the word "walking" in the New
Testament in the Greek, the peripateo, to continue in the way of, which means that you have to have a leader that you follow as you walk. And I think that's a beautiful thing to say, "Oh, well, I have to follow the compass of God." Because if I'm really honest, after reading these two verses, I think to myself, "Okay, God calls me to care, but it's so much easier to care about the things I already care about. It's harder to care about the things I know I'm supposed to care about, but I don't care about."
Janine: Wow!
Gerard: Which is why it's been so hard in an age where there are so many issues, where you know should care about so many things, it's almost like you have to choose care corners of where I fit in or what serves me the best. And that's something that, generationally, I think my generation really struggles with, millennials, or our generation. You're not that, that old.
Janine: [gasping sound].
Gerard: I'm sorry.
Janine: [gasping sound].
Gerard: I mean it's like we really struggle with that. We have these pet projects that we want to like, "This is our project, and we care about this, and we're going to do this." But God calls us to care about a myriad of other things. Even things that annoy us, we still have to care about. So we're supposed to be walking in His way. And along the way, we're supposed to be delivering His justice and His grace, having Him be the driver's seat inside of our heart to do that work, letting it be all His work and none of our work. I mean, I think of Jeremiah 22:3, it says, "Thus says the Lord: Do justice and righteousness," not ours, but His, right?
Janine: Yeah.
Gerard: "And deliver from the hand of the oppressor him who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the resident alien, the fatherless, and the widow, nor shed innocent blood in this place." I mean it names all of these different kind of situations, a resident alien, a fatherless person, a widow. You could choose your pet project, but God is saying, "I care about all these things. And if I care about it, you got to care about it." Which is pretty deep. I mean in Amos 5, it says that too. It says, "Let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream." It's not just supposed to be a trickle for what I care about, it has to be a stream for the things that God cares about.
Janine: Yes. And I love the image of the water here, because when it's talking about rolling down and ever-flowing, it's something that is continuous, right?
Gerard: Yeah.
Janine: It's something that is so powerful. Water can harm, and water can help. And that verse from Amos really paints that picture for us very well. So what we see in all these texts is that they have this righteousness and justice piece in common. And that's because these two ideas really are linked. In God's mind, they're linked. So that means in our mind, they have to be linked.
Gerard: Yeah.
Janine: They both deal with right relationships between us, people, and Him, God.
Gerard: Yeah. And it reminds me of the second thing that we should really discuss, too. In kind of unpacking all these different points, I mean, we're trying to go through five reasons why people should take part in restorative justice and racial reconciliation. Number two has got to be, it's because it's how God self describes, and we should aim to be like God. Right? We're made in His likeness.
Exodus 34:6 says, "And He," God, "passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, 'The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, and abounding in love and faithfulness.'" God is giving us His character here, telling us about who He is. He's describing Himself as compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in this love and this faithfulness. So we should seek to be like that, too. Are you always like that, Janine?
Janine: Compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in love and faithfulness?
Gerard: Yeah.
Janine: Pretty much every day.
Gerard: Oh, yeah, I thought so. May we be more like you. May we be more like you.
Janine: No. But absolutely not. I fail on this all the time, especially on being compassionate. All right, compassion, we've talked about this before on the podcast. It's looking at people with the heart of God, really, without understanding where they are, where they've come from, but still extending mercy to them. And that's something that's very difficult, especially in the face of hate. But it is what God calls us to do.
The third reason is because Jesus cares and shows the way. The third reason for why we should care about the restorative work of racial reconciliation, because Jesus cares and shows the way. So from that woman at the well, to the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus was a huge advocate for people who are different than Him. First, because there's literally no one like Him, so everybody's different than Jesus. You think about walking into a room where you're the only one? Jesus did it every day of his life. There was no one in the world who was like Him.
Gerard: Yeah.
Janine: He was fully God and fully Man. After all that time and for all those years that He was alive, right?
Gerard: Yeah.
Janine: Jesus was the Son of God, the Messiah, but He still led by example. So if we are going to follow Him, we have to care about the plight of others, even when we don't necessarily share that plight. This is what Jesus did over and over, and it is what He did to show us through stories what it looks like to actively participate in that. It's so difficult to have to follow after someone who is not in a place that you want to be. But I don't think any of us can say that about Jesus. So—
Gerard: Absolutely.
Janine: as He delved into the depths of the different parts of His community throughout His ministry, down from babies, all the way up through the elderly, from people with different ailments, He cared about their plight, and He rarely shared the plight that they were going through, right?
Gerard: Yeah.
Janine: So Jesus has no knowledge of what it means to be turned away on a mountainside from Jesus, because He's Himself. But He did share the plight of the children at that time. So He does it over and over again, showing us the way to care.
Gerard: Yeah. Reason number four, Janine, because it dignifies the lives of other image-barriers. Now, this idea may not immediately make sense to all our listeners, so I'm going to give it to you like this. Okay? Let's talk about kids. Even me and you, Janine, as kids. Let's talk about us. So Janine, growing up, her hair was always a certain way. I always had to have a haircut. We had to have the nice clothes on when we were going out with people. Mom and dad would always say, "We don't want you looking any kind of way." They didn't want us looking like we weren't taken care of, or we didn't have parents that loved us, and thought about what we would wear, and who we would be as we went out into the world. Why? Because mom would always say, what, Janine?
Janine: "You're a reflection of me."
Gerard: "You're a reflection of me. You represent me." So it's kind of like in the Genesis account, when God says this, He says, "Let us make man in Our own image after Our likeness and let him have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all of the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in His own image. In the image of God, He created him, male and female, He created them." See, all of us are meant to represent the God that we serve.
It's kind of like my mom and my dad were thinking, our mom and our dad. I mean, they didn't want us going out there any old way. We were representing them wherever we went. Right? And sure, we get that wrong a lot. I mean, Janine got it wrong more than I did in representing them, notably, but we all sin, and we all fall short of the glory of God, and we all sin and fall short of the glory of our parents as they want us to be representations of themselves. So when we bring this back into the spiritual realm of Christ, we know that we are still loved, even though we sin and fall short. We know that we are to love other people and love our neighbors as ourselves, as we honor God who loves us at the same time.
Janine: Yes, absolutely. And I think that that's really important, because a lot of people do get that statement wrong. I think as one who works with teenagers who struggle a lot with that identity of love people as you love yourself, I like to tell them to love themselves like God loves them. Because some people don't love themselves. It's a fact. But when we think about how God loves us and how God loves our neighbors, that's one of the ways we can get to model how to treat our own selves.
The fifth reason why we should care about the racial reconciliation work is because caring is proof of what the kingdom of God is like. When we pray the Lord's Prayer, we've all memorized the Lord's Prayer, hopefully, in our childhood. But if you're an adult convert, then memorize the Lord's Prayer. It's really powerful.
Gerard: Yeah.
Janine: And it says, "Thy kingdom come." A lot of Christians think that this is a request for a far off time. Like, "My kingdom come, someday, in 2030 or so." And it's true that there will be a day when every knee will bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. But in the meantime, in between time, we live in the mystery of the now and the not yet.
Gerard: Not yet.
Janine: Yeah. So the now and not yet teaches a lot about Christ's body. Does it not?
Gerard: Yeah. I mean, the church is Christ's body, where His hands and His feet were the image-bearers of God, we're given the calling of cultivating a world that honors Him, and we are His emissaries. This is not a word that you'll see a lot of people use in America, because we have a representative democracy, not a monarchy. But an emissary is defined as a person sent on a mission by a diplomatic representative. We are literally here to proclaim the Good News about Jesus' upside-down kingdom.
Janine: So as you can see here, there really is a lot at stake. God cares about the way we treat each other.
Gerard: Yeah.
Janine: God tells us this much through His Word.
Gerard: Right.
Janine: He shows us through His character. Jesus Himself acts as an example of compassion for us to follow. So if there's any moment where you think, "I don't have to care about that because I don't see it, or because it's not in my world, or because it doesn't affect me, or because I haven't heard about it, or because I didn't know," it's just not true. Right?
Gerard: It's not true.
Janine: Jesus calls us to be compassionate, and it's how we dignify the lives of other image-bearers. And lastly, it shows us that we are watching a world, and it shows us that the world is watching us to understand and to see what God's kingdom is like.
Gerard: Yeah, it is a lot. But it's something we can't just glaze over, because there's a lot of times we just do that. And honestly, sometimes it makes me feel like trash when we do that.
Janine: Not trash.
Gerard: Yeah, trash.
Janine: But you know what, Gerard, maybe we should all feel a little gross about the times when we miss the mark. After all, God gives us the very breath that we breathe in our lungs, and we use it to do, what? To hurt others and to hurt ourselves.
Gerard: Yeah.
Janine: Perhaps a little bit of self-reflection would do us some good. We have to learn the lessons of history, or else, we are doomed to repeat it.
Gerard: I know that's right. Maybe next week, it'll be a good idea to look at that and discuss that. What do we do with our convictions? Right?
Janine: Yeah.
Gerard: How can we responsibly heed God's voice?
Janine: I think that's a great idea, Gerard. Next week, let's tune in, and we're going to answer and talk through that question, "What do we do when we feel convicted?" So join us next week. We're excited to have you back on The (Im)partial Church.