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All people created equal (20 January)

This weeks thought is written by Nick Lear, EBA Regional Minister

Yesterday was a day with two very different designations: it was ‘Blue Monday’ (the day when people feel lowest in the year and an encouragement to focus on mental health) and, in USA, Martin Luther King Day. I hope you will have seen the email I sent out yesterday about mental health training, so I hope you will forgive me for focusing my thoughts today on MLK Day.

Revd Dr Martin Luther King Jr was a Baptist Minister who led an incredible non-violent campaign against racism, racial injustice and segregation laws in the United States in the 1960s. Yesterday I read things written about him which eulogised him and almost declared him a saint. He was not perfect, he had flaws. But he was an incredible orator and was used by God to lead a movement that changed a nation. I was particularly struck by these words from his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech to 250,000 people from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963: “So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

Those radical words “all men are created equal” came from the US Declaration of Independence in 1776 – one of the truths that were deemed self-evident. But not all people deemed them self-evident – hence the racism, violence, murder of black people that were tolerated (or worse) in some parts of the USA. The problem was that while all people were created equal, not all were treated equally. That was self-evident in the USA in 1963. If you have any doubt about this, I encourage you to watch the film ‘Selma’ which dramatises the events around the 1965 voting rights marches in Selma, Alabama. It is both harrowing and inspiring. I like to think that if that was happening today, I would join with the campaigns and marchers.

Do we really believe that all people are created equal? Jesus seemed to go out of his way to affirm that truth by elevating those whom others had deemed ‘less than equal’ by virtue of their age, gender, ethnicity, disability, or illness. Surely that’s part of the message of his pointed parable of the banquet where the invited guests made excuses so those who were on the margins became specially invited guests instead (Luke 14:15-24).

You see the problem is not simply a 1960s problem, is it? It is not something that was resolved finally by Revd Dr Martin Luther King Jr and those he led, for all the progress that was made. The deaths of George Floyd and others in the USA last year leading to the Black Lives Matter campaigns should shake us from any complacency about this. It is happening today.

And it’s not just an American problem, is it? Racism is still alive and kicking in our country and in our communities. What did we make of last year’s anti-racism campaigns and marches and ‘taking the knee’ against racism in our country?

But it’s not just society’s problem: what about racism in our churches? Like the disciples protesting when Jesus said one of them would betray him, we might cry out, “Surely not!” But, if you talk with your Black and Minority Ethnic sisters and brothers and they will tell you a different story, with tears in their eyes. They will tell you of hurtful and discriminatory language used. They will tell you of jokes made at their expense. They will tell you of attitudes and behaviours that demean or exclude. And even worse. In them we will see a Christlike grace in the fact that they remain part of us despite this racism, but we should not need them to show us such grace.  Maybe we need to ‘take the knee’ – in repentance and in seeking forgiveness.

If these truths are self-evident, that all people are created equal and that all people are loved equally by God, then there is no place for deliberate, casual, or even inadvertent racism in Jesus’ body. If you haven’t already, do read the articles in the latest edition of Baptists Together Magazine written by our President, Yinka Oyekan, Starlette Thomas, and BUGB’s Justice Enabler, Wale Hudson-Roberts and allow God to speak to you through them about justice for all, for all are created equal.

Amen?