The Pain of Charleston

This past week, all of our hearts were saddened when we heard about the shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) in Charleston, South Carolina.  This historically black church has a rich, and tragic, history going back to the early 1800s.  One of its early pastors planned a slave revolt, which was discovered by authorities and resulted in this pastor’s execution.  In the aftermath of this most recent murders, many have wondered about the motivation of this young man who ended the lives of nine people last Wednesday evening.  Some have attempted to explain this by attributing Dylann Roof’s motivations to an anti-Christian attitude, but this is not the case.  Roof’s actions, by his own apparent admission, were the result of his deep-seated racism, with the desired outcome being a “race war.”  Despite the sometimes breathless assertions by some, studies have shown that racist attitudes continue to exist at nearly the same levels in the Millennial Generation as it did in Generation X and the Baby Boomer Generation.

As believers, we need to take care not to suggest that racism is dead in America (or around the world) today.  Sadly, the death of nine brothers and sisters in Christ in Charleston demonstrates the reality that racism remains firmly entrenched in the heart of man, and not only in the American South; it exists throughout the nation, even here in our backyard of Battle Creek.  We must recognize that racism is a heart issue, rooted in the sin of pride.  Our enemy, Satan, wants us to view the world as divided between “us” and “them,” and one of the easiest ways that we can draw these distinctions is by our external (and I would argue, superficial) differences.  When we view others as “them,” we are revealing a pride that says that “we” are better.  The reasons why we think this are both myriad and irrelevant; what matters is the pride of the human heart.  Today, our enemy has even succeeded in convincing many of us that we have conquered our pride and our prejudices, but these recent events should be a reminder of why we must constantly adhere to the words of Paul in 2 Corinthians 13:5:  “Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves.”  Sin is deceptive and will seek to lull you into a sense of peace with yourself.

The great Puritan John Owns wrote, “Be killing sin or it will be killing you…Let no man think to kill sin with few, easy, or gentle strokes.  He who hath once smitten a serpent, if he follow not on his blow until it be slain, may repent that ever he began the quarrel.  And so he who undertakes to deal with sin, and pursues it not constantly to the death.”  Brothers and sisters, let us take these words to heart, and search ourselves daily for the those sins “which cling so closely” (Hebrews 12:1) so that we might cast them off by the power of the Holy Spirit in us.  Just something to think about…