One Day ...

I'm irritated tonight honestly.  I want to share songs by Black artists which don't have injustice, oppression, inequality, or civil rights as their theme.  And I will.  But not tonight.

Those themes are unavoidable in 2020 and 2021.  I sit here continually brokenhearted over the state of violence in our country as I read headlines of the third mass shooting in as many days, analysis of bodycam footage of the killing of a 13 year old boy, remembering the recent death of a local unarmed Black man, all while the nation awaits news of a verdict in a trial for the murder of George Flyod.  And I know that beyond the theme of violence and the excessive prevalence of unnecessarily destructive weaponry, the themes of injustice, oppression, inequality, and civil rights are right there at the surface, inextricably linked.

When the nation has seen forty-five mass shootings in a single month, and our prisons are disproportionately filled with black and brown men charged with nonviolent minor crimes and held on unaffordable bails, it ought not be offensive to say: Our system is broken.

So why speak about things like injustice and oppression on a blog devoted to the intersection of faith and the arts?

Because these issues are intimately close to the heart of God.  Verse after verse of the Bible tout the virtues of justice, fairness, equality.  Chapter after chapter speak to God's disdain for oppression and systems which exploit the powerless.

"This is what the LORD says: Do what is just and right.  Rescue from the hand of the oppressor the one who has been robbed.  Do no wrong or violence to the foreigner, the fatherless, or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place. ... Woe to him who builds his palace by unrighteousness, his upper rooms by injustice ..." - Jeremiah 22:3, 13

When people throughout history have faced persecution and injustice, we as a species have turned to the arts, to express what can't be said, or won't be heard, in other venues.  The spirituals sung by slaves being robbed of their God-given humanity and dignity.  The protest songs of those fighting for equal rights.  The pleas of the psalmist, hiding out in caves from those who sought to harm him.

We turn to verse, to song, to poetry, to filmmaking ... ways to give voice to something which must be spoken if God's sense of justice is to be believed.

The movie Selma raises the voice of the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Legend's song for the movie, Glory, featuring poet and rapper Common, connects that history with the present day.  Yolanda Adams' version is even more powerfully expressed:

" ... to the degree that you share the sufferings of Christ, keep on rejoicing, so that at the revelation of His glory you may also rejoice and be overjoyed." - 1 Peter 4:13

I look forward to a day when those who have been oppressed throughout time are lifted above me in the glory of God.  I haven't faced true injustice; those who have deserve the place of honor God promises.  In the meantime, I can do my best to lift their voices and causes above my own.

"... make my joy complete by being of the same mind, maintaining the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose ... with humility consider one another as more important than yourselves" - Philippians 2:2-3

If you are reading this blog as a person of faith, I challenge you to sit this week with your Bible and seek out God's views of injustice, oppression, and inequality.  They are deep and wide, and we as a faith community need to breathe them in until God's view is our view.  I'm not there yet, personally; I'm not speaking from a high place on the mountain of insight, but from the base of it, seeing the climb ahead.

If you're reading this from a different background - perhaps curious about faith, skeptical of "God's truth", or simply interested intellectually in the intersection of faith and arts, please know this: God is clear about the evils of injustice, and reserves the greatest honor and glory for those who society has wronged.  Christian faith is unequivocal on this.  Everything and everyone who shows you something different is not speaking for the God of the Bible, and those who spend their lives fighting for justice and equality, whether through a lens of faith or not, are.

"Take your evil deeds out of my sight; stop doing wrong.  Learn to do right; seek justice.  Defend the oppressed." - Isaiah 1:16-17