I arrived at a community meeting about rehabbing a block of vacant houses and found that I was an hour early. I was walking back to my car to listen to the radio and wait. I was preoccupied contemplating the amount of time I had wasted, how I could have enjoyed a more leisurely dinner if I had paid better attention to the phone message.
Just as I walked under the light of a street lamp, a young
black man stepped out of the shadows of the building. He startled me, and I yelped. He too drew back a bit, not expecting me to
be there. We stood there face to face,
less than two feet apart, looking into one another’s eyes. He blurted out: “It’s O.K., I was just lighting a cigarette
out of the wind.” I responded: “No problem, you just startled me.” We stood there with our eyes locked
continuing to assure one another that all was good.
A whole other conversation took place through our
faces. This was not a block to be
avoided at night, but there were blocks close by that were not so peaceful. Considerations of safety and harmony were
always on people’s minds. We both lived in a society that said I, as a white
guy, should be a bit leery young black urban males; he was certainly aware of
this. Society often told him that I did not have his best interest at heart. It was within this context that we
stood face to face under a pool of light on a dark city street.
I wanted to communicate to him that he had simply surprised
me. I reacted without thinking or even clearly
seeing who he was. I wanted him to know
that I did not see him as my enemy. I
sensed from his eyes that he wanted to communicate to me that he was not
threat. There was nothing I had that he
wanted. He was just trying to light a
cigarette on a windy street. This is
what I sensed passing between us, both of us feeling awkward. I was aware of our common humanity and
vulnerability in that moment. I felt our
shared need to be understood and accepted. Both of us were simply trying live our lives
in peace.
There is so much in our society that tries to set us against
one another, to say for one group to get ahead another group must be
diminished. The creation account denies
this lie. It teaches that we are all kin
to one another. For any of us to live
fully into God’s plan for our life, our neighbor must have that same
opportunity. At the core of our being we are kin to one another.
White folks and black folks, protestors and police officers,
Republicans, Democrats, Independents and Libertarians, we are all in this
together. If we choose sides and build walls, we are each damaging a piece of who were created by God to be; we are less than whole human beings. Human beings are not the
natural enemies of other human beings.
This is an aberration we introduce into creation because we fail
to see the image of God in that other person.
Sometimes that image is, admittedly, buried pretty deeply and a bit
malformed; but it is there. The Bible
says so.
Jim Kelsey
Executive Minister-American Baptist Churches of
New York State
