Dear Tab Family,
Do you pray to a Black God? Is the Jesus you imagine a Black man? What does it mean to you if Jesus was Black? How does it feel in your body to pray to a Black Jesus? Do you feel uncomfortable, excited, validated, scared, or surprised? I encourage you to play with this idea, not because Jesus was really Black, but because we can only meet Jesus in the crucified bodies in our midst.
We know Jesus was a brown-skinned Palestinian Jew living under an oppressive Roman Empire. Pastor Katie said on Sunday, “Jesus not only was one among the working poor of his day, we hear him begin to preach and teach that his very mission was to bring the good news of liberation to the poor.” We believe that God took human form in Jesus and dwelt with us on Earth. Or as John 1:14 says, “The Word became flesh and blood and moved into our neighborhood.” The reality of this particular incarnation has implications for our faith.
What does it mean that Jesus wasn’t on a hovercraft floating just a little bit above the earth, but that Jesus was a particular person living in a particular time from a particular sociocultural location? Moreover, how is that context relevant to us now?
In Epiphany season we examine how God is revealing God’s self to us now. When we look at Jesus’s particularities or how God chose to incarnate through Jesus, we know that God became flesh to preach and live out the good news, a message of liberation and love that stirred up fury and resistance from people who benefited from the empire. If Jesus lived today, Jesus would be Black in America, because he would be among and standing with the crucified class of our day. Pastor Katie says, “I think we would do well to just sit with this statement and notice what happens inside of us, and to our understanding of salvation and liberation as we see Jesus as Black.”
Writer Danté Stewart shares that when Black theologians and scholars insisted that Jesus is Black, “they were not talking about his skin color during his earthly ministry, though it definitely wasn’t white. They were talking about Jesus’s experience, about how Jesus knows what it means to live in an occupied territory, and knows what it means to be from an oppressed people.” In his recently published book Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle, Stewart talks about learning to love himself as a Black man after reading authors like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. He writes,
“The more I read these works, the more I let them teach me how to love. Not the type of love that must perform to be accepted — the type that would allow us to embrace our humanity and never allow ourselves to believe that proving what could never be proved was the best we had to offer. The type of love that Toni Morrison writes of in “Paradise”: “That Jesus had been freed from white religion and he wanted these kids to know that they did not have to beg for respect; it was already in them, and they needed only to display it…..My world changed when I stopped sitting at the feet of white Jesus and began becoming a disciple of Black Jesus. I didn’t have to hate myself or my people or our creativity or our beauty to be human or to be Christian.”Pastor Katie reminds us that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Today “the Word has become Black flesh and blood and this incarnation is saving us. Jesus didn’t come to make me or you comfortable. Jesus came to save us, to free us. And he will continue to reveal himself to us, if we have eyes to notice and ears to hear.”
To watch Pastor Katie’s full sermon from Sunday, please go here.
Please feel free to reflect on any of the questions posed above and share your reflections with me via email at lanenalinda@gmail.com.
Warmly,
Sana DelCorazón
UTS Seminary Student & Member of Tabernacle United
African-American Spiritual
I want Jesus to walk with me (2x)
All along my pilgrim journey
Lord, I want Jesus to walk with me
In my trials, Lord, walk with me (2x)
When my heart is almost breaking
Lord, I want Jesus to walk with me
When I’m in trouble, Lord, walk with me (2x)
When my head is bowed in sorrow
Lord, I want Jesus to walk with me