By Dr. Lani Wilson

Good morning, prayer and fasting partners. We persevere in prayer for Allen temple and all of God’s houses of worship on the planet. Push on.

May we consider the word “in?” It’s always the simplest ones that seem daunting, isn’t it? Nothing heroic, earth shattering, bold, compromising or challenging. In. We fall “in” love, are “in”-capacitated, “in”-trouble “in”-volved, “in”-violate, suffer “in”-justice, and finally, there is “in”-carnate. The word “incarnate” can be an adjective or verb that describes an embodied deity or the extreme form of something.

(especially of a deity or spirit) embodied in flesh; in human form: God incarnate | he chose to be incarnate as a man.• [ postpositive ] represented in the ultimate or most extreme form: here is capitalism incarnate.
Apple Online Dictionary

As Christians when we think of God we are, of course, referring to God-in-the-World in the form of Jesus the Christ. And there it is again, “in.” It sounds ridiculous to state the obvious, but human beings are wired to be in a group, to be part of a community; not just to be counted as a member but to actually feel like one is in the group as a distinct member. We also need to feel “in”-cluded, to feel like our presence makes a difference, that what and who we are matters. We know what happens when people do not feel that way, and perhaps we have all had that feeling at some point in our lives. But what if someone never feels like they belong to something or someone(s)? That they are just “out there?”

Anomie is a word associated with “lawlessness,” according to the Apple Online Dictionary, although it is a much more complex idea than that. Émile Durkheim, the recognized founder of sociology, coined the word to describe what happens to societies when there is a breakdown in behavioral regulation, when society changes rapidly and people feel like the established order is not protecting them, giving structure. He defined it simply as the “absence of accepted social values” in his 1933 classic sociology text, Suicide. By the late 20th century American sociologist Robert K. Merton focused on the effects of anomie, also known as means-ends or strain theory.

Greater emphasis on ends rather than means creates a stress that leads to a breakdown in the regulatory structure—i.e., anomie. If, for example, a society impelled its members to acquire wealth yetvoffered inadequate means for them to do so, the strain would cause many people to violate norms. The only regulating agencies would be the desire for personal advantage and the fear of punishment. Social behaviour would thus become unpredictable. Merton defined a continuum of responses to anomie that ranged from conformity to social innovation, ritualism, retreatism, and, finally, rebellion. Delinquency, crime, and suicide are often reactions to anomie.
www.brittanica.com

So, what does this have to do with “in” and more importantly, Jesus the Christ and His church? Born in France, Durkheim lived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (1858-1917) and yet even as sociology grew into a legitimate discipline the word anomie didn’t enter into mainstream usage until much later. And it is fascinating to see when it gained prominence. Use of “anomie” began to rise around the beginning of the Baby Boomer births in the mid-1940s and peaked around 1973.

google.com

Academia was still deeply ensconced in European and neo-European dominance of the social sciences and thus, going against Establishment norms was seen as “deviance.” However, as society changed over the latter half of the 20th century and academic scholars of Color entered The Academy, that dominance loosened…a bit. In essence, anything or anyone that countered society’s norms was deemed criminal and Merton’s theories led to the development of the field of Criminology.

During the feast it was customary to release one prisoner to the people whomever they requested. A man named Barabbas was imprisoned with rebels who had committed murder during an insurrection.
Mark 15:7 (NET)

We know the story: Jesus is chosen to die by the crowd and Barabbas is released. Barabbas with his fellow rebels against the Roman occupation of Palestine had committed murder during an uprising. They were criminally deviant in an unjust society where everything was stacked against them.

Jesus made it clear that the kingdom of God is not a matter of talk, but of action. He did not lament their hunger or promise to do something about it, he simply fed them. Demonstrating the alternative gives people something to hold on to. It also gives credibility to a movement and its leaders in that it shows where a movement’s true heart lies.
Obery Hendricks, The Politics of Jesus, pg. 181

Jesus just did it, just like we try to do the same now. Jesus just kept showing His followers what was expected of them if they believed that He was the Son of God. He came to fulfill the law and not destroy it, and it would not be by the sword – this time. It would not be just a new set of behaviors and rules but new relationships that went against all the norms of 1000 years of Roman rule and thousands of years of Hebraic-Jewish tradition.

But this is not simply another instance of Jesus being presented as replacing the important functions of the priests, a motif that occurs often in John’s gospel, as in ‘I am the good shepherd’; ‘I am the true vine’; ‘I am the bread of life’; et cetera. Rather, it portrays Jesus as presenting a whole new way of doing things, as rearticulating humanity’s relationship with God based not upon fear of divine displeasure, as taught by the religious authorities, but upon God’s largesse and loving generosity.
Ibid. pg. 180

It was by definition a norm that deviated from the Establishment. In that empire, deviance meant death. What about the empires of today? Is it surprising that the use of the word anomie surged during the heat of the Black Power Movement? Is it surprising that established societies around the world cracked down against this surge in the culture that was moving away from the norm.

…the U.S. has minority groups whose access to success by conventional means is clearly limited. In the period in which Merton was writing, ours was a clearly racist society. Black Americans, for example, were severely limited in their access to education, but if they overcame those obstacles and obtained a good education, that education would not "buy" them as good a job as it would for a white person. In some societies that emphasize ascriptive criteria in allocating power and privilege, the culture sets a very different standard of success. Someone who was born an untouchable in the Indian caste system, for example, would learn not to aspire to the kind of success that might be available to an upper-caste individual. But in the U.S. the same kinds of success goals are held out to all. Thus our very high rates of deviance and crime, compared with other societies, in Merton's analysis can be understood, first as a result of our emphasizing success goals more than we emphasize approved means of achieving those goals, and second, our emphasizing the same kind of success for everyone even while the race, ethnic, and class stratification of the society limits the opportunities for success by those in the less privileged groups.
https://www.d.umn.edu/~bmork/2306/Theories/BAManomie.htm

American society still holds out the falsity that it is no longer racist. Anyone who has access to a cell phone has to, at the very least, question that premise. The police murders of Black men and women are not new; what is new is that everyone in America and around the world can see it almost instantly. At some point we have to decide how we in the church, the Bride of Christ, are going to live in a society that empowers its peacekeepers to cull our ranks, especially those who live in that “underclass basement.” After all, it was Martin King who called out all the Negro preachers who were condemning the Civil Rights Movement.

I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against "outsiders coming in….I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their "thus saith the Lord" far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town.
MLK, Jr., Letter From A Birmingham Jail, 1963

So, what has that got to do with us now in 2015 on the precipice of 2016? Was there anomie in 1963 or hope in our hearts? Is there a disorder of complacency in Black churches, especially along denominational lines, such that they are growing silent, sparse, empty? No crying babies during the service in the sanctuary? There’s a pall at 7:59am hanging over the buzz of chatter and greetings among the OGs, “Old Gangstas”…us. A radical change is happening in our midst. Yet, we are strategizing on how to get the people back in when it appears that the people may not be interested in coming back in. Has the Black church slipped away and pulled back into an unjust society for comfort? Are we the “My Dear Fellow Clergymen” whom Martin addressed in his letter fifty-two (52) years ago?

A recent compilation of Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s writings and speeches has the eye-catching title God is Not a Christian… (Tutu 2011). The title comes from an inter-faith address that Tutu gave in 1989, whose message was fundamentally ecumenical. The logic of the message goes as follows. First, ‘accidents of birth and geography determine to a very large extent to what faith we belong’, so that adhering to one faith, such as Christianity, is quite arbitrary. Second, while some Christians ‘charitably’ suggest that all the world’s faiths are Christian in spirit—that ‘the adherents of other faiths are really Christians without knowing it’—this stance is profoundly insulting, since it is necessary to ‘hold to our particular and peculiar beliefs tenaciously, not pretending that all religions are the same, for they are patently not the same’. Thirdly, in spite of patent variability in the religions of the world, we can nevertheless recognise the universality of the divine and some ‘transcendent reference point, a mysterium tremendum, that comes to be known by deigning to reveal itself, himself, herself, to humanity’. The need to come to know this transcendent reality, which we call God, is pressing in all human communities. The ‘eternal’ word, the Logos of God, enlightens everyone—not just Christians, but everyone who comes into the world’. The Spirit of God is thus universal: ‘if God is one, as we believe, then he is the only God of all his people, whether they acknowledge him as such or not’ (Tutu 2011: 5–8).
Durkheim, Freud and I in Aboriginal Australia,
John Morton, pg. 235, The Australian Journal of Anthropology (2013) 24. doi:10.1111/taja.12049
accessed 12.09.15

Is it possible that we in the church have put on our comfortable, doctrinal blinders and sleep masks while the young of all faiths, colors, belief/non-belief, gender, and identity are out on the line for justice while we are we beating the bushes for members-of-means to come back in and give us their tithes and offerings? Really?

It’s called “BLM” - Black Lives Matter. Although our hearts are there and it’s touched on and referenced and cited, are we as an organized Body of the Christ viscerally, publicly, and vociferously in the mix? Would people come back in with their purses and wallets if we were out there more proclaiming support and defense of this social movement that is defining the 21st century? Du Bois said the issue for the 20th century was going to be the “Color Line.” The issue for the 21st century is going to be the “Inequity Line.” Are we going to be a “Historically Black Church” of yesteryear or are we going to be the Bride of Christ today, reflecting all His glory and color and difference and love? Perversely, are we experiencing anomie as a church body
because things are changing? Could Jesus be talking to us about who we are, what we are doing in His church, and what our role is in His plan for humanity?

Turn both your pockets and your hearts inside out and give generously to the poor; then your lives will be clean, not just your dishes and your hands.
Luke 11:41 (TMB)

We are used to requests for emptying our pockets for The Nazarene. But what about our hearts, turning them inside out to love and do the courageous work of The Christ with everyone?

Invite some people who never get invited out, the misfits from the wrong side of the tracks.
Luke 14:13 (TMB)

Not so long ago, and probably for the most part still, the Establishment looked at us as those “misfits from the wrong side of the tracks.”

Then he spoke: You’re blessed when you’ve lost it all. God’s kingdom is there for the finding, You’re blessed when you’re ravenously hungry. Then you’re ready for the Messianic meal. You’re blessed when the tears flow freely. Joy comes with the morning. Count yourself blessed every time someone cuts you down or throws you out, every time someone smears or blackens your name to discredit me. What it means is that the truth is too close for comfort and that that person is uncomfortable.
Luke 6:20-22 (TMB)

“Blacken” our names for The Christ? We have a head start! Have we gotten so comfortable that we’ve forgotten what it’s like to be on the outside, looking in?!

God Incarnate, in-the-flesh, in our lives, in every breath, remind us of who we are in You. Even as the world quivers in fear of the unhinged souls among us, we have always known what terror is on this continent. Thank You for being our battering ram and our mighty shield in this battle for justice. Keep us, your Deep East Foot Soldiers, close in rank and open to Your other troops, ready to welcome them in and move ourselves out. We love You, Jesus. You have been, are, and always will be all that we have to depend on in this life. This country may never overcome its ancient wound of racism until You return, but in the meantime, we press on, we pray on, we fast on, and we stay in the fight.

Count us blessed when we’ve lost it all.
Cut down.
Thrown out.
Smeared.
Ravenously hungry for the Messianic meal.
Tears flow freely.
Joy comes IN the morning.

In the morning…
Amen.