By Dr. Lani Wilson

Good Morning, fellow prayer servants. We are in the midst of a warm interlude in winter. We could use more rain and are grateful for whatever God will allow. We pray and fast on for the sake of our little Deep East Outpost and for the most vulnerable, for whom the droughts and overflows of life are most threatening.

The word that was given is clear. How many different ways have you used that word in your life? As a parent… as a mentor, co-worker, friend, adult child of an aging parent? It has six (6) uses as an adjective, two (2) as an adverb, and seven (7) as a verb (Apple Online Dictionary). We are familiar with the snippet of that familiar passage when Jesus is teaching his disciples so many things, at least as reported in Luke.

“It’s easy to see a smudge on your neighbor’s face and be oblivious to the ugly sneer on your own. Do you have the nerve to say, ’Let me wash your face for you,’ when your own face is distorted by contempt? It’s this I-know-better-than-you mentality again, playing a holier-than-thou part instead of just living your own part. Wipe that ugly sneer off your own face and you might be fit to offer a washcloth to your neighbor.
Luke 6:41-42 (TMB)

Why do you see the speck in your brother’s eye, but fail to see the beam of wood in your own? How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me remove the speck from your eye,’ while you yourself don’t see the beam in your own? You hypocrite! First remove the beam from your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.
Ibid. (NET)

Jesus doesn’t play, does He? One of the more powerful definitions of the word clear is this:

easy to perceive, understand, or interpret: the voice on the telephone
was clear and strong | clear and precise directions | her handwriting was clear | am I making myself clear?
• leaving no doubt; obvious or unambiguous: it was clear that they were in a trap | a clear case of poisoning.
• having or feeling no doubt or confusion: every student must be clear about what is expected.
Apple Online Dictionary

The entire premise of this these two verses is predicated on one thing: The presumption that we are going to help somebody. We tend to miss that because we’re so focused on getting the most obvious intent out of what Jesus says and moving on. But Jesus didn’t say clean up our act just because it’s good to do that for our own souls. Jesus is telling us that before we presume to help someone else, we have to clean up our act. Why? Not because it’s not good to be hypocritical, we already know that. In the NET translation Jesus tells us emphatically, “You hypocrite!” He didn’t say, “Oh, you must not understand what you’re doing. So let me show you what I mean.” No. He declares that we know what we are doing when we make judgments about people as we help them, as if the position of the helper is superior to the helped. That’s the backbone, the very definition of a Servant-Leader, a royal priesthood-king, the complex and mysterious Melchizedek puzzle, is it not? (See “Melchizedek as a Covenantal Figure: The Biblical Theology of the Eschatological Royal Priesthood,” Sung Jin Park, Ph.D., published 4 April 2011, bible.org).

Is it possible that in this well-known verse first taught to some of us as Sunday School children, Jesus is trying to help us clearly see the essence of why S/He, why God, came to earth in the first place? If we assume that this passage is a declaration of His very purpose for coming and dying, then maybe there is another way to view it. Maybe The Nazarene knew that through the sacrifice of His body and life, things He knew we should “be about” might happen.

1. Jesus’ presumption that we will help each other; we will love each other (“Brother, let me help remove the speck from your eye”)
2. Jesus’ presumption that we will not look down on each other (“Wipe that ugly sneer off your own face and you might be fit”)
3. Jesus’ presumption that we will not be ruled by our need to create rulers over each other in the name of helping one another (“You hypocrite!”)
4. Jesus’ presumption that we are able to clear our own vision (“remove the beam from your own eye”)
5. Jesus’ presumption that our vision is clouded by an even bigger obstruction than the person we think we want to help (“while you yourself don’t see the beam in your own”)
6. Jesus’ presumption that we will always see the smudge on the other person’s face before we see our own injuries and wounds (“It’s easy to see the smudge on your neighbor’s face”)
7. Jesus’ presumption that the other person will want help from us (“Do you have the nerve to say”).

From a psychological viewpoint, Carl Jung gets right to the heart of what Jesus is trying to tell us.

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
Carl Jung (brainyquote.com)

And who knows the “darknesses” of humankind better than The Nazarene? Jesus is telling us that we have a choice. Clearly, we always have a choice.

• We can notice someone else’s “smudge” or not.
• We can choose to help or not.
• We can choose to be hypocritical or not.
• We can face our own “darknesses” or not.

But one thing is sure in His words. If we choose to get involved, be clear about who we are before we do anything (“the beam of wood in your own”); why we are helping (“remove the speck from your brother’s eye”); and for whom we are doing it (“It’s this I-know-better-than-you mentality again, playing a holier-than-thou part instead of just living your own part”).

We’re Christians. We want to help, right? It’s a no-brainer to find people to help, and it doesn’t take a lot of “grey matter” to just go and and do. We are good at doing, but as we can see from these two verses and Jesus’ serious admonitions within them, He presents much more than just what we want to run through and move on. It’s easy to “just do” without thinking, without examining the waters The Christ is trying to deeply move us in as He becomes our lifeboat, our life vests, and our lifeline. What are we not seeing clearly as Christians? What are we missing in plain view?

It must not be this way among you! Instead whoever wants to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you must be your slave – just as the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
Mathew 20:26-28 (NET)

The BLM Movement (Black Lives Matter) has support from many parts of the American populace. But there is also widespread criticism that it will be watered down overtime, co-opted, and fade as most fads do.

BLM is not a typical movement with leaders, headquarters or an appointed spokesperson. It is as much a digital movement as it is a physical one. This dynamic can be extremely effective, as the internet and social media helps push information across multiple platforms at a much faster speed. However, the downside is that you are rendered powerless against the buffoonery that comes with free speech. 

Torri Stuckey, Huffpost Black Voices 09/05/2015 04:27 pm ET | Updated Sep 05, 2015

BLM came out with Campaign Zero is August 2015, a complex policy platform of reforms specifically addressing the issue of system sanctioned, police murder of Black men and women. This is clearly not a fad. In August, activists associated with Black Lives Matter, the nationwide movement to end unjust police killings, distinguished themselves among grassroots protestors: They crafted and published an impressive package of specific policy solutions. “They’re practical, well-thought out, and in most cases, achievable,” declaredRadley Balko, one of the country’s most knowledgeable law-enforcement-policy journalists. “These are proposals that will almost certainly have an impact, even if only some of them are implemented. The ideas here are well-researched, supported with real-world evidence and ought to be seriously considered by policymakers.” Professor Harold Pollack, a policy expert at the University of Chicago, declared in his assessment, “One does not need to embrace every element to recognize that this well-crafted document provides a useful basis of discussion between grassroots activists, elected officials, law enforcement professionals, and policy analysts... And based on my own research on urban crime and policing, which has included the implementation of randomized-violence-prevention trials, interviews with incarcerated offenders, and collaboration with public-health and criminal-justice authorities, several proposals in Campaign Zero struck me as particularly smart.”
“Will Black Lives Matter Be A Movement That Persuades?” Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic
September 24, 2015

Rahiel Tesfamariam, another national leader of BLM, a Stanford graduate, Yale Divinity School M.Div. who sat under our own Reverend Dr. Jacqueline Thompson at Howard University, was invited to speak to Allen Temple by Senior Pastor J. Alfred Smith, Jr. at the request of Deacon Reggie Lyles this past fall. Lo and Behold! When you open up her page at rahiel.com, guess what’s the first post with pictures that you see? Her Allen Temple visit, eight o’clock service, September 18, 2015.

rahiel.com, photo by Calvin Walker

She gave a beautiful, moving, articulate, and challenging sermon to us, the Black Church: Will we support those who are on the frontlines of the struggle for Black lives? Will we meet them out there? And what was the congregational response? Tepid. Lukewarm. Typical. As credentialed, qualified, and battle-scarred as this Millennial was, our response was…tepid. I was reminded of the response of the mainline Black churches to Martin Luther King’s press for non-violent protest and a few lines from his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

“…when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to
be plunged into the abyss of despair.”
Letter from a Birmingham Jail
April 16, 1963

Although we know that we are involved somewhere in BLM, there is no outcry, no rush to mobilize, no urgency felt as you mosey through the parking lot on Sundays. We are embattled on many fronts and have felt the sting of dwindling numbers as thousands of other churches. But not all of American Christendom is struggling this way: Many non-denominational, White, Evangelical congregations are busting at the seams. I visited my eldest son’s church, Flatirons Community Church outside Denver, Colorado in Lafayette. It has over 25,000 members that attend Saturday night and Sunday services – every weekend; and they had just opened up two more satellite campuses in and around Denver. There is no single answer to the question of what is happening to the Christian church in North America, nor is it our purview. However, our Black churches are. Where are we? Is it enough to say that denominationalism is in decline? Is it enough to say that digitized culture is a culprit? Is it enough to say that our young people, especially the Millennials, have other ideas about the relevance of the Black church?

There is the possibility that young people observed the values (at least theoretically) of Black Baby Boomers (I will call us “B3”) of openness, possibility, self-determination, empowerment, and opportunity for everyone. Now that they are living it, we have problems with it: Human (including LGBTQ) rights, relaxed attitudes about career choice and higher education, multiracial friendships and relationships, digitized knowledge acquisition over Elder Wisdom. B3s enjoy the long term benefits of the struggle of the 60s but are puzzled with the urgency of the BLM Movement. If it interrupts our commute to/and or from our jobs (the BART protest) or entertainment (Super Bowl 50), it’s just annoyance. One sobering question should haunt us and bring us back to Luke 6:41-42. Would Jesus be sitting in a BART train or would he be chained to the trains with those (mostly) Black Queer young women? And there it is…the BLM Movement is multiracial, multi-gendered, and disaffected by pomp and circumstance.

Jesus’ fundamental directive was two-fold and very clear.

Jesus said, "’Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence.’
Mathew 22:37 (TMB)

You must love the Lord your God with your whole mind, your whole being, and all your strength.
Deuteronomy 6:5 (TMB)

And then He affirmed what He expects from us.

An expert in the Law of Moses stood up and asked Jesus a question to see what he would say. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to have eternal life?” Jesus answered, “What is written in the Scriptures? How do you understand them?” The man replied, “The Scriptures say, ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind.’ They also say, ‘Love your neighbors as much as you love yourself.’” Jesus said, “You have given the right answer. If you do this, you will have eternal life.”
Luke 10:25-28 (CEV)

Jesus asked, “How do you understand them?” He didn’t answer immediately but asked the man what he understood. He wanted this man to be clear about what Jesus was teaching. We have room, freedom to understand the scriptures that His life came to fulfill. So just how big is that “love” mentioned in Mathew 22, Deuteronomy 6, and Luke 10? Do we get to define that love for ourselves? Is that what Jesus meant by “how do you understand them?” Does Jesus qualify that love? Does He quantify it? Does He describe it? No. He just tells us to do it. Is it possible that the love Jesus commanded of us, if we call ourselves Christians, is much bigger than the Black Church is willing to give, as if we had a choice?

Moses answered the families of Gad and Reuben: "Do you mean that you are going to leave the fighting that’s ahead to your brothers while you settle down here? Why would you even think of letting the People of Israel down, demoralizing them just as they’re about to move into the land God gave them? That’s exactly what your ancestors did when I sent them from Kadesh Barnea to survey the country. They went as far as the Valley of Eshcol, took one look and quit. They completely demoralized the People of Israel from entering the land God had given them. And God got angry-oh, did he get angry! He swore: ’They’ll never get to see it; none of those who came up out of Egypt who are twenty years and older will ever get to see the land that I promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They weren’t interested in following me-their hearts weren’t in it. None, except for Caleb son of Jephunneh the Kenizzite, and Joshua son of Nun; they followed me-their hearts were in it.’ "God’s anger smoked against Israel. He made them wander in the wilderness for forty years, until that entire generation that acted out evil in his sight had died out.
Numbers 32:6-13 (TMB)

Is it possible that the B3s (Black Baby Boomers) “are going to leave the fighting that’s ahead to your brothers while you settle down here?” Is God’s anger going to keep us B3s from getting to that American freedom of equality or the Promised Land because we can’t clearly see a bigger love that truly welcomes everybody? Are we just like the ancestors of Gad and Reuben? Everyone over twenty years old, two generations, except for Caleb and Joshua were allowed to wander the desert. Even though they had angered God, S/He didn’t destroy them. S/He took care of them still but allowed them to die out: They never saw that Promised Land. Is that what God is allowing to happen to the Black Church because we don’t have a love big enough for everyone? Of all the people on the planet, by this time, shouldn’t African-Americans be the prime example of a bigger love? Is the 21st Century Black Church going to be Historically Black and multiracial, multi-gendered, and multi-accessible for “whosoever will?” Are we capable of that bigger love commanded by Jesus the Christ, with His presumptions and expectations about our awareness of His sacrifice? Or is He going to allow us, two generations worth of Black Americans born between 1946 and 1964, to die out so that He can work that bigger love with the new generation in this new century? Is it possible that Jesus The Nazarene is the invisible Protestor shackled to all those defiant Black, White, Asian, Hispanic, LGBTQ, Straight young people putting their bodies and futures in jeopardy - in harm’s way, in jail - for us? Are we clear about where Jesus would be?

We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!
I Corinthians 13:12 (TMB)

LORD Jesus, forgive us for that small love to which we fearfully and clearly cling. Don’t let us wander around here in the desert of stale, regimented churches. Clear out our clutter. Don’t let us die off because we think we know what Your love is: It is unfathomable, undefinable, without boundary, multi-gendered, multicolored, and unstoppable, universal, and very, very clear. You are the Ultimate Good and beyond, above, and around You there is no Other. We do love you, LORD, but our small fears rage on before us and we cower when You call. Give us big hearts for the bigger love you demand and command of us. Thank You for every breath, every good thing, every struggle You guide us through. Don’t leave us behind as we mount up for this ride into the third decade of Your new century. Like Caleb, Joshua, their wives and families, we’ll walk into the land of the giants and hide behind the folds of Your robe as You conquer with justice and Your bigger love.

Wait…wait…wait for us!
We can do it.

A bigger love. A bigger love.

Amen.