WINSTON-SALEM — Reconciling racial conflicts requires abandoning a “human point of view,” two pastors told a group of Baptists in North Carolina last weekend.
“There’s power when we look at people from a ‘Jesus point of view,’ ” said Darryl Aaron, senior pastor of First Baptist Church on Highland Avenue in Winston-Salem.
“Jesus came to open us to walk in new ways,” agreed Nathan Parrish, pastor of Peace Haven Baptist Church in Winston-Salem. “He came to set us free.”
The two pastors — one black, the other white — engaged in a “sermon dialogue” Nov. 4 during the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina’s “Fellowship on the Move,” the last of three educational and worship events hosted across the state this fall. Earlier meetings were held Oct. 7 in Ahoskie and Oct. 21 in Waynesville.
Communion brought worship to a close at the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina's Nov. 4 regional event.
|
“These gatherings have focused on the theme of reconciliation,” said CBFNC executive coordinator Larry Hovis at the Nov. 4 event at Peace Haven Baptist Church. “God was in Christ reconciling himself to the world and has entrusted to us the ministry of reconciliation.”
In their sermon, Aaron and Parrish explored the Apostle Paul’s observation in 2 Corinthians that Christians “regard no one from a human point of view” because “everything has become new.”
“I hope you don’t mind me reminding you that some people who look like me have never been considered from a human point of view,” said Aaron. “They’ve been regarded as 3/5 of a person. Immigrants, refugees, the poor, those on welfare have never received full human status. And now am I hearing you say the Bible doesn’t give them human status?”
No, said Parrish, that’s “not the way the God who took on flesh is operating among us.”
“The Bible condemns degrading strategies or treating anyone in a way that denies giving people human status,” he said.
Then what does it mean to abandon the human point of view in engaging one’s neighbors and enemies? Aaron asked.
“I don’t think it means becoming what some people call color blind,” said Parish. “It doesn’t mean denying cultural differences or erasing those distinctive marks and characteristics of our humanity, and pretending they don’t exist.
“Having said that, the gospel calls us to something,” he said. “It’s changed me to see how my particularities, my experiences, my identities have been shaped, and how they have often misshaped the way I see you, my neighbor and others and especially the way I see myself.”
“It would be mighty nice if we could free ourselves from the mess we wallow in,” said Aaron. “But it’s difficult to be free and be in community.”
He recalled once seeing a woman walking down a street remove shoes which apparently didn’t fit before continuing her journey barefoot.
“Is the gospel calling us to take off some stuff that is preventing us from being in community?” he asked.
“The gospel is calling us to take off shoes that are too tight,” said Parrish. “They’re rubbing our feet raw, they’re shoes we inherited from other people, put on our feet by others and forced to wear. Some we even picked out for ourselves and they didn’t fit and we couldn’t walk in them. … Sometimes I feel there is a whole closet of shoes that needs to be gotten rid of.”
Transforming freedom
That kind of freedom is transforming, said Aaron. “Free people help people, free other people, lift people, love people, forgive people, challenge the status quo, go beyond neighborhoods, help those who can’t help themselves and see people from God’s point of view.”
The worship service closed with an invitation to communion, an act the two pastors said “gives us courage to break down barriers and build bridges and change the way we see each other.”
Earlier in the service, an offering was collected for the CBFNC’s hunger fund, which is distributed to a variety of ministries across the state. About 18 percent of North Carolinians — and 27 percent of the state’s children — experience food insecurity, said John Carroll, a staff minister at Peace Haven Baptist Church who will become pastor of First Baptist Church in Danville, Va., in January.
“On the other hand, we know the words of Christ, that when you throw a banquet you should invite the poor and blind because they cannot repay you,” he said. “When we stand between those two facts, we hear the call of Christ reverberate — feed those who hunger.”
Carroll said one of the recipients of the CBFNC’s hunger fund is the Winston-Salem-based Second Harvest Food Bank, which aims to reduce hunger and malnutrition in northwest North Carolina. The food bank’s Triad Community Kitchen, which provides training and placement in the food industry for chronically unemployed or underemployed people, later provided dinner for Fellowship on the Move participants.
A chef from the food bank — N’gai Dickerson — led an awareness workshop at the Nov. 4 meeting, one of eight offered on topics that included parenting, ministry to refugees, reaching 20-somethings and being Baptist.
Robert Dilday ([email protected]) is managing editor of the Religious Herald.