Stories of being black, white, and brown in America, as seen through the lens of being One in Christ, as illustrated in Ephesians 2:11-22.
Charlotta knew things couldn’t go on like this. As a black slave who worked on a Kentucky plantation she was treated as property, not person. Charlotta’s husband, who was white, was free, and lived nearby. The couple had twelve children. They too were slaves. This, at the time, was the law of the land.
The family lived amongst very real divisions. Divisions designed to oppress one group and lift up another. Divisions based exclusively on the pigment of your skin.
When the plantation owner died in 1853, Charlotta and her children were willed to the owner’s daughter with one caveat: she had to set the entire family free. The plantation owner was a Wesleyan Methodist; the antislavery principles of his faith had begun to sink in.
The daughter agreed. But the plantation owner’s two sons, not sharing their sister’s religious or antislavery convictions, felt otherwise. Jealous at being left out of the inheritance, the brothers captured one of Charlotta’s sons and sold him, again, into slavery.
Can you hear the technicolor coat echoes from scripture?
Realizing her family could never truly be free, or safe, in the South, Charlotta made plans for them to escape North in the hopes of a better life. The odds were low they would be successful. Very low. Only around 1,000 slaves escaped each year for good. But their family couldn’t live like this. There could be no peace with captivity always on the horizon. She held onto a tiny glimmer of hope, knowing she at least had to try (1).
Guatemala
Not too long ago, from the migrant camp near one of Tijuana’s main border crossings, Violetta could almost see San Diego. The American city shimmered just beyond the frontier fence. She could see American cars as they slid down a highway and disappeared toward a ghostly skyline. She could imagine what lay almost within reach. But that promised land was also infinitely distant. From the Mexican side of the border, mired in inches of mud that reeked of broken portable toilets, the entire U.S. might as well have been a mirage.
When Violetta and her husband Cándido arrived at the camp with their children, ages 12, 11 and 9, they added their names to the bottom of a thick book. More than 5,000 migrants were ahead of them waiting to request asylum. Because of recent policy changes, American authorities were processing only 40 to 100 requests a day. The family expected it would take months before their names were called.
It was a chance they would have to take; going back to Guatemala was simply not an option. Violetta explained that a month before, their family was forced to flee after a gang threatened to murder their children if they didn’t pay an exorbitant bribe; five months’ worth of profits from their tiny juice stall. The family hid for a day in their house and then sneaked away before dawn.
“Nobody can protect us there,” Violetta said. “We have seen in other cases, they kill the people and kill their children.” Statistics tell a similar tale; Guatemala has the second highest homicide rate in the world. A rate ten times what it is here in the US, over 250 times as much as Japan.
Violetta’s voice quivered with emotion as she continued. “The first thing is to have security for them,” she said of her kids. “That nothing bad happens to them.”
There could be no peace in the environment they left. For now a glimmer of hope, as they stood at the border between safety and insanity, would have to do (2).
Then
Two millennia ago was also a time of extreme darkness. Not just for a person or a people, but for the world. God’s beloved had failed, consistently, to live in right relationship with their creator. God crafted covenants to help humanity along, people kept drifting away. God tried fewer religious laws, then more, trying to find a fix that would work. No matter the design God’s people just couldn’t get it right.
And for those not part of God’s tribe? They found themselves on the other side of an eternal wall impossible to breach.
All these rules and tribes and separation from each other created endless division here on earth.
People fought over religion, race, ethnicity, borders.
Each an attempt to define –
Who had worth,
Who did not.
God knew things couldn’t go on like this. More laws or floods or fires weren’t going to solve it either. It was time for a glimmer of hope to be birthed into the world.
Enter Jesus.
Now
Through his life, death, and resurrection this new hope would live on. This new hope was not just for a person, a people, a tribe or a nation. This new hope would be for all.
Before Christ we were strangers to the promise; non-citizens in the kingdom of God. We were aliens, foreigners; separate from our Maker, separate from each other. We created walls of division, easily judging whoever dwelt on the other side.
We couldn’t help ourselves, really.
It was part of our broken, fallen state.
But Jesus? He up and changed all that. We who were once far off have been brought near. Instead of being enslaved in fear and violence Christ is now our peace. The walls that divide us have been torn down. The laws and commandments and ordinances that keep us apart are poof – thanks be to God – now gone.
In the place of two there is one.
In the place of conflict, peace.
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For the divided have been reconciled to God through the cross. No longer are we strangers, foreigners, aliens. We all share a common citizenship in the kingdom of God.
We need only care for one another, our neighbors, as we care for ourselves.
Charlotta
With the aid of a white minister from Ohio, and the white daughter of a former slaveholder, Charlotta and her family set out in the Fall of 1853 in an old covered wagon, praying for safe passage. The mix of races in the group made their escape from the South easier than most. They rode to Louisville, boarding a steamboat to St. Louis. There they arranged for transport north. But the smuggler threatened to turn Charlotta and her family over to Missouri slave traders if they didn’t pay more. The slaveholder’s daughter, still traveling with the group, had no choice but to comply.
As the family traveled over the Des Moines River into Iowa the weather turned cold. Instead of continuing father north they opted to settle in Keokuk, a town in the southeast corner of the Hawkeye state. Charlotta’s husband secured a job and got to building their house. They had made it to the safety of Iowa and began to settle in.
Charlotta, learning that two of her daughter’s husbands, who were still enslaved, could be purchased and freed, went east to make anti-slavery speeches. Within six months she had made enough money to buy her sons-in-law from their captors.
By the grace of God, with help from many faithful Christians, she had secured freedom for her family.
For the white Christians that were part of this journey anti-slavery efforts weren’t just a matter of belief. There was real risk involved. Prior to the Civil War, helping slaves escape to safety broke US law; punishable by a fine of $1,000 and six months in jail.
That’s about $35,000 in today’s dollars; enough to make you think twice about how firmly you believe in liberty and justice for all.
Even though her family was safe and reunited, Charlotta didn’t stop there.
In later years, her home became an early stop on the Underground Railroad in Iowa, a gateway from the South to the North, eventually into Canada. Her efforts gave countless others a first taste of a freedom they could call their own (1).
Through Christ what was separate began to be joined together in these United States. Through Christ walls of division based on the pigment of skin were starting to come down. For Charlotta’s family, and millions of other African Americans that soon got their first glimpse of freedom, new glimmers of hope for a brighter future, alongside all of God’s children, had begun.
Close
And for Violetta’s family waiting at the Tijuana migrant camp, at the bottom of a long list, holding on to that glimmer of hope? The story you heard earlier comes from a Time magazine article from 2019. We don’t know how it ends.
Perhaps the family was granted asylum.
Perhaps not.
It is an ending as yet unwritten for them, and millions more.
The story of race in America is nowhere near complete, with much still to overcome. As we imagine what the future for our black and brown brothers and sisters will look like, let us consider these scriptural truths from Ephesians 2:
In Christ –
You were once far off have been brought near;
Two groups have been made into one;
Walls that divide have been broken down;
The hostility between us has been removed.
In Christ we are no longer strangers, no longer aliens.
In Christ we share citizenship with the saints.
In Christ we are fellow members of the household of God.
In Christ we are family.
These are lofty ideals, for sure.
Yet they are possible, through Christ.
Turning glimmers of hope into beacons of light will not happen overnight. And it will not happen on its own. It will take Christians of conviction to lend a hand, helping turn scriptural ideal into lived reality. It will take a synthesis of thought, word, deed. It will take effort to bring us together, as one, in Christ. Effort from people like you and me. Amen.
(1) Summarized from the book Outside In: African American History in Iowa, 1838-2000
(2) Summarized from a Time Magazine Article published Feb 4, 2019, available here.
