Supremacy

Last week there was another mass shooting. 50 are dead and many more injured. This time in Christchurch, New Zealand.

I’m not sure how those words strike you, but they aren’t surprising or shocking to me anymore. Certainly it’s tragic and appalling, but somehow mass killings and terror attacks have morphed into expected events that we can anticipate every 6-9 months. I’m not sure if there is a way to describe that other than crazy. And maybe the craziest part is that in two or three more days, Christchurch will fall out of the news cycle and become a foggy memory that blends in with the other mass killings in the recent past. After all, it’s hard to keep the different shootings straight.

As we watched the details unfold last week, the suspect’s motives and ideologies came to light. White supremacy. Unfortunately, it’s a phrase that has become far too familiar. This shooter wrote a manifesto, made his views clear, and had barbaric aspirations. His goal was to propagate racial and religious hatred between ethnicities, hoping to ignite a race war.

The depravity of such an ideology makes me gag. It’s one thing to be proud of your heritage and history and celebrate your ethnicity. It’s quite another for pride in “self” to evolve into hatred of other. But, then again, the Devil is most devious when he takes a small, good thing and transforms it into a massive evil.

At its center, that’s what white supremacy is: the distorting work of the Devil. As C.S. Lewis warned in The Screwtape Letters, the Devil tempts men to live in the extremes. When it comes to any form of nationalism, once you get people to wholesale accept one group and wholesale reject the other, the Enemy has won.

White supremacy though cannot stand under the supremacy of Christ. The gospel doesn’t medicate racism, it abolishes it. The tragedy is felt now, but the promise of reconciliation is still good.

In the face of such evil, Ephesians 2 is our wellspring of hope.

Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called “the uncircumcision” by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands - remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near.  Ephesians 2: 11-17

Christ is making all people new. Not refurbished or simply cleaned up. New, as in transformed. New, like an invasion. He does it by putting Himself inside of us. He makes us new men and women because, by the blood of Christ, our most fundamental identity is in Him.

That doesn’t mean I cease to be white or you cease to be black. And we should celebrate all God has done by giving us unique and distinct national and ethnic identities. Praise God we’re not all the same. But we are so much more than our national and ethnic differences. Our differences are meant to help us see Christ differently. They are not meant to create “us” and “them” categories.

We know this because our end-zone isn’t eternal segregation, it’s corporate communal worship. It’s a City filled with every tribe and tongue and nation singing to King Jesus together (Rev. 7: 9 – 17). I once heard a pastor say, “Heaven will be every white supremacist’s Hell.” His point is that all forms of racial superiority are incinerated by the Gospel because the Gospel reconciles all people to God first and to one another second.

This means that Christians ought to be the loudest voices against any form of racism or nationalism. This is a basic outworking of the Gospel. There’s zero room for white supremacy while a Supreme Christ reigns on the Throne.