God's Grace & a "post racial America"

With the recent events between the Cambridge police officer, Sergeant Crowley, and professor Gates of Harvard University, the media has been in an uproar about who was right and who was wrong. Professor Gates was arrested for disorderly conduct after his neighbor called 911 because she thought someone was breaking into his house. It turned out that he was trying to get into his back door after the front door was jammed. Gates was returning from a long trip from China and when the police office got there, it is alleged that he hurled insults at the officer, Mr. Crowley, alleging that he was only being harassed because he was black. Gates would be arrested, but eventually the charges were dropped and the case would probably have died down until a reporter asked president Obama about it at a presidential news conference, to which president Obama made an ill-advised comment about the cop acting stupidly. This added to the drama of this incident as the Cambridge police department rallied to the defense of their guy and one officer, Justin Barrett, even going a little too far in an e-mail calling using a racial slur to refer to professor Gates; Mr. Barrett was suspended from the police department for the comment.

All this drama this culminated in a sit down session at the White House yesterday with professor Gates, officer Crowley, vice president Biden and president Obama, all sitting in the South Lawn enjoying some alone time. What was discussed has remained confidential. The sit down meeting was at the suggestion of the president, realizing that he should have calibrated his words more carefully when commenting about the original incident that started all of this.

Some say that the election of President Obama is proof that we are in a post racial America and that we are at a point where we have finally gotten over our racial baggage. But anytime an incident like this happens, we are reminded once again that generally speaking, people of different races tend to see things through different lenses. I personally don't think that officer Crowley is racist and do believe that if cooler heads had prevailed, this issue would not have even made headline news. But two huge egos were in the room, and neither side was willing to back down. It ended up being a case of testicular fortitude. I learned a long time ago to never be disrespectful towards authority figures, especially the ones with guns, like cops.

We are told that this is a teachable moment and I hope that it is. Let us be honest, America has indeed come a very long way. Case in point, the city of Cambridge, where this happened, has a black female mayor. The state of Massachusetts has a black male governor, the country has a black president. This is not the same America that we used to be. But this does not mean that racial baggage does not exits. Blacks still trail whites in almost every indicator of socio-economic progress and their unemployment rate is almost double that of whites. We should have a debate as to why this is the case, a debate that goes beyond the talking points of the left and the right which try and make everything into a shouting match which imply it is either that the government can solve all problems (it can't), or that personal responsibility alone can solve all ills (it can't either)..

From a spiritual perspective, embracing the message of God's grace frees us to stop being so defensive and insulting in our dialogue, because we realize that even at our best, we all need the same love and compassion that God gives out freely. If we could start from this standpoint, it is easier to talk from a paradigm of compassion, instead of conflict; a paradigm of love, instead of fear and disdain. We all have our individual biases and the least that we can do is acknowledge them when they exist, maybe not publicly, but at least to ourselves; healing and maturity cannot occur otherwise. We can never dispel some of the harmful myths and stereotypes if we don't at least have the courage to engage in honest dialogue that is not trapped in the prison of political correctness. How many of us have true friends from other cultures, ethnic groups or "racial" categories? How many of us are daring enough to get outside of our comfort zones to at least converse with such persons?

Politics at its best is about service towards others, but at its worst is nothing but a game where one side is always trying to outdo the other side and win by proving that "my side is ALWAYS right and your side ALWAYS wrong!" This is very obvious especially if you listen to the political talking heads on TV or on the radio. But the truth is not always that black or white (no pun intended) though and we have to be willing to examine the nuances that make up every day life. But we can only do so if we are coming from a place where we have embraced the same love and forgiveness that has been extended to us from God and offer it to others.. If God's compassion and love know no boundaries, who are we to set limits?

Maybe we can learn more from one another in this "teachable moment", but it will take the courage to at least engage in non-judgmental dialogue with one another...

"If anyone boasts, "I love God," and goes right on hating his brother or sister, thinking nothing of it, he is a liar. If he won't love the person he can see, how can he love the God he can't see? The command we have from Christ is blunt: Loving God includes loving people. You've got to love both. " 1 John 4:20-21 (The Message)

Stephen Oladotun Akinduro

THE ART OF FORGIVENESS!!

"Look after each other so that none of you fails to receive the grace of God. Watch out that no poisonous root of bitterness grows up to trouble you, corrupting many." Hebrews 12:15 (NLT)

If you live long enough, someone, somewhere is going to hurt you. It is a fact of life that we are all, to various degrees, both perpetrators and victims of pain. The real question when this happens, however, is what do you do when you have been hurt? do you seek revenge, do you let the authorities or the 'law" handle it if it is a serious offense, and even if you do either of those things, do you eventually choose to forgive? Forgiveness is one of those things that is easy to talk about in spiritual circles until you are the one that has to do the forgiving. Let's face it, when we are hurt, our first instinct is to seek revenge, we use phrases like "Karma is a b%tch" and "what goes around comes around" or "revenge is a dish that is best served cold" because there is a part of us that secretly yearns for those who hurt us to get a taste of their own medicine. The irony about bitterness, however, is that it is like a poison that eats up the soul. Bitterness is like drinking poison and expecting your enemy to die.

Too often we expect people to simply forgive, without realizing that forgiveness is not necessarily an easy process, and besides, asking someone who does not realize the degree to which they have been forgiven to forgive another is putting the cart before the horse and is an act of sheer futility.

I was reminded of this recently after reading a powerful true story, the book, "Picking Cotton" (by Jennifer Thompson-Canino & Ronald Cotton) about a black man, Ronald Cotton who was wrongfully convicted of raping a white woman, Jennifer Thompson, in 1985. I first saw their story in a recent episode of "60-Minutes". The story was basically about how an eye witness can falsely accuse someone of something they did not do because ones memory can easily be flawed when it comes to the way lineups are done in the criminal justice system. Jennifer Thompson was raped by a black man in 1984, while she was a college student. After the authorities asked her to identify her rapist and made a composite diagram of him, she identified Ronald Cotton as her rapist, even though he was completely innocent. But because he initially forgot where he was that night and because she was convinced he was the one who raped her based on her memory, he would be found guilty at his trial and sentenced for a crime that he did not commit. He was able to get a retrial while he was in prison, but after the retrial, he was found guilty of raping not one, but two women (it was believed that the rapist raped two women that night) and given life in prison..It was not until 11 years after his sentence, that DNA evidence found him not-guilty and he was exonerated of all the crimes against him, and the real rapist - a guy named Bobby Poole - finally confessed to raping both women (by that time, he was also already in prison for an unrelated incident, and he had been bragging to another inmate about how he got away with raping those women).

Forgiveness in action: This is where the story gets interesting. After Ronald Cotton is set free, he is given financial compensation by the State, and Jennifer Thompson is ridden with tremendous guilt about putting this man away for so long. At first she is terrified that he may try to harm her in revenge, but she is reassured that this is not the case. Ronald simply wants to move on with his life and start a family. They, Ronald & Jennifer, eventually meet and she tells him that even if she apologized every day for the rest of her life, she could not repay him for taking all those years away. He tells her that he has forgiven her and she experiences some of the healing grace that she not only needs to move on, but to forgive the real perpetrator of the crime. Finding forgiveness that she did not deserve from a person whom she once despised based on her flawed memory helps free her from the prison of bitterness that is eating away at her soul. It is truly an amazing story of forgiveness and redemption and the unlikely friendship that ensues between the two families after years of thinking that the "other side" was the enemy.

What I got from reading that story if that it is practically impossible to forgive until we realize how much we have been forgiven. I know I have done many things that I am not proud of in my life and I am humbled and grateful that God had forgiven me of such deeds. So who am I to hold bitterness against another? It does not mean that harmful actions do not hurt, it simply means that we extend the same compassion that has been shown to us to others. That is something that is sorely lacking in our dog-eat-dog world.

Stephen O. Akinduro

Why are the most religious people often the most judgmental?

"Oh, don’t worry; we wouldn’t dare say that we are as wonderful as these other men who tell you how important they are! But they are only comparing themselves with each other, using themselves as the standard of measurement. How ignorant!" ~ 2 Corinthians 10:12 (NLT)

"Morality as a badge of attainment breeds the deadliest state of mind - a delusion of absolute autonomy." ~ Ravi Zacharias, "The Lotus and the Cross".

I have often wondered why it seems like the more religious a person is, the more there is the tendency to be judgmental and the less the tendency to show compassion. I have not only seen this in the life of others, but also in my own life. It is often said that the thing that we battle with the most is what we tend to despise the most in others, and I know that "self-righteousness" is one of those things that I tend to struggle with - maybe that explains why I write so much about God's grace, because I am reminded every day by my own conscious how far I fall short and yet how much I am blessed.

And yet, what I have realized is that the most religious amongst us usually struggle with the concept of God's grace, because grace levels the playing field of fallibility. Grace says that you cannot fool God with the petty comparisons where you set yourself on a pedestal at the expense of someone else's struggles or sins. The common argument that I hear to justify this phenomenon (of self-righteousness) is that just because we are Christians does not mean we should not point out sin when we see it, after all God wants us to stay away from sin and live pure lives. My comeback to that statement would be this: if we say that we are sanctified (or made pure and acceptable to God) based on he the gracious sacrifice that Jesus paid for us, and if we say that apart from this gift of love, we are all in the same boat - sinners in need of a Savior - then how can we even have the audacity to even condemn others to hell for things that we are all capable of doing ourselves given similar circumstances?

It is a weird that the very people who often need the grace of God are often the last people thinking about going to church, mainly because they don't think they will find compassion or understanding there. To be fair, it would be wrong to generalize all "churches" or religious persons and say that they're all this way..This would be an unfair caricature. But it is fair to say that the main reason why being very religious tends to increase one sense of condemnation is because religion by its very definition places self on a moral pedestal at the expense of other people's flaws. In other words, as long as I base my righteousness on how much morally better I perceive myself to be compared to someone else, this condemnation madness continues. It is a trick that always works, as long as I can see enough fault in someone else that makes me look better, then I feel good about myself. Is it no wonder that we are fascinated with tabloid gossip and reality shows that highlight the drama in other people's lives? We salivate over the drama, and the more salacious the drama, the bigger the ratings or sales for that show or publication.

This is how self-righteous works in practice: Here are a few examples: the person without tattoos or piercings decries those who do as defiling their bodies; the person who may tell white lies, says "at least I did not commit perjury"; the person who hates, says "at least I am not a murderer like Hitler", the "petty" thief says, "at least I am not Bernie Madoff", arguably the most hated man in America right now; there is always some "other" whom we think we are not as bad as, in an attempt to make ourselves feel better about ourselves and gauge our sense of self and righteousness. But the fact is that these tricks only perpetuate an illusion which fosters arrogance and prevent compassion from flowing towards others...The flip side of this type of self-righteous behavior occurs when we always assume that others are not as "fortunate" as us because they did not always follow the right rules like we did. We never really know the depths of real compassion until we see the depths of our own fallibility and the need we all have for God's grace.

Happy Independence Day Weekend!!

Go Venus Williams & Roger Federer!!!