“There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair. “ MLK, Letter From Birmingham Jail

#GeorgeFloyd

This week I was part of a cohort of @ColsonCenter fellows that read this letter. Then a few days later, once again, we see a black man die in the streets. For what? Alleged forgery? What strikes me about King’s words and the letter as whole are twofold.

First, the letter has a strong undercurrent of the imago dei, that all men are created in the image of God. Friends, the names #GeorgeFloyd #AhmaudArbery and countless others represent the destruction of God’s image in the name of racism.

Second, MLK’s audience, as @msmullin correctly pointed out was not his fellow blacks, but moderate white church members of the South who refused to speak up due to their lukewarm-ness. If this is going to stop, it will take everyone.

There can be no fence-sitting when black men made in the image of God are chased down and shot, when they held to the ground with a knee on the throat - all not done in the dark abyss of ignorant eyes, but in the full light of a watching audience.

King says later, “I have heard so many ministers say, ‘Those are social issues which the gospel has nothing to do with,’ and I have watched so many churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion which made a strange distinction between bodies and souls,...

“...the sacred and the secular.”

Brothers and sisters, this issue is about the gospel. It is about destroying the vitriolic prejudice that sees the color of a man’s skin but not the value of his soul. May the church not be silent anymore.