We are trying to hold one another, while our knees are weak, chests are tight, our worlds on fire, burning and burning and burning and burning.
—Danté Stewart

It took time for author and minister Danté Stewart to acknowledge and allow his own anger:

After running from rage my whole life, it took some getting used to. I noticed that rage neither set me free nor made me feel better. But it did give me some words and some energy to fight white supremacy in myself and white supremacy in the world, and all the ways white supremacy destroyed us and those we loved. It shook me out of my illusion that the world as I now knew it was the world that God wanted. It forced me to deal with the ways in which my Black body and Black children, women, and men live in a system of injustice—a system of inequality, exploitation, and disrespect. It became my public outcry that our bodies and our souls must be loved, and that our bodies and our souls mattered to God, and that our bodies and our souls must find rest.

I started to see that my Black rage in an anti-Black world was a spiritual virtue…. Black rage is the work of love that protests an unloving world. It is the good news that though our society has often forgotten us, there is Someone who loves us and believes us worth fighting for.

Stewart recognized power in joining his anger with love: 

I began to see that being enraged becomes dangerous when it is not channeled through love, serious deep love for ourselves and our neighbor. It can become a lonely place, and I have had my struggle with loneliness. When rage becomes the spark that embraces Black flesh, moves us to universal love, to struggle, to fight, to pray, to embrace, to remember, this becomes a sword and shield. In a world that wounds our souls and bodies, this becomes the work of love: holy, healing, and liberating work. Love dancing with rage, rage dancing with love, becomes the greatest spiritual, moral, and political task in each generation. It is a call for us as Black people to what Jesus called abundant life, spirit of the Lord upon Black flesh, freedom for all people.

Stewart writes that Jesus embodied love, healing, and liberation: 

Jesus loves bodies, no matter who or where or what they are. And Jesus does not hurt people in order to love them. He did not live out of his own woundedness; he did not cover up his pain by enacting it onto others…. Jesus wanted us to learn love…. I learned too late, but I learned. I learned that we all live in brokenness, deep brokenness. I learned that Jesus does not forget bodies, despised and abused bodies, but becomes good news to them by remembering them, touching them and being touched, and creating a world where their bodies are liberated, redeemed, and resurrected

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The story of Naaman in 2 Kings 5 begins by introducing two people at opposite ends of the social hierarchy. First, we meet Naaman who is described as a “great man.” He commanded the armies of Aram—Israel’s neighbor and frequent enemy which is also called Syria. Naaman was valiant, victorious, and celebrated even by his master, the king of Syria. He was one of the most famous and respected men in the country.The other character is Naaman’s opposite in almost every way. He was a great man; she was a young girl. He was Syrian; she was a foreigner from Israel. He commanded Syria’s army; she was taken captive by Syria’s army. He possessed great power; she was enslaved with no power. Naaman’s name was highly respected even by the king; she was so unimportant that her name was never even identified.Despite the seemingly insurmountable distance between their social locations, we soon discover that the young Israelite slave girl would forever change the life of the great commander of the Syrian army. How this was possible teaches us important lessons about the link between identity and empathy that we will unpack over the next few days. To begin, we need to recognize our temptation to reduce everyone’s identity, including our own, to one dimension. If the enslaved Israelite girl only saw herself as the victim of Syrian injustice, and if she only saw her master as the man who led the army that kidnapped her, it’s unlikely that her capacity for empathy would have extended to Naaman.Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, calls this the danger of a single story, and she experienced it acutely when she attended college in the United States. In her 2009 TED Talk, Adichie said, “My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to what she called my ‘tribal music,’ and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey.”Adichie grew up on a university campus in Nigeria, in a middle-class family with professional parents. She was highly educated and cosmopolitan, but those were not the identities her American roommate had been told Africans could possess. “She felt sorry for me even before she saw me,” Adichie said. “Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals”.Her experience illustrates the problem that occurs when we see ourselves or others as possessing only a single identity—it eliminates virtually any possibility of meaningful connection. Today, there are numerous forces—economic, political, and cultural—seeking to minimize your multifaceted and complex identity to a single story, and in the process widen the gap between you and others or between a group you belong to and ones you do not. Not only does this fuel the divisions in our society, but it also eliminates the possibility of empathy toward those who do not share your narrow identity. DAILY SCRIPTURE GALATIANS 3:26-29  2 KINGS 5:1-27  WEEKLY PRAYER From John Chrysostom (347 – 407) Lord, let us pattern our lives only on those things that are worthy of being imitated. Not gorgeous buildings or expensive estates, but on those people who have confidence in you. Help us to imitate those who have riches in heaven—the owners of those treasures that make them truly rich. Help us to imitate those who are poor for Christ’s sake, so that we may attain the good things of eternity by the grace and love toward man of our Lord Jesus Christ. Glory, might, and honor be unto him with the Father, together with the Holy Spirit, now and always, world without end. Amen.

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