In response to the series of posting on race and reconciliation that my good friend Danielle has started doing on her blog, I thought I would offer my pennies worth of thoughts here as well.

I find it very peculiar how different institutions and structures become identified with a certain idea or word. My college, LCC, for example, was obsessed with "community." Everything we did was community this or community that. I will not deny that community indeed was an important and very real aspect of our life together, but by the time I graduated I had  developped a strange twitch as a refelx to that "c" word. Now that I am Duke, everyone is talking about reconcilliation. Big time reconcilliation. And on top of that I am working at a "reconciling" church. And everyone is using that word to suit their own agenda or syllabus or theology or whatever else that has captured their imaginations and hearts for the time being.

So reconcilliation at Duke has to do with race, and 99% of the time it is in black and white rekational dynamics. It is about the walled campus of Duke - the epitomy of the white institution in the New South - in the middle of black Durham. It is about the lacrosse scandal and white boys' privilege and black girl's body. It is about our dying white churches and the need for us as pastors to engage in the work of reconcilliation to save the churches from dying inself-absorbtion. It is about the Jim Crow laws, segragation, Tim Tyson, biracial couples, the racial make up of our faculty and our housekeeping staff. It is a bout black and white as if they were clean cut easily defined categories in which every person comes.

Without denying that those are issues worthy of our attention, I cannot let this rhetoric trick me into believing that the need for racial reconcilliation is bilatteral. As an intern at a Hispanic church I have quickly learned that my students that I tutor are the blacks of the blacks: in other words, the pecking order in the public school system goes something like this: whites-blacks-Hispanics. White and black tensions have progressed into a whole new level where discrimination is subtle and systemic, almost invisible, more felt and intuitively detected than obviosly screaming into one's face; the discrimination against Hispanic kids is blatant and raw. It is as if the history is being re-written with one race replacing the other. North Carolina, I believe will be soon known as the state with the fastest growing Hispanic population and the state that is blindest to it. Somehow, though, the questions of reconcilliation raised at Duke Divinity School do not take that piece of the racial puzzle into account, to say nothing of the Korean, Montangard, white-non-English speaking and other groups.

So now on to my recinciling church. When in the United Methodist circles we say "reconciling" we mean intentionally inclusive of the LGBT community. And we are so inclusive of it that if we quit doing that we would need to lock the door of the church and go home and find another place to worship. as the church is going through the visioning process now and deciding whom it is going to reach, the primary questions circle around whether we will be safe within our church if we open it to people who are different. So we are willing to be reconcilling amidst ourselves, but we are unwilling to be reconciling to the rest of the world and take the risk that some people took when they decided to open the doors of the church to them. As a straight girl, i cannot but wonder if the church's doors are as widely open to me as they would be to a person from LGBT community.

So here is reconcilliation as I have seen it. But I am still thirsting to see the ministry of reconcilliation that Christ has entrusted to the church lived out fully...

2 Corinthians 5:13-20

13 For if we are beside ourselves, it is for God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you. 14 For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. 15 And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them. 16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. 17 So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! 18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; 19 that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. 20 So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.