Column: Working through prejudice with fear and trembling

By DR. MARK ROSS/Columnist

My parents did not teach me to be prejudiced. I learned it on my own. I graduated from high school and college in Birmingham, Ala. The Magic City also had the claim to shame of being the most segregated city in the nation. The KKK brazenly stood at intersections collecting money in buckets from sympathetic motorists. They dressed in white with hoods, hiding their identities but not their maniacal purposes.
Today the Civil Rights Museum is in downtown Birmingham, directly across from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. In 1963, the KKK bombed that church, taking the lives of four small African-American children. The church and the museum remind the city and all who visit it of the heart of darkness in all of us.
Unfortunately, attending church did not cure my bigotry. Instead, the church often reinforced that prejudice. Someone once called Sunday morning at 11 a.m. the most segregated hour in America. The churches I attended and served were without color. More than that, they were generally without tolerance of other races. Part of their problem was the Bible.
There are places in the Bible that are small and petty. Some of those places demonstrate both racial and ethnic prejudice. There are texts that indicate people with physical defects and just plain differences are disqualified from being part of God’s people. Stories in the Bible describe ethnic cleansing and the genocide of entire people groups. Some actually think it was God’s will.
For reasons I do not completely understand, God inspired people to write the Bible who were a lot less than perfect. God gave them words, pictures and ideas. He also gave them a free hand. Even as the writers wrote inspired accounts of nothing short of divine revelation, they did so alongside their own episodes of mortal bigotry.
God did not edit. He left their words the way they wrote them. I think that is why I trust the Bible as much as I do. God did not clean it up and sanitize it. He did not rewrite history. Instead, he left the Bible as a reflection of the people who wrote it and those of us who read it, a mix of the good and the bad.
King David can be a “man after God’s own heart” in one place, and in the next commit adultery and have the woman’s husband killed. The Bible calls Abraham a friend of God, but freely admits that he masqueraded as his wife’s brother to save his own skin.
The ideas in the Bible can be just as complex as its heroes are. You do not have to look far to find support for something as wrong as slavery. Yet, if you will keep reading, you will also find truth.
The Bible not only teaches, but it also learns. It grows. The Bible begins with ideas that we now see as crude and primitive, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” Yet, it ends with something as profound as “If someone strikes you on your right cheek, turn to him the other.” It may begin with one small nation as God’s elect, but it ends with a revelation of heaven filled with folks from “every nation, all tribes, and peoples and languages standing before the throne.” As Saint Paul put it, “There is neither male nor female, slave nor free, Greek nor Jew all are one in Christ Jesus.”
Like the Bible, I am trying to grow. I am working through my own prejudice just as I work through my own salvation, “with fear and trembling.” It appeared to me while watching the election, that I was not the only one.

Dr. Mark Ross is the pastor of Marion Baptist Church. To learn more about MBC, visit http://www.marionbaptistchurchva.com/.