Reconstructing the Gospel by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Author:Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove [Wilson-Hartgrove, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Racial justice;political engagement;Christian mission;Civil War;South;Reconstruction;bible belt;history;civil rights movement;Black Lives Matter;Moral Mondays;moral movement;race and faith;politics and religion;whiteness;freedom movement;resistance
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2018-01-24T18:26:23+00:00

On Pilgrimage in America

Vincent Harding taught me to pay attention to the holy ground that we often forget in the American story. An African American colleague and colaborer of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. Harding was also a historian who saw the world through the eyes of faith. He knew well the importance of memory for people’s movements, but he wanted to build movements, not monuments. Dr. Harding believed, as Revelation reprises from Psalm 46, that “there is a river whose streams make glad the city of God” (Psalm 46:4). That great river flows through history, connecting people of faith to the Christianity of Christ. Dr. Harding’s life’s work was to baptize people into that river.

I met Dr. Harding after a friend in Birmingham, Alabama, called to ask if I would gather a busload of young people from the Southeast to come spend a few days with Dr. Harding, soaking in the memories of that place and considering together what the freedom movement looks like today. This was before Black Lives Matter, but young people in Walltown—much like young people of color elsewhere—were angry about racial profiling and the number of people who looked like them in our jail. We decided to make a 21st Century Freedom Ride together and to start with a public forum on racial profiling in our neighborhood. Every pilgrimage begins somewhere.

When God called Abram in Genesis 12, his destination was unclear. “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you” (Genesis 12:1). Abram did not know where he was going, but God’s call focused Abram’s attention on what he needed to leave behind: “your country, your people and your father’s household.” To begin to imagine ourselves on pilgrimage in America is to acknowledge, like the abolitionists before us, that we are aliens in a strange land. This world is not our home, and the nation we have known is not our true country. Not only was this land stolen from the indigenous people who were here before us, but also, in a broader sense, we have never yet been the land of the free and the home of the brave that we aspire to become. If we are honest, there is no time in our history we can return to when everything was as we say it should be.

In the most practical sense, the promise of an America with liberty and justice for all is something we must leave the country and people and households we’ve known to discover. To be true to our faith as well as our nation’s aspirations is to be on pilgrimage.

Dr. Harding taught us that every pilgrimage toward freedom begins with attention to our basic identity. “Where did you spend your childhood?” he asked each person, even the ones who were still children. “And where did your maternal grandmother spend her childhood?” Each of us comes from a household and a story, Dr. Harding knew. “Tell me her name,” he said, leaning forward with his gentle smile.

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