As We Are

[This post is a rewriting of a five-minute impromptu speech I gave a couple of weeks ago. Although I don't consider it the best impromptu I've ever given, it was the most relevant, and I meant every word of it, so I'll share it here before the relevance decreases.]

"All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die." - Bob Dylan*

Inequality of people in different groups is one of the most common complaints in modern society. Especially in the midst of a remarkably contentious election season, almost everyone has some pet inequality that they vocally despise. We can argue all day over the existence, scope, and impact of certain inequalities and whether or not all people experience inequality equally. But it exists. It's real and it matters.

This is one thing people have in common: no matter who you are, you belong to a group that sometimes faces discrimination. If you are a woman and you ask for a raise, you are less likely to receive one than a male coworker asking for a raise. If you are a man calling a domestic abuse hotline, you are more likely to be turned away or told you're the aggressor than actually offered help. If you're a white student with good grades, you will receive less help getting into college than non-white students with similar grades (except for Asians). If you are a black person encountering a police officer, you are more likely to die in the following interaction than an equally or more dangerous white person.

There are ways to rationalize all of these inequalities, if you try hard. In comparing individual events, the differences may be completely justified. But the inequalities exist. They differ in scope, institutionalization, and severity- yet they are all wrong.

It is wrong for us to treat people differently based on their DNA because we all have the same beginning and end. We came into this world with nothing (Job 1:21) and will turn into dust when we die (Genesis 3:19). We have all failed in our duty to our Creator (Romans 3:23). Anything beyond that is mere details. We share the same origins, status, and destiny in the eyes of the One who made us. The only thing more ridiculous than our obsession with talking about inequality apart from any attempt to offer solutions is our insistence that certain groups are still fundamentally different from us. They're not. We're here, we're fallen, we're dying. No one can escape this.

It's foolishness to discriminate based on skin color, gender, wealth, attractiveness, or anything else because that's not how God sees us. In offering salvation He doesn't divide us the way we divide ourselves. "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). We are one. We are equally hopeless without Him and equally loved as His children. He does not offer one kind of love to black men from low-income families and another kind of love to white women with outstanding volunteer records. Our identity as His children erases all the artificial categories we place ourselves into.

In less than a week, the votes will be cast and America will have its next president. I have heard of no one who looks favorably on both the candidates who have the best chance at winning the election. Most voters detest at least one major party candidate and view people voting for that person with at least some measure of distaste. It is hard to see people with whom you strongly disagree rising to positions of immense power. We cannot change the candidates who have won the primaries. What we can change, long past the time when this election is just a strange memory, is how we treat each other. See people as your brothers and sisters, as your neighbors, before latching on to every way they are different from you. Your neighbors are sometimes very wrong in their views. Sometimes you are wrong too. Their incorrectness, their appearance, and their background do not make them any less worthy of love, respect, life, safety, assistance, or wages for their work. Each one of your neighbors was made in the image of God and bears that dignity. By your witness they may come to know the grace that will sanctify them and reform them into that image. Our calling is not to compete to prove we are the most oppressed, but to fight injustice wherever we find it and honor all those we come into contact with, seeing them as God does. Our equals.



[*I gave the speech about a week after Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel prize in literature. The person who selected the topics each speaker chose from used Dylan quotes for all of them.]