Observation: The Israelites have just endured a rebellion. A man named Korah and his followers have just tried to turn the entire nation against Moses and Aaron. God causes the earth to swallow up the rebels, as the text describes, "taking them alive into Sheol" (the land of the dead). But the rebellion doesn't end there. The whole congregation rebels and accuses Moses and Aaron of killing "the people of the Lord". What the people don't know is:
1) ...that Moses and Aaron had nothing to do with the death of Korah and the rebels, but it was God's doing.
2) ...that Moses and Aaron have in fact saved the lives of the vast majority of the nation, because God's first reaction was to want to swallow them all up, except for Moses and Aaron, but they essentially "talked God down".
In response to this second rebellion, God again wants to consume the people, and it is once again Moses and Aaron, by running out into the midst of the people with an offering of incense, who save hundreds of thousands of lives. Just swallowing up the rebels didn't work. Until Israel deals with the roots of its rebellion--mistrust of and impatience with God--the rebellion won't stop.
Application: I feel that our country today is at war with the ghosts of rebels long dead. It's been a hundred and fifty two years since the signing of the peace treaty at Appomattox, and yet cities and states are still in turmoil over the removal of Confederate symbols--statues, monuments and flags--which to some simply represent history, but to many others represent the celebration of an ugly past of slavery and racism. It's been 72 years since VE day, bringing an end to the Nazi regime in Germany, and yet it was only last week that a white supremacist murdered two people on a train in Portland for the crime of standing between him and the teenaged Muslim girls he was trying to abuse. The armed conflicts ended years ago, but the ghosts of racism still haunt us.
I believe the Gospel sheds a light on this important reality: you can kill people, but you can't kill attitudes. You can gain and lose territory, you can pass or fail to pass laws, you can set or fail to set policies, but you can not force people to love one another, and you can not reverse the core reality of human existence: that we are captive to sin, and can not free ourselves. We don't just commit sins. We are consumed by our sinfulness, and it affects our every thought, word and deed.
First John describes sin as "lawlessness," not wanting any higher authority to constrain our actions. Luther's definition of sin is to be incurvatus in se, literally "curved in on ourselves", in a closed loop of self-preservation where the concerns of others can not enter into our thinking. Whichever definition you choose, the fact remains: no one is exempt from it. We are all affected by it, and we all willingly contribute to it. And no human victory, military, legislative, or moral, can abrogate its effects on us or on our neighbors.
There are ways, of course, to stand against the sin of racism. We can educate ourselves, and listen to those affected by it, not in order to debate them and defend our fragile perspective, but to really empathize and understand their experience. We can educate our children, and help them understand that racism is alive and well. We can call it out when we see it, even if that may cost us a friend or two. Hopefully only in very rare instances, as in Portland, will it cost White Americans our lives, but we need to understand that our neighbors of color feel their lives to be under threat on a much more regular basis.
As Christians, the most important thing we can do is to shine the light of the Gospel on this sin, and show the world that on the cross, Jesus defeated it. We can radically and stubbornly live in the hope of the new community Jesus formed around himself and which his followers continued: where race, class, ethnicity and gender are not tools of hierarchy, but rather add to the diversity of our one body of Christ.
Prayer: God, my land is haunted. May your Spirit drive out the spirits that are plaguing our society. Banish hatred and prejudice, in the name of him who was crucified by it, and who now reigns victorious at your right hand: Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
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