On June 11, 2020, our Lead Pastor, Rev. Jason Coker, delivered the following remarks at a press conference of more than 30 San Diego area clergy who joined together to condemn anti-black racism and demand substantial policy changes in American policing.
Good morning.
In the Christian tradition, we teach that more than 2,000 years ago Jesus and his friends faced a social problem that is all-too-familiar to us today: a few religious power-brokers co-opted Israel’s sacred temple and sacred worship, transforming it into a system of discrimination, oppression, and profiteering.
Jesus called these religious hypocrites “whitewashed tombs”: Clean and ornate on the outside, but full of death and decay on the inside.
Christian institutions in America are dripping in white supremacy. Our churches and schools, our songs and sacraments, our Euro-centric theologies all bow before the idol of Whiteness.
From the earliest days of the American experiment, Christianity has been responsible for the spiritual formation of our Nation. As a result, America, too, is a whitewashed tomb. On the outside, we appear rich and powerful, but on the inside, we are stuffed with the bodies and bones of murdered Black men, women, and children.
We have in this Nation the immeasurably valuable and undeserved gift of the Black community. For generations they have sent us their prophets and sages, and we have responded by flogging and crucifying them on lynching trees in every town square in America.
So today, we stand here to make demands of our police departments and of our elected officials in San Diego County. But the first demand we make is of ourselves.
To my fellow Christians, I say that demand is this:
Let us repent of White privilege, gained on the backs of Black bodies.
Let us repent of polite White society, our tone-policing of righteous Black anger.
Let us repent of White economics and the looting of Black America for White profit.
Let us repent of White addiction to authoritarian policies and policing that protect White property at the expense of Black lives.
Let us repent of White identities, gained at the expense of our souls.
Instead, dear Church, let us abandon our whitewashed tombs and once-and-for-all, finally and truly, embrace the cruciform identity of Christ; that impoverished, homeless, brown-skinned Jew who poured out his privilege for others, who became poor so that we could become rich in grace, and who was lynched for the sake “law and order.”
Amen.