“What is our world coming to?” A good friend of mine asked that over the weekend as we talked about recent events. Maybe you’ve asked that yourself lately. It’s a good question. We’ll get back to it in a minute. First let’s talk about what our world is and has been, before we consider what it’s coming to.
It’s easy to see tough stories on the news from other towns, other states, or other countries, and then go back to the regular routine of our lives. It is a fortunate privilege to have a regular routine when people elsewhere face daily challenges. So we sometimes hear the news, feel bad, maybe say a prayer, and hope things work out for them. Then we go back to our lives and don’t think about it much.
Living up in our beautiful mountains feels distant from a lot of problems elsewhere. Until it’s not. Take the coronavirus. It devastated countries before it got to the US. Then it devastated areas like New York before it got to the South. We didn’t think it was a big deal. Until it was. Now it’s infecting people in our county, in our nursing homes, and in our own families. So we can’t ignore it anymore.
Perhaps some of the recent cruel killings of black men and women were like that too. Maybe it was tragic to hear about but it felt far away, when Ahmad Arbury was shot while going for a run, when an EMT in Louisville named Breonna Taylor was shot by police, and George Floyd was suffocated on the ground while he cried “I can’t breathe. Please don’t kill me. Mama!”
Such cruelty and abuse of power rightly made people angry, so there were protests in other places. But this weekend the upsetness and anger and protests were also expressed in Asheville. So if we had thought it was an issue elsewhere, we can’t ignore it anymore.
But this isn’t anything new. It wasn’t new in 2014 when Eric Garner also cried to the police “I can’t breathe!” before he died. It wasn’t new in 2012 when 17 year-old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed while walking home because he looked suspicious...carrying a bag of Skittles and a bottle of sweet tea. It’s been going on for years, decades, and centuries. It’s why parents of black children have to have “the talk” with them, about what to do in encounters with law enforcement, so they don’t get hurt or killed.
So before we ask the question “What is our world coming to,” let us first acknowledge what is sad and wrong about the world we’ve been living in. Those with black and brown skin have to endure discrimination regularly, often in subtle ways; sometimes in ways that lead to death. I can’t imagine the stress of living like that, and having to fear for my children like that. What pain and trauma.
No wonder there have been protests in many places—towns large and small—over the deep wrongness of it all. How could you not do something when people are hurting? (In full disclosure, I myself participated in a silent vigil by the clock in Weaverville on May 9, with a small group of others who were equally burdened by recent race-based cruelty.) That’s why it is also sad to see that some places of protests have ended in violence. But again, it isn’t new. There will always be bad actors who use tense times for opportunities to steal and destroy. And much like in the 1960s when there were protests then for right treatment of African-Americans, some police units used fire hoses and dogs on the crowds to make them go away.
There has always been hatred and discrimination in the world. It isn’t new. But we don’t have to take it for granted. We can join in God’s work to make things new, so that God’s will can be done here on our earth as it is in heaven, so that every person is loved and treated equally. That is our longing hope. In the days ahead, we’ll be thinking more about this.
Romans 8:18-28 has relevant things to say about the world’s present suffering, and about hoping “in eager expectation” for something new to be born. It says that “the whole of creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” And that is still true today. There is still a great deal of groaning. But we groan in the hope of a new kind of life, when “creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21).
So, what is our world coming to? Hopefully, it is something better than it has been. That is what God is working on. And God invites us to join in the work.