Last night I was doing my nerd thing, watching The History of Mankind: The story of all of us 
and it dawned on me. Human history is pretty brutal. Basically the cycle is one ethnic group finds out about the resources of the land that another ethnic group lives on; then the group with the superior weapons overpowers the others for those resources.  Ugly, unforgivable atrocities are committed and life goes on.

What this creates is a global context for historical ethnic distrust. It doesn’t matter how long ago the atrocities happened, we live with the implications for centuries. As William Faulkner once said, “the past is not dead – it is not even the past.”

Let me demonstrate what I mean with a small personal story that I often tell when I train leaders for multi-ethnic ministry.  When I went off to college at my first undergraduate institution (there were several but we won’t go there) my mom, sisters, and I get off the elevator with my stuff to move into the dorm room.

It was a coed dorm and down the hall comes walking this cute white young lady. She looks at me, smiles, and sweetly says “hi” to me in a way that clearly indicated it was more than a cursory greeting. Being the red blooded young male I was, I returned the compliment.  With gusto!

After the young lady left my Alabama-raised, Jim Crow surviving  mother looked me dead in the eye and with all the Christian convictions she had made a very clear proclamation to me: “Son don’t bring home no white girls.” This was more than a personal preference. This was a historical statement. Really if you think about mom’s background what else was she going to say?

God created us all with a capacity to trust other human beings regardless of skin color. But if we do not work to transcend the brutal histories that all of our ethnic backgrounds contain, trust will not happen. And it is not about doing the Sunday school, Kum-By-Yah thing of just letting by-gones be by-gones.

I think not. It’s about engaging the truth of the past, acknowledging and repenting of the atrocities, forgiving one another, and moving forward into a preferred racially righteous  future.

By doing these things we enlarge our capacity to trust across racial lines. The reality is the ability to trust resides in the One who stands outside of history. So for us it is not about righting the wrongs of the past – we have to leave that up to the One who is in charge of that  (“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord”; Romans 12:19).  We have no authority to right historical wrongs.

However that does not mean we get a “get out of social justice free” card. Micah 6:8 begs to differ. Christians forget that things like the abolitionist, civil rights, and present day human trafficking movements were started and led by people inspired by the Scriptures.

If we are to be about our Father’s business we need to be fully aware of how broken this world is, and understand that our personal and corporate relationship to Him is the only factor in life that will determine historical destiny. So the choice is ours: Will the history of mankind be a site of redemption or a stumbling block for the Church?