I'm not a handyman.
When something is broken in our home it produces stress and anxiety within me and reminds me of how I'm just not good at working around the house.
If you have a hankering for some from-scratch pizza or some oven-roasted chicken shawarma, then I'm your guy. I can roast, grill, saute, ferment, fry, and bake with the best of them.
I suppose this is because I grew up with a father who taught me the ways of the kitchen, rather than the ways of the handyman. My Dad was a professional cook who ran kitchens that often fed hundreds of people three delicious meals each day, nearly year-round. He could whip out homemade pancakes for 300 people on a flattop griddle in 45 minutes. He could make enough pizza to satisfy 250 middle-schoolers on a Wednesday night. He made the best damn homemade croutons you'll ever have.
And so I learned how to cook.
Really, I learned how to cook once I moved out and wanted to prepare food as good as my Dad's in the absence of his presence. Even though he died a few years ago, cooking is still one of the greatest connective activities I have to remember him and honor him. I'm grateful for what he passed on to me.
If you need a subtly spiced chicken tikka masala, I'm your guy.
If you need a circuit breaker checked, or a garbage disposal replaced, not so much.
We are who we are largely because of the parents who nurtured us, raised us, and taught us what they knew to teach. Sure, we pick up lessons, wisdom, and practical knowledge from places like school, church, and other social environments, but our families have an outsized influence on who we are as kids, and who we become as adults.
As a pastor, I've learned from folks like Reggie Joiner that, at best the local church will have 52 hours each year with the kids that we serve. 52 hours to disciple, to love, to learn, and to influence.
Parents, on the other hand, have 3600 hours each year with our kids. 3600 hours to disciple, to love, to learn, and to influence.
Our families have a massive opportunity - and a massive responsibility - to nurture and shape our children, so they can bring about their own human flourishing, and the human flourishing of others throughout their entire lives. The greater the cultural power, the greater responsibility we have to bring about human flourishing.
And that brings me to the murder of Ahmaud Arbery.
If you STILL don't know who that is, take 10 minutes to google his name, read the stories, watch the video (WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT) of his senseless execution, and then come on back. I'll wait...
You back? Good.
It is not lost on me, or anyone really, that Arbery was gunned down by a family. A father and son, to be precise.
Now, I have no idea why these men felt threatened by Arbery’s presence in their neighborhood, beyond their stated reason. If we take them at their word, they were concerned that Arbery was a neighborhood burglar, and they felt compelled to confront him. Not knowing if such a person was armed, they entered into this confrontation heavily armed themselves.
People do dumb, even horrific things when they (we) are afraid. I know I have. Fear has a way of inviting us to throw out all sensibility. Fear has a way of distorting reality. Fear has a way of controlling us and inviting us to do things that we wouldn't normally do. I have no idea if these men *behaved* in this way prior to hunting down, confronting, and killing Aubrey. But I'm guessing they weren't regularly practicing racial reconciliation with their black brothers and sisters.
We fear what we don't know. Fear controls us. Fear leads us down the road to destruction.
Fear also has a way of revealing what is truly in our hearts.
Suspicion.
Hatred.
Anger.
The need to be in control.
When we're afraid, we aren't in touch with empathy, or compassion, or goodness in any way. When we're afraid, we're only feeling fight-flight or freeze.
And these two men, this father, and son, they chose to fight.
So did Ahmaud. What choice did he really have? And he lost his life in this confrontation.
Here's my worry at this moment. In the coming days, you will hear a growing chorus of people that will say things like, "This doesn't matter because...." They will look to explain away, to scapegoat, to implicate, and to plant seeds of doubt in your mind.
In order to solve a problem, one first has to admit that they have a problem. And my friends, here in America, we have a problem.
Our problem goes back centuries.
It spans generations of American families.
Our problem is passed on from parents to children, from fathers and mothers to sons and daughters.
Our problem is what we call racism.
It is an inability to acknowledge the image of God that is inherent within everyone, no matter their skin color, economic standing, background, beliefs, power, or even their criminal record.
Our problem is that some of us believe we are better than others.
Some of us believe that we deserve a better life, through no merit of our own.
Some of us have been told the lie that our God-ordained place is at the top, while others are left to do the evil they so clearly want to do (or so we're told).
Some of us have been brought up to believe that our inherent value is somehow greater than that of our neighbors.
All because of the systems around us that call one person black, and another person (like me) white.
Some of us are never *told* any of these things, but we pick up the messages around us.
We speak of "bad neighborhoods" without the faintest idea of how those neighborhoods have been under-resourced and discriminated against for generations.
We grow up watching tv shows like Cops, which show law enforcement running down people in these "bad neighborhoods."
We come to see black and brown people as "less than," and we come to see white folks as more deserving.
Arbery’s murder is a gross act of racism. I have never done such a thing. But racism has crept into my heart nonetheless.
Some of us can't come to terms with how we have been living in The Huner Games our entire lives, and we are the residents of The Capitol.
My friends, here in America, we have a problem.
And the only way to begin solving a problem is to admit we have one in the first place. That's the most basic first step here.
I have grown up in a culture of racism.
I am a racist.
I have so much to learn.
I have so far to go.
This is not because my parents deliberately taught me to be racists, or to discriminate against black and brown people, or to think I'm somehow better than *those* people.
But our entire culture around us has been designed, at times deliberately, at times by coincidence, to lift up someone like me, and to tear down someone like Ahmaud Arbery.
I'm a proficient home cook because of my family.
I'm a terrible handyman because of my family.
I'm a loving father because of my family.
And I'm a recovering racist white man because of the America my family has been part of for generations.
It's as simple, and complicated as that.
My first real job out of college was two-fold. By day I was a substitute teacher in the 2nd largest urban school district in Indiana (Fort Wayne), and on the nights and weekends, I was a worship leader for a large, wealthy suburban mega-church, for high school and college students.
One community was predominately white.
One was predominantly Black and Latino.
It was my two years in these two very different spaces that led me to see the racism that was alive and active in my own heart. Those are different stories for a different day. But take my word for it. What I saw in myself was deeply troubling.
What I see in America is deeply troubling. Even more so.
I grieve the loss of Ahmaud Arbery’s life.
I grieve a culture that leads two white men to so fear - to perhaps so *hate* - a black man that they follow him in a residential neighborhood, confront him with guns, and shoot him to death when he doesn't respond with a stay-calm-and-carry-on type of attitude. Just like you would if you were hunted down by men with guns.
I grieve the America that I so love, that after all these years we *still* haven't done the cultural work of naming our sin, repenting of our sin, and doing the work of restorative justice.
I don't have any easy answers.
All I know is that if we want to solve a problem, we must admit there is a problem in the first place.
America, we have a problem.
White folks, we have a problem.
The first step is to admit it.
The next step is to begin to ask, "What are we going to do about it?"