A few years back, a famous worship artist tweeted that, “God wants all your dreams to come true.” As a musician, that hit me hard, because I had spent a lot of time and energy when I was younger trying to achieve a dream like theirs. I had spent much of my life chasing after the Disney-theology that all of our hopes will eventually be fulfilled if we just try hard enough.
But I learned many years ago that this just isn’t the case. I realized that a celebrity tweeting, “God wants all your dreams to come true,” was a celebrity tweeting theology created out of their minority experience. The majority of us could rightfully respond, “What are you talking about? That’s not the gospel. That’s just your experience. And millions of us are all living proof of that.”
Some of us are falling for this same narrative in a different way right now. Occasionally a black person (celebrity or not) comes along that has not experienced racism to the extent that the majority have. We flock to their minority experience and use their stories to silence our conviction, fuel our complacency, and ignore the majority.
Might we let God use coronavirus to teach us to see the minority? Might our ears be opened to the cry of the racially oppressed, whose voices scream out in pain, “I can’t breathe”? Might our hearts be opened to the sick around us who can’t risk a visit to the grocery store? Might our eyes take note that many poor and middle-class lives were completely changed when both state and federal government gave many Americans an equal amount of quarantine money, that for many felt like winning the lottery?
In 2020, we note that America has been diagnosed with the same sicknesses that every Babylon falls prey to. And while no Babylon can find the antidote for it, we Christians can do our best to note the pain and use our lives and actions to offer the antidote of Jesus, one person at a time and one social action at a time—starting by accepting the antidote ourselves.
Jamin Bradley 