The Church is Sick — It’s Time to Heal
I am a surgeon in-training. In surgical training, we learn how to take care of patients with surgical diseases from trauma to appendicitis to cancer. Cancer is a particularly complex disease, and one of its most complex features is that, for the most part, it is invisible. There is no blood, and there may not even be pain, but if left untreated, it is deadly.
For some patients and families, though, the heavy reality of cancer is just too overwhelming to accept, and its invisibility makes it too easy to reject. Often, the treatments we have for cancer are so taxing on the body and soul that it takes many to walk alongside the patient in order that she might be healed. Which is part of what makes it so heartbreaking when the families and friends of a patient deny her illness or its severity. Looking past cancer and seeing the person in front of them for who they “really” are, refusing to say the word “cancer,” wanting to go back to “normal,” hoping that their loved one will be the one to beat the odds — all strategies to deny the reality of sickness and suffering. And in their denial, they leave the sick to care for themselves. To this, you want to say, your husband needs you. You want to yell out, your sister feels alone. You want to ask, how can you earnestly hope and pray for your brother to heal if you let the invisibility of his illness keep you from acknowledging that he’s sick?
Friends, there is an invisible sickness in the church. You may not see it, and you may not hear the cries of pain, but rest assured that the cancer of racism is devouring all of life. And no, this is not the kind of cancer that comes from decades of smoking. It is the kind that comes from being exposed to a substance you try to get away from but cannot escape. No mask can filter it out; it is in the very air we breathe and it is suffocating us. White Christians: black and brown Christians are sick, tired, exhausted, and dying. And if we are sick, then the church is sick, because “if one part suffers, every part suffers with it” (1 Corinthians 12:26). White church: as one of your black, Latina sisters in Christ, hear this — you, our church family, are denying our sickness and its severity. And it is heartbreaking.
If when you look at us you “don’t see color,” then you do not see the cancer that threatens our very survival at every moment of every day — on a jog, at the store, driving a car, sleeping in our homes. If when you look at us you acknowledge that we are unwell but shirk your duty to care for your sick neighbor because, in your optimism, you mistakenly believe that we will be the one to beat the odds, you underappreciate the aggressive, deadly nature of this cancer. If when you speak to us, you don’t want to mention “racism” for fear that saying it makes it real, you fail to realize that it is your refusal to say it that makes it more and more powerful. If after you post black squares on social media in response to black and brown deaths you want to go “back to normal,” you forget that caring for someone who has had cancer means remaining ever vigilant for signs of recurrence. To these ways of seeing and speaking to us, I want to say, your black and brown brothers and sisters in Christ need you. I want to yell out, your fellow image-bearers feel alone. I want to ask, how can you earnestly hope and pray that we might be healed if you let the invisibility of racism keep you from acknowledging that it is killing us?
Jesus Christ, in whom we put our faith and who called us to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God (Micah 6:8), is trying to come in and heal the black and brown bodies who suffer at the hands of the sickness and sin that is racism. Despite claiming to believe that he is the authority and author of justice, you shirk his treatment recommendations and you ignore his warning that the sickness is spreading, choosing instead to avoid the discomfort and personal inconvenience that having a sick brother or sister creates. Your denial does nothing to erase our illness — it merely makes it all the more painful and makes death all the more inevitable.
The good news is that all of the black and brown people who attend your church and belong to the body of Christ don’t actually have cancer. The bad news is that every single one of us is sick with the consequences of racism. And despite the will to survive, we do not have the energy or the power to fight this alone. Alone, it is only a matter of time before it claims our lives. I do not mean that every single one of us will fall prey to police brutality or be killed by white supremacists. I mean that our men will continue to be more likely to be incarcerated, our families less likely to own homes, our children more likely to be suspended, our parents more likely to develop a chronic medical condition (to which racial discrimination is a contributing factor), and our women more likely to die in childbirth than you are.
White church, the time for healing is now. And Christ is here right now trying to heal the church. For the sake of my life on earth and your soul in eternity, ask Him for eyes to see and ears to hear what He is doing. Healing the church and its sick members will come at a cost to you, just as healing you of your sin came at an unbelievable cost to Jesus.
The Great Physician has shown us the cure for the cancer that is racism, but you must join the race for it. You will have to listen, learn, read, watch, and advocate. You will experience discomfort; you will get it wrong. You will have to exchange apathy for accountability by speaking out against your friends, family, and leaders whose words and actions are inconsistent with the Living Word or endeavor to keep the sick, sick. Many of you will have to vote differently than you did in 2016, or at a minimum, no longer maintain that different economic priorities are a reason to unconditionally support candidates who clearly hate your black and brown brothers and sisters — for “whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen” (1 John 4:20). You will have to bring politics into church, despite your desire to uphold the pretense that somehow, service, justice, and equity belong on the news but not in the pulpit. You will have to be pro-life — that is, for black lives, for immigrant lives, for Muslim lives — not just anti-abortion.
If you are a follower of Jesus, seeking first his kingdom and righteousness, you will run this race for the cure today. Because waiting passively for justice until Jesus returns to right all wrongs is not the gospel. Nowhere in scripture do Christ or those who follow him prioritize the economy, social tradition, reputation, or comfort over the love of neighbor and the care for the least of these. And if any of those are more important to you than what we have been called to pursue, I ask only that in your perversion of truth you not malign the name of the brown, immigrant Son of God who came to heal the brokenhearted, proclaim good news to the poor, and set the oppressed free.
Church, some of your brothers and sisters are sick. Church, you are sick. May Jesus give us all the eyes to see it, as invisible as it may be. It is not enough to weep with those who weep; it is time to take up your cross. The work of healing cannot wait — our lives depend on it.
