Paul uses human anatomy to make a basic point about the corporate body of the church. Every part is necessary; without eyes or feet, the body cannot function as it is created to function. Every part, every member, is absolutely necessary—that’s Paul’s basic point throughout this section in I Corinthians. But then he adds, with a wink and a smile: Yes, even that “necessary member” is absolutely necessary, it’s the most necessary part of the body. As Paul says, “God has so arranged the body, giving greater honor to this lesser member” (v. 25). The lesser member, the part of the body that we keep hidden, that is least presentable, is actually the most necessary member, the most honored, the most beautiful.

Paul doesn’t say anything new when he talks about people as if they were one body. Everyone in Corinth understood that kind of language—it was as old as the ancient philosopher Plato. Citizens form one body—together, all of the people form a political body. But here’s the difference between Paul and all the other Greek and Roman philosophers and politicians: While Paul’s contemporaries talked about every member of society as being an absolutely necessary part of the body, everyone knew that the head was the most necessary. And the head of the political body was the sovereign, the king, the one at the top of the masses. While people were told that they were necessary to the health of the social body, the king was the most necessary member of society. Without him, everything would fall apart.

But Paul takes this body language and turns it upside-down. The head is not the most necessary member; the necessary member is the most necessary member—the genitals, not the head. And then Paul talks about the nature of that necessary member—it’s hidden, fragile, weak, and vulnerable. It’s easily forgotten as you go about your daily work, unless you have to use the bathroom—then you quickly discover its necessity. Or for sex. I won’t go into details.

Verse 17: “Peter and John laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.” Notice how the Spirit comes through the hands, through the flesh, through bodily contact. Some people like to separate body and spirit, material and spiritual, what we do with our bodies and what we do with our thoughts—but that’s not what happens in this story. The Holy Spirit goes to the people of Samaria with Peter and John, all the way from Jerusalem. The Spirit travels with people; the Spirit happens in human contact, a material point of contact, the laying on of hands, a touch.

This touch is the affirmation of fellowship, of solidarity. The laying on of hands is the communication of the Spirit, which makes possible their communion, their fellowship, in the same body of Christ. Now the same Holy Spirit circulates through the church in Jerusalem and this new church in Samaria. They are all wrapped up in the same movement of God. These two different groups become part of the same movement through something done with human hands, with bodies that travel, with the material of this world. The Holy Spirit comes through human contact. The Spirit flows through material, fleshy stuff like our hands.

Most of us don’t want to remember what King didn’t want us to forget: that the racial violence that birthed colonial America is remembered in the genetic code of U.S. power. Amnesia doesn’t change the past. Repressed memories always come back to haunt the forgetful. This land is populated with the ghosts of genocide. “Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race,” King wrote in his 1963 book, Why We Can’t Wait. In a speech in December 1967, King described how this initial racism unfolded: “While they refused to give the black man any land, don’t forget this, America at that same moment … was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest to white peasants from Europe.” King continued: “Never forget it.”

How strange is it that the news of Jesus’ birth first comes to lowly shepherds? “[T]he angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord” (Lk. 2:10-11). Notice how the news is so personal: twice the angel addresses the shepherds as “you”—“I am bringing you good news,” and “to you is born this day.” Yes, this news will change the world, but it is also for the shepherds, maybe even primarily for the shepherds, because they get the news first.

The lowly get the news first, not Emperor Augustus. Everyone would expect that Augustus would get the news first. His reign extended throughout the known world. Many even thought he was more like a god than a human—all powerful, all knowing, a benevolent leader. Roman citizens hailed Augustus as a force of peace since he united the empire and efficiently put down insurrectionists and invaders. War in the name of peace is the oldest play in the warrior playbook. Our recent Nobel Peace Prize recipient shows that some things never change, when he said a few weeks ago: “the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace.”

But that’s not who first get’s the news. The good news comes to the shepherds, to the lowly, to the ones without any plans to change the world, to the outsiders. Maybe that’s why they get the news first. Unlike people with power, the shepherds have no reason to make the good news useful for their own plans. The shepherds don’t need to manipulate the news, the fact on the ground, because they don’t have any desires or dreams or responsibilities that can corrupt the news. They don’t need to manipulate the news for their own ends, for their security, for their economic prosperity, for their hold on power.

Worship that evening choreographed our bodies into a dance with the Holy Spirit. We were like Grace’s wiggly, noisy little body. We sat and stood, sang and prayed, listened and talked, and all that movement was how the Spirit drew us into companionship. Mary Jo led us in hymns that blended our voices. Laura’s prayer opened our minds to God as we let our thoughts flow through one another. And Dave’s sermon broke into my tired heart and invited me to share in his weaknesses with tears; my vision turned misty when his voice cracked and trembled. We were companions.

This is a talk I gave at my church’s annual Faith & Race conference. You can check out the video as well as the talks from the other speakers over on Quest’s website.

I’m going to be talking for the next few minutes about something called White Privilege and asking the question “now what?”.  What can we do about it?  To start: What is White Privilege?  Put simply, it’s that some of what I have as a Wwhite man is unearned.  Or, to use an analogy, it’s like riding a bike in the wind.  I like to ride my bike around town and I started to notice that there were days I felt great about my ride because I was zipping along and feeling like, yeah, I’m workin’ it today.  And then I’d notice a flag flying or someone huffing it out going the other way and I’d realize I’m not feeling any wind because I’m sailing along with it.  And that’s what White Privilege is: an invisible wind at my back that aids my journey, amplifies my efforts, and of which I can remain happily unaware until I start trying to go the other way.

Still, even with these definitions the concept of White Privilege still seems  abstract and nebulous.  There’s also the issue that as a White person I’v been taught to not see these unearned advantages, or to put it more strongly I’ve been taught to keep a pair of blinders on, so much so that I was able to grow up without ever asking what it means that I am a White person.  For these reasons I want to share with you a few of my own ah-ha!, lightbulb came on, experiences that helped the blinders to come down a bit.

The first one came when I was talking with a friend of mine, Reggie, who was the only Black Resident Director at the Christian college we both attended.  He mentioned how he had been trying to get a chapter of the Black Student Union going and had met with opposition from students on campus.  Some of the White students had written into the newspaper saying that it would be reverse racism to have a group meeting in our dining commons that was only for Blacks.  More to the point, they would be called racist if they were organizing a group that was only for White students.  I nodded like I could see where he was going, but if I was honest what these White students were saying made some logical sense to me, even if I sensed I was missing something.  Reggie then asked me a simple question: “when you walk into the dining commons can you find a table of White students to sit with?”  “Definitely,” I replied.  It is a predominantly White college, it was never hard to find a table with all White students.  “That is because every day the dining commons is a gathering of the White Student Union.  You just don’t have to call it that because it’s the default mode of operation,” said Reggie.  Ouch.  For four years I had been able to attend college blind to the privilege that, if I wanted, I could sit with, talk with, and eat with only other White students and have it be a complete non-issue. Yet, when a group of Black students decided to do the same, and by so doing bring to the surface the White privilege that existed in our lives, it was looked on with suspicion and labeled divisive.

Experience number two was when I got pulled over for changing lanes without my blinker on. I was peeing in my pants given the wonderful combination of an overactive adrenal gland and  having just watched Shawshank Redemption.  The two California patrol officers, both of whom were White, didn’t like my wide-eyed, admittedly mumbled, answers to their questions and were convinced I was up to no good. Long story short, after a breathalizer, walking the line, ransacking our car, and a pee test (which came back clear, by the way) they nonetheless were bound and determined to make an arrest and so I was thrown in the clink for the rest of the night.  So where’s the White Privilege in a White guy getting pulled over by other White guys?

But then I started reading about our racialized prison systems, like how a Black man is 6 times more likely than a White man to be incarcerated, or a Latino man twice as likely to be sent to prison than a White man in America, and hearing more and more stories about racial profiling by cops and this experience kept coming back to me.  During my whole 2 hour ordeal with the cops, not once did I worry about whether I had been pulled over and was going through this because I am White.  And a more subtle, but just as prevalent privilege that came up as I was talking to some non-White friends is that I had no worries about the stereotypes the cops had of me.  Which, as my friends informed me, is a constant obstacle if you’re a person of color.  I wasn’t worried that how White people speak or how White people dress or how White people are portrayed on the shows that the cops might have been watching.  I didn’t worry because I didn’t need to avoid falling into a negative stereotype in a world where White is the norm.  In fact, just the opposite, all those things were unseen privileges that even operated in a situation where I didn’t have a whole lot of power.

Alright, so hopefully you now have a sense of what White Privilege is at the street level, in the ways it plays out in everyday life.  But I’m sure there are objections.  Folks object that they can think of plenty of White people who are under the thumb of other White people.  True, poor White people have less power then than rich White people, and White women have less power than White men.  But I hope that my story about being pulled over by the cops illustrates that the privileges of being White in this country are always operating, even when other forces do factor into the mix.  Perhaps the biggest objection we hear is that this whole White Privilege thing is a farce because in America what you have is based on how hard you’ve worked.  To say that part of why I’m where I am today, with the education I have, or the job I have, or the house I own is because I have benefited from the color of my skin flies in the face of American individualism and meritocracy.

As Christians we should be the first to acknowledge that idea as a farce.  It should not be a problem for us to call White Privilege what it is, which is sin.  Still more, White Christians should be the first to own up to our part in that sin because we’re a people who know we need a Savior from our sin.  Unfortunately, the Church in America doesn’t have a great track record of acknowledging and doing something about White Privilege, and I think that’s because our view of sin is too small.  We tend to see sin as an act I commit about which I feel guilty about and then need to repent of.  That’s part of sin, but not all of it.  When Paul writes in Ephesians that Jesus’ resurrection made him ruler “over all rule and authority, power and dominion” he’s getting at a much bigger idea of sin.  These “rulers and authorities” point to the idea that sin isn’t just things we do, it’s also something in which we get trapped; it’s ways in which the world gets twisted by sins that are bigger than any one person and in which we get caught, whether we acknowledge it or not.

Acknowledging that White Privilege exists, that it’s a sin in which all White folks in America are entangled, that I as a White man have benefited from the suffering of others who were denied these privileges, is a huge first step.  Of course, recognizing this does not happen in a moment, but as a process.  There was no one day when I stopped seeing myself as generic, as devoid of a race or a culture, and as someone who had been riding all my life with the wind at my back.  It happened in conversations like the one with Reggie about issues of race and it’s still happening, even as I’ve been thinking about this talk.  Nonetheless, acknowledging it has to begin, because privilege must be made visible if Whiteness and the privilege it entails is going to stop being invisible.

Once it’s visible, once we acknowledge it exists, what now?  That’s a tough question, because there is no getting rid of my White skin.  Privilege will be something I benefit from until our society is one that no longer hands it out on the basis of skin color.  And it’s tough because with something as prevalent and pervasive as White Privilege there are as many ways to confront it as there are situations in which it rears its ugly head.

Nonetheless, I want to take a quick look at Esther as a model and guide for where we might go from here.  Do you remember her story?  Here’s a young woman living in exile and captivity with her fellow Jews in Persia.  When King Xerxes starts looking for a new wife Esther is brought in as a possibility and with the help of some crazy 5th century BC Olay beauty products she becomes the King’s favorite and then his wife.  Oh, and she was helped by keeping mum about that little fact that she was a Jew, a captive people who had to be dragged from their homeland because they kept causing so much trouble.  Everything is great for a while, big banquets, moving up in the world, and Esther is enjoying what good luck and diligence have given her.  And then things start to unravel.  Some of the Persians can’t stand these Jews with their refusal to assimilate or worship their gods and get King Xerxes to issue a decree allowing for the wholesale genocide, the annihilation of the Jews, on the day he appointed.

What is Esther doing while this decree is being signed by the king and plans being made for the destruction of her people?  Not much from what we can tell.  And why not?  She wasn’t in any danger.  She’s comfortable.  She’s riding with the winds of privilege at her back.  I’d  be tempted to do the same.  I suppose we could wonder if she hadn’t yet heard Jesus’ words that to whom much is given, much is required.  Maybe she feels powerless as one woman in a harem of hundreds to confront the King who ruled most of the world at that time.  Perhaps she is simply too afraid to confront a King who routinely executes people for speaking when they’re supposed to be quiet.  That sounds like me, does it sound like you?

Mordechai, her uncle, will have none of it.  He sends this message to Esther:

Because of where and when I live it is a time in which I am called to live every day in a dis-comforting awareness of those facts.  Is that putting it too strong?  Every day?  I don’t think so, for my non-White brothers and sisters live in discomforting awareness each day, but without the privilege of escaping it.  It’s only as we refuse to let privilege slip into invisibility that the discomfort of living with it will start to pop up in how we digest our TV shows, interpret the political debates, what we value in our schools and neighborhoods, or what it means to be the church in a still segregated society.  That is where I want to leave us.  Not at the end of Esther’s story where every thing works out, but in the middle of the story, which is where we are: in a world moving towards redemption, but not yet there.  I want to leave us with Mordechai’s ringing words that we, whatever the color of our skin, were made and called for just such a messy time as this.

This is our deconstruction. We have to clear space. We have to tear out a lot of stuff from our lives—from our houses, like we did with Habitat for Humanity. That’s how we make room in our lives for the good news, for Christ to come, for the advent of God. None of this is easy. It will take work. Gentleness may not come naturally for us. Sharing may require difficult sacrifices. But that’s the nature of deconstruction—it takes sweat and tears to rip out the old stuff and make room for the new. Gentleness and sharing—those are two ways we deconstruct our selves in order to welcome the advent of Christ, the coming of God, when all things are made new.

And when the good news comes into our lives, when Christ happens in our midst, we are overwhelmed. The goodness of God is overwhelming. It may not seem like it fits in our lives at first. God seems to bring more life than we can handle, more than we can manage, more than we thought we had room for. It may take us some time to make room for the good news, to let God in a corner of our lives and grow. That’s why we think about Mary during Advent—a young woman, unprepared, without the necessary prerequisites, yet she opens herself to the good news: “Let it be done unto me,” she says. We see Mary, with Jesus stretching and growing in her belly for 9 months—and when he arrives, when he is born, I’m sure the whole process felt like more life than Mary could handle. Yet that’s how it goes with God. Christ comes and invites us into more life than we think we can handle—and it turns out to be good for us; it turns out to be good news for the world.

Jesus is not a king of this world, a king whose power comes from the sword, a king who acts as commander and chief of the armed forces. Those kinds of kings don’t really care about the truth, especially when it’s inconvenient. When you have the power of the sword, truth is usually a matter of pragmatics, of expedience. Truth is the first victim of power. When you have the power, and have to worry about your rivals, all truth becomes tactical truth—what you can say and to whom you can say it, what facts you can use against your enemies and what you have to keep from going public. And when you have a gun, inconvenient truth can be killed, disappeared, hidden from public scrutiny.

And that’s what happens to Jesus. He testifies to truth that Pilate can’t control, and Pilate has to get rid of the truth—for the sake of his own power.

War in the name of peace—it’s the oldest play in the Messianic game book. Once we kill these people, then peace will rain down from heaven—these violent acts will be the apocalyptic event that shatters the power of evil, and peace will finally come. The birth pains will be over. We will finally establish a just and fair political order—not just for us, but for them…because, after all, we are compassionate killers, benevolent imperialists, democratic colonialists. But we need one last push to make this happen, one last battle, one more murder, one more building to destroy, a strategic target to wipe out, or one more troop surge. Then the end will come.

No, Jesus says. All of this, the rubble from the buildings, from the temple, from the towers, all of the wars and rumors of wars—this is just the beginning. “This is but the beginning of the birth pains,” Jesus says. Despite all the promises, the sword will not bring the final solution—just another cycle of violence, another reason for revenge.

And Jesus says, “Beware that no one leads you astray. Many will…say ‘I am he!’” Christians are people who are skeptical of leaders who promise the end, the consummation, the solution to all our problems.