To Iowa Christians: Loving our neighbors isn’t enough

I was 6 when the video of Rodney King being beaten by L.A. police officers surfaced, just a year older than his own daughter. I walked in on my mom crying as she watched the news. We talked about how it was wrong to treat Black people differently, about how God made everyone equal and because God loves us, we too were to love everyone else.

Thirty years later I sat by the fire pit in our backyard with my own children — ages 5 and 8. I cried as we discussed what had happened when news broke of George Floyd’s murder. How, because God created everyone equal, we are to love everyone equally and how our white skin gives us privileges in this world.

It has been 30 years since my first awareness of racism, and I am ashamed to confess that it has taken this long for me to begin to understand.

The insidious natures of racism and white supremacy have lulled many of us (white skinned) good Christians into thinking that we just need to love everyone the same. But I can love my Black and brown neighbor until they can’t take any more love and nothing will have changed.

One in three Black boys will end up in prison, and one in eighteen Black girls, and when they do they will receive harsher sentencing than white boys and white girls charged with the same crime. Black and brown children are more likely to live below the poverty line, partly because of the system built into the foundations of this country and that is clearly mapped, even in Iowa.

So no. Loving my Black and brown neighbor is not enough.

In American Christianity, a favorite parable it that of the good Samaritan. At the end of the tale the unexpected, anonymous hero ensures the victim of highway robbery is cared for and Jesus says, “Go and do likewise.” But it is easier to “take pity,” as the hero did, and pay for someone else to do the hard work of caring for the victim, than it is to actually do the work yourself. It likely cost the man financially, but what did it change?

No. Loving your neighbor, “going and doing likewise,” is not enough.

Rather than emulate the good Samaritan, what if Christians tried to be more like Jesus? Jesus did not see a need and get someone else to take care of it. He put his body on the line — building actual relationships that ended up transforming the world. He touched and healed the leper. He ate with prostitutes and tax collectors. And in doing so he changed the system in which they all lived.

Jesus’ desire to be with people in their homes and on the streets resulted in his own body ending up like that of Rodney King. And George Floyd. And Breonna Taylor. And Daunte Wright. And Emmet Till. And the list is so long.

Derek Chauvin is guilty but our work is just beginning. It is time for Christians to move beyond simply loving our neighbor and start following Jesus by speaking truth to power, putting our bodies in homes and on the streets with people who are oppressed, building relationships that transform our world and dismantle injustice and violence.

If we don’t do this work now, my own daughters will find themselves sitting around the dinner table in 30 years explaining to their own children how what is happening to Black people is wrong. How God created everybody equal. How we need to love everybody the same. Years will have gone by and God’s children will have continued to endure violence, injustice and death — simply because people in places of privilege and power only loved their neighbor and didn't put in the work. I am ready.

Erika Uthe of Ely is a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) and currently serves as assistant to the bishop for the Southeastern Iowa Synod.