In teaching us how to pray, Jesus underscores the importance of forgiveness, That lesson is central to how we will overcome and heal from America’s legacy of racism and White supremacy.
This morning I was reading a story in The New York Times about President Jimmy Carter’s political evolution. Carter is remembered now as an exemplar of the meaning of true personhood, but Carter was a product of the Jim Crow South. He was steeped in the ideology and systems of white supremacy, and his early political campaigns reflected that. It’s hard to believe now, but Carter once used as an attack line against an opposing candidate in a state primary election that the candidate had attended Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral.
But Carter was not only a product of the Jim Crow South. He was also the product of relationships with Black people who had a profound influence on him and moved him in the direction of overtly opposing systemic racism. By the time he ran for president in 1976, he had won more than 80 percent of the Black vote.
I remember Carter’s reckoning with America’s racial legacy as still being a work in progress as he was president, but I think the fact that he was a person of faith surrounded by other people of faith who shared a belief in the radical love of God meant that his term in office led to substantial progress in healing America’s racial wounds.
This was possible because of the cycle of repentance and forgiveness that God offers us as a powerful tool of healing. In Matthew 6, Jesus gives us a simple but deep prayer template for our relationship with God and with others. It starts with acknowledging God as our creator and the source of all that we need. We then acknowledge our faults, the ways we have fallen short of demonstrating God’s love, truth and wisdom in our lives. Then we acknowledge the ways others have harmed us, but instead of holding that trauma, we release it, just as we need others to release the trauma we have caused them. Jesus then instructs us to pray that we are not lured back into reinflicting that trauma, but that we are delivered from all that drives us to harm others or ourselves.
And then Jesus underscores the importance of forgiveness. “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”
The fact that Jesus singles out forgiveness out of all of the themes in what we know as “The Lord’s Prayer” is telling. It signifies how key forgiveness is to healing and starting anew.
Forgiveness is one of the hardest things to do—perhaps the hardest thing to do—in the face of people who have oppressed you, benefited from your oppression, or were passively complicit in your oppression. But none of us will heal—neither the children of slaves nor the children of slaveholders—unless we can talk about the past, the pain we inflicted and the pain we felt, and enter that cycle of repentance and forgiveness.
We actually had an opportunity to do that during Carter’s presidency, but instead in 1980 White Americans flocked to the candidacy of Ronald Reagan and his campaign of White resentment. There was also an opening during the presidency of Barack Obama, but the election of America’s first Black president was followed by another wave of White grievance politics, first in the form of the “Tea Party” takeover of the House of Representatives and later, and most horrifically, in the rise of Donald Trump, arguably the most racist president of the modern era.
But we have to keep pushing, for justice, equality, equity and inclusion, and for the deep spiritual cleansing that would happen if we took The Lord’s Prayer and its call for repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation to heart.