For the LORD is a great God, and a great King above all gods. In his hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also. — Psalm 95:3-4

It may be partially as survival mechanism, but urbanites find near-perverse delight in the idiosyncrasies of city life. One of the most striking contrasts in New York City is found in a 7-ton bronze statue of the god Atlas. Although immense, and depicted with defined muscle, the figure of Atlas strains under the weight of the world, which rests on his shoulders.

The 45 foot tall statue is dwarfed by the scale of Rockefeller Center rising above it. “Heroic materialism,” Adam Gopnik observes, quoting British author Kenneth Clark on modern commercial culture as demonstrated in its architecture.

‘Why are the public buildings so high?’ another Englishman of the same Oxonian generation, W.H. Auden, who knew the squalid city rather better than Clark did, asked when he arrived. ‘Why, that’s because the spirits of the public are so low.’

Gopnik continues, “The tall building is the symbol of all that we hope for—height, reach, power, and a revolving restaurant with a long wine list—and all that we cower beneath.” In particular to Rockefeller Center, and its impressive artwork, he writes:

It was not that Rockefeller, in a burst of civic generosity, decided to go all out. It was that everyone then was expected to go all out… All the things that make Rockefeller Center immediately winning–the statues of Prometheus and Atlas, the molded glass bas-reliefs–were just part of what you were expected to do.

Expectations can be immensely heavy. We often find ourselves, like Atlas, crushed by the weight of the world.

Tucked humbly behind the altar inside St. Patrick’s Cathedral—just a few hundred feet from Rockefeller’s statue of Atlas on Fifth Avenue—is a significantly smaller statue. This one is of Jesus. The Christ stands, but a child, effortlessly holding the world in the palm of his hand.

The Psalmist writes, “In his hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also.… Oh come, let us worship and bow down.” The best reason to find ourselves kneeling is not because we’re buckling under the weight of the world, but because we’ve given ourselves in worship and submission to the one who holds it all effortlessly in his hands.

Today’s Reading
Ezekiel 43 (Listen – 5:15)
Psalms 95-96 (Listen – 2:41)

I have a “slight automatic preference for European Americans over African Americans.” Actually, if you ask me forthrightly, I say I have no preference—but an online bias test hosted by Harvard University exposes something I hate: the reality behind the quote above, which appears as my result after the test.

This is not a political piece. The Park Forum exists to cultivate vibrant faith and sharpen cultural insight through curated devotionals and scripture readings. Part of this calling requires we face the realities of living in a broken world—including confronting the darkness inside of ourselves.

Implicit racial bias is, thankfully, receiving a lot of press time right now. The live broadcast of events which are as old as our nation is forcing a conversation we need to have. Civil rights attorney and author Michelle Alexander writes:

I think we all know, deep down, that something more is required of us now. This truth is difficult to face because it’s inconvenient and deeply unsettling. And yet silence isn’t an option. On any given day, there’s always something I’d rather be doing than facing the ugly, racist underbelly of America. I know that I am not alone. But I also know that the families of the slain officers, and the families of all those who have been killed by the police, would rather not be attending funerals.

White American culture has been slow to acknowledge racial bias. One of the objections is that the entire argument is built on perceptions. And, to be fair, all races are guilty of interpreting data and reporting back a skewed perspective. “The evidence shows black delusions, too,” writes Nicholas Kristof:

In 1962, for example, a majority of blacks said that black children had the same educational opportunities as white children, and nearly one-quarter of blacks said that they had the same job opportunities as whites. That was preposterous: History hasn’t discredited the complaints of blacks but rather has shown that they were muted.

My hunch is that we will likewise look back and conclude that today’s calls for racial justice, if anything, understate the problem—and that white America, however well meaning, is astonishingly oblivious to pervasive inequity.

Overwhelming research [shows] that blacks are more likely to be suspended from preschool, to be prosecuted for drug use, to receive longer sentences, to be discriminated against in housing, to be denied job interviews, to be rejected by doctors’ offices, to suffer bias in almost every measurable sector of daily life.

So where do we go from here? As people of faith, we confess—not only the implicit racism that marks our souls (isn’t this the doctrine of original sin?), but of the pride and individualism that prevents us from seeing it.

“The entire discussion of race in America centers around the protection of White feelings,” proclaims author John Metta. His sermon, I, Racist, is one of the most profound, heartbreaking, and powerful modern spiritual works I’ve ever read:

The reality of thousands of innocent people raped, shot, imprisoned, and systematically disenfranchised are less important than the suggestion that a single White person might be complicit in a racist system.

This is the country we live in. Millions of Black lives are valued less than a single White person’s hurt feelings.

White people and Black people are not having a discussion about race. Black people, thinking as a group, are talking about living in a racist system. White people, thinking as individuals, refuse to talk about “I, racist” and instead protect their own individual and personal goodness. In doing so, they reject the existence of racism.

This is not a political piece because it is a theological piece. As an author I frequently yield the final words of these devotionals to other thinkers. This expands the voice of The Park Forum beyond my own perspective. Here I do it again—this time to a black man who sees something about the world I must commit myself to understanding. He calls me to account in the way that I—as his brother in the faith—so desperately need. Mr. Metta, in his sermon to Bethel Congregational United Church of Christ, concludes:

I don’t like the story of the good samaritan. Everyone likes to think of themselves as the person who sees someone beaten and bloodied and helps him out.

If I could re-write that story, I’d rewrite it from the perspective of Black America. What if the person wasn’t beaten and bloody? What if it wasn’t so obvious? What if they were just systematically challenged in a thousand small ways that actually made it easier for you to succeed in life?

Would you be so quick to help then, or would you, like most White people, stay silent and let it happen.

Weekend Reading List

• Take the Project Implicit Bias Test at Harvard.edu.
• I, Racist. Sermon transcript from John Metta.
• Something More Is Required Of Us Now. What? Michelle Alexander on Medium.
• A History of White Delusion. Nicholas Kristof for The New York Times.

Today’s Reading
Ezekiel 40 (Listen – 8:21)
Psalms 91 (Listen – 1:39)

Today’s Reading
Ezekiel 41 (Listen – 4:40) Psalms 92-93 (Listen – 2:09)
Ezekiel 42 (Listen – 3:12) Psalms 94 (Listen – 2:08)

By Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-1892)

Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. — Psalm 90.14

Israel had suffered a long night of affliction. Dense was the darkness while they abode in Egypt, and cheerless was the glimmering twilight of that wilderness which was covered with their graves. Amidst a thousand miracles of mercy, what must have been the sorrows of a camp in which every stop was marked with many burials, until the whole track was a long cemetery?

The voice of wisdom in our text reminds that you are not pure in God’s sight, but need his mercy. Early, as it is with you, you must come before God on the same footing as those who seek him at the eleventh hour. Nothing is said about merit, nothing concerning the natural innocency of youth, nor the beauty of the juvenile character.

Remember, beloved young friends, that if you are saved in the morning of life, you will have wonderful instances of preventing mercy. It is great mercy which blots out sin, but who will say that it is not equally great mercy which prevents it? What a million mercies are here compressed into one!

Salvation, if it comes to you, must not only be mercy, but it must be mercy through the cross. I infer that from the text, because the text desires it to be a satisfying mercy, and there is no mercy which ever can satisfy a sinner, but mercy through the cross of Christ.

Many preach a mercy apart from the cross. Many say that God is merciful, and therefore surely he will not condemn them—but in the pangs of death, and in the terrors of conscience, the uncovenanted mercy of God is no solace to the soul.

Some proclaim a mercy which is dependent upon human effort, human goodness, or merit—but no soul ever yet did or could find any lasting satisfaction in this delusion. Mercy by mere ceremonies—mercy by outward ordinances—is but a mockery of human thirst.

There is no resting place for conscience but at the cross. Priests may preach what they will, and philosophers may imagine what they please, but there is, in the unresting conscience of man, an indication that the cross of Christ must have come from God—because that conscience never ceases from its disquiet till it hides in the wounds of the Crucified.

*Abridged from “The Young Man’s Prayer,” delivered by Charles Haddon Spurgeon in 1863.

Today’s Reading
Ezekiel 39 (Listen – 4:51)
Psalms 90 (Listen – 2:03)

Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne; steadfast love and faithfulness go before you. — Psalm 89.14

“Time and again in the history of the Christian church, the blood of martyrs has been its seed,” reflected Elisabeth Elliot. Her husband Jim was killed with four other missionaries in January of 1956. After she was widowed, Elliot—and her daughter—returned to live among the very indigenous people who savagely killed her husband and friends. Her motivating factor was faith in God’s justice. Decades later she wrote:

There is always the urge to oversimplify, to weigh in at once with interpretations that cannot possibly cover all the data or stand up to close inspection. Cause and effect are in Gods hands. Is it not the part of faith to simply let them rest there?

God is God. I dethrone him in my heart if I demand that He act in ways that satisfy my idea of justice. For us widows the question as to why the men who had trusted God to be both shield and defender should be allowed to be speared to death was not one that could be smoothly or finally answered in 1956, nor yet silenced in 1996.

God did not answer Job’s questions either. Job was living in a mystery—the mystery of the sovereign purpose of God—and the questions that rose out of the depths of that mystery were answered only by a deeper mystery, that of God Himself.

I believe with all my heart that God’s Story has a happy ending. But not yet, not necessarily yet. It takes faith to hold on to that in the face of the great burden of experience, which seems to prove otherwise. What God means by happiness and goodness is a far higher thing that we can conceive.

A healthier faith seeks a reference point outside all human experience, the Polestar which marks the course of all human events, not forgetting that impenetrable mystery of the interplay of God’s will and man’s (“He did not many miracles there because of their unbelief”; “Jesus was handed over to the power of men”).

It is not the level of our spirituality that we can depend on. It is God and nothing less than God, for the work is God’s and the call is God’s and everything is summoned by Him and to His purposes, the whole scene, the whole mess, the whole package—our bravery and our cowardice, our love and our selfishness, our strengths and our weaknesses.

Today’s Reading
Ezekiel 38 (Listen – 4:23)
Psalms 89 (Listen – 5:29)

For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol. — Psalm 88.3

If Christianity has lost anything in the transition from its eastern roots to modern western culture it is surely its emphasis on contentment. It takes enormous energy to find contentment in the day-to-day of material-oriented life—let alone to find it in the depths of pain and discomfort.

The journey of contentment is often short-circuited by our appetite for conclusion. Contentment requires one to sit in the midst of whatever is happening without longing for “the next step.” It necessitates performance-oriented people relinquish their commitment to get everything right. Sitting in contentment isn’t about getting answers, but gaining understanding.

In The Resurrection of the Son of God, bishop N.T. Wright contrasts what the authors of scripture ought to have felt with the reality they confess in their deepest struggles:

When this strong faith in YHWH as the creator, the life-giver, the God of ultimate justice met the apparent contradiction of the injustices and sufferings of life, at that point there was, as we have seen, a chance of fresh belief springing up. Not that the sufferings of Israel always evoked this response. Psalm 88, and the book of Job, are evidence to the contrary.

Psalm 88 is disturbing not only because, as Spurgeon says, it is, “the darkest of all the Psalms; it has hardly a spot of light in it,” but because it doesn’t even try to move forward out of the abyss.

The psalmist pours out pain, frustration, and disappointment before God. The lament is unapologetic and lacks a move toward restoration: it weeps, aches, complains, and accuses. Then it ends.

Contentment, in this way, is not satisfaction in the moment but the ability to be fully present. It creates margin for the exploration of the soul and space for transparency in what was found. Contentment’s fruit is born not in resolution, but in presence.

We fear contentment because it has become convoluted with complacency. How can we rest at peace when there are great things to accomplish, proper beliefs to be held, and greener pastures in which we could find ourselves? And so we press on—unaware, performing, and restless.

The invitation of Psalm 88 is to stop. Discover where you are—don’t judge it against where you ought be, or what you ought believe—just find yourself. It’s only here that the journey of authentic community and renewal in the gospel can take root.

Today’s Reading
Ezekiel 37 (Listen – 5:07)
Psalms 87-88 (Listen – 2:45)