From “US: The Resurrection of American Terror” by Rev. Kenneth W. Wheeler
The Sermon on the Mount is a radical message about The Kingdom of God. We see a radical Jesus delivering a radical message as he goes beyond the message of religious piety. You can be religious and ignore justice. White Evangelicalism and white Christianity have practiced a kind of religiosity but they have not done justice. I can imagine Jesus in this text speaking to white people in general and to white Christians in particular. In very clear terms he is saying your worship is lacking. Jesus is saying the worship of white Christians will continue to remain empty unless and until they come out of their places of worship and do not stop until they find a way to make things right with their Black siblings. It’s time for white people and for white Christians to make things right with Black people. It’s time for that now. It’s time for white people to reach out to Black people, not just with a meaningless apology but with a commitment and plans to make Black people whole.
The clear path to making Black people whole is restoring to them what has been taken from them, what has been denied them: their dignity, their freedom, their humanity. Ta-Nehisi Coates describes this in real and historical way: “Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy.” All of those realities contributed to the huge wealth gap that exists between white and Black people today. The disparities in home ownership, in education, in unequal medical care or lack of medical care, all have their roots in the cruel and ugly narrative of America’s racist past. It was a racist narrative that white evangelicals either ignored or gave their blessings to. As Coates has written: “Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.”