The recent death of George Floyd, who suffocated on the streets of Minneapolis, is a tragedy which has rightly provoked anger and dismay. Many people in the US and the UK have chosen to demonstrate, even amidst the perils of social distancing. Any death of a human being at the hands of another human being is shocking, but it is all the more shocking to hear a man’s plaintive cry ‘I cannot breathe’ ignored amidst a global pandemic caused by a respiratory disease. As we give thanks for the many physicians and medical staff throughout the world who have given everything, in some cases their lives, to help others to breathe, there is something particularly callous and wicked about the brutality of police officers refusing to allow a black man to breathe.

The demonstrations of recent days and the cry that ‘Black Lives Matter’ are a wake up call to all of us to confront the systemic and almost casual racism that characterises both American and British society. In the face of police brutality and the outpouring of public anger, it is difficult to understand how the images of a President of the United States standing outside a church with a Bible in his hand was supposed to help. Holding aloft a text which bears witness to the truth, which challenges all of us with words of divine judgement, and which teaches us to love our neighbours as ourselves, Trump appears to have weaponised the Bible as a prop to play to his own base. As Rowan Williams has recently suggested, this action was ‘objectively…an act of idolatry’. But before we conclude that this is America’s problem, we too need to confront the uncomfortable truth that so many BAME people have died in the current pandemic and we need to work out why this is.

Nearly thirty years ago, I listened in the University Church to Archbishop Desmond Tutu talk about another society structured around institutionalised racism. Tutu had become a significant voice in the fight against apartheid in South Africa. And then just as now, people objected that bishops should keep out of politics. ‘Judge not that ye be not judged’ was cited, then just as now, by journalists who should have had the sense to recognise that to insist on such an assertion would have put most newspaper commentators out of a job. But Tutu drew the cry of freedom and justice from the Book of Exodus and the Old Testament prophets: ‘let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an overflowing stream’ (Amos 5.24). As I heard Tutu speak at St Mary’s all those years ago, I recognised that he spoke with authority not because he was a politician but because he was a Christian leader. His words and insights drew on a series of convictions which were shaped by the doctrine at the heart of the Christian faith, the doctrine of the incarnation. To say that 'the Word became flesh’, to say that God became human in Jesus Christ, is to recognise that our humanity is significant and precious. Every human being is made in the image and likeness of God, and this conviction provides the basis for our understanding of human rights and equality. Orthodox Christian teaching gives to every one of us the strength and the courage to defend the dignity and worth of every human being. It is not negotiable - and that is a lesson which I have never forgotten.

The first Christians were distinguished by their commitment to adopt orphans, to pay for the redemption of slaves, to care for the sick, to feed the hungry, to welcome the stranger, and to defend the vulnerable and the marginalised. These convictions about the dignity of being human are things we sometimes take for granted in our culture, but as Tom Holland has recently argued in his book Dominion, these values were not universally shared by people in the Roman world. However ambiguous the subsequent history of the Christian church has been (and believe me, the world today needs a repentant church rather than a triumphant church), Christian teaching about the dignity of being human provides the foundations for some of our deepest convictions and hopes, in ways which our culture is often not ready to acknowledge. And yet, we need to pay attention to these basic Christian doctrines about being human because they give us the strength and the courage, even in the face of violence and provocation, to stand alongside all those who insist that Black lives matter.   

The Revd Dr William Lamb