A Trembling Hand - Lee Shelnutt

The children of Jeremiah and Nancy Brown, expelled from Forsyth County, Georgia, in 1912.  (Credit: Charles Grogan)

It was in the early 90s. I was working full-time at Delta Air Lines and taking seminary classes at a small, inner-city, Bible College – Seminary, ministry of the Presbyterian Evangelistic Fellowship, called the Atlanta School of Biblical Studies. Along with five others, I was enrolled in Dr. Bill Iverson’s Systematic Theology class. Bill would come up for several weekends (Friday night and Saturday classes) per semester from Miami. One particular weekend was special for so many reasons. Bill had a friend who owned a large, multi-room, house in the North Georgia mountains, and he proposed that this particular weekend we would have a retreat there for our classwork. 

So, off we went. The “we” was myself; Tim, a young white accountant; Katherine, a 30-something year old black lady from rural Louisiana; her future husband, Doug, a white brother from upstate New York; Mr. William Diggs, a refugee from Liberia in his early 70s; and, Naomi, a middle-aged, black lady, and lifelong citizen of Atlanta. Call me blessed to have been in that class.

In God’s providence, two experiences on that trip impressed me deeply. Let me start with the latter. We four male students shared the same large bedroom with its’ half a dozen single beds. I didn’t sleep so well that night often awakening for periods of time before I would doze back off to sleep. One of those times was just after 5:00 a.m. When I opened my eyes, I saw Mr. Diggs on his knees, beside his bed, fervently but quietly praying. What humble, quiet, and beautiful zeal and love for God and others! Where was mine? Sure, I had a nice paying job, was a respectable deacon in my local church, and had a good education but here was what mattered most. I am not sure if I have ever known a more humble and holy man.

As convicting as that moment was, the other experience was one of those lightbulbs being flipped on, epiphanies. Eye-opening. It took place on the drive from Atlanta to the mountain get-away. I offered to be one of the drivers. Naomi, Mr. Diggs, and Tim rode with me.  Naomi rode in the front passenger seat. Well, our route took us through Forsyth County, Georgia. That meant nothing to me. I suppose I may have heard a story or two in the news about Klan activity there when I was in high school or college, but since it really didn’t affect me, I never paid it much attention. Naomi hadn’t known of our route, but I sensed her growing tense even as we pulled out of her familiar metro Atlanta heading north. And that was odd if you knew this saint, for the Naomi I knew up until that point was one of the most loving and joy-filled women I have ever met. She was the sort you felt like you had always known and loved upon your first meeting. She always put others around her at ease. Now it was clear that my friend was not at ease.

General unease turned into outright trembling when Naomi saw the county sign, and she visibly started trembling. I was thinking, what’s going on?! I asked her what was wrong. I can’t remember her words exactly, but the gist was, they don’t like me here, please don’t stop! I didn’t and it didn’t matter at the time whether I thought her fears were legitimate or not. The thing is, no one else in our group of classmates knew what Forsyth County meant for an African America Naomi’s age living in Atlanta. You see after the Civil War, between the 1860s and 1920 all of the black citizens of Forsyth County were driven out by the pressures of their neighbors. In 1912, a black man by the name of Rob Edwards was lynched in the town square. He was accused of a crime yet never had the opportunity of a trial. Two teenage black boys were lynched soon thereafter. After the 1920s, white citizens enforced their county borders to keep Forsyth a “whites only” county up until the 1980s, less than 10 years before when I held Naomi’s hand as I drove through that infamous county, grateful for her sake that I had plenty gas in the tank.

My epiphany was that I had had no idea. The name “Forsyth County” did not strike fear in me. It was not a part of my life experience. The fact that there had been Klan rallies and a civil rights march in 1987 there had not ever really registered. After feeling the terror of my dear sister Naomi, I could no longer not know.

I am grateful to the Lord for that experience for opening my eyes a bit to the sin of racism, as I am grateful to the Lord for opening my eyes a decade before to the horrors of abortion. Unfortunately, I had really never heard either issue directly addressed in the church of my youth. In both cases, I can never now “un-see” the pain, the hurt, and the sin. Do I see it clearly enough? Probably not.

Fast forward to the end of May. During that last week, I was running on emotional and spiritual fumes, looking forward to a couple of weeks away to decompress. Yet, in God’s providence, during that week I watched, as all of us did, the video of the merciless actions and inactions of police officers with George Floyd, and then the beginnings of the massive reactions to it, including everything from understandable protests to sinful riots of hostile and violent mobs and, now, further bloodshed. And for me, Sunday was coming. How should I respond as a human being, as a Christian, as a brother in Christ, as my congregation’s pastor? As I watched, as I meditated, as I thought, I remembered holding Naomi’s trembling hand. 

I do not know how you have processed it all from that week onward, but here is where I am being led personally and pastorally. I want to lament. I want to listen. And I want to love. And do so in the deepest sense of those words. Not offer simplistic platitudes. Not act as if these things are not happening. Not self-righteously pontificating. Not being swept up into worldly traps of ungodly organizations that aim at the destruction of God-appointed institutions like the family. Not gutting the Gospel of its power to change a sinner’s heart and that being his greatest need. Nor limiting the power of the Gospel and its world-changing implications.

Lament. In my sermon on May 31, all I could offer was an extended sermonic prayer of lament and my tears and the cry Maranatha! I have not been good at biblical lament and I suspect others are like me in the West. But let me just speak of myself here, I have experienced so many wonderful and rich blessings of the Lord and outside of health issues, I have not had much personal experience of suffering (ironically, something which by God’s grace can be a blessing too, pointing the sufferer to the Suffering Servant of Yahweh!). The suffering of others, the pains of others, have not and do not always register with me. My Naomi moment, my watching the “Silent Scream” video (showing the horror of abortion), and now recently the video of George Floyd’s death and subsequent mayhem of angry mobs, did though capture my heart and the biblical words, weep with those who weep have resounded in my soul. I have a long way to go to weep as I should and to lament as I should. How about you? My hope is that we will spend more personal devotional time in the Psalms, in Jeremiah and the prophets, in the book of Lamentations, and the book of Revelation, and before the cross that I, that we, might learn to lament and lament well. May we all lament that in this good creation of the Lord, there is such hatred, mayhem, destruction, stealing, murder – in the heart and in our streets. Lord please give me a heart that can and will grieve and lament and cry out to You to right every wrong.

Listen. Going away for two weeks, was good for me because it impressed upon me the need to be slow to speak, and quick to listen. To listen. Truly. Not just shout slogans. Not just to launch into denunciations or justifications. I needed (and need) time to listen to the stories of others. I needed to listen to Naomi, not just tell her, wrongly, that her fears were not justified. I need to be quick to listen and slow to speak. Too many times I am apt to be formulating my next response in my mind, and not listening to others. How about you? 

But as important as I believe it is to listen to others, do you know who I need to listen to foremost, and repeatedly? Our Sovereign God of grace! I am more and more convinced that God’s word and the Gospel contained therein are sufficient to address every ill, and what the response to such should be! Let’s take the sin of racism. If we are in the Word, then we know that to mistreat another due to skin color is affront to their bearing the image of God (Genesis 1:26-27). If it is in the church, it’s a contradiction of the visible unity that is ours in Christ (Eph. 2:11-22 and Revelation 5:9, 7-9). It is a disobedience to the command of our Savior and King’s to love our neighbor as ourselves (Mark 12:31, etc.). Take it all together, at some point, at some level, it denies the biblical doctrines of creation, man, the communion of saints, and the kingship of Christ. Brothers and sisters, if we listen to the Word of God, we ought to know how serious a sin this is.

I was listening to a Scottish Presbyterian minister recently who was talking about being in a membership interview with a man who was requesting to join the church he was pastoring and for some reason as they were talking this man said he hated “Pakis.” The minister somewhat taken back asked “what?” The man responded, “Yeah, the Pakistanis come in to where I work all the time and I can’t stand them. Don’t want to be around them.” The minister courageously and rightly said, you won’t be joining this church then. You see, he understood the seriousness of such unrepentant hatred.

Let’s listen to the stories and cries of others, whether we agree with them or not. But let us chiefly listen to the Word of God which both challenges the sins of all of our hearts and lives and provides us with the only hope which is in the Lord Jesus Christ! And may we not truncate that glorious Gospel and the working of the Spirit in and through his Church – the Church which should be seen for what we will be and are already in Christ, the Bride made up of people from every nation, every tribe, every tongue. I have got a whole lot of listening to do. How about you?

Love. Lastly, not only am I to lament, not only am I to a listen, I am always – always to love. Brothers and sisters, the rest of our lifetimes is a school for learning to love, and a hospital to administer love, and a field to sow the seeds of love. I am not speaking of sentimentality. I am speaking of biblical love – loving God and loving our neighbors. It’s a love defined by the Ten Commandments and their deep implications for all our actions, words, and thoughts. It is a love that dares warn others of a holy judgment that will one day fall and the horrors of an eternal hell. Want to know where we stand as a Church regarding hatred, racism, abortion, looting, slander, etc., look at the explications of the Ten Commandments in our Larger Catechism. How to love is defined there. True biblical love is unfolded in 1 Cor. 13. To love is supremely pictured for us in the One who hung upon the cross for all of our ugliness, callousness, self-righteous, hatred, and failures to care for our neighbor like that Good Samaritan. Such love will cost us, brothers and sisters, but it is the way of the cross. And the Spirit indwells us and enables us to bear our own cross and follow the Savior. He can give us eyes to see how we can care for any who suffer injustice and wrong and also convict us of our own blindness, indifference, or self-righteousness. If we love Christ, shouldn’t we desire this? 

Dear ones, God has us in this time and at this moment for a reason. Let us love Him, let us love one another, and let us proclaim the Gospel of Love, by our words and by our actions. Where do we start? In our homes and in our loving church families. Then let us not let our sanctuary walls keep such love contained. May it overflow into our communities and beyond. To the praise of His glorious name!