Even the Holy Ghost Ain't White

Even the Holy Ghost Ain’t White

Occasionally some evangelistic type (usually white) will arrive unannounced and uninvited at Manna House.  The person will hand out tracts and then be on his way.  This morning I discovered a few such tracts discarded on the ground.  So I struck up a conversation with some of our guests about why they thought the tracts were thrown away.

“Look at the pictures!” suggested one guest.

I opened the tract, which was really more of a booklet complete with pictures of biblical characters.

“Do you see any Black people?” another guest asked.

I began looking at the pictures.

“Adam and Eve sure were a fine looking white couple” I said, and then I continued turning the pages.  “Moses has a good beard, but he’s pictured as a white.  Here’s a random picture of a king of Israel, also white.  There’s a prophet, he’s white too.  Here’s Jesus being baptized.  He’s not only white; he doesn’t have any chest hair.  He’s mighty white in all the other pictures too.  And here’s Paul, also white.”

“Now you know why this stuff is on the ground and in the trash,” said a guest.

“I don’t trust folks who bring this kind of thing around,” said another guest.

“Jesus was a dark-skinned Jew,” said yet another guest.

“Moses was dark, maybe even black,” offered another.

“None of them folks was white,” said a guest, “and I ain’t believing anyone who says they were.”

“Even the Holy Ghost ain’t white,” offered another guest.

Black theology is alive and well among many of the guests at Manna House.  In his book “God of the Oppressed,” James Cone wrote, “Christ’s blackness is both literal and symbolic...The least in America are literally and symbolically present in black people.”  Cone further points to “the appalling silence of white theologians on racism in the United States and the modern world.” 

The guests I spoke with this morning at Manna House pointed to the appalling depiction of every biblical character as white.  The silence Cone identified and the white biblical depictions are closely related.  And both likely have something to do with the abject failure of so many churches in Memphis to see Christ in the homeless poor of this city.  The theologians on the front porch at Manna House are great teachers.  Churches in Memphis should open their doors and offer them a meal and a place to stay for the night.  If they would, they would invite in Christ, the black one, not the sanitized spiritualized sentimentalized white one.

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me” (Revelation 3:20).