Ash Wednesday

We observe Ash Wednesday this month. Christians all over this world from Cape May, New Jersey to Cape Town, South Africa will pause on Ash Wednesday to pray prayers of repentance and prayers of rededication as they begin a 40 day period of reflection and renewal during the Lenten Season.
I encourage the people of faith who support our ministry to reflect on the deeper meanings of “repentance” this year as you observe Ash Wednesday and the Lenten Season. By that I mean spend some quiet time with God, yes! Engage in personal devotions and repent privately and personally for those acts you have engaged in that mar the image of the One in whose image you are made, yes.
But I mean more than that. I also mean use Ash Wednesday as a starting point and use the Lenten Season as a 40 day period to reflect on (and repent for) the corporate acts we have engaged in that have hurt the heart of God.
We as a nation need to repent for what we have done to the people of Haiti.
Read Randall Robinson’s book, “An Unbroken Agony” during this Season of Lent to learn more about what is not taught to you (or your children) in school concerning the egregious crimes committed by us against the Africans on the Island of Haiti from 1804 to 2010!
We need to repent for causing the conditions of poverty with which, in which and through which Hatians live every day. The causes for their poverty and their pain is a corporate act we have engaged in as a nation and as a people — sometimes knowingly and sometimes unconsciously!
An example of our “unconscious” engagement in corporate acts that need repentance is this: Every cruise we have taken on a Royal Caribbean Cruise Ship that has stopped on the “man made” island of Labadee is a corporate act of sin. Ever been to Labadee? Ever been there and done that?
Ever seen pictures of that “Caribbean paradise” called Labadee? Well guess what?
Labadee is nothing more than a slice of land on the island of Haiti! Labadee is a piece of property on the island of Haiti owned by Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines. (Purchased at a “steal” — literally!– from the people of Haiti)
Labadee (the “Caribbean paradise”) is sealed off from the rest of Haiti by a high wall and security guards. It is cut off from the reality of the misery in which the citizens of Haiti live. That misery is kept away from the eyesight of those who can afford a cruise and who are vacationing on the other side of the wall.
The cost of a Caribbean cruise, incidentally, is more than the average citizen of Haiti makes in two years; and the food thrown overboard into the sea at the end of each Caribbean cruise is more food than the island of Haiti sees all year long!
We need to repent for our corporate acts that have hurt and that continue to hurt the heart of God.
Our government has engaged in outrageously evil behavior towards Haiti since the days of Thomas Jefferson, yes. But our contemporary greed — even as African Americans — has contributed to the conditions that cause the “Unbroken Agony” through which Haitians live; and we need to repent privately and corporately for causing those conditions.
Repentance in the Biblical tradition means more than saying, “I am sorry.” It also means engaging in Restorative Justice (or reparations) as the story of Zaccheus teaches us in Luke 19.
We need to restore the money we have stolen from the people of Haiti; but we need to do more than that. We need to restore to the people of Haiti the dignity which our greed stole from them.
We need to restore the $31 billion white supremacy took from them and demanded of them for their having the audacity to think they could defeat the French and get away with it. The white Western Governments made the poor black Africans pay their former slaveholders back for what the slaveowners lost in revenue when slavery ended. Revenue, please remember, that white slave holders received from the slave trade and from slave labor! (Does anybody besides me see anything wrong with this picture?)
We need to restore the possibility for an even playing field for the Haitians by forgiving their debt completly! The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (both white) need to lift the insane and sinful trade restrictions they have imposed on Haiti; and they need to forgive Haiti’s debt completely — while paying them back what was stolen from them through the machinations of so called “free market capitalism” (spelled G-R-E-E-D) in the process.
That kind of Restorative Justice is TRUE repentance…at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Restorative Justice is true repentance personally and corporately; and I encourage every believer to reflect on that kind of repentace from Ash Wednesday until Easter Sunday.
And remember as you reflect that the message of Easter is that God not only has been watching what we do; but that God will ALWAYS have the last word in our lives — in spite of the things (including the evil) we do!
Jeremiah Wright