Have you visited the recently opened the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, otherwise known as the National Lynching Museum?  I have not, but have read much about it, and have found myself deeply, deeply moved.  This museum is a testament to the paradox of the human being:  extraordinary magnificence juxtaposed with immense tragedy.  How grand we are, how we can be so creative and visionary and loving, yet how at the same time we so quickly descend into utterly abject moral darkness!  The history of slavery in America is a highly sordid tale, one whose legacy reverberates to this day.  It is a sorry display of assertions of cultural superiority, unbridled moral perversion, and perfidious economic greed.  I'm profoundly regretful for it.

     I hope one day to visit this museum.  I hope one day to walk into its darkness, to touch its horror of humanness.  I then hope to emerge with a clearer vision of whom we, divine image bearers, can really be.  Though we are fractured by sin, we remain creatures of enormous potential.  What can we do to find and fulfill it?
     It's easy to say that we must turn to God, although we should.  Far more difficult it is, however, to admit that we do not so much turn to God to affirm ourselves and our cultural commitments but rather to turn to him to affirm and testify to the absolute necessity of his transcendent love in the cosmos. We can do little without him.
     Jesus didn't die for people to be lynched.