Mark Labberton:
What a joy it is today to welcome back Jemar Tisby as our guest on Conversing. Jemar has been here before and appeared the first time when he had just recently published his best-selling book called The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the Church’s Complicity in Racism. It’s a book that was really a kind of landmark book in Christian publishing. To write a book for Christian audiences, particularly perhaps evangelical audiences on racism and to succeed as strongly as it did in the market. It arrived at the right time with the right message. And while it’s been anything but free from controversy, it’s a book that has already significantly left its mark. Since that time, Jemar has written other books such as How to Fight Racism. And the book that we’re going to be talking about mostly today, which is a marvelous new book called The Spirit of Justice: True Stories of Faith, Race and Resistance.
Jemar is currently a Professor of History at Simmons College of Kentucky, which is located in Louisville. He’s the co-host of Pass the Mic Podcast, and he has written a great deal in such places as the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and the New York Times, along with others.
Jemar, it is just such a gift to have you with us today.
Jemar Tisby:
I am so excited to be here, especially to talk about this really important history in the spirit of justice, so thank you for the opportunity.
Mark Labberton:
Well, I just found the book amazing. And I really, really again want to encourage people who have been following your writing. First, as I said in the introduction, your book The Color of Compromise has made a very significant contribution and sort of splashed down at exactly the right moment when there was a heightened awareness of the need to reconsider issues of American racism, particularly in relationship to African-Americans. And also it was such an incredibly raw moment in our nation’s life because of all the cruelty and brutality and injustice perpetrated against black bodies, and also the kind of juxtaposition with that and COVID where people were simply more willing and ready to take time by force of circumstances to read and consider.
And your book, the Color of Compromise becoming a New York Times bestseller was really an exceptional achievement given the history of books like this not being well received. I think The Spirit of Justice captures that same spirit and now it takes us across a different plane. If The Color of Compromise is about the larger narrative, this is now about individual people who embedded in that narrative, embodied what you’re calling the spirit of justice. And this really emerges beautifully in your first chapter which explained the origin of that. Please set that up for us. If you could read a little bit to give us a flavor of how this came about and led ultimately to the title of the book, that would be great.
Jemar Tisby:
Sure. This was one of those rare moments when as it’s happening, you sort of get a sense of how significant it was. So it is December 9th, 2017. It is the grand opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. The star speaker, the keynote speaker there is Myrlie Evers Williams who listeners will remember because her husband, Medgar Evers was assassinated in front of their home in June 1963 for his work with the NAACP and for voting rights in Mississippi. And so here she was back in Jackson Mississippi at this grand opening. She gives this nationally televised address, which is full of hope and inspiration, which is absolutely confounding because in the museum that she had privately toured is the very rifle used to kill her husband.
And in the midst of that flood of emotion, she still comes out with the word of encouragement. Then afterwards, she has this smaller gathering. It’s a press conference, and I was privileged to be there and I was actually recording on my cellphone. They can be used for good every now and again, and so I caught her words in real time. A journalist asked her, “Well, how does this moment in terms of racism and justice compare to the 1950s and 60s during the civil rights movement?” And I’ll read you what she said.
Mark Labberton:
Please.
Jemar Tisby:
“I see something today that I hoped I would never see again. That is prejudice, hatred, negativism that comes from the highest points across America” she told us. Then, with the candor that comes with old age, she said, “And I found myself asking Medgar in the conversations that I have with him. Is this really what’s happening again in this country? And asking for guidance because I don’t mind admitting this to the press I’m a little weary at this point.” At that moment, I fully expected her to expound on the weariness of fighting for racial justice for decades to vent about her frustrations with people who still oppose the laws and policies that would move us closer to racial progress. To say that she was passing the torch to another generation and that she had earned her rest.
But she took her comments in a different direction, one that pointed to the strength and resolve of the staunchest defenders of justice. She said, “But it’s something about the spirit of justice that raises up like a war horse. That horse that stands with its back sunk in and hears that bell, I like to say, the bell of freedom. And all of a sudden it becomes straight and the back becomes stiff, and you become determined all over again.”
Mark Labberton:
It’s such an amazing moment. I read this opening chapter maybe two or three times just to savor all of the ingredients that went into that moment and the other details that you provide in the opening of the book. Jemar, is that phrase, the spirit of justice and her vivid imagery of that sense of a horse’s back straightening and being ready to charge forward in the work for freedom and justice, which she’s capturing in such a poignant way. And the way that it has to be done again and again and again and again. So I want to start before we turn to illustrations in the book, which are these amazing stories in a way, a set of short stories interlaced together for sure, but each one poignantly described and lifted up in a, very, very powerful way. But let’s start with today.
I mean, just as she has written about the past and you have written about the even more distant past you know better than anyone that I know, that the depth to which this need to stay at the task of fighting for justice has to be recurrent, and it has low moments and it has inspired moments, and it has moments of beleaguered discouragement, and it has moments of great hope. I remember when I was the president at Fuller just finding myself so regularly filled with the deepest of admiration for our African-American students and faculty. In part because their race, because of how it works in the United States, their race sets them up for a work which they do by necessity, not by design. It’s the work that is given to African-Americans to have to do, and everyone does it in their own way. Not everyone becomes a professor in your case. Not everyone becomes an activist in other people’s cases, but it is a work that in some way or another, if you’re African-American in the United States, you will have to do some measure of this work of justice.
And to think that there are literally, of course, millions and millions of African-Americans who have to dedicate sometimes a very significant part of their whole life still working out something that is so basic about the quality of people regardless of their melatonin level is just an astounding thing. I have no expectations placed on my life in my culture to have to do something because I’m white. I don’t know of an African-American who doesn’t have expectations placed on their life because they’re Black. I guess as we get started on talking about this book, could you just make some comments about that fact itself?
Jemar Tisby:
Absolutely. You’re touching on something vitally important here, which is Black people are born into a situation in which we are forced to defend, assert, and constantly so our humanity. And that is in the midst of constant attacks on our humanity, big and small, whether it is the vicarious suffering that we see when there’s another cellphone video of a Black person being brutalized by law enforcement. Whether it is… We all have memories of the first time we were called the N-word, whether it is going into the workplace and wondering if you didn’t get that raise or you were passed over for that promotion, if it had anything to do with the colour of your skin, even subconsciously. And so we are born into a situation in which resistance is a daily reality in many cases.
So there is, I think a realism about our nation as well as a resilience in the face of setbacks and a determination to continue the struggle no matter what. And I think that’s what Myrlie Evers Williams was articulating was you got to do what you got to do for justice.
Mark Labberton:
Right, right.
Jemar Tisby:
And that’s Angela Y. Davis, the former Black Panther and professor says, “Freedom is a constant struggle.” That’s what we’re confronting. Wave after wave of halting progress with a massive backlash. And part of this book is prompted by what happened in 2020 and after.
Mark Labberton:
Yes, yes.
Jemar Tisby:
So you mentioned my first book Color of Compromise. It was out a year and a half before it became a New York Times bestseller. It was in the midst of the summer of 2020 when everyone was paying attention to racism and saying, “We got to do something about it.”
Mark Labberton:
Right.
Jemar Tisby:
Well, no sooner does the calendar turn over from 2020 to 2021. Then we have a January 6, the attempted insurrection. But along with that, you have all of this anti-woke rhetoric. You have attacks against critical race theory. You have attacks against diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. And so this massive backlash, what would many call whitelash to the little bit of racial progress that we were even just talking about in 2020. And so for white people in particular, I think it was very jarring and unnerving to see this massive mobilization for racial justice be attacked so vehemently and acutely and quickly. But we got to go back to words like what Myrlie Evers Williams said, “There’s something about the spirit of justice and you become determined all over again.”
Mark Labberton:
Right. And you are a great bearer of that Jemar too, that I just find extremely moving and I’m just so grateful for the way that God has planted that so deeply in your heart. I do think the book is a gift for so many reasons, because in The Spirit of Justice, you give us these windows, these stories really of a set of individuals over the arc again, of American history in which the spirit of justice has risen up in various people’s lives. And though largely if not a hundred percent of them are functionally unknown, certainly they have names that are hardly known outside the Black community. And even in the history books, their stories are diminutively told rather than expansively told. And what makes this book so rich to read is that you find and know and have studied these things. You understand their unique contributions.
It struck me how extraordinary some of these people were regardless of the actual struggle that they were working on in terms of racial justice, they were just super impressive people, period. And then because of their race and because of their circumstances, often because of slavery, in many instances, they have circumstances which then put their faces in injustice and they decide like that great image of the horse whose back stiffens and rises up, out of the spirit of justice to do their peace. So I have a number of them that I just found so remarkable. But before I share my list and ask you a few questions about that, just tell me, was there somebody that you particularly discovered in this process that you may or may not have really known about but really was maybe one of the more aha moments like, “Wow, I can’t believe that person did this.”
Jemar Tisby:
Well, how people sometimes ask if you could have dinner with any person from history, who would it be? My table has gotten a lot bigger…
Mark Labberton:
Yes, yes.
Jemar Tisby:
… after studying for this book.
Mark Labberton:
That’s right.
Jemar Tisby:
One of those people is Sister Thea Bowman and she’s relatively recent. She died in the early nineties, but she was born in Mississippi and as a Black girl, her parents sent her to a local Catholic school that was sort of a mission school. It was serving Black children. And she just had this profound piety, even as a young girl and knew in her early teenage years she wanted to become a nun. So you have a Black Mississippian who wants to become a nun because of her experience in Catholic schools. And she does. And she moves from Mississippi up to Wisconsin.
She remembers the first time she saw snow and she’s like, “Oh, this is so cool.” And then it didn’t go away for months and months and months. She’s like, “What am I doing here?” And of course, she’s the only Black person there and everything and she’s whip-smart so she ends up getting her PhD, I believe in English, but throughout it all, she’s one of these people who just reading about her holiness just kind of leaps off the page
Mark Labberton:
Yes, yes.
Jemar Tisby:
As well as her effervescence. And she was a singer and she incorporated song into her presentations. And there’s this dramatic speech with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops almost exclusively white men who are running the show in the United States. And it’s in a period when Black Catholics are starting to coalesce in terms of an identity and a push for more autonomy, independence, and a voice in the U.S. Catholic Church. And she articulates this so well to this group of powerful men as one of them as a Black Catholic sister and sings of course, but cast this vision not only for an integrated equal church, but also one in which Black people can do Black church the way Black folk needed to be done.
And she was just one of these folks. I actually was the recipient of the Sister Thea Bowman Award at Notre Dame, which is a Catholic school, of course. It was a scholarship award. I knew she was a Black Catholic nun. Didn’t know anything of the profundity of the history. And now I just sit back in awe of the way our lives intersected and the way she continues to affect people today.
Mark Labberton:
Right, right. Amazing. Let’s stick with your own circumstances in that way. So you graduate from Notre Dame. You go on to eventually get your PhD in history. You are currently serving at Simmons College, which is of Kentucky, which is in Louisville. And in that school obviously it has this heritage as an HBCU of deep Black leadership and the significance of leadership that had visionary impact. William Simmons is one of the early people that plays a critical role. Take us to him and to that spot. He was very impressive to me.
Jemar Tisby:
That’s in one of my favorite chapters. It’s the chapter on the era that we commonly call Jim Crow. And I was thinking about it because what The Spirit of Justice does is in contrast to The Color of Compromise where really white Christians are at the centre talking about the ways that they compromised with racism. Now, Black Christians are at the centre of the story. So how do you tell the story of the Jim Crow era without centreing the white supremacy, the violence, the segregation?
How do you centre Black people in that area, in that era? And so I called it that chapter, the Era of Black Institution Building, and I loved it because what happened once Black people got our freedom, we built. We built colleges, we built churches and denominations, we built banks, we built homes, whatever it is, schools. And so Simmons College of Kentucky is one of those institutions that we built. It came together as the dream of a group of Black baptist ministers in Kentucky in 1866. And after a couple of starts and stalls, they finally inaugurated the college in 1879, which was called Kentucky Normal and Theological Institute. Their second president was William J. Simmons, just a dynamic human being. He wrote this thick, thick book called Men of Mark, which my book is sort of patterned after in a way. And he’s talking about all these Black Christian men who did remarkable things.
And he says in the book that I am going to write another volume for women. Unfortunately, he died before he was able to do that. But he was an incredibly gifted fundraiser, so he brought all kinds of funding to the college. He was instrumental in the career of Ida B. Wells, the investigative journalist of course. And she writes in one of her books that whatever I am today is due to the confidence that William J. Simmons placed in me. He gave her her first paying job as a journalist and so really launched her career in that way. The story of Simmons College as a whole is remarkable because it’s a really dynamic institution in its first several decades up to the point where it included a graduate school for nursing, for law, and for teaching. All there in Louisville Kentucky, and it was private faith-based.
They’re not getting land grant money, they’re not getting state money, but they fell on hard times. Everyone fell on hard times during the Great Depression, but as has often been said, when white America gets a cold, Black America gets pneumonia. And that’s what happened with Simmons. So they lost all their buildings. But then several decades later, in the ’90s, due to the leadership of our current college president, Kevin W. Cosby, they were able to buy back their original buildings. It’s the only story we know of an HBCU losing their property, having it foreclosed, but then coming back and being able to buy it back, and now that’s where campus is.
Mark Labberton:
I’d realise that. Yeah. Amazing. Amazing. And would you say that The Spirit of Justice is thriving at Simmons?
Jemar Tisby:
It is a college on the comeback. That is for sure. And it was hanging on by a thread as an unaccredited Bible college basically. Since then, we’ve been able to get our accreditation, which was the necessary prerequisite to being officially recognised as an HBCU, which the Department of Education did in 2015. So we are the latest and most likely the last HBCU because to be an HBCU, you have to have at least two things. One, you have to have a historic mission of serving predominantly Black students at your institution. And two, you have to be founded before 1964.
So that’s the historic part. And to our knowledge, we would be the last HBCU that could fit those qualifications and officially be recognised as an HBCU.
Mark Labberton:
So jumping around, another person that really stood out to me, not because she was unfamiliar to me, but because she’s always been familiar to me, but I found her even more inspiring this time, is Harriet Tubman.
I have to say, there’s something about her story, her tenacity, her complete immersion in the work of justice that is just profound. I mean, she put her life literally on the line again and again and again. Just remind people or fill that story out because it’s so well known on the surface, but there’s so much beneath it.
Jemar Tisby:
Absolutely. So Harriet Tubman is most famous for the Underground Railroad and going back, I believe a dozen times or more to help lead enslaved people from the south to the north to freedom. She was born under the name Araminta Ross. And early in her life she sustained a head injury at the hands of her enslaver that she said gave her visions and that God spoke to her in these visions and told her about danger and foretold about trips that she should make to help free enslaved people.
What I focus on in the spirit of Justice is not the Underground Railroad portion of her work, but her work during the Civil War. So she had escaped the freedom. She had been back and forth several times and she still wanted to do more. She strikes me as one of those people, you would have to say to her, “Okay, now Harriet, you need to sit down. You need to get rest. Did you eat food today?”
Mark Labberton:
Breath deeply.
Jemar Tisby:
Yes. She was just so focused on the mission and the work in helping other people and humbly too. So I write about how she went to this camp down south, you know, her reputation precedes her, right? So they say, “Okay. You can help here. Go to this camp where we’re trying to help recently freed Black people.” She goes there and she’s incredibly enterprising. She does whatever she can do. Everything from nursing, and she’s not officially trained in this, whatever, but it’s ministering to people in need. She’s starting to train young women on how to do laundry and other skills so they can start their own businesses and make their own money, but she still wants to do more. She wants to be closer to the action.
So essentially she’s able to persuade the white leadership that, hey, I can be helpful basically as a spy or at least to gather information because A, she knows the geography of the south better than they do. B, she’s a Black woman, and enslaved people are more likely to talk to her than a white union officer, right?
So she has more trust there. All of that eventually builds up to this incredible night where she actually leads a raid during the Civil War. It’s called the Combahee River Raid. All these union soldiers get on boats on a river and drift to these plantations where people are still enslaved. And so the plan is not only to take over the plantations and kick out the owners, but to also free the enslaved people there. Well, initially there’s hesitation. These Black folk don’t know any. It’s the middle of the night. These boats are on the river. Yeah, they may be union, but I don’t know. And there’s water and all. So they’re afraid.
The legend has it. Harriet Tubman is watching all the chaos, right? People are milling around. Then they come in a rush and they’re threatening to capsize some of these boats. She watches that for a second, then she starts singing, and the singing catches on, and the singing calms everything down so that they’re able to proceed in an orderly manner. And she ends up freeing in one night more enslaved people than all her trips back and forth on the Underground Railroad, which is why upon her death, she received a full military burial.
Mark Labberton:
Right. And why we’re waiting for her profile on our money.
Jemar Tisby:
Right. True patriot.
Mark Labberton:
True patriot. Absolutely. Jemar, when you go through these stories and you see this arc for the benefit of those who haven’t yet read your book, what are the themes that stoke the Spirit of Justice? Is it really the suffering on the one hand, which is certainly a big piece of it. Is it people’s faith, which is a very, very significant component in the people that you highlighted in the book. Is it the uniqueness of the given individuals who just had the right wiring and giftedness moment, whatever it might be.
It’s a constellation of things, of course. But as you look at the arc that is held in this book of all these different narratives, what would you observe about that?
Jemar Tisby:
Unfortunately, I do think a through line is suffering.
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Jemar Tisby:
So the reason why we need a spirit of justice is because injustice is present. And when you’re faced with injustice, you have a couple of options. Psychologists talk about fight, flight, freeze or fawn, and so you can run away from it, which doesn’t entail. You know, it is not… all kinds of metaphorical ways of running away from it, right?
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Jemar Tisby:
You can freeze or be paralyzed in the midst of it. Fawning is ingratiating yourself to the oppressor which some chose varying levels of success there and always conditional, always dangerous, or you can fight it. And in all kinds of ways, Black people chose to fight their oppression. In ways big and small, which I lay out in the introduction between resistance, advocacy, and activism, all of these are sort of degrees of how conscious and intentional your resistance is. But anything from creating music to having a family to starting a business can be considered a form of resistance in the face of a society that considers you less than. So I do think the through line is suffering, and who I highlight in this book are the people who chose to fight or to resist or to advocate in different ways, right?
And it reminds me of the Bible verse from Romans 5 that suffering produces perseverance. Perseverance produces character. Character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame. And I think that’s what the spirit of justice is. What we’re seeing are people who suffered, but they persevered through it. It produced the kind of character that we can admire and learn from, and it gives us hope, which as I’m reminded by Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourners, one of his mentors was the Archbishop Desmond Tutu who said, “Hope is a decision. Hope is a choice.”
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Jemar Tisby:
And that’s what I find so inspiring about these historical figures is that they chose hope.
Mark Labberton:
Yes, yes. One of the people that we share in common is someone very, very important to your story, the long story of American anti-racism and courage and faithfulness, which was really the that marked Dr. William Pannell, who was Fuller’s first, African-American Black faculty member and board member, and left a long legacy and stayed with Fuller from the time he joined it until he just recently a few weeks ago, passed away.
And I know that you and he had opportunity to be together partly because of work that you were doing on Tom Skinner, but also just because of Bill’s own contribution. He’s one of these people that definitely had the spirit of justice, but his positioning was different than some. So I wonder if you could just share a bit about that, partly, as an in memoriam opportunity, just to honour and recognise him. I
Jemar Tisby:
I dearly love Bill Pannell, and that’s entirely because of the grace he showed me. I first encountered him when I was doing some research for my dissertation, which included Tom Skinner, who he worked with at Tom Skinner Associates, was basically his right-hand man and lieutenant in that organization. And as I was researching, his name kept coming up and I was searching, “Oh, he’s still alive.” So I randomly reached out to him and just as an indication of how gracious and welcoming and hospitable he was, he responded to my messages. We had multiple calls where we’re just getting to know each other, but over time, he became a friend and a mentor. And honestly, people like me, Black Christians, who have been brought up if you will, in white evangelical spaces, I was looking for people to guide me.
I was looking to people to pattern my own ministry after. How do you get by in these predominantly white circles that are still entrenched in many ways in racism and white centreedness and all of those things. And here was this man, Bill Pannell, who not only had done it but was still doing it. So his positioning at Fuller was truly impactful. As you said, he’s the first in many ways, but also he lasted and he endured in this institution partly. And I mean this genuinely, not just because I’m on your podcast because of leaders like you, Mark, who are humble enough to open yourself up to learning and not just to learning, to truly adapting the structure of the seminary. To be more welcoming and inclusive to people across races and ethnicities.
So I learned a lot from Bill Pannell. Pivotal to me was his first book published in 1968 called My Friend, The Enemy. When I read that book today more than 40 years later, it resonates so deeply with my own experience. He’s talking about white evangelicals, my friend. He did have truly cordial relationships.
Mark Labberton:
Yes, deep friendships.
Jemar Tisby:
So many white evangelicals to the day that he died. And yet in so many ways, they were his enemy. They were the people holding him back, the people who didn’t speak up, the people who demonstrated compromise and complicity instead of confronting racism.
And the way he articulated that with an incisive perspective, as well as, biting humor and mirth, it’s a book that is underappreciated but truly paved the way for people like me today.
Mark Labberton:
At the time that that book was published, of course, it was such a contentious thing that a person like Bill would be allowed to write a book as bold as that and get it published by a Christian publisher, which was almost always, and still is usually a white institution in its own regard. So it was a boldness certainly on his part to write that and to choose that particular title, which is so aggressive. Like the title that he chose later after the Rodney King riots and everything that came out of the brutality against him when he wrote the Coming Race Wars. And again, in this very bold way was saying, far more is on the line than white people actually think. And there is a deeper problem here than just saying, well, there’s a little bit of post-civil war, post Jim Crow that we need to keep slowly, slowly working at.
Instead, it’s like this is a coming train. And if we do not act. If we do not take this reality seriously and understand the depth of the crisis then we’re blind to what we really should see right in front of us on most days. And Bill for me too was… I met him when I was first a seminary student way back in the late 70s, and he had a huge impact on me as a seminary student. And then I tracked a bit with him over the years that I was away. And when I came back to Fuller, I had the opportunity to get much more deeply acquainted. And we spent hours and hours together. And he was, for me, a beacon of a kind of spirit that this book, the Spirit of Justice so beautifully captures. It is this surging capacity.
And as you and I both know, he’s written a memoir, which we hope one day will be published, and it carries the same story. And there’s this recent film that’s just been made about him called The Gospel According to Bill Pannell. This spirit that we’re talking about in him, which just continues, continues, continues. And that film was only released a couple of weeks before he passed away. He knew that, he was aware of that. He was not able to go to the premiere of it itself but really very full of joy and gratitude that that opportunity of storytelling had been given to him. And he did it with the same passion and clarity that he’s done his whole life.
Jemar Tisby:
And as you speak of that book, The Coming Race Wars, which I had the incredible, probably still the highlight of my writing career, the opportunity to write a new introduction and a new foreword to that book.
Mark Labberton:
Yes, exactly.
Jemar Tisby:
The title maybe sounded hyperbolic to some, The Coming Race Wars, but just as you were speaking, it occurred to me as we record this, maybe we’re in the midst of it, maybe we’re in the midst of it. It’s highlighted and punctuated by the political situation that we see. But when you see what’s really motivating people, what’s really stirring up fear and hatred, which can lead also to violence, it’s still around race. If you think back to 2016 when Trump was first elected president and people were trying to discern support for this person, and so many people were trying to point to economic anxiety was the phrase they used.
And then so often when you parsed it more closely, it was racial anxiety. It was that 20-40, 20-50 window when the United States will no longer be majority white, which is already true in certain geographies, already true among the youngest generations. And the sense among some, we are losing our nation is the words they use. But maybe what’s really behind it is this is no longer a white man’s America. And so how prescient he was, all the way back in the 90s to say, “If we don’t deal with this now and effectively with the church leading the way, then it’s all going to come to a head and sooner than we think.”
Mark Labberton:
You know, Jemar, I so agree with you. And I’m moved really by the connection in the book and through what you’ve just said about the relationship between the spirit of justice as you’ve described it in the book, but also the Holy Spirit of justice, which is really behind the spirit of justice in God’s own being.
I wonder if you could talk about the explicitly Christian connections between what you found in this research and the writing of this book and the manifestation of these individuals who manifested what we’re calling the spirit of justice, which I would say was really a manifestation of the work of the Holy Spirit. So talk to us about that.
Jemar Tisby:
I’m getting so Pentecostal in these days.
Mark Labberton:
Go for it. Amen, brother.
Jemar Tisby:
So I do say in the introduction of the book that for people of faith, we can think of the spirit of justice as the Holy Spirit of justice. I’ve been preaching a sermon called The Spirit of Justice, which begins with Psalm 11 verse 7 which says, “God is a God of righteousness. God loves justice.”
And when I think about what exactly the spirit of justice is, I think it’s the fingerprint of God on every human being made in God’s image that says, I’m worthy of dignity, respect, and the freedom to flourish. And when that is taken away from me because of oppression and injustice, I have this spirit within me to resist. And more than a spirit within me to resist, to defy, I have a spirit in me that equips me through spiritual gifts for the common good is what it says in first Corinthians. Now to each one is given the manifestation of the spirit for the common good. What is the common good? It’s social justice in a way, right? It’s the uplift of our neighbours.
And we actually are gifted by the spirit for that work uniquely equipped, which means A, None of us can sit this out. And B, what we do doesn’t have to look exactly like what anyone else does. So we don’t have to feel like we need to sit on the sideline and watch the “real activists.” We all can be part of the common good. And moreover, the spirit of justice gives us that resilience, that strength to become determined all over again.
This is not a power that we find within ourselves to get back up again every time the backlash pushes us back. It is the supernatural power, the same power that raised Jesus from the dead, that also empowers us for the work of justice. So absolutely, it is the Holy Spirit of justice in the work of people who follow Jesus.
Mark Labberton:
It’s so inspiring to me to read what you’ve been writing Jemar and to hear you speak again today and to just be so encouraged that God is raising all of us up to do our own peace in this work of justice as specifically ambassadors of the gospel of peace and of the God of peace and of justice. And also, I just want to say that the kind of voice that you’re expressing, which we’ve talked about on other occasions, has certainly garnered its own opposition and all kinds of pushback that’s come typically from white institutions, white institutional leadership in various ways, but for me is the source of great inspiration and encouragement because it allows me to have probably a clearer sense of how a person with my background, my ethnicity, my role, my place in kingdom work and in the body of Christ can actually make a difference.
Because I can see it so differently by the way that you’ve helped me to see and understand both the Black experience, which is obviously multiple, not singular, but the whole variety of Black experiences and the ongoing contemporary urgency of responding. So again, thank you so much for being on Conversing. Thank you. May God continue to bless your work. May this book The Spirit of Justice, be one that is like The Color of Compromise, be a book that gets a great reading and continues to stoke the spirit that you write about. Thank you so much, very much for being here today.
Jemar Tisby:
And just a very quick word, there is an all-ages component to The Spirit of Justice. I am publishing my first picture book.
Mark Labberton:
Oh, nice.
Jemar Tisby:
Called I Am The Spirit of Justice.
Mark Labberton:
Oh, great.
Jemar Tisby:
Good for Kids four to eight, and that’s coming out January 7th, along with a young reader’s edition-
Mark Labberton:
Fantastic.
Jemar Tisby:
… called Stories of the Spirit of Justice, good for Kids eight and Up, so that you can look forward to in January. It’s available for pre-order now. Kids, adults can all go through it.
Mark Labberton:
Fantastic. We’ll put it in the show notes so people can be sure to have that information.
Jemar Tisby:
Thanks again.
Mark Labberton:
Jemar, God bless you.
