A Veneer of Imago Dei: Sermon Response To Racial Reconciliation

Written by Chrissy Hamilton. Republished June 2020.

It seems to me that whenever we encounter people, we place a veneer over them of our own assumptions, a veneer of expectation we have of them that is built by our own experiences. They don't have control of it at all; it's what we bring to the meeting and put on them. It gives us a kind of framework from which to begin to engage with them. It's perfectly natural, and often misleading.

I was raised in a military family, in a lot of different places around a lot of different people. The military tended toward a level playing field, in race and class and religion. And it fostered exposure to all kinds of people, foreign and domestic. A base was a bubble of that wherever it was, from Colorado Springs, Colorado, to Montgomery, Alabama. When Pastor Jim described his experience in sports growing up, where he didn't experience race and class lines, I understood that. At the USAFA in the mid-1970's, my mother, a Southern Baptist from south Georgia, had a group of bridge-playing friends that included an African American woman, a Jewish woman from up North and a Catholic. There was a world, in my experience, where racial differences meant…just different, plain and simple. And maybe neighbors with weird food to try.

In light of that, when I was in college, I remember one experience that bewildered me. I was a resident assistant in an upperclassman dorm at the University of Alabama. Of course, there was one suite of women at the end of my hall that always played loud music. I'd get a complaint, and I would go ask them to turn the volume down. I remember intentionally stopping to say hello sometimes, randomly, so that they didn't feel like I was always harping on them about the music. That was awkward, but such is life as an RA.

At the end of the year, when my boss went over my residents' reviews of me, that suite of women, all African-American, had reported that I was racist toward them. I was stunned. I couldn't believe it. I did not know what I had done to make them feel that way.

Suddenly, I felt like I didn't know how to act around African-Americans, something that I had never really thought about before. My first roommate at school there had been African-American, and we were good friends. I felt like a veneer had been laid on me that I had no control over. My actions had been interpreted through someone else's expectation of me, based on what? I didn't and still don't know. But I do know that it made me very aware of any veneer of expectation I might lay on people.

When Pastor Jim pointed out (Genesis 1:27) that every last man and woman on earth is first and foremost created imago Dei, in God's image, it hit me that that is the only veneer Christ would expect from His people to lay on anyone we meet. If we do that, we are best equipped to erase any assumptions and expectations we might have that were built in sin or fear.

We can't always control the imperfections we bring along to any interaction with others. But we can choose to lay God's sight over our own. We can ask Christ to help us see others through His eyes first, in wisdom and truth, before we act. And we can choose to then walk in the confidence of knowing where we came from and where we are going (John 8:14), in the hands of a loving Father who is utterly in control no matter what. If we align our expectations there first, well, how can it go wrong?