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Good morning.

Over the weekend Beyoncé received the humanitarian prize at the Bet Awards and in her acceptance speech, delivered a blunt message to the black community in the US – ‘We have to vote like our life depends on it, because it does.’

She wasn’t speaking only about the Covid-19 pandemic, but what she said certainly applies to that. We have just passed yet another gloomy milestone, with global deaths from the virus passing 500,000. But these deaths have not been randomly distributed, neither in the US nor in the UK – as the Health Secretary has said, people from ethnic minority backgrounds are suffering and dying ‘disproportionately’ in the current crisis.

I’m sure that Beyoncé is right that black voters in America should use their votes to try to ensure that their lives matter. But in the end, recognition of the worth of human life cannot securely depend on the size and power of a voting bloc, any more than it can or should depend on, let’s say, financial muscle. That recognition needs to rest on a more fundamental and shared perception – of the equal claims of all to justice, dignity and fair treatment.

For Christians that claim is embodied in certain stories from the Bible, and perhaps most clearly in a story from the book of Acts. A heavenly messenger bids a certain Philip to head south from Jerusalem into the desert towards Gaza – when he gets there he finds an Ethiopian eunuch riding in a chariot, devoutly studying the scriptures. Philip joins him in the chariot, interprets the passage he has been reading, tells him the story of Jesus, and, at the Ethiopian’s request, they pull over by a rather handy pool and Philip promptly baptizes him.

The Ethiopian eunuch is arguably the first gentile convert recorded in the New Testament – and doubtless in the past the story has been put to use to justify the sort of aggressive missionary endeavours which were sometimes little more than covers for colonialism. But that is to ignore the real meaning of the story in its context. An Ethiopian, hailing from a land on the very edge of the map as far as the ancient world was concerned, was the most outside outsider you could find. His baptism dramatically symbolized the church’s radical openness to all.

And yet, shaming though it is to say it, the Church has never been very good at living up to the universal vision of this story and at overcoming the evil myths of race. Martin Luther King used to say that 11 o’clock on a Sunday morning was the most segregated hour of the whole week in America – and 60 years later, in both the US and the UK, you could probably say something similar.

So - I hope Beyoncé’s message reaches those to whom it is directed; but I also hope that it touches all of us. For ensuring that black lives matter shouldn’t have to depend on getting the minority vote out; it ought to be able rely on the majority, passionately and not before time, wanting to do the right thing.

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