At the start of the week, I was feeling a little sorry for myself. Can we just have one national crisis at a time, please? That’s what I was thinking.
My better angels caught up with me quickly, as they always do. I think my angels follow the motto of the legendary Tennessee sheriff Buford Pusser. They walk softly but carry a big stick. I may have only been facing one crisis, but Americans of color were up to their necks in crisis long before the Covid-19 pandemic was a thing, and even that disease could not slow down the murder of African-Americans, in the street and in their beds. It could not stop the constant harassment by white citizens who feel they have a right to stop and challenge any person of color anywhere, demanding to know why they are where they are, something they would rarely if ever do to another white American, something increasingly caught on camera..
So it is just as well that Martin Luther advised preachers to stay silent on Trinity Sunday, for I cannot preach on the Mysterious Trinity this Sunday. In fact, to do so would be a dereliction of duty, for the gospel is not the gospel of some distant age, nor is it detached from our lives. The gospel is life. It is the gospel of now, and now demands our attention.
So here, a week after Pentecost, Easter long in the rearview mirror, we go back to Golgotha. Crucifixion was a brutal death. You didn’t die from the nails or the ropes or the convenient spear in the side of the Good Friday story. You died of asphyxiation. Jesus may well have said from the Cross “I can’t breathe.” And the legends say his mother was there, so he may well have called “Mama.”
And there is George Floyd being murdered before our very eyes, and the only reason we are talking about it is because a brave teenager kept the camera rolling after the police scared away another bystander with a camera.
He says he can’t breathe. He calls for his mama.
We want to look away. We want them to stop showing it. But we must look, for it was done in our name, and if we are going to oppose the slaughter of reckless militarism on foreign shores, surely we must oppose the daily slaughter on our own.
Like so many Americans, George Floyd lost his job to the pandemic. He had survived Covid-19, a miracle really as he had co-morbidities, and the death toll has been staggering for people of color. He may have been drunk that night. He may have tried to buy cigarettes with a fake bill. Don’t know. Doesn’t matter.
If you call the police on an African-American, you are rolling the dice, for they may well end up dead, even if they are docile and follow orders. Heck, they may end up dead running to the store to get a loaf of bread or jogging down the street. It is remarkable how every single African-American male looks like a suspect in a nearby robbery.
Every. Single. One.
People of color are not even safe in their own homes. They get shot there too. All the time. They get threatened with police violence while bird watching in Central Park for having the audacity to ask a liberal white woman to follow the park rules and leash her dog.
And here comes the Greek chorus, hidden behind their masks: “All lives matter.”
No one said only black lives matter. But your teenage son, grandson, is not likely to be gunned down in the street because they look suspicious. And if that did happen, you could be sure that the murderer would be prosecuted and convicted. But if that boy’s skin was brown, it would be a different story.
All lives matter? “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’”
That’s gospel.
So my better angels were not having my self-pity.
Here is what I can do, what I am called to do, what I vowed to do when I was ordained as a Minister of Word and Sacrament in the United Church of Christ, that heritage of radical welcome, continuing testament, of a church engaged in the real world, not just engaged in some imagined other world. I am going to do what I said I was going to do. I am going to speak truth.
Law and order is not law and order if those we entrust with it are lawless and disorderly. It is not law and order if it is only so for white people. It does not matter if some of the officers are minorities. It does not matter if most of the officers are good. If the entire system views people of color and people in distressed neighborhoods as the enemy, sees itself as an occupying army maintaining peace through violence, then it does not matter what color an individual officer is. A good cop who protects a bad cop is a bad cop.
If you vote for that sort of law and order, you killed George Floyd. Your vote matters, for attorney general, for district attorney, for municipal office.
My father was a public servant and a union man, but I believe many police unions are corrupt rackets and must be abolished. And oh how it galls me to say that.
If you vote for your 401k and ignore the racist views of a candidate, you are placing a dollar value on the lives of others. God help you if they ever get to put a dollar value on yours. God sees their lives as priceless, and calls on us to do the same.
If you only think free speech is free speech when you like what is being said, if you value a piece of cloth with stars and stripes more than you value the life of your sister and brother, well, you must be white, and not afraid. How can you love God who you cannot see when you fail to love the brother you can see?
We don’t like being angry. We are tired. And the news reports are usually manageable because there was no one there with a camera mostly, not in Breonna Taylor’s bedroom, so we don’t have to see it, and besides, that man had just been in that construction site, and Lord only knows what he was doing, which is our first thought because of the color of his skin. No one would have ever said that if Ahmaud Arbery had been white. Well they must have had a reason. If Floyd hadn’t resisted. Well guess what, he didn’t resist.
It is not enough to not be a racist in this time. There are lost sheep. There is a brother in the ditch. The Good Samaritan is not good because he didn’t commit the assault. He is good because he sacrificed his time, his gold, and his dignity to go and save the stranger.
The gospel is clear.
So I am challenging you to do the hard work of anti-racism, even if you don’t see the difference it is going to make in your life, even if you see these problems as distant from your day-to-day experience. I am asking you to open your eyes and open your hearts to the connection between exploitative economics and food deserts and environmental destruction and toxins in poor neighborhoods and risk factors for Covid and the gassing of peaceful protesters. I am asking you to read one of the excellent books that has come out in recent years about white privilege, to take a class. I am asking you to find and embrace multi-cultural images of our faith story, for Jesus looked more like an Iraqi than a Norwegian, and the Christ is bigger than one race, one tribe.
Remember, even after my years of education and hard work on these issues, I fell right back into the trap of privilege at the start of this week. One crisis at a time please. Who said there wasn’t already a crisis? Police brutality did not take time off for the pandemic. Neither did addiction or domestic violence.
We cannot remain a Sunday morning church of good polite people. That sort of church has no future, and quite frankly, it shouldn’t. The Southern Baptists reported this week that they lost more than a quarter million members last year. Churches in general have become irrelevant, important in the life of those who belong, but meaningless to those outside. All too often, the church is seen in our culture as backward and hateful. And funny enough, the unchurched young people look far more like gospel that those inside on a Sunday morning.
We are a soul sick nation, a soul sick faith, and the treatment is not going to be fun. We must be a church deeply engaged in the world crying out for justice, for we claim to follow a man who was deeply engaged in his world, a man who was harassed and threatened, and finally killed by the law enforcement of that place and time. “I can’t breathe.”
And the master said, “When I was incarcerated for weeks on a minor charge because I could not make bail, you did not visit me. When I was gassed because they did not like what I was saying, you did not come to my aid. When I was murdered because of the color of my skin, you still voted for so-called law and order.
And they said “When were you incarcerated, Master? When were you gassed? How were you murdered in the street?”
And the Master said “Whatever you have done to the least of these, you have done also unto me.”
Or, to quote from Ilya Kaminsky’s 2018 narrative poem “Deaf Republic,”
At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this?
And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?
We come to the table. It is not all happy clappy. It isn’t shot glasses of Jesus and Wonder Bread. Have you forgotten the story?
This is my body, broken…
This is my blood, shed…
May God, Creator, Christ, and Comforter, Trinity of Love, be with us in this time, at my table and at yours, in the streets and in the voting booth. Amen.