The victims were burned, electrocuted, and sexually assaulted. They were part of an ethnic minority, and many confessed under the torture. Some were sentenced to death.
This did not occur in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, not in Idi Amin’s Uganda, not in Myanmar or China. The victims were not Palestinians in yet another apartheid interrogation. This occurred primarily in the Area 2 Precinct Building on the South Side of Chicago, though it was not limited to this single precinct. And while one villain, John Burge, played an organizing role, he was not alone in believing that brutal violence was required to control black Chicago. These acts, globally understood as crimes against humanity, went on until 1991.
Let me say that again. African-American men were routinely tortured for almost twenty years by commanders and officers of the Chicago Police Department in what was referred to by insiders as the “Vietnamese Treatment.” Some of the living victims are younger than me. How can anyone wonder that many of the residents of the city’s mostly black South Side look on the department as violent and abusive?
Illinois has a five year statute of limitations on police brutality cases, but there have been many civil suits, documents and depositions, and in 2011, Bruge was sentenced not for his violent crimes, but for criminal perjury and obstruction of justice. He has since died. In 2015, after decades of pressure, the Chicago City Council created a reparations bill. It established a victim fund, promised to pay for counseling services, to teach this history in the public schools, and to support a monument to the victims. While action on these measures has been at best half-hearted, as Peter Baker reports in the current issue of the New York Review of Books, the bill also stated clearly, courageously, that the torture was immoral whether or not the victims were “’good’ or ‘bad,’ ‘criminal’ or ‘innocent.’”
This history has re-surfaced not only because of our current national awareness of police violence against people of color, the warrior cop approach, and the over-extension of the police state into elementary schools, mental health, and hotel swimming pools, but also because of the fortuitous timing of Laurence Ralph’s new book, “The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence,” part story, part confessional, composed as open letters, some to specific people, some to strangers, all connected to this terrible history.
Now, I do not tell you this to further hammer at the topic of anti-racism and our call to action as Christians charged to “do justice.” Our hearts have been broken by the deaths of an out of work Covid-survivor, George Floyd, a first-responder, Breonna Taylor, and a quirky but gentle young adult, Elijah McClain. We have been outraged by police sick-outs in Atlanta, by the use of an unidentified para-military against peaceful protesters in the streets of our nation’s capitol. There is always an excuse for the violence. There is never a reason. And we’ve been engaged, educating ourselves, witnessing to the wider community.
No, I am telling you this because our reading this week is about truth telling confession. It is a bit circular, a bit convoluted, the reason I encouraged Jeanne to read it so slowly. But in the end, Paul, who so powerfully argues for his interpretation of the Christ event that he turns a Hebrew reform into a worldwide religion, tells these Jesus-following communities he hopes to visit in Rome that he too is a sinner saved by God’s grace. While some Queer theologians argue that Paul was gay, we actually have no clues as to the nature of his supposed sin, not that being gay is a sin, but Paul would have understood it that way in his context.
Many of us do not like the word sin, a cudgel used against non-conformists and the powerless for far too long. It is true that the powerful and the self-righteous have misused the concept of sin, but surrendering the importance of sin and grace in our understanding of the Hebrew story, the Jesus story, is to allow them to still have power over us and power over the good news of Jesus as interpreted by this sinner, Saul in the Hebrew, Paul in the Greek. I’m simply not willing to give up this core understanding of failure and aspiration without a fight, for God is bigger than the toxic theology of the powerful, as is Jesus, whether you see him as a rabbi trying to reform the Hebrew religion or as a cosmic Christ.
We humans make mistakes. We fall and get stung and trust people we shouldn’t and add too much salt to the recipe. This is how we learn. We build, on what we have been taught and what we have discovered. Add to this fear, fight, and flight, the tug-of-war between the transcendent spirit and the sometimes fearful animal. We are perfectly imperfect, tightly wound firecrackers of potential, God-touched and vulnerable. And we are sinners, for we know that we have turned away at times from the creative and selfless love that is our call as creatures made by a mysterious holy. We are echoes of that holy mystery, sometimes distorted and fading, sometimes at our best, becoming.
We do not need a “satan,” an adversary. We do not need a Tree of Knowledge and a punitive god. Those myths served a purpose, still serve as cultural tropes, but we know love when we see it, exuberance of Spirit, connection. And we know when fear becomes greed and violence. We are wired to align ourselves with the work of holy creative love in the world, and it takes a whole lot of work to twist us against our own nature into the sick and perverted creatures that pepper spray children, shove elderly protesters to the ground, scream “white power” from a golf cart, or refuse to wear a mask. It ain’t natural, this hatred, this perversion of what we have been made to be.
To confess our sin is the start of our journey back to the holy and back to right relations with one another and with creation. That does not necessarily mean the sort of in-the-box confession and man-mediated forgiveness found in some traditions, though that works for many. It does not have to mean an altar call and a public admission that you are a sinner while the congregation sings “Just As I Am,” though there is something to be said for publicly admitting our brokenness. In fact there is a lot to be said for confessing our brokenness, our utter dependence on the love of that mystery we name as God and on the power of the people of God to forgive, to love, to grow.
In the Christian tradition, we call the reset button offered by the divine, the holy forgiveness offered to us, grace. We say it is unearned. Our Calvinist forebears would say it was irresistible, though they might have gone way too far down a scholastic rabbit-hole on that one, for we have all known people who were capable of resisting both divine and human forgiveness, love, and reconciliation, and I can assure you that there are still many who cling with white-knuckled fear to every bit of guilt they feel, resisting the full love that God offers, unable to reconcile with themselves, with us, with the holy.
Theologians of an earlier age, including the Christian Martyr St. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, trapped in an economic understanding of God that required repayment of lost honor, of blood and atonement, would refer to this as costly grace, the price being the brown-skinned man tortured and suffocated by the law enforcement of his time and place on a hill called Golgotha. In contrast, Bonhoeffer would say this about cheap grace:
“Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession…Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
It was not his only passage on costly grace and cheap grace, and while I do not believe in atonement theology, I think there is something to be said in the holy man’s understanding of cost, though it is a cost imposed by our fearfully and wonderfully made bodies and by the social and spiritual lives we have built for ourselves. In fact, the idea of cost and effort, of the reality of how creation works, can also be found in the Seven Social Sins, often misattributed to Gandhi but actually conceived by the Christian Socialist the Rev. Canon Frederick Lewis Donaldson in a 1925 sermon at Westminster Abbey. The Seven Social Sins are:
- Wealth without work.
- Pleasure without conscience.
- Knowledge without character.
- Commerce without morality.
- Science without humanity.
- Religion without sacrifice.
- Politics without principle.
Far more useful than the deadly sins of the Medieval church, for they are constructed to contain their own reflection. If wealth without work is a sin, then wealth as a result of work is not necessarily sinful.
Forgiveness requires repentance and confession of some sort, not because God’s honor requires it as part of some transaction in the economics of honor, but because our wetware, our brains and spirits, require it, because growth only happens when something breaks to make room. It is the cost, just as putting aside that piece of cake and walking that extra mile is the cost of that slim waistline.
Truth-telling confession may not work as well in a litigious culture where everyone is lawyered-up, in a culture that has forgotten the importance of community, worshipping instead at the altar of self, but it is essential for our salvation, collectively and individually. And we are at a moment for collective truth-telling confession, at a moment when we are in a crisis on a biblical scale and need salvation on a biblical scale. The prophets of scripture were made for exactly this sort of moment.
I know. It was not easy to see past the stories I was taught as a child, the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, the Pioneer Spirit following a Manifest Destiny into a mostly empty territory, Horatio Alger’s tales of scrappy young boys pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. It was not easy to confess that much of this nation’s territory and wealth, our national “kickstarter,” was stolen land and stolen labor. But in confessing that, in admitting that, I was able to become who I was meant to become, an agent of mysterious and creative love, called by God’s prophet to “do justice,” which means for me to be an anti-racist. The United Church of Christ has done this hard work as a denomination, truth-telling confession and contrition with the native peoples of Hawaii, and with the native peoples of the Americas when we voted to reject the “doctrine of discovery,” the myth that the continent was unclaimed land, sparsely populated by the uncivilized, free for the taking.
Australia practiced an imperfect but well intentioned truth-telling confession when they formally rejected the doctrine of “terra nullius,” like the “doctrine of discovery,” the notion that Australia was “nobody’s land.” A group of Traditionalist Christian leaders made news in recent years when they confessed all the ways their misguided beliefs and actions harmed members of the LGBTQ+ community, the ways they had failed to love their neighbor.
I am not suggesting that we spend all of our time in some politically correct spiral of never-ending grievance, trying to correct every wrong in history. All too often, progressives end up in a circular firing squad, finding fault until there is no one left to work for the good. But there is nothing inherently wrong with being politically correct, being progressive, if that means striving to better answer the call to do justice, to love kindness, to walk humbly.
While the elected officials on the Chicago City Council did a historic and courageous thing in reparations, that was not an action of the Chicago Police Department. Truth-telling confession, so needed for reconciliation, has not happened. We may soon enter a period where truth-telling confession is needed as a nation, confession that the rule of law has been perverted, that cruelty and racism has been celebrated, that tens of thousands are dead that need not be dead, that crimes against humanity have happened on our watch. But it is necessary that we confess if we are to grow, if we are to become who we might yet become.
So on this Fourth of July weekend, I pray that God will bless America, not for what it has been, not for the promises unfulfilled for so many, but for what we might become. I am a sinner saved by grace, and my truth is this: I believe in what we might become, and to quote from one of our great leaders, I will give my all, “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Amen.