Instead of a sermon on Sept. 11, 2016, we saw a brief clip of the film Divided We Fall and did an interactive dialogue exercise called "Crossing the Line." Below is the letter Mother Tracy sent out to the congregation before that Sunday:
What do you do when the 15th anniversary of 9/11 falls on a Sunday?
This is the question pastors all over the country have been asking this week. Do you acknowledge it in the sermon, in the prayers? Do you pray for first responders and have a special blessing for them? Do you just go on with life as usual, not wanting to draw too much attention to what may be too traumatic to remember for many? Has enough time passed that we don't "need" to acknowledge it anymore?
Since the events of 9/11 and its aftermath profoundly changed my life and influenced the way I do ministry, and since this anniversary falls on a Sunday and is a significant number (15 years), and since the lessons for this Sunday seem in some way related to the themes of 9/11, I've decided to observe the anniversary in this way:
This Sunday, at the sermon time, we'll have an opportunity to share with each other about our own 9/11 experiences. Instead of a sermon, I'll show the opening 3 minutes of the film "Divided We Fall: Americans in the Aftermath" (www.dividedwefallfilm.com), the documentary film on hate crimes after 9/11 that I've mentioned to you before, that I worked for as communications director. After that clip, I'll lead the congregation in a participatory dialogue exercise designed to illustrate our shared experience of 9/11 and also the ways in which our experiences of that event highlight our differences.
Because time won't permit during the service, the debrief and discussion of this exercise will take place after the service in the parish hall. As we make sandwiches for the outdoor church for the homeless in Hayward (as we do every second Sunday of the month), we'll share reflections about how the dialogue exercise during the service and our own experiences with 9/11 relate to our scripture passages for this Sunday, which have a theme of sin and repentance.
I hope you'll join us, and bring friends: the more diverse the crowd we do this exercise with, the better.
To prepare for Sunday, if you'd like, you can actually watch the entire film online (1.5 hours) -- the filmmakers have partnered with the Sikh Coalition, a civil rights group, to make the film available to the public online for FREE from now until Election Day, to showcase one way in which love can overcome fear and hatred.
Watch the film here:
http://dividedwefallfilm.com/
You can also read the scripture passages ahead of time, here:
http://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Pentecost/CProp19_RCL.html
These passages call us to think about our own sinfulness and God's great mercy. They call us to remember that "Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners," that Jesus "welcomed sinners and ate with them," that "all are corrupt and commit abominable acts." How do you hear these passages with the memory of 9/11 in the forefront of your mind? How do you hear them in light of our current context, fifteen years later?
Some may ask, why even commemorate the "anniversary" of a horrific event, anyway? Shouldn't we focus on remembering positive things?
Certainly, an "anniversary" is often something we celebrate, but not always. Consider the ways in which you mark the months or years after the death of a loved one or another traumatic event in your life. Yes, sometimes it can be best not to dwell on it, but sometimes the healthiest thing to do is to dig into it and process the remaining grief and find a way to hold on to the relentless hope and optimism that is at the core of our faith. To find a way to look at the darkness and say, in the words of the Gospel of John, "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."
On this 15th anniversary of 9/11, we'll both see the darkness and affirm the strength of the light. Join us in worship this Sunday, at 10 a.m.
Many blessings,
Mother Tracy+
Showing posts with label violence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label violence. Show all posts
Sunday, September 11, 2016
Sunday, August 14, 2016
What kind of "peace" does Jesus come to bring?
Sermon delivered Sunday, August 14, 2016 (The Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 15, Year C (Track 2)) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
“Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” (Luke 12:51)
Jesus’s words in today’s Gospel passage stand in stark contrast to the understanding many of us in the mainline churches have of the teachings of Jesus. Jesus is the “Prince of Peace,” Jesus “loves the little children,” Jesus’s message was to “love God and love neighbor,” and that’s about it, right? We often talk about our faith as if we think “be nice to each other” pretty much sums up the Gospel.
But that’s not quite all of it. Jesus didn’t just say “be nice to each other.” He also said to free the oppressed and heal the sick and release the prisoners. He called us to fight against injustice, to stand in solidarity with the marginalized, to question any institutional structures whose rules about right and wrong ignore and even perpetuate human suffering. And as most of you know from experience, when you start standing up against injustice and raising up the voices of the marginalized, the reactions from others are often less than peaceful.
“I have not come to bring peace, but division,” Jesus says. Yes, he does call us to love God and love neighbor, but he wants us to understand that “loving God and loving neighbor” doesn’t mean always being nice, or never getting into conflict with anyone, or “keeping the peace” at all costs. Loving God and loving neighbor can be a revolutionary act – an act that compels us to see one other’s wounds rather than hide them.
Jesus’s words here echo other scripture passages from the Hebrew Bible that admonish false prophets for assuring the people that everything was ok when it wasn’t. He would have known these words of the prophet Jeremiah well:
“They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.” (Jeremiah 6:14)
Or, as Taylor Swift puts it in her song “Bad Blood,” “Band-aids don’t fix bullet holes.”
Unfortunately that’s too often how we, in society at large and in the church, attempt to solve problems. We offer solutions that do not take into account the seriousness of the problem. We attempt to “dress the wound as though it were not serious.” We become like the false prophets Ezekiel spoke about, who cover a flimsy wall with whitewash to make look good what is really weak and rotting (Ezekiel 13:11). That’s the kind of “peace” Jesus is talking about when he says “I come not to bring peace” – he doesn’t come to bring the kind of peace that shoves conflict under the rug rather than resolving it, or worse, that denies there’s even a problem at all.
“I’m sure there’s a legitimate reason the cop pulled you over.”
“Just cheer up and snap out of it; you’re not REALLY sick.”
“I’m sure your boss didn’t REALLY mean that as a threat.”
You’re blowing things out of proportion, you’re being too sensitive.
Just put a band-aid on it.
Everything will be all right.
But everything is NOT all right, and as followers of Jesus Christ, we are called to say so, even if doing so causes conflict or division with those closest to us.
How many social issues in our society would cause arguments if you were to bring them up with your family members? When Jesus says, “I have come not to bring peace but division. From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three,” he didn’t mean that his GOAL was to divide people, to create familial discord, but that whenever the word of God breaks through into human society, it almost always causes conflict because of humanity’s tendency to avoid pain. We’d rather bury our heads in the sand and say “everything will be all right” than to acknowledge that there is something seriously wrong with us or with our society. So the voices that don’t deny the wounds, that shine spotlights on things others would rather stay hidden – they often wind up causing division within their communities, and especially within their own families.
This is playing out right now in American society with Black Lives Matter. One could certainly say that the Black Lives Matter movement has caused division in this country. But the folks affiliated with Black Lives Matter would probably say they haven’t caused division, they are simply pointing out divisions that have existed for a long time. Despite the achievements of the Civil Rights movement, we still have much further to go. When Barack Obama was elected President, it was easy for some people to assume we had “arrived,” that we had reached a point where racism was no longer an issue in this country. And it is easy for those of us who have never lived in this society with brown or black skin to say “peace, peace” on this issue, when in reality there is no peace. For those of us in that position of privilege, our role is to listen. To listen to the voices we have not heard, to bear witness to experiences that we have not had, and acknowledge that they are real even if we haven’t personally experienced them ourselves. We must not turn away from pain, but face it head on, as Jesus and the prophets did.
The apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans that “all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death” (Romans 6:3). Our baptism connects us not just to the washing with water that Jesus got from John in the Jordan River, but to the “terrible baptism of suffering” that he experienced on the cross, the “baptism” he refers to in today’s Gospel that causes him great distress. We should have issued little Benjamin a hard hat along with his baptismal candle a few weeks ago, because while baptism is empowering, it is also dangerous. It means that we are forever connected to God and our sins are forgiven, but it also means we are also forever connected to Christ’s suffering and death.
Many people have criticized Christian theology that emphasizes our call to suffering, that insists that suffering can be redemptive, that we can be saved through suffering, that Jesus saves us through suffering. They don’t want to acknowledge that anything could be positive about suffering because of the ways that idea can be abused by people in power to justify injustice, to keep the oppressed oppressed. “Oh, you guys are called to suffer, it’s ok, just wait and stick it out; your reward will be great in heaven,” the church has said to black people in slavery, to women in abusive relationships, to workers exploited by corporations.
But that’s not the message of the Gospel! That’s the message of the false prophets who say “peace” when there is no peace! The call to suffering is not a call to inflict suffering on others, it’s a call to experience the suffering of others – to “weep with those who weep and to mourn with those who mourn.”
Charles Péguy, a French poet and philosopher, imagines that when we die, the recording angel at the entrance to heaven will say to us, “Show me your wounds.”
A life in Christ calls us to a life of suffering. If we have no wounds to show at the end of our days, we haven’t truly lived the Christian life. We’ve followed the false prophets who say “peace, peace” when there is no peace. We’ve turned a blind eye to the world’s injustices and benefitted from our complicity in them.
In the midst of the national anxiety around the police shootings last month, there was a meme circulating on Facebook that said,
“Things are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered. We must hold each other close and continue to pull back the veil.”
Testifying to the truth might create division, but it is what we are called to do. Pulling back that veil so we can truly see the wounds that divide our society might make things seem like they are getting worse, but in another one of Jesus’s less popular sayings, he refers to this kind of conflict as the “beginning of the birth pangs,” of the necessary pain we must go through to come out on the other side with new life and a true peace, a peace that has its roots in reconciliation rather than denial, a peace that comes from healing the bullet hole rather than putting a band-aid over it.
That’s what “loving God and loving neighbor” looks like. Jesus calls us to a revolutionary love, a love that involves suffering. The suffering inherent in the Christian way leads us to a peace greater than any that would deny the existence of the wounds. And that’s the kind of peace Jesus is the prince of.
“Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” (Luke 12:51)
Jesus’s words in today’s Gospel passage stand in stark contrast to the understanding many of us in the mainline churches have of the teachings of Jesus. Jesus is the “Prince of Peace,” Jesus “loves the little children,” Jesus’s message was to “love God and love neighbor,” and that’s about it, right? We often talk about our faith as if we think “be nice to each other” pretty much sums up the Gospel.
But that’s not quite all of it. Jesus didn’t just say “be nice to each other.” He also said to free the oppressed and heal the sick and release the prisoners. He called us to fight against injustice, to stand in solidarity with the marginalized, to question any institutional structures whose rules about right and wrong ignore and even perpetuate human suffering. And as most of you know from experience, when you start standing up against injustice and raising up the voices of the marginalized, the reactions from others are often less than peaceful.
“I have not come to bring peace, but division,” Jesus says. Yes, he does call us to love God and love neighbor, but he wants us to understand that “loving God and loving neighbor” doesn’t mean always being nice, or never getting into conflict with anyone, or “keeping the peace” at all costs. Loving God and loving neighbor can be a revolutionary act – an act that compels us to see one other’s wounds rather than hide them.
Jesus’s words here echo other scripture passages from the Hebrew Bible that admonish false prophets for assuring the people that everything was ok when it wasn’t. He would have known these words of the prophet Jeremiah well:
“They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.” (Jeremiah 6:14)
Or, as Taylor Swift puts it in her song “Bad Blood,” “Band-aids don’t fix bullet holes.”
Unfortunately that’s too often how we, in society at large and in the church, attempt to solve problems. We offer solutions that do not take into account the seriousness of the problem. We attempt to “dress the wound as though it were not serious.” We become like the false prophets Ezekiel spoke about, who cover a flimsy wall with whitewash to make look good what is really weak and rotting (Ezekiel 13:11). That’s the kind of “peace” Jesus is talking about when he says “I come not to bring peace” – he doesn’t come to bring the kind of peace that shoves conflict under the rug rather than resolving it, or worse, that denies there’s even a problem at all.
“I’m sure there’s a legitimate reason the cop pulled you over.”
“Just cheer up and snap out of it; you’re not REALLY sick.”
“I’m sure your boss didn’t REALLY mean that as a threat.”
You’re blowing things out of proportion, you’re being too sensitive.
Just put a band-aid on it.
Everything will be all right.
But everything is NOT all right, and as followers of Jesus Christ, we are called to say so, even if doing so causes conflict or division with those closest to us.
How many social issues in our society would cause arguments if you were to bring them up with your family members? When Jesus says, “I have come not to bring peace but division. From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three,” he didn’t mean that his GOAL was to divide people, to create familial discord, but that whenever the word of God breaks through into human society, it almost always causes conflict because of humanity’s tendency to avoid pain. We’d rather bury our heads in the sand and say “everything will be all right” than to acknowledge that there is something seriously wrong with us or with our society. So the voices that don’t deny the wounds, that shine spotlights on things others would rather stay hidden – they often wind up causing division within their communities, and especially within their own families.
This is playing out right now in American society with Black Lives Matter. One could certainly say that the Black Lives Matter movement has caused division in this country. But the folks affiliated with Black Lives Matter would probably say they haven’t caused division, they are simply pointing out divisions that have existed for a long time. Despite the achievements of the Civil Rights movement, we still have much further to go. When Barack Obama was elected President, it was easy for some people to assume we had “arrived,” that we had reached a point where racism was no longer an issue in this country. And it is easy for those of us who have never lived in this society with brown or black skin to say “peace, peace” on this issue, when in reality there is no peace. For those of us in that position of privilege, our role is to listen. To listen to the voices we have not heard, to bear witness to experiences that we have not had, and acknowledge that they are real even if we haven’t personally experienced them ourselves. We must not turn away from pain, but face it head on, as Jesus and the prophets did.
The apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans that “all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death” (Romans 6:3). Our baptism connects us not just to the washing with water that Jesus got from John in the Jordan River, but to the “terrible baptism of suffering” that he experienced on the cross, the “baptism” he refers to in today’s Gospel that causes him great distress. We should have issued little Benjamin a hard hat along with his baptismal candle a few weeks ago, because while baptism is empowering, it is also dangerous. It means that we are forever connected to God and our sins are forgiven, but it also means we are also forever connected to Christ’s suffering and death.
Many people have criticized Christian theology that emphasizes our call to suffering, that insists that suffering can be redemptive, that we can be saved through suffering, that Jesus saves us through suffering. They don’t want to acknowledge that anything could be positive about suffering because of the ways that idea can be abused by people in power to justify injustice, to keep the oppressed oppressed. “Oh, you guys are called to suffer, it’s ok, just wait and stick it out; your reward will be great in heaven,” the church has said to black people in slavery, to women in abusive relationships, to workers exploited by corporations.
But that’s not the message of the Gospel! That’s the message of the false prophets who say “peace” when there is no peace! The call to suffering is not a call to inflict suffering on others, it’s a call to experience the suffering of others – to “weep with those who weep and to mourn with those who mourn.”
Charles Péguy, a French poet and philosopher, imagines that when we die, the recording angel at the entrance to heaven will say to us, “Show me your wounds.”
A life in Christ calls us to a life of suffering. If we have no wounds to show at the end of our days, we haven’t truly lived the Christian life. We’ve followed the false prophets who say “peace, peace” when there is no peace. We’ve turned a blind eye to the world’s injustices and benefitted from our complicity in them.
In the midst of the national anxiety around the police shootings last month, there was a meme circulating on Facebook that said,
“Things are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered. We must hold each other close and continue to pull back the veil.”
Testifying to the truth might create division, but it is what we are called to do. Pulling back that veil so we can truly see the wounds that divide our society might make things seem like they are getting worse, but in another one of Jesus’s less popular sayings, he refers to this kind of conflict as the “beginning of the birth pangs,” of the necessary pain we must go through to come out on the other side with new life and a true peace, a peace that has its roots in reconciliation rather than denial, a peace that comes from healing the bullet hole rather than putting a band-aid over it.
That’s what “loving God and loving neighbor” looks like. Jesus calls us to a revolutionary love, a love that involves suffering. The suffering inherent in the Christian way leads us to a peace greater than any that would deny the existence of the wounds. And that’s the kind of peace Jesus is the prince of.
Sunday, July 10, 2016
Who is the Samaritan? A call to see beyond the divides
Sermon delivered Sunday, July 10, 2016 (The Sixth Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 10, Year C (Track 2)) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
“Who is my neighbor?”
“Who is my neighbor?”
I know that I’m supposed to love God and love my neighbor, says the lawyer, but who is my neighbor? Who is it, exactly, who I’m supposed to love?
Have you ever noticed that Jesus doesn’t actually answer that question? In his clever way, Jesus is always doing that, somehow sidestepping the question people are asking to answer another question they’re not asking but should be. Giving them the answer they need rather than the answer they seek.
So when the lawyer asks, “Who is my neighbor,” Jesus sees that what is behind the lawyer’s question is, as the scripture tells us, a need to “justify himself.” The lawyer is actually more concerned about himself and his own personal salvation – what he needs to do to “inherit eternal life” – than he is with anyone else’s wellbeing. The very fact that he even asks, “who is my neighbor” shows that he has not quite gotten the point of the commandment.
But Jesus doesn’t answer him in a straightforward way. He doesn’t say, “Everyone is your neighbor. All lives matter. You must love everyone.”
Instead, he tells a story that gets right to the heart of the lawyer’s biases, of his need to divide the world into “us” and “them,” to figure out who’s in and who’s out, to determine who is “worthy” of our love and who is not.
He tells a story about someone who is in need, someone who has been hurt and has been left vulnerable, someone who has been a victim of violence. Interestingly, Jesus does not tell us anything about the person who was hurt, besides the fact that he was “a man.” He doesn’t tell us anything about the man’s ethnicity, religion, profession, political affiliation, or any other marker of identity. But he does tell us about some identity markers of the people who come across him on the road. The two who pass by the hurt man, who even cross over to the other side of the road to avoid coming into contact with him, were of the highly respected classes of Jewish society, the priests and Levites, the “good people,” the “righteous people,” the people who knew the answer to the lawyer’s question “what must I do to inherit eternal life” backwards and forwards, the ones who talked all day long about loving God with all your heart and soul and strength and mind, and loving your neighbor as yourself – but they walked right past this man in need, this person who had been hurt, attacked, this victim of violence – and they did nothing. They said nothing. They avoided the pain.
The person who stops to help him is a Samaritan, and this word has become so synonymous with “good” in our society because of the ways this parable has influenced popular culture that we miss the fact that “Good Samaritan” most likely sounded like an oxymoron to the audience to whom Jesus was speaking.
The Samaritans were rivals, enemies, of Jesus’s community. But contrary to how they often are portrayed, they were not an entirely different ethnic or religious group, another nation like the Egyptians or the Assyrians. They were actually another sect of Judaism, who had different ideas about where and how the God of Israel should be worshipped, and who claimed to be the true, most authentic representation of the religion of Israel from before the Israelites were exiled into Babylon. The Samaritans were the folks who managed to avoid the exile and stayed in the land and continued the practices as they had been going on before the exile, and when the other folks returned from exile, a lot of things had changed about how they practiced the faith, and a conflict began.
It was an internal fight, and we all know how those can be all the more difficult and painful. A modern equivalent for us in the Episcopal Church might be the conflict between us and the “Anglicans,” the American Episcopalians who left the Episcopal Church to affiliate with other parts of the Anglican Communion.
Think about the vitriol and bitterness that comes out of some people in our denomination when they talk about “the Anglicans.” That’s probably something similar to how the people in Jesus’s community talked about “the Samaritans.” They were the people who didn’t “get it” religiously, who were doing things all wrong, who were clearly not as “enlightened” as “we” are in all things religious.
And yet, in Jesus’s story, it is a Samaritan who stopped to help someone in need. Jesus holds up the Samaritan as the example of what it means to live out the essential elements of the faith. Jesus uses a person from the group most unlikely to be seen as sacred, holy, or righteous, from the group that is hated and vilified, from the group who is “the other” and says, “Look at this. This person gets it. You, with your focus on ‘who is my neighbor,’ you don’t get it. But precisely the person you assume is the problem, they get it.”
So the question for us, then, is not “who is my neighbor,” but “who is the Samaritan”? Who is our “other,” the one in whom it is most difficult for us to see the face of God?
Think about that for a moment. Who do you consider the enemy, the other, the problem? We all have those people in our minds, no matter how much we like to profess that we “love everyone.” There is always someone that, despite what we say outwardly, inwardly we find ourselves seething with anger toward that person or that group. Now, consider Jesus’s story with that person in the role of the Samaritan.
Close your eyes for a moment and picture this. A man is beaten, robbed, left for dead, shot and bloodied, perhaps just down the road on MacArthur Boulevard. And several people from your group, people who look like you, talk like you, think like you, believe like you, maybe other Episcopalians, maybe people from this church, they walk right past him and do nothing. But then this person, this person who is part of that group that you consider the problem, the other, the enemy, this person who stirs up anger and negative emotions in your heart whenever you think of them, that person walks up, sees the hurt person, and stops to help. They don’t avoid the pain. They get up close and personal. They use their jacket to try to stop the flow of blood. They pick him up in their car and drive him to a hospital. They pay his medical bills, spending up to about a quarter of their salary for that week on this person they’ve never met before in their life.
What does it feel like to imagine that person, part of that group that you have such difficulty feeling compassion for, doing something compassionate? What emotions ran through your body as you saw that scene? And how does the lawyer’s question, “who is my neighbor?” sound different to you now?
History is full of these stories. In spite of the divisions that pit one group against another, there are always people who are able to see beyond the divides and recognize our common humanity. Whether it’s Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who saved thousands of Jews from death during the Holocaust, or Keisha Thomas, the black woman who threw herself over a white man at a KKK rally to protect him from counter-protestors who had turned violent, shouting, “Kill the Nazi!,” or Nick Kelton, one of the inmates who broke out of a holding cell in a Parker County, Texas courthouse last month to save a guard who had collapsed from a heart attack, these people would have never thought to ask the question, “Who is my neighbor?” They saw human need, and they acted. No matter who the person was who was in need.
When interviewed by the press, Nick Kelton acknowledged that the inmates realized that they could have potentially lost their own lives in trying to help the guard.
“We were worried they were going to come with guns drawn on us,” he said, and indeed, the deputies who heard the commotion the inmates were making assumed a fight had broken out, and when they arrived and saw inmates broken out of their cell surrounding an unconscious guard, the first thing that went through their minds was probably not that these inmates were trying to help that guard. But the deputies exercised restraint, and they herded the inmates back into the cell, and assessed the situation before responding with more violence, and all parties involved came out alive.
When asked why they did this, Kelton gave a surprising response.
“Cause that’s a good man,” he said, pointing out toward the hallway where the guard had been sitting. “He saves lives.”
He elaborated further, “I mean, it never crossed my mind… whether he’s got a gun or a badge, if he falls down, I’m gonna help him.”
Another inmate added, “It just seems natural to me.”
Keisha Thomas expressed a similar sentiment when asked why she acted to protect a man who represented an ideology that saw her as inferior.
“Violence is violence,” she said. “Nobody deserves to be hurt, especially not for an idea.”
She also indicated that her own experience of being the victim of violence motivated her to help.
“I knew what it was like to be hurt,” she said. “The many times that happened, I wish someone would have stood up for me.”
She also acknowledged how violence can be a vicious cycle, and how necessary it is to intervene to prevent the cycle from spiraling out of hand.
“Let’s say they had killed him or hurt him really bad,” she says. “How does the son feel? Does he carry on the violence?”
As it happened, a man in a coffee shop one day came up to her and said thank you. “What for?” she said. “That was my dad,” he said.
In the midst of the divide and turmoil that has shaken our country this week, there will be no way forward without solidarity across the historic divides.
Forty eight years ago, Martin Luther King gave a sermon the night before his death, a sermon in which he commented on this parable of the Good Samaritan. He said that in fighting for justice, we must be willing to develop “a dangerous kind of unselfishness.” The people who didn’t stop to help the man on the road might have been worried that the robbers were still nearby, that their own lives could have been in danger if they stopped. Dr. King said that when they saw man on the side of the road, they asked the question, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?”, and it was their fear that kept them from acting. But the Samaritan asked a different question. He asked, “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”
In his context in Memphis in 1968, Dr. King was fighting for the rights of the sanitation workers who were on strike, and he asked the congregation gathered to consider that situation in light of this parable:
“[T]he question before you tonight… [is] [n]ot, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job?” Not, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?" The question is not, "If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?" The question is, "If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?" That's the question.”
And for us, today, this week, the question is not, “If we stop to stand up for black men who are murdered at a disproportionate rate by police, what will happen to us? To our jobs? To our friendships?” The question is, “If we do NOT stand up and say that Black Lives Matter just as much as any other life, if we do NOT stand up for our black brothers and sisters – and in an increasingly multiracial world, that “brother” and “sister” rhetoric is becoming increasingly less metaphorical and more literal – what will happen to them?” What would have happened if those inmates in Texas looked less like the white guard and deputies who had authority over them and more like my cousin Kaliq, son of a white mother and a black father, whose dark skin and afro would have made him “other” to those in authority? Would that situation have ended with everyone still alive and unharmed?
On Thursday, Ric Hudgens, a poet and pastor in Evanston, Illinois, just outside Chicago, posted this poem to his blog:
What It Will Take (Poem)
My eighty-year old neighbor,
a man of deep, abiding faith,
now frail and bent with age,
who marched
when marching made a difference,
once upon a time
late at night
heard a yell
from our alley.
A black man
screamed for mercy
as policeman raised their clubs.
My neighbor left his bed,
entered the alley,
threw his body over his neighbor
making himself a shield.
The police stopped.
This is what it will take.
White men
throwing our bodies
in between.
Making them break us
before
they break our brothers.
If there’s anyone in the world who should understand this, it is we who call ourselves Christians. For we follow a savior who also “threw his body in between,” who allowed himself to be murdered rather than respond to violence with violence, who sacrificed himself for a world that rejected him. Who died to save not just his friends, but those who considered themselves his enemies. Who called us to not be afraid, to see beyond the divides, to love God and to love neighbor, and to show mercy. He has called us to “go and do likewise.”
“Who is my neighbor?”
“Who is my neighbor?”
I know that I’m supposed to love God and love my neighbor, says the lawyer, but who is my neighbor? Who is it, exactly, who I’m supposed to love?
Have you ever noticed that Jesus doesn’t actually answer that question? In his clever way, Jesus is always doing that, somehow sidestepping the question people are asking to answer another question they’re not asking but should be. Giving them the answer they need rather than the answer they seek.
So when the lawyer asks, “Who is my neighbor,” Jesus sees that what is behind the lawyer’s question is, as the scripture tells us, a need to “justify himself.” The lawyer is actually more concerned about himself and his own personal salvation – what he needs to do to “inherit eternal life” – than he is with anyone else’s wellbeing. The very fact that he even asks, “who is my neighbor” shows that he has not quite gotten the point of the commandment.
But Jesus doesn’t answer him in a straightforward way. He doesn’t say, “Everyone is your neighbor. All lives matter. You must love everyone.”
Instead, he tells a story that gets right to the heart of the lawyer’s biases, of his need to divide the world into “us” and “them,” to figure out who’s in and who’s out, to determine who is “worthy” of our love and who is not.
He tells a story about someone who is in need, someone who has been hurt and has been left vulnerable, someone who has been a victim of violence. Interestingly, Jesus does not tell us anything about the person who was hurt, besides the fact that he was “a man.” He doesn’t tell us anything about the man’s ethnicity, religion, profession, political affiliation, or any other marker of identity. But he does tell us about some identity markers of the people who come across him on the road. The two who pass by the hurt man, who even cross over to the other side of the road to avoid coming into contact with him, were of the highly respected classes of Jewish society, the priests and Levites, the “good people,” the “righteous people,” the people who knew the answer to the lawyer’s question “what must I do to inherit eternal life” backwards and forwards, the ones who talked all day long about loving God with all your heart and soul and strength and mind, and loving your neighbor as yourself – but they walked right past this man in need, this person who had been hurt, attacked, this victim of violence – and they did nothing. They said nothing. They avoided the pain.
The person who stops to help him is a Samaritan, and this word has become so synonymous with “good” in our society because of the ways this parable has influenced popular culture that we miss the fact that “Good Samaritan” most likely sounded like an oxymoron to the audience to whom Jesus was speaking.
The Samaritans were rivals, enemies, of Jesus’s community. But contrary to how they often are portrayed, they were not an entirely different ethnic or religious group, another nation like the Egyptians or the Assyrians. They were actually another sect of Judaism, who had different ideas about where and how the God of Israel should be worshipped, and who claimed to be the true, most authentic representation of the religion of Israel from before the Israelites were exiled into Babylon. The Samaritans were the folks who managed to avoid the exile and stayed in the land and continued the practices as they had been going on before the exile, and when the other folks returned from exile, a lot of things had changed about how they practiced the faith, and a conflict began.
It was an internal fight, and we all know how those can be all the more difficult and painful. A modern equivalent for us in the Episcopal Church might be the conflict between us and the “Anglicans,” the American Episcopalians who left the Episcopal Church to affiliate with other parts of the Anglican Communion.
Think about the vitriol and bitterness that comes out of some people in our denomination when they talk about “the Anglicans.” That’s probably something similar to how the people in Jesus’s community talked about “the Samaritans.” They were the people who didn’t “get it” religiously, who were doing things all wrong, who were clearly not as “enlightened” as “we” are in all things religious.
And yet, in Jesus’s story, it is a Samaritan who stopped to help someone in need. Jesus holds up the Samaritan as the example of what it means to live out the essential elements of the faith. Jesus uses a person from the group most unlikely to be seen as sacred, holy, or righteous, from the group that is hated and vilified, from the group who is “the other” and says, “Look at this. This person gets it. You, with your focus on ‘who is my neighbor,’ you don’t get it. But precisely the person you assume is the problem, they get it.”
So the question for us, then, is not “who is my neighbor,” but “who is the Samaritan”? Who is our “other,” the one in whom it is most difficult for us to see the face of God?
Think about that for a moment. Who do you consider the enemy, the other, the problem? We all have those people in our minds, no matter how much we like to profess that we “love everyone.” There is always someone that, despite what we say outwardly, inwardly we find ourselves seething with anger toward that person or that group. Now, consider Jesus’s story with that person in the role of the Samaritan.
Close your eyes for a moment and picture this. A man is beaten, robbed, left for dead, shot and bloodied, perhaps just down the road on MacArthur Boulevard. And several people from your group, people who look like you, talk like you, think like you, believe like you, maybe other Episcopalians, maybe people from this church, they walk right past him and do nothing. But then this person, this person who is part of that group that you consider the problem, the other, the enemy, this person who stirs up anger and negative emotions in your heart whenever you think of them, that person walks up, sees the hurt person, and stops to help. They don’t avoid the pain. They get up close and personal. They use their jacket to try to stop the flow of blood. They pick him up in their car and drive him to a hospital. They pay his medical bills, spending up to about a quarter of their salary for that week on this person they’ve never met before in their life.
What does it feel like to imagine that person, part of that group that you have such difficulty feeling compassion for, doing something compassionate? What emotions ran through your body as you saw that scene? And how does the lawyer’s question, “who is my neighbor?” sound different to you now?
History is full of these stories. In spite of the divisions that pit one group against another, there are always people who are able to see beyond the divides and recognize our common humanity. Whether it’s Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who saved thousands of Jews from death during the Holocaust, or Keisha Thomas, the black woman who threw herself over a white man at a KKK rally to protect him from counter-protestors who had turned violent, shouting, “Kill the Nazi!,” or Nick Kelton, one of the inmates who broke out of a holding cell in a Parker County, Texas courthouse last month to save a guard who had collapsed from a heart attack, these people would have never thought to ask the question, “Who is my neighbor?” They saw human need, and they acted. No matter who the person was who was in need.
When interviewed by the press, Nick Kelton acknowledged that the inmates realized that they could have potentially lost their own lives in trying to help the guard.
“We were worried they were going to come with guns drawn on us,” he said, and indeed, the deputies who heard the commotion the inmates were making assumed a fight had broken out, and when they arrived and saw inmates broken out of their cell surrounding an unconscious guard, the first thing that went through their minds was probably not that these inmates were trying to help that guard. But the deputies exercised restraint, and they herded the inmates back into the cell, and assessed the situation before responding with more violence, and all parties involved came out alive.
When asked why they did this, Kelton gave a surprising response.
“Cause that’s a good man,” he said, pointing out toward the hallway where the guard had been sitting. “He saves lives.”
He elaborated further, “I mean, it never crossed my mind… whether he’s got a gun or a badge, if he falls down, I’m gonna help him.”
Another inmate added, “It just seems natural to me.”
Keisha Thomas expressed a similar sentiment when asked why she acted to protect a man who represented an ideology that saw her as inferior.
“Violence is violence,” she said. “Nobody deserves to be hurt, especially not for an idea.”
She also indicated that her own experience of being the victim of violence motivated her to help.
“I knew what it was like to be hurt,” she said. “The many times that happened, I wish someone would have stood up for me.”
She also acknowledged how violence can be a vicious cycle, and how necessary it is to intervene to prevent the cycle from spiraling out of hand.
“Let’s say they had killed him or hurt him really bad,” she says. “How does the son feel? Does he carry on the violence?”
As it happened, a man in a coffee shop one day came up to her and said thank you. “What for?” she said. “That was my dad,” he said.
In the midst of the divide and turmoil that has shaken our country this week, there will be no way forward without solidarity across the historic divides.
Forty eight years ago, Martin Luther King gave a sermon the night before his death, a sermon in which he commented on this parable of the Good Samaritan. He said that in fighting for justice, we must be willing to develop “a dangerous kind of unselfishness.” The people who didn’t stop to help the man on the road might have been worried that the robbers were still nearby, that their own lives could have been in danger if they stopped. Dr. King said that when they saw man on the side of the road, they asked the question, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?”, and it was their fear that kept them from acting. But the Samaritan asked a different question. He asked, “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”
In his context in Memphis in 1968, Dr. King was fighting for the rights of the sanitation workers who were on strike, and he asked the congregation gathered to consider that situation in light of this parable:
“[T]he question before you tonight… [is] [n]ot, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job?” Not, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?" The question is not, "If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?" The question is, "If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?" That's the question.”
And for us, today, this week, the question is not, “If we stop to stand up for black men who are murdered at a disproportionate rate by police, what will happen to us? To our jobs? To our friendships?” The question is, “If we do NOT stand up and say that Black Lives Matter just as much as any other life, if we do NOT stand up for our black brothers and sisters – and in an increasingly multiracial world, that “brother” and “sister” rhetoric is becoming increasingly less metaphorical and more literal – what will happen to them?” What would have happened if those inmates in Texas looked less like the white guard and deputies who had authority over them and more like my cousin Kaliq, son of a white mother and a black father, whose dark skin and afro would have made him “other” to those in authority? Would that situation have ended with everyone still alive and unharmed?
On Thursday, Ric Hudgens, a poet and pastor in Evanston, Illinois, just outside Chicago, posted this poem to his blog:
What It Will Take (Poem)
My eighty-year old neighbor,
a man of deep, abiding faith,
now frail and bent with age,
who marched
when marching made a difference,
once upon a time
late at night
heard a yell
from our alley.
A black man
screamed for mercy
as policeman raised their clubs.
My neighbor left his bed,
entered the alley,
threw his body over his neighbor
making himself a shield.
The police stopped.
This is what it will take.
White men
throwing our bodies
in between.
Making them break us
before
they break our brothers.
If there’s anyone in the world who should understand this, it is we who call ourselves Christians. For we follow a savior who also “threw his body in between,” who allowed himself to be murdered rather than respond to violence with violence, who sacrificed himself for a world that rejected him. Who died to save not just his friends, but those who considered themselves his enemies. Who called us to not be afraid, to see beyond the divides, to love God and to love neighbor, and to show mercy. He has called us to “go and do likewise.”
Sunday, June 5, 2016
Gun Violence Awareness Sunday: Our faith calls us to more than just words
Sermon delivered Sunday, June 5, 2016 (The Third Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 5, Year C), at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.
The women in the first reading and in the Gospel today are both grieving over lost sons. This is not an uncommon theme in the Bible; we could turn to any number of books in the Bible and find stories of grief over lost loved ones. In both passages today, the cause of death was illness or natural causes, but in many other parts of the Bible we have graphic stories of violent death and the mourning that follows when life is cut too short -- not because of natural causes, but because of the sinfulness of people.
This past Thursday, June 2, was National Gun Violence Awareness Day. This is a relatively new observance; only the second annual. And it came into existence not because of some government decree or some organization pronouncing it would be so, but through the grassroots organizing of a group of high school students in Chicago.
After losing their friend Hadiya Pendleton to a random shooting in January of 2013, Hadiya’s friends started a movement to raise awareness about gun violence. They encouraged their classmates to wear orange – the color hunters wear to protect themselves in the woods, the color of gun safety, the color that indicates that someone is not a target or something is not a weapon – they encouraged their classmates to wear orange on June 2, which was Hadiya’s birthday. The movement has gained momentum, and now people all over the country are wearing orange on June 2 to raise awareness about the toll gun violence is taking on our nation and to advocate for gun safety. And today, clergy all over the Episcopal Church are wearing orange stoles to stand in solidarity with this movement.
So as I looked at our lessons today, I noticed these grieving mothers. In these stories, both mothers get their sons back – God restores them to life, through the prayer of Elijah and the command of Jesus. These resurrection narratives remind us that death does not have the last word. We are given a promise that life will overcome death, that death cannot defeat us.
But what about Hadiya's parents? What about those mothers and fathers in Newtown, who will never see their children master reading, or get braces, or take the SATs? What about the mothers and fathers in Columbine, whose children never got to graduate from high school, who would have been my age now, had they lived, with careers and families and who knows what else? What about those children at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek, whose parents were gunned down while they worshipped, whose parents will not be there to see them graduate, get married, have children? God hasn’t brought back their sons, their daughters, their mothers, their fathers, from the dead. What does resurrection mean for them? What does resurrection look like for them?
As a priest, I have a duty to remind the church of the power of the resurrection, to remind us that death does not have the last word. But sometimes that is difficult to do when all evidence around us seems to point to the contrary. Sometimes mere words don’t feel like enough. It’s not enough to say that death triumphs over life, it’s not enough to read the stories of Jesus raising someone’s son from the dead and hope against hope that this can happen for our loved ones, too. The purpose of our faith is not only to give comfort in times of despair, but to stir us to action, to work to prevent the preventable tragedies of this life. To demand that action be taken, to say “not one more!” Not one more life lost to preventable, unnecessary violence, to gun-related accidents, or to suicide.
Some tragedies in this life are beyond our control, like natural disasters – hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes – or many kinds of illnesses. For those things there will always be a theological question around why God allows these things to happen. But some things we can control. Some tragedies are due to human behavior, human sin, things that could be different if we were to be intentional about the choices we make and the actions we take. Gun violence is one of those tragedies. We CAN change it. It is within our power. We can’t blame God for it. We have to take responsibility for the ways we, as a species, have endlessly invented ways to harm each other and ourselves. We created the gun, and we are responsible for its misuse. We must, as our confession in the liturgy says, “repent of the evil that enslaves us – the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.” And to repent means to CHANGE. To change direction. To turn around completely. To do something different. Not to keep doing the same thing and expecting different results, which as we all know, is the definition of insanity. We must raise our voices and say, “enough is enough.”
In 2013, I led a Lenten series called “Christian Responses to Gun Violence.” It was right after 2012, a particularly bloody year in terms of mass shootings: the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, in July, the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin in August, and Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December. We took the traditional Anglican “three-legged stool” approach and looked at what scripture, tradition, and reason had to say about the use of weapons and violent force. We realized that faithful Christians can and do disagree on the best way to protect innocent life, and that Christian ethics has historically had two different “positions” on the use of weapons and violent force: the pacifist perspective, which says that violence is never justified, and the just war theory, which says that violent force is justified in some circumstances, if the scenario meets a certain set of criteria, including that the violence is used as a last resort, that violence is done in service of the common good, and that only the minimal amount of violence necessary to bring about the desired result is used.
After considering all this, we got to the “so what” question – the question I want to hold up for you today. What does our faith call us to do in response to the tragic loss of life in our cities and towns due to gun violence? Surely our location on the edge of East Oakland, one of the most notorious neighborhoods in the country for gun violence -- makes this issue relevant and important to us as we seek to bring God’s justice and mercy to the communities around us.
In my research on how Christians of all sorts have responded to gun violence, I noticed three basic ways they have done so:
• political advocacy
• prayer and witness
• community development and empowerment.
The Episcopal Church has a public policy network that focuses exclusively on activism through political advocacy. They lobby Congress and advocate for certain courses of action that they believe are most congruous with the values of our faith. A group of bishops that formed after Newtown, led by the bishops of Connecticut, called Bishops United Against Gun Violence, and another group of lay people called Episcopalians Against Gun Violence, fall into this category. There are many ways to get involved in their work if political advocacy is where you are feeling called.
In the prayer and witness category, a church in New Orleans stands out. St. Anna’s Episcopal Church on the outskirts of the French Quarter has become known for their “murder board,” (click the word "murder board" for a link to a video about this ministry) a wall on the outside of the church where they record the name, age, and method of death for all local murder victims each week. In a city that has one of the highest murder rates in the country, this church is bearing public witness to the very human toll of urban violence, reminding the community that each one of the statistics is a human being with a name and a face and a family. They pray for each week’s victims by name in the Prayers of the People on Sundays as part of their liturgy.
Another example in this category would be this new icon (pictured at right). This is “Our Lady Mother of Ferguson and All Killed By Guns.” It was commissioned by Mark Bozzuti-Jones, a priest at Trinity Wall Street, and was written by Mark Dukes, the iconographer who wrote the dancing saints icons at St. Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco. This image powerfully speaks to how sacred and valuable every life lost to gun violence is, and gives voice, through visual representation, to the grief of those who remain to mourn their loss.
Finally, community development and empowerment. When I led the Lenten series in Nashville in 2013, I highlighted the work of a trauma surgeon who had started a violence prevention program in the public schools after seeing too many young people come through the ER as gunshot victims. He wanted to address the root causes of violence – poverty, lack of education, lack of positive mentors and role models, and so on – to try to help prevent these kids from winding up on his operating table in the ER.
One organization I’ve discovered here in Oakland that’s doing a similar kind of work is a program called Oakland Unite, part of the Department of Human Services for the City of Oakland, that leads violence prevention and intervention programs in the most at-risk parts of Oakland – but I turn to you all, the experts on this area, to let each other know about other initiatives you are familiar with that are doing good work to address the root causes of violence.
So, whether it’s political advocacy, prayer and witness, community development and empowerment, or all three, there is bound to be some way in which your gifts can be used to address this issue. And who knows? Some of you may be called to go even deeper and take a leadership role in this area. Or maybe St. Cuthbert’s as a community might be called to be God’s hands and feet in addressing violence in the neighborhoods that surround our church. That could be a critical part of our way forward. Again, we must listen for God’s call to us – taking the time for discernment is key. Where is the Holy Spirit calling you, calling us, on this issue, if anywhere? The psalmist reminds us today that “Weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning.” How can you, how can we, turn weeping into dancing for our brothers and sisters who live in constant fear of gun violence, especially our neighbors in East Oakland? Because our faith calls us to more than just words.
The women in the first reading and in the Gospel today are both grieving over lost sons. This is not an uncommon theme in the Bible; we could turn to any number of books in the Bible and find stories of grief over lost loved ones. In both passages today, the cause of death was illness or natural causes, but in many other parts of the Bible we have graphic stories of violent death and the mourning that follows when life is cut too short -- not because of natural causes, but because of the sinfulness of people.
This past Thursday, June 2, was National Gun Violence Awareness Day. This is a relatively new observance; only the second annual. And it came into existence not because of some government decree or some organization pronouncing it would be so, but through the grassroots organizing of a group of high school students in Chicago.
After losing their friend Hadiya Pendleton to a random shooting in January of 2013, Hadiya’s friends started a movement to raise awareness about gun violence. They encouraged their classmates to wear orange – the color hunters wear to protect themselves in the woods, the color of gun safety, the color that indicates that someone is not a target or something is not a weapon – they encouraged their classmates to wear orange on June 2, which was Hadiya’s birthday. The movement has gained momentum, and now people all over the country are wearing orange on June 2 to raise awareness about the toll gun violence is taking on our nation and to advocate for gun safety. And today, clergy all over the Episcopal Church are wearing orange stoles to stand in solidarity with this movement.
So as I looked at our lessons today, I noticed these grieving mothers. In these stories, both mothers get their sons back – God restores them to life, through the prayer of Elijah and the command of Jesus. These resurrection narratives remind us that death does not have the last word. We are given a promise that life will overcome death, that death cannot defeat us.
But what about Hadiya's parents? What about those mothers and fathers in Newtown, who will never see their children master reading, or get braces, or take the SATs? What about the mothers and fathers in Columbine, whose children never got to graduate from high school, who would have been my age now, had they lived, with careers and families and who knows what else? What about those children at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek, whose parents were gunned down while they worshipped, whose parents will not be there to see them graduate, get married, have children? God hasn’t brought back their sons, their daughters, their mothers, their fathers, from the dead. What does resurrection mean for them? What does resurrection look like for them?
As a priest, I have a duty to remind the church of the power of the resurrection, to remind us that death does not have the last word. But sometimes that is difficult to do when all evidence around us seems to point to the contrary. Sometimes mere words don’t feel like enough. It’s not enough to say that death triumphs over life, it’s not enough to read the stories of Jesus raising someone’s son from the dead and hope against hope that this can happen for our loved ones, too. The purpose of our faith is not only to give comfort in times of despair, but to stir us to action, to work to prevent the preventable tragedies of this life. To demand that action be taken, to say “not one more!” Not one more life lost to preventable, unnecessary violence, to gun-related accidents, or to suicide.
Some tragedies in this life are beyond our control, like natural disasters – hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes – or many kinds of illnesses. For those things there will always be a theological question around why God allows these things to happen. But some things we can control. Some tragedies are due to human behavior, human sin, things that could be different if we were to be intentional about the choices we make and the actions we take. Gun violence is one of those tragedies. We CAN change it. It is within our power. We can’t blame God for it. We have to take responsibility for the ways we, as a species, have endlessly invented ways to harm each other and ourselves. We created the gun, and we are responsible for its misuse. We must, as our confession in the liturgy says, “repent of the evil that enslaves us – the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.” And to repent means to CHANGE. To change direction. To turn around completely. To do something different. Not to keep doing the same thing and expecting different results, which as we all know, is the definition of insanity. We must raise our voices and say, “enough is enough.”
In 2013, I led a Lenten series called “Christian Responses to Gun Violence.” It was right after 2012, a particularly bloody year in terms of mass shootings: the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, in July, the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin in August, and Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December. We took the traditional Anglican “three-legged stool” approach and looked at what scripture, tradition, and reason had to say about the use of weapons and violent force. We realized that faithful Christians can and do disagree on the best way to protect innocent life, and that Christian ethics has historically had two different “positions” on the use of weapons and violent force: the pacifist perspective, which says that violence is never justified, and the just war theory, which says that violent force is justified in some circumstances, if the scenario meets a certain set of criteria, including that the violence is used as a last resort, that violence is done in service of the common good, and that only the minimal amount of violence necessary to bring about the desired result is used.
After considering all this, we got to the “so what” question – the question I want to hold up for you today. What does our faith call us to do in response to the tragic loss of life in our cities and towns due to gun violence? Surely our location on the edge of East Oakland, one of the most notorious neighborhoods in the country for gun violence -- makes this issue relevant and important to us as we seek to bring God’s justice and mercy to the communities around us.
In my research on how Christians of all sorts have responded to gun violence, I noticed three basic ways they have done so:
• political advocacy
• prayer and witness
• community development and empowerment.
The Episcopal Church has a public policy network that focuses exclusively on activism through political advocacy. They lobby Congress and advocate for certain courses of action that they believe are most congruous with the values of our faith. A group of bishops that formed after Newtown, led by the bishops of Connecticut, called Bishops United Against Gun Violence, and another group of lay people called Episcopalians Against Gun Violence, fall into this category. There are many ways to get involved in their work if political advocacy is where you are feeling called.
In the prayer and witness category, a church in New Orleans stands out. St. Anna’s Episcopal Church on the outskirts of the French Quarter has become known for their “murder board,” (click the word "murder board" for a link to a video about this ministry) a wall on the outside of the church where they record the name, age, and method of death for all local murder victims each week. In a city that has one of the highest murder rates in the country, this church is bearing public witness to the very human toll of urban violence, reminding the community that each one of the statistics is a human being with a name and a face and a family. They pray for each week’s victims by name in the Prayers of the People on Sundays as part of their liturgy.
Finally, community development and empowerment. When I led the Lenten series in Nashville in 2013, I highlighted the work of a trauma surgeon who had started a violence prevention program in the public schools after seeing too many young people come through the ER as gunshot victims. He wanted to address the root causes of violence – poverty, lack of education, lack of positive mentors and role models, and so on – to try to help prevent these kids from winding up on his operating table in the ER.
One organization I’ve discovered here in Oakland that’s doing a similar kind of work is a program called Oakland Unite, part of the Department of Human Services for the City of Oakland, that leads violence prevention and intervention programs in the most at-risk parts of Oakland – but I turn to you all, the experts on this area, to let each other know about other initiatives you are familiar with that are doing good work to address the root causes of violence.
So, whether it’s political advocacy, prayer and witness, community development and empowerment, or all three, there is bound to be some way in which your gifts can be used to address this issue. And who knows? Some of you may be called to go even deeper and take a leadership role in this area. Or maybe St. Cuthbert’s as a community might be called to be God’s hands and feet in addressing violence in the neighborhoods that surround our church. That could be a critical part of our way forward. Again, we must listen for God’s call to us – taking the time for discernment is key. Where is the Holy Spirit calling you, calling us, on this issue, if anywhere? The psalmist reminds us today that “Weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning.” How can you, how can we, turn weeping into dancing for our brothers and sisters who live in constant fear of gun violence, especially our neighbors in East Oakland? Because our faith calls us to more than just words.
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