Brown Shirts in the Streets and Fear in the Pulpit.
I was on the road to New Mexico when I heard about #Charlottesville, but I hadn’t really grasped the full picture of what was about to happen.
White supremacists had done this in New Orleans a few months earlier. The eerie scenes with the torches had struck me then. I knew it signaled something old becoming something new. It was the legitimizing of white radical groups from the fringes of society by a system that has been in place for them since this country was founded.
They no longer had to hide out in straight jobs, having quiet conversations with their brethren on the dark corners of the internet, or hurriedly after looking left and right at the water cooler. White supremacy was doing what it always does. We progress, it evolves. From slavery and the doctrine of discovery to the reconstruction and Jim Crow. From “We Shall Overcome” to the prison industrial complex. From Bull Conner to Steve Bannon.
Then came #Charlottesville.
They had torches.
And they were in a mob.
And they were standing at the altars of the old Confederate States of America.
Since then our President just called the confederacy “our heritage” on Tuesday night at campaign rally that was seconds away from a book burning.
He is right.
The oppression of my people. Slavery. The destruction of my culture. The continued destruction of Black Bodies by police and citizens, hunted like runaway slaves, that is “our heritage.”
His off script remarks are the key. They reveal what many have waited for in the last 50 years. The signal that they have a friend on Pennsylvania ave.
When I heard about #Charlottesvile I was staying at a motel three miles from Ferguson, MO, reflecting on where we are as a country since #MichaelBrown. I had been driving for 15 hours that day with my Jewish wife, driving our daughter to college and the start of a new life in NM.
I looked at my notifications and there it was.
The face of America.
Raw and angry — screaming “blood and soil.”
(Has the face of white America ever brought anything else to the table other than spilling blood and stealing soil?)
I started to get reports from the ground. A church was surrounded by white supremacists with torches because clergy had the nerve to show up and declare the truth.
The truth is that a Jewish man of color overcame death and murder by Law Enforcement in the form of centurions.
Jesus would not stand with Nazis. Or the Klan. Or the Alt-Right-hipster-skinhead-wanna-be intellectuals.
The Gospel message is in direct opposition to the culture of empire and white supremacy. These folks gathered to say that. It seemed there may be a church burning. After Charleston I know the church offers no pause to white supremacy. Have you ever faced a mob of white supremacists? I mean, other than in your pews?
I have. There is no way to describe the physical feeling that washes over you when you see the demonic eye to eye. Face to face.
It was funny, the Sunday just following that bloody Saturday, watching all the “Bonhoeffer Lutherans” who loved to imagine what they would have done in the face of the rise of fascism, suddenly knowing exactly what they would have done in his shoes. Because now they were doing it, whether they knew it or not.
And the first hint is when they said this word:
Context.
“Well, in my context…”
It’s the cowards shield. It is the cry of the fearful. It is way you wiggle out of a tough theological position when faced with the realities of student loans and a family to feed. It’s how you have decided to kill me. So, if you used context as an excuse to not to take on what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia last week, do me and every other Black person in this country a favor.
Don’t ever declare #BlacksLivesMatter. You have lost that right.
They clearly don’t matter as much as your Poritico Health benefits.
Yes, ministry is contextual. Any first-year seminarian can tell you that. Yes, you have to find the voice that speaks to your people. But I have to ask, unless it’s your first 6 months with a new church, what the hell have you been doing while we have been dying in the streets?
What did you say after #SandraBland?
After the sitting President of the United States blew the dog whistle about “the good old days?”
After #JordanEdwards?
Look, you may know your people better than me. You should. But let’s not kid ourselves ELCA, many of you have been making the same excuses on Facebook clergy pages since #Charleston. And it says something very clearly about you.
You just don’t care about God’s justice and the in-breaking of the Kingdom of Heaven as much as you care about your job.
Because as soon as you abandon your prophetic responsibility in times like this, being a pastor is now just a job. You have allowed your congregations to become your employer and your ministry a job.
You also probably think your church is dying, but here is the problem with that.
It isn’t your Church.
It will never die.
And people like me are going to march on without you.
But at least we know what a great many of you would have done in World War II.
Nothing.
Or next to it. You can take your Bonhoeffer books off your shelves now.
To the rest of my peers and betters — I saw you publicly wrestle with what God has placed on our shoulders and the mantle we now carry. We have to be a public church for the sake of Jesus Christ in the world. To stand with the poor, the oppressed and margnilized. We are called for a time such as this, and I think some of us are going to lay our lives on the line for the sake of this broken world — and sooner rather than later.
That is what happens when you have been anointed.
So, let me break the alabaster perfume jar of my struggle directly on your head. Let me wash your feet with my tears, and then dry them with the thick, absorbent tapestry of my experience in America.
Let me prepare your body as we march towards the cross.
In this generation, the nails are white supremacy. The scourge is the indifference of our peers. When our sides are pierced with the loneliness this work often creates, our comfort is in knowing that resurrection awaits.
#charlottesville is another in a long line of Golgothas. This country has crucified it’s marginalized since its inception and its birth a few hundred years later. It screams crucify them to it’s black bodies. To its lgbtq+ bodies. To its Jewish bodies. The Alt right are the reforming and rebuilding of the centurion and the political mainstream on both sides is too busy washing it’s hand, bust saying this blood isn’t on them. #fergunson Golgotha. #movebombing Golgotha. #baltimore Golgotha. #charleston Golgotha. You may ask where is resurrection? Now is a time that doubt in the power of God would be understandable. I have waited by the tomb for the soul of this country to move the stone aside my whole life. I await this country to see me, truly see me with my wounds and to share the good news.
In the kingdom, we shall feast on justice, drink the wine of grace, and eat the bread of eternal life, and we will not cease to proclaim our millennia-old mantra: as it is in heaven, so shall it be on earth.
