I Can't Breathe

"Fire. Wind. Noise. Chaos. And out of it all come words we don’t understand...and words we understand all too well, like 'I can’t breathe.'"  

These are words from Tim Hart-Anderson, the Senior Pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church in downtown Minneapolis.  He reports that persons coming in from out of town have been threatening harm to black churches in his city.  He also reports that downtown churches have been urged to have folks calmly present in their buildings, even overnight, as a witness against people who might want to target any religious institution as a way of fueling flames.

We watch peaceful protests all around the country, including here in Phoenix, as people gather to express pent up anger and pent up mourning at continuing patterns of injustice, inequity, and indifference.  We also see undirected rage and pure opportunism upend these legitimate protests with violence and criminality.  And we're living through a time of unprecedented uncertainty, with mixed messages from political leadership and deep wounds of division.  

Sympathy.  Outrage.  Fear.  Confusion.  We have many responses.  But we don't want to allow extremism to deflect our attention from legitimate grievances.  For we are a people of faith and hope.  And we are a people who confess their sin with confidence that in God we don't need to fear being honest about our shortcomings—as individuals, as churches, as communities, as a nation.  And we are a people who may not always agree about how to live out our gospel values, but still agree that those values call us to care for the poor and the vulnerable, to break chains of oppression and harm, to serve peace and decry violence, and to listen to people in pain.  

Last Sunday we celebrated Pentecost, when wind blew through the house where the disciples were staying with the force of a violent noise.  As dramatic and as frightening as that moment must have been, that very wind proved to be the Spirit of Peace, and the Spirit of Hope, and the Spirit of Suffering Saving Healing Liberating Grace.  It was the Spirit of Christ.  

That same Spirit lets us tell the truth.  Justice is always partial, but its imperfection needn't be systemic—and it too often is.  Mercy is always inconsistent, but its inconsistency needn't be so bent toward privileges of race, class, education level, or zip code—and it too often is.  We can do better than this.  And we can talk about these things, even with our different life-experiences and different perspectives.  In fact, we must talk about them.  

I remember being challenged by a precocious faculty member when I was a College Chaplain, as if I represented all people of faith.  "Why is the church so racist?" he demanded.  I didn't have much of an answer when he asked me because I didn't know if I was ready to acknowledge the question.  The church is a site of conflicts that engulf us all.  The church and its preachers, and even its scriptures, have certainly served injustice.  Yet the church and its preachers, and even its scriptures, have also held the very seeds of the hope we all so desperately need.  

And so I thought about my own experience.  I grew up in an all-white neighborhood of an all-white middle class suburb of a predominantly black major city.  My family was active in an all-white church in that suburb.  Yet for me, it was there in that church that I learned about racial division and God's vision of reconciliation.  It was that little congregation that made it possible for families to join sisters and brothers in a black congregation in the city after riots, to clean up together, to listen to each other, and to learn.  It was that little congregation that allowed African-American activists to address the members about their concerns.  It was from that little congregation that connections were made with a sister congregation in the city that was working for social transformation—with some even choosing to pick up their whole household and move into the neighborhood of that church in an act of reconciliation.  It was that sleepy little church, comfortably situated in a system of white privilege it hadn't created but still benefitted from, whose loving and humble spirit opened the world.  We can act.  

So what can we do?  Waving Bibles doesn't help.  Reading Bibles does.  Blustery side-taking doesn't help.  Acting for reconciliation, in the interest of justice, does.  This is true from whatever political perspective you come.  Standing against violence and wanton destruction is right and good.  Listening to pain, even when it upsets our views of a nation we cherish is also right and good.  And so is practical action to make things better.

By God's grace, we have what we need to change the world.  So let's breathe in the breath God gives us and get busy.  Let's.