“Is There No Safe Place?”
Not unlike our church, the people of Emanuel AME Church in Charleston meet every Wednesday for Bible study. And like us, everyone is welcome to attend. On a recent Wednesday night, a man sat among those desiring to study the word and draw closer to God and one another. He sat for an hour, filled with hate, before he began to open fire, killing nine people. A witness heard him saying that he had come to kill black people.
As a black man, I’m left wondering, Where can we go, is there no safe place?
There was a time when folks would run to the church screaming “Sanctuary! Sanctuary!” as if entering the church was like entering an embassy of the kingdom of heaven. The church gave those in harm’s way relief from this world’s unjust laws and hate. But it was in this embassy of heaven that our brothers and sisters were met with unbridled hate. The pervasiveness of this evil reminds me that this battle is not one waged against flesh and blood but against powers and principalities, an evil not of this world.
It is clear that the enemy offers us no spiritual diplomatic immunity, that there is no a threshold so sacred that he won’t transgress to inflict pain. His hope is that his hate would cultivate hate in and through us. The enemy's hope is that we would render ourselves unfit to carry the mantle of ambassadors of the kingdom. His hope is that we will stop worshiping.
Someone once told me that to worship is to engage in spiritual warfare. We worship not to gloss over the tragedy, not to acquiesce in our pursuit of justice, not to set aside anger and anguish, but the contrary. We worship to raise our cry for justice, to proclaim our holy anger, to lament the loss of our brothers and sisters. We worship to say with fervent hearts that there is no hate in this world that is stronger then the love of God. We worship with the belief that God’s love will have us see true justice. For in his love is a place for our anger. In his love there is space for our tears. In his love there is space for our doubt and fears. In his love black lives matter. Our tears and anguish, our fatigue and frustration will be our offering, holy and acceptable onto God.
Brandon Green is associate pastor of River City Community Church in Chicago.
“To Go Beyond Any Given Sunday”
Scripture teaches us to grieve with those who grieve. Whenever tragedies like this one occur, the church can choose to respond several ways. We can continue church as usual—where the church chooses to numb itself and worship is merely a distraction. Or we can begin to prayerfully and thoughtfully consider how we can be the church in times of suffering.
As a pastor of a church seeking to respond, my desire is to go beyond any given Sunday. I’m interested instead in how we can shape cultures and liturgies that cultivate the church's social engagement.
First, we can speak the names of the victims as we pray. In a world where we remember the names of celebrities and rock stars, victims of racial crimes often remain nameless, or are remembered simply as being black. Even the word "victim" can often leave us disconnected from human suffering. Taking a moment to read the individual names aloud will bring to remembrance that these people were family members, sons and daughter, parents, children of God who are no longer with us.
Second, we can remember the social dimension of communion. The sacrament of communion is a communal act filled with public implications. In communion we remember Christ's body, broken as a family of faith. This remembrance can be connected to the fellowship of suffering in Charleston, particularly in the black community. Communion can remind us that Christ is actively involved in the suffering of the world through his church and that the breaking of bodies even today can point back to a Savior who is well acquainted with suffering. God's Love and power are not beyond the mystery of suffering.
Finally, we can commission the artists. Are there poets in the church who can write laments capturing unresolved emotions, or translate inspiration to a canvas through paint? These expressions are ways of communicating what preachers often cannot put to words. Remember, the largest book in the Bible was a songbook. Using this kind of God-given expression is a viable way of honoring the victims of Emanuel AME.
Jose Humphreys is pastor of Metro Hope Church in Harlem, New York.
“We Will Choose Not to Lament from a Distance.”
This is the weekend for our church’s annual retreat. Tonight we will drive away from the noisy city and make our way to a quiet lake in Wisconsin. As I’ve thought about the timing—the days immediately following the church murders in Charleston—I’ve wondered whether this is the right time to go on retreat.
There will be a tendency among some churches this Sunday to retreat from the horrors that were visited upon Emanuel AME Church. Much of this retreat will be out of ignorance. Within our still-segregated congregations, it can be hard for churches that don’t have many African-American members to recognize the depths of this tragedy.
Our time of retreat must be different. Space will be created for unscripted lament and grief. A very public trauma has been once again inflicted upon members of our Christian family and our public worship has to acknowledge and respond to this pain.
Another thing we will be doing this weekend is confessing the particular expression of sinfulness that took the lives of Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Cynthia Hurd, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Tywanza Sanders, Myra Thompson, Ethel Lee Lance, Susie Jackson, Daniel L. Simmons, and Depayne Middleton Doctor. Each one is a grievous loss. We will reject the temptation to generalize the presence of sin in these murders.
It was, in fact, a white man who killed these nine black people. So we must consider and confess the specific forms of racial hatred that continue unabated in our country and, if we are honest, in more subtle forms through our congregations. We will choose not to lament from a distance. Like Nehemiah when he heard the news from Jerusalem, we will draw near to the pain and the sin. We will ask God to reveal our own complicity. And we will ask for forgiveness.
David Swanson is the pastor of New Community Covenant Church in Chicago.
“Our Prayers Ought to Take the Form of Protest.”
Many of us whose faith was nurtured in the Asian American church context were raised in a spiritual culture that prized meditation, prayer, and reflection–internal processing, private prayer closets, and individual journeys. But what happened in Charleston this week is a jarring reminder that private expressions of spirituality deny the full power of the gospel. There are times when prayer ought to take different forms and Jesus modeled this himself. Sometimes he found solitude by climbing mountains and falling on his knees. There were other times when prayer looked more like protest. "My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46)
As Asian American Christians, we often dial in one frequency when we pray. We find solace in contemplation and reflection, seeking God as a refuge and asking God to meet us. Now is the time to pray in a different frequency with a different urgency. Our prayers ought to take the form of protest. This prayer by virtue of its essence transcends the walls of our churches and hushed voices in our pews. It joins the chorus of our sisters and brothers in Christ who cry out, “Let your kingdom come, your will be done.”
Richard Kohng is a pastor at Ninth Hour Church in Chicago.
“We Fear Each Other”
At the heart of this tragedy lies our inability to see ourselves as interconnected, our identities as bounded to one another’s. This tragedy is yet another example of how race has endured as a spiritual stronghold within our nation. This tragedy elucidates the hard, sacrificial, longsuffering work that stands before us as reconcilers and ambassadors of God’s love within a fallen world. It must compel us to lament, repent, and change our ways. Silence is no longer an option, neither is hatred.
We must confess that sin has cognitively perverted humanity and, as a consequence, we see and treat each other as enemies instead of neighbors. We seldom see each other as brothers and sisters in Christ, as fellow image bearers. Instead, we see each other as competition for the spoils of empire. We respond to each other based off a capitalistic logic that pits us against one another as opposed to a baptismal ethic which calls us into solidarity with one another. We fear each other, largely because we don’t know each other; we don’t worship together, fellowship with one another, and as a result, we don’t see or treat each other as family; fellow members within the Body.
Dominique DuBois Gilliard is a pastor at New Hope Covenant Church in Oakland.
