“We believe in love, truth and the goodness of people.”

“[What] matters is what we do now that we are here.”

“I promise to fill every dark place I find with the light of love.”

I hope you all were listening to the statements of the young people Coming of Age this year. The minister in me was bursting my buttons. These folks have gotten the message of love and hope that is at the center of our faith.

“I believe more than anything in the power of love and its ability to unite us and heal us.”

(Touches heart)

Amen.

But with that hope is present for these young people at the very same time…the knowledge that “We are all a mix of our best and our worst selves, it is which wolf we feed that defines us as people.”

There is no guarantee that love will win.

There is some good theology here.

I was going to preach a simple homily about marking the passages in our lives, and about the role of the church in helping us create meaning…even when we have to do church “at a distance.”

I was going to return to the message at the heart of my ministry… that love can be real if we make it so…by the living of our lives. The Coming of Age…already preached that sermon. class knows that lesson.

And I was going to charge the young people, and all of us, to hold fast to what we know…to our own lived experience…and what we observe in the world.

I was going to urge us all to engage with the truth of the world…as we live through the pandemic. And urge us all to use our truths to help construct a world of more equity, more compassion…where more of us are seen and known and loved for all that we are.

It would have been a good sermon. A hopeful sermon.

But this week has forced me back. It is not just passing the 100,000 death mark in the pandemic. That would have been test enough.

It is also the police murder of another unarmed Black man in Minneapolis. And it is the rioting in so many cities, including our own.

The demonstrations did not set me back with their calls for justice. Those calls for justice were often angry…I can understand both anger and urgency.

When the rioting drowns out the calls for justice…that’s what really sets me back.

The rioting violates the hope I still hold for this nation, the hope that  protest and the organized power of love might someday be enough to help bend that arc of the universe toward justice…the hope that still lives in me, despite all the broken promises and the reverses, despite all of the evidence to the contrary.

These days are a test of faith for me.

What should I preach to you today?

Do I try to avoid the news of the world? Pretend that things are well with the world?

The coming of age folks, graduating seniors, the teachers…they all know that things are not well with our world. We all know it.

And this liberal religious faith is not about avoiding the world or retreating from it.

What should I preach to you? What do I know confidently enough? What am I sure enough about?

What should I preach to you.?

Should I preach that it is harmful to your health to be Black in the US.

Being a black woman sleeping in your bed in Louisville can get you killed.

Jogging while black while Black can get you killed.

Bird watching or being a black boy of 12 playing with a toy in a park…

Walking down a street…

Being stopped for a broken taillight…

Shopping at a store…

Any encounter with the police can get you killed…any encounter… if you are Black

And it has been dangerous to be Black in the US every day of every year since 1619.

And every Black person and every person of color in this country knows this…lives with this…every day.

Do you know this? All of you? Every day?

What should I preach?

Should I point to the dramatically higher death rates from the virus for Black, Indigenous and People of Color? Should I ask if our nation is willing to accept this level of death and rush to re-open only because so many of those dying are People of Color?

There have been protests of police violence so many times before.

There were protests of Bull Connor in the segregated 1960’s. Protests of Joe Arpaio closer to our time. Protests of the Rodney King beating in 1992. Protests of the murders of Travon Martin and Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor and now George Floyd. So many protests.

And there have been promises of reform again…and again…and again.  And even laws passed…but there are always ways around laws…and laws can be repealed and overturned…

And killings continue.

It may even feel like killings are increasing. But that is just because more and more of them are being caught on video…by bystanders. There have always been killings. More of us are just seeing more of them now.

Should I ask why you think People of Color should trust our system? Trust in the goodwill of decision makers? Believe that it is just a few bad apples rather than a culture that decision makers do not care enough about to confront and change.

Mayor Ted Wheeler says enough is enough…about riots here in Portland. The demonstrators say enough is enough, too. Enough violence…yes…more than enough. But also enough promises when what we need is change.

Should I ask who benefits from the riots? Ask whether the riots help move us toward justice or whether the riots don’t in fact keep the status quo in place? Don’t they encourage a kind of authoritarian police-state response?

Should I ask who is supporting the riots as well as who is benefitting? Am I being paranoid to consider the possibility that there could be a plan at work? Or at least a lack of understanding of how the riots could make life more dangerous…for me and my children and my grandchildren.

I am lightly touched by the violence of the police state in which we live, well protected by the many privileges I enjoy. But I also know that it could so easily be me lying on the pavement with a white man’s knee pressed into my windpipe.

That is the way the police state functions. It instills fear. Though I have never had my face pressed to the pavement, I live with the fear.

That is the way lynchings worked, too. There were a few thousand lynchings but they terrorized a whole people for decades. They didn’t need to be coordinated…or constant…just publicized.

I am a love preacher. You hear me every week trying to convince you that love just might be real and that hope just might be justified…despite all the evidence to the contrary.

But each new murder makes that faith harder to hold and that sermon harder to preach.

And yet even in these hard times I still feel the call of Beloved Community, the hope of creating a world in which … we are all welcomed as blessings and the human family lives whole and reconciled.

I still feel that call. And I believe that you do as well.

Black Lives Matter. Do you realize how low a bar that is, how little that should demand of us? Can this culture not even meet that standard?

I wrote in my blog this week that I could not offer you a simplified and sanitized hope. The most I can offer is an invitation…for those of you who are white-identified and even those who are Black, Indigenous and Persons of Color.

It is an invitation to be present to the truth. An invitation to be present to how hard hope is to sustain.

It is not an invitation to a pity party. Nor is it an invitation to despair.

It is an invitation to move out of denial and cease pretending.

We have been talking about the Culture of White Supremacy here at the church for some time. That has been a hard conversation for some. Some have felt pushed away and their good will questioned by that language.

Perhaps this is an opportunity to help more of us understand what we mean by that culture.

The challenge is not to punish one white police office in one city for one act of violence.

It is not about one individual officer. The culture is what allows one officer with 18 complaints on his record to continue wearing the badge. And if that officer is fired, the culture allows that officer to drive down the road to the next town and be hired there.

The culture is what allows that officer to get two other officers to put their knees on a man lying on the pavement in handcuffs while a fourth officer looks on…and have none of them raise a finger to help that man, nor ask that officer to lift his knee when that man cried out his mother’s name.

That is the culture we need to dismantle.

Why is it that virtually every other union in this nation has been under attack…except the police union? What is being served?

That is the culture.

We…that would be all of us… need to face the truth that so much of the structure of the world we know is built on a commitment to maintain the racial hierarchy. We must face it if we want to have any chance of changing it.

The words of the prophet James Baldwin: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

My invitation is to face the truth. Be present to it. Visit the threat of hopelessness…because that is part of the truth that I live with.

That is part of the truth that I invite you to know…in yourself if that truth is present in you…or through me and other People of Color, if that is as close to this truth as you can approach.

Let us face the truth.

Let us not allow ourselves to be diverted by the small group of individuals who want to turn this tragedy into violent confrontation.

Let us face the truth. Let us name it. So that we do not remain in either despair or denial, but can emerge more certain of that hope for Beloved Community that will not let us go.

The truth can set you free. It may well trouble your soul first… but only the truth can provide the firm foundation for the Beloved Community we hope to build.

“In our suffering we must find solidarity.

Our grief can give us back our gratitude

And show us how to find hope if we lose it.

Do not give in to the pain. Give it purpose. Use it.”

Prayer

Will you pray with me now?

Spirit of Life and of Love. God of truth and of hope.

God of justice and of compassion.

God of both comfort and righteousness.

We call your many names.

We are thankful for the truths we have discovered and we

Come willing to hear more deeply

The call to the work of compassion and justice.

We come to this virtual sanctuary ready to pray…

And to promise.

We come ready to promise to see in each human face

The face of the Holy…each one precious, each one worthy,

We come ready to see the beauty in each human face…and to

Work for a world in which all of us are seen as blessings.

There is much that we need to change in our world…

and in ourselves

…but the goal is not more complex than that…

each of us seen as who we are, seen as a blessing

and treated as a blessing.

We come ready to promise.

And we come ready to pray. To pray for ourselves and to pray

For those we are too late to save.

To say their names. To hold them in our hearts as we would want to be held.

To say their names.

 George Floyd.

Say his name, at home.

 George Floyd

Breonna Taylor

Say her name.

Breonna Taylor

Ahmaud Arbery

Say his name.

Ahmaud Arbery

Sandra Bland

Say her name.

Sandra Bland

Tamir Rice

Say his name

Tamir Rice

We call out these few of the multitude we could name. There is a great cloud of witnesses who have died.

We pray that we will not be too late to save too many others.

For the sake of our own souls,

We need them to survive.

Amen

Topics: Trust