Go out and tell your stories to your daughters and your sons. Make them hear you
Esau McCaulley’s 13 year old son offered his opinion of this last week: “I do not understand why there is a trial. There is a nine-minute video.”
McCauley is an Anglican priest and a professor at Wheaton College. He writes for the New York Times. Oh, and he’s a Black man in America. And his son is a Black boy.
His son: a year older than Tamir Rice was when he was murdered in Cleveland, in a park, with a toy gun in his hand;
13; the same age as Adam Toledo, shot in the chest with his hands up in Chicago.
Not much younger than 20 year old Daunte Wright, pulled over on a Sunday afternoon for an expired registration, murdered by an experienced policewoman who seemed unable to distinguish a yellow plastic taser from her heavy handgun.
Three years younger than MaKhia Bryant, killed in Columbus, Ohio just 30 minutes before the Chauvin verdict was announced.
There are too many other police shootings of Black Americans…too many.
“I lacked good answers for my son,” McCauley writes, “especially in a moment when the trial [of George Floyd’s murderer] was not the only reminder of our country’s deep racial injustice…when people of color [even children] encounter the police.
Tell your stories to your daughters and your sons.
Make them hear you.
What would you say to Esau McCauley’s son…or to the daughters and sons of this congregation…in a week when George Floyd’s murderer was convicted AND when other Black children were killed by the police?
What would you say? What should we say?
There was a lot at stake this week. Much was being decided. And we knew it. Not just the verdict in one trial. At least that is the way it felt to me.
It felt like our system was on trial. Could you feel the weight of the decision that was being made? Did you find it hard, at times, to draw breath?
I felt like I was holding my breath. Not literally. Not quite.
But holding my breath. Waiting to exhale.
This sermon is in the service of all of our breath.
‘Why is there [even] a trial’, the 13 year old asked. Can’t we believe our eyes and our ears and our common sense? Why can’t the rules of common sense and fairness apply to him, too?
What story will you tell of this week? Will you celebrate the care our system takes to protect the innocent…innocent until proven guilty? Former officer Chauvin was certainly given his day in court.
Innocent until proven guilty? Is that an adequate answer for that 13 year old…who knows that his life is in danger when the police pull up?
What will you say about our system’s care for George Floyd’s innocence or guilt?
Will you say that our system…finally delivered justice? That faced with that 9 1/2 minute video record, and the testimony of the passersby who begged the police to care for George Floyd’s life, and the testimony of all the experts and even the chief of police. Faced with the eyes of the world…and the certainty that the streets of cities across the country would erupt if the verdict was innocent…
Faced with all that, will you say that our system finally worked?
Oh, it does need some adjustment…but our system deserves preservation. It has proven that it can work. Is that what you will say?
Or will you say that our system…faced with all of that…
Barely managed to avoid complete failure? Is that closer to the story you will tell?
That it took all of that to find one police officer guilty.
That we escaped almost certain calamity, perhaps collapse of our system…at the very least violence on our streets …again.
What will you say and what will this church say? What is the sermon this church needs on this day…from me?
Here is the problem…at least one of the problems. One dilemma. I have not said a thing that you did not already know.
You already knew about all of the killings by police. You knew about the overwhelming case against former Officer Chauvin. You knew that the nation was holding its breath.
You knew, when I asked the question, that there is no good answer to Esau McCauley’s son.
The only honest answer is that there is no good answer…
Until we dismantle the structures and the culture that keeps repeating these patterns of violence and oppression.
And there will not be a good answer…
Until a new day dawns in this nation.
There is a lot to be present to.
I want to start with the verdict itself.
I was relieved, so relieved when Chauvin was found guilty on all three charges. Relieved that he was convicted of the murder that we all saw…over and over…on that video.
I exhaled.
But I felt no joy. I was not happy to hear the verdict. Happy is not a word that describes what I felt.
Because that verdict does not change the practices of policing…as the murders of other Black Americans since the verdict demonstrate…
And punishment for Chauvin…well, he does need to be punished, because that is how our system deals with crime…we have a punishment, not a prevention system…
But our responsive reading has it right.
“that this verdict comes … in far too vast an ocean of violence upon Black bodies.“
And “that justice [cannot be] served…against one man when an entire system, a nation, a history raised him that way. “
Chauvin is a product of the culture we have failed…thus far…to change.
Punishment can be rendered upon Chauvin…but justice speaks a different language and sees with a wider and wiser lens.
Where should our focus as a religious community be? Where should we start?
Do you remember the initial police report of George Floyd’s murder?
“Two officers arrived and located the suspect…. He was ordered to step from his car. After he got out, he physically resisted officers. Officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress. Officers called for an ambulance. He was transported to Hennepin County Medical Center…where he died a short time later.” The statement stressed that no weapons were used.
Is that what you saw in that video?
First, let’s start with telling the truth. Let’s start with a system that condemns the lies, rather than rewarding them.
Let’s start with a system that is worthy of our trust.
Second, let’s try to make that verdict the watershed moment it might become. There is no guarantee…let me be clear. Time and time again the system has found ways to protect itself from real change. The culture is skilled at preserving power.
So, elimination of qualified immunity…yes. A national data base of police killings…yes…it doesn’t exist now. The network of 1800 independent police forces means we rely on news reports and court records to even guess how many incidents there are.
Yes, let’s call for changing the laws that govern police use of force. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act needs to be on our advocacy agenda.
But we need to use a lens that sees beyond the specific changes to the policing protocols. Because police violence against Black and brown bodies is only an enforcement mechanism…for a system that keeps Black and Brown and poor white communities under-resourced and over-policed…in a system where the lack of explicit discrimination masks the truth of continuing disempowerment.
The culture of white supremacy is staring us in the face .That culture is about race…make no mistake. But race is being used in this culture to protect privilege.
Isabel Wilkerson’s words, from her book, Caste:
“We in the developed world are like homeowners who inherited a house…that is beautiful on the outside, but whose soil is unstable…, heaving and contracting over generations, cracks patched but the deeper ruptures waved away for decades, centuries even. … Not one of us was here when this house was built…but here we are,…the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now.
Caste…is the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining,..a four-hundred-year-old social order.”
In the context of this larger culture, just addressing police killings…which we need to do…but addressing only the police killings would be like shoring up one of the broken joists…while the cracked foundation continues to settle…
But how do we address something that is so…big…so much a part of so much of our living?
I was in the church office earlier this morning and I noticed, on the desk where volunteers sit, when we are all in the office, the script we prepared so that the volunteers would be able to respond to the complaints about our Black Lives Matter banner. Don’t all lives matter? What about blue lives?
BLM pushed the envelope for many folks…
But it was brilliant. It pushed limits that needed so badly to be pushed..
Recently, I’ve been driving around Portland neighborhoods with my daughter who has moved up from LA and is looking to for a place to live. There are BLM signs…everywhere. She and I nod to each other when we notice a concentration of them. Might be a good place for her to live…
Today, Defund the Police is pushing similar limits. I’m having conversations that are just as complicated. What I’m hearing are questions about safety. Who will keep us safe? Who will punish the bad actors? Who will we call when our safety is threatened, when the rioters come our way?
I want to argue the Defund the Police is brilliant as well.
Defund the Police argues that there are better ways to insure public safety than spending untold millions over-policing communities of color. That providing services and reducing poverty will get us all more safety than military equipment ever will. Who thought that sending heavily armed teams into a domestic dispute was a sound idea?
Many of us already live in communities without police. You know it and I know it. How often do you see police cruisers and flashing lights from your front windows?
As religious people, what we need most is to keep our eyes on the prize. There are some parts of our system that are so infected with the virus of racism and oppression, that they need to be scrapped…not all at once and not without a new imagination and new structures to replace them…but they need to go.
Their foundations are too cracked for repair. The only solutions is replacement.
Eyes on the prize.
And what is the prize that is visible in this week of guilty verdicts AND continued killings.
The prize is a society organized around human flourishing…not human punishment. The prize is a society in which the power of love has a chance to be real.
The prize is the Beloved Community.
Will this week be a watershed? A turning toward hope?
Will we have the common sense to listen to the grandmothers…who see the pain in our bravado, the confusion in our anger, the depth behind our coldness.
The Grandmas always look you in the eye and acknowledge the light in you…with no hesitation or fear. The light in you…the light in us…all of us…Black, white, brown, trans, straight, young, old, Christian, Muslim, believer or not, UU…
The light in all of us.
The religious task…in the public square…this week…and every week…in the building of life-affirming institutions.
Life-affirming institutions.
Grandma love may be hard to institutionalize…but is it really more difficult to imagine that kind of tough and tender love than to insist on keeping the system that has failed us so badly?
Can this week be a turning point? Something more than a chance to exhale?
Esau McCauley told his son the story of Adam Toledo’s death as they drove to a baseball practice. “It slipped from my lips unexpectedly,” he writes. ”the Gospel singer Kirk Franklin was playing in the background, and we sat in silence [listening to] the choir [praise] the glories of God. In that moment, we were not just father and son but a Black boy and a Black man trying to make sense of the task of living…”
“When I could wait no longer, I asked him, ‘What are you thinking?’ He told me, sounding somber and somehow older, ‘I want to do some good in the world, to make it better.’ That’s it, I thought. …We push forward.”
Grandmas’ love “want[s] to make your life sweeter…”
Yes, we push forward. Knowing and telling and demanding as much truth as we can bear. Keeping our eyes on the prize. Aiming for the most human flourishing we can imagine…knowing that our children will imagine so much more.
We keep on pushing.
McCauley concludes: “At some point, I will sit down with my son and tell him that justice was served in the Chauvin trial. But I am not sure that the playfulness in his voice will immediately return. He has experienced something that has changed him.”
We have experienced something that has changed us, as well.
We came very close this week. Close enough for more of us to see just how high the stakes are.
May we remember what has become so clear this week…
We already have more than enough to grieve. And more persons are being lost. There will be more persons who are damaged. And we ourselves may well be further bruised.
But perhaps…perhaps we have seen enough to hope.
“grieve we must
[but] it’s okay to breatheand then breathe and breathe again.
until true justice is done.”
Amen
Prayer
Will you pray with me now?
Spirit of life and of love. Source of both courage and compassion.
Be with us.
Help us be truth-tellers and justice-seekers.
Help us stay present, awake and aware
Not only to the violence that presses in on us
But also to the persistent hope
That will not let us go.
The affirmation of life, the spark that still burns
Even in our bruised and fearful hearts.
Help us live as if that grandmothers love were real,
That tender love that is there to feed us when we are hungry
That looks us in the eye and smiles.
That tough love that knows all of our truth
But remembers that are more than our worst decision
On our worst day.
Help us bring more of that love into our living
And into our world.
Amen.
Topics: Awe