After the last week, I feel like Jon Stewart: "I got nothin'." I am saddened, and sickened, and stunned by the act of violence against the members of Emmanuel AME Church. There is no reason. There is no justification. There is no excuse.
I'm referring to the murder of innocent people, of course. But more than that, I'm referring to the response (or lack thereof) of the larger community. "This means you need to take your guns to worship." "It's just another senseless act of violence. So, what's on Facebook?" Really? Fifty years after Selma, fifty-some years after the murder of those four beautiful young girls in Birmingham, and here we (still) are.
My gut reaction is to despair, to move to a bunker somewhere in South Dakota and live an isolated life that's in my control, to drown my sorrows with people who look and think exactly like me and to deepen the divide between myself and those who are different, to mourn the anger and insensitivity of everyone else. That's what guts are for, to think stupid things like that.
If things are ever to change, we're going to have to go beyond our gut re-actions and move into deliberate, courageous action. Now more than ever, the world needs the real church: not the judgmental, pious, politically-driven stuff that we often associate with "church," but the real thing. The place where two or more are gathered in worship, prayer and study, to hold each other when we cry and to hold each other accountable. The place from which we draw the courage to speak the truth in love.
We Presbyterians believe that the #1 sin continues to be that of idolatry: worshiping any thing or any one more than we worship the God of Abraham and Sarah, the God we know as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In Psalm 115, the Psalmist talks of those who are idol makers and worshipers. The idols, says the writer, have "mouths but do no speak, eyes but do not see, ears but do not hear..." and then goes on to say that "those who make them are like them."
Could it be that, for those of us who find the power to resist idolatry - the worship of flags, of firearms, of race, of violence - that the opposite could be true? That "those who worship God are more like God?" Yes. Those who worship God, not lifeless idols, can find the courage to speak out, the power to resist evil, the wisdom to forgive, and the strength of character to recognize our connectedness with all of God's creatures. But we have to do it. And that's what it's going to take to make any change in the current situation.
We can't feel good about the fact that the evil is in some poor, sick, deranged soul. We can't satisfy ourselves that taking down every Confederate flag will do away with someone else's racism. The potential for evil and hate is within each of us. And only as we see our own complicity will there ever be the possibility of change.
