A Pastoral Letter to the Nation

gracious god help us to discern what's really going on in this moment the complexity the depth that was to respond in ways that are truly committed to justice and love and mercy amen I wanted to come this morning after talking with many people in our circle of concern and deliver a letter to America they passed her a letter in the time of protest in the time of pain and at the time of pandemic the day is Pentecost Sunday and it's the time when discernment happens discernment happens for on that day some thought one thing was going on it was the Apostle Peter that had to stand up and say no let me let me to discern use that moment of discernment to call the whole nation the whole people to repentance like many of you I have heard George Floyd cry I can't breathe and mama I love you on the recordings of his lynching his murder in the streets of Minneapolis I've seen the pose of the officer full body weight hands in pocket looking into the camera of a 17 year old that was filming and it dawned on me that I've seen that pose before tickle out in the South when certain people are hunting and they kill animals then they pose with them they kneel on them and take pictures as though they have down their prey I've watched as crowds of people and it's important for us to see this black people white people brown people Asian people gay people straight people trans people First Nation people have taken to those same streets and streets without throughout the country to cry out against systemic racism they recognize that what they saw may have happened to a black man but in fact it happened to all of us and it is pain that is even deeper than what we saw on this last Memorial Day the image of a white officer choking the life out of a black man while fellow officers looked on his viscerally reminiscent of the lynching photographs that were used to terrorize African Americans for decades in this nation and literally to terrorize the nation protesters are right to decry such brutal and inhumane treatment as racism and thank God people are in the streets refusing to accept what has been seen as normal for too long what a shame it would be if this nation could watch a policeman murder another human being and then pose like a hunter with its prey while his colleagues looked on and there not be protests there not be anger there not be tears there not be a diversity of people willing to say this is right there not be outrage there not be moral disruption all that is needed to understand why black people and brown people and white people and Asian people and First Nation people and gay and straight and trans people are crying out is to ask what the response of our justice system would have been if a video had emerged a four black man doing that to a white man we all know what racism looks like even the perpetrators of racism know what it looks like that's why they do it but the lethal violence here mean America the lethal violence of these races officers and others is only one manifestation of the systemic racism that is choking the life out of the American democracy George Florida in some ways was a tipping point we have five systemic issues that we have to deal with in this country and not separately but together systemic racism systemic poverty ecological devastation denial of healthcare the war economy false more narrative of religious nationalism and in this country and they all are inter locking in justices I come here today on Pentecost and today is also 20 days from when the mass puppy was assembly and moral march on Washington is scheduled to happen that this digital gathering but originally was to be a meeting on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC because people of every race creed color and sexuality several years ago and the founding of the Poor People's Campaign a national call for moral revival saw even then how deadly these five interlocking and justices are to the souls and bodies of the people of this nation and to the soul and body of the nation's democracy itself one of the things we have to ask in this injustice period is we have to ask why is it causing so many people to question whether this nation's commitment to the establishment of justice means anything at all you see George fleurs murder would have been enough alone but it comes after the compounded death and deadliness of a pandemic that has wreaked havoc on poor and low-income communities across this nation especially communities of color more than 100,000 people have said I can't breathe as this disease choke them to death the corona virus had spread through the fishes of our society fishes and wounds of systemic racism and poverty this virus has exposed the inequalities we have long accepted as normal like a contrast dye in our body politic even before Jorge floor to death we were having to look at death we must be clear long before Cape Kovac came to our shores before there was one death from kovat this is what existed prior to George Floyd's there this is what existed in this nation a hundred and forty million Americans were poor and low-income one study said 700 people were dying a day from poverty and low income and quarter million a year before we declared a nation national emergency that if that fact in itself so traumatize us that we were having national discussions around vaping but 700 poor and low-income people in this country were dying a day before covert before the death of George Florida no national emergency 80 million people were uninsured or underinsured and we knew that thousands of people died died every year for every 500,000 people uninsured knew what to do and we had the means to do it and did not then last week before we heard and saw this lynching on live stream Columbia University published a study that said many of the hundred thousand Americans we have lost did not have to die this is trauma the study said their deaths are the result of a government of an administration of a president of members of Congress that refused to care for its people and yet too many in political leadership have accepted the greed and wanton disregard for human life that has become normal in our political systems we saw millions trillions of dollars immediately go to of whole corporations but not the same effort to save lives that could have been saved we all know what America needs to survive in this pandemic we need access to health care we need living wages we need paid sick leave we need housing for the homeless we know what we need we know what we have needed the testing targeting that would have slowed the spread of this death and yet and yet we did not do it our leadership did not do it and before George Florida this whole nation was traumatized I hundred thousand deaths in less than four months on top of the hundreds of people who die every day already apart from poverty and low income and some people were just saying let's just go back to normal we have seen in the midst of this the poorest and the brownness and the blackest and the most vulnerable Americans being sent back into harm's way often without proper protection equipment some of them have said to me they feel like what they've experienced during this pandemic and this inept response as a form of mass murder he said why bring this up in the midst of a time when we're talking about George Florida because you must see that this moment is deeply traumatic and a moment demands that all who care about the American experiment in democracy listen closely and deeply to the uprising that is itself a collective gasp for life as a pastor I turn into Scripture in times of crisis and I have prayed with the prophet Isaiah this week that God would open my ears to offer a word that might sustain those in distress I prayed with Jeremiah that we as a nation and as a world will not try to heal the wound of the people likely we will not try to just quickly deal with this and put it in a little box and refuse to really probe the depths of the pain and the wound that we would not weep that we would not fail to recognize how the wounds of poverty demands Social surgery the wounds of racism demands Social surgery and a strong antibiotic of truth to cleanse aseptic democracy and in the church we are preparing for the season of Pentecost when we recall today how God's Spirit allowed people from various backgrounds to hear each other's truth in their own language to come out of a place of quarantine and to come into the community in the street with the word of repentance and a word of restoration and liberation and I pray that this letter might be received like this but those who are crying out in Minneapolis and in solidarity actions across the nation our right to say I hear you we hear your cry as a collective expression of the racial wounds and empowerment and economic wounds we have all inherited in this nation and I join you as we scream because of the constant death-dealing wounds suffered by our people people of color poor people over and over and over again when all we want is to be free that full citizens that am I hear you and I hope we all hear you hope we hear the echoes of the screams from the past and even the screams of our children as they hear toward a future afraid that they may face more of the same forensic scientists tell us that wounds always speak but those who have ears to hear the wounds of a victim have something to say about the perpetrator of the crime what's more wounds echo compounded by repetition like a concussion for someone who is struck on the head we all hear the echo of Eric Garner's last words in gorge floors I can't breathe the people of Minneapolis cannot watch this video without reliving the trauma of a and oka steals murder at the hands of police many hear the echoes from Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin to Michael Brown to Sandra bland to Terri Brandon we all know names of someone who has borne this trauma even if the nation doesn't know but there is also a litany of loss that each black community poor community cannot forget names and stories that never made the national news but echo this trauma throughout all of our community is the same this trauma of police brutality and then there are all the other deaths that grow out of the deadly dealing of racism and poverty and each of us who carry this trauma in our bodies is crying this is screwed up and it's true a society that tolerates such disregard for black life a brown life a poor life is sick and we are right to insist that the public know America symptoms of spiritual death when the president calls you thugs he speaks more truth than he knows because in the hip-hop community community thug is an acronym for the hate you give and it's long been claimed by communities that have experienced criminalization as an assertion that the disruption of rebellion is only a reflection of the hate and the violence a community has received the inevitable reflex of a people who cannot breathe because their life is being systematically snuffed out mr. president we know what you're doing when we hear your tough talk and see you using the military as your pawn we know what you're doing when you talk about when the looting starts shooting star we know where that came from we all remember who are old enough and those of us who are read and read enough 1968 and the way the call for law and order was used to consolidate power the way it was used to disregard the legitimate discontent of the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement the anti-poverty movement we are not naive but we can as active participants in a fledgling democracy still imagine better leadership we still have the capacity to ask what if the leadership in this country was moved to arrest police who destroy and the murder people's lives as much as they are moved to arrest those who destroy property what if instead of a president who tweets when the looting starts the shooting starts we had leadership that could unequivocally say when you use police power in the name of the state to murder and Lynch and destroy you will be prosecuted for your crimes what if before the death of George Florida we had dealt with the deaths from poverty the deaths from the denial of health care what if we understood as Coretta Scott King said that violence is denying children opportunity and denying health care and denying living wages and even an apathetic attitude that refuses to deal with these other areas of violence is a cynical form of violence to those who look at the fires in Minneapolis and say there must be a better way I must say that no one wants to see their community burned no one wants to see brokenness and glasses and property but they have also shared many of those who have protested for years they have shared how they are nonviolent pleas and protests have gone unnoticed for years as the situation has gotten out of hand we hear that out of Minneapolis and other places around this country no one knows who and what is behind the property damage we know who's around who's who's behind the bodily death no one knows exactly who and what is behind the property damage and the violence the property but we do know the countless activists and grassroots leaders and preachers who were screaming nonviolent long before now change America changed Minneapolis changed North Carolina changed New York and they're still crying out non-violently still engaged in righteous militancy deeply rooted in non-violence but rather than listen many of those in power saw even their nonviolent protests as an unwelcome development this is so often the case because many Americans struggle to imagine that our governments policies and to use the language of the Declaration of Independence is long train of abuses many Americans struggle to imagine that these long train of abuses demand radical transformation too often we want to believe racism is merely caused by a few bad actors we want to turn racism into a spectacle issue something that we view every now and again when something like George Florida death happens like that's the only death that comes from the policies and the realities of the nation we only want to consider the cruel legacy of racism when an egregious action escalates publicly and escalates outrage at this level when in fact when we look at the facts we should be outraged mostly all the time black Americans will tell you brown America's first nation American progressive white Americans with deep conscience and others will tell you black Americans have rarely been able to sustain such illusions that racism is just a few bad actors deadly racism is always with us and not only through police brutality in the midst of the current pandemic we are painfully aware that our families bear a disproportionate burden of kovat 19 deaths in some cities where racial data is available and that's the problem we don't even have all of the data racial data economic data but what we know is that black people are six times as likely to die from the virus as their white counterparts even before Kovic large numbers of black Americans died because of the racial disparities in health care not because of their race but the racial disparities the systemic racism which are systemic and not unintentional African Americans are three times more likely to die from particular airport evolution than our fellow Americans the percentage of black children suffering from asthma is nearly double that of white people and the death rate is 10 times higher and this is but a reflection of the fishes of inequality that run through every institution in our public life where the black wealth gap and education gap and healthcare gap have persisted despite the civil rights movement and legal desegregation and symbolic affirmative action we understand that the same mentality that will accept and defend the violence of armed officers against unarmed black people and people of car we'll also send black brown and poor white people into harm's way during a pandemic in the name of Liberty and the economy too much death is part and parcel from the policies of racism and the policies of inequality economic inequality in this culture many people have cited dr. King to remind Americans that a riot is the language of the unheard but I've been in reflecting on a eulogy he offered when another man a white man who came to Selma Alabama to work for voting rights was brutally murdered by racist violence in 1965 at the funeral for James Reid dr. King said is not enough to ask who killed the victim in the case of James Reid or in the case like the murder of George Florida he said we have to ask what killed him weak and unacceptable charges have been brought against the officer whose knee choked George floored staying on his neck for three minutes after he went unconscious but no charges have been filed against the other officers who stood by and watched and even prosecutors are saying we're trying to do what we can probably win even that statement is a form of violence that you can see someone literally lynched and choked to death and posed over in broad daylight on camera and prosecutors who want justice wonder if the justice system will even provide but even still dealing with who did the killing is not all that justice demand dr. King said the question is not only who killed him but what killed him the systemic racism to kill George flawed has taken untold souls from us over 400 years and it is killing the very possibility of American democracy today I joined those screaming that this is all screwed up and it's been screwed up for far too long but I also must declare that we are not screwed up as long as we have the conscience and the humanity to know what is right and what is wrong in fact we are clothed in our right minds when we exist insists that no human being should tolerate such cruelty we are clothed in our right mind when we say we can no longer accept the death that comes from poverty the death that comes from the diol of healthcare the death that comes in the midst of a pandemic not because of the germ but because of greed and ineptness and intentional looking the other way those who have faced the lethal force of systemic racism and those who have some to have faced a lethal force of policy racism and policy economic injustice we've also learned that we can be wounded healers we don't have to be arbitrarily destructive and yet we can be strong and committed and have the kind of righteous militancy that is necessary what dr. King was calling marvelous new militancy we can be yes we can assuredly determine to never accept the destruction of our bodies and dreams as an acceptable reality by any police person or by any policy we have learned that there is a force more powerful and to win hands that once picked cotton can join with white hands and native hands and brown hands and Asian hands that we have been able down through history to fundamentally reconstruct this democracy has it done everything no but we are not going to give in to the cynical ISM that things cannot continually be changed that is why I want us to look at those crowds deeply industry listen to them here there see the diversity and remember that in our history slavery was abolished women did get the right to vote labor did win a 40-hour workweek and minimum wage the civil rights movement in the face of lynching and shooting did expand the right to vote for African Americans and change laws and they did it when people found their way together when people decided in the spirit of Pentecost and us in the power of the Spirit that they were greater than the spirit of greed the spirit of racism the spirit of injustice and that they would be united together in a common humanity it doesn't always take everybody but it does take somebody if we take the time to listen to this nation's wounds they tell us where to look for hope might answer me the other day what is the hope I said the hope is in the morning the mo you are in ing the hope is in the screens the hope is in the tears the hope is in the black and the white and the brown too gay in the straight saying this is screwed up this is wrong the hope is in the very things that make us want to rush from this place that make too many people want to heal this wound lightly there's a sense in which right now we must refuse to be comforted too quickly there was the sense right now that what we are hearing is what the Scriptures talked about when it said there's a sound of mourning coming from Rhema and Rachel is refusing to be comforted it is only if these screams and tears and protests shake the very conscience of this nation and we do what we know what to do not another task for us but we take up the task of addressing these issues our conscience is shaken until there is real political and judicial repentance can we hope for a better society on the other side of this but we cannot try to hurry up and put the screams and the tears and the hurt back in the bottle to just get back to some normal that was abnormal in the first place hear the screams feel the tears the very people been rejected over and over again are the ones who have shown us the possibility of a more perfect nation they are telling us these ones are too much this death is too much that's why even before this stop and in 20 days on June 20 of 2024 and lower-income Americans of every race and Creed and culture and sexuality are planning a digital mass gathering to lift up a new moral agenda in public life to take on the death-dealing policies to say to put before the nation the picture of our pain white coal miners from Kentucky standing with black folk from Alabama Latinos from California standing with black folk from the Carolinas black and white women who have suffered the pain of death because of the lack of health care standing together we didn't know this was gonna be the clay so we set this date for this event two years ago we had no way of knowing that over a hundred thousand America would have breathed their last breath due to Kovac or Noren thought that many of them due to the response response to Kovac we didn't know that Jorge floors dying words would have forced the nation to consider how the knee of white supremacy continues to bat out on our common life but we knew already before that that there was too much death too much pain too many wars and we were listening to the wounds from California to Carolina from Maine to Mississippi and we know where to look for hope the hope is right in the valley of the rejected if we listen America if we listen and now is the time for us to not to stop morning but the morn and refuse to be comforted to unite our collective moral power and demand transformative change right now while we're crying someone asks the question one day to me do you expect us to change the health care system in the midst of a pandemic shouldn't we wait till afterwards and do that I said that is not the way real transformation happens we change slavery in the midst of it we change Jim Crow in the midst of it we change refusing women the right to vote in the midst of but we change labor laws when men and women were dying from being overworked and destroyed and put in all kinds of trouble because of people's greed you change things win but when what is happening is no longer working it is dying and the death has become two months and the pain has become too much now is the moment right now screams and the wounds and the pain and the tears so caught up sure there's an addressing a property damage but don't ever miss in the midst of this what the real damage is but the real violence is what the real looting is the way in which the greed of this society gives all resources to the top and leaves 140 million people poor and low wealth and dying that the real real violence is the violence that causes death every day from police brutality to Polish brutality the violence is a nation where a president would say I'm on use of defense production act to make meatpackers go back to work but I'm not going to use that same for defense production act to make sure they have what they need the policy violence that in the midst of a pandemic we've still not said we're gonna give people health care and knowing they're dying we're not gonna make sure they have sickly knowing that they're dying via violence not just the destruction of property the fires don't nobody wants that the greatest violence the dead bodies dead souls as killing what's left of this democracy it doesn't have to be if we hear the morning and the screams and see this public trauma this public morning and we respond to it not by covering over it lightly saying let's just get back to normal quietness but if we say these screams of a signal a change can no longer wait you must see it we must establish justice now we must provide for the common defense now we must promote the general wear pher now it is the only way to ensure domestic tranquility now and then if you do we must focus on love and just we must understand that any nation is under judgment until that nation does right by the poor and the sick and the homeless and the broken and the immigrant the screams from the valleys are the sign it's our sign actually of hope that people have not lost it to the point that they're known to the in justices the worst thing for America would have been Russ to see George Florida previous last breath and die in front of us and people just say oh well that's the way it is nothing can be done the screams the hurt the pain the righteous marching the standing together of every race creed and color the call is saying that this is more than just the death of one man but the death-dealing in society the hope right in mr. that pain that grief that morning you still have a chance America change and on this Pentecost day I pray that we hear the tongues of this moment and we hear the wounds speaking to us and we change change change thank you so much

Channel: Repairers of the Breach

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Length: 40min 58sec (2458 seconds)

Published: Sun May 31 2020