Dear Brothers and Sisters of  Emanuel AME,

I can only begin to imagine the sense of loss and terror you are feeling. The horror of violence and suffering of Wednesday, the defilement of your temple and your people, has shaken me and many of my friends. Please know that our prayers are certainly with you now and in the days to come.

I, too, was gathered for Bible study that night with friends and other pastors. Methodists and Episcopalians were gathered with Presbyterians and Lutherans. We have come together for the last three years to do a joint VBS for the children and adults. A pretty cool thing.

What were you studying? I’ve been wondering since then. Not out of morbid curiosity, but out of hope that your friends and loved ones’ last thoughts and prayers were on love and grace. That they were imagining ways to expand the Kingdom and bring it closer. That tragedy isn’t the end, but a necessary stop on the way to salvation. I don’t know. Better that then stuck in Leviticus or Numbers, I suppose. Perhaps a Psalm of lament would have been most appropriate.

We were exploring water that night. Living water. A historian friend was sharing about rainfall and the regional climates of the Middle East. She shared pictures she has taken and matched these locations with the story of the Hebrew people in the scripture we call the Old Testament. I loved getting some help in locating the people with their probable climate regions. It was so informative.

I keep going back to the Jesus claim: Living Water. Share on X

My instruction was the second half. We talked about John 4: the story of Jesus and the woman at the well. I can’t talk about these stories without sharing in the context, so we talked a bit about the first three chapters of John and the beginning of Jesus’s ministry.

I also shared one of my favorite observations about the gospels: that the people with names are either historical figures: Pilate, Herod, Joseph and Mary: or they are disciples. And if strangers get a name, it is because they are disciples or followers of Jesus. In chapter 3, Nicodemus is named. Elsewhere, a blind man, Bartimaeus is named. Disciples, both, I think. Same goes for Mary and Mary Magdalene, and Salome.

The other thing about the people with names is that they tend to screw up or miss things about Jesus. But the people without names, these tend to be the people who actually get what Jesus is up to. Some, like the pious young man, run away because they can’t handle it. Others, like this woman, actually see Jesus for who he is.

In John 4, Jesus says two deeply important things: one to this woman and one to the disciples. He says to the woman that if she were to ask him for something to drink, he would offer her living water: the source of eternal life. We all know that this isn’t immortality in the physical sense, but a suggestion of real, true, vibrant living. That we live with the vitality of GOD’s blessing. This is what Jesus offers this woman.

And I know this is exactly what you offered that young man. To gather in peace; sharing in Christ’s love with a stranger is true peace. To be Christ to him displays true beauty, true living water. That he saw fit to spit in that water and contaminate it with the blood of innocents is deplorable and violating in the most despicable way. My soul aches for what you tried and hoped to do. For what Jesus said to him and he did not have ears to hear it.

The other statement Jesus makes in John 4 is to his disciples. They are itching to leave. They’re in “enemy territory” they think. That territory is Samaria. Jesus led them there on the way home from Jerusalem, rather than take the longer, but easier route for them.

One of the things I learned this week is that, in Jesus’s time, the term “Samaritan” was between 150 and 350 years old. It seems to have come out of Samarian, but seems to be different. The overt hostility between the Hebrews and the Samaritans, therefore, is only a couple centuries old. And, frankly, seems to be justified. They hated each other. They hurt each other. They killed each other.

It fascinates me to think, then that these aren’t age-old opponents, but more like the Hatfields and McCoys. A family dispute that feels like forever, but only goes back a few generations. Both sides victims and aggressors. There is little wonder why the disciples would want to get out of that space.

Instead, Jesus tells them that they’ll stick around. Not just a few more hours, but days. Because they have work to do. The harvest is plentiful and the laborers are few.

I’ve always loved that image. The ripened fruit, ready to be picked is an easy metaphor – to use and understand. However, the juice is in the second half, when he says there isn’t anyone to do it, but a few. These people need us and no one else is coming; let it be us.

I reminded our people that GOD’s harvest is not always in the easy places and doesn’t always look safe. I pointed out that we were in the church undercroft across a street from a major university and our usual approach to harvesting is to place the bushel basket on our side of the street and hope that the fruit will fall to the ground sideways.

My other suggestion to them was that sometimes the fruit doesn’t come dressed like we do. I shared with them the work of Strike Debt and its Rolling Jubilee. A people who are doing GOD’s work, with GOD’s purpose and GOD’s plan. But not for GOD (directly). That maybe GOD is doing something amazing through them, rather than through us.

These were my images at 7:45 pm on Wednesday. When we wrapped up at 8:15, I went to get my children and go home. I put them to bed, and was on the couch at about 10. That’s when I saw your horror in my Facebook feed.

Given the pain of division we have suffered: our own Hatfields and McCoys separation as a church divided, splintering not really because of theology. It’s about race and leadership. It’s about white supremacy and black subordination. And my church was the original problem. Given Jesus’s great transgressions to break apart the divisions of hate and anger, may we come together for our harvest.

And may we, in the predominantly white mainline, and particularly these your cousins in the Episcopal and Methodist Churches find our voice of outrage and pain and communal suffering, that we can no longer stand to see our cousins and our friends, our brothers and sisters in Christ, killed by the fearful and the evil, using weapons far too easily procured and far too easily brandished. That we might live in a world in which no five year-old has to have the wits and understanding to “play dead” just to avoid being shot at church.

May GOD damn these guns! And this racism! This is our scourge and our evil!

Every second we ignore the suffering of the black community or worse, turn it into the suffering of everyone is a second lost, a drop of living water spilled, another second’s delay that we might inhabit the kingdom come.

And lest we confuse the message, it is this deep black suffering that unearths and reveals the sin of this white dominance and demands the shattering of our claimed superiority. When we ignore the pain of the black community, we are not only committing acts of racism once again, but supporting this brand of evil, this expectation of white supremacy.

The world we all dream for doesn’t look like this. There is no freakin’ way any of us is praying for a world in which some sick white kid walks into a church and kills people for being black. There is no way that is something we can stand. But it is what White Christian America has stood behind throughout its history. From the original sin of slavery to our broken reconstruction; from arson and burning crosses to lynching, White Christian America has been directly and indirectly responsible for it. It is we who are responsible for the old Jim Crowe and the new Jim Crowe. We are responsible for flooding our prisons and making them profit centers hungering for the blood of persons of color. We did this and we are currently still responsible.

The only way we can show you that we are interested in coming together, to bury the hatchet, is if we do that: to bury our weapons and beat our swords into ploughshares. If the white community gives up its guns and its white supremacy and begs for forgiveness. For the sins of our past and our present; the sins we’ve known and unknown; the sins we’ve done and those done on our behalf. That we seek forgiveness and restoration with you.

I’m sorry it has taken such a disgusting tragedy to make us see. May we have eyes to see much more than this tragedy and hands to do the work of preventing any more like it.

With hope and conviction for GOD’s great Shalom,
The Rev. Drew Downs

 

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