One Book One Diocese Lenten Study
The Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis is reading the same book together for Lent. Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God by Kelly Brown Douglas. We’re gathering in local communities to discuss the book or reading independently.
As part of my own discipline of reading the book and preparing for discussion, I’m summarizing each chapter in fewer than 300 words.
5. Jesus and Trayvon: The Justice of God
We must relate to the cross. It is not a 2000-year-old tragedy to mourn, but an icon of infinite tragedies we encounter in our own world. Like lynchings, we paint our weakest as predators and reward those who kill them.
This sin stems from exceptionalism—we make the Us v. Them paradigm and then bemoan the “need” to enforce these boundaries.
Boundaries Jesus breaks intentionally.
“In fact, that Jesus was crucified signals his prior bond with the “crucified class” of his day.” (174)
Jesus raised up the lowly and brought the powerful low to equalize the people.
None is surprised when the powerful feel threatened. Nor should we be in their response: crucifixion. To protect their cherished property of exceptionalism, the powerful are willing to kill. Because it is also our sin.
The purpose of Stand Your Ground laws is to remove the penalty from killing. This doesn’t reflect the nature of God, then or now.
“The God who freely grants life is not a commissioner of death.” (181)
The Crucifixion isn’t a display of the power of God. It was particular people with a particular fear of losing power that crucified Jesus for expressing the equalizing love of God.
God didn’t utilize the culture of death to defeat death. But the resurrection reveals the nonviolent transcendent freedom of God.
The challenge for Christians is to see the redemptive power embodied by the resurrection in light of the terrible violence of the crucifixion.
“This is the meaning of the resurrection. It is not a theodicy to explain or make meaning out of a death. Rather, the resurrection restores life to those who have been crucified.” (192)
Like Jesus, we don’t confront a culture of death with its tools but build the kin-dom with God’s tools for restoring life.
Thoughts
Us vs. Them
Exceptionalism necessitates
And further, one cannot be exceptional if others are not. As we explored in earlier chapters, the pressure to condemn those who are not exceptional like we are seems embedded to the very nature of exceptionalism.
The ancestor of our present construct we call “whiteness,” Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism, likewise creates dualism and rejects equality. It is a direct affront to the idea of multiple viewpoints because it necessitates a winner and a loser, a stronger and a weaker, an oppressor and a victim.
Those who buy into it will naturally try to always find themselves on top, rather than the bottom. Of course, the natural antidote is to see our common condition and express equality. It requires leveling the playing field as Jesus does. Not only from the bottom, but from the top.
The woman at the well couldn’t come to Jesus because she would be killed for it. His Jewish male exceptionalism was severely protected. But he could come to her. It would take multiple such transgressions to get Jesus killed.
Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism rejects the redistribution of wealth for this reason. It rejects any raising up of the poor because it sees every attempt at equality as an act of aggression toward a system which protects their superiority—whether that protection comes from the myth of blood, culture, or merit. The sense of necessary superiority is greater than any sense of justice.
The Interviews with Lauer
Douglas illustrates how the narrative of black guilt and white innocence plays out in full view for us to see. Her telling of The Today Show interviews with Trayvon Martin’s parents is deeply revealing. Not just for the specifics of how we interact around race, but for white blindness to our sin.
In the parents, we see incredible wisdom and foresight. Despite the tragedy that was pushed into their life, they recognize that their son continues to be victimized, even in death. They see the way his whole life is being erased and replaced with a stamp of disapproval: like meat past its expiration date.
They are expected to arrest their pain and mourning to sympathize with the killer. Even as their son’s life is being erased, Lauer expects them to participate in giving new life to his killer.
It all seems profound—from my whiteness. But clearly they could truly see what was happening. They could see what exceptionalism does: it covers its tracks. It hides behind selective journalistic decisions. And it makes the pursuit, stalking, and killing of a boy by a large man into a time to talk about race neutrality and legal consistency. All while erasing the victim’s family and its story.
The very move never done when the victim is white.
Hyper-individualism
Stand-your-ground culture is sinful by definition. It creates an Us and Them through “exceptionalism” and breeds an unsympathetic response to tragedy. It is hyper-individualistic and rejects the fundamental character of relationship that is necessary to even have a relationship with God.
Stand-your-ground culture nurtures individual sin, but it also nurtures systemic and structural sin.
“There is no getting around it: stand your ground is a reflection of a culture of death. It degrades humanity and destroys life.” (195)
Salvation (like the kin-dom itself) is not simply a future eternal after death, but a revealed actuality in life. It is about freedom from slavery and oppression in the here and now.
Our hyper-individualism and the sin of exceptionalism are intertwined and serve as another justification through obfuscation. It allows us to say but I’m not racist! or but I’m doing my part without any responsibility for the whole community.
This thinking was used during Reconstruction to split the poor over
And most deviously, it helps us nit-pick our common moment, certain of our own exceptional belief, that diagnosing a singular problem will yield a simple solution. When we do it. Everybody else has really bad ideas that will never work and should shut up for a minute and listen to us.
In the first half of the book, we explored the stand-your-ground culture. In the second half of the book, we’ll explore the hope that comes from God.
Next: Chapter 6 – the Time of God.