Ambivalence

In the past three years, I think I have been beginning to gain a foothold on the ambivalence of the apostle Paul about the faith communities with which he corresponded throughout the third quarter of the First Century.

This is not a foothold I wanted or sought.

Aware of my passion for justice and my activist heart, I have been invited repeatedly to take roles of leadership in the interest of bringing peace with justice to different settings - communities and country. I have been in attendance at meetings between clergy and community leaders with the governor of my state, chiefs of police, mayors and other highly placed officials. My mainstream (white, married, male, heterosexual, middle class, parent...) presence has helped to ensure that the variety of minority communities concerned about the implications of the killing of Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer are reinforced by equally concerned majority members of society.

We must not forget. We must never forget: Eighteen years old and African American, Michael was unarmed as shots rang out. He was struck multiple times and killed by Officer Darren Wilson with whom he had struggled earlier. Dead and uncovered, Michael's body was left lying in the street for nearly four and a half hours for all to see. Whether intended or not, the Ferguson Police Department by leaving his body so exposed appeared to make Michael an example for others who might dare to defy authority. The scene rang familiar for many who declared that it resembled a Southern-style lynching or a Roman-style crucifixion. Michael's name has been added to a seemingly endless roster of African American men and women prevented from realizing the fullness of promise within them.

My wife and I have lamented his death and the growing amount of blood being spilled and muddying the steep trail towards equality and unity. Coco posted then on Facebook,

"How young is young enough to teach Gwen to be guarded around white folks? Praying for peace in Ferguson."

I confessed in a sermon once that I had wished when Gwen was born that Americans as a people might have finally erased, by the time she was old enough to understand the words of W. E. B. DuBois, the "color line" he so poignantly described at the turn of the 20th Century.

But it hasn't. If anything, its clarity is sharper now than ever. And in an era in which our younger generations clearly will choose to disregard color or sexual orientation when judging a person, it is sickening that there is still enough racism left in us to fill the killing of so many people with souring overtones.

I want to cry out, to call for justice. And repeatedly I have been invited to do just that.

This much, however, weighs in the balance: I am my daughter's father, while at the same time I am also the pastor of a police officer who has been called up for duty, keeping the peace in Ferguson during these wakeful nights there.

I know, at least second hand, the delicate balance of protecting and serving. Law enforcement can be a maddening profession. "The quality of mercy," as Shakespeare referred to the problem of executing the law, may be "not strained," but the administration of justice certainly can be. And here we have one of those strained moments.

And I am the pastor of dear friends of the grandparents of Darren Wilson, that same couple who reared him from his earliest years into the man he became. The grandparents and my parishioners were out to dinner together when Officer Wilson called from an emergency room to say that he had been involved in an encounter which had ended in the death of a young man he had shot.

There is not a fiber of my being that believes any American police officer would presume to join the force encumbered with a racist heart or imagination. With the purest of intentions, they expect to protect and to serve. The blindfolded character of justice is presented in that way to assure the balance of the scales she holds. Every individual in law enforcement I have ever known has entered the field with the personal expectation that she or he will exercise that measure of equanimity.

And we citizens expect no less of them. We want no one citizen afforded greater deference than any other. All ought to be able to expect treatment with respect and dignity.

Then a moment comes to pass like the one that Saturday afternoon in Ferguson, and so many times before and since. Fear or passion or rage or haste escalate as divisions we imagined we individually had overcome prove insuperable, because our society still has a very long way to go toward the defeat of prejudice and fear of one another. Heated words may be exchanged, the situation may come to blows. The gentleness and kindness to which we are called in the Christian tradition do not prevail, and principled people descend into the hell we sometimes make of earth rather than the heaven to which the Almighty beckons us.

Two thousand years since Paul wrote his letters, we still witness how Paul loved the people to whom he wrote, and the ambivalence he felt about them because he loved them.

The opening of nearly every one of his letters includes almost fawning praise for them. But it never took long for him to turn from praise to preaching. In the first letter to the Christians at Corinth, Paul described groups with different dietary restrictions, and mysterious categories of "weak" and "strong" adherents the precise qualities of which we no longer comprehend. He cursed at the Galatians for confusing the gospel with its messengers. Later letters indicated that there were in some among the Christians who sought to undermine or even overthrow their rulers, perhaps because of the freedom they had come to know in Christ, and Paul would offered warnings about keeping in line with authorities, presumably to keep his own religious minority safe (Romans 13).

For one curious hallmark of Christian communities in ancient Asia Minor and Greece seems to have been their attractiveness to a wide variety of humanity. As Paul would put it in one letter, those churches included not only male and female, but "Greek and Jew, ... barbarian, Scythian, slave and free" (Colossians 3:11). And these would have difficulty getting along, even in the uniting love of the Holy Spirit.

I love my parishioners and never want them to imagine that I somehow disrespect them or trivialize their professions or ignore their struggles. I bear within me the heart of an activist and the concern of a pastor. I find these better selves within me at odds with each other. In the same moment as my conscience insists that I must demand justice, for the sake of my daughter and my brothers and sisters who also are Black; my Christian heart and pastor's role insist I must extend mercy to those charged with keeping the peace in places where injustice seems very visible. I must be compassionate toward both at once.

It is this sort of concern which confuses the heart. And isn't this ambivalence like what Paul must have been feeling when he saw his churches divided over rights and privileges, and then asserted (perhaps fatalistically) that he had to be "all things to all people"!