Daily Lesson for March 12, 2015

Today's daily lesson is a break from the lectionary in response to last night's police shooting in Ferguson, MO:

I awoke this morning horrified to learn that two police officers were shot last night in protests outside the Ferguson, MO police headquarters. I pray for these two officers, their families, and also all of the police officers in Ferguson and the greater St. Louis region. I also pray the perpetrator of this act is brought to justice. 

I pray too for our country. 

Pictures from last night's protests are chilling to me. Police are lined up in protective riot gear outside the police headquarters while protesters appear to scowl and taunt them. By the looks on the protesters' faces, it seems to me almost inevitable that someone would resort to violence and that a police officer would be shot. It is the very antithesis of the 1965 peaceful protest march across the Edward Pettis, Jr. in Selma, Alabama which our country commemorated this past week. 

The protesters' anger is understandable. Last week's scathing Justice Department report underlined the serious racial and class fault lines which existed prior to last summer's shooting death of Mike Brown and the protests that ensued. The report underscores how there was on the police force and within the city municipality of Ferguson -- as there is in a many places in America -- a kind of culture which criminalized blackness insofar as it disproportionately targeted and unfairly penalized the black community, even as the city padded its coffers with fines and fees from the largely black community.  In addition, the Justice Department report disclosed a number of racist emails amongst city employees, which underscored the general lack of respect blacks were afforded in Ferguson and the degree to which overt racism was tolerated within the city's leadership.  This is sad and sickening; and righteous anger in the form of protest is justified. 

But the protests we have seen in the wake of Officer Darren Wilson's shooting of Brown, has been the wrong kind of protest. What we have seen has been broadly escalatory in nature, predicated on the threat of violence, and an insult to the tradition of creative, nonviolent engagement which was the redemptive force behind the civil rights movement of the 1960s. What seems to be happening now -- from individual contacts between citizens and police officers to the larger mass demonstrations like last night -- is not creative protest, but violence and mayhem. What these protest lack altogether is the creative force of love, which seeks to win over one's enemy and not demonize him.

Jesus' followers were largely masses of people under the boot (sandal) of a dehumanizing, and highly militarized force of occupation. Yet Jesus surprised his followers with his charity toward these Romans, teaching his disciples that when asked by a Roman soldier to take his pack and carry it a mile to go ahead and go a second mile. It was a creative and humane response and it offered the chance to win over the one who had previously considered you worthy of no respect. This kind of creativity rooted in love of one's enemy was the bedrock for the social transformation of the 1960s which truly changed America. It was the same force which changed South Africa. And it not only changes nations; it changes people.  It is a force that has the potential to change every encounter between a police officer and a young black person into something transformatively redemptive and heart changing. 

But what we see now is anything but redemptive; it has devolved into what T.S Eliot called, "mere anarchy". These protestors have become Moses killing the Egyptian soldier; and it may take 40 years of wandering in the wilderness before we can move forward again as a people. That is so disheartening; but a real possibility. Only a change of consciousness can redirect us. 

At the end of his life, Dr. King reflected on the riots which began erupting in the later 1960s. He asked about where our country was headed -- "chaos or community?" There is much work to be done in the way of changing individual hearts and minds and dismantling inherently racist systems which isolate poor people and poor communities. It is work which must be done.  A new community must be built; but it can never be built on chaos. It can never be built on violence or ill-will. It must be built on love. 

And love, as Dr. King said and I believe, is "an irresistible force".