A Pastoral Letter after Dallas

The troubling events of this week in Baton Rouge and Falcon Heights and the horrific violence of last night in Dallas combine to awaken us this morning to the disturbingly dark time in race and community relations we live in.  We offer our deepest prayers for all the families who have lost loved ones on the cross of fear and enmity.  Our prayers are also offered for those serving to protect us as a people and working to bring about peace, justice, and reconciliation within our communities.

Evil wishes to alienate, divide, and eventually destroy us.  The book of Genesis tells us "its desire is to consume," (Genesis 4:7). Surely, this is what happened to the perpetrators of the heinous acts in Dallas. They were eaten up by evil.  But evil will not be satisfied with consuming them and their victims; evil's real desire is to destroy us all. As Jesus said, "Seeing lawlessness grow, the hearts of many will turn cold," (Matthew 24:12). This is the ultimate aim of evil, to turn our hearts so cold towards one another that we are willing to go to war. Last night in Dallas was the first act of a war perpetrated not only by a few individuals but by evil itself.

Evil's next act will be to so shock so many of us with the violent end in Dallas that we turn cold to the peaceful purposes of its beginning. Hearts will be further hardened to the truth that needs to be heard in the Black Lives Matter movement. This will only serve to further alienate and fracture us.  Afterward, evil's next step beyond that will be to have some calling for us to weigh the lives of those police officers lost at the hands of the gunmen last night against the lives of blacks unjustly lost at the hands of police over all the course of our nation's history. This is what people at war do -- they tally and compare casualties and weigh blood shed by one side and measure it against blood shed by the other.  When we begin to weigh blood shed ounce by ounce, black against blue against white, then we will be at war.  Our hearts will have completely frozen towards one another and evil will have won.

St Paul gives us the ancient words, "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good," (Romans 12:1).  Today is a day of awaking to the reality of evil among us and a time for resolving our commitment to do good. Today is a day for prayer, for lamentation, for confession, for action.  Today is a day for showing up at vigils, listening to neighbors, walking across the tracks, crossing racial boundaries. Today is a day for doing something beautiful, something surprising, something good -- anything good.

Just a year before his death, at a moment of deep racial tension and unrest in our nation, Dr. King asked this question: "Where do we go from here? Chaos or Community?"  A half century later, we find ourselves at a very similar place, confronting very similar issues and asked now the exact same question,  "Where do we go from here? Chaos or Community?"

We know the answer; and we know that the way we will find it is together.