Listening, Civil
Order, and Grand Juries
Democracies characterized by freedom and order exist by voluntary compliance on the part of the
citizenry. It is a fragile arrangement,
and this compliance must be continually monitored and maintained. I lived in a country once where there was
little reliance upon income taxes as a source of revenue for running the
country. Indeed, there were a myriad of
laws on the books; but practically no one voluntarily
obeyed them. People did not trust the
government, writing it off as corrupt and ineffectual. Thus, many needs within the country went
unmet in a way that undermined the quality of life in that place.
The widespread public outcry over two recent grand jury
decisions concerning the death of two black men at the hands of the police has
gotten me thinking about the importance of trust in a community. Without overwhelming trust in our
institutions and in those who serve on our behalf as public servants, we as a
nation cannot be effectively governed and at the same time live as free
people. It is all really that fragile.
How do we as believers move ahead in a healthy way? Jesus might provide for us a clue. Jesus is going from Judea to Galilee, and he
takes a shortcut through Samaria. Most
Jews would have gone around Samaria. The
Jews and the Samaritans did not like or trust one another and avoided each
other. The woman Jesus meets at the well
inasmuch says that: Jews do not associate
with Samaritans (John 4:9). Their
isolated patterns of living led to antipathy and mistrust. Jesus breaks through those barriers by
actually spending some time with the woman.
Reforming the grand jury system when dealing with law
enforcement and modifying policing policies is a bit beyond my area of expertise. (But for the wellbeing of our national
community, I think this needs to be quickly addressed.) I would, however, make
a related observation. At our Board of
Mission meeting last Saturday, we had guided conversations about the recent
deaths and grand jury decisions during our lunch. Afterward we shared as a large group about
our conversations. I was sitting among a
group of people who want good things for all Americans regardless of race. They want America to be a place of fairness
and opportunity, a place where everyone is valued and treated well. As I sat there, I asked myself why then have
issues of race been such a persistent struggle for us. I think we are a bit like the Jews and the
Samaritans; we live parallel but not mutually engaged lives.
We are people of sympathy. We acknowledge and care about the hardships
of others. We want to provide support
and comfort, but we are untouched by the challenges faced by people who have
been formed by a different set of experiences.
We need to work to become people of empathy.
Empathy is born of exposure, of hearing the unmediated stories of others. Empathy comes from living lives engaged with
others, from being affected by what affects them. Perhaps we stand at the threshold of empathy
yet remain in the land of sympathy because the journey into empathy can be
uncomfortable.
I was recently at a
meeting of ministerial leaders, and we were discussing racial diversity. An African American man in his sixties told
us of an experience he had as a 14 year old boy in St. Louis. He was walking home one night, and a police
officer stopped his car in the street and pulled his gun on the boy. He took the young man to the police station
and began to question him. The officer
demanded that the boy confess to something.
When he refused, the officer began to beat him with a rolled up phone
book. Still the young man refused. So two officers drove him out to a vacant lot
and told him to get out of the car. He
refused to get out; he thought to himself:
“If they shoot me, they will have to do it in the back of this cruiser
and leave a bloody mess.” He shared that,
in that day, St. Louis police officers routinely shot young black men without
any consequences; he knew he would likely not survive the night. One officer pulled him out of the cruiser and onto
the ground and told the other officer to drive away. The officer pulled his gun and said “run.” The young man knew if he ran he would be
killed within a few steps. So he
confessed to everything he could think of and lived to tell this story.
When the man finished his story there was an awkward silence
around the table, and then the prior conversation was resumed. The man had just shared a harrowing story
about nearly being killed before he was old enough to drive, and no one at the
table seemed to acknowledge the gravity and terror of his experience. He was pushing us from the land of sympathy
into the land of empathy, but it was too uncomfortable a journey to make. The man who had nearly lost
his life that night didn’t seem surprised that there was little interest in
continuing the conversation. When I read
the news these days, I think of that man and the decades he has invested in
building Christ’s church. He hears the
same news filtered through a different lens.
The American Baptist Churches of New York State is a diverse
family of churches. We and our
congregations have been shaped by a variety of experiences; we tell different
stories around the table. How can we
create spaces where honest, and therefore sometimes uncomfortable, conversations
can take place? We need to be talking
and listening and understanding and acting.
What I hear many of our fellow Americans saying through the public
outcry these days is: “We are finding it
hard to breathe.” We as Christians must
hear that; we are caretakers of neighbors. Who is our neighbor? Someone put that to Jesus and he told a story
(Luke 10:30 to 37); it is for us at this moment a timely story. Our obedience to the Gospel lies not with
sympathy but with empathy, and empathy comes through casting our lots together
in community.
We as a family of churches gathering each Sunday in the name
of Christ are a great place to have those uncomfortable conversations that can
lead to change in our nation. Each and
every one of us has the life-giving breath of God within us (Genesis 2:7). When some of us are having are hard time
breathing, the rest of us should start listening.
Blessings,
Jim Kelsey
