"In our world, something is terribly wrong and must be put right. If, when we see an injustice, our blood does not boil at some point, we have not yet understood the depths of God."
- The Rev. Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p. 143 (emphasis original)
It was an ordinary Tuesday afternoon... well, ordinary in the time of COVID-19. I wrapped up another item on my to-do list and looked at the clock: 4:36. I’m supposed to start our church’s Evening Prayer live stream at 5:00. Not enough time for me to muster up the energy to start another task. So I did what I often do: Open the Twitter app.
And I was stunned.
At first, I saw people's reactions to the video. They were talking about a police officer who put his knee on a man's neck. I scrolled and scrolled looking for answers about this devastating news that I was just discovering. And then I saw the video myself. For the first couple of minutes, as I listened to the man on the ground begging for relief and the filmer pleading with the nearby officer to do something, I naively waited for the officer on the ground to move his knee. Then I heard the cries for mercy turn into shouts of rage. The filmer was cursing the officers and their stoic disregard for human life. George Floyd lay motionless on the asphalt and that uniformed knee was still planted on the back of his neck.
I was horrified. I couldn't watch the rest. I saw that the video lasted over ten minutes but stopped at about minute four. I frantically searched online to see if Floyd had survived. He did not.
And then I saw the news reports on the content of the graphic video and on the official statements from the Minneapolis Police Department. The official word was that Floyd had "resisted arrest." That phrase is a license for a cop to do anything he deems necessary to the body of another, especially if that body has black or brown skin. It's an old playbook in this country, one we have seen repeated over and over again with impunity, even in the age of camera phones that expose the truth of these incidents for the world to see.
It was 4:59. I couldn't think straight. I was overcome with emotion, with grief, with rage, with powerlessness. But I'm still a priest. I still have to minister to my people and do what I said I would do. Now more than ever, we needed to pray.
So I opened my Prayer Book, turned on the camera, and prepared to go live on Facebook. Fatefully, I looked ahead at what the appointed psalm and readings were. (In my denomination, The Episcopal Church, we have a calendar of suggested Bible readings to use in our daily prayers.) It just so happened that during Evening Prayer on the Tuesday after the 7th Sunday of Easter Season (which fell on May 26, 2020), the appointed psalm was Psalm 94. The first three verses say this (quoted from The Book of Common Prayer):
1 O LORD God of vengeance,
O God of vengeance, show yourself.
2 Rise up, O Judge of the world;
give the arrogant their just deserts.
3 How long shall the wicked, O LORD,
how long shall the wicked triumph?
A lot of Christians I know don't like reading the Psalms because of passages like this. They don't like how much rage pours out of some of these poems. They don’t understand why God should be wrathful, vengeful, or judgmental. We would rather talk about a god who is loving and merciful, not wrathful, not judgmental. Judgment is an ugly word in these Christian circles.
But at that moment I was reminded of exactly why Psalm 94 (and others like it) exist.
The Psalms are the ancient prayers of God’s chosen people, Israel. Israel was not a powerful or wealthy people. Throughout the Bible, they are often found losing a war or conquered by some bigger, stronger empire (Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Greece, Rome... you name it). They are oppressed people who usually don’t get their way in the geopolitical machinations of empire. The chosen people of God often found themselves with a global superpower crushing them into the ground with their knees on its neck.
So the Psalms aren’t censored from Israel’s rage about the injustice of the world. They are written by and for people who knew injustice intimately. They lived with it and under it. And they fought against it, often to no avail.
But the Psalms aren’t just human records. They are also Jewish and Christian Scriptures that we believe to be inspired by God. They’re written by people who were so broken by the blatant arrogance and wickedness of their enemies that they turned to prayer. And they prayed in hope.
They didn’t just hope for escape, for a heaven that was far way where everyone will be happy all the time.
They hoped for justice. They hoped for recompense, for restitution, for reparation (see Rutledge, pp. 165-166). They wanted what was wrong to actually be set right. And they believed that God agreed.
The God of Israel (the God who Jews and Christians worship) is called a “God of vengeance” and the “Judge of the world” (Psalm 94:1, 2). This is too important to gloss over. God has to be just (i.e. on the side of justice) if we want any hope that the world will get better. If George Floyd and the police officers who murdered him are ever both going to be welcome into God’s Kingdom Reign, God is going to have to do something to make things right between them. Evil has real consequences, especially for relationships between human beings. And we need a God of Justice who won’t ignore the plight of the suffering.
We need a God who “will not abandon [God’s] people ... For judgment will again be just, and all the true of heart will follow it” (Psalm 94:14-15). We need a God who will “come to my help” whenever we face unchecked police brutality, intimidation, and murder (94:17). We need a God who will give “arrogant” racists “their just deserts,” that is, the things they actually deserve when God makes everything fair.
As I was praying through the Psalm on camera (together virtually with members of my church) I had to hold back tears when I got to verse 21:
21 They conspire against the life of the just
and condemn the innocent to death.
I saw flashes of George Floyd’s desperate face, heard his plea, “I cannot breathe,” and his tearful cries for his mother as he took his final breaths. The corrupt powers of this nation conspire against the lives of innocent people of color. The condemn black and brown people to death for the pettiest of crimes. George Floyd was apprehended for suspected forgery. They took this man’s life over the stroke of a pen! Is it any wonder that protesters took to the streets asserting that Black Lives Matter?
I don’t know how to respond to the riots that emerged out of the peaceful organized protests in Minneapolis this week. As a priest and theologian, I know what I think about violence (I think it’s wrong). But then Scripture confronts me with Psalm 94. I’m reminded that the visceral rage that burst forth from these protesters doesn’t just live in human hearts. It lives in the heart of God.
God’s wrath burns to save the unjustly persecuted. God’s wrath burns to set things right. God’s wrath even burns to turn the hearts of wicked oppressors. We believe that God’s wrath and God’s love are really one thing, two sides of the same coin that is God’s character. God's Love is going to feel like comfort to the hurting and hopeless. But it's going to feel more like judgment to those who oppress the innocent and anyone who is complicit in unjust systems.
That’s the gist of the final verse of Psalm 94 — a verse that sounds terrifying if you wield violent power over others in this life, but that is strangely comforting if your brother was killed in broad daylight by those called to protect and serve.
23 [God] will turn their wickedness back upon them
and destroy them in their own malice;
the LORD our God will destroy them.
May George Floyd rest in peace and rise in glory. May his death not be in vain. May we work to fight the racist systems that cut his life short and never sit idly by while our brothers and sisters die in the streets.
Bibliography
The Episcopal Church. The Book of Common Prayer and Administration fo the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church Together with The Psalter or Psalms of David According to the use of The Episcopal Church. New York: Church Publishing, Inc., 1979, 2007.
Rutledge, Fleming. The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2015.
Comentarios