Last
Wednesday I took advantage of a bit of free time to watch a couple of innings
of the Orioles-White Sox game. Happily
for Orioles fans, Baltimore won that match 8 to 2. But sadly for us all, the game was played in
an empty ballpark. Watching it was a
bizarre experience: images on the Jumbotron,
music between batters, a full cadre of cameras and announcers, and no one in
the stands.
Last Monday’s
civil unrest in Baltimore was disturbing on so many levels. The then-unexplained death of Freddie Gray in
police custody was just one more instance of an unarmed black man dying at the
hands of police in a year already overloaded with such incidents. The violence itself was unsettling first
because it changed the character of what had until then been an entirely
peaceful protest. And, as in all such disturbances, the violence further damaged
a neighborhood already stressed by poverty, unemployment, and crime.
Wednesday’s ball game wasn’t the only TV I saw last
week. On Monday night I watched some of
CNN’s live coverage of the disturbance, and I was less shocked by the images
than I was by what one of the CNN anchors had to say. “It is hard to believe
this is happening in a major American city.”
“I don’t remember seeing anything like this in the United States of
America in a long time.” “This is a scene that a lot of us never
anticipated seeing in a city like Baltimore.”
Really? I grew up in Los Angeles, and I still
remember 1965 in Watts and 1992 in South Central L.A. And then there’s Ferguson, Missouri a mere
five months ago. CNN’s memory lapse wasn’t the worst. The people on Fox News
characterized violence as positively un-American, one of them saying that
Baltimore “looks like some riot in a third world nation”. Violent protest may
be upsetting, disturbing, and disappointing, but it certainly isn’t un-American. We’re a country that got its start with a
revolution and solved its biggest social problem with a civil war. Violent protests are not something new in
American life. There was Shay’s
Rebellion in 1796, the New York draft riots of 1863, the Chicago Haymarket
riots of 1886, the Bonus Army March of 1932, and of course the Long Hot Summer
of 1967 and Washington’s own riot after Martin Luther King’s assassination in
1968 to name a few. Baltimore’s response
to Freddie Gray’s death is only the most recent example of a longstanding
American practice of taking it to the streets. Violent protest is as American
as apple pie.
And now, thanks to the
charges filed against six Baltimore police officers last Friday, we have an
inkling of the originating act of violence that caused the death of an innocent
young man who was ridden around roughly and then blamed for his own death.
Violent street protest is almost always a response to an originating act of
violence. Slavery, segregation, economic injustice, aggressive policing—all
these are acts of coercive force which sooner or later will necessarily provoke
a violent response.
That Baltimore officials
have acted decisively to charge the officers involved is a cause for hope in an
otherwise depressing routine being played out in American cities right
now. Just as in 1967 and 1968, something
is desperately wrong in the racial politics of our nation. God is saying
something to us in the streets of Baltimore, Ferguson, Oakland, and New York. We
have the opportunity—and the responsibility—to read the current moment and
respond.
The theologian Karl Barth
once said that Christian preachers should hold the Bible in one hand and the
newspaper in the other. How might we put the Bible and the newspaper together
today? This morning’s Gospel is relevant here.
It gives us Jesus’s well-known allegory of the vine and the branches
[John 15: 1-8], a familiar yet challenging text. Here is the part we always
remember: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower,” says
Jesus. “Abide in me as I abide in you. “
Here is the part we always forget: “He removes every branch in me that bears no
fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit.”
“I
am the vine, you are the branches”—a saying that has brought comfort and joy to
Christians over the centuries, an extended metaphor suggesting our unity, our
oneness in Christ. The vine, of course,
was also a traditional metaphor for the people of Israel [Psalm 80]. In John’s rendering, Jesus himself is the new
Israel and all of us who believe in him are what Paul would call “members one
of another.” [Romans 12:5] But the more we press on it, the more we see that
Jesus’s use of this figure is not just about Jesus and the church. To say that
Jesus is the vine and we are the branches is to suggest something about the
nature of God and the world. All of us are
woven together in one fabric of life. We
are all in this together. So one thing
we hear in today’s Bible-newspaper dialogue is a word of human solidarity even
in hard moments like Ferguson or Baltimore.
We cannot look at these events—the protests or the violence that
occasioned them—and not see ourselves implicated. Jesus is the vine, we are the branches. We are all in this together.
But what
are we to make of God’s role as the vinegrower? “He removes every branch
in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it
bear more fruit.” The Greek verb here (airo) suggests both cutting and
cleansing. The cheering news is that we
are all connected to each other through our oneness in Christ. The sobering news is that God is at work in events
that try and test and shape us into the people God intends us to be. Just as you would not let a rose bush grow
wild but would cut it back to enhance its fullness, so it seems God uses hard
events in our personal and social lives to shape us for God’s own
purposes. To describe this process of
trial and testing, the Hebrew prophets often compared it to the smelting of
precious metals. Jesus uses the figure of the gardener and the vine.
As I have thought about Baltimore this week and what God
might be saying to us through it, I have continually been drawn back to Abraham
Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, delivered just weeks before his
assassination in 1865. We all remember
his stirring words, “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” We often
forget the words that precede them.
Looking for divine meaning in the civil war then drawing to a close,
Lincoln poses this question: is the war
God’s judgment for the sin of slavery? If so, then his conclusion is
inescapable:
Fondly do we
hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass
away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the
bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and
until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn
with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said
"the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
It is hard to look at the events in our cities in this
year alone and avoid the conclusion that we are still living out the scourge of
which Lincoln spoke. As a people, as a nation, we are still paying for the sin
of slavery and its subsequent mutation into racism, segregation, mass incarceration,
police brutality, and a massive disparity in economic opportunity. We cannot live in true harmony in America until
justice prevails. As Jesus reminds us, we are all branches of one vine. And as
Jesus warns us, we cannot escape the consequences of actions done by us or on
our behalf.
Revolt
and unrest will continue until we attend to their causes. We cannot observe the events in Baltimore and
not see ourselves implicated in their origin. Jesus is the vine. We are the
branches. God uses history to prune and
shape us to God’s own purposes. We have
a ways to go to be the healthy, fruitful people God wills and calls us to
be. If we look to Baltimore and dismiss
it as a city of lawless thugs we will be missing the message we should take
from this moment. The sin of racism is alive and well in our nation. Our job,
as God’s people and Jesus’s followers is to face into it and not look away.
As
Christian people, we must read the death of Freddie Gray and the protests that
followed it as signs of the work we all have yet to do. We are members of each
other. We will only heal our nation as we attend to the lingering effects of
slavery, the originating act of violence that still ricochets through our
history over time. The events in Baltimore are painful, but let our pain be
that of a pruning moment that heals and shapes us into a people formed for
justice, compassion, and love. In this
hard news there is good news. All this
suffering, injustice and pain can bring us to something healing and hopeful and
new. In the words of the Psalmist [Psalm 19.9] and our 16th president,
“The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” Amen.
