Sunday Statement on Shootings at Emmanuel AME
Church
We gather this morning in the wake of last
Wednesday night’s shootings at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South
Carolina. As many of you know, Bishop
Budde and I issued a statement on Thursday morning which read, in part:
We and all people
of good will are compelled to name this tragedy for what it is: the [result of
the] conjoined sins of racism and violence. For too long, our African-American
sisters and brothers have lived in the shadow of a reign of terror that has
targeted churches, homes and businesses in the false notion of white supremacy.
Such a visceral hatred for people of color has no place in our country, our
homes or our hearts.
The bishop and I also attended (along with
cathedral colleagues Stuart Kenworthy, Ruth Frey, Patty Johnson, and my wife
Kathy) a community prayer vigil Friday afternoon at Metropolitan AME Church
here in Washington. And Preston Hannibal, Stuart, and I represented the
cathedral at a diocesan prayer vigil at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church on Friday night.
The response of the black church in America has been, for me, the purest
expression of authentic Christianity I have seen in my life as a priest. Their
powerful expressions of forgiveness and love remind us all of what it means
really to follow Jesus.
Many people have asked me, “How is the cathedral
going to respond?” I want to say that we
are going to respond in three ways:
first, we respond by standing with our African American brothers and
sisters in this moment and by showing up to mourn with them. Second, we respond by joining with them in naming
this murder for what it is: a hateful expression
of racist white supremacy. This hate
crime is not about mental illness, or drugs, or the persecution of
Christians. This killing was an act of
terrorism designed to intimidate and silence people of color in the United
States. We need vocally to resist all attempts to explain the shootings away as
anything other than a race crime.
Third, we respond by moving the cathedral’s work
on racial justice to the very top of our missional agenda. As the most visible Christian institution in
the United States, we have the opportunity and the responsibility to gather the
faith community in calling America come to terms with its history of racism,
violence, and segregation. There are
many issues—each of them serious and worthwhile—that claim the cathedral’s
attention. But nothing is more important in this moment than for us to lead
American people of faith not only to healing and repentance but to the hard and
freeing work of taking the lid off a past we would rather ignore, exploring
that past’s ongoing effects in the present, and working together with men and
women and children of good will across the ethnic and racial spectrum of
America to build a future in which racism, violence, and false notions of
supremacy will cease to have a place.
The shooting of nine Christian
martyrs in Charleston calls each of us to examine our own participation in
systemic and cultural racism. It calls
all of us to forge real relationships outside the comfort zones of our own
racial identities. And it demands that
we, as a cathedral community and as a great church for national purposes, act
to lead church and society into a new way of being together in America.
It is time for America to face into
the open wound of race relations in our nation.
It is time for Washington National Cathedral to reach out to our
churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques to build a new community of love and
justice that can help all of us do right by the nine who died in Charleston and
for our nation, finally, to do the right thing. I will dedicate the rest of my
time here as your dean to that purpose. I ask that all of you join me and my
cathedral colleagues in this work.
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