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Exploring the intersection of sacred and secular.
[This is adapted from a larger article by the same name, which you can find here.]
A Voice from Beyond
I still hear his voice in my head when I think of Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Clem. It was deep, rich, and welcoming.
Clem graduated from Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary a year or two after me, so around 2008. It wasn’t unusual for our liberal Lutheran seminary to host people from other denominations, and theologically, the AME Church is pretty closely aligned with us. That’s why I can hear his distinctive voice. We didn’t know each other well, but we’d talked enough to know each other.
Fast forward to June 17, 2015, we learned that nine black people were martyred at a Wednesday evening Bible study at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC. Clem was their pastor. We know them as the Emanuel 9. Their murderer is a man named Dylann Storm Roof. At the time, Dylann was a young radicalized white man hoping to start a race war. In truth, he became just another tragic footnote because there was nothing to start. America’s race war has ever been cold at any point in our history. It’s our first war, and its bullets have never stopped flying at black and brown bodies strewn across cotton fields and amber waves of grain.
Talking the Talk
One of the most surprising things I’ve learned here is that daily interactions with someone of a different race outside of a workplace are rare because Massachusetts towns are so hauntingly segregated. I wonder if this is why conversations about race here seem limited to book studies. It’s different in the South. Despite the reality of white flight, we all live much closer together. Because of our peculiar relationship to slavery in South Carolina, our discussions are seldom about theory.
This is critical to the difference in how different regions approach white supremacy. In the South, black people can get as close as they want as long as they don’t try to go too high. Up North, they can go as high as they want as long as they don’t get too close.
Hurt Hits Home
I can hear Clem welcoming Dylann with some of his last words even as we deny him.
As I was on my way to Charleston to represent the Bishop the morning of June 18, I began hearing rumors that Dylann grew up in our denomination, at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in downtown Columbia. Not long after, I heard the first rumblings that, “Dylann isn’t actually a member there anymore, he’s been estranged for years.” This didn’t sit right.
As much as I question, doubt, argue, and wrestle with my faith, it’s my bone-deep conviction that because he was baptized and confirmed in one of our congregations, Dylann remains one of ours. I keep calling him Dylann because, even now, it’s a spiritual discipline to remember that we both grew up in the whitest denomination in the nation and I cannot diminish the stark reality that something of me is more intimately connected to the martyrdom of the Emanuel 9 than I’d like.
Despite all the creative ways South Carolinians have to argue and divide ourselves, we know how to come together in a moment of crisis. Instead of a race war, black and white hands joined across the length of Charleston’s Ravenel Bridge as thousands marched across in support of their neighbors. It’s one of those moments that really doesn’t make any sense unless you understand that at our core and despite that we frequently have a funny way of showing it, we really do love our neighbors when you get right down to it.
Voices of Grace
I hear Clem’s voice.
Yet I know that the voice compelling me to continue isn’t Clem, but the Spirit driving me into the wilderness of my own conscience, stirring my heart with the conviction that it’s time to be about God’s work through the waters of my baptism, as well as the vows and sacred obligations of my ordination.
The true wages of racism’s idolatrous heresy is that in diminishing someone else’s humanity, I lose my own. In proclaiming the reality of someone else’s humanity, my own is restored. Similar to the way people joined hands and connected across the span of the Ravenel Bridge, this tenth anniversary of the Emanuel 9 compels us in our own tenuous moment.
We’re called now to offer our hands in the work of death and resurrection that we learn from the black community in South Carolina. They were hurt, and God knows they were angry, but the words they offered were words of forgiveness and unity. Similarly, we in Massachusetts are called to embody the best of ourselves during an unpredictable time.
What bridge must we all cross, hand in hand, to get there?
Eric Wolf is a local Lutheran pastor, and he’d love to buy you a coffee, tea, or beverage of your choice to tell him about your faith, your ideas about meaning, or whatever “sacred stuff” means to you. Reach him at [email protected]!
