Standing on different ground

This week, there’s a strange combination of heavy-heartedness and hope in the air with the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and the prospect of military strikes in Syria.   Our situation around racism in this country is improved, but a wide gulf remains between the opportunities our society affords to people of color and those who are white.  This summer, I was camping in the Black Hills of South Dakota struck by so much injustice toward Native American peoples when the George Zimmerman verdict was handed down.  Again, again, again, thought of how Martin Luther King Jr’s image of the bounced check) —a promise of equality and freedom that simply has not been honored.  It’s not just Trayvon Martin; it’s not just George Zimmerman. It’s not just the idea of “standing your ground,” it’s the constant human temptation toward violence and force.  Witness: the assumption that more violence can end violence in Syria. As Martin Luther King, Jr, also said that day: “Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.”

I’m interested in that soul force, inhabiting space in a different way.

The usual standing your ground is based on the underlying assumption that one individual’s right to the ground trumps the rights of the other person.  But when I read my Bible, it seems to say that even the life of an aggressor is sacred: Love your enemies (Matthew 5: 43-48). What if we found a different ground?  

 Last week, a school bookkeeper stopped a school shooting outside of Atlanta.  A man turned up loaded with guns and ammunition declaring that he was going to kill everybody, including himself.  With an AK 47, 500 rounds of ammunition, and no will to live, he ought to have been unstoppable.

 But he wasn’t.

Finding a shared place of suffering, step by step, over an agonizing conversation (all captured on tape in a 911 call), Antoinette Tuff calmly, slowly, was able to connect with the prospective shooter. “We all go through things in life,” she said, and talked about how she had felt there was nothing to live for when her marriage ended the year before. Rather than allowing her own pain to cut her off, she was able to reach out from it.  Rather than writing him off as a crazed madman, they had a conversation. This is as good a piece of evidence for the resurrection as I can imagine; in God’s solidarity with us, sparing nothing, our own pain can be transformed. Not because God wants us to suffer, or pulls strings from the great beyond.  Nobody was at a keyboard in the sky ending a marriage in 2012 to save the lives of children in 2013. But as Antoinette Tuff prayed that day, thinking of her pastor’s sermon the week before about anchoring in Christ, she followed the pattern of love and connection that Jesus embodied.   And yes, drawing on her pain was part of that. And, yes, a black woman saving the life of a white man 50 years later almost to the day from the March on Washington is kind of amazing, too.

 It is much, much harder to live this way.  It is impractical, and messy, and slow.  But it’s what will save us. It’s what has.

Text of Martin Luther King Jr’s I have a dream speech: http://www.archives.gov/press/exhibits/dream-speech.pdf

Link to Matthew 5: 43-48

http://bible.oremus.org/?passage=Matthew+5:43-48

CNN Link on Antoinette Tuff:

http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/21/us/georgia-school-gunshots