A poet
once said, “Things aren’t all so tangible and
sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are
unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered.” On June 17, 2015, at Emanuel African Methodist
Episcopal (AME) Church in Charleston, South Carolina, nine people were killed
during bible study. At my desk at work when I heard the news, I sank into
my chair. The act of forming words became as strenuous as Sisyphus pushing a bolder
to the top of a hill only to fall back down again. I was conflicted on several
levels: historically, the massacre took place in a black church, which
splintered from a mainline white denomination that displayed racial prejudice
against people of African descent. Racially, Emanuel AME church became a target
because of the skin color of the people who worshipped there. Vocationally, I
had graduated from seminary a year prior to this massacre. Was this the context in which I was prepared to minister?
This tragic event led me to raise
the ethical question, “Should members of the clergy be allowed to carry guns to
protect their members?” In a society where unarmed black men and women have
become targets of neighborhood vigilantes and police officers— (usually
resulting in murder before trigger persons ask any questions), it seems fair
and wise to have some level of security at houses of worship. When I lived in Washington, DC I attended a
service at Covenant Baptist United Church of Christ commemorating the 50th
anniversary of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama where a
bomb was intentionally planted as a way to scare African Americans even from
their place of worship. This is not the
first time in our history that sanctuaries have become mere targets for terrorism.
What should be our response?
Photo credit: www.Google.com
Many liberals will say that they do
not like violent terms such as “war” or “fight” to describe the freedom
movement in the United States, let alone the mention of weapons such as
guns—and definitely not in the church, mosque, temple or gudwara. I submit that this stance is on the side of
privilege and does not grasp the reality of the struggle for survival in the
lived African-American experience. It easily becomes a debate over semantics
versus survival— if the conversation must be watered down to comfortable, non-aggressive or non-confrontational terms. The
words of Frederick Douglas come to mind: “Those who profess to favor freedom
and yet depreciate agitation are people who want crops without ploughing the
ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean
without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it
may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power
concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
It is the debate of violence or
non-violence. Many of us have engaged in
discourse on this topic or saw the media portrayals of Martin Luther King Jr. as
doing God’s work and Malcolm X labeled the devilish activist outcast.
Whether or not clergy should be able to carry guns to protect their members is
a question worth considering. While I am struggling to find an answer, one
picture gave me solace. It is a picture of a little girl and the usher on the
steps of Emanuel AME Church, the Sunday after the June 17th massacre.
I do not know that I would have been able to walk in the building, given what
had transpired the week before. Nevertheless, on the little girl’s face was a
look of innocence and on the elder’s was a look of hope. Maybe the child and
the elder, without knowing it have told us what we need: enough innocence to
believe that the world can be a beautiful place but in the moments it is not—to
stay at our post looking out for the members of our community in good hope, but
on guard.
Photo credit: Joe Raedle
May God be with and comfort the members of this
church and their families as they mourn the loss of the following:
Cynthia Hurd, 54; Susie Jackson, 87;
Ethel Lance, 70; Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, 49; Hon. Rev. Clementa
Pinckney, 41; Tywanza Sanders, 26; Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr., 74; Rev. Sharonda
Singleton, 45; Myra Thompson, 59.
