Approximately 80 people attended the Candlelight Vigil for Peace, held at Trinity & St. Philip's Cathedral on Sunday, December 7, 2014, in response to the Grand Jury decisions in Ferguson, Missouri and Staten Island, New York declining to bring charges in the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.
Some attendees wore bull's-eyes on their backs. The Rev. Sandye Wilson of St. Andrew & Holy Communion in South Orange told a reporter/photographer for The Star-Ledger, "We feel like we all are walking around with a target on our backs, especially young black men." (See The Star-Ledger coverage and photo gallery.)
The Rev. Deacon Chris McCloud, who serves at the Cathedral, gave a personal witness titled Letter from a Mother.
Bishop Mark Beckwith gave a reflection which concluded:
We are here because I deeply believe that we want to join with Christ to work where God is already working, has been working. And he wants us to work with God. God is paving the way. Our faith, our hope says that God is winning. It is painful, it is hard, it is scary, but God is working. God is working to make all things new. With reconciliation, and hope and solidarity and peace. God needs your help. Let’s provide it.
Bishop Beckwith's reflection is transcribed below.
Bishop Beckwith's reflection at the Candlelight Vigil for Peace
Thank you all for coming. I want to thank the Cathedral for once again opening their doors for the rest of the diocese. I want to thank Sandye Wilson and Shelly White for their conversation on Thursday – and Sandye called me and said “We need to do something.” And I want to thank Sandye, Shelly, Greg [Jacobs], Willy [Smith], Joseph [Harmon] and Chris [McCloud], who just spoke, for putting this vigil service together. For providing the leadership and offering a container for us to offer our feelings, our prayers, and our ultimate hope.
The events of these past couple of weeks took me right back to the Rodney King verdict of 1992. Rodney King as you remember was savagely beaten by five police, caught on videotape. They were all charged and were all acquitted. Riots broke out all over L.A. Millions of dollars in damage, and 53 lives were lost. I was the rector at Christ Church in Hackensack at the time. We held a forum after church, in the church. A lot of people came. Most people came. Several people spoke of their fear, their anger, their hurts, and one woman who got up to speak was warden. She was originally from Jamaica, and she expressed her fear for her son who was then 8 years old. Her passion and her fear were real – palpable. And everyone could feel it. Her witness changed everything. It wasn’t a news story read in print or something seen on television. Her story, her witness – people knew her, respected her, and her 8-year-old son was loved. She was afraid for her son as Chris indicated in her letter from a mother about her sons. That fear continues. We see variations of Rodney King played out: Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Akai Gurley in Brooklyn, Tamir Rice a couple of weeks ago in Cleveland, Eric Garner on Staten Island – and on and on and on.
This past summer I read The New Jim Crow, a book by Michelle Alexander, an attorney and author. A rather chilling book. She makes the case – and I support her case – that, do you remember in the 1980s there was the war on drugs? Her case was it wasn’t a war on drugs. It was a war on young Black men. “Make them invisible! Throw them out! Three strikes, and you’re out!” Remember that? The prison population exploded. And she talks about how we live now in a color-blind society. That’s the mantra that we have. “We’re a color-blind society. Look! We have a Black president! The Civil Rights laws are now 50 years old. We’re over all that. We are color-blind!” Well in fact, I am color-blind. I cannot pick a crayon out of a box. I can’t pick colors. I am red-green color-blind. We do not live a color-blind society. All these events that have captured our attention and have brought us here tonight are indications that we are not in a color-blind society.
We have all been taught prejudice. All of us. We learned it. At home or in school, in our neighborhoods – sometimes in church. Somewhere, we have all learned it. The challenge is to say “No, you didn’t learn it.” The challenge is to own it where it works in our lives so it doesn’t have the power over us. All these events that have us gathered here this evening expose how difficult and in some cases how seemingly impossible it is for people in American society to move beyond the prejudice and racism which has been woven into our nation’s fabric and work together as communities that offer equal justice and freedom.
All of these situations are rooted in fear. No doubt the police are often afraid given the risks and challenges of their role. But they also carry the deepest anxiety of the communities that they serve. It is dumped upon them. A society which often lives with an unspoken fear of the other.
There is a tragedy of young unarmed Black men being shot and killed or strangled while in custody and other tragedies that are too numerous to mention. But there is a deeper tragedy of a culture that seems to live with the illusion that in order to keep the majority safe and presumably free of fear some need to be sacrificed. That illusion is racial profiling of the worst order.
I remember Walter Brueggemann saying – Walter Brueggemann is an Old Testament scholar, he’s been to this diocese, he’s written many books, he is a prophet of our time – saying that “fear not” is the overarching message of the Gospel. “Fear not’ is the overarching message of the Gospel.” I believe that. But I also believe that the way to deal with fear is not to deny it or create illusions that hide it, but name it and work through it. Jesus did that. He named fear. He faced fear. And in His resurrection, overcame fear. Jesus continues to name and face fear through us.
What does this mean for us? Lots of things, which I’ll get to in a moment, but I want to start with what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean that we go on a campaign of blame. It is easy to do. Our juices get going, and we want to point to the offending parts of the group. If we scapegoat the police that is just recreating what the police are doing with young Black men. They are being scapegoated. If you keep the scapegoating going, nothing gets solved. It just keeps moving the scapegoats around. It keeps the adrenaline moving, but it solves nothing.
It doesn’t mean that. It also doesn’t mean that we try and “fix this.” “Try and fix this.” I remember years ago when I again was in Christ Church, Hackensack. On Martin Luther King Day, we invited the whole community into the church. We were the ones to host that year, Christ Church, Hackensack. And the main speaker was James Washington, who was a professor at Union Theological Seminary. He wrote a lot of books about Black religion and the dynamics of what is going on in our culture. And he asked a very excited and engaged congregation, “Do you know what a liberal is?” And people were ready for this. He said, “A liberal is someone who approaches a house that is invested with termites and takes a splinter out of the house and fumigates it. He takes the splinter and puts it back in the house and walks away.” That doesn’t fix anything.
We’re followers of Jesus. We didn’t come to fix, but to make all things new. Yes, there are things that need to be fixed. There are people who need to be held to account. All that needs to happen. But it doesn’t mean that we try and fix. It also doesn’t mean that we get worked up in our self-righteous silos and say “God is on my side.” We don’t do that. That is one of most egregious sins that we can commit. Because the only side that God has ever been on is God’s side. That’s what it doesn’t mean.
What does it mean? It means we become apostles for peace. That’s why we’re here. I encourage each of you and your congregations to observe Gun Violence Sabbath next Sunday. Get into a rhythm of praying for peace. Not token and prayers that feed our self-righteousness. But prayers that express our fear, our prejudice as we pray for others. Second: Own your stuff. Learn it. This is not just a police problem or a young Black men’s problem, although that is where it is most manifest. It is our problem. Learn your prejudice. Where did it come from? How does it operate? When is it most likely to show up? If you don’t think you have any, you’ll need to burn down your self-righteousness silo. You may need help with that. There are lots of people around you who will help you with that. Own it. If you own it, it will have less power over each of us.
Similarly, if you think that this is an urban problem, start again. This is our problem. And then build relationships with the police. When I was in Massachusetts, community policing was the order of the day. And we worked very, very hard to build relationships with the police to get them to walk the beats so that they would know the people in the neighborhood, and so the people in the neighborhood would know the police. More and more it seems that community policing is becoming a fiction. It may be that the police don’t want to do this. They’re busy – a lot of troubling issues to deal with, getting their systems down, resistant to change…. I hear a lot of that from vestries when I visit congregations in the diocese. “Oh my goodness, how do we change? We have our system down. We can’t change it.” Oh yes we can. Oh yes we must.
I’m going to ask the Convention to suspend its rules. Resolution deadline has come and gone. I’m going to ask it to suspend the rules, and a group of people, perhaps here tonight, can write a resolution patterned perhaps on the resolution of the Diocese of New York, calling to congregations to build relationships with police departments. So we’re in a relationship with one another – and reduces the temptation to offer scapegoats of one another.
I also calling that we develop a process in this diocese. I’m not exactly sure what that will look like, but I think that the people who planned this service this evening will help me with that – a process that we can engage in diocese-wide to talk about culture, about race, about prejudice beyond the anti-racism dialogues that are so helpful and so important but pick up maybe five or six people every time we do it once a year. We need to do more about this.
This past week I was in Chicago with a small group of bishops and others to plan an event at this upcoming General Convention in Salt Lake City at the end of June. We were there to plan a prayer witness to reduce gun violence. Our commitment to bring our faith outside – outside the convention hall, make it witness to the public, prayerfully and passionately advocate for the reduction of gun violence. We’re calling it “Together for Common Ground on Gun Violence,” to fight, to find common ground. That is in our DNA as Episcopalians – finding common ground. There are many people who are polarized and they say polarized ideology keeps them that way. We in the church can find a place where people can talk.
I remember when I was in seminary at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale in the late 1970s – the chaplain at the university was William Sloane Coffin. He was leaving Yale to go to become pastor at Riverside Church in New York City. William Sloane Coffin is the primary author of the lesson that I offer at each service. Bill Coffin was touring around to all the schools at Yale and offering his valedictory moment. And he said to us – and here is somebody who had been in the trenches for a decade around civil rights, about the Vietnam War, nuclear disarmament, you name it, he was in the thick of it – and he said of all the protests that he had been involved in, it was his perception that 60 to 75% of the people involved don’t want to win. They don’t want to win. They want to complain, they want to kvetch, and want to make noise and they’re acting out all sorts of stuff.
We are here because I deeply believe that we want to join with Christ to work where God is already working, has been working. And he wants us to work with God. God is paving the way. Our faith, our hope says that God is winning. It is painful, it is hard, it is scary, but God is working. God is working to make all things new. With reconciliation, and hope and solidarity and peace. God needs your help. Let’s provide it.
