Sunday, July 17, 2016 | 4:00 p.m.

Fully Known

Nanette Sawyer
Minister for Congregational Life

Psalm 78:1–16
Colossians 1:15–28

Today there has been news of another shooting in Baton Rouge, leaving three police officers dead, three more wounded, and one shooter dead. Early reports said the police were looking for two more assailants, but the New York Times reported this afternoon that police were saying there was only one gunman. He is dead.

We can add the names of these police officers—Montrell Jackson, Matthew Gerald, and Brad Garafola—to the list of names of people killed without justice. There is no justice in their deaths.

Things in our world have been so difficult in these last two weeks/two months/two years. For some people it has been this difficult for a long, long time. But for some of us, and maybe for all of us, more is being revealed to us now. The death and violence, the grief and suffering, is boggling our minds.

Questions roll off our tongues like rain water off leaves. The questions just keep coming and coming and coming.

Why is this violence spinning out of control? Why can’t we all just get along? Where is justice? Where is peace? And how can we do something? How can we interrupt this trajectory we are on and change it? Is it even possible to make a difference?

We are not going to find easy answers to any of these questions today, tomorrow, or next week. And as we look for answers, we are probably going to disagree. It’s vitally important that we do disagree. That is what makes a democracy work.

It’s what we believe as Presbyterians, too—that we can best approach the truth, that we can find the best way forward, by listening to all the voices and all the perspectives. The Holy Spirit speaks through those around us when it can’t get through to us, and it never will get through to us totally, because the world is bigger and God is bigger and our problems are bigger than any one of us can understand. We need each other’s perspective.

So yes, we’re going to disagree about causes and solutions to the problems confronting us, and we’re going to have strong emotions about it. We already do.

How many of these feelings have you felt this week?

Fear . . . that this violence might get to you next, or your loved ones, if it hasn’t already
Anger . . . that a single person in any situation can create so much suffering for so many people
Rage . . . at the perpetrators, or at the system that isn’t stopping them
Frustration . . . that it happens again and again
Confusion . . . at all the mixed emotions and intersecting issues and injustices
Sadness . . . that the death keeps happening
Grief . . . for the losses we have had, the amazing, beautiful, and beloved people who’ve been taken from us
Longing . . . wishing for something different, for healing, for a new way

These are just a few of the feelings. There are so many more, and we need to make room for them. We need to sit with them and not run away from them, because they are showing us—these feelings are teaching us—something about our world that’s real, that’s happening.

If we run away, if we slip into denial or avoidance, or despair or indifference, we will become tools of the violence. We will allow it and not resist it. We will slip into the control of what the Bible calls the powers and principalities of the world.

In some ways it can feel like we are lost in a wilderness right now. We are wandering in the wilderness like our ancestors did, wondering who we are as a people. Some things that we thought were true—we are finding out—might not be true. And it’s scary. It’s threatening. It’s disorienting. And we might have an impulse to protect. We might have a survival instinct to fight, flight, or freeze.

In a wilderness time like this, I always want to talk about love as a power that can get us through. Love, I do believe, can help us moderate our impulse to fight. It can help us steady ourselves and not run away by fleeing reality or slipping into denial or indifference. Love can help energize us to do something when we really feel the impulse to freeze, to be paralyzed into inaction because we are afraid.

I do believe that love can do all these things. Relying on the love of God and sharing God’s love with each other—that does change things.

But sometimes love is not enough. Or maybe I should say, some kinds of love are not enough. If love is just a feeling, an emotion that we feel, then love is not enough.

This week I read an article by an African American woman, Regina Shands Stoltzfus, a professor of peace, justice, and conflict studies at a college in Indiana. The article was published in a Mennonite journal, The Mennonite, on Monday, July 11, and it was called “I cannot speak of love to you today.”

She began by telling the story of her twenty-year-old son getting a burned-out headlight on his car earlier this summer. She helped him fix that right away, including looking up on YouTube how to do the replacement, and then doing it together. “We were successful—” she wrote; “chalk one up for feeling accomplished and a little mother-son bonding.”

“But,” she went on to say, “frankly, I wanted to get that light changed as soon as possible, because a burned-out headlight can be a death sentence for a black man.” As we have recently seen demonstrated.

Love is a wonderful thing. But it’s not enough to keep her son safe.

She writes, “If my son gets stopped for a traffic violation, I can’t hope that the officer who stops him loves someone who looks like him. I can and do know that the public at large, not just police officers, but educators, employers, people just walking down the street—[the public] has been socialized to view my black son as a threat, as a criminal.”

Many of us have focused on relationship-building as a way to undo stereotypes and to begin to resocialize ourselves in a more egalitarian way. We’ve worked and continue to work to really know our neighbors, to see around stereotypes, and to become real friends.

Studies have shown that having contact with people who are different from us, to relate in diverse ways, changes us both mentally and emotionally (Jim A. C. Everett, “Intergroup Contact Theory: Past, Present, and Future,” Diana Onu ed., The Inquisitive Mind, February 2013). When we interact we learn about each other and don’t rely on stereotypes. We change our thinking, and we change our behavior toward each other. In that process of changing our minds and our behaviors, we develop empathy for each other. We change our hearts, too. Then we rethink who we are—as individuals and as who “we” are. Our “we” becomes bigger. That’s all good.

In psychology it’s called the intergroup contact. It’s about diminishing prejudice and learning to love each other. But that’s not enough, it turns out.

Other studies have suggested that diminishing feelings of prejudice did not change people’s “attitudes toward policy in combating inequality in housing, jobs, and education.” There was a study in the United States in 1986 and one in South Africa in 2007 that showed similar results—that having good feelings about people doesn’t necessarily lead to changing policies and systems that hurt them (Everett, “Intergroup Contact Theory”).

I happened to read about these studies about intergroup contact on the same week I read the article by Professor Stultzfus. Her personal testimony and the scientific study seemed to be saying the same thing. If we want society to be different and people to be safer, we need to take an additional step beyond feeling love. We need to change systems.

Professor Stultzfus wrote, “The systemic nature of oppression means that oppression functions despite the goodwill, intentions, and yes, the love, of many, many people. And at the end of the day I am more interested in my son coming home alive than I am with someone learning to love him.”

My goodwill and my good intentions, even my love, does not let me off the hook with society. And yours does not let you off the hook either. We have to put feet on our love. We have to work together to make love manifest in the policies and laws and social expectations of civil society.

Now, I do think my feelings of love can help me do that. Our feelings of love, if we can tap into them and grow them, our feelings of love can subvert our impulses to fight, flight, or freeze. The love of Christ in us can give us strength and passion to carry on.

But once we’ve decided we’re not going to freeze and give in to paralysis, and we’re not going to flee from our pain and from our responsibility, and we’re not going to make some people our enemy or our scapegoat just so we can fight them—then what?

How do we put feet on our love?

Well, we’ve already started it in this church. We’ve done a lot to learn about systemic problems and injustices.

Last year we had an educational focus on the problems of mass incarceration. We had high-profile speakers come to educate us at a Michigan Avenue Forum, and we had adult education classes on the history of racism in the United States and on the problem of white supremacy.

We’ve had interfaith gatherings, including welcoming Muslims last month to present a program in Buchanan Chapel during Ramadan so that we could learn about their spiritual practices and strengthen our bonds of friendship and break their fast with them in a shared meal in Anderson Hall.

We have a multifaceted mission committee doing incredible work, not the least of which is participation in the Interfaith Coalition Against Racism, ICAR. This coalition was formed in response to the events in Ferguson nearly two years ago. They are focusing on three things: (1) police reform; (2) a reduction in mass incarceration, and (3) hosting small interracial peace circles to address racism in the spirit of the restorative justice movement.

So if you want to put feet on your love, consider getting involved in the work of the mission committee. You can find such opportunities in the “News and Opportunities” section of your bulletin under “Mission and Outreach.”

None of these things is the answer to our problems; none of them are going to fix everything, not anytime soon. But these are ways to put feet on our love, so that love is not a feeling but a way of life.

Our scripture today tells us that God reconciled the whole creation through the body of Christ, and now Christ is in us and the process of reconciliation continues.

It’s not an easy thing. Sometimes it hurts. Many of us are hurting right now. Paul said it was happening in his body too—that he was suffering as he continued the work of bringing God’s word to completion, to make God’s word fully known.

This is our task, too—to make God’s word of full reconciliation more fully known. That is the prize that our eyes are focused on.

We can work toward that prize by working to fully know ourselves and all the feelings inside us, not letting ourselves slip into denial or avoidance or indifference.

We can work toward that prize by working to fully know our neighbors, breaking down stereotypes, building relationships, and giving ourselves opportunities to understand experiences that differ from our own.

We can work toward that prize by working to fully know the systems in our society that recreate problems, regardless of the intentions of the individuals who are working in the systems. You can take out one person, ten people, a hundred people, and the system is still there reproducing the problems.

These three things—knowing ourselves, knowing our neighbors, and knowing the systems—can help us to more fully know that God has reconciled the entire creation to God’s own self through the body of Christ, already but not yet. That’s a classic Christian phrase. God has done it already but not yet. It is still happening, the reconciliation is still being worked out through us, because Christ is in us now, and we are in Christ. And we are the body of Christ as the church.

So although we may feel lost, let us remember that God continues to guide us to take the next step; to love, yes, but to put feet on our love—so that together we can walk through this wilderness toward that promised land of peace and justice. That will be the true commonwealth of God.

May we have courage for the journey, and may we have community. May we find nourishment and strength and healing, so that we may carry on, on that journey. May it be so. Amen.