“What We Need”
Luke 17:20-21
Rev. Dr. Deborah L. Clark
July 24, 2016
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here. —Wendell Berry
“And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here.” “The realm of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the Realm of God is among you.”
Two weeks ago, on a Tuesday at noon, eleven folks gathered in the basement of Greater Framingham Community Church. It was a week after the shooting death of Alton Sterling by police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; six days after the killing of Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, also by a police officer; five days after the assassination of five police officers, protecting a peaceful protest, by a lone gunman in Houston, Texas. It was before dozens of people were killed by a truck on Bastille Day in Nice, before hundreds were killed in a coup attempt in Turkey, before another lone gunman killed three police officers in Baton Rouge, before a knife attack and another shooter in Germany.
The eleven of us gathered that day to try to find some way for the Framingham community to respond to those first three horrifying events. We knew we needed a public opportunity to honor the lives lost, to express outrage and shock and sorrow and to claim a little bit of hope.
We also knew this was going to be a complicated planning meeting. The meeting was organized after some emails between pastors, and then the invitation was expanded to include other community leaders who have been part of the Framingham Coming Together conversations—town officials, police officers, hospital staff. A tentative date and location for a silent vigil was set—Thursday at 7 pm on the steps of town hall.
But the day before our planning meeting, Rev. Dr. J. Anthony Lloyd, the pastor at Greater Framingham, received an email inviting his congregation to another event at the same time: a Black Lives Matter rally on the Town Centre Common Thursday at 7 pm. The young woman organizing that event was invited to our meeting, with the intent that we would somehow come up with one event to happen in Framingham that Thursday night.
We went around the table and introduced ourselves: six pastors, two police officers, the leader of the Welcoming Framingham Committee, two women I’d describe as community activists, and one poodle, who cozied right up to the chief of police. Three were African-American, one Southeast Asian, and seven Caucasian.
The Chief of Police shared what a difficult time this was for his officers. They were grieving deeply–deaths that felt personal. They were tense—anxious about the potential for copy-cat killings. They were frustrated that they are put on the front line in impossible situations and often not appreciated. The chief was clear the officers are committed to doing their jobs with a high degree of professionalism, and equally clear how hard it is to do that right now.
The two pastors who serve predominantly African-American churches talked about what a difficult time this has been for their congregations. They too are grieving deeply—deaths that feel personal. They too are tense—anxious especially for their young men who seem so vulnerable to being stereotyped and targeted. They too feel frustrated—at a nation that doesn’t seem to value their lives.
The young woman who had planned the rally on the common talked about the need for young people to give expression to their anger; a pastor talked about the power of silent witness.
There was so much pain in that room, so many different needs and longings and perspectives. At one point I asked whether it made sense to have two gatherings on two different nights—one that had more of a rally flavor, another that was silence and prayer. Rev. Lloyd replied: “If we can’t figure out how to do this together, then we are in big trouble.” He was right. So we hung in together and came up with a plan.
“Everything you need is here.” “The realm of God is among you.” In this anxious time in our nation and our world, those two lines are perplexing. We are so far from where we need to be. The realm of God—a world where God’s love reigns—seems so counter to the reality we see that we despair it can ever come to fruition.
When we used the Wendell Berry poem in our Gentle Yoga class, we noticed the paradox in it. Berry starts by describing geese in flight. They are on a journey, migrating. They have to go somewhere else if they are going to get the food they need for the next season. What is Berry trying to say when he begins with a description of a necessary migration and ends with “everything we need is here”? How do we hold those two truths together?
Jesus’ teaching about the realm of God contains within it that same paradox. As Jesus began his ministry, he proclaimed the coming of the realm of God, followed immediately by a call to repent–to turn around, to make a change. His words, “The realm of God is among you,” were spoken as he stood in the midst of the realm of Caesar’s power. What people saw then they looked around was brutality and injustice–so far from a vision of a world ruled by God’s love they could not imagine it. Jesus called them to repent–to embark on a journey of transformation–, and he reminded them that the journey would lead them right to where they started, for the realm of God was already there, already breaking in. The realm of God was among them.
This paradox, lifted up in Wendell Berry’s poetry and proclaimed by our savior and teacher Jesus of Nazareth, speaks to where we find ourselves today. As a nation, we are broken–broken by the legacy of slavery and discrimination, broken by the persistence of racism in many forms, broken by violence and grief, broken by the frayed trust between police officers who chose their profession to serve others and the people they serve.
The journey we must make is a long and arduous one. It is a journey that calls us to take our history seriously. It is a journey that challenges us to look deep within for our own hidden prejudices and requires our naming and taking responsibility for the privilege and power we have. It is a journey that leads us out of our comfort zones and into relationships with people who experience the world in different ways than we do. It is a journey of repentance, of turning around.
Along this long, arduous journey, we hear the voice of Wendell Berry reminding us: “Everything we need is here.” We hear the promise of Jesus: “The realm of God is among you.”
The eleven of us who gathered in that church basement on a Tuesday afternoon ultimately came up with a plan for what we called “An Expression of Community Solidarity.” That Thursday night, more than a hundred people gathered on the common. There were at least a dozen police officers. I saw the town manager and the president of Framingham State University. There families with children, and young adults who came on bikes. There were activists who’ve been working for peace for half a century, and folks who’d never before come to such a gathering. We were African American, Latino and Latina, Asian, Caucasian. We were people from many faith traditions and people who have never walked into a church.
We sang the National Anthem. Rev. Lloyd named the grief, outrage, and hope that brought us together. We read the names of seven people killed that week, followed by ringing of the First Parish bell, and we acknowledged there were many more people unnamed. We lit candles and sang We Shall Overcome.
When it was over, we stayed around. We introduced ourselves to strangers. We reconnected with neighbors we hadn’t seen in awhile. We talked with each other. We thanked each other.
As I think back to that gathering, the words of Wendell Berry and Jesus begin to make sense. Everything we need is right here: people who care, people willing to risk building relationship even when they are complicated, wisdom we can share with one another. The realm of God is among us–in our desire to be part of change, in our willingness to hang in when it gets hard, in our imperfect but sincere efforts to listen to one another’s stories, in our imperfect but remarkable human capacity to honor truths different from our own.
The vigil ended with a challenge: to recommit ourselves to doing the hard work of making meaningful change, to recommit ourselves to engaging together to heal the brokenness in our own community.
Those words were the most important ones of the night. Candles are nice; church bells are evocative. They matter only if we follow up with action. The journey is only just beginning.
What can we do? We can educate ourselves–a book study, a movie discussion, an anti-racism training. We can pay attention to the small ways we honor the dignity of each person–saying hello to someone whose life appears to be very different from our own, thanking the police office on the construction detail. We can work to address public policies that perpetuate long-standing inequalities: reforming our criminal justice system, strengthening our urban schools, doing something about low wages that lead to persistent poverty. We can build relationships and commit ourselves to listening deeply to one another.
The journey is long and arduous. Everything we need for the journey is here. The realm of God’s love is among us–in our caring, in our listening, in our relationships, in our action.
Thanks be to God. Amen.