by Alisha Gordon | Jul 16, 2013 | Feature |
As the country waited to hear the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial, there were a host of emotions present. Many were hopeful that justice would come quickly for 17 year old Trayvon Martin; we ended the night only to have our hopes dashed with a not guilty verdict.
I took some time to look at the response of many people while I waited for the verdict and even afterward. People around the country had a similar request: “let God’s will be done.”
There was a common theme that abounded throughout the night: the need for God’s “will to be done.” As hundreds of people tweeted and posted about wanting God’s will to be done with bated breath, hoping the verdict would offer solace to both the Martin family and supporters across the country, the collective disappointment was met with even more social commentary about how we will continue to wait for God’s will to be done and, as Psalm 94:1 suggests, allow God’s vengeance to do the work that the judicial system could not do.
I am not arguing any facts or failures about this case. The aforementioned introduction shines light on my personal views of the case, series of events, and desired outcome. I am, however, raising theological questions about God, justice, and our use of free will. I mean, how do we find/know God’s will anyway?
We could use algorithms and formulas to figure out God’s will…
Powerful scripture + past experiences / prophetic word from a televangelist = God’s will?
OR
A biblical story + prayer x a seed of faith($) = God’s will?
Here are the hard, theological questions I have about praying for God’s will in the midst of waiting for and reacting to Zimmerman’s not guilty verdict:
Since the verdict was not in Trayvon’s favor, does this mean that God was not listening to the supplication of those who wanted a guilty verdict? Was God’s will to allow the Martin family to not see justice and face the devastating pain of having their son’s killer go free? Does God, in fact, will for George Zimmerman to be a free man? Does this mean that Zimmerman’s life was more valuable than Trayvon’s?
Can we definitively say that our prayers for God’s will to be done come with the presumption that God’s will is like our own? And when these things do not work in our favor, does it now mean that God is in opposition to us? More importantly, whose will is really at work in the earth?
Is it God’s or man’s?
God gave mankind the ability to choose. Many people call this “free will.” We are able to make our own decisions, one way or the other, with or without an understanding of God’s will for any given situation. I imagine that even when we are fully aware of what we think is God’s will for our lives, we still have the ability to choose otherwise.
Zimmerman made a choice on a cold, rainy February night in 2012. Some may argue that his actions were a part of “God’s will”–Zimmerman claims that the events of that night were all in God’s plan. Others would scoff at the idea. Nevertheless, it was his ablity to exercise his free will that took Trayvon’s life.
So what does this mean for God, justice, and our collective will?
I’m reminded of Marvin Gaye’s song, “I Want You” where he croons over a carefully orchestrated melodic tune with electric and bass guitars, bongos, and string instruments:
I want you / the right way / I want you / but I want you to want me, too.
During my time in seminary, I’ve learned that God can be quite narcissistic, conceited, and totally consumed with Himself. We see countless scriptures throughout the Old Testament where God’s desire for a monolithic worship experience with His people was of prime importance and this incessant need to be chosen by His people is how much of the biblical text plays itself out.
God wants us to want Him the way that He wants us. He wants us to choose Him, intentionally.
But I’m convinced that God knew that we would not always choose Him on purpose. This free will gets in the way of seeing how amazingly wonderful it is to love God, to choose to be in relationship with Him. Our sinful nature pushes against the very idea.
Because God knew we wouldn’t choose Him on our own, He sent Jesus to show us how serious He was about us choosing Him. I’m being a bit presumptuous, but I think God knew that we would not choose Him on our own — our fleshly nature wants to reject God and our minds follow suit in a proverbial rebellion against The Creator.
God sending Jesus was the ultimate example of divine leadership: a leader should not expect their followers to do anything they are not willing to do themselves.
So God gives the ultimate sacrifice (His son) to prove that though He was asking us to make a choice to choose him (something that we could not do through our mind/flesh), He first had to show us what it truly meant to not only sacrifice but to choose intentionally. Choosing had to be a HEART matter, it could not be an act of the flesh. God gave his son Jesus as a HEART sacrifice.
So, when we begin talking about God’s will versus our own, though we have the ability to choose any way we would like, when we consider that LOVE fueled God’s decisions to not only create us but sacrifice for us, we have a new lens to look at how we engage in the process of finding justice for those who have been wronged.
We will never be able to answer the question of what God’s will is — especially when it is juxtaposed against human free will. What we do know however, is the core essence of having any type of will at all, is that every choice is a heart matter — when we live and act in LOVE we don’t have to war with who’s will is at work — LOVE is what drives our decision making and communal interactions.
by John C. Richards Jr. | Jul 14, 2013 | Entertainment, Feature, Headline News |
While commuting, Oscar Grant lost his life on New Year’s Day in 2009. A film that paints a vivid picture of how complex his life may have been.
While the nation is immersed in coverage of the George Zimmerman trial, it seems fitting that a film would premiere this weekend in limited markets (New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco) that features another racially charged, outrage-inducing incident that occurred in the early morning hours on New Year’s Day 2009. Titled Fruitvale Station—named after a train station in the Bay Area Rapid Transit system in the San Francisco/Oakland area—the film recounts the final hours of Oscar Grant III.
Grant, a 22 year-old African American, was fatally shot by Bay Area Rapid Transit police who had responded to reports of a fight on one of the trains. The officers detained Grant and a group of his friends on the train’s platform. After several minutes of questioning, Grant, who was laying face down and allegedly resisting arrest, was shot in the back and later succumbed to his injuries.
A huge hit at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the film won both the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award for U.S. dramatic film. Two days after its premiere, The Weinstein Group, a major American film studio, picked up the visceral movie. The director, Ryan Coogler, a young, driven, African American filmmaker, is an Oakland native who attended film school at the University of Southern California (USC).
The Big Picture
Thankfully, the film doesn’t focus on the events that transpired on the Fruitvale Station platform. Instead, the filmmaker chose to focus on the complex nature of Grant’s personal life. Specifically, the audience is invited to become insiders. Rather than another news story about a former convict being shot by local authorities, the film humanizes Grant. He has a mother (played by the incomparable Olivia Spencer) who cares deeply for him. He has a family. He’s a father. He has plans for his life. Does he have a criminal record? Yes. But, as Michelle Alexander points out in her enlightening work The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, there are more blacks under correctional control today—in prison or jail, on probation or parole—than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. The percentage of black males with criminal records is astronomically higher than any other ethnic group in America. So yeah, the chances of Grant having a criminal record are pretty high.
The Embattled Protagonist
The film paints a picture of an embattled young man. A model citizen one moment—helping others with seemingly insignificant daily tasks—and a brazen, conflicted, young man the next—trying to navigate his post-parole life. But he’s a human being. The film makes viewers encounter our own prejudices when we hear about stories like this on the nightly news. They become dehumanizing after a while. Fruitvale Station ingeniously reintroduces the human element. Michael B. Jordan (affectionately known to many as Wallace from The Wire or Vince Howard from Friday Night Lights) does an excellent job of portraying Grant’s dichotomous existence.
Dangers of Commuting While Black
Imagine walking through the turnstile of an urban metro transit station without knowing it would be your last time traversing the elevated platform. In the film, Grant’s mother encouraged him to take the train. It was safer than navigating the Bay Area streets in the car on New Year’s Eve. Grant relented and took his mother’s advice. He decided to do what millions of people do nationwide daily—become a commuter. The decision proved to be fatal. The conflicting details leading up to the shooting incident pale in comparison to the fact that a handcuffed, unarmed, young, black man was gunned down by authorities while laying face down on the same concrete platform his mother felt was the safer option for her child. Did the officer believe he was using a taser? Was Grant resisting to the degree that he needed to be neutralized? Those questions were for the court (and jury) to decide. (Sidenote: The officer involved in the shooting was convicted of involuntary manslaughter.)
The more important question here is what we can do to erase the stigma we’ve attached to young, black males. To some degree, I’m not exempt from this treatment (though on a smaller scale). One day, while taking the commuter train to Los Angeles to my job in a law office downtown, I ran into one of my seminary professors on the train. I hadn’t taken one of his classes yet, and admittedly I was underdressed, since it was a Friday, but I decided to speak to him, since I’d heard his class was one to take. “Are you __________?” He looked at me square in the eyes and said, “No.” He grasped his bag a little closer and scurried further down the train car.
Hold up. What just happened? I was furious. Didn’t he know I was headed down to my cozy office in downtown Los Angeles to write legal briefs? But that didn’t matter. I made him uncomfortable. I’m sure there were some preconceived notions that I was some kind of threat. At times (and this may have been one of those occasions), ethnic identity drives that threat. I contacted that professor later that day to let him know who I was and why I had spoken to him. He apologized profusely, but why did it come to that? Why did I have to legitimize myself?
My story is nowhere close to being as tragic as what Oscar Grant experienced on that fateful night in January. Was he flawed? Yes. Was he conflicted? Yes. But he was also black. And he was commuting while black. Something that tens of thousands of black professionals do every day. He lost his life doing so. Kudos to Coogler for a film that will generate conversation in America. The proverbial “race relations” elephant in the room has once again reared its ugly head. Will we acknowledge it or continue to move our “furniture” around to accommodate our safe environments? In any event, please go see this film. It will be well worth the price of admission.
Question: What can we do to alleviate the stigma attached to being young and black in America?
by Nicole Symmonds, Urban Faith Contributing Writer | Jul 12, 2013 | Feature, Headline News |
It has been a little over a month since former president of South Africa and anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela entered the hospital due to health complications. Since then, mainstream and social media has kept tabs on his progress or lack thereof. Actually I am being nice; there has been less focus on his progress and more on his lack thereof. Mainstream media is functioning like a vitals monitor letting us know every time the leader has moved from stable to critical condition and back again while those on social media are awaiting his death so that they can celebrate his life. What has been most interesting to me as I watch the coverage of Mandela’s health is the emphasis on his demise over their hope for his life.
In the midst of the headlines boasting Mandela’s critical but stable condition, sites have also published stories on the life and times of the leader as if he had already left this earth. There are also conversations taking place about Mandela’s legacy, which are being fueled by internal conflict within the family. On social media many have taken to posting articles and past-tense reflections on Mandela. All of a sudden, people who have never so much as posted a “Happy Birthday Madiba!” are inspired by his life and prematurely mourning his death. Through social media, some people have turned Mandela into a cluster of meaning in order to indicate what he has meant in their life via a series of statuses, shared links, tweets, and images which transitions Mandela from flesh and blood to symbol. Some wait for Mandela to die so that they can exalt him as a symbol rather than celebrate his humanity now. This is primarily the work of social media, which creates an obsessive nature in even the most careful person. Once something tragic happens, we take to the keyboards to express ourselves and sometimes, without realizing it, we turn into grim reapers keeping watch over the dying through our actions online. But this is nothing new; we have seen what I like to call the “active memorialization” of the living before. It happens every time a celebrity or important public figure lands in the hospital or is found unconscious in their home and it is bolstered by our use of social media in tandem with mainstream media. My most recent memory of this is Michael Jackson’s death.
News broke that Jackson was found unconscious in his home and the world anxiously awaited news on his status. I remember sitting in a cubicle at my previous job and repeatedly hitting the refresh button to get updates on Jackson’s status. The entire office was held captive and we were all hitting refresh, which was partially a result of our needing to know so that we could figure out our editorial strategy and partially because there were some Jackson fans in the room. In the midst of this, my Facebook friends were posting their favorite Michael Jackson songs, reflecting on the first time they heard or saw Jackson and mourning his death before it was declared true. Sure we wanted him to live, but our activity was propelled by the thought of his death. Of course we all know how this ended, but I bring this up as another example of how we launch into overdrive the minute a beloved celebrity and/or public figure’s health is on the straits. It is no different with Mandela. Indeed many of us want him to live because we acknowledge the contributions that he made not only in South Africa but also to the world. We’ve watched him go from Robben Island and Pollsmoor to the presidency and everything surrounding those moments. We are vested in keeping our leaders alive but sometimes we are equally vested in their death—at times like these—so that we can memorialize them in our own special way in front of a captive audience. We don’t want to imagine the world without him and yet we are fully ready to mourn.
On one hand, being comfortable with death and dying is a good thing because it reminds us of our finite nature and the fact that we don’t have control over when we might leave this earth. But when we become obsessed with death to the point that we spend our lives predicting death and prematurely memorializing people, we lose sight of the gift we have right in front of us. It should not take the failure of someone’s health for people to come out of the woodworks to profess their love and admiration for them. We ought to love people while they are still here with us, give them their flowers now, share our admiration now, and celebrate them now, not as a cluster of meaning but as flesh and blood. Let our celebration of life not be propelled by thought of death. Let us speak of our beloved public figures, celebrities, and loved ones in the present tense as if we might never lose them so that our love and admiration may ring much more genuinely.
