“You value justice higher than mercy.” This sentence, at once both question and accusation, glared at me as I took the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator, a test that measures psychological tendencies in how a person perceives the world around them and makes decisions. I sat for a while, staring at the words and considering my response and its implications. I answered no, propelled by nagging thoughts not only of Jordan Davis, a black teen recently slain, unarmed, in the passenger seat of a friend’s SUV, but also of Michael Dunn, a 45-year old software developer and Davis’s killer. In that moment I decided that, as a Christian, I should be more concerned with mercy and love–not so as to forfeit justice, but in order to balance the scales. My thoughts rested on how we pursue justice AND mercy, particularly when the former pursuit appears hopeless.
Weeks ago I saw Jordan Davis’s face flash across my computer screen. I read the headline indicating he was shot and killed by a white man while sitting in a vehicle with his friends playing loud music. After that, I read no further. It’s a story I’ve seen before and I knew how it would end. I never expected that justice would be served. So I went on about my weekend, unfettered by the anticipation of a verdict that would inevitably disappoint me. But this case wouldn’t let me go. When I met a friend at the movies on Saturday evening she told me that she just got off the phone with her mother who was waiting by the television for the verdict. And when I left the movie theatre and checked Facebook, my timeline was flooded with cries of “No Justice, No Peace” and expletive-laced statements about how Florida did it again. None of this came as a surprise and I didn’t join in the chorus because I had nothing new to add. But by Sunday I wondered if our cries for justice are made hollow–and if we are made numb–because we lack a concern for mercy and love.
W.E.B DuBois asked, “How does it feel to be a problem?” We seek justice on behalf of young black boys whose lives are marked by that question. They walk out of their homes and are considered a threat even when they are just walking down the street with a bottle of Arizona Iced Tea and a bag of Skittles, asking for help after their car breaks down, or in a convenient store parking lot in their car with their friends and their music turned up. These young men weren’t armed with anything more dangerous than the color of their skin. That color is enough. As the verdicts are rendered it feels like the moral arc of the universe that Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of is too long, like it will never really bend all the way toward justice. And so our cries for justice continue and crescendo, though muffled by a system that is not interested in the rights of all individuals to equal protection, but that protects some individuals while flatly denying the worth of others. Every time the blood of one of our own is shed, we know shout “No justice, no peace” in the streets. Yet at the same time, we should question whether our one-sided pursuit for justice aligns with divine justice. We are always concerned about our own—the ones whom look like us, but should our concern be so limited? What of the mercy and love of which our sacred text speaks? In light of that what are we to do with our justice? Do we cry out for justice alone or should we always be crying out for mercy in the pursuit of justice?
Every Sunday I stand at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church and sing “Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison” Lord Have Mercy, Christ Have Mercy. I know how to do this well for myself among my brothers and sisters in Christ. But I don’t know how to cry out for mercy in the public square. I have learned to cry “No Justice! No Peace!” but I struggle with what it looks like to be concerned about mercy in the midst of what appears to be injustice. Alongside our cries for justice we must cry out for mercy for our young black men because of the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Jonathan Ferrell, and Jordan Davis–that much is a given. But I believe that mercy requires us to care for both the victim and the offender, which, in turn, requires us to let go of our thirst for retribution. We fail to cry out for mercy in cases like these precisely because to do so forces us either to care about our enemies, or to admit the fact that Christ commands it and we simply won’t obey.
Valuing mercy in the case of Michael Dunn is to remove him from our system of justice–one dependent upon the keeping of contracts and rewarding of merits—and to consider him a person still in the midst of becoming. It doesn’t excuse him from his actions, which denied Jordan Davis any mercy. But it reminds us–and perhaps Dunn himself–that he is human. From the moment that offense is committed, we seek to dehumanize persons such as Michael Dunn. We strip them of any trace back to God and blame their actions on their individual depravity without concern for how they may be in need of mercy. But we forget that we are inextricably linked together by our humanity and our shared lot in falling short of the glory of God. The white supremacism of this society is an ugly thing, but we should not fail to recognize that its greatest perpetrators are also some of its greatest victims, for they lose not simply their lives, but their humanity as well.
On Agapic Love and Justice
W.H. Auden wrote, “Evil is always unspectacular, and always human, it shares our bed and eats at our table.” Auden finds the face of evil in the face of everyday people. And if we dare to consider how our own faces can be evil, we will not hesitate to cry out for mercy. This challenges us to ask if we are any different from Michael Dunn, Randall Kerrick, George Zimmerman and others, particularly when our pursuit of justice finds us exalting ourselves above them just as their pursuit of power found them exalting their humanity above another. Jesus touched on this in the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector in Luke 18:9-14 when he said:
“Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all of my income.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”
Through this parable Jesus shows how justice and mercy works. It is like the old church mothers who remind us that “favor ain’t fair.” It isn’t always in the favor of the people who consider themselves most worthy of it. The text shows the sinner asking for mercy and being justified but, at its core, it is a cautionary tale for those who trust too much in their own righteousness. This may be hard to swallow because we live in a time when we watch our brothers and sisters of all stripes commit all manner of offense. We don’t want to align ourselves with them but we needto because we are all connected and made in the image of the same God. As much as we claim being made in God’s image for ourselves, we must also claim it for those who have forgotten. We remember difference, but without being connected to a larger community that difference would be perpetual alienation: an option that is neither practically possible nor theologically acceptable. And this is what impresses upon us the universal need for mercy: it is how we must live together. Such a consideration of mercy depends on love–specifically, agapic love.
As Christians we have a particular command to love not just our neighbors but also our enemies. Jesus declares this in Matthew 5: 43-48 when he says:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
If you blink you will miss the fact that Jesus is deconstructing Israelite law and radicalizing it every time he says, “You have heard that it was said…But I say to you…” Here he is changing things, upending assumptions and moving people to let go of personal agendas and preferential love. Therefore, Jesus’ living presence in our lives should challenge the way we love. In his book “The Priority of Love,” ethicist Timothy Jackson argues that, “A strict legalistic justice based on contract or merit falls short of God’s spontaneous agape. This is not to say that God, and therefore ethics, are arbitrary. It does suggest, however, that God’s own holiness is the key to integrating questions of character, action, and consequence into a coherent picture of biblical justice.” Jackson goes on to suggest that if justice is concerned with keeping contracts and giving no less than what is deserved, agape is incompatible with it because agape pushes us to bestow value beyond what is required and in this we see God.
We who follow this God must unbind our theories of right in order to let a fuller vision of justice and mercy come forth. This refusal to seek a justice bereft of mercy may require us to live in tension between what we prefer and what God may inevitably desire, but we are not without examples. Perhaps the party least expected to show mercy, Jordan Davis’s parents have, despite their disappointment in the verdict, shown the path to grace and mercy in their recent interviews. “God is the ultimate justice and so justice on Earth is one justice,” his mother explains, “but always look to God to be the ultimate justice.”
Single by Pete Rock, Lecrae, and Rapsody – Be Inspired
The latest shot from the naysayer crowd (I would call them “haters” but that’s played, and plus, I’m an adult) at Reach Records founder and holy hip-hop superstar Lecrae, came from Meeke Addison of Urban Family Communications. In her recent article, “Is It Time for the Church to Reevaluate Lecrae?” her argument is highlighted in the first paragraph:
If Lecrae were looking at himself objectively, even he would caution church leaders considering “bringing him in.” In his attempt to reach and engage today’s hip hop culture, the popular rapper has made some decisions that are destructive to the souls of men. Lecrae may be able to work with secular artists and not be influenced by their music content – but our youth are not.
Meeke Addison continues on, relating a story of when she was first impressed by Lecrae and his wife at a concert in 2005, and contrasts his prior, sold-out-and-on-fire-for-the-Lord stance with his current stance, which she deems as a slippery slope of compromise with wickedness. Addison infers several conclusions from Lecrae’s recent collaborations, among them are the following:
Lecrae believes that “being a Christian is unfruitful when attempting to reach the lost; you’ll be far more effective as a positive person.”
His collaborations with rappers like Pete Rock, David Banner and Paul Wall are implicit endorsements of all of their music and lifestyles ( “he’s telling our youth Kendrick Lamar is good for their soul”).
These collaborations, combined with public comments she interprets as downplaying his faith, mean that Lecrae is no longer unashamed of the gospel – the crux of his “11Six” identity.
Given the way that the church supported Lecrae during his upward trajectory, this reversal is not simply embarrassing to the church, but is tantamount to outright betrayal.
It sends the message that musical success cannot be found within the Christian market because Christian music is known to be mediocre.
Of these five assertions, the only one that even holds a little bit of water in my book is the last one, but they all stem from a fundamental assumption that I refer to as the “Sentient Song Fallacy,” which I learned about from the seminal work on Christian music ministry At the Crossroads, by legendary guitarist Charlie Peacock. Essentially, the fallacy is to believe that a song can be Christian. It’s not that Christians can’t make music that reflects our belief – obviously we can and often do. But a song itself cannot be “Christian” in the way that a person can, because a song is an inanimate object. It is incapable of coming to a saving relationship with Jesus Christ. It’s incapable of any sentient behavior at all, it’s just a song.
I believe this fallacy persists because of two important, symbiotic reasons.
First, it persists because of market forces. There are plenty of record labels who were started by Christians but have long since been bought out by multinational media conglomerates. These music companies have sustained a profitable business by selling music by Christians, to Christians.
But the market forces wouldn’t exist without evangelical gatekeepers, parents, church and community leaders, sometimes even political figures, who make it their business to decide which artists they will support and why. Sometimes, it’s just as simple as parents wanting to have music that they can play for their children that will not have profanity. But whatever the reasoning, evangelical gatekeepers depend on the machinery of the Christian music industry to help identify which songs and artists are worthy of their support. Which is understandable, especially if you’re talking about hip-hop.
There are obviously many contemporary hip-hop artists on urban radio stations and cable TV shows that no self-respecting parent would ever want influencing their child. And there are so many artists and groups, it can be difficult to keep track. It’s much easier to say, “well, if they’re on this record label, they’re probably safe.” Or, “if they record with this person, they’re probably safe.” Or, “if they performed at this event, sponsored by this radio station, they’re probably safe.” After all, there’s a reason why all those The Fish stations use the slogan “safe for the whole family.”
But this approach is flawed, for a bunch of reasons. Yolanda Adams, Marvin Winans and Fred Hammond are three of the biggest names in gospel music, with careers spanning over 20 years of music performance. Also, all three have gone through very public divorces. That may not disqualify them from ministry altogether, but I’m not sure I’d ask any of them to present their teachings on marriage.
My point is that artists are people, and people are more complicated than just what we can ascertain by putting them in boxes labeled “Christian” or “non-Christian.” Furthermore, there are songs by artists who profess to be Christians that might still contain elements of errant, heretical doctrine. On the flipside, there are songs by “secular” artists that may communicate certain Biblical truths very clearly, even though those artists may not publicly profess to be Christians.
So sometimes deciding who should be “in” and who should be “out” can be somewhat arbitrary, and it drives me crazy. This artist spent years on a Christian label and had a substance abuse problems. But this artist never recorded on a Christian label, yet released an album with a really compelling depiction of the processes of salvation and sanctification. Who should be in, and who should be out?
If your answer is, “it’s complicated,” then that’s my point. The Sentient Song Fallacy is bad because it enables lazy analysis and rewards shallow theology. If you’re a parent, you wouldn’t let some middle manager dictate what your kids eat for breakfast, right? So why let them decide what music they listen to?
As for Addison’s inferences, let me address them one by one:
Why is being a Christian mutually exclusive from being “positive”? Last time I checked, the fruit of the Spirit included love, joy, peace, patience … those all sound positive to me.
If we’re disqualifying Christian artists on the basis of their collaborations with people who do sinful things, I hope you stopped listening to The Winans after they collaborated with R. Kelly.
If you actually listen to the verse Lecrae does on the Pete Rock and Rapsody track, it seems pretty clear that he’s not ashamed to rep Christ in the general market.
Are we to assume that the Great Commission doesn’t apply to rappers? Or is it only acceptable for unsaved people to hear the gospel in a church?
First, I don’t think Lecrae thinks this. But even if he did, it would only be true to the extent that church people continue to insist their artists operate in a smaller, parallel music market marked “Christians only.” When Christ-followers who are talented, focused musicians tend to put their music in the general market, they often do just fine. Christian music isn’t the problem, it’s the marketing of Christian music.
To Meeke Addison, or anyone else who has a problem with Lecrae – please don’t think I’m just saying this because I’m a fan. On a basic level, I appreciate that you want to keep someone like Lecrae accountable. I just wish you didn’t operate with these assumptions, because we can’t have a real discussion about the music unless we address them.
Without that, we’ll just talk in circles, and that drives me crazy.
One year ago Eunique Jones Gibson had a dream, in the metaphorical sense. It was six months after the birth of her second son and she began reflecting on the future of her children and the “opportunities they could pursue as a result of the progress and achievements made by individuals past and present.” Her reflections were also in the wake of the Trayvon Martin case and her concerns as the mother of two black boys. With those concerns she started the “I Am Trayvon Martin” photo campaign in which she photographed everyday people wearing hoodies. From there she started “Because of Them We Can” a campaign which started as a Black History Month feature and then rolled into a year-long project because of Jones-Gibson’s realization that “28 days wasn’t enough.” The “Because of Them We Can” campaign features children posing as notable figures in black history and their resemblance is often uncanny. But, more significant than that is how Jones helps these children embody historical figures. An embodiment that we must hope will enable them to always recall what is possible because they’ve spent some time walking in their shoes in the most literal sense. An embodiment that takes them beyond the 28 days in February allotted for mass recognition of our history into the other 337 days where we must remember the work that was done and is still being done toward our liberation.
But, in celebration of this month that we still are grateful for, Gibson recently released the latest video in the BOTWC series which finds a young woman reenacting Rosa Parks’s bus experience. Watch the video below and check out more of Eunique Jones Gibson’s work on “Because of Them We Can.”
Around this time of year there is plenty of talk about religion and sports. People are praying for their team to win and others are questioning whether it is a prayer wasted. The Super Bowl is like a religion of its own where believers pay a high price to gather together in quasi-fellowship with the hope that their team will overcome. It’s a house divided but tonight the house will come together under the banner of the gospel for an exhibition of “fellowship, faith, and football.”
Tonight, in New York City’s Madison Square Garden, gospel artists and football players will join together for the Super Bowl Gospel Celebration, an event in its 15th year that is the “first and only Gospel event sanctioned by the NFL for the Super Bowl weekend.” This year Patti LaBelle, Donnie McClurkin, Mary Mary, Natalie Grant, and Tamela Mann will belt their hits while more than 40 of the best NFL players in the league will exchange their cleats and competitive spirt for choir robes and singing in perfect harmony. The show will air in national syndication on broadcast television statements in February. Until then, check out the video clip with highlights of last year’s SBGC.
(RNS) African church leaders are urging parties in the South Sudanese conflict to respect places of worship, after rebels attacked and looted church compounds in the town of Malakal.
The Roman Catholic Cathedral of Malakal was looted at gunpoint, forcing priests and civilians to flee, a regional church leader said.
Catholic and Presbyterian churches, a hospital and an orphanage have become safe havens for refugees escaping the fighting in the city.
“I came to know myself what it means to be asked for something under the threat of a gun when a group in uniform stopped me on the way from the hospital to the church,” said one Catholic priest, who did not give his name because he fears for his safety. “They blocked me and took my watch and a key.”
The conflict began Dec. 15 after President Salva Kiir alleged that his former deputy Riek Machar was planning a coup and arrested several senior politicians. (Seven of the 12 politicians arrested then were released Wednesday.) Since the conflict started, soldiers loyal to Kiir and rebels aligned with Machar have been engaged in bloody battles across the country.
The fighting has taken on an ethnic dimension, pitting Kiir’s Dinka tribe and Machar’s Nuer one.
Fighting has been heaviest in Malakal, which is seen as a gateway to oilfields in the north. Rebels looted shops and businesses there in mid-January before turning to homes and churches.
“We urge the fighters to respect the places of worship,” said the Rev. Ferdinand Lugonzo, general secretary of the Association of Member Episcopal Conferences in Eastern Africa. “They should not force out civilians who already feel safe in the church compounds.”
Churches have been providing aid to victims of the conflict with support from international relief organizations. As of Jan. 18, the Catholic cathedral in the town was harboring 6,500 refugees.
The U.N. compound is hosting an additional 20,000. More than 600,000 people have been displaced in the fighting countrywide.
“We first thought this was spontaneous and the rebels were simply looking for houses to loot, but the attack on churches, which are clearly marked, is very disturbing,” said Lugonzo. “At all costs these premises must be revered.”
Although both sides signed a cease-fire agreement last week at peace talks in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, clashes have continued, with both sides being accused of human rights abuses.
Church leaders have urged expansion of the talks to include the religious leaders and the international community.
Christians played a crucial role in South Sudan’s independence, reconciling fighting factions, providing services and building structures. The groups now fear that all these facilities may be at risk of destruction.
Copyright 2014 Religion News Service. All rights reserved. No part of this transmission may be reproduced without written permission.
Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan (Photo Credit: AP/Richard Drew)
(RNS) In the last month, many Westerners watched in horror as Uganda, and then Nigeria, enacted laws that are brutally repressive to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
The fate of a bill passed by the Ugandan parliament remains uncertain after President Yoweri Museveni refused to sign it, but news reports from Nigeria indicate that there have been mass arrests of gay men following President Goodluck Jonathan’s signing of the National Assembly’s anti-gay bill.
World leaders, including United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, have expressed their dismay. Many Christian leaders around the world, regrettably, have been largely unwilling to criticize Christian leaders in Africa who cheered the passage of these punitive laws.
The Anglican primates of Uganda and Nigeria enthusiastically support anti-gay legislation in their countries. I, like them, am a member of the Anglican Communion, a worldwide body of more than 80 million Christians. I am troubled and saddened that fellow Anglicans could support legislation that fails to recognize that every human being is created in the image of God.
Western Christians cannot ignore the homophobia of these church officials or the peril in which they place Ugandan and Nigerian LGBT people. The legacy of colonial-era Christian missionaries and infusions of cash from modern-day American conservatives have helped to create it.
Twice in the last three years, I have traveled to Africa to meet with biblical scholars, grass-roots activists and church officials at consultations about the Bible and sexuality. These brave leaders have taught me that there is no getting around the Bible when searching for the origins of the homophobia that is rampant in many African cultures. What’s more, Europeans and North Americans bear much of the historical responsibility for this sad state of affairs. As Zimbabwean biblical scholar Masiiwa Ragies Gunda has written, it is “far-fetched to look beyond the activities of Western missionaries” when considering the role of the Bible in Africa.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Western missionaries, fired with fervor to save souls in what they called “the dark continent,” sought to translate the Bible into indigenous languages so that converts could hear the Word of God, with special emphasis on the passages that urged hard work and submission. We know the result: as former President Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya reportedly said, “When the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.”
Along with the Bible, Western missionaries also bequeathed to Africans a literal understanding of how to read it. Today, that literalism continues to encourage fundamentalist interpretation of difficult passages like the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Although many scholars in Africa now understand that these passages are properly read in context of the ancient cultures that produced them, people can still fuel grass-roots homophobia by appropriating a handful of biblical texts that seem to vilify gay people.
As a result, Christians who publicly advocate for more historically accurate biblical interpretations and more generous treatment of LGBT people can find themselves jobless, homeless and in grave danger.
The situation is not hopeless. Across Christian Africa, tools like contextual Bible study, developed in post-apartheid South Africa, provide new ways to read the Bible and what it has to say about sexuality and other central issues in the lives of African Christians. These new readings of old texts encourage Christians to accept LGBT people as God’s children.
Even so, progressive African Christians are fighting an uphill battle. The voices of strident homophobic leaders in Africa have been amplified by large infusions of money from American right-wing culture warriors such as Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., who has bankrolled homophobia on both sides of the Atlantic and helped make common cause between right-wing American Anglican splinter groups and the Anglican churches of Nigeria and Uganda.
Western Christians cannot fix the homophobia that is currently gripping Nigeria, Uganda, or other African countries. We can, however, stand in solidarity with progressive Africans and support their efforts to teach new ways of interpreting the Bible and understanding sexuality. When we see human rights abuses, we can speak out. And most of all, we can acknowledge with humility that we bear our share of the responsibility for this tragic legacy of empire and insist on repudiating contemporary efforts to expand its reach.
(The Rev. Gay Clark Jennings is the president of the Episcopal Church’s lay and clergy House of Deputies and is a member of the worldwide Anglican Consultative Council. She is a founding steering committee member of the Chicago Consultation.)
Copyright 2014 Religion News Service. All rights reserved. No part of this transmission may be reproduced without written permission.
