One benefit to understanding worship as God’s work within which we participate is the gift of the long view. We can’t expect instant transformation—either personally or in our faith communities. We are participating in God’s ongoing work of renewing and transforming Creation, work that has been taking place over the course of millennia. To the degree that we are transformed by the grace of God, we are microcosms of God’s ongoing work. Our private prayer and public worship are not only training us for this work, they are active and ongoing engagements with this work.
Never has this been more evident to me than when I was living in Kansas City, Missouri, when Michael Brown was shot. In the aftermath of the shooting, I found myself struggling to understand what it meant to be black in the United States. My faith in America’s ability to actually make true on its original promise of “liberty and justice for all” died next to Michael Brown, exposed for all the world to see on Florissant Avenue. My upbringing as a Baptist had taught me that my relationship with Jesus Christ was personal, that I “could go to God in prayer,” that Jesus was a friend, that “earth had no sorrow that heaven could not heal.” But I found my experience in a historically white congregation challenging to say the least. If the oozing wound of American white supremacy was mentioned at all, it was mentioned in overly simplistic terms. “We have to learn to forgive,” one white minister said, “only then can we achieve reconciliation.”
He wasn’t wrong, but it was tone-deaf for sure.
While reconciliation is the goal—and God’s mission—in that moment we were dealing with bodies in the street, a community in turmoil, and individuals experiencing an incredible amount of pain. Platitudes about loving your neighbor aren’t helpful when our society has grossly distorted neighborliness and often frames relationships across racial or any other difference as impossible and unequal. What we need is an intervention. What we need is a new framework for law enforcement that helps them dismantle the implicit bias taught to them by the dominant narratives of a racialized society. What we need is for black people and other people of color to be able to occupy public space without fear of running into the wrong police officer who either understands their role as judge, jury, and executioner or simply is so immersed in a culture that constantly sends negative messages about black people that they respond to a black person as an automatic threat, guilty of something until posthumously proven innocent in a court of law.
In need of healing and compassionate community, I attended an event organized by local community activists in Kansas City just a few days into the firestorm that was enveloping Ferguson, Missouri. A few community organizations had joined together to organize a march and protest in Mill Creek Park, just across the street from a major shopping district in the city. The entire event was powerful as the black community and antiracist allies from across the region joined together to grieve the ongoing assault on black bodies and to find a way to organize to continue the monumental task of dismantling racism from the institutions of our communities.
I couldn’t find solace in Christian community, so I found it in the street. The Holy Spirit is known to stir beyond our gates called beautiful.
I was particularly moved when an elder from the community, a black woman with her hair styled in long, salt-and-pepper locks, stood up on a platform, grabbed a megaphone, and apologized to the younger activists and participants. “We are sorry that we didn’t teach you the truth about our struggle. We were afraid we would give you a too-small view of the world and we wanted you to soar. But what we did was allow you to believe that this wasn’t possible, that the hatred some folks have for you—just because you breathe—died a long time ago, when it didn’t. It’s here and y’all are dying.”
I didn’t even know I needed to hear those words and yet, as I stood in the middle of that field, buzzing with activity, somber and mournful, her words washed over me like an ocean. That moment personified the old hymn:
There is a balm in Gilead,
to make the wounded whole.
There is a balm in Gilead,
to heal the sin-sick soul.
(Lift Every Voice and Sing, hymn 203)
I don’t remember leaving that action with any plan, any organizing strategy, any idea of how were going to walk together differently as a community in the wake of the extrajudicial killings of Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice, and Sandra Bland, and Akai Gurley, and . . . and . . . and . . . , and yet I walkedawayholdinga bit more hope than I showed up with. That a community dared to assemble to grieve together in public, to love one another publicly, and to hold each other up gave me that hope.
I also left that gathering feeling empowered. Even though I was standing in a field—an indistinguishable face in a field of hundreds—I left feeling more seen then I had felt in weeks, or months, or years. A few days later, moved to action, I picked up the phone and called a congregation in Ferguson, Missouri, and asked their priest a simple question, “What do you need?”
“We need backpacks and school supplies. When the unrest dies down, kids will need to go back to school, but parents are afraid to go out to buy supplies.”
“Got it.”
With just a few days to organize, I sent out a few e-mails and mobilized my congregation and a few neighboring ones to donate school supplies. The local news even ran a story on it. Parishioners and folks in the community who couldn’t make it to the local stores to buy supplies came by my office with checks and cash. “Get what you need,” they said.
I don’t remember the quantity of backpacks and school supplies I collected. I do remember that it exceeded my goal. By the time I loaded up my car to take the donated supplies across Missouri, they filled the trunk, backseat, and passenger seat. I remember feeling secure and powerful as I drove down Interstate 40 from Kansas City to Saint Louis, like in this small, simple action, I had resisted the narrative that hopelessness and powerlessness are inevitable realities in the face of white supremacy, like I get to make choices about how I exist in the world and I can choose to use power in a way that seeks the well-being of another.
And all because I felt seen.
That action in Kansas City was not only a way to train us for the work of dismantling racist, white power structures across the institutions of our communities, but it was an active participation therein. We gathered to learn to love each other by loving each other, to learn to stand with one another by standing together, by learning to hold each other up by holding one another up in moments of grief. This was on-the-job training, not an antiracism training in the sterile and controlled environment of a seminar room. We were live and in living color and I left empowered.
The way we worship God should not make us feel invisible and nameless, not if we believe that we worship a God who knows each of us by name and calls us “beloved.” Although we are swept up into the relentless current of God’s love in worship and prayer, we do so, not to escape this world with all its joys and pains, but to better understand ourselves and our place in this world. If devotion to Christ is an active participation in his work of reconciliation and liberation, then we should flow out of our closer encounters with Christ in the direction of freedom.
I also left wondering about the ways I might leave a gathering of Christian worship feeling this same way. We gather, we claim space as holy, we listen and respond to scripture, we tell truths about ourselves and receive God’s grace for the places in our lives where we are prone to wander, we share peace, and we make Christ present in bread and wine before sharing in the banquet of the kingdom of heaven. How do we do all of this and leave lonely, bitter, unmoved, ungracious, and overwhelmed by the brokenness of our world?
Is it because we think we are in a training in the controlled environment of a seminar room?
I was teaching a newcomer class once when a question