MIKE ANGELL
How Can I
Live Peacefully
with Justice?
Copyright © 2020 by Mike Angell
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.
Unless otherwise noted, the scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission.
All rights reserved worldwide.
Church Publishing
19 East 34th Street
New York, NY 10016
Cover design by Jennifer Kopec, 2 Pug Design
Typeset by Denise Hoff
A record of this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN-13: 9781640652101 (pbk.)
ISBN-13: 9781640652118 (ebook)
Printed in Canada
Dedicated to all the folkswith whom I have marched(in church or the streets)and especially to Ellis and Silas.
Contents
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3
4
5
Epilogue
It may seem odd that a priest from one of America’s most violent cities has been asked to write a book of guidance about peace. The image of St. Louis around the world has been reshaped in recent years. I moved to St. Louis, Missouri, seven months before Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson. The story of Michael’s death, the protests, the media attention, the questions raised are well-known. It would be impossible to write about peace from Missouri without reflecting on the events of August 2014 and what they revealed about our city, our nation, our world.
I chose that word “revealed” carefully. Michael’s death and the protests surrounding it seemed to surprise the world. In parts of my community, Michael’s death was experienced not as an anomaly, but as an uncovering. This is a violent city. In 2017 the Guardian newspaper named a stretch of Natural Bridge Avenue, just a few miles from where Michael died, the center of America’s gun violence epidemic. Of course, yard signs in St. Louis proclaim “Black Lives Matter,” but on the city’s north side, another sign is even more common. It reads: “We Must Stop Killing Each Other.” St. Louisans know we have a problem with violence. In the months that followed August 2014, the world would learn about a specific violent dynamic at play in our streets.
What was uncovered in the streets, on social media, and over live television was the dynamic of fear that exists between Black residents and the police. This fear wasn’t new. This fear was generational. In the months that followed, the deaths of Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Sandra Bland in Texas, and others revealed that the fear wasn’t just local. Black parents fear that their children will be killed by an officer of the peace.
What was different about August of 2014, and what has been different in my city since that month, is an unwillingness to “return to normal.” Black activists, young people who gathered in the streets of Ferguson, refused to quiet down, refused to back down. As my Methodist colleague the Rev. Willis Johnson has said, it was as though a “slowly dripping dam had broke open.”1 Those leaders would not allow the city to return to police business as usual. Protests continued for over 100 days and nights. The activists wouldn’t allow the old game of covering up injustice to continue.
I watched the refusal to allow a cover-up play out in St. Louis’s streets from a particular vantage point as a Christian in the “Episcopal branch of the Jesus Movement” (as our presiding bishop likes to say). Every Sunday the first prayer a priest prays, at the front of the congregation gathered for Eucharist, is the Collect for Purity: “Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid. . . .”2 Christians believe in a God who is in the business of uncovering, revealing, exposing. At the very beginning of our service every Sunday, we acknowledge our vulnerability. Before God no secrets are hidden, no desires are unknown, and no hearts are closed.
The prayer book knows there can be no peace without vulnerability. We live in a world that pretends the opposite. We equate peace with a lack of conflict. Our tax structures are built to maximize the resources for policing in response to violence. More than half of our taxes in St. Louis go to support public safety.3 If our police officers have the latest equipment, if our local police force carries military grade weaponry, we tell ourselves, they can keep the peace. The Ferguson uprising uncovered a wide separation between the culture of police departments and the people who are policed.
Ferguson also taught us that the police were the vanguard of a deeper enforced separation. The Ferguson uprising uncovered the deeply persistent segregation. We are taught to hope, to dream, to pray separately. So how could a pastor who works so close to Ferguson write a book about peace? I would argue that we won’t know peace unless we are willing to face uncovering. Ferguson showed us how much we have relied on a false peace. Real peace doesn’t come from a show of force. Real peace is not one-sided. Real peace requires that my neighbor have peace. Peace requires revelation. We have to be willing to be vulnerable. We have to be willing to move with God to a place where we know our neighbors’ fears. We must know what keeps folks up at night. We must know what our most vulnerable communities count as injustice. Until we know what causes our neighbors’ nightmares, can we honestly say we know how to dream of a godly peace? Are we willing to work, with God, for a peace in which no secrets are hid?
Living with peace means being willing to become uncomfortably vulnerable, and working for justice requires building unlikely relationships of trust. Living with peace also means knowing ourselves. Finding real peace means facing elements of our own stories that are painful to confront. We all, all of us, need to work to reconcile our own sense of self, our own identity, if we are ever to be able to reconcile with others. Peace only exists in relationship.
The Role of the Church in Peacemaking
Scripture—especially the writings