"Massacre"

Jesus said to his disciples, “Let us go across to the other side.”

Mark 4:35b

3,446. That number resides now uneasily with the number 9: the number of innocent black men and women ─ ranging in age from 26 to 87 ─ murdered in cold blood last Wednesday evening in Charleston, South Carolina.

3,446. As the New Yorker’s David Remnick points out, “Between 1882 and 1968 ─ the year Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated ─ 3,446 black men, women, and children were lynched in this country.”

It cannot be argued otherwise. Each of those lynchings was a political statement ─ a statement about race, in particular. And a statement about ─ each perpetrator believed ─ the supremacy of the white race. That means, too, that each of those lynchings was a hate crime. Each of those lynchings was a terrorist attack designed to intimidate black men, women, and children as a class, as an entire race.

As we are still reeling amid grief, incomprehension, and soul-searching in the wake of nine sisters and brothers shot dead Wednesday evening at Emanuel AME Church ─ “Mother Emanuel” ─ in Charleston, it’s impossible for us not to conclude, as Remnick suggests, that we have witnessed a mass lynching … only by different means: a .45-calibre handgun.

But the vocabulary of the murderer is the same: “You [black people] rape our women,” 21 year-old Dylan Roof charged his victims, after he had finished the shooting. “And you’re taking over our country.”

“Our country.” Shades of the white supremacist epithets hurled at town meetings during the Obamacare debates. “We want our country back!” Read: Our country, as opposed to theirs: the country of blacks, Latinos, LGBT persons ─ all those other people not like us.

That is, if you’re not like the white-supremacist us, you don’t belong here. “You have to go,” as assassin Dylan Roof said, justifying ─ in his twisted mind ─ the Charleston slaughter.

And another armed and angry, hate-spewing citizen dispatches nine victims to join the ranks of those 3,446 lynched Americans and the gunned-down body count of Columbine, Aurora, Newtown, Baltimore, Ferguson, and Sanford.

How much longer can we go on like this?

How much longer can we go on like this as citizens of this country?

How much longer can we go on like this as followers of Jesus Christ? Certainly Jesus himself wouldn’t tolerate this status quo of carnage ─ carnage perpetuated by all-too-easy access to guns and triggered by hate.

In other words, as journalist Amy Davidson suggests, “Hate can serve as an accelerant of violence. So can a gun in the hands of a man like Dylan Roof.”

And for those who “want our country back” … for those who demand of people different from them, “You have to go” … or “You can’t vote” … or “You’re not entitled to a quality education, good jobs, and safe communities,” there is one question we have every right to demand they answer: “What will you say to Jesus Christ?”

What will you say to the Jesus of today’s Gospel: Jesus, the restless, the curious, the seeker, the explorer, the risk-taker who commandeers a boat on the Sea of Galilee and tells his disciples, “Let’s go across to the other side”? Put another way, “Let’s look at the world through the eyes of people not our kind, dear.”

Picture this: So far in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus has been healing, teaching, and preaching to the people he knows best, to the people who best know him ─ people who think God made them best.

But Jesus is anxious to move on. He’s ready to move on from familiar, safe, home territory and the trap of predictability to step into the “unknown” of non-Jewish towns and villages across the Galilean Sea’s expanse to the east in order to prove that God’s Good News ─ God’s news of political, economic, and spiritual liberation ─ isn’t just for one people, one race … that it’s not just for people who look alike or even think and act alike. As a matter of fact, Jesus’ point in crossing over to the “other side” is that the Good News is designed to pull together people who neither look, think, nor act alike in order to get them to look and think and act more like God.

Bottomline: “Let’s go across to the other side.” That’s Good News.

But forces there be that just can’t take the expansive Good News Jesus broadcasts. That’s what’s going on in our story this morning when ─ once Jesus and the disciples set out ─ it’s all-of-a-sudden, small boat … wide sea … long night … BIG storm.

In other words, the storm-at-sea that threatens to swamp their boat is recorded here as a meteorological event, but it’s also metaphor. That’s because, in Jesus’ day, people think of the sea ─ the uncontrollable, unpredictable, and dangerous sea ─ as pushing back against God’s intention that every man, woman, and child live in safety, free from danger.

Now, if you look at the data ─ and not the NRA’s scandalous suggestion that clergy who don’t tote guns in church endanger their flock ─ most reasonable people would conclude, fewer guns = greater safety.

But some of those stormy forces say that this isn’t a gun-control issue at all. The Charleston gunman was deranged, they say. It’s a mental health issue.

We have absolutely no proof that the young man was out-of-his-mind. Fanatic, yes. But “certifiable”? No. We do have proof that this was a premeditated act. The gunman chose his targets and the location of the massacre fully aware of the iconic status of Emanuel AME Church in the black community and in the civil rights struggle.

And if Dylann Roof could plead insanity successfully, wouldn’t that actually point to legislating tighter gun controls to keep guns out of the hands of unstable people?

Other forces pushing back against tighter gun controls in the wake of Charleston try to say that this wasn’t a racist attack at all … that, in fact, because the gunman targeted a church, the shootings were an attack against Christianity and religious liberty (all of a piece with the ludicrous charge that religious liberty is under systematic attack by the push for same-sex marriage, among other progressive causes, like equal protection under the law).

Look. Dylann Roof appears to be a Lutheran in good standing, according to his pastor. And by the perpetrator’s own admission, it was a racist attack. Like many other gun-toting ideologues of his ilk in the past, he pointedly stated that he wanted to start a racial civil war. He wasn’t out to shut down any religious institution in this country, except maybe black churches as historically safe havens for people of color. But the capital-C “Church” wasn’t his target.

And then, there’s the unconvincingly bespectacled (but affable) presidential candidate who maintains that what happened in Charleston was just an “accident” … that the shooter was high on drugs … that, again, the rampage had nothing to do with racism.

Well, we’ve already proven that it was a racist attack. And we have no indication ─ so far, at least ─ that this was just a drug-driven, random, impulsive attack. No, it was planned far in advance. We know that.

Factoids: Dylann Roof went to Emanuel AME Church Wednesday night, knowing that there would be a Bible study/prayer meeting going on. He asked to see the pastor, the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, who was also a state senator. Roof was welcomed into the group, as indeed people of all races and colors are at Emanuel. Roof sat next to the pastor. Almost decided against opening fire on them all because, he says, the people at Mother Emanuel were so nice to him.

But, at length, Roof started arguing with the pastor about black people. Then he took out the gun and kept firing until he did, as he said, “what he had to do.”

Premeditated, fatal racism: before … during … after.

So, there are those stormy critics who would prevent us from asking, “How much longer can we go on like this?” It’s easier not to address racism. Easier to let the good times roll for the gun manufacturers. Easier to keep the base riled up with specious threats of religious liberty under attack. Easier to stay on this side of the shore.

But the critics make easy targets for folks like me. They make it easy for us not to address our own racism. Make it easier for us to say that we don’t need to engage in a dialogue about race or even tighter gun controls in this country, because we’re already converted, immune to change.

And yet, Jesus says to us as well, “Let’s go across to the other side.”

Accompanying Jesus, then, to the “other side” means asking ourselves, “To what extent do we believe that the life of every single person in this church, in this community, in this country matters equally? Black, white, Jewish, Muslim, gay, straight, transgender, none-of-the-above. Even Dylann Roof’s life ─ so easily diminished now by his own murderous hands ─ do we believe his life matters equally?

… because we have no choice now. We have to answer these questions ─ each of us ─ for ourselves … all of us together because:

What would this country look like without a trace of racism?

What would this country look like if all Constitutionally-eligible citizens had equal access to the polls?

What would it look like if the citizens of this country had highly-restricted access to guns?

What would it look like on all these issues? In other words, how would it look like accompanying Jesus to the “other side”?

… because how long can we go on like this?

We can begin ─ now ─ to move on with Jesus, going across to the “other side” by first praying:

Grant, O God, that your holy and life-giving Spirit may so move our own hearts and the hearts of the people of this land, that barriers which divide us may crumble, suspicions disappear, and hatreds cease; that our divisions being healed, we may live in justice and peace. Then lead us, we pray, at the last, to that heavenly country, where we may be partakers in the inheritance of the saints in light, in the blessed company of the Martyrs of Charleston:

The Rev’d Clementa Pinckney
Ethel Lance
Sharonda Coleman-Singleton
Depayne Doctor
Cynthia Hurd
Susie Jackson
Tywanza Sanders
The Rev’d Daniel Simmons, Sr.
Mira Thompson

All this we ask in the Name of Jesus Christ, our Savior. Amen.