GUIDE US IN THE WAY OF JUSTICE AND TRUTH: ON BURNING BUSHES, FINGERPRINTS, AND A COURAGEOUS IMAGINATION

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American history as most of us have been taught it is, as someone recently said, basically fan fiction. Or as Micky Scottbey Jones recently tweeted, it’s a myth. Sure it contains names and dates and things that happened, but whose names are included and whose are left out narrows its focus to a few mostly white, mostly male “heroes” whose names and actions get lionized and their faults get glossed over. Also glossed over? The atrocities at the founding of this country are often presented as an “oops” we’ve moved on from, because to scrutinize them too closely is more than most people can bear. Clinging to these myths is comfortable. But growth has never been about comfort, and as people who claim to follow Christ, we are called to expand our imaginations to include everyone as we pursue justice and peace. 

Bishop Michael Curry in his video introduction to the Sacred Ground anti-racism curriculum talks about God speaking to Moses from the burning bush and telling Moses to take off his shoes because he was standing on holy ground. The dirt itself wasn’t holy, Bishop Curry went on to say, the place was holy because God was about to tell God’s story. Likewise any ground where we tell our stories is holy ground. And by extension, any place where we truly listen to the stories of others is holy ground. The stories are abundant if we have ears to hear. 

There’s a painting going around social media of Anarcha, the enslaved woman who was operated on without her consent or anesthesia as many as thirty times in order for white male surgeons to perfect gynecological procedures. In the painting, Anarcha is kneeling on an operating table, barefoot, surrounded by three well-dressed male doctors. One person who shared this noted we often give status to people based on how they are dressed, with shoes being a sign of success we often then give honor to, but the person in the painting most deserving of honor is barefoot. 

Throughout our history the Episcopal church has often been seen as a measure of status, a place for social climbers, a way to boost connections simply by attending rather than a place of discipleship and formation. It is time we looked honestly both at our past and our liturgy to see both where we have need for lament and repentance, and where our liturgy and doctrine have always been calling us to work for true justice. It is time we took off our shoes--our symbols of status--and sat with the stories of those too often overlooked by society and history.

In my context in the diocese of Tennessee, we know for certain several of our buildings--probably more than several once we do the digging--were built by enslaved people. One church in Franklin has child-sized fingerprints in the original brick. Those fingerprints are a tangible reminder to those in the congregation, the diocese, and our state that the building we are in was one built by white supremacy and the brutalization of Black people. 

Not twenty minutes from where I write this is the Hermitage, home of Andrew Jackson who presided over the Trail of Tears and the removal of many Cherokee from this part of the country with disastrous and genocidal results. Would my home or church or city even be here if it hadn’t been for the atrocities done, while not in my name specifically, but in the name of future generations of European settlers who would inhabit this--the traditional land of the Cherokee and the Shawnee--with no knowledge of who they were and no connection to this land from which they were severed? 

Being Christians in the Episcopal tradition should form us into servants of justice and equity. After all, each of us affirms every time we say our baptismal vows that we will “strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being” (Book of Common Prayer p. 305). And yet, all too often we focus on just the peace part, anxious about rocking the boat, anxious perhaps about losing our political or societal power, and settle for a false peace--a perverse peace--that excludes justice. For without justice, there is no peace. Understanding our baptismal vows call us not to a vacuous peace but to shalom--which goes beyond a common misunderstanding of peace as merely the absence of conflict and instead means total well-being and thriving for everyone--should give us a thoroughly Episcopalian basis for being anti-racist.

Being Episcopalian means we must have the moral courage to pursue formation together that will “guide us in the way of justice and truth” (BCP p. 122) for all people, the courage to make right what we can make right, and an imagination large enough to create an expansive future where we work for the restoration of “all people to unity with God and each other in Christ” (BCP p. 855). We pray we might be “united to one another with pure affection” (BCP p. 231) and that “we may walk in the way of [Christ’s] suffering” (BCP p. 219). We speak these words on Sundays; will we have the courage to be formed by them on all the other days of the week? 

Our history, like any, is complicated. We have both abolitionists and activists as well as confederate generals who not only were members of The Episcopal Church but in at least one case a bishop, Leonidas Polk, whose portrait was still hanging in the building of the congregation I now attend until the tenure of the current rector. Polk was one of the founding bishops of the University of the South and his portrait was apparently willed to the congregation as part of an estate. Unlabeled, it had hung in the parish hall anonymously since the 1960s. The fact no one had looked into it for over fifty years is poignantly symbolic of the inherited and unexamined racism and biases we all must unpack if we are to live into our baptismal vows. 

This is the same church in which Pauli Murray was ordained in the first group of women to be (regularly) ordained and who since has been elevated to sainthood. Raising a Black activist to sainthood is a wonderful way of saying where we want the church to go. However, if we are to be worthy to claim her, we must walk in her footsteps as she walked in Jesus’ footsteps. We must put feet to the prayer we pray on her feast day: “Unshackle us from the chains of prejudice and fear, that we may show forth the reconciling love and true freedom which you revealed in your Son our Savior Jesus Christ,” (Lesser Feasts and Fasts p. 293) and to work to create a world that answers Pauli’s prayer:

Give me a song of hope 
And a world where I can sing it.
Give me a song of faith
and a people to believe in it. 
Give me a song of kindliness
And a country where I can live it.
Give me a song of hope and love
And a brown girl’s heart to hear it. (Dark Testament p. 13)

If we let it, our liturgy calls us to courageous formation. It calls us to imagine a better world and work to bring that into being. Repeating these lines and phrases should be wearing grooves into our hearts, habituating us to the work of justice and shalom. The path has been marked out for us, if we will only put feet to our prayer and walk into a way of living where we will not settle for less than the thriving of all of our siblings, no exceptions. 

“Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?”

And may we all not just say, but embody every day:

“I will, with God’s help.”