Finding a Way Forward

Reverend Myra Brown

September 6, 2020

Matthew 18: 15-20

So I must begin by giving a shout out to Lori Fromm for making my new beautiful stole.  Lori thank you wherever you are!

So friends I stand before you tired and exhausted. I have spent months in meetings with Mayors and police chiefs, activists, and pastors and going to court with people talking about structural racism and education, policing, funding, corona virus response, fighting to find a pathway forward for a better tomorrow.

I have also spent the last two days on the streets of Rochester marching with protestors calling for justice for Daniel Prude.  Another victim of police  brutality who died on our streets of Rochester.  I have taken to the streets before like many of you for Freddy Gray, Eric Garner, George Floyd and Jacob Blake.  And when you are in a battle for the soul of your community, for your people, in your heart you realize that the conflict that is upon you will require a move from God.  A move of the people.  Hours of dedication.  Relentless appeal and demand to transform a system that has been a mammoth and one of the last bastions of power baked in to it.  An ideology and premise of white supremacy and domination for those of us with black and brown bodies.

Last night we had to open the church to a hundred protestors, trapped in the cross fire of pepper spray, police dogs, canisters, pepper bullets in front of the church.  One person had a seizure and had to be taken to the hospital.  Another injured with a possible broken ankle from rubber bullets.  Another shot in the knee who could barely walk as she limped inside.  Others were simply finding it difficult to breathe.

The street was blocked off.  There was nowhere for them to go.  So I received phone calls up to 2:00 in the morning getting ahold of the Mayor.  Getting a hold of the Police Chief and demanding that they stand down to get people out of the church safely.  And we did.  We got them home.  We got them out.  But how fitting is it that today in the Gospel Jesus calls on us, on those of the household of faith to deal with the conflicts between them.  In this Gospel, he addresses individual conflict and gives us a blue print of what to do if I, as an individual, find myself in personal conflict with you I am simply asked to go to you tell you what the offense is, the fault that I between us, the harm that is done and make every attempt to get you to listen to me.   If I am successful, or if I am the problem and you are successful, Jesus says, then we have won each other over and what ever it was that came between us is resolved.  No harm, no foul.

But what do you do if your conflict is with a system?  How do you get a proper hearing of your offense?  Well, us black Americans in this country, we have been telling white America about an offense, a fault between us and the American policing system since its inception.  Trying to make America hear us.  And it has been a difficult conversation to have up until George Floyd’s death and now Daniel Prude.  What we understood is that the policing system in America was created around the 17^th century.  In Rochester, New York it was created in 1819 to be exact when most people who looked like me were either in slavery or indentured servitude.  And so as the policing systems around the world were being created, they were being designed to answer one question after emancipation and that question was:  What do we now do with the black people in this country?  They are free now.  We cannot own them anymore.  We cannot control them anymore.  We cannot profit off of them anymore through free labor.   So what do we do with them? It is the question that our American policing system was more than happy to answer.  We created a system, patterned after the slave patrol blueprint to monitor, to control, to exploit, to intimidate and dominate black and brown bodies through the use of state-sanctioned violence and force with the goal of attending to white anxiety and protecting the wealth and property of white people in this country.

It is the system of state-sanctioned violence against black and brown bodies that we find ourselves embroiled in conflict and what do we do with that?

We are calling on America to reckon with the blueprint that requires that if you look like me you warrant following, monitoring, reigning in, having your movements restricted.  Pleas for injustice ignored.  Designated and assumed culpable and assigned to be a problem even in the midst of grief and oppression, committed against you and your community.

If they blueprint is faulty, the solution sitting on the blueprint will be faulty.  So how do you get America to dismantle and defund the blueprint that is killing us, that is harming us, that has been the fault for us?

So Jesus says in the Gospel:  First you have to name the problem and work to be heard.  Well, we have named the problem for centuries. You may remember that 57 years ago Dr. King marched on Washington. Naming one of the main problems in America as police brutality in black and brown communities.  Years of reform and programs seem to route us right back to the same spot that Dr. King found himself in on that bridge in Selma, Alabama.  Where Dr. King and his protestors were met with police force, brutality and a paramilitary control environment.  

Jesus said:  If you can’t find that you are able to be heard in the conflict at the first level then bring in people to bear witness of the facts.  If you have been refused a hearing about the harm and the experience, bring others along with you.

Many Spiritus parishioners and those from our community as we have protested have born witness to what is happening on our streets.  To what black people have experienced in this system forever, many of you have experienced it now for the first time.

And so Black Lives Matter have called on us to consider the blueprint.  In some cities they have chosen to disband and create a different model of policing and public safety like in Camden, New Jersey.  Jesus calls it “new wine in new wine skins.” 

In other cities they are calling for defunding budgets and refunding communities of color by setting up a community chest with 50% of the policing budget to allow black and brown communities to meet its needs caused by the trauma of structural racism and systems of white supremacy and domination baked into the system.  Mental health needs, educational needs, addiction services, housing, employment needs, etc.

In our city, that ask has been for 50% of the hundred million dollar budget leaving 50% – 50 million – to reimagine public safety in Rochester.  And to dismantle the blueprint, to defund a system that delivers law and order to black people in America differently than it delivers it to white people in America.  To get the kind of policing that gives us all humanity.  All dignity.

I was thinking about how many of you are old enough to remember the Andy Griffith Show?  Right?  The Andy Griffith showed a kind of policing that we in black communities have never experienced!  Do you remember Otis?  Right?  Otis, this white man, is portrayed as the town alcoholic a he is allowed to come and go through that system with ease.  He has this relationship of trust with the jailing and criminal justice system of Andy and Barney Fife. He can be assured that he will be taken care of.  He even locks himself up and lets himself out.  He knows that the system will take care of him.  Will respect his humanity and treat him fair and justly.  And that is what black America is asking for.

So how does American move through this conflict if the first steps of conflict transformation doesn’t work and the second steps aren’t working and you are not feeling heard?

Jesus calls on us to take another step.  He says to bring in allies to bear witness to the facts.

What I can tell you is that when the police on Thursday night got in to formation in riot gear in the absence of a riot, to fire tear gas, pepper spray, pepper bullets on youth, on pastors like myself, on Pastor Melvin Cross, Jr., on Mike Bouche, on Rena Golden, on Ashley Gantt and so many others for chanting and shaking of a fence barrier that we were leaning up against, 300 feet away from the Public Safety Building, I can tell you that there were not concerns in that moment about distinguishing themselves in categories between good and bad police.

They shot at us as if they were playing some video game.  The goal was to engage in a roll of paramilitary agents against its citizenry calling for justice and expressing its rage at the death and the handling of Mr. Prude’s case and his humanity.  Each night we get to a certain point of the street and then it becomes declared a combat zone.

We are not combatants.  We are a community hurting, frustrated, angry and in need of healing and justice.  Freedom from a slave patrol model that continues to offend us.  Continues to target us and criminalize use.  I realized that in these moments that I was having as I walked with those crowds in the street – an epiphany.  We are actually funding our own terror.  Our own humiliation.  Our own indignity.  And often in this debate to be hear and to bear witness the conversation becomes about good and bad cops and it get stuck right there somewhere in the middle.

But this is not about good and bad cops.  It is about the system that will harm any cop that decides to step in to it and function from that blueprint.  This is not about good and bad cops.  This is an overdue, over haul.  A system that is broken and harming us instead of collectively helping us.  It is ineffective for the safety of all and we must change that.  It is time to make a change and we are the people that can do it.

But in order to do it we must keep bearing witness to the cry for help.  We must consider defunding and refunding the community towards a new model of equity and fair play in justice.

If in the bearing witness we still find resistance and the conflict Jesus says, then bring it to the church, to the community.  Why the church?  Because it is our faith that informs who we are.  How we are to treat one another.  How we are to love one another.  How we are to dispense justice to each other.  Repair the breeches that we create.  This is about reclaiming our identity.  We get to define who we are and not let the systems define who we say we are.

And so I’m reminded when Jesus was driven in to the wilderness by the spirit to be tempted to find out who he was and who he wanted to be.  Friends, this is our wilderness.  We are being called to find out who we are in this and who we want to be.  Jesus went in to the wilderness to three temptations: To choose God’s word over the self-interests of turning stones in to bread.  And we will be called on to choose God’s word.  We will be called on to chose God’s word of justice, of addressing oppression, of liberating those who are captive.  Jesus had a temptation to throw his body from the pinnacle denying the sacredness of the body.  Because all bodies, Jesus says, are sacred.  And when we sacrifice the body, Jesus understood that we were simply tempting God.  We don’t have to tempt God by body sacrifices; we can just not throw them up the pinnacle of our systems. 

The third temptation was that Satan asked him, the tempter said:  would you bow before me in exchange for wealth and riches?  He refused to bow.  We too, must refuse to bow.  We must refuse to bow to injustice.  We must refuse to bow to white supremacy.  We must refuse to bow to racism.  We must refuse to bow to domination.  So Jesus came out by putting the tempter behind him.  We are being called to do the same.

How we come out of this conflict will determine the relationships we forge as a nation.  As a people.  As a church.  We must struggle in love in the moments of justice to decide who we want to be.  Because a nation who loves its neighbor and its enemy as Jesus teaches, is that who we are going to be?  Are we going to be a nation that knows how to love our neighbor and our enemy alike? Or are we going to be a nation that consumes its neighbor and devours their humanity through the experiences we allow them to have.

When Mr. Prude died naked on the street, aspired our notion of good and bad officers; his death left me with lots of questions about the system that night.  Why didn’t the goodness in the policing system ranks cover his naked body and not just his head leaving him exposed and vulnerable?  Why didn’t the good cops call for the officers who were taunting him to stop?  Why didn’t the good cops check on his breathing under the sock cap to see if he was all right after a minute and then swap it out for a blue mask that they carry with them on their possession so that he would not have asphyxiated?  Why did, when officers push his head and his body in to the concrete and held his legs and knees and pressed in to his body, why didn’t the good cops on the scene, why did they remain silent and complicit until he loss the life of his body?  Where were the voices of the good cops in speaking out about these actions?  To what do we attribute the silence in a system where we believe that it is about good and bad cops?  Nothing.  Because it is not about good and bad cops it is about a system of oppression and white supremacy stamped in to it from the beginning. It is not about individuals.  

And so friends, we know that these men and woman who want to serve, who want to protect.  They are victims of this system just as we are and this is our moment to help them.  So what I have left in me is a call for transformation in the urgency of now.

We must help good people create good systems.  We must defund and refund campaigns and support them as a way out.  If we truly believe it and want justice within policing in this country, regardless of our connections to good cops.

Congressman Morelle and I spoke recently and he said, “I believe that but people are afraid of anarchy and that the policy won’t come when they call 911 and if I support defund/refund. “  So I asked him for a minute to imagine whom do you think they have in mind when they are thinking of anarchy?  Black anarchy.  What will we do with the blacks?  You see, that question is still lingering.  In this system, white communities have never had to worry about not having the police available to them.  So I thought that was interesting that the concern was that we won’t have police when we call them.

This has always been a people of color problem.  Right?  So for us – when we are calling for the police – we are not sure if they show up for us.

So what we are being asked to do, friends.  It’s hard.  It’s scary, it’s necessary and it’s possible.  What is impossible with humanity is possible with God.  This is the good trouble that John Lewis invited us in to.  The way in which the system is set up to engage black and brown bodies is often indistinguishable most days.  I would suggest, if you need to know more.  If you would like to bear witness, join us for a protest.  Get on the streets with black people at night.  Test the theories that are holding you back.  It is quite eye opening.  

I saw Jesus last night.  Standing with this community.  But he looked different.  He was being pepper sprayed as he called on a system of policing to let justice roll down like water and righteousness like a running stream. Jesus said, “If bearing witness doesn’t work, then just treat them like a gentile and a tax collector.”  But then you have to ask, how did Jesus treat gentiles and tax collectors?  He loved them.   Friends, this is a work of love.  Love for the world.  Love for ourselves and love for God.  We can find our way out of this mess and whatever we hold on to, Jesus says, will be held.  And whatever we are ready to release will be released.  We get to decide what that looks like.  But what we know is that Jesus will be with us as we bend this arch towards justice.