In her incredible book, “Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God”, Kelly Brown-Douglas writes, “Essentially, a free black person contests the notion that the world as it is is the way that God ordained it to be. A free black body literally points to the possibility of a different cosmic order.” The pernicious story of Anglo-exceptionalism and anti-blackness in the United States is one that can operate quietly in the consciousness of the dominant culture, until confronted, often violently, by a story of freedom, liberation, and aliveness. At those moments, the story becomes quite loud indeed.
Such a confrontation is on display now as the US faces yet another murder of a black man at the hands of police officers. Tyre Nichols.
Policing culture in the United States is rooted in a story of anti-blackness and the belief that black bodies are guilty by default. And the dominant culture in the United States supports this policing culture with its dollars, its equivocation, and its silence. But we who benefit from this culture also support it through our hyperactive attempts to ease collective guilt, identify scapegoats, and distance ourselves from responsibility in response to the violent defense of the dominant story.
This coming Sunday, the lectionary gifts us with Isaiah 58:1-9 – a text that speaks directly to this performative hyperactivity:
58 Shout out; do not hold back!
Lift up your voice like a trumpet!
Announce to my people their rebellion,
to the house of Jacob their sins.
2 Yet day after day they seek me
and delight to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness
and did not forsake the ordinance of their God;
they ask of me righteous judgments;
they want God on their side.[a]
3 “Why do we fast, but you do not see?
Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?”
Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day
and oppress all your workers.
4 You fast only to quarrel and to fight
and to strike with a wicked fist.
Such fasting as you do today
will not make your voice heard on high.
5 Is such the fast that I choose,
a day to humble oneself?
Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush
and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?
Will you call this a fast,
a day acceptable to the Lord? (Isaiah 58:1-5)
As we confront the violent reaction of our dominant story to the possibility of a different cosmic order, I pray that we will heed the words of God in Isaiah’s text. I pray that we who belong to the dominant culture, and who benefit from the world as it is, will see the ways that our attempts to abdicate responsibility for the story that killed Tyre Nichols with the pointing of fingers, the performative outrage, and faux-resignation to the accepted order are fasts wholly unacceptable to God.
God does not need our quarreling, our rhetoric, or our performative outrage. Tyre Nichols does not need our self-interested fasts. What is the fast that the Lord chooses?
6…to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the straps of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
7 Is it not to share your bread with the hungry
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them
and not to hide yourself from your own kin? (Isaiah 58:6-7)
May we who follow Jesus, who himself was murdered by authorities empowered by a story of domination, loose the bonds of injustice in our own communities. May we look to our own neighborhoods, precincts, and cities and through our public actions, our votes, and our dollars demand a new story – one that delights in the freedom and the aliveness of all people.
8 Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up quickly;
your vindicator[b] shall go before you;
the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.
9 Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;
you shall cry for help, and he will say, “Here I am.” (Isaiah 58:8-9)
Tyre Nichols.
If you are in the Twin Cities, please consider supporting the work of Communities United Against Police Brutality Communities United Against Police Brutality (cuapb.org)
Talk to your neighbors. Talk to your city council. Talk to your congregation. Let us enter a fast worthy of God.
