Dear Church Family,
I am back from a lovely vacation and Ben is off on his vacation right now. So my original intent for today’s Contact was to write something light and fun about the importance of relaxing and resting. God knows we need it—resting (sabbath) is one of the Ten Commandments. But I returned home and checked news to find a story that could have come straight out of the book of Lamentations: the murder of Daunte Wright near Minneapolis this weekend. “Thou shalt not kill” is an even more recognizable, clear, moral commandment. Yet even when tensions are high and passions flaring all around Minnesota during the Derek Chauvin trial, a routine and non-emergency traffic stop could turn into the needless death of a young father. We cannot let that pass unmentioned.
In a world full of such aching, crying out for justice, we must continue to boldly affirm that Black Lives Matter. We must let our hearts break again and again with the horror of these deaths, at the hands of police, which even when witnessed by many still go without justice.
“Imagine,” someone wrote on the internet, “if we treated the police as strictly as we treat the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.” Just imagine it. I have not heard anyone say that the vaccine might have a few bad apples in the barrel and that a few deaths are just to be expected; no, we insist on the highest of standards even at the risk of shortfalls. We seek that kind of accountability for officers who literally can hold life and death in their hands and who should not be able to accidentally mistake a gun for a taser. But the history of policing is so tied up in our nation’s “original sin”, our deeply embedded racism and the violent controlling of Black and Brown bodies, that accountability is hard to find.
We cry out, “how long O Lord?” And at the same time we know we are called to become the answer to that question. It is our time as voters, citizens, members of this society to boldly demand change and not to sit by while innocent lives are lost.
May God give us the strength to pray and to answer that prayer for justice.
Every Blessing,
Talitha