Public theology 1: Resurrection, vindication and bearing witness

Public theology 1: Resurrection, vindication and bearing witness June 30, 2015

“As we are in the Christian season of Easter, we are reminded of the story of Jesus … gathering his disciples in the upper room,” the state senator begins. The moment is fraught. The senator, who is also an ordained minister and a preacher, is speaking in the South Carolina statehouse — a forum governed by the secular authority of the Constitution and not by sectarian arguments or the religious principles of a Bible story. The senator seems to be taking a wrong turn. Rather than speaking directly to the subject at hand — legislation requiring body cameras for police — it seems he’s preparing to rehash and recycle one of his Sunday sermons.

“And in that week following Easter, every disciple was there but one: Thomas,” the preacher/senator continued, “and if you don’t mind, a small recap of the story.” And then the senator provides exactly that. He summarizes a Bible story — an explicitly sectarian New Testament story:

Jesus walks through a locked door, and the disciples see something that they were amazed to see, and that is the living Jesus. And they were able to see the nails in his hands and they were able to put their hand in his side, to prove to them. Jesus allowed this so that they would have no doubt.

But one … person was missing. And that was Thomas. And when Thomas heard the news, he said he didn’t believe it. He said there’s no way. It’s impossible. Jesus is dead. There’s no way that he came and visited.

But the next week, Thomas was there, Jesus walked in, he said, “I won’t believe until I see the nails. I won’t believe until I can put my hand in your side.” And it was only when he was able to do that, he said, “I believe, my Lord and my God.”

This really is an Easter sermon. It doesn’t get any more explicitly, specifically, particularly sectarian than that. It may have been a short Easter sermon — just a few paragraphs long — but the preacher managed to cram into it the key fact of the Christian gospel, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He seems about ready to launch into an altar call.

Caravaggio
“The Incredulity of St. Thomas,” by Caravaggio (1602).

As Easter sermons go, that’s pretty good. As legislative speeches in a public forum go, this seems utterly inappropriate and almost completely irrelevant.

But then the preacher — the Rev. Clementa Pinckney of Charleston’s Mother Emanuel AME Church — pivots, and reminds us that he was also a legislator, the Hon. Senator Clementa Pinckney:

Ladies and gentlemen of the Senate, when we first heard on the television, that a police officer had gunned down an unarmed African American in North Charleston by the name of Walter Scott, there were some who said, “Wow. The national story has come home to South Carolina.” But there were many who said, “There is no way that a police officer would ever shoot somebody in the back 6, 7, 8, times.” But like Thomas, when we were able to see the video, and we were able to see the gun shots, and when we saw him fall to the ground, and when we saw the police officer come and handcuff him on the ground, without even trying to resuscitate him, without even seeing if he was really alive, without calling an ambulance, without calling for help, and to see him die face down in the ground as if he were gunned down like game, I believe we all were like Thomas, and said, “I believe.”

What if Mr. Santiago was not there to record what happened? I’m sure that many of us would still say, like Thomas, we don’t believe. I believe that as a legislature, that as a state, we have a great opportunity to allow sunshine into this process, to at least give us new eyes for seeing, so that we’re able to make sure that our proud and great law enforcement officers, and every citizen that we represent, is able to at least know that they will be seen and heard, and that their rights will be protected.

… It is my hope that as South Carolina senators, that we will stand up for what is best and good about our state and really adopt this legislation and find a way to have body cameras in South Carolina. Our hearts go out to the Scott family, and our hearts go out to the Slager family, because the Lord teaches us to love all, and we pray that over time, that justice be done.

This might seem like a simple trick — little more than an analogy and an allusion to a story so well-known that “doubting Thomas” has become a proverb and a cliché not just within Pinckney’s sectarian tradition, but within the broader culture as a whole.

But there’s more going on here. Pinckney is bearing witness to the importance of bearing witness. This story of Thomas, from the 20th chapter of John’s Gospel, is aptly chosen for its relevance to the subject of body cameras, but Pinckney doesn’t merely appeal to the story as a simple parable affirming the value of visual evidence. His argument is framed by his affirmation of resurrection — and thus of vindication. The resurrection and vindication of Jesus Christ becomes the vindication, too, of Walter Scott. The “national story” of unarmed black lives ended by police is thus bound to the Christian story that centers on the unjust execution of an innocent man and the two stories inform and enrich one another.

Pinckney did not offer a sectarian argument, expecting it to be persuasive in a pluralistic context or to be compelling for the secular business of government. But neither did he abandon his particular sectarian identity — or require any of his listeners to abandon theirs — in exchange for some lowest-common-denominator pretense of neutrality. Like any good novelist or preacher, he reminded us that the particular can be universal and the universal can be particular.

You can watch Pinckney’s brief speech here:

I can’t watch that speech without finding a deeper resonance in Pinckney’s own story. This was one of the last — perhaps the last — speeches he gave in the state legislature before he was killed this month, assassinated along with eight of his parishioners during their Wednesday night Bible study in an act of white supremacist terrorism. But the lethal violence of injustice hasn’t gotten the final word in that story.

The final word is resurrection and vindication. Bear witness.

 


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