Thy Kingdom Come, but how?

When tragedies occur something within us cries out to respond. We want to say something to our fellow human beings — something meaningful, something we hope can temper the feelings of grief and despair one feels in the wake of great loss. But following last Wednesday’s massacre, I am once again painfully reminded of the poverty of language.

Like many of you, I felt compelled to share a thought or prayer via social media. This desire was compounded by the fact that Rev. Clementa Pinckney, lead pastor of Mother Emmanuel A.M.E., was attending the seminary of which I am a recent graduate. In the wake of the shooting friends and classmates shared memories of Rev. Pickney. Stories of the ways his presence or words touched them. Not having met Clementa, I had nothing to offer but a prayer for the speedy in- breaking of God’s kingdom, where racism and gun violence are no more.

People were quick to respond to my post, and like many articles and blogs written this week, their comments tended to fall into one of two categories. Either, they adopted a passive commitment to praying for the end of racism. Or, they questioned the efficacy of prayer and emphasized that the kingdom is something we must build. In effect, the religious response to last Wednesday’s shooting is a microcosm of a much larger question we have to wrestle with, namely, what is the role of religion in the fight for justice? Is our response to individual and systemic evil confined to spiritual realm? Or does it extend into the political arena? Put simply: are we theological commentators or kingdom builders?

Don’t get me wrong, I acknowledge that there is nuance here. I don’t want to oversimplify the church’s response to justice issues. At the same time, I think if we took an honest assessment of our particular faith communities, we would find that they regularly privilege one of these perspectives over the other. So why do some of us turn almost exclusively to prayer while others charge ahead to “build the kingdom” here?

On the one hand, defaulting to a disembodied spirituality is an understandable response to events like Charleston. When the  news breaks that a young white man walks into a bible study and murders nine African-American worshippers, we are confronted by our incapacities. We can hardly articulate how we feel let alone identify how to take action. The loss, the outrage, the injustice of it all is too great for our minds to comprehend or hearts to grieve. We are paralyzed by the layers of systemic racism, economic inequality, and fear that need to be dismantled in order to avoid similar events in the future. It’s nothing if not an uphill battle.

And if — like me— you think you are safe from ever having to grapple with these issues, think again. Only two days after the shooting in Charleston, an unhoused man was murdered on the steps of the building where I work. Joel Johnson was only 53 years old when he was stabbed in his sleep last Saturday, by another unhoused man who (mistakenly) believed Johnson owed him $40. Yes, you read that correctly. A man was killed over $40. Members of our church and a nearby non-profit had tried to help Joel, offered him shelter and access to resources. But the effects of chronic homelessness and institutional racism made Joel resistant to outside help.

I keep asking myself: what can I do when evil looms as large as racism and as small as a forty dollar debt? Even when we act with the best intentions we frequently find that the world is out of our control. And while I intellectually reject the notion of an interventionist God, in times like these I can’t help but wish a third party would step in. Where is the Deus ex machina when you need one?

On the other hand, at the heart of activism is an ever present struggle with disillusionment, despair, and burnout. Change on a macro-level happens with great persistence over long periods of time. Perhaps even more frustrating: change takes cooperation, compromise, and usually some kind of self-sacrifice — be it time, money, or the hope of success.

In her book Faith-Rooted Organizing, activist Alexia Salvatierra tells the story of a group of impoverished women from the Philippines who worked for a sugar plantation. While these women worked long arduous hours in the fields, they received so little pay that they were unable to meet their children’s basic needs. In an act of resistance, the workers decided to plant banana trees around their huts to gain some control over their access to food. The managers of the plantation promptly tore the trees out of the ground. Angry and disappointed, Alexia recalls asking one of the women: “When will you win?” “Soon,” said the woman. “In the time of my daughter’s daughter. Soon.”

As I turn these two responses to Charleston over and over again in my head, I begin to wonder if there is a third way. A proactive response to justice that neither evades individual/collective responsibility, nor assumes that our efforts can resolve problems beyond our control.

I may have found one answer to this question in a recent On Being interview with Jean Vanier, founder of the L’Arche community. Vanier tells the story of meeting an American businessman who is intrigued by L’Arche’s ability to transform the hearts and minds of its members across the world. The man tells Vanier, “Give me your formula and I can create 300 new communities in five years!” Surprisingly, Vanier responds by saying that L’arche doesn’t want to change the world:

“What we can do is what Gandhi says, we can’t change the world, but I can change. And if I change, and I seek to be more open to people and less frightened of relationship, if I begin to see what is beautiful within them, if I recognize also that there’s brokenness because I’m also broken, and that’s OK, then there’s something that begins to happen…What has happened, what I sense for the future of our poor little world, with all its ecological difficulties and financial difficulties, that maybe the big thing that’s going to happen is that little lights of love will spread over the country. Little places where people love each other, and welcome the poor and the broken. Where each other, we give to each other their gifts, and have these little, little places… And if there are sufficient number of little lamps in each village or each city and parts of the city, well then the glow will be a little bit greater.”

He summarizes his sentiments by noting simply: “L’Arche is not a solution but a sign.”

I’m not entirely sure what Vanier means here, but I think the distinction might be similar to the Christian understanding of sacraments. A sacrament is a sign that communicates what it represents; a symbol of the presence of grace coming to fulfillment. If we understood the kingdom of God as a sacramental reality, our response to injustice would both acknowledge that the world we desire is yet to be fully realized, while simultaneously demonstrating its immanence through personal and communal transformation. Perhaps, like grace, the kingdom is a gift born of God’s love for the world. A gift we must learn to receive. And if Vanier is right, as we receive it something begins to happen. We become more open, less frightened of relationship, able to accept the brokenness and vulnerabilities of others because we recognize our own brokenness. We are transformed and through our transformation we transmit a vision of what could be.

When tragedies occur something within us cries out to respond. I pray that moving forward from Ferguson, Baltimore, and now Charleston, we remember that we are both vehicles and recipients of grace. People called to pray for and enact the kingdom of God coming into being right here, among and within us. And when we fail or encounter setbacks, as we sometimes do, we remember that God abides with us.  May we learn how to gracefully receive the precious gift of God’s kingdom,  and may the darkness flee from the light of our loving.