Our Prayers For Emanuel AME Are Worthless

(Credit: CNN Breaking News, Twitter)

I can only begin to imagine the pain reverberating through Emanuel AME Church right now.

I’ve had friends and loved ones die before, but I’ve never been hunted down like an animal and slaughtered in a holy place because of my race.

I’m a white guy. I have no clue what it’s like to be black. I have no clue what it’s like to be so hated by someone I’ve never met just because of the color of my skin that they would pretend to care about something so sacred to me – my faith – just to make it easier to kill me when I least expected it.

I have no clue what life is like for the folks who lived and died at Emanuel AME Church, but like everyone else – regardless of race – my heart breaks for them today. Like so many others, all I could offer yesterday when I heard about the tragedy in Charleston were my prayers.

They were sincere prayers and I believe everyone who offered and continues to offer their prayers for Emanuel AME are sincere in their offering and genuinely brokenhearted for the Emanuel community.

But our prayers are not enough.

Not even close.

And by “our” I’m speaking specifically to other white people like me because for far, far too long we’ve offered prayers and extended sympathies for a never-ending torrent of tragedy in the black community only to turn around and dismiss the structural problems that created an environment ripe for tragedy while simultaneously going out of our way to acquit ourselves of any form of complicity.

I know, I know. You’re not racist. You abhor oppression and believe that everyone should have an equal opportunity in life and would never intentionally support racist policies or institutions. Me either. But it doesn’t matter whether our complicity has been intentional or not, as people who refuse to recognize our privileged position in life, we’ve become enablers of a climate in which oppression, injustice, and death thrive because when tragedy does strike the black community and change is demanded, too many of us white folks go out of our way to come up with justifications for police brutality, rationalizations for economic oppression, and explanations for why it’s “their fault” or why new laws won’t help, never seeming to realize that in doing so we become enablers of future tragedy by ensuring that nothing actually changes to prevent such evil from ever occurring again.

It’s a sad reality captured perfectly in a monologue by Jon Stewart that’s gone viral. It’s worth the 5 minutes it takes to watch. Seriously, watch it now. I’ll wait.
 
 
For those without 5 minutes to spare, Stewart hits the proverbial nail on the head when he says…

I honestly have nothing other than sadness that once again we have to peer into the abyss of the depraved violence that we do to each other and the nexus of a just gaping racial wound that will not heal yet we pretend doesn’t exist. I’m confident though that by acknowledging it—by staring into it—we still won’t do jack shit. That’s us. And that’s the part that blows my mind…What blows my mind is the disparity of response. When we think people that are foreign are going to kill us and us killing ourselves…We invade two countries and spent trillions of dollars and lost thousands of American lives and now fly unmanned death machines over like five or six different counties, all to keep Americans safe. We’ve got to do whatever we can—we’ll torture people. We’ve got to do whatever we can to keep Americans safe. But nine people shot in a church— ‘Hey, what are you going go to do? Crazy is as crazy is, right?’ That’s the part that, for the life of me, I can’t wrap my head around. And you know it’s going to go down the same path.

Stewart is exactly right.

We can offer our most eloquent and heartfelt prayers at church, but if they’re not accompanied by real, tangible action that takes us down a different path, then our prayers are just empty, worthless words.

Of course we should pray for our brothers and sisters and petition God on their behalf, but God isn’t going to magically make everything better. That’s not how God operates, at least not the God of the Christian faith. The God of the Christian faith works through ordinary everyday people, disciples who follow in the footsteps of Jesus and act as the hands and feet of God in the world, putting prayer into action in order to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth just as it is heaven.

In other words, particularly as Christians, we need to put up or shut up.

We need to be agents of change or we need to stop pretending to be surprised every time yet another preventable tragedy occurs because after the last one happened we fought kicking and screaming to make sure no structural change happened and no new laws were passed that might have actually changed things.

Now, don’t hear me wrong. The work of the Kingdom is by no means just the work of white people. It’s the work of all of us together, regardless of race. Likewise, this plea to act is most definitely not a call for white saviors to swoop into places like Charleston and save the day. We’ve had plenty of white saviors and plenty whitening of the Savior.

This a plea to my fellow white people to stop being so dismissive of black pain and start actually listening to what the black community has to say and then act in response and with humility to whatever they ask us to do.

As my friend Nish Weiseth so eloquently puts it,

Our black brothers and sisters have been trying to tell us for generations, GENERATIONS, that there is a problem. They’ve been trying to tell us that they’re hurting, marginalized, oppressed, violated, killed, for being black. For the last 2 years, they’ve been chanting “Black Lives Matter!!” Because we have forgotten. We’ve drowned them out. We’ve turned a blind eye to their anguish and oppression. We have whitewashed our history and say things like, “we live in a post-racial society.”
 
When we say “All Lives Matter” in response to our black brothers and sisters, it looks like we just rolled your eyes at the black community and told them they’re being silly.
 
Their pain is not silly. Their oppression is not silly. The murder and violence perpetrated against them because of their skin color is not silly. It’s horrifying. It’s not something we can brush off. ESPECIALLY not as believers.
 
Their pain must become our pain, too.

Their pain can only become our pain when we – white people – stop with the excuses and justifications and rationalizations and start listening to, acknowledging, and affirming the black community. Or to put it another way, we have no right in the white community to talk about the slain victims of Emanuel AME as our brothers and sisters if we never treated them like brothers and sisters before they were gunned down.

Don’t get me wrong, I know there are good people offering genuinely brokenhearted prayers for Emanuel AME who never want to see something like this ever happen again. But change will never come if we’re not even willing to listen to the cries of the black community. And if we do listen, but don’t respond with humility and sacrifice, change will still never come. Until we are willing to work together to take real, tangible steps to address the structural, legal, and cultural issues that are our tearing our nation apart one black life at a time, change will never come.

Of course we should keep on praying in the meantime, but until we’re willing to invest more of ourselves into the lives of our black neighbors than the effort it takes to click “share” on a Facebook prayer meme, until we’re willing to acknowledge our own complicity in a culture of violence, injustice, and oppression, until we’re willing to make personal sacrifices in order to seek the changes necessary to improve and safeguard the lives of those around us, until then our prayers are worthless.