Mark 4 v.37 “a great gale arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped.”... A great gale arose in the
Charleston Emmanuel African American Methodist Church on
Wednesday evening of this week. At the weekly bible study, starting at 8 o’clock, a young white man came in and sat in on the meeting. After an hour or so of attending, he started to get aggressive and then opened fire killing nine of the twelve church members, including the minister the
Reverend Clementa Pinckney. This unspeakable murder of the innocent in a place of worship and at a time of prayerful reflection is hard to comprehend. It is a grotesque tragedy of twisted, corroded humanity. It was being spoken of very quickly by the police department of Charleston as a ‘hate crime’ and it has subsequently become apparent that this is very much the case. According to a friend, Dylann Roof was openly a white supremacist and expressed extreme racist views about black people claim ing that black people were “bringing down the white race”.
This was the way he thought. He also advocated for the reintroduction of segregation.
Dylann Roof lived some 120 miles away from the place where he committed the murders. Charleston has a reputation as being a very densely churched town with a high level of religious observance, also as a friendly place to live. Emmanuel church is also an iconic place across the US south as regards black presence and black history. The church was born in the terrifying days of slavery and the organised subjugation of black people. It played host to a key group of insurrectionists who rose up in protest at their enslavement in the nineteenth century. They were put down mercilessly and the church was burnt down. But the church was rebuilt and the people rose again. They rose up again in the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King addressed a rally from the church steps. It is likely that the church was singled out by
Roof for this very reason.
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What is also being said, is that Charleston continues to experience significant racial tension. Behind this ‘violent storm ’ of Wednesday night there lie troubled and troubling undercurrents that still run through the life of the place. Only two months ago a young unarmed black man, Walter Scott, was killed by a white police officer in
North Charleston. The officer is now charged with murder. What has happened brings into relief a long and painful history. It exposes white violence in the present and from the past, and re-opens a deep wound....
A great gale has arisen. It is being said, however, including by the
President of the nation that people will rise again once more. As so many times before, against the backdrop of white terror, the voice of black defiance, resilience and passion speaks out. The question is, who’s listening and who’s doing anything to change things?
In the opening chapters of Mark’s gospel, Jesus is depicted as “one with authority” who heals, casts out unclean spirits and banishes demons.
Throughout the gospel we see him pitched in a thinly-veiled battle against the forces of Satan, evil and chaos. And we should not forget that Mark’s audience faced many significant evils, of poverty, Roman oppression and everyday hardship. And we are to imagine, I think, a mindset that identifies the forces of evil as existing within people and the created order as well as in any independent being such as Beelzebul. Thus the unruly forces of nature, such as the regular storms on Lake Galilee, are just as much a manifestation of evil as are symptoms of illness or possession in individuals. Therefore Jesus’ power over the elements is as important as his ability to command the spirits and banish the demons. In the gospel there is a single narrative about Jesus’ power and authority over evil. And we can pick this up from the text itself because in Mark chapter one, when Jesus heals a man with an unclean spirit in the synagogue at
Capernaum, afterwards w e are told that “they were all amazed”, and said,
“he commands even the unclean spirits and they obey him.’” That sounds very familiar with reference to today’s gospel, in which Jesus is in the
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boat with the disciples as the storm is stilled, and we are told, “they were filled with great awe and said to one another, ‘who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?’” The parallelism is unmistakeable, and it tells us that we are looking at the same phenomenon, the authority of
Jesus over evil. This narrative only comes to its full fruition, of course, on the cross. This is the decisive moment when the power of evil is finally overcome through the power of suffering love, and when the Lord rises again.
What the narrative in Mark points us towards, is that humans and human communities are necessarily caught up in a drama of contending with the forces and impact of evil. And within this drama we are to take very seriously both the power of evil, that goes aroun d “as a roaring lion seeking whom it may devour”, and the opposing, defiant power of Christ to withstand and ultimately to overcome evil. The battle must be engaged because the final victory is still to be won. This is a state of being that we may recognise in our own experience and as we observe the world around us..
Whereas the language of evil, and indeed possession, is less prevalent now than in biblical times, it is interesting that we still find ourselves resorting to it when terrible things happen and when human behaviours go beyond a point of rationality and the explicable. Charleston is a case in point. It is a case in point because of a devastating act of murder and hatred. It is also a case in point in relation to the matter of racism and its capacity to both inspire acts of brutality and inhumanity and to impose a matrix of distortion and lies, constraints and oppressions and to deface humanity. The language of evil becomes very apposite when racism is being considered.
In connection with white racism in the context of North America,
Charleston knows that whilst it may be a friendly place to live, it has
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matters to which it has to attend. One of their state senators Thomas
McKelvine acknowledged this week , “ we do have an issue with race relatio ns”. In a Radio 4 report on Friday morning a pastor of a neighbouring church Reverend Joe Darby was interviewed. It was put to him that some say it’s about a gun problem and others say it was the actions of a lone wolf. His reply was very clear. He said th at it’s not about guns, and it’s not just about Emmanuel church, because attacks of this kind have been happening in synagogues and mosques as well. And it’s not about lone wolves. “When there are that many wolves,” he said, “it’s a pack and a pattern.” The interviewer went on to say that what he was hearing from the pastor and others, was that the attack had come about in their opinion because prejudice and demonisation of non-whites was both tolerated and even encouraged by those in authority. This turns us back of course to the spectre of racism, and racism in its most pernicious form, hidden in the structures of social organisation, economic outcomes and guarded access, and hidden too in the presuppositions and sometimes ignorant, sometimes wilful mindsets of people.
What we have witnessed already is a community assaulted by evil that has demonstrated its resilience and powerful faith in God and in the future. Since we have also witnessed the horror of white racism, we are confronted with this question that as we watch and listen, what if anything is going to change – either about us or within us, especially those of us who are white? Since we have identified the evil and joined ourselves to
Christ who gave his life to draw the power of evil, what can we do to contribute to the dethroning of evil?
And perhaps, surprisingly, there is I think much we can go away and ponder for good – because what’s at issue is not just about North America, it concerns Western Europe, including the
UK, and other white-majority and white-dominated nations albeit in particular ways in each context. And the matter I think we can usefully address revolves around the comment that what happened in Charleston
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had its roots in the stance of the white-dominated authorities of the state and the town – that prejudice and demonisation of non-whites was tolerated. And the first thing we notice here is that this is an issue not for black people, but for white people. It is we who tolerate – for the most part. And the question is why? Why, why is manifest evil tolerated, be it in the form of violent racial hatred or hidden racism – even though much has happened to turn back the tide of hatred and subjugation?
And in answer, very briefly, two potential reasons come to mind. The first is, I would contend, that we white people are prisoners of history. To my observation and in my experience, we are prisoners of our black and white history.
Whereas to a large extent black people have had to face their own history because they have had to live it and defy it, most white people and white communities that I have ever known, have not – and I speak here for myself and what I consider to be my own community. We have neither faced the reality of black suffering nor have we plumbed the depths of white terror. The good news, however, is that I think this is work that all we white people can do, and do very profitably, if we are willing. The second reason why I think the evil of white racism is ‘tolerated’, is the maintenance of white privilege. As we have observed already, racism is often most potent in its hidden, veiled processes , in its capacity to lure people into falsified, distorted ways of living, in this case accepting and choosing to maintain a status quo that suits us white people all too well.
There is not time to look closely at this today, and I would be happy to return to the theme another time, but suffice to say here, there is much good, I think, that could come if the privileged – in this case the white privileged – could (a) face up to the unearned benefits we have accumulated and cling to and (b) that we might be prepared to forego what has become an assumed inheritance, almost a birthright. I am not naive enough to think that white America or white Britain is about to stand back easily or quickly from its many holds on the levers of power, privilege and advantage, but if Christ calls us to confront evil, and it is the
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evil of white racism that is before our eyes, there is not nothing that can be done . There is scope for us to acquire a renewed and deeper understanding of the history we belong to and of what needs to happen for the evil of white racism to be dethroned – for the roaring lion to be silenced and banished. In the great storm that is white racism, then, when we white people cry out, “teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”, let us remember that “he woke up and rebuked the storm and said to the sea, ‘be still’ and there was a dead calm. And then he said to them, ‘why are you afraid, have you still no faith?’” For every step we take in the battle against this evil in Christ’s name, he will honour.
Reverend Julian Francis
21.6.2015.
1992 Words
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