Many people saw and were moved by the poignant photo of Brandt Jean offering a hug to Amber Guyger, the police offer who shot to death his brother Botham Jean after entering Jean’s apartment by mistake, thinking it was her own. It might appear to be the epitome of how we as Christians ought to express forgiveness.
However, what might be less well known, as least to my white friends, is the reaction that image provokes among people of color, especially African-Americans. Many of my Covenant African-American friends would ask that white Christians not imagine that such heroic acts of forgiveness actually bring closure to the pain and suffering of their communities. That hug must not be construed as excusing racial prejudice, constant abuse of white privilege, and centuries of systemic injustice that has disadvantaged and oppressed non-white people.
In this week’s sermon text psalm, Psalm 99, from our Poets reading as a congregation, I’d like to note verse 8. It struck me many years ago when I first noticed it appear in one of the psalms for my daily prayers. It still gives me pause whenever it comes around in that cycle of psalms for prayer:
O Lord our God, you answered them.
You were a forgiving God to them,
but you punished them when they went wrong.
The seeming paradox of that verse, both forgiveness and punishment at the hands of God, seems especially important to linger over in these times. Earlier in the psalm we read in verse 4,
Mighty King, lover of justice,
you have established fairness.
You have acted with justice
and righteousness throughout Israel.
Justice seems very much the issue in that tension we find in verse 8, a tension that arises just because our God is a lover of justice and fairness (equity). If God Himself can both forgive and punish then we need to consider the truth that forgiveness does not vacate or neutralize justice. Brandt Jean can offer that hug while still justly desiring that Guyger be punished for her crime. Even more, that hug can be offered without at all eliminating the need for drastic changes in a society where people of color are hugely more at risk of suffering the kind of injustice experienced by Botham Jean and more recently by Atatiana Jefferson who was shot by another police officer just about 30 miles from where Jean died.
My white friends may want to say that these shootings and other injustices were mistakes, aberrations, not the usual course of things. People just need to forgive and move on. The problem is that we are part of an evil, broken, unjust society in which these sorts of “mistakes” happen much more often to people who are not white than to those who are. I can attest to that in regard to a recent incarceration experienced by a developmentally disabled man of color in our own congregation. He might have ended up in mental health treatment rather than jail if he had been white.
Our God loves justice. In celebrating our Lord’s loving forgiveness, let’s not forget that other love of His. In our Gospel for this week, Luke 18:1-8, Jesus declares, “And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night?” Maybe we need to think more about the Jeans and Jeffersons in our communities and worry that the promised justice of God might include some punishment for our own injustice against such people.
If we have a gun, are a little drunk, and are trained to use it….
thanks for the word to us white brethren. it’s a strength of the covenant to have black and brown clergy to help us all keep it real in these strange times.