Embodied Hope
FROM THE RECTOR
In the opening words of his pastoral response to the death of Tyre Nichols, the Presiding Bishop wrote, “Sense cannot be made of the murder of a young man at the hands of five men whose vocation and calling are to protect and serve. This was evil and senseless.” I find those words strangely comforting—comforting because the chief pastor and theologian of The Episcopal Church begins his reflection by implicitly responding to my need for answers by acknowledging our collective inability to make sense of this tragic death. We may want desperately to understand how such an unthinkable thing can happen, but those longings remain as unanswered as Mr. Nichols’ agonizing death-cries for his own mother. (You can read the Presiding Bishop’s entire statement here.)
In addition to my instinctive search for understanding, I also feel an insatiable desire to find an answer for what unfolded in that Memphis neighborhood and, more broadly, to find a solution to the problem of evil, racism, and violence that plagues this world and manifests itself in a senseless death like this one. I want to know what can be done to prevent additional deaths at the hands of police. I want to know how to reverse the dehumanization of people with black and brown skin that has left an indelible mark on our culture. I want to know what steps we can take to rid the world of injustice. Unlike the longing for an explanation, I think the search for a solution has clear answers, though they may feel gallingly unsatisfying.
One of the complicating realities of Mr. Nichols’ death, which the Presiding Bishop does not address, is the fact that the police officers who killed him were also Black. In a simplistic, misplaced interpretation of the root cause of police violence against minorities, one might assume that by simply substituting officers of color for their White counterparts one can solve the problem. What happened in Memphis is a rejection of that. Like all insidious manifestations of the human condition, racism is not that simple.
While efforts to ensure that police departments reflect the diversity of the people whom they serve are a step in the right direction, racism itself is more than an individual’s conscious choice or intentional action. Racism is the product of racial prejudice and the power to act upon it. When institutions like governments, churches, families, or schools have been designed, led, and sustained by human beings with deeply held prejudices and the ability to act upon them in ways that marginalize others, attempts to irradicate systems and structures within them that perpetuate racism require wholesale transformation.
If our story of faith is any indication, that sort of necessary transformation is beyond our own abilities. We cannot will ourselves to rid the world of racism any more than we can will ourselves to purge the world of sin. I make that claim that not as a defeatist but as someone unwaveringly committed to the uniquely transformative hope that God has given us in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As God’s people have understood it throughout the generations—from the hardships of the patriarchs to the slavery of Egypt, from the struggles in the wilderness to the missteps in Canaan, from the Babylonian exile to the Roman occupation, from the persecutions of the Empire to the violence of the Reformation—our hope does not lie in the perfection of our best efforts but in God’s unfailing commitment to save us from ourselves.
In his pastoral word, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry points to the parable of the Good Samaritan as a reminder of hope. In Jesus’ story about neighborly concern, the Samaritan stops to help a Jewish man in need despite the ethnic and religious differences that divide them. In so doing, the Samaritan teaches us something about how God sees each one of us and calls us to embrace our common humanity. In his writing, the Presiding Bishop reminds us that there are Good Samaritans all around us—among those government officials who remain committed to addressing systemic racism, in law enforcement officers and other first responders who risk their lives to protect and serve the dignity of every human being, and in the crowds of people who protest Mr. Nichols’ death and call for radical change.
In each example of those Good Samaritans around us, we see not a human gesture powerful enough to defeat racism on its own but an instance of God’s transformative power manifest in real human relationships, breaking through the evil forces that seek to divide us. Our hope for a renewed world comes not from ourselves—even our best selves—but from God working within us until we, too, become those Good Samaritans. We seek to become instruments of God’s reign not because we have the power to make it manifest on the earth but because God has already made it manifest in Jesus Christ and now calls us to follow him into it.
Because, in the incarnation, God has taken upon the divine self the fullness of human nature, the power of God working through us is not an abstract concept or a metaphor but the real, tangible transformation of our flesh. Because in Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word, God came to earth not to be insulated from the struggles of this life but to embrace them in order that they might be transformed, we embrace our own transformation not by escaping hardship but by enduring suffering. Just as we see in Jesus, who also was brutalized and executed by officers of the state, the power of God to renew all that is broken within this world, we see in the death of Tyre Nichols a reminder that God is not indifferent to human suffering but has, in Christ, redeemed it.
We honor the life and memory of Tyre Nichols and other victims of violence by recommitting ourselves to the work of justice in this world. As Christians, we commit to that work most fully by seeking our own renewal through repentance and rebirth. We repent of the prejudice that infects our hearts and minds and ask God to forgive us for those moments when we have acted upon it. Because our powerlessness over sin has died with Christ, we recognize that we have been raised with him to a new, Spirit-empowered life. It is that life we pursue—not of our own ability but through the power of God working through us until, at last, God makes all things new.
May that vision of a transformed world take hold in our hearts and minds until God has brought all of humanity into it.
Yours Faithfully,
Evan D. Garner