Justice - A Conversation

“You ever been to Hoist?”

“No.”

“It’s great, really. You hike both loops and you can be out there for two days, three if you take it slow. The last time I was there though I spent the whole night absolutely convinced that a bear was rifling through my things.”

“You’re not really selling it,” the younger man said, shifting in the seat.

“They have pine martens there.”

“I’m not really sure what those are.”

“Or at least the sign in the parking lot said they did. I didn’t actually see them. They’re like a weasel, I think.”

The dawn broke over the freshly tilled fields and a few a few other cars had joined them on the road. The driver, the older of the two men, merged into the left lane to pass one of the many semis with which they shared the road. He wore a dark brown beard that gave his face the air of distinction and poise. Progressing ever northward they passed an exit sign for Mt. Morris, a suburb of Flint.

“It’ll be great. The weather is beautiful this time of year. Cool at night, perfect in the day,” he said.

The rail-thin younger man rested his head on the window and stared down at his phone.

“I’m so tired of being sad,” he intoned.

“Huh?”

“Oh, just Twitter.”

“What now?”

“It’s like every time I go on, something else horrible has happened or someone has said something horrible.”

“Perhaps you should stop going on Twitter?”

“And bury our heads in the sand?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah I know. It’s just. I mean I’m torn. Part of me absolutely wants to do that. To just turn it off and walk away. But then I always wonder: do I have a moral obligation as a believer to represent justice and the good happening in the world? Do I tacitly endorse things that I don’t speak out against?”

“I think you’re thinking too deeply about it.”

“Maybe, but that’s the accusation that gets leveled at the church right? That it doesn’t speak out against injustice? And who is the ‘Church’? We are. I am. If the church isn’t speaking out it’s because I’m not speaking out. And if I have a voice, pathetic as it is, via social media, am I obliged to utilize it?”

“What would Jesus tweet?”

“Funny.”

“You think Jesus would tweet? Assuming of course the technology available?”

“I don’t know about Jesus, but Wesley would definitely be all over twitter.”

“And Charles would be ghost-writing for T-Swift?”

“In all seriousness,” the young man began, watching the highway’s metal divider blur into an indistinct flash of movement,” I’m so tired. I mean just exhausted. Police killing blacks. Criminals killing police. I never knew Twitter could become a place to mourn and lament. My news feed has basically become a stream of weeping and lamentation.”

“I think you need to step away for a while.”

“I know. That’s what this trip is I guess. Or at least that’s a positive outcome of this trip. At least I won’t have internet access. But I feel like I’m contributing to the injustice if I just retreat. That’s what the early desert fathers did, not that I want to judge, but they fled the wickedness and immorality of Rome to the solitude of the desert. I just don’t see that as being a particularly biblical response.”

“Unless you’re John the Baptist.”

“Still, he had interaction. All I want is to be able to wake up tomorrow and not have anybody kill each other. How messed up is that? My expectations have become so low that I’m only saying: ‘please don’t’ kill anybody.’”

“It is disturbing.”

“Disturbing? I think that’s a bit of an understatement don’t you think.”

“I mean yes it’s horrible. But they say that violence is down, worldwide that is. Though it doesn’t feel like it, we’re living in the most peaceful time in human history. We just have the immediate access to it. The tools and the technology to be made aware of it.”

“But it’s happening here. It’s happening on our watch. We’re responsible for it.”

“I’m not saying we’re not.”

“The worst part of it all, at least for me, is that I don’t know what to do about it. I mean I’m a privileged white guy. Heck I was an only child. You can’t get more privileged than that. And for the better part of a month I’ve been just ripped apart searching for sin in my life. God holds us responsible for the sins that we are made aware of. I’ve just been trying to find my sins. It’s easy to assign blame to the “system” or to “racists” somewhere out there, but in reality, the problem is us. Each of us is prejudiced to one extent or another. We walk down the street and we make judgements. That’s normal and in some sense it’s good. The problem comes when we let that prejudice trump reason and experience. That’s when we give in to sin. And nobody wants to admit that about themselves. It just kills me, nobody is willing to say, ‘yep, you know what, I’m the problem as much as that cop or that shooter.’”

“Because it goes against everything we strive for. We remain blind to the sins in our own lives. It’s easier to see the speck in another’s eye…”

“But we’re never, never going to make any progress until we can admit that we are the problem, that our hearts are sinful and selfish. For those of us with power (whether we call it ‘power’ or not) we want to keep it. For those who don’t have power, they want it. All of it is sin, striving and sin.”

“So we need Jesus.”

“Yeah, basically.”

They crossed over the Zilwaukee Bridge over the Saginaw River. The younger man shifted in his seat to glance down at the industrial thoroughfare below. Barges hauled various components up and down the river. The economy trundling along as it had for a hundred, two hundred years in this very spot. Industry, the backbone of the American economic system, or at least it had been. Things now were in an evolution, the outcome of which was still very much undecided.

Emerging safely on the other side, their car crossed what many residents of south-eastern Michigan considered to be the start of ‘up north’. There was not any noticeable change in scenery of climate but the bridge (seemingly always under construction) served as a sentry to the top of the mitten.

“The worst part of it,” he began again, “for me is the comments. I know that social media and Twitter specifically is basically everybody’s first reaction to the events.”

“Which of course means that it’s completely rational right?”

“Yeah. I mean I know or I’ve learned that my first reactions are almost always bad or mean-spirited. It becomes so easy to lash out. And we’ve got lots of reasons to lash out, legitimate reasons. But it becomes this wounded, hateful mix of blaming this person or that person. It’s the police department’s faults. Its black criminals’ faults. It’s white privilege. It’s those Black Lives Matter protesters. It’s just so easy to blame, blame, blame without seeing the guilt in ourselves.”

“And that’s where you struggle?”

“Yeah. I’ve honestly just been wracking my brain trying to find where I’m sinning; where I’m contributing to keeping my black neighbors in poverty and oppression. I mean I just want to tear out my eyes or my brain or something.”

“At that point I feel like you need to entrust it to the Lord.”

“I know. But I want to act. But I don’t know what to do. I see the problem. I acknowledge the problem, but that answer isn’t blaming this group or that group; this party or that party. The answer has to be substantive. I mean we can and definitely should look at the ways police are trained and assigned. We can do that, but the problem ultimately lies in our own hearts. I honestly think that police are just like the rest of us, people with many different prejudices, but they carry guns, and they’ve been trained to kill in tense situations. It’s a powder keg for injustice. But it always comes back to the heart. Our sinful, prejudiced hearts that only seek ourselves and what’s best for us.”

“You know it’s funny. Actually it’s not, but you know. I’m a history guy. It’s so easy for us to judge the sins of the past. We look back at Christendom in America and say, ‘how can they possibly have tolerated slavery, in many cases condoned it?’ We ask that now. But I bet there were a lot of people just like you back then, they saw the problem, they saw how big it was and they didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know how to go about solving the problem, the ‘systemic’ problem. I’m not absolving them of guilt. I think there are right ways to act in those situations. But I think it’s easier to lay blame at the feet of our fathers and grandfathers than to consider the ways they may have thought. I mean what are we going to be known for endorsing or ignoring? Pornography? Abortion? Income disparity? A culture that intentionally or not keeps blacks in a position of weakness? The fact that you’re asking these questions is good.”

“Not good enough. Was it good enough to think: ‘gee, I bet those slaves are having a really rough time picking cotton. Oh, well, I’ll go back to colonizing the West.’? “

“I guess I don’t have the answer either.”

“You know what really kicked me in the gut? I was reading John Perkins’ memoir Let Justice Roll Down where he talks about his growing up as a sharecropping family in the South. He’s talking about religion, about Black Christianity and White Christianity. Uh, hold on.”

The man fumbled through his messenger bag and retrieved a plain bound book with the slipcover removed.

“Ok. Let’s see if I can do this without getting carsick. He’s talking about why he didn’t care about religion. He says: “And I did not see white Christianity as meaningful either. To me it was part of that whole system that helped dehumanize and destroy black people--- that system that identified me as a nigger. So how could the white Church really be concerned about me?” Here’s the part that gets me: “I had lived in the South. I had drunk at separate drinking fountains. I had ridden in the back of buses. And never in the South had I heard one white Christian speak out against the way whites treated blacks as second-class citizens.””

“Wow.”

“Yeah. Wow. I hear that and that’s why I question my responsibility as a social media user, as a believer. Does my silence to injustice become and endorsement?”

“I think we need to pray for the Holy Spirit to lead us.”

“Check.”

“And we need to talk with others. Honestly talk. Especially right now we’re all afraid to speak what we feel. I mean unless we’re online and then it’s fine, apparently. But we’re afraid to have a conversation with the black man down the street. I don’t mean the ‘he’s going to jump me’ kind of afraid, but we’re afraid of the uncertainty. We’re afraid that we’ll be misconstrued. We’re afraid that we’ll say the wrong thing. But you’re right, it does come down to the heart of every man, sorry, every person. And only God knows what’s in every heart. Only he can fully judge us for our racism or prejudice. But right now we’re operating with the media as the indicator of what people are like. That’s where we take our cues. It’s not the medias fault mind you, it just happens. But we hear someone somewhere say; ‘yeah I wish some more cops had gotten killed’ and we assume that that’s what the people down the street from us are thinking. Or maybe someone sees a white girl tweet about some trivial inconvenience and they assume that ‘you know what, those white people are content just living the high life while others have it like me’. They don’t know your heart. They don’t know that you’ve been earnestly questioning yourself. They don’t know that you can admit that your heart is tainted. We need to talk about it. We do have a moral mandate for that, I think, to answer your first question. I just don’t think it really should be done online. There’s too much anonymity there. There’s not enough space for vulnerability. You can’t communicate your heart in 140 characters and don’t talk to me about emojis, I’m tired of you lecturing me on emojis. You just can’t open up and actually have someone trust you through the medium. We’re bound by the medium to some extent and our discourse is suffering because of it. The only answer is actually getting out there and talking and having hard conversations. Sorry for the rant.”

“No it was good.”

“No, I was getting heated. You see how I’m gripping the wheel? Good thing we’re past the bridge. All this righteous anger would have taken us to the bottom of the Saginaw River.”

“It makes me understand the place of lamentation. I mean I haven’t dealt with too much pain and suffering in my life, thank God. But there are moments when there’s just no words, no logical pattern of thought. It’s just this deep ache that says that things are not the way they’re supposed to me. It makes you question God. Not like doubting per se. I dunno, I’ve always been able to hold questions in one hand and faith in the other. My questions don’t negate the fact that I have faith. I just have faith. I feel like that’s a gift that He has given me- the ability to trust Him. At the same time though, weeks like this; weeks that are just so bent; so wrong, it brings up so many questions.”

“It makes it a struggle to walk in the light of the gospel in a fallen world.”

“You don’t have to look very far to see that this world is broken. It’s hard to deny that these days.”

“Back in the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s, that was the hey-day of Science Fiction and there was all this talk of utopias. Like Star Trek. The thought was, if you could just remove the problems: food, money, violence, then humanity would become this perfect, idealized world. Those ideas about utopias seem really hollow now; when we see that hatred and violence are birthed out of our own hearts. We don’t need problems, we make our own. Still, when we look at the implications of the gospel we can see the hope it offers. Sure, it’s easy to see the depravity and the selfishness of people but it’s also so much more remarkable to see the light amid the darkness and right now there is certainly a lot of darkness but we have to look for the light.”

“Easier said than done.”

“True.”

“I truly believe, the elder began again; the gospel is our only hope of ridding ourselves of the selfishness that causes all of this. That should be our focus in all of this. Sorry. Again.”

“No. No. You should be a pastor.”

“Well…”

They pulled over at a rest area just after West Branch. The older man went to the bathroom while the younger, quite accustomed to long car rides, stood to stretch his legs. The sun had risen now and the drowsy morning had evaporated in the warmth. To his right at the back of the rest area was a ridge of cottonwoods swaying slightly in the breeze beyond that a field of thigh-high corn stretched out for an unfathomable distance. He turned from the pastoral landscape to the fanatical sounds of the road resonating with the passing of each car, no more than abstractions to the bystander at 75 miles an hour. In each, a man or woman sat: a being with hopes and dreams, faith and failings. He felt the inexpressible desire to swallow them all up; all the hurt and the pain; to somehow envelop it all in an infinite embrace. He felt his heart ache. He blinked and forced himself to look harder; to look for the light.