Dear Saint Markans & Friends,

With the rest of the world watching, we here locally have held our collective breath since early March, when the murder trial of former-Officer Derek Chauvin first began. Through painful testimony, we have witnessed again the dehumanizing power of racism and lethal force on both victim and perpetrator. This painful unveiling has re-traumatized our BIPOC sisters and brothers, who’ve been telling the broader public they’ve been dehumanized this way for over four hundred years. Despite persistent whataboutism and yeah, but-ism, the Truth of this deadly dysfunction is now widely undeniable, and there’s a renewed effort at the grassroots and legislative levels to seize this moment to affect lasting change. While we wrestle at a technical level with how best to renegotiate the proper ‘use of (lethal) force’ we have entrusted to law enforcement, a larger percentage of the population now also recognizes the degree to which we need to wrestle at a social, emotional, and spiritual level with the much more foundational issue of racism, broadly, and within law enforcement, in particular. Engaging this difficult conversation and making necessary personal and policy changes is essential to the well-being and flourishing of the public AND our police.

On the heels of Tuesday’s historic guilty verdict, we here at Saint Mark’s commit to claim this singular moment of police accountability as further inspiration AND conviction to pursue real justice in the form of concrete systemic change.

We commit to not only acquiring the knowledge necessary to connect the dots between personal and systemic racism and the violence they inflict on BIPOC bodies, but we further commit to showing up to the movement in a healthy and helpful way AND to listening, to learning, to following, and to leveraging our resources — personal, positional, political — as accomplices in the fight for BIPOC safety, specifically, and for BIPOC liberation, generally.

We commit to the self-emptying — the kenosis — required of us to move, both personally and institutionally, from passive observer to active participant, relinquishing the deadly privilege of moral ambiguity and factual uncertainty. We will hear the Truth in the experiences of our BIPOC neighbors and will be moved with compassion and courage ‘to love our neighbor as we love ourselves,’ in thought, word, AND deed, asking no longer ‘for whom the bell tolls.’ For, indeed, in the Beloved Community, to which Jesus calls us, we know that when one suffers, we all suffer — when any are diminished, we are all diminished. Again, as said elsewhere, the safety and liberation of our BIPOC siblings is the safety and liberation of us all. So we owe it to each other and to ourselves to take this work and witness seriously.

As a first step, we hope you can join with others this upcoming Tuesday, April 27th from 6-7:30pm for our first ‘Interfaith Post-Verdict Community Gathering,’ bringing together members of the various Downtown Interfaith Congregations. This virtual gathering will include prayer, learning, and mutual listening. We anticipate this to be the first of many such gatherings. Find all the information and links here. And please join me in expressing your gratitude to the Rev. Jia Starr Brown (First Covenant Church) and Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman (Temple Israel) for coordinating this important event.

While we share the joy, the gratitude, and the relief of this week’s conviction of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, we know this is only one important step in a much longer journey toward real, lasting racial justice and healing. As we rightly grieve every tragic loss of life at the intersection of racism and lethal policing, may our graveside song surely light our hearts on fire and set our feet firm upon The Way: ‘alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.’

Ever yours, in Christ,