I'll freely admit which camp I inhabit. I'm one of the people who had a hard time understanding why it took so long for Zimmerman to become a suspect, and who believes that Martin's race made his death more "acceptable" to some. If I were African American, I'd likely have a hard time not concluding that the life of a young black male is less important than the life of others, and that gun rights matter a lot more than Trayvon Martin's right to grow up.
That said, a lot of comments on all sides are pretty predictable and often knee-jerk. The terrible and troubled legacy of racism in this country is very much alive, but it is also very complex, and every event connected to it cannot be reduced to simple, clear-cut motivations and causes.
I have little doubt that race played a role in this sad affair. If George Zimmerman had not regarded a young black male as both suspicious and threatening, things would surely have turned out differently. For that matter, if people's lives grew out of reflections on loving neighbor and the parable about a Samaritan Jesus told to address that issue (one of my sermon asides), our world would be a very different place, regardless of whether or not it wore the label "Christian."
And so, while I don't have much to add to the commentary on the Trayvon Martin case, I find myself wondering - with some prodding by today's gospel - about which it is that America needs more, forgiveness or healing. Many people get irritated when hearing of the sins of slavery or racism. "That was long ago," they say. It has nothing to do with me. But as William Faulkner once said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
The wounds and scars of the past are far from fully healed, and the fact that I never owned a slave doesn't change that at all. And the all too frequent desire to minimize those wounds and scars only rubs salt in them. There is something therapeutic about naming and claiming sins, but we are often loathe to do so. As a child of the South, I heard often the absurd claim that the Civil War wasn't caused by slavery, a denial of sin that is still popular no matter how often it is debunked.
Regardless, there has been much progress in the area of racial reconciliation. Events from my childhood seem almost ancient when I see them in news footage. Maybe we simply need to focus on getting past race. Let's forget about sin and move on with the healing.
I've often been troubled by today's gospel reading which seems to imply that Jesus only healed a paralytic to prove he had authority to forgive the man. But today I am appreciative of the passage's unwillingness to completely separate the two things. Not that sin caused the man to be paralyzed, but sin is a fundamental problem for human beings, and any healing that deals with physical healing without dealing with sin is at best a partial healing. And our difficulty with sin in matters of race makes full healing difficult.
And this is not simply a call for all those racists out there to confess their sins. I hope they will, but confessing other people's sin is part of the problem. I tend to imagine my lingering tinges of racism as benign. Only other, more virulent forms are a problem. Of course that's not so different from someone who looks like a racist to me talking about how he never owned slaves or barred people from his establishment on account of race.
And so in my uncertainty about just what to say about George Zimmerman or the meanings to be drawn from the verdict in his trial, I'll simply pray for forgiveness and healing. We still need both.
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