Links:

• Jesus Wept — Online Worship Slideshow
• Teesha Hadra and John Hambrick Black & White: Disrupting Racism One Relationship at a Time (Abingdon, 2018)
• An interview with Teesha & John
• An article-length summary of Teesha's and John's book
• Andre Henry Interview on Systemic Racism
• Article on "Making the Invisible Visible"

Welcome to Pivot, a podcast for church leaders, co-sponsored by Luther Seminary Space Lead and Lead.

Welcome to Pivot. I'm Terri Elton from Luther Seminary.

and I'm Scott Cormode from Fuller Seminary.

And I'm Louise Johnson and I work with LEAD.

So we're adding an extra episode to pivot this week. It was a kind of disruptive week in Minneapolis, St. Paul this last week. And we just felt like we needed to pivot and add this episode. So it was May 30th. And I know that because it was my wedding anniversary and my husband and I had some plans for the day. We were going to do our COVID anniversary day by getting some takeout food and going to a park.

And I had plans for the day where I was going to grade and I had graduation stuff for Luther Seminary. And the night before we had gone to bed watching live on television our city with rioting and looting. The peaceful protests of the George Floyd death had turned violent and it was a bit chaos.

And I was at unrest. There was no way that my day could go on as planned. I tried to do a few things around the house to just be busy. And it wasn't long. And I saw a post from a friend on Facebook that had connected with a leader in Minneapolis and was starting to collect food and was going to bring it to some people in need because their grocery stores.

were closed or boarded up or looted or some other fashion. And all I could think of was I had to do something. So I replied to her with help and got that long story turned into my husband and I ended up joining her and a whole lot of people in providing food, probably 85 or 90 grocery bags of meals that were going to be delivered and a bunch of diapers and whatnot.

to different parts of the city. And we drove through what the night before I had seen as chaos, the burnt buildings, you could smell the smoke. It was a heart wrenching day. Move forward. And I was to record that next Wednesday, my sermon for the following week. And I had nothing to say. And I was unsure how to make even sense of what had happened.

And I knew as the protests were continuing each day that each day this was going to unfold differently. And so we decided not to record the sermon, but instead to gather and to talk about what could we do for worship to make any sense. This was going to be a part of our summer school. So it had people going to attend this worship from around the country. So it was not just people in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

But we sat there for an hour and a half and we began by just trying to make sense of our own experience. And what that did was it sent me into another several days of listening to the longings and the losses and to live into the complexity of this time. I had

Black brothers and sisters who this pain was just releasing for them all kinds of pent up anger and frustration that was new to me. I had people graduating with high school kids and I had people that were having weddings during this time and the loss of what they thought was that day gonna be was now overshadowed by this other thing.

and COVID. And I tried to find God's presence in that. And that's what my week turned out to be.

Terry you and I actually saw each other on Saturday. We had similar impulses that day Because we have this common friends with similar impulses to be part of what it meant to Bring food and supplies to people who were deeply in need My week began similarly to yours as I watched the video of George Floyd being murdered

and then watched as the growing anger and tension of our cities erupted into peaceful protests, but also looting and burning and a whole lot of anger and frustration from communities and people that had just boiled over. It had just sat underneath the surface for too long and you could feel

that tension in the whole city. You could smell it in the burning, you could feel it in the air, you could hear it as people spoke. I woke up to watch what was happening on the news and I moved to St. Paul in January and pretty much since then I traveled the first six weeks of my job and then after that I've been locked down. So I know my neighborhood by walking it.

But the one place I did know was the target that I saw burning on TV. It's about a mile and a half from my house. And so that really sort of woke me up to the reality of what was going on just really blocks from my house. And on that Friday, like you, I had to drive. just, had to see what was going on. And so in the midst of...

delivering groceries and supplies and so on and so forth. I drove both through St. Paul and through Minneapolis in a way to serve to reconcile what felt like cognitive dissonance as I sat silently by myself in my apartment and what felt like relative safety. When I looked outside my window, the usual joggers were going by and a few cars here and there and the mail was still delivered and my Amazon packages came and yet

a mile and a half from my house was this terrible anger and frustration that was boiling over. And to be perfectly honest, I started to feel really afraid. And I'm not sure yet even what I was afraid of. wasn't like I thought that it was going to turn, but I didn't know at that point. We just didn't know how this was going to resolve or end or what was going to happen. I realized how difficult

like you, how difficult it was to just even figure out what to do this week, right? There was just constant discontinuity between what was on my list of things to do in terms of teaching and working with congregations and adaptive change and so on and so forth. And then this whole thing that was unfolding in our own neighborhoods around us.

But I realized that fear really started to overtake me. And as I sat with that feeling of fear and uncertainty, what I realized to my horror was that it brought a sense of shame because I realized that the George Floyds of this world wake up with that baseline of fear and uncertainty and more every day of their life. For me, it was in its own strange way a privilege

to feel that. And of course, I had the privilege to get out of it if I wanted to. I could go somewhere else. I had friends who were begging me to come stay with them in other states. My mother wanted me to pick up and go see her in Ohio. She didn't want me in the middle of this. But I realized what a privilege it was. And so I decided that I needed to sit with that fear and that shame for a while. But it brought to me a new level of

understanding of what we're in the middle of.

So this podcast is a companion podcast to one we recorded a weeks ago that's about loss. And in it, we ask who are the people entrusted to your care? And we ask what are the longings and losses they experience? And we talk about how important it is we must deal with whatever comes up in the moment. And it seems like it would be just terribly hypocritical of us just to put that podcast out there without something

that takes seriously the people entrusted to our care are not just the people in our congregations. They are the people that are all around us. And we make that point in the podcast, but it drives home in a new way with listening to the stories that you tell. We talk about dealing with loss and some of those losses are the things that people are experiencing at any moment like COVID or something like that.

And some of the losses like you say, Louise, are the things that people live with every single day of their lives. And we talk about dealing with what comes up in the moment. know, and Terry, you're you're saying that. I didn't know how to make spiritual sense of the moment. It took a while. I still am working on that. That's our job. And everything that we're doing in this particular podcast is trying to.

live out and to be honest with the losses that we see around us because it would just be terribly hypocritical if we didn't do if we did anything else.

So as I listened to a variety of sources, one of my friends and colleagues, his congregational pastor, was working who is in a suburban congregation, primarily white. And he started talking about this and blogging about it with his congregation, which is a common practice that he does.

but he happened to have done some previous work on it in another setting and was bringing that to bear. And the three things that he said that really stuck with me, one is for us to deal with our white privilege, we have to have some disequilibrium. We have to be shaken out of either a slumber or a naivete of some kind.

And so as I held that and I looked around, I saw in a deeper way, a lot of my Christian white brothers and sisters feeling some of that disequilibrium. Some for the first time, some just in a deeper way. Kind of Luis, what you were saying, it was closer to home. It wasn't out there in another city, in another location.

And I know for me, I had lived with a naivete that Minnesota was doing better.

We are on the lowest of the 50 states around discrimination and education in all kinds of categories. And that came out in the day since one of my, one of the things that happened on the news right away on the next morning, I think it was actually even Saturday morning, where is one of the mayors came out and said of the people arrested, most of them did not have Minnesota addresses.

And then they looked deeper and they said, we're wrong. They actually did. But there was this idea that it was other people coming to us and using this as a moment. wasn't us. And then there was the lifting of the veil to say it was us. this living in this just equilibrium and allowing what I thought I knew to not be true anymore. The second thing that I heard when I listened was

All right, white people, don't go to black people and say, now tell me what to do.

The first move was learn. There are a lot of ways to educate yourself on the issues that are going on. This is not a new topic. And I appreciated all kinds of resources and documentaries and YouTube kind of shortened pieces that pointed to some of the issues that many of my Black brothers and sisters have known existed for a long time.

I even fact found a resource for the state of Minnesota and ordered that book to say I need to know more about what it looks like in my own backyard. It also was in lean into relationships with this listening, not to solve, not to figure out that what's my position, but to just hear the stories and live whether it's in the pain.

or whether it's in the resilience or whether it's just the different expressions of what this looks like with the people that might be around me. I had this great story on Sunday of one of the people in our congregation and our virtual small group that we had going on that talked about the 10 years he had worked at doing this anti-racism stuff in his position.

And he told the story that broke his heart and he shared it. He said, after all of that and all the good work we've done on the systems level, one of my great colleagues moved to a different place and they were talking about her son and said he had turned 16. And so he said, did he get his driver's license? And he's African-American. And he said, no, I do not want to be a 16 year old driving around in the suburbs.

It's too life threatening for him. And this man told this story and wept. I need to know about those experiences and it's in the relationships that often we get into what that was like for other people.

Perry, thank you. I appreciate that both the lean toward the disequilibrium, which of course, you we've both talked about the fact that we're experiencing, but also this call to relationships and not only to learning about those experiences, you know, in videos and so on and so forth, but just in personal relationships. And one of the things that I've been thinking a lot about is that we've...

built a pretty significant divide in relationship to how we think about these matters of racism. And there are a lot of people out there, some in my own family, with whom I disagree strongly on how these matters ought to be dealt with and what needs to be done and so on and so forth. What I'm beginning to recognize is the value not only of building relationships,

in the African-American community and continuing to be allies and support and understanding our own complicity. But what does it mean to actually build a relationship with somebody with whom I disagree so strongly and particularly in the face of what I just watched happen to George Floyd, right? What does it mean to genuinely listen and engage somebody who sees that

sees that murder in different terms than I do. And to be open to learning about where they're coming from and what their longings and losses are. And I'm beginning to think that at some level or another, that that's part of how we have to move forward. That's part of the pivot for me is being able to find ways to build enough trust and enough relationships so that...

I can hear someone else's story and that I can share mine in a way that might just plant a seed for down the road that might just resonate sometime in the future. But I'm just convinced that this relationship building not only with people who have been suffering and people with whom we agree, but people with whom we deeply disagree that that's part of how we're gonna be able to move forward.

So let me summarize some of the pivots we've talked about. We've talked about how important it is to listen, how important it is to listen for loss, how the basis of change is relationship, even if it's relationships with people we don't agree with, about how important it is to educate ourselves before we go into relationship. Because, and then the last one is don't make it about me. You know, it would be so easy for me to...

Say okay now I have come to this new discovery of something this new experience I'm going to go and badger all my black friends and say tell me about your experience Relive all your pain so that it can help me be better. I bear an obligation to go and educate myself before I can Get to the point where I can build new relationships. And so one of the things that we've talked about

Is the importance of resources? So let me give you a couple of resources One of the things that I found particularly helpful is a book called black and white disrupting racism One relationship at a time. It's by a woman named tisha hadra and a man named john hambrick their friends and they was decided to write together about their relationship as a black woman and a white man and we'll Put something out so that you can get links to

both the book and to an article that summarizes it. Another thing I found helpful is just this last week, the president of my school, Mark Labberton, interviewed one of our former students, one of our graduates, an African American named Andre Henry, who is working very hard. What he says is that in the Old Testament, the job of a prophet is to make the invisible visible. And so much of the theme of what both you, Terry, and you, have been saying

is how this has erupted. The invisible has become visible to us. And so we'll post a link to the podcast and we'll post a link to a little article that he wrote where he can talk about his experience as an African-American trying to make the invisible visible. The other thing is how this makes you think of the gospel of Mark. Tell us about that.

Scott, I appreciate your raising the issue of prophets and that brought to mind for me as scripture that I've been thinking a lot about lately as I've been traveling through the gospel of Mark. And I've been just trying to think about what's happening around us and to think about that in terms of scripture and biblical cues. And one of the one of the stories that keeps coming to mind for me is this little

weird story in the middle of Mark and it's after Jesus sends the 70 out and they come back together and there is there is a boy whose demon they can't cast out and so I think it's the father who brings him to Jesus and Jesus of course is able to cast out the demons but later when he is with the disciples and they're there together they ask him why is it that we couldn't

cast out this demon. Jesus' response to that is this kind can only come out through prayer. And so as I've been thinking a lot about systemic racism, I've been thinking about that in terms of the powers and principalities, in terms of a kind of demon that we have been really struggling to cast out of our world. And it reminds me that maybe it's not

I don't think it's the only lane for sure, but one of the most important lanes that we might be in as people of faith is that of prayer and to understand that sometimes the demons come out through prayer and I I wonder if in part why Jesus gives that directive is because I don't a prayer of course calls upon God, but it also changes who I am and so

I think there's a lot of deep wisdom in that, in what looks like a kind of, could look like a kind of trite response, you know, while you pray about it and then it'll get better. Except that I think if we're engaged in deep prayer on a regular basis about what it might mean to cast out the demons of racism, to defeat these powers and principalities that affect all of us, that prayer might be one of the most significant.

at our disposal.

One of the pivots that I've thought about with regard to this is I think with when I think of listening to longing and losses I think of a personal or individualistic kind of approach and this Week that we have lived through and these issues that we're talking about today are communal and personal and that's different than when I think of myself as an individual entity and so part of what that brings me to is there so

complex Minneapolis and st. Paul have a job now of reimagining justice and systems that are not oppressive and We as people of faith have a call to participate in that in some way and As I sit with I need to move beyond bringing food and diapers To participating in healing and restoration and

I don't know what that looks like yet, but the scripture that I was able to lean into this week was actually Micah 6 and the whole chapter of not just taking out Micah 6-8, which we often get to. But what does it mean for us? And I think of me communally with my brothers and sisters that are people of faith with me to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly.

with our God in this time. And sometimes that means to be quiet. And sometimes that means to speak up because I have not done that on behalf of my brothers and sisters. And this is complex work, but it's time to create different conditions for another way forward than what we have done.

For me, the scripture and the prayer are deeply connected to each other. For the last eight weeks, my wife and I have been part of a small online Bible study, about 10 people going through the Psalms. And we have been looking at the Psalms that talk about what God intends for the world, the Psalms where the...

People of God cry out and say, God, it's not that way, please fix it. And then the Psalms that start with just simply how long. And I have found myself in the last week over and over again, just saying how long. How long, because God has announced what God intends. God has called us as a people to this. We have cried out.

to God for it to be so, and it's not. And all I know to do is to cry out and say, long? And these are the Psalms of lament. And that gives us a bridge to say, next week we're going to focus in this podcast all on the kind of lament that allows us to deal with the loss of the people entrusted to our care. We'll listen to you then.

Thanks for joining us for this episode of our Pivot podcast. For more leadership resources from LEAD, you can go to waytolead.org or from Faith Lead, go to faithlead.luthersam.edu.