The Victims of Fear and the Victory of Love
A letter by the Rt. Rev. Mark D. W. Edington
On this first weekend in July, communities in both France and Belgium have awakened to cities torn by violence — reactions to the shooting of a young man by a police officer at a traffic stop in Nanterre. More will surely come. The death of “Nahel M,” the seventeen-year-old only child of a family from Algeria and Morocco, is just the latest telling of a tragic story. It is a story that has played out again and again in so many of the countries where we live, and whence we have come; a young man of color, an encounter with the police, a gunshot, and a needless, unjustifiable death.
Like the tragedies of Michael Brown, or George Floyd, or Breonna Taylor, or Patrick Lyoya, or Adama Traoré, or Makomé M’Bowolé, beneath the details of any one story a disturbing pattern emerges — a growing estrangement between society and those given the authority to be its guardians. A cognitive shift in the role of policing from “peace officers” to warriors; and worst of all, a deepening fear of the “other” — however the “other” is defined.
There will be justice for Nahel when we break down the fears that imprison us in hate.
It is fruitless to point to the guarantee of “equal justice under law” and argue that it is a sufficient answer to the pervasive reality of racism in multiracial, multi-ethnic societies. It is blind to offer, in response to the lived experience of communities of color, a theoretical citizenship of “universalism” that obtusely denies the reality of discrimination and disempowerment — injustices now being called to account by those whose rage has been given voice in protests, whether Black Lives Matter protests or Justice for Nahel protests.
As followers after Christ, absolutely none of this is surprising to us — while at the same time all of it is heartbreaking to us, as it is to the heart of God. Our faith teaches us two things at once, seemingly contradictory but in fact deeply connected:
First, that all people are equally worthy of dignity, equally stamped with the indelible image of the divine, equally beloved by the source of all life and all love;
And second, that we, each one of us, need desperately to be saved — saved from ourselves, saved from our ingrained, hard-wired tendency to fall out of love and into fear with God’s other children, saved from our refusal to see, and celebrate, the image of God equally present in the “other.”
God, who loved all things into being, who walked alongside us in the path of evolution and watched us grow, knows exactly where we are most likely to go wrong. God who watched us as we learned long ago to form social bonds saw that we fell into believing our survival depended on seeing other communities as suspect — especially if they looked, or sounded, or believed in ways different from our own.
God saw how those first mistakes became patterns and finally became the crooked timber of our humanity — our tendency more easily to believe our fears about the other, our florid imaginings that impute judgments of character and worth from the differences we observe, than to believe in the radical universality of God’s call to all of us to make beloved community together.
So often in these stories, fear plays the role of seducer. The police were afraid — because they have been taught to be afraid — of the other; the person of color, the foreigner, the refugee. There actions were justified, so the narrative goes, by their fear. Fear is the beguiling serpent justifying the choice of life-destroying path. And when it is obeyed, all of us lose our place in the garden, cast out into the thicket of thorns and the darkness of hate.
And that is why, for those of us who follow this God who embodies fierce and fearless love, the single most insistent message — the one that begins the story abiding in the field and ends it weeping in the garden — is simply this: Do not be afraid. “Do not be afraid,” says the angel to the shepherds. “Do not be afraid,” says the angel to the women.
Not a “there, there, don’t worry, child” word of comfort; no, a word of command, an order to summon the courage and soul-strength to do exactly the opposite of what we have been formed to do, raised to do, shaped by society to do.
Do not be afraid of those who differ from you. Do not be afraid of those who have a different story that is sacred to them, gather around a different fire, celebrate and weep for reasons of their own.
White supremacy is many things, but it is at least this: The indulgence, on a vast and societal scale, of a long-inherited, generationally transmitted, and legally buttressed fear — a sickly, desperate fear. It is a fear so seductive that it masquerades as righteousness and poses as wisdom.
But it is simply a lie — and what is worse, it is a libel against God’s purpose in creating us, redeeming us, and calling us into community with each other.
If the church is to stand as a witness against hatred, if it is to offer a path out of the fears that divide our societies and lie at the bitter root of systems of supremacy and injustice, then it must not just speak but enact the love it teaches — because that love, the love Christ calls us to show to all “others,” is the only power that can overcome and transform fear into fellowship.
That is not an easy counsel. It is not an easy yoke. Acting out of the discipline of love instead of the reflex of fear takes work. It requires each of us to begin with a deep self-examination, finding the places where fear rules in our own hearts. But it is, as Dr. King preached long ago, an urgent summons:
“…far from being an impractical idealist, Jesus has become the practical realist… Far from being the pious injunction of a utopian dreamer, this command is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization. Yes, it is love that will save our world and our civilization, love even for enemies” (“Loving Your Enemies,” Sermon delivered at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, 17 November 1957).
There will be justice for Nahel when we break down the fears that imprison us in hate. There will be justice for Nahel when we acknowledge the times that we have succumbed to the laziness of fear, and take up our own struggle to resist it. There will be justice for Nahel, and Michael, and Makomé, and Breonna, and Patrick, and George, and so many, many others only when we finally risk living as Christ calls us to live — with a fearlessness rooted in love that is, in the end, the ground on which we stand and the spirit by which we live.
See you in church,
