This isn’t the type of presence I’ve been trying to embrace for almost 16 years of clergy life, the type that feels impossible after 3 deaths and 2 funerals, or after a weekend-long event with 80+ college students, the type I run from when the overwhelm kicks in. This ain’t that. This isn’t the type of presence I was graciously advised to lean into whenever possible, learning of its positive ripple effects particularly in moments when there is nothing to be spoken. This ain’t that.
This presence manipulates, causing people to believe there’s a rise in crime so great that more boots are needed on this ground even though the stats say otherwise. This presence is the result of a decades-long persistence, of a 10,000 hour laser focus, of the calculated teaching that we cannot trust even statisticians. This presence was born in sin and shaped in the iniquity of white supremacy and the belief in the existence of the savage “other”.
The National Guard
The FBI
Placed on DC streets and in Metro cars
For safety
This presence may put another brown body into a jail cell for shoplifting long before it stops a car jacking.
This presence will keep many a brown body at home when they should be outside enjoying a picnic or a movie in the park. Or when they should be leaving home for a night shift, but they’re too dark to walk outside in the dark with so many extra boots on the ground.
This presence will elicit the unnecessary “I told you the immigrants are dangerous,” from the mouths of immigrants able to pass for safe.
This presence isn’t safe.
And nothing can be fact-checked because facts continue to disappear like fairy dust and everyone who was once an expert is now no smarter than an AI generated response. Recently, I’d received the results of a blood draw, but hadn’t yet heard from my hematologist to know what the results really mean. I very impatiently told AI the results and it told me what I was likely facing and what followup questions I could ask my doctor. I saw the nurse practitioner. I didn’t tell her what AI told me, but I used its questions to guide my questions. Her conclusions weren’t at all as serious. But what does she know anyway?
DC has a lot of very bad people.
And so does every other city, even the ones with a lot of conservative Christians, some of the ones who helped to get all this started decades ago, 1 hour at a time while gazing at their navels, checking their bank accounts, praying and reading the Bible.
Don’t ask me to believe the words of anyone who continues to show me their affinity for the Nebuchadnezzar who existed before he looked more bird than man. I want people with a different type of presence who read the Bible not solely for an understanding of their next steps but primarily to know who God is…to better understand God’s love, God’s grace.
Pastors sometimes talk about moments when we realize who is actually discipling our members. It’s often other pastors, the pastors many miles away with a really nice livestream who help our members feel more certain in who they believe God wants them to be, yet less certain of who God is. Their picture of God is no clearer even though their certainty of their next steps sparkles like crystal. They are being discipled into certainty, not into faith—into a false sense of black and white. And pre-bird Nebuchadnezzar speaks life into that falsehood. Join me in the grandeur that I’ve built. Join me in a self-centeredness that I call safety.