How Can I Live Peacefully with Justice?

A Little Book of Guidance

Mike Angell

• Publisher: Church Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781640652118
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Explores way Christian individuals and communities can cultivate peace both locally and on a global scale. Peace can seem so very far away, whether we are watching news of atrocities committed in other countries or we encounter the violence in our own neighborhoods. Mike Angell engages peace as more than an absence of conflict. Peace, following the Christian tradition, is more concrete. It must be planted, tended, and grown in our own hearts and in the world. This book explores ways individuals and Christian communities can cultivate peace personally, locally, and on a global scale. Non-violence is a core value of The Episcopal Church and integral the Jesus Movement's focus on reconciliation. As part of our baptismal covenant to strive for justice and peace among all people, we are called to be models of reconciliation and peace towards our neighbors. This book is a simple guide for building peace when the streets around us are filled with anger and violence.

1

What Do We Mean by Peace?

It may seem odd that a priest from one of America’s most violent cities has been asked to write a book of guidance about peace. The image of St. Louis around the world has been reshaped in recent years. I moved to St. Louis, Missouri, seven months before Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson. The story of Michael’s death, the protests, the media attention, the questions raised are well-known. It would be impossible to write about peace from Missouri without reflecting on the events of August 2014 and what they revealed about our city, our nation, our world.

I chose that word “revealed” carefully. Michael’s death and the protests surrounding it seemed to surprise the world. In parts of my community, Michael’s death was experienced not as an anomaly, but as an uncovering. This is a violent city. In 2017 the Guardian newspaper named a stretch of Natural Bridge Avenue, just a few miles from where Michael died, the center of America’s gun violence epidemic. Of course, yard signs in St. Louis proclaim “Black Lives Matter,” but on the city’s north side, another sign is even more common. It reads: “We Must Stop Killing Each Other.” St. Louisans know we have a problem with violence. In the months that followed August 2014, the world would learn about a specific violent dynamic at play in our streets.

What was uncovered in the streets, on social media, and over live television was the dynamic of fear that exists between Black residents and the police. This fear wasn’t new. This fear was generational. In the months that followed, the deaths of Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Sandra Bland in Texas, and others revealed that the fear wasn’t just local. Black parents fear that their children will be killed by an officer of the peace.

What was different about August of 2014, and what has been different in my city since that month, is an unwillingness to “return to normal.” Black activists, young people who gathered in the streets of Ferguson, refused to quiet down, refused to back down. As my Methodist colleague the Rev. Willis Johnson has said, it was as though a “slowly dripping dam had broke open.”¹ Those leaders would not allow the city to return to police business as usual. Protests continued for over 100 days and nights. The activists wouldn’t allow the old game of covering up injustice to continue.

I watched the refusal to allow a cover-up play out in St. Louis’s streets from a particular vantage point as a Christian in the “Episcopal branch of the Jesus Movement” (as our presiding bishop likes to say). Every Sunday the first prayer a priest prays, at the front of the congregation gathered for Eucharist, is the Collect for Purity: “Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid. . . .”² Christians believe in a God who is in the business of uncovering, revealing, exposing. At the very beginning of our service every Sunday, we acknowledge our vulnerability. Before God no secrets are hidden, no desires are unknown, and no hearts are closed.

The prayer book knows there can be no peace without vulnerability. We live in a world that pretends the opposite. We equate peace with a lack of conflict. Our tax structures are built to maximize the resources for policing in response to violence. More than half of our taxes in St. Louis go to support public safety.³ If our police officers have the latest equipment, if our local police force carries military grade weaponry, we tell ourselves, they can keep the peace. The Ferguson uprising uncovered a wide separation between the culture of police departments and the people who are policed.

Ferguson also taught us that the police were the vanguard of a deeper enforced separation. The Ferguson uprising uncovered the deeply persistent segregation. We are taught to hope, to dream, to pray separately. So how could a pastor who works so close to Ferguson write a book about peace? I would argue that we won’t know peace unless we are willing to face uncovering. Ferguson showed us how much we have relied on a false peace. Real peace doesn’t come from a show of force. Real peace is not one-sided. Real peace requires that my neighbor have peace. Peace requires revelation. We have to be willing to be vulnerable. We have to be willing to move with God to a place where we know our neighbors’ fears. We must know what keeps folks up at night. We must know what our most vulnerable communities count as injustice. Until we know what causes our neighbors’ nightmares, can we honestly say we know how to dream of a godly peace? Are we willing to work, with God, for a peace in which no secrets are hid?

Living with peace means being willing to become uncomfortably vulnerable, and working for justice requires building unlikely relationships of trust. Living with peace also means knowing ourselves. Finding real peace means facing elements of our own stories that are painful to confront. We all, all of us, need to work to reconcile our own sense of self, our own identity, if we are ever to be able to reconcile with others. Peace only exists in relationship.

The Role of the Church in Peacemaking

Scripture—especially the writings of the New Testament—can serve as a resourceful companion for Christians living in these difficult days. As Phyllis Tickle, Brian McLaren, and many others have written, we are facing a turning point for the church in North America and Western Europe. “Christendom” is coming to an end, the scholars tell us. Shrinking Sunday attendance is the primary data. For the first time since the early centuries of the Christian movement, Christians may not be the gatekeepers of power. Christians may find themselves on the margins. Aren’t the margins exactly where the followers of Jesus belong?

It is hard not to greet the news as a loss. But, in the counterintuitive logic of faith, loss can also be gain. Christianity’s marriage to power also meant that the faith was used to justify the structures of that power. Christianity was used to bless a particular constellation of identities: whiteness, maleness, European, heterosexual, land-owning, able-bodied, etc. Losing an attachment to patriarchal, homophobic, racist, ableist, xenophobic power structures could bring us back to the heart of Christianity. Losing our marriage to unjust power might indeed take us back to our roots as followers of a first-century Palestinian Jew.

If the scholars are right, we are beginning to know something like the reality of the early disciples. The Gospels, the Epistles, all the writings of the New Testament were written by a people who counted as outsiders. The peace that Jesus proclaimed stood in contrast to the officially proclaimed Pax Romana, the supposed peace of Rome. Jesus and his followers witnessed to a different kind of peace.

As Christians this moment may represent a chance to go back to our roots, to be known as the Church was in the early centuries, as a movement engaged with the disenfranchised. The Romans mocked the Jesus movement as a religion for women and slaves. If our movement knows those on the receiving end of injustice, Christianity can be a resource for folks who seek justice, who question the status quo. But asking these questions is difficult: because asking questions about power, asking questions about structural change, requires a willingness to question relationships with the current power structures.

I moved to St. Louis from Washington, DC. I had served a parish in the heart of our nation’s capital, and at the heart of our idea of a Christian nation: St. John’s, Lafayette Square sits across from the White House. President Madison wanted a church close to the president’s base of operations. Every president since Madison has attended services there. Bright yellow St. John’s, the church of the presidents, is one of the most vivid symbols of my denomination’s historically close relationship with the power structures of our society.

That closeness comes with both difficulty and responsibility. Asking questions of justice can be difficult when you are close to power. Upsetting the status quo might jeopardize budgets and buildings. But proximity to power also means that sometimes our church has the capacity to focus attention. We have the ability to influence the conversation about the meaning of peace.

What is Peace?

What is peace? What do we mean by the word? When we slow down and ask the question, the answer can become surprisingly difficult. We might think of peace in the way our nation’s founders thought of the truths of human rights. We might think of peace as “self-evident.” We know peace when we see it, when we feel it.

But the meaning of peace can be fearfully contextual. What one group in society experiences as the dream of peace, another may experience as a nightmare. In the suburbs of Denver, where I grew up, the police are often called “officers of the peace.” But a few miles from where I live now, on Canfield Drive in Ferguson, Missouri, Black parents worry about police officers as dangerous. Parents teach their children to keep their hands in full view around police, teach them to say “yes, sir” and to answer questions politely. When protests erupted after Michael Brown’s death, municipal leaders called for “peace.” But chants echoed from the streets in response, “if we don’t get no justice, then you don’t get no peace.” The word “peace” can have a contested definition.

Jesus makes a distinction. “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled” (John 14:27). The world in the time of Jesus claimed to be at peace. But the Pax Romana, the so-called peace of Rome, was a violent and fearful reality for Jesus’s people. Rome’s “peace” relied on the repression of the people of Galilee, Palestine, all the Roman colonies. The Roman armies were funded by the taxes of the colonized. Those without Roman citizenship knew terror. Their hearts were troubled. They lived in fear of uniformed officers of the Roman regime. They lived with anxiety, that their neighbors might be collaborating with the empire. In the midst of this so-called “peace,” Jesus ...