Drew Paton at the Black Lives Matter Rally, September 13, 2020

2000 years ago in Ancient Palestine, a brown-skinned prophet who spoke peace to those in trouble, who made Peter put down his sword, who blessed the peacemakers, who made healing his work, who said the most important thing was to love one another, who came to be known by some as the “prince of peace” – said this: “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword… to set son against father, daughter against mother… One’s foes will be the members of one’s own household.” Now why? Why would this man, so obviously, demonstrably devoted to peace, say a thing like that?

Here’s what I think: He knew that if you stand up for love, some folx are going get angry. If you stand up for justice, some folx may disown you. If you refuse that fragile sham of peace that is based on politeness and avoidance of conflict, and instead strive for the true peace that is the result of justice done and relationship reordered – some folx may hate you. And the relationships that will be hardest of all will be with those who are closest to you – those with whom you share a grocery store or a dinner table. If we love one another enough, we’ll tell the truth. If we want relationship badly enough, we’ll hold one another to account. And that will cause conflict – or rather it will bring to light those conflicts that are already present and insist that they be addressed. We’ll begin to feel all the feelings we’ve numbed, suppressed, avoided or hidden until now.

It isn’t politics that divide us. It isn’t the genuine expression of pain and anger that threatens community. Don’t fall for that. The true danger comes when we start pretending everything is ok; when we start putting our pain away when we’re in public; when we place civility, social respectability and just getting along ahead of truth and justice; when we accept the comfort and familiarity of the status quo, with all its every day evils, instead of risking our love and lives on a different future.

We might hear in Jesus’ barbed and urgent words this affirmation: That we are all, in fact, family – siblings in God, one household – every one of us bound together. However deep the divide, however fierce the conflict, that truth remains. If we know that in our hearts – we can hold complexity. We can believe that good, intelligent, well-meaning beloved people can do foolish and harmful, and even evil things. We can hold the distinction between intent and impact. We can remember that leaders like MLK have held some of their choicest words for white moderates and self-described liberals or progressives who have given themselves high scores; and that however woke I may strive to be, as a white person, I am likely to make mistakes with racist outcomes. We can talk honestly about the ways in which opposition to newcomers and change, in a village that is 79% white, and white, historically, by design, is INHERENTLY racist. We can say that when you stand on land stolen from the Lenape, in a nation built upon labor stolen from black people, and say “go back to where you came from” you are committing a grave and racist hypocrisy. While at the same time acknowledging that some of us wealthy, white, progressives with advanced degrees have never taken the time to learn from those who were here before us what they know and what is most important to them. We haven’t sat down with them at table and had hard conversations about white supremacy. We can say some of the opposition to development in our villages has been rooted in white supremacy – and has sometimes blocked housing and jobs that may have further diversified the rivertowns. And also acknowledge that some of the opposition has been rooted in love for this community, and even driven by a working class struggle against greedy developers and gentrifiers who look at these villages and see only dollar signs. It’s complex. And if we remember that we are family – if we love one another – we can hold that complexity.

What we cannot do (and now I’m talking to the white folx – because black and brown people already know all this and are tired and it isn’t their responsibility) What we cannot do, is turn a blind eye to racism – to the everyday injustices and longstanding wounds, the offhand comments and local policies that have for too long been part of “the way things are.” We cannot turn our backs on our neighbors nearest to the hurt. We cannot police the expressions of that hurt or ask traumatized people to be reasonable, or tamp down their resistance. We cannot point the finger at others without doing the work of dismantling racism within ourselves. We cannot console ourselves with the notion that our heritage of white supremacy can be pinned on a few bad apples or pin our hopes on a presidential election and expect the struggle to evaporate in January. We cannot wait for the next crisis to do our work. In a very real way there are lives at stake.

We sometimes talk about the cost of war – and we know those costs are tremendous indeed. But true peace also comes at a cost. If we want peace, we have to work for justice. We have to do that at our dinner tables and grocery stores, in our schools and places of work and worship, in the halls of power and in the streets. We have to get the hell off social media and wade deeply into the discomfort of relationship in the real world – in the belief that there is hope for us all. The sword of truth does cut, but if the hand that holds it is love it does not harm – it clears the way for the new world that is coming.