From Your Minister
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In the early 1990s I interned in the Church of the United Community, a tiny storefront congregation in the Marcus Garvey Center in Roxbury, Massachusetts, triple yoked between the United Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ, and Unitarian Universalists.
Many in the congregation had been through drug treatment. More had been to jail, at a time when crack cocaine was plentiful and arrests of young black men more plentiful still. Many had contracted “the virus,” as AIDS was called there.
Poverty was a blanket that lay over the whole community. Many people lived in the nearby projects. Almost all had experienced homelessness at one time or another.
Violence was always present around the edges. The church ran classes to teach young people what to do when the police stopped them, so they wouldn’t get shot. And, in the year I was there, far too many young men died by gunshot from other young men, some just children sitting in the park at the wrong time. One child, I remember, drew a picture of hopes for his future: Under a picture of jail, he wrote, I hope I get to go to jail and don’t get killed.
This daily life of suffering, oppression and violence was, in itself, a kind of crucifixion, forged by racism, classism, poverty, addiction, violence. Crucifixion was an accurate description, implying violence, prolonged physical agony, systemic authorization of the killing. And so, because the crucifixion was so real, the story of Jesus was not just about the friendly teacher/prophet I’d always been introduced to in my UU congregations, or even in a liberal white Christian seminary. The resurrection, in this context, was absolutely necessary and real unless hope was also to die.
I’ll be honest: If I hadn’t signed on for a yearlong internship, and if I hadn’t needed that internship as one last hoop to jump to get ordained, I would have slipped away within a few weeks. As a young, white, middle class UU, I was completely out of my element, and terrified. I was not afraid of physical violence, though walking from the subway (the T) was a little sketchy at night.
Nope, I was afraid of something much scarier: being totally irrelevant. In this setting, I had nothing to offer. No wisdom, no experience, no cultural competency, no prayer that would be of use to these people writhing with pain. For a wannabe minister, this is a fate worse than death!
I remember one time stomping from the Church to the T, muttering to myself. “They should have called it the WHITE New Testament. They should have called it WHITE Church History.” Nothing in my background had prepared me for this.
The Church of the United Community, led by Rev. Graylan Hagler, a UCC/ Disciples minister, was engaged in Black Liberation Theology. Hagler, along with President Obama’s mentor Jeremiah Wright and others in the tradition of Black Liberation Theology, were, and are, raising the dead, week after week, using Scripture, prayer, music, and other elements of worship in a way I had never experienced. They are creating “a way out of no way.” They are laying out breadcrumbs toward freedom, pointing out landmarks on the road for those who still live in chains.
While UU worship might, typically, reflect on what is holy and deepen or explore it, this worship was bringing new life to old bones, resurrecting the living from the dead. Church was where you found freedom, where all of the suffering and oppression of the week was kindling for a raging fire—a fire that, once I got over myself, caught in me and is still burning more than 20 years later.
The resurrection, I learned in Roxbury, was in the gathered community, in the power of oppressed people coming together and claiming their lives as holy. Jesus could not be killed because his community would not allow it. Freedom was in solidarity, in throwing in my lot with the tortured community writhing on the cross, knowing that they were immortal because they were the Living God.
They were free not because of the suffering—much suffering does not lead to freedom!—but because they knew the truth of the Resurrection. Like the women looking for Jesus, they knew that the tomb was empty. And they lived in the freedom of that knowledge.
Each week in our services, we broke bread and had communion. In any given week, Rev. Hagler might point to anyone in the room and nod, and we knew it was our turn to tell that story of freedom. Twenty years later, I still know it in my bones and my heart:
On the night Jesus was betrayed, he took a loaf of bread and broke it, and said, this is my body, broken like the bodies of so many who have stood for justice. Eat it and remember me. And then the community would call out the names of others who had died, famous people and local friends, who had died for justice.
Standing in that circle, hearing those words, eating that bread, I tasted freedom.
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