Bob Feeney shares why he went to Minneapolis

 

On a "Know Before You Go" call in preparation for my trip to Minneapolis, organizers asked us to answer a question for ourselves and leave it with someone we trust and love. I needed a sermon for Sunday, so I wrote this letter to Westminster United Church of Christ, where I am pastor.

The question was: Why am I going to Minneapolis?

Minneapolis is a conflict zone. Thousands of federal agents are on the ground, hundreds of people have been abducted and detained, and Renee Good has been murdered. There is no reason to believe that the situation will improve by the time we arrive.

So…Why am I going to Minneapolis?

This answer came to me more quickly than I could have imagined, and with greater clarity than I almost ever experience. I spoke the words aloud, in my living room alone … uttering words whose interpretation I did not understand until minutes later.

It will not end with me.

This crackdown is not about immigrants, about queer or trans folks, nor about BIPOC people. It is about fear, and the power some people feel to act out their most hopeless fears on vulnerable people. In Minneapolis, Latin American and Somali communities are being targeted, but at some point, when inflicting terror and pain on these people becomes inefficient or inconvenient enough, they will move on to someone else.

I am a native-born, white, cisgender male citizen, ordained and educated at one of the world's most prestigious universities. I am afforded a level of privilege and protection that many people cannot dream of in this country. As far-removed as I could feel from the people being terrorized in Minneapolis, I know that if this cruelty continues, it will eventually come for me. I know that if I wait until it reaches me, it will not end with me.

Violence always creates more violence. If I turn my back on this current wave of violence, hoping it will crest and break before reaching me, I know that one day soon it will crash over me, and there may be nobody left to pull me from the undertow.

It will not end with me.

I am committed to peace. Jesus calls us to love God by loving our neighbor, and when my Somali neighbor is under attack, Jesus calls me to bear witness, to refuse to look away, because that is what love commands—and only through bearing witness to the violence can we hope to respond peacefully.

I am going to Minneapolis in peace, knowing I will be met by violent people. I am going because a witness is needed. First, to tell the people of Minnesota that we see them, that the Church sees them through the eyes of Christ, and we will not look away. We will not turn our backs on our neighbors. No matter how difficult it may be, we will see them.

Second, I am going to Minneapolis to tell the people carrying out this violence that I see them—that the Church sees them. I am leaving the relative safety of Westminster and Spokane, people whom I love, to go and tell them they have wandered far from the fold.

They have forgotten their own humanity, and while they are exercising power to take life from their neighbors, they have placed themselves in grave danger. I do not believe in hell, but a wise colleague offered me a nuanced perspective: perhaps there is a hell, but the gates are always open.

So, to those who would be oppressors, to the ones willing to demean and attack the vulnerable, those who would sacrifice tenderness for an illusion of safety and order, I am coming to tell you that you are bound for hell, indeed you are employed as an architect of hell—but the gates have been left open.

I am writing this because I know that you, violent ones, may not hear me, and even if you hear me, hell's sirens are seductive, and you may choose to respond not with love, but with violence. You may choose to fire your weapon, fashioned in fear.

I know you are fearful of this call, because it is a call to freedom, and freedom is actually quite frightening. Christ does not call us out onto a glassy pond, but out into the swirl and chop of a wide ocean. I know that many of you will not hear me when I tell you that you are my neighbor, and you are free to leave this place and its fearful ways behind—the gate is open, and we could walk out together into paradise, into the Kingdom of God.

I am writing before I leave the safety and love I feel among friends and neighbors in Spokane because I worry you may not take my invitation to peace and into beloved community.

If my greatest fear is realized, if you will not hear my invitation but remain intent on your fear, I need you to hear these words: It will not end with me.

For more than 2,000 years, Jesus Christ has called us into a witness of peace. For thousands of years before him, prophets and peacemakers spoke the same invitation. Those willing to step boldly have always known that the gates of hell were unlocked and unguarded, open to all willing to walk into something they had imagined but perhaps not fully seen: peace that surpasses understanding.

Many have twisted Christ's name to serve their agenda, as their leaders do now, but there has always been a remnant giving voice to the voiceless, insisting that peace is our only purpose, and we will not compromise—peace is the only means by which we are going to get there. You will leave when it is no longer cost-effective to be here, but we will keep working for peace, and we will never count the cost.

You have buried and disappeared millions throughout history. Millions more have endured torment and told their story. You seem to never learn that we are seeds, and we will always keep creating more than all you can destroy or bury.

It will not end with me. It will not end with us. It will never end with us.

You have done violence on Dakota lands, and the Dakota are still here, singing their songs. You have done violence on Spokane lands, and still, each day drumming and prayer rise from this place. We will keep singing our songs until you have buried us all, and still our songs will spring up from the earth. From every rubble pile in Gaza, every block in Minneapolis, our songs will continue to rise. Across the Southern deserts where you believe nothing lives or grows, our songs will continue to trace our stories, leaving tracks you will never be able to erase.

It will not end with us.

We will keep singing our songs until the sound is so seductive, even you will be lost in its sway. We will keep on singing until you join in the song and we walk out of that gate together, because that is who we are. We are the ones called by the One who you buried, who rose again to proclaim that it will not end with me.

Church, take heart in these words: it will not end with me. It will not end with us. Keep singing.

After returning, Bob commented: Our lives move through seasons, from life, to the tomb and back into life. That is the Christian story.

In Minneapolis, I saw the death, the tomb, the hell that they are living through right now, and I saw a community connected and strong. I learned about neighborhood "commuters" who drive around tracking ICE agents and alerting their neighbors. I learned that the Dakota people have been doing this for generations and still do it.

The Rev. Jim Bear Jacobs, a Mohican pastor and environmental activist, noted that in communities that have experienced trauma, it is passed down on a cellular level. It is called epigenetic trauma. He added that if epigenetic trauma is real, then so is epigenetic hope, because all who are alive are descendants of those who survived.

When, on the plane home, I learned of Alex Pretti's murder, my heart sank.

There is something about the proximity and persistence of the violence that makes it so heavy.

We have to remind ourselves that this is the shape of Christian life. We are drawn back to the tomb again and again. We face death each time, with hope of resurrection.

In Minneapolis, I have seen the brutality, and I have seen the strength of the resistance. I know that what they are doing there, they will try here. It will look different. Our resistance will need to be different, but the same Spirit will guide us, and the same God will go into the streets with us, because Christ's call into beloved community, into being a neighbor to the world, is irrevocable.