A Painful Sermon that Frustrates Me, and Makes Me Hopeful
This week, for the first time I remember, I heard the name Yusef Hawkins.
Do you know who he is?
Yusef (also spelled Yusuf) was a high school student in Brooklyn in 1989. One summer night he accompanied two of his friends, one of whom was looking for a used car. They left their neighborhood of East New York and headed to Bensonhurst.
Near where my family now lives.
They got off the N train at 20th Ave and began walking the ten blocks to check out the car for sale.
They never made it.
The three teenagers stumbled onto a group of 20–30 teenagers who had gathered that evening for a fight.
Seven of them had baseball bats.
One brought a gun.
They didn’t plan to fight Yusef and his friends, per se.
They planned to fight the “dark-skinned Latino” teenage boy who was dating one of their girls.
A white girl.
Did I mention that the large group was white?
So when Yusef and his friends, all of whom were Black, walked by, the mob made the fatal assumption that one of these teenagers was their target.
Yusef and his friends were not the planned target.
Reportedly no words were exchanged. No one swung a baseball bat.
But four shots were fired.
And two of them hit Yusef in the chest.
The sixteen-year-old was pronouned dead upon arrival.
“A whole society can repent”
Why do I bring up this story?
For one, though I was only 11 years old at the time of this senseless murder, it occurred within blocks of where my family now lives.
My marathon training runs have led me past the scene of this crime—20th Ave and 68th Street—dozens of times.
It’s alarmingly close to where my family gets on the D train every day.
But I never knew.
The other reason I retell Yusef’s story is to share how Fleming Rutledge addressed the tragedy.
She was serving in Manhattan at the time of Yusef’s death, and her sermon in August 1989 referenced a New York Times article documenting the crime.
I read “Rising Up against the Grave” this week. It’s in her collection And God Spoke to Abraham: Preaching from the Old Testament.
For me the sermon induced both frustration and hope.
Frustration because the alarm she sounded on racism in America sounds strikingly familiar. As if as a society we haven’t improved since I was a 6th grader.
As if we’ve actually regressed.
The issues could hardly be more clear-cut. God does not want this land, which he set as a beacon for the nations of the world, to sink into a pit of racial hatred, crime, violence, drugs, poverty, despair, and armed conflict between the haves and the have-nots. He does not want us to make a covenant with death [a quotation of Isaiah 28:15].
If we keep on doing that, we will experience the full force of his left hand, his alien work [referring to the judgment pronounced in Isaiah 28:21]. We will more and more feel that the rising up of God is a rising up in wrath only, to judge and condemn.
And yet it also inspired hope. Hope grounded in a God who strikes that he might heal, whose left hand (to follow Rutledge in employing Martin Luther‘s idiom) always conceals his right hand, his hand of deliverance.
A hope that bends his people towards repentance.
Repentance does not mean saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ or even being sorry. It means something far more radical. It means to turn in the opposite direction. A whole society can repent. Germany has done that.
Indeed after World War II German turned away from its racist fascism, acknowledged its crimes, and moved in a new direction.
What would this path look like for the church? Rutledge asserts:
It is surely the part of Christians in America to lead in a movement in national repentance.
That was 1989.
We’ve got a lot of work to do.
Starting With Ourselves
But during this season of fasting and prayer, this Lent 2021, we have sought to do just that—repent of sins personal and national, listen to those who have been victimized by our prejudice, and turn the tide wherever we are.
Our hope is not in our repentance or our national heritage.
Our hope is in the living God.
As Rutledge puts it:
[National repentance] means that we who are relatively secure make common cause with the most vulnerable members of our society—the ones for whom the Holy One of Israel has a special concern…. [As we repent] we will begin to understand how God’s right hand is concealed in his left, how it is that God’s judgment is an instrument of his mercy.We may even become agents of God’s right hand ourselves.
May it ever be, Lord.
Amen.
Sixth Prayer Meeting – Video Link
My sincerely apologies to those who had trouble logging into prayer meeting this week. I mistakenly thought I had set an email to send Wednesday morning with the link.
Furthermore I was leading a training session on Zoom at the time of this meeting so I wasn’t able to respond to your emails in a timely fashion.
Truly I am sorry.
We had the privilege of hearing Reyn Cabinte, pastor of Uptown Community Church (PCA) in Washington Heights, Manhattan.
He shared his reflections on an increasingly important topic—what it’s like to be Asian American.
I heard a version of this talk a week before the shootings in Atlanta, and man, was it powerful.
The video is now available. Click here to have the link sent to you.
This Week’s Shared Resource
A few years ago Tim Keller and Bryan Stevenson shared the stagefor an evening on Grace, Justice, and Mercy.
You may know Tim as the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Manhattan and the author of many books, such as The Reason for God and Prodigal God.
If you don’t know Bryan Stevenson, you need to read this book.
For years now I’ve thought that if Bryan wrote about Chinese Christians suffering unjustly, evangelical pastors all across American would exhort their people to read his book.
But he’s not writing about Chinese Christians suffering unjustly.
He writes about (and works on behalf of) Black people suffering unjustly.
Mostly Black Christians.
That he is so unknown in evangelical circles tells us more about ourselves than it does about him.
So watch this video. Then go buy his book.
Final Prayer Meeting
One final time we’ll gather Wednesday at noon ET.
Instead of hearing a guest speaker, we will have a discussion of what we’ve learned and what next steps we plan to take. And then we’ll pray.
I asked Jim Salladin to lead our conversation; he first had the vision for this season of fasting and prayer.
So come prepared to share what you’ve learned, how you’ve lamented, and fresh ways you’ve seen and experienced the glory of our Savior.
Check your email two hours beforehand for the link.
(And if you don’t get one, feel free to text me!)
It’s been quite a journey. Thank you for walking it with us.