Raising Holy Hands: Reflections on the Killing of Michael Brown

Raising Holy Hands: Reflections on the Killing of Michael Brown
Dale T. Irvin, President, NYTS

“I desire, then, that in every place the people should pray, lifting up holy hands without anger or argument…” 1 Timothy 2:8

More than two weeks have now passed since an unarmed 18-year-old African American named Michael Brown was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, MO. Witnesses said that the teen-ager had his hands raised in the air to show he was unarmed and was surrendering before being shot by the officer six times, including two times to the head. Ferguson itself has been embroiled in continuous uproar since then. The majority of protestors have been peaceful, but the violence in the streets has included Molotov cocktails being thrown and local businesses being looted on one side, and police and national guard troops firing tear-gas and stun grenades on the other. The outrage has not been confined to Ferguson, but has reached across the nation. Even the President of the United States has weighed in, holding several news conferences, ordering a separate federal investigation, and sending the US Attorney General to Ferguson to be briefed directly on the case.

Protestors may not be throwing Molotov cocktails in every city in the nation, but that does not diminish the fact that we are all in this once again together with our anger and outrage. They are manifest expressions of a deeper, lingering, unresolved and often repressed deadly social fact: the United States remains a deeply racist and deeply divided society. We have seen this before. This time protestors are putting up their hands across America to show their outrage. Two and a half years ago it was donning “hoodies” to protest the Trayvon Martin killing. Before that it was something else, and something else, and something else, all the way back for at least 350 years that amount to nothing less than a sustained regime of unrelenting terror and injustice.

NYTS has long put the struggle for justice and the call for social transformation at the center of our teaching and learning. We mourn the loss of life of this African American teen-ager, of other African American young men and women in our cities, and of all our young people, no matter what their race or ethnicity might be. After the turmoil in Ferguson has died down, the investigators have done their work, the courts have considered the case against the police officers, and something possibly resembling “justice” has been done, we will still be at it, educating ourselves and others about the underlying conditions of racism as well as other forms of structural violence such as sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia; and looking for effective means of ministry that will lead to lasting transformation.

In the meantime, we must act to respond to this issue. Our colleagues from the national Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference have issued a letter titled “#DONTSHOOT: BEARING WITNESS AND BREAKING THE SILENCE” that calls upon congregations, synagogues, mosques and other houses of faith throughout the nation to join in solidarity with those in Ferguson. They are inviting all of us to lift up this issue in prayer over the coming weeks in our worship services. To help us do so, they have published “A Litany for Children Slain by Violence.” You can download it on their web site at http://sdpconference.info/dontshoot-bearing-witness-and-breaking-the-silence/

They are also asking us to pause at the end of our worship services, maybe stepping outside on to the streets, and with arms raised, to repeat the words, “Don’t shoot! We are not armed.” Follow the instructions of the apostle in 1Timothy 2:8 this week and lift up holy hands, not in anger and argument but in solidarity and as a sign of hope. We will be doing so at our fall retreat for all master’s degree programs. We will also be thinking of the promise given to all of us in Revelation 21:4 that there will come a day when God will wipe away the tears from our eyes, and there will be no more killings in the streets, no more mourning, no more rioting, no more pain, and no more injustice. Until then we are going to have to keep our hands up.