"Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last." (Mark 15:37).

"Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last." (Mark 15:37).

This was our “word for the day” at Manna House this morning, the day after a Grand Jury in New York failed to indict the police officer who killed Eric Garner.  The “crime” Mr. Garner was engaged in when confronted by New York City police officers is one familiar to many of our guests at Manna House.  Mr. Garner was selling individual cigarettes from a pack.  It is a low level form of entrepreneurship.  You buy a pack of cigarettes and then sell each cigarette for 25 cents or so.  This way you make a few bucks.

A police officer put Mr. Garner in a chokehold, despite such chokeholds being against New York Police Department policy.  Mr. Garner repeatedly said, “I can’t breathe.”  Then he passed out, and died.

"Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last." (Mark 15:37).

Guests at Manna House are familiar with police harassment.  One reported how the police stopped him a few weeks back as he walked along Claybrook, one block from Manna House.  “They told me to take my hands out of my pockets.  I asked why?  They said, ‘We want to see what’s in your pockets.’  I said, ‘My hands are in my pockets.’  And then I showed them my hands.  They keep after you and keep after you.  It’s frustrating.”

We don’t have children at Manna House very often.  But today, there were three children who came with their mothers.  These women are not homeless, but come for the coffee and socializing and a few items.  While waiting for “socks and hygiene” the mothers, both African American, sat with their children, and listened in on the conversation about the “Word of the Day.”  One held her four-year old boy closely and said, “All this scares me for my child. I just don’t know.  I just don’t know.  How will I keep him safe?”

“Jesus died like that man did,” said another guest, “the police got him.”

“I guess we’ll just have to walk around with our hands up,” said a guest as he raised his hands.

“Even then I don’t know if we’d be safe,” yet another guest responded.

Then one who had been quiet offered, “I don’t even know what to say anymore.  It just needs to stop.” 

Said another as he shook his head, “It is hard enough to survive out here without worrying about this too.”

I could hear in the voices of these guests their pain, anguish, weariness, and sadness.

Christians are in the season of Advent.  A spiritual writer, Br. Robert L’Esperance writes, “Advent is a time to look for “desert places”: the place of solitude, the place of true silence in which we can become fully awake to our sin and God’s forgiving grace which alone can heal it.”

If white people would listen more carefully, and drop the defensive judgments and rationalizations that try to explain away the deaths of African Americans at the hands of police officers, then an important first step would be taken toward the work of racial justice.  I find Manna House to be a good place to listen, to consider the Word of the Day in light of the events of the day, and to learn from those who see from below.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer urged no less when he wrote from prison, “There remains an experience of incomparable value. We have for once learnt to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled – in short, from the perspective of those who suffer.”