Thursday, Dec. 28 pm
Calling Forth a Reconciliation GenerationBrenda Salter-McNeil
It was July 2, 1999. I’ll never forget it. It was a Friday. The fourth of July weekend—a weekend in America that’s supposed to be filled with festivities and fun and cookouts and all that kind of stuff. I had just driven from Chicago, Illinois to Trenton, New Jersey, where my mom was really sick and we expected that she should die.
I preach at a church in the summer, and they had called and asked if I would preach all summer long. And I decided that before taking on this preaching assignment of preaching every Sunday for the month of July and the month of August, I would go home and be with my mom first. So, my friends and I drove back to New Jersey.
As is my custom, when I got back home, I called my husband. I said to him, “We got here safely, thanks for praying for me. Everything’s OK.” About fifteen minutes later, the phone rang again, and it was Derek, my husband. I don’t know if you’ve ever received a phone call where you immediately know something’s wrong. As soon as I picked up the phone, I said, “Hey, what’s the matter?” And he said, “Ricky’s been shot.” “Ricky? Ricky’s been shot?!” It became surreal for a moment. Ricky who? Ricky where? How? What?!
He said to me on the other line, “We don’t know much, we don’t know how it happened, but he’s in the hospital. Pray.” I hung up the phone, and I’m like, “Coach Ricky Byrdsong? I mean, Coach, our friend, the member of my church? I just saw him last Sunday!” I thought to myself, “I just walked out of church. I told him about something I thought we ought to do at our church, and he said, “Sister Brenda, I’m gonna do that!” And it was the Friday before we got back to church. And Derek is saying Ricky’s been shot? All we knew is that it seemed to be a drive-by shooting. And just like some of you, I immediately thought it must have taken place in the hood. Must have been in a bad neighborhood—drive-by shootings. That doesn’t happen in nice places. That happens to those people in those neighborhoods. That’s why we don’t live there.
And he said, “No, it wasn’t in a bad neighborhood. He was a block away from his house.”
“In Skulky, Illinois?” I thought. “Where homes start at $200,000? Not so!”
I hung up the phone. Derek told me, “It’s all over the news; cut on the television.” So I cut on the news, and it was. It was plastered all over the television. You see, Ricky Byrdsong had been the former head basketball coach at Northwestern University. And as such, a lot of people knew him. He had coached all over the place, had relationships with some people who were now basketball stars in the National Basketball Association, and so this was widely reported.
But sadly to say, Ricky wasn’t the only person who got hurt that fatal weekend. In nine separate incidences across Illinois and Indiana, a guy, a young white guy, a college student, in a light blue Ford Taurus, decided that he was going to go on a random shooting spree. And at first he started shooting in the neighborhood where I used to live. And he shot at Jewish people coming from Temple on Sabbath. And then he sped away from there and he went to another neighborhood, Skulky, Illinois, where a lot of Jewish people live.
And my guess is that he drove around that corner that day looking for a Jewish person to shoot. And he saw a really tall black man with two of his kids, walking down the street, and he decided that instead of a Jew, he’d get a black man this time. And he shot him, right in front of his kids.
I told you it was the Fourth of July weekend. They were coming home from the playground. This was supposed to be a good time. This guy was a member of something called the World Church of the Creator. Doesn’t that sound good? The World Church of the Creator? We looked at creation this morning, didn’t we? And that’s who we’re supposed to be—the World Church of the Creator! But they had co-opted a good name and done a horrible thing with it. It’s a white supremacy group and they are scared to death of the changes that are happening all around them.
I didn’t expect Ricky to die. I prayed all night, “Oh, God, don’t let him die. Oh, God, don’t let him die. Oh, God, don’t let him die.” We hear about people being shot so often, that somehow I’d kind of thought that Christians would be exempt because we pray hard, we love God. So yeah, he got shot. But no weapon formed against us will prosper. He’s going to surely come out of the hospital.
But that is not what happened. Ricky Byrdsong, healthy, strong, vibrant man of God died. Just after 12 o’clock, midnight. So I came back home for the funeral. I came back home because it was messing up my theology. You see, my theology said that somehow if I minded my business and didn’t go into bad neighborhoods, and if I kept to myself, and did good things, and if I prayed and did holy, somehow God kind of owed it to me to treat me well and to take care of me and keep me safe. That if I got a good college education and if my children were taught of the Lord, somehow I didn’t have to worry about my eleven-year-old little boy walking down the street and being shot to death. And Ricky Byrdsong’s death stood that on its head for me.
And then I was even further taken aback by his wife, Sherialyn’s response to this tragedy. I told you I was watching the news; I looked at it constantly. So as I was looking at the news, I heard Sherialyn say this—and she did not shed one tear, she was not an apologetic, she was a pillar of faith, a strong woman of God. I expected her to be absolutely devastated, wouldn’t you? She stood, faced the camera, and she said, in a prepared statement, the following:
The violent act that took my husband’s life is yet another clarion call to our nation, and I might add, our world. It’s time to wake up. It’s time to turn back to God, to read and obey his word, to put prayer and the Bible back into our schools and daily family living.
And then she said, “This is not a gun problem. It’s heart problem. And only God and reading his word can change our hearts.”
Where does a person get that kind of faith in God in the midst of such a horrible, devastating tragedy? I wanted to believe in God. I’m a person who preaches racial reconciliation; I talk about racial reconciliation. Ricky Byrdsong lived for racial reconciliation. And I was having a hard time coming up with reconciliation. I wanted to hate that boy. I won’t even call his name tonight, because I don’t want to be giving his props.
When I watched Sherialyn on that television set, the wife of the victim, have faith, I thought “I’ve got to get back to Chicago, I’ve got to go around the people of God, because I have lost perspective, and I need somehow for them to help me have hope again.” So I came back the funeral, and I was absolutely overwhelmed by what happened in that thing. I walked into the funeral, and I’m telling you, I was messed up. “The Woman of God” had no faith, I had no hope, I wasn’t happy, and I wasn’t trying to look happy. So I walked in there and I was dragging. I walked up to the casket, and I thought, “Now they’re looking at me, because I’m the preacher, and I’m the one who’s supposed to be one who has things to say, and I want to fall out in front of this casket. I want to say ‘Oh no, no, no, this shouldn’t happen. Oh, Ricky!’” I wanted to perform.
So I went to my seat and I sat there, trying to hold back the tears and trying to keep my face straight. Television cameras were all over the place, and I was trying to look right. I was sitting with the clergy members, but my heart wasn’t in it.
And then Sherailyn comes in, all dressed in white, standing as a pillar of faith, and a worship service kicked off. I mean it went into high gear into worship. In fact, the church that I attend and that Ricky attended is called the Worship Center. We are known for our belief that worship changes people’s lives. And we came in and we declared that we were going to be the worship center.
My pastor said, “This tragedy is not going to overcome the grace of God. We’re not going to let hate triumph over love. We’re going to bless our God in here.” I mean they pulled out all the stops. They blessed God, they worshiped God, they danced, and they rejoiced, right in front of the casket. Ah, you should have seen people looking at them—the newsmen were staring. “What’s going on in here? What kind of people is this? We came to report on a funeral!” And here go these people ahead dancing and shouting, in front of all the NBA stars in absolute amazement. They were aghast. And Sherailyn is blessing God, “Hallelujah! Worship God!” I mean she took off her shoes and gave God praise!
And at some point, she looked at me. And I still looked like “I ain’t with this. And I ain’t trying to be with it.” She came over to me with a tambourine and she said, “Play!” Now everybody’s eyes are on her, so they’ve seen her bring me this tambourine. And I’m thinking, “I don’t want to worship God, I don’t want to worship God. Too much injustice has happened for me to worship God. I don’t want to worship; I’m not in a good mood.” So I took it begrudgingly, because I thought I had to, and I started kind of trying to play. So I’m doing this [motions limp tambourine playing] and I’m looking around and I’m trying, and then I began to watch the people’s reaction to the worship.
I saw B.J. Armstrong—some of y’all know that name, he used to play for the Bulls. I watched him. I watched him looking around. I saw another guy Steve Kerr; he also played on that same team. He looked around. I literally saw them staring at Christians, wondering, “What kind of people is this?”
And God grabbed my heart, and I said, “Oh, God, I preach about something that when I’m forced to believe it, I don’t. Help me, God, to understand the reality that’s going on in this place. Help me to know, God, to you have called us to be a people, that even in the face of tragedy, we understand who you are, and we worship. Help me to represent the Kingdom, Lord. Help me to represent the Kingdom.”
This morning you all were introduced to a text: Isaiah chapter 6. I want to suggest to you tonight that what happened to me happened to Isaiah. Isaiah was in a worship service. He was with other priests and he was praising God. My guess is that Isaiah had been in worship services many times prior to that, but something was different about Isaiah this time. His heart, I think, was in a different place. Perhaps he had grown more sensitive to God. Perhaps he had learned how to hear God. Maybe he was having his quiet time. Maybe he was spending personal time with God, so that when he got into the big worship service, he was able to connect with God at a different level.
So when the worship began to happen, and the incense began to rise, Isaiah said, “I saw the Lord this time. I’ve been in worship a lot of times before, but I have never seen God like I saw God this time. I saw God high. I saw God lifted up. I tell you, his train filled the temple! And not only that, I heard the angels, those attending around the throne—the seraphim, the shining ones—I heard them cry ‘Holy! Holy! Holy! Hey! Holy is the Lord God Almighty! The whole earth is filled with his glory!’
“I tell you, these shining beings, these burning ones, these seraphim, they themselves shone with glory, but when they looked at God, they had to cover their eyes, because even the glory of God—they couldn’t stand to look at it. They said, ‘God, you’re too deep for us, you’re too much for us; all we can cry is holy!’”
Isaiah could describe the seraphim, but he could not describe God. And then, without an altar call, without anyone saying, “Yo, man, you got a dirty mouth,” nobody said “Isaiah, you need to clean up your act.” Nobody sang, “Just as I am without one plea.” Nobody did a thing. Isaiah, all by himself, in the midst of the worship service, Isaiah said, “Oh, woe, woe, woe! Woe is me! I’m messed up! I’ve got a dirty mouth. My mouth is messed up.”
And the Bible says that out of the heart the mouth speaks. So I believe that Isaiah was making a confession about his heart. I think Isaiah was saying “God, my heart’s messed up. That’s why my mouth is messed up.” I say the wrong things, I think the wrong things because I believe the wrong things. And not only I, God. I’m not the only one. I dwell amongst a people of unclean lips. I’m messed up and the people I’ve come from are messed up too. I’m a product of my generation.”
I know most of us would like to think we’re not a product of our society, that somehow we’re cut above; we’re better. I’d like to think that about myself—that somehow, everybody else is messed up and we can look at the world and go, “Tsk, tsk, tsk. What horrible, messed up people. But me, on the other hand, I’ve seen the Lord high and lifted up!”
But Isaiah didn’t go there. Isaiah identified with the people. He said God, in your presence, when true worship happens, you can’t shuck and jive. You can’t have facades, you can’t pretend. You can’t make believe that you’ve got it all together because when God is really elevated, when you really see God high and lifted up, you can’t help but see yourself differently.
And Isaiah said, “I’m not going to pretend in front of you, God. I’m not going to front. I’m not going to make believe that I’m a wonderful, great person, because you know too much about me and you can see into my heart. So before you say it, I’ll say it myself: God, I don’t deserve to be in this worship service. Everybody here is crying, ‘Holy,’ and I don’t even deserve to be here. I can’t open my mouth in this worship. I shouldn’t be privileged to this because I’m a man of unclean lips. And if the truth be known, everybody I come from is just like me.”
As I was preparing for this service tonight, I had some sense of what I was supposed to say. But God always tends to interrupt my previously scheduled program with the truth. I know that it is hard to repent for something you didn’t do. I don’t like being blamed for stuff that I don’t think was my fault. Now if it was my fault, generally I’ll say, “I’m sorry for what I’ve done,” but I don’t want to own what you’ve done.
Isaiah, as I study this “Woe is me, I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell with people just like me. I’m a product of my society, I represent this whole generation, God.” As I prepared, God said, “The very same thing that was in the heart of that guy that killed Ricky is in all of your hearts.” And I said, “God, what? The very same thing that was in his heart is in my heart? Not so!”
Do you know that whenever we hear about tragedies and atrocities like Burundi and other horrible things, in us, we wonder, “Who could do such a horrible thing?” It’s almost as if to us, they are completely different than us, right? Yes!
We see them as wholly other. And somehow, yeah, we’ve got our problems, but we are nothing like them. And God said that the same thing that is in his heart—in the heart that killed my friend—is in my heart and in your heart, in all of our hearts? I said, “No! No!” But I had to think about it because then God said, “What caused him to do it was fear. He was scared and so are you. You’re scared, he was scared, you’re scared.
And if you tell the truth tonight, you’re scared. We’re scared. We’re scared of people who are not like us. We’re scared of people who don’t hold our values. We’re scared that they’re going to change things, upset things, mess up things, not obey how we’ve understood things, not keep our traditions sacred or safe. We’re scared.
The other day, I have a little boy, he’s eleven-years-old, he’s here, and he was talking. He goes to a Lutheran school that I absolutely love, but he one of few African American children in that school. We can count them on one hand. He’s there because I want my child to get a good education. But I’m also aware that he’s getting socialized a certain way. And as I listened to him talk one night not long ago, I said to my husband, “He’s sounding white.”
Now you laugh, but that’s a fear in the heart of a mother who wants her child to grow up with a sense of identity. And I’m scared. What are you scared of? Because the guy who shot my friend was scared.
There’s a statistic that I want you to hear tonight before I close. By the year 2050, some people estimate that by the year 2025—we’re talking 25 years from now, so you add 25 years to your age and you got what I’m talking about—in about 25 years, there will be more non-white than white Americans, and most of the non-white population will be Asian and Hispanic, not black. The world is changing. We’re becoming a global people. And the yen affects the dollar and the peso affects what we buy and sell in different countries. We’re more interconnected than we have ever been before, and that concerns us. Corporate America has woken up to this reality and they’re doing all kinds of diversity training things for people to learn how to be more global in their approach to the marketplace, but not the church. Oh no, not the church. We don’t half care.
My husband is reading a book called Divided by Faith. It’s one of the best books out right now. I would’ve recommended it, but it was not out by the time I knew I was speaking here. But it’s an awesome text and basically the writers of that text have come to believe that the church is comfortable in its isolationism, and we don’t care that we don’t care! And that’s why we don’t do anything. And that’s why we don’t try to change. And that’s why we cry out more about things like homosexuality or abortion, and we won’t say a thing about racism because we don’t care. We don’t care. It doesn’t bug us that much. It doesn’t affect us, it doesn’t hurt us. We are safe, or so we think.
Or so I thought, until Ricky Byrdsong. I had to admit, “Yeah, God, I don’t care. I kind of care, and I’m trying.” He brought back a story to my mind that I’m going to tell you. I went to England for the first time in my life in 1986. I was invited to go there with my husband and several other seminarians from Fuller Theological Seminary to talk about the black church in America. We went there because the Anglican church was very interested in how to make the church in urban areas thrive. We had a wonderful experience. God used us there. And then we were invited to a place called Birmingham.
When we got to Birmingham, there were all Jamaican people there. I thought “I’m going to be with my people—Jamaican people in the house!” Before I knew it, we got out of the van, I thought, “This is going to be a celebration, it’s going to be a party.” And instead of it being a party, Mavis, one of the young people came to the front of the group, and she said, “Where have you been? Didn’t you hear about the suffering we’re going through? Didn’t you understand our plight? In America, you can be anything you want to be. But here, you cannot. Why didn’t you come help us? Why didn’t you come serve? Why didn’t you come share with us?”
I stood there dumbfounded. What I said to her was, “I didn’t know. But now I’m going to confess to you: I didn’t care. I didn’t care enough to read the newspaper about what was going on in other countries. I didn’t care enough to know what was going on. I didn’t know that there were people hurting beyond where I was because it didn’t touch me.”
So tonight—because now that I understand what was in the heart of that young white guy who killed my friend Ricky Byrdsong, is also in my heart (and if we be honest like Isaiah, it’s in your heart too)—I’m going to start by being the first one to repent:
Hey, God, I’m sorry. You’re right. My heart’s messed up. And Ricky, I swear I didn’t know I had anything to do with it. But I’m really, really sorry.
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