A Sermon about how we are Pharisees and sometimes good news doesn't make us feel like bunnies inside.

Preached at Gethsemane Lutheran Austin 8/30/15; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Grace, Mercy, and Peace to you from the Holy Trinity.  Amen. 

Thank you for welcoming me to worship with you this morning, I’m so delighted to be here with you once again, and thanks Pastor Karl for inviting me to preach…it’s exciting to be a pastor in a church that worships in the evenings, so that I can spend my Sunday mornings with great faithful people like you here, and in other Austin congregations.  I bring you greetings from Table of Mercy, the new ELCA congregation I’m working on forming.  We’re a group of folks who have been largely disenfranchized by the church looking for ways to reclaim our identity as Christians in the world.  We meet every other Sunday evening and make dinner together and eat it during worship like the earliest Christians did and keep all our focus on social justice here in Austin and throughout the world and you’re welcome to visit us at any time!

When I was growing up, I would often times hear the line “if you were here last week you heard…” and then the preacher would refer to the gospel reading from the last week.  I realize now that it was important for the sermon if it built on a theme that had been introduced the week before for everyone to be on the same page.  Because often that’s the case….our readings follow one gospel per year and while each Sunday has its own integrity and ability to stand on its own theologically, sometimes its nice to take the long view of things and see how Jesus weaves the same things throughout the things he teaches, or see how he starts something in one reading and flips it on its head the next week.  

But I can’t do that this week, because it is the first time we have read from the Gospel of Mark in since July 19th.  We took a huge break and read from the same chapter of John for the last 5 weeks…so if you haven’t been in church since mid july, welcome back and maybe you can remember what last happened.  If not, I’ll give you a little refresher…Jesus zooms around healing people and getting in boats and such and he ends up in a town where people have heard about him and touch the hem of his garment and they are healed.  The religious leaders heard about this and are upset because Jesus is doing exactly everything he’s not supposed to.  He’s breaking laws and as a way to trap him, the leaders known as the Pharisees, are looking for any way to get him nailed up to a cross.  They catch wind of the fact that his disciples are eating without washing their hands and are appalled because they are violating the terms of the Torah, the books of the Law…which gets us to where we are today.  Jesus telling three groups of people the same thing in slightly different language (the leaders, his disciples, and the crowds).  

Part of the beauty of getting to preach is spending time each week locating myself in the story…and it’s something I encourage you to do when listening to it on Sunday or reading it throughout the week.  By thinking about where I fit I can often times hear God’s words to me more powerfully.  And since we are reading the Bible thousands of years after it was published, we have the luxury of seeing the different parts of the story and placing ourselves where we see fit.  

This week, of course, it’s super tempting to see ourselves as Jesus’ renegade disciples who spend so much of their time bucking the system and the status quo and helping the orphans and widows that they don’t have time to wash their hands before they eat.  It’s tempting to see ourselves as the disciples because we too are followers of Jesus, we too feed the orphans and widows not just in this city but around the world, we too try to follow the path of Christ.  But this week, as I read the story, and thought about the ELCA and the world I thought that putting myself…putting ourselves….in the shoes of the disciples in this story wouldn’t be honest.  

It wouldn’t be honest because, quite frankly, I think we’re more like the Pharisees than the disciples.  Maybe you saw about a month ago the study that showed the ELCA was the second least diverse denomination in the United States.  Surely you remember learning that the Charleston shooter was a member of an ELCA congregation.  Hopefully you started listening to the voices of people of color in our church and hearing their experiences of being a Person of Color and what that means for how they interact in the world.  I think the ELCA, and largely the whole church catholic tends to be on the side of the Pharisees….and I think we’re being confronted with it right now.  See, the Pharisees had the privilege of hiding behind the law so that they didn’t have to interact with people they didn’t want to.  The Pharisees had the luxury of not talking to people who didn’t look like them or didn’t act like them if they didn’t want to.  The pharisees….are us.  Now I totally understand that no one likes being called out as a racist, or that they have undeserved privileges…I don’t either…but the reality of the matter is that the ELCA and all the church have an immense amount of privilege that we’ve been hiding behind.  We do amazing work around the world to alleviate hunger, we do okay work around the city to alleviate hunger.  We do incredible work with disaster response and accompanying people to accomplish the goals that they set for themselves.  We do things like the Youth Gathering that change the landscape of an entire city in just one week.  I do not want to deny these things and the good that the church does.  

But Lutherans believe we are simultaneously saints and sinners.  In the midst of the good we do, we still are infected by the sin of racism, just like the Pharisees were.  The issue in Jesus’ time in this story is not a story of two ethnicities, but of two different worldviews.  And the Pharisees, rather than listening to the voices of those who were different than them are listening only to the narrative that gives them power and control over others.  And we’ve fallen into that trap that is so alluring…the trap of power, of control…without even knowing we’ve done it.  We’ve stayed a beacon of whiteness in a world that is in the middle of relearning that white identity is fragile, and is dependent on putting negative value on the color of skin that someone has if it’s not white.

And that’s really what I think Jesus is reacting to here.  The isolation that happens when the Pharisees, and us, stand behind privilege and use it as an excuse (whether explicit or not) to not engage in the issues of Justice that Jesus preached about.  He’s reacting to the fact that the Pharisees use their privilege to keep themselves from looking out in the world and seeing their neighbor and responding to their need. 

And Jesus reaction….the reaction that says “your privilege is something you need to work with….you need to take your privilege and use it to raise up the voices of those in the minority, you need to take your privilege and work with it so that people begin to understand that black lives matter…which isn’t to say other lives don’t matter, but to recognize that for so long black lives have not mattered in this country….that reaction of Jesus is what got him killed.  See, when someone tries to upset the balance of a world that thrives on the propagation of privilige, the system works its hardest to get rid of them.  The system and world thought it succeeded with Jesus but that’s not the case…and it’s not the case for us either.  

See, we might act a lot like the Pharisees (and that’s hard to hear)….but really, truly….we have a different story we can tell.  We don’t have to hide behind these harmful and false identities of power to which we are told by the world that we need to cling to keep our identity. Because we’ve been given a different identity in baptism, a dangerous identity because it’s the identity of Christ.  We are bound to him and to the way of his death in our baptism.  We are bound to all those who have been rejected and killed because they have challenged the system, we become one with every single person who suffers violence because they are powerless.  

And each week we gather around a table and eat and drink the body and blood of the one who was killed because he spoke out against the forces of this world that sought to keep people oppressed.  He spoke out against the forces of this world that claimed that black lives don’t matter.  But God, our God, cannot abide by death and takes the death of the one who was the victim of power and privilege and raised him to new life.  So we, when we eat and drink the body and blood of the one who was killed by power and killed by privilege, we are bound to everyone else in the world who is killed by privilege and power, and we cannot help but see that they are part of us, and we are part of them. And we cannot help but see and experience that God raises all of us from the death we create.  Because the promise of Christ is a promise that we belong to not just the death, but to the resurrection of a God that would experience all the pain in the world from humanity and still tell us that we are beloved.

When we eat and drink the body and blood of Christ we see that we are part of each other.  We see the face of God in our neighbors and we can no longer live like the Pharisees, in our towers of privilege.  When we consume the body of Christ and become the body of Christ amazing things happen, like the town hall meetings happening in Austin between people of color and white folk who are starting to create action plans for how to work together to dismantle racism in this city.  Or a public discussion on the nature of race and policing in Austin that had to be moved to a bigger venue because so many people had RSVP’d.  When we eat and drink Christ, we become one with the very people we oppress and we see that God can make something happen even in the midst of death.   We come together around the name of Jesus, the one whom God raised from the dead because God refuses to let death have the final word.  We come together to eat and drink and say the name of the one we crucified. 

And when we say the name of Jesus we say the name of Sandra, Cynthia, Susie, Ethel, Depayne, Clementa, Tywanza, Daniel, Sharonda, Myra, and all those who have been the victims of power and privilege.  And in saying their names, we speak the very name of God.  We speak the name of God who shows up in the middle of suffering, who shows up in the midst of death, and brings peace, breaks down the walls that divide us, and makes us one body with new life and a new start.  

A sermon about how sometimes we should just shut up and let God talk.

This sermon was preached at Living Word Lutheran Church in Buda, TX on June 7th, 2015.  During the summer, LW studies a book of the bible that's not often included in the lectionary readings.  This sermon is based on 1 Samuel 3

Grace, Mercy, and Peace to you from the Holy Trinity.  Amen. 

The word of the Lord was Rare in those days.  If you're interested in Biblical history at all, this passage is the only time the combination of Hebrew words used to make that phrase is ever used.  If you're not interested in Biblical history, I'm sorry to have just wasted one sentence of time...

Anyway, I was trying to think of a time when the word of the Lord was NOT rare...I mean, really...God spoke through the prophets, God spoke to the world through Jesus, the early church fathers who were determining what went in the bible and what didn't presumed that God spoke through Paul, though some people might disagree.  God spoke to Sara and Abraham, Moses and Miriam, Eve and Adam...and spoke to them directly.  But if we believe that the Bible isn't a complete history of the world, there had to be many many people who did not hear God speaking directly to them, and the ones that got it were included because it would be pretty boring to read through the first several chapters of the Bible with several hundred  stories like "Melthese lived his whole life never hearing God speak to him, and that made him sad"

But the reality is...the word of the Lord is rare.  And I'm often times wary of people who claim to have heard God speaking directly to them...because it really just seems like they're generally using their own voice, but projecting it larger and calling it God.  Preachers of the prosperity Gospel are famous for this....Give "god" money and you'll be blessed is the message on the big screen at the satellite campus.  Yet the man behind the curtain is living in a $15 million mansion and effectively telling people that he is God.  And that CERTAINLY isn't the voice of God.  

Or preachers who tell you that they heard from God that they could cure you if you believed hard enough, or prayed with them (for a fee, of course) and yet you still died.  

I don't even think this claim to hear the word of God is relegated to those theological traditions we disagree with.  In this church, both sides of the aisle on the decision to ordain clergy in Publically Accountable Lifelong Monogamous Same Gender Relationships claimed that they heard the voice of God telling them that their convictions were the "right" ones.  Or when the ELCA entered into the "call to common mission" with the Episcopal Church and people were divided in the name of God...or any number of other things that are just projections of people's already held biases onto God.  

The word of the Lord was rare in those days.   So rare, in fact, that Samuel thought it was his teacher Eli calling him in the night.  And like a dutiful and obedient student he goes to Eli 3 different times saying "here I am".  I'm certain this confused Eli the first couple times, because he knew he didn't call Samuel.  But, since he was a holy man, he finally had the good sense to realize that it was God who was calling to Samuel...after all, they were in the place where the ark of the covenant was kept...they were literally in the presence of God according to how they understood God's presence.  So Eli figures this out and tells Samuel to respond to the Lord the next time.  

And here's where things take a crazy turn.  Samuel has been obeying the command of his teacher and responding correctly with "here I am".  

Yet, once he learns that it is God, his response changes.  No longer does he boldly say "here I am".  Instead, he says to the Lord "Speak Lord, for your servant is listening."  

And this week...that line just killed me.  

Because it changed my perception of God in a way that is going to force me to grow.  Which is a good thing, but man is it painful.  I've always been pretty good at showing up and saying "here I am"  to things....which just dumps me right in the lap of pridefulness....I'm good at saying Here I am.  Good at talking.  Good at projecting my voice on to God.  Good at believing the word of the Lord was rare in these days.  

Several months ago, when it came into the public consciousness that the North Miami Beach police department was using pictures of real African American people in their target practice, I joined in with other clergy sending our pictures to them via twitter and postal mail with the message and hashtag #usemeinstead to send the message that it is harder to shoot a (white) clergy person than it is to shoot a young black man, because we are so blind to the system of racism that pervades our country.  This project started out from a dialogue between anglo and African American clergy, but quickly took on a life of its own.  A good friend of mine made several critiques of us (the anglo pastors participating) which were, quite frankly, hard to hear.  We were accused of once again co-opting the struggles of black life and bringing our whiteness to focus, pushing the lives of the people who were being shot at in the photos to the back of the bus.  

Those were hard words to hear for someone who just wanted to show support, and to point out the double standard many of our police forces operate under.  All of a sudden my "here I am" became an act of violence against African American lives through my blind use of privilege and the expectation that my voice be heard.  

Through many conversations after that moment, I learned an important lesson from my colleagues and friends of color.  Shut up and listen.  

Like Samuel needed his teacher to tell him his earnestness was nice, but wasn't what was expected of him, we all have teachers in our lives who have told us to shut up and listen.  We all need to hear God's voice more often. 

And this week...it killed me to read that the voice of the Lord is rare, because maybe it's not rare at all....maybe the voice of the Lord is rare because we just won't stop talking.  Maybe the word of the Lord is really incredibly prevalent but we drown out the noise of it with our talking, with our facebooking, with our cynicism, with our vapid optimism, with our blindness to our own power and privilege, with our desire to get to the top of the ladder, with our glorification of busy-ness, with our lawn mowers and car engines and oil rigs, with our excessive consumerism and rampant individualism....maybe these things are so loud that they literally drown out the voice of the Lord....that they make us think it's rare because WE rarely stop and listen.  

Because if we stop to listen....if we finally learn to shut up and say "Speak Lord, for your servant is listening" we may hear the voice of the Lord all around us.  

We may say Speak to the woman who has to commute to work an hour every day to two low wage jobs because she can't afford to live in the place she works....speak, for your servant is listening.  

We may say Speak to the homeless man we pass on our daily drive yet know nothing of his condition.  Speak, for your servant is listening.  

We may say Speak to the woman in the detention center who came to the United States out of necessity because our trade agreements have pushed our neighboring countries further into poverty.  Speak, for we, your servants are listening.  

To the border patrol agent, who thinks that detaining people is the most human thing possible....speak, for we are listening. 

To the wind as it blows around houses in places where wild grasses used to purify the air, Speak....for your servants are listening. 

To the earth itself which begs for water in some places, and roars with flood waters in others, thanks to global climate change, Speak.....for we, your servants, are listening. 

Speak!  People of color who's voices we oppress.

Speak!  People in poverty we'd rather ignore.  

Speak!  People who grate on our nerves at work

Speak!  earth and seas

Speak!  Wind and sun

Speak!  Our own hearts. 

Speak for your servants are listening.  

Listening for God in the cries of injustice and in the still beating of our own hearts 

Listening for God in the sounds of this building and in the breaths we each take. 

Listening for God in the silence, and in ourselves.  

Amen.   

Shake the Dust

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of 40 days of penitence that the church calls Lent.  It's a season where we use purple fabric in our church buildings, we put away the word "Alleluia" because it smacks too much of joy and celebration.  We remember our mothers and fathers of ages past wandering in the wilderness for 40 years wondering if they would ever find the promised land.  We remember Jesus wandering the wilderness for 40 days after his baptism, being tempted by the devil, and God only knows what else.

We remember today that we are dust.  And to dust we shall return.

We remember.

Lent gives us ample time to look at our story, the story of human existence, and reflect on our journeys, our failings, our human-ness...It is time to be introspective and think about the fact that human nature doesn't really lead us to do things like change the world and advocate for the poor and outcast only...but that we have a great capacity for destruction as well.

In Lutheran circles, we talk about being simultaneously sinner and saint, and if Easter is about celebrating the saint portion, then surely Lent is about remembering the sinner part...

And I think that humanity needs that.  We need to remember that we are dust.  Stardust...from billions of years of creation and recreation...but dust nonetheless.  We need to take a hard look at the state of our world and see that it has a dark ashen cross smudged across it by a God that says, I know there is more than this, and I will not let your self destruction be the final word.  We need to see our addiction to disaster less through the eyes of CNN and MSNBC and AlJazeera, and more through the cry of pain that the earth sighs from bearing the load of a humanity that is bent on destroying itself and the world it inhabits.

And we need to look at ourselves and see the same.

But even though we need to do that, this Lent, I'm looking at things a little differently.  Yes, today I'm going to go to church and get ashes smeared across my forehead....but I've decided I need to take Lent in a radically different direction.

This Lent, I'm going to shake the dust.  

(if you can't see that video cause you're on your phone or something...check it out here)


See, Lent lends itself to introspection, and feeling down about the state of affairs, and is the most depressed as a church body we tend to get, between the general mood of the season, the removal of the Alleluias from our lives and our liturgies, the impending death of Jesus.  It's drastically different from the hope of Advent, the Joy of Easter, the confusing celebration of Pentecost...it's....well...frankly, kind of depressing.

Which is why I'm shaking the dust this year.  It's not that I don't want to be reminded of the state of humanity, or to look in on my own failings and misdeeds....it's just that I've been doing that for a while...in fact, it's getting pretty comfortable.  Like the sweatpants I'm pretty fond of wearing.

It's not a secret that depression is about as common as Facebook ads...there's much more being written about the state of our (American) collective struggles with mental health...there's much more talk about it than when I was a child....and much more being done to de-stigmatize the need for people to go to therapists, explore medical options, etc.  Buzzfeed even tackles the subject in pretty poignant ways rather often.  Yet, in spite of all of that publicity, we still have a publicized rate of 1 in 5 people walking around the streets dealing with something that is hard to talk about, and who knows how many more are undiagnosed.

So for that, I'm shaking the dust this Lent.  Instead of spending the next 40 days and beyond sort of wallowing in the ashes of tonight like Job did...instead of wrapping myself in sackcloth and wailing at the state of humanity....instead of letting myself get more wrapped up in depression in the name of "Lent", I'm going to shake the dust off.

See, Matthew's gospel where Jesus tells the disciples to shake the dust off their sandals if they aren't welcome in a town actually seems like pretty good advice.  It's better to move on to something that is actually going to be fruitful than it is to just let the dust collect on our foreheads, and in our souls.

So this year, Lent is going to look pretty different....

It's still going to look introspective...it's still going to be taking a look at who I am, who we are, why this world is so imperfect...

But this year, Lent is about shaking the dust.  It's about looking inside myself to get to Easter....it's about journeying with a purpose, not just wandering around in the wilderness...because God knows I've done enough of that already.  As have many, many people I know and love.  Lent this year is still going to be uncomfortable, as it is every year.  It's uncomfortable because it shakes people up and makes them think about the state of affairs for 40 days every year....more than 10% of the entire year. But this time, because self gratifyingly wandering around in my own wilderness is getting too comfortable, I'll be shaking the dust off tonight.  Shaking the dust and stepping out, uncomfortably, onto the path toward resurrection...I'll be stepping out of the comfort of being sick, and onto the uncomfortable path of new life.

Shake the dust.




***I feel a need to put a disclaimer here....lest people try to pity me, or comfort me, or in other ways be a pastor to me.  I have a huge and vast support network and this post is not intended to be a way of coercing condolences or anything like that.  It is not intended to be a cry for help or a plea for pitty...if you have depression you know how shitty that is...if you don't, know how shitty that is.  Pity never helped anyone.

Instead, it is meant to be an honest look at how the season of Lent might be looked at differently from the eyes of people who wander into the wilderness of their minds and get stuck there too long.  It's meant to be part of the process of destigmatizing mental illness in the church and in the world.  It's meant to maybe be a springboard for someone to give themselves permission to finally get the help they need.***

Why the food bank almost made me cry.

Today I volunteered at the Capital Area Food Bank in Austin, TX.  Because, ministry in the wider community.

While I was there I spent 3 hours sorting cans into various bins that would then be repacked into 25lb boxes which get sold to partner agencies to distribute to those in need.  (Food Banks sell the food you donate at grocery stores, churches, etc. to food pantries, soup kitchens, and other agencies...this is NOT a bad thing.  It is typically sold at $.05/lb or less to agencies and this fee goes to operational costs of the food bank.  That means more food to more people, with less overhead costs.)

So, these cans come from a variety of places, Randalls and HEB sell bags that have been prepackaged with a certain dollar amount of food, HEB sells slips with dollar amounts which then are translated into canned goods which get sent to the food bank.  Places that do food drives will collect cans and send them to the food bank.  Food comes from all over the place, and someone has to sort it into appropriate amounts and check to make sure the food isn't past dates or bad or otherwise non-sellable.

This is a BIG problem, in the two food banks I've volunteered at...people are really willing to give away that can of condensed french onion soup that expired in 2007 thinking "well, hungry people would rather eat this than die" and then they feel good about themselves for being so generous.  Only, there's a big problem when that happens....it literally goes from their pantry, to the can sorting people, who READ THE DATE, and then from there straight into a landfill.  So, falsely generous feels good about themselves person just felt good about making someone else throw away their trash.  At the Capital Area Food Bank, food items (with the exception of baby food) are allowed to be out of date by various amounts of time (cereals, 12 months....tomatoes, 18 months, canned vegetables, 3 years....etc) and these items are still incredibly edible....just don't donate something that expired in the Bush presidency or earlier!

Anyway, so I was sorting canned proteins (think chili, beans, tuna) into their holding container and started pulling out can after can of vienna sausages.  Also in my box to sort was some coffee creamer that didn't have a lid and a bag of spaghetti that had to be taped up because someone had used part of it.

And I almost had to leave the room because I was on the verge of tears.

When I was in Urban Servant Corps for internship, we were able to purchase food from the food bank (which significantly helped us stretch our meager grocery budget) and we regularly purchased things like the 25lb boxes of vegetables, or 25lb boxes of beverages, or 25lb boxes of canned meat.  Basically, any time we could buy a box of assorted things we did it, because you often got some variety as opposed to just a case of canned peas.

And when we opened these boxes (now, this part would generally be done by the staff of the food pantry) it was pretty dehumanizing to get people's rejects.  Opening up a box of grains to see that we got 3 boxes of taco shells with the box tops for education cut off (as if poor people don't care about supporting their schools), boxes of costco spaghetti with 2 of 6 bags missing and the box taped back shut, and the like made us feel like we weren't even worthy of having real food, but that we were just worthy of having people's rejected items.  And we weren't really experiencing poverty...we were experiencing faux poverty. 

I can't imagine what a person who is already dehumanized enough by society for being unable to feed themselves regularly must deal with...that they are already in a bad place and have to deal with eating people's rejects.

So, for the love of God and the love of people, don't donate vienna sausages to food banks....unless you really love them yourself.  Don't donate K-cups of coffee that you took one out of the package and didn't like so you closed the box back up and dropped it in a donation bin (chances are, the recipients won't have a keurig anyway, so this is not a helpful item to donate...unless they are crafty like we were.  We got a K-Cup pack once and opened every cup, dumped out the grounds into our coffee can, and used them that way.  Again, because we had the time, energy, and thought to do so...luxuries not every hungry person has).

Really, truly, the best way to feed hungry people is by giving money to your local food pantry, or donating money to the food bank itself.  But donating money is not as glamorous as donating items, so if you want to go that route (and keep me volunteering!) please donate things you'd actually eat.  I call it food with dignity.  People deserve to eat like humans, even if their food is given to them by food pantries.  Because with the rising income inequality in this country, you might not always be on the giving end of the food system in our country.

Shoot Me Instead

It's no secret that racism is alive and well in the United States.  

Recently, news was made in North Miami Beach, where officers were found to be using pictures of actual people in their target practice.  Not only were these officers shooting at actual people, but they were black people.  

The chief said that this was protocol, that the officers were learning facial recognition...

Is that because for so long white people have internalized that black people aren't human, thus aren't able to be recognized?  Is this because the police force in North Miami Beach believes stereotypes that black people have different facial features than white people?  Who knows....but what we do know is that they were using mugshots of black people, some of whom were citizens of the city that these police officers patrol.  

What we do know is that police are being taught to shoot black people.  Argue all you want, but when you shoot a picture of a black person right between the eyes, it becomes easier to do that when the living, breathing black face is in front of you.  And this is a travesty.  It's a travesty that this happened, and it's a travesty that it has likely been going on for much longer than this.  It's a travesty that the actions of these officers were defended, and that no punishment is going to happen.  

It's a travesty that the real punishment here is toward black lives.  

It's a travesty that videos like this must be made.  And distributed.  And followed.  

I, as a middle class, educated, white man, don't have to watch videos like this....police assume I'm probably not guilty of anything.  

I, as a middle class, educated, white man, MUST watch videos like this.....to constantly learn about the struggles my sisters and brothers of color face, so that I can stand alongside them.  While I'll never truly understand what it means to be black in America, I damn well will keep listening to black people, keep praying with black people, keep detesting the horrible acts of violence toward black people, and keep educating myself about race in America and using that education to work toward ending violence toward black people.  

An amazing group of (mostly) Lutheran clergy have started a Facebook event in response to this news of target practice on black bodies.  I know slacktivism is a real thing...and I've been guilty of it before, but I'm proud to join this event titled North Miami Beach Police, use our pictures for your target practice.

Clergy people* are being invited to send a picture of themselves in clergy wear to the North Miami Beach police department to use as target practice instead.  It is my sincere hope that these pictures will be used.  Not so that cops become predisposed to shooting members of religious traditions, but because people are used to looking white folks in the eye.  Shooting a picture of a black person is easy, when you're raised in a society that lynches people on a daily basis.  Shooting a picture of a person with the same color skin as you is hard, because you see yourself.  

Maybe, when these cops are shooting up pastors in target practice they'll finally make the link that they're shooting at humans.  And then that will lead them to look at black people as humans too, and not shoot them.  

So, North Miami Beach Police, use my picture to shoot.  I hope you get me right between the eyes, so that you can see that murder of innocent people isn't the answer.  Especially if they are black.  

*It was noted in a comment on the Facebook event by a black pastor that she would not be sending her picture because there were already too many of her friends and family members who had been shot by police.  By participating in this event, and having my photo sent, I understand that I am able to do this because I do not have to follow the 10 steps to get home safely after an incident with the police, but I do hope that it opens more people's eyes to the reality that we live in a country where just because of the color of my skin, I don't have to walk around in fear of police shootings.