Guest commentary by Anna Kendig Flores
In the agonizing hour before the verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial was announced last week, I was getting texts and seeing posts from all over Minnesota and the rest of the country talking about how on edge everyone was. My sister texted at 3 p.m. from her workplace, a bank near the University of Minnesota campus: We’re closing early and being sent home. The roads were jam-packed for her commute because of the mass exodus from the city, which quickly felt quite deserted.
Meanwhile, I was sitting in my home office just a mile or so outside of Minneapolis, trying to work on the final touches to two separate statements (depending on the decision) leaders in the presbytery had prepared for the verdict. Just that morning we had met together on Zoom, praying for “words for what is beyond words.” Now I was editing commas while incessantly checking my live video feed of the courtroom.
In my state of dread and waiting, more than anything I was experiencing an intense feeling of unreadiness. Despite the weeks of preparing and praying, I was not ready for this moment of reckoning. A reckoning not only with this particular trial and verdict, but with the entire weight of history that comes behind it — especially here in Minnesota where society struggles to take systemic racism seriously. Oh, that’s somewhere else, many white Minnesotans say. We welcome everyone here.
The only prayer that worked for me in that hour were the words thy kingdom come, a slow loop in my thoughts: lament, invocation and risky invitation all at once.
For context on what this moment meant to us here in Minnesota, let me take you back, briefly, to the days after George Floyd’s murder. National Guard trucks rolled through the streets. Yes, the smell of burning was in the air around the area of 38th and Chicago, but so were the collective voices of people of color rising up for justice. Unmarked trucks with confederate flags were slow-rolling through communities of color, causing residents to hide in their basements. In my own neighborhood, just 15 minutes away, store windows were boarded up. Every night there was a curfew.
And yes, we were uncertain. And yes, so many things were lost. But we also knew something important was happening. The world was paying attention. Networks of mutual aid were popping up out of nowhere when basic services fell through. People were actually paying attention to their own neighbors – including their homeless neighbors – like they never had before. White people were waking up to the world as it actually is in ways that I had never witnessed before — and though it definitely pained them, the truth felt bracing and urgent. Black justice organizers were having nuanced conversations related to policing, justice and community care, and actually getting news coverage about it. These were things that I didn’t ever want to end.
So even after the verdict was finally read last week, my prayer remained the same: God, thy kingdom come.
Because no matter the verdict, George Perry Floyd Jr. is still dead. Young Daunte Wright, Adam Toledo and Ma’Khia Bryant’s lives were still stolen from them. My Black friends and colleagues are still numb with the ongoing trauma of loss upon loss. And too many people are still trying to justify why our public safety systems should be allowed to kill a thousand people a year, especially Black people, without trials or consequences of any sort.
I know these words are not the ones some of us want to hear, but siblings, we all know that the realm of God won’t be like the society we have today, and it won’t just look like consequences for one instance of egregious harm. It will look like being remade by God, and rethinking what we truly mean when we say words like “peace” or “safety.” It will look like wrestling with our past to seed our future with something better. And for white-majority spaces, it will be truly learning to embrace theologies of sin, repair and hope like we never, in our whole Christian lives, have had to before.
Frankly, calling on God to make the realm of God manifest among us will make or break us, church.
Thy kin-dom come.
As Sonya Renee Taylor wrote: “We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our … existence was not normal, other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion … and lack. We should not long to return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment.” She was writing about the coronavirus pandemic, but it’s also true of the pandemic of racism that we’ve been living with — and it’s true of the pandemic of loneliness or the environmental crisis that have become so excruciatingly clear in this time. We may think of these as separate issues, but they are all connected. And we are called, as people of faith, to get past our objections, our discomfort and our fears to be bearers of good news in its midst: God is doing a new and beautiful thing and invites us to join in.
We are not ready for this call, siblings in Christ, but we are called nonetheless. Like the disciples at the lakeshore called to drop their nets and follow Jesus, or met with the risen Jesus for a humble feast, thankfully we don’t have to feel ready for what’s coming next — we just have to answer this risky, powerful and life-giving call with our trust and faith.
From the city of Minneapolis to our siblings across the country, we look forward to laboring and dreaming alongside you.
ANNA KENDIG FLORES is a pastor and the anti-racism coordinator for the Presbytery of the Twin Cities Area. She pursues the spiritual practice of mountain biking to teach herself about humility, resilience and courage — all powerful aspects of anti-racist living as well.
