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This last weekend brought the shooting deaths of three more children:
8 year old Jurnee Thompson was shot and killed while leaving a high school football game on the westside.
15 year old Sentonio Cox was shot and killed near the Carondelet neighborhood.
10 year old Nyla Banks was shot and killed downtown.

Our priorities are off. Our urgency is misplaced. Our children are being killed and communities further traumatized. 

Our country continues to act brand new to compassion, truth, and humility. This might be the reason the church in the United States can be so bad at living out these principles we idolize but never implement. Compassion requires empathy, the truth requires education. Baldwin wrote “A person does not lightly elect to oppose his own society. One would much rather be at home among one’s compatriots than be mocked and detested by them”…Baldwin’s message is as relevant for the church as it is for the country, because their pool of citizens is the same. Because the Black identity experience is the same. That’s why the governing principles he observed are so striking.

What can we celebrate this so-called Independence Day? Frederick Douglass still speaks to remind us that those who fight for and alongside the oppressed of America had little to celebrate in the first place. I agree. I choose to recall, to serve Truth and the Author of the same. 

I will celebrate the survival of my people and all who ennoble themselves by clinging to peace over power.

In Jesus, perfection and divinity are acquainted with lament and trepidation. He boldly declares that His death will have purpose. He humbly reveals the troubling of His soul. Were we there, were we to witness with our own eyes, we would see - as the old folks say -  that it caused Him to tremble. But He was determined to save the flock of His people, the jewels of His crown (Zech 9.16). Jesus was not yearning to suffer. He was yearning to end our suffering at any cost.

On a recent Sunday before dawn, Lisa Sharon Harper, a prominent evangelical activist, boarded a train from Washington, D.C., to New York City. Harper is forty-nine, and African-American, with a serene and self-assured manner. Although she had moved to D.C. seven and a half years ago, to work as the director of mobilizing for a Christian social-justice organization called Sojourners, she still considered New York her home. She missed its edgy energy, and was worn down by the political battles in Washington, which pitted her more and more aggressively against her fellow-evangelicals. On this frigid morning, she was on her way to Metro Hope, her old church in East Harlem. She couldn’t find anything like it in Washington, D.C. “It’s the South,” she told me. Black and Latinx-run evangelical churches committed to justice were scarce, she noted. Metro Hope is led by her friend José Humphreys, an erudite forty-five-year-old Afro-Latino preacher who grew up in the projects on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.