Sermon: Non-judgment Day Is Coming

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Non-Judgment Day is Coming

Ana Levy-Lyons

December 7, 2014

First Unitarian, Brooklyn

You might have seen the bumper sticker or the t-shirt or the button that says, “Non-judgment day is coming.” It’s the kind of smug quip that would elicit an LOL if it were a text message, even though probably no one is laughing out loud about it. It’s a classic liberal retort to the dour conservative Christian idea that there is a day approaching, always in the very near future, when everyone is finally going to be called to account for their sins — the flock will be sorted into the righteous and the sinners and re-routed to either bliss or misery. And so the liberal religious comeback is that – Hey, I’m okay, you’re okay. We all have the love light of the divine in our hearts. And so no, actually, the day is coming when we will not be judged. We will be seen for who we really are. We will no longer be judged. Not for our beliefs, not for our gender, not for our eccentricities, not for the color of our skin. That’s what’s coming.

Sure doesn’t feel like it these days, does it? In this season of Advent with its self-conscious accelerating profusion of peace and joy, giving, charity, and goodwill, it kind of feels like exactly the opposite. It kind of feels like the world is ending. These days we can’t help but see the white Santas and the white Jesuses and the white Moses in Ridley Scott’s new Exodus movie (in which all of the thieves and assassins are black) — we can’t help but see all this against the backdrop of Ferguson and Staten Island. We can’t help but notice that the advent of non-judgment day seems to apply only to certain people. It was certainly non-judgment day for Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson and Officer Daniel Pantaleo on Staten Island. Grand juries decreed that these men would not be judged. Somehow I don’t think this is what the author of the bumper sticker had in mind.

But it’s complicated. Consider this story: I was on the train heading home a couple months ago watching an African-American mother and her two kids — a boy who looked like he was about 3 and a girl who looked about 10. The mother and the boy were seated and the girl was standing nearby. The boy was crying, the mother was playing a game on her phone. When he tried to cuddle up to her for comfort, she would push him off saying, “I don’t want you on me.” He would start wailing anew. This happened over and over again. The girl was standing very still, ignoring the scene, and her eyes looked glazed. I couldn’t get a read on her until her eyelids started to droop and I realized that she was falling asleep on her feet. Her mother poked her hard. “Wake up! You’re not falling asleep on me.” The girl’s eyes flew open and she resumed her military stance. As the train filled up the girl moved in a little to accommodate the crowd. The mother poked her again and said, “Don’t let them push you. You don’t have to move.” Finally someone who had a seat nearby got the mother’s attention and said, “She can take my seat if she wants. She’s falling asleep!” The mother said, “No. She knows! She knows. I’m not carrying her out of here.”

I was horrified. I was heartbroken for these kids. I wanted to take them home with me. The boy was the age of my kids. I couldn’t believe the cruelty. I was furious at the mother. Should I do something? Is there anything I can do? There was no physical abuse, but it certainly seemed like emotional abuse to me. Should I say something? What could I say? I got off at my stop, having not said or done anything, feeling awful about myself, about her. This is how all our problems get perpetuated, I was thinking – by people like her not loving their kids well.

And then it struck me: easy for me to say. Easy for me, a white mother, to sit in judgment of a black mother. How do I know what kind of world she lives in and what kind of world she’s preparing her children for? Maybe teaching her children that life is hard and that you can’t lean on anybody, even your own mother, is exactly what they need to survive in the world they will face. Maybe her own life experience has taught her this. How do I know what she’s going through? How do I know what it would cost her to have to carry her daughter out of the subway if she fell asleep? How do I know how hard she’s struggling to keep her own eyes open so she can get her kids home safely? Put me in her shoes – I mean, her exact shoes – and can I really be so sure that I would be any different?

What a privilege I have to raise my white children so gently, kissing every booboo, anticipating a world that will be fundamentally safe for them. Their chance of winding up in prison is low. Their chance of being killed by police is virtually zero. I can teach them to graciously yield to others on the subway because I’m not worried about them getting pushed around in life. We already assume their right to stand their ground. So, I can still be heartbroken for that woman’s kids on the subway, sad or even angry that they don’t have the blessings that my kids do and that all kids should have. But I can’t judge their mother without walking in her shoes. Non-judgment day is coming.

And so where does this leave us? If I can’t judge that mother without walking in her shoes, can we ever judge anyone without walking in theirs? What about the police officers who killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner? The grand juries say, no – they will not be judged. (And grand juries frequently – more often than not – make the same decision to not indict when it comes to police.) How do we know what kind of world these policemen live in? How do we know what it’s like to have a job that forces you into constant conflict with young people of color? How do we know what it’s like to get up in the morning and put on a bulletproof vest, knowing that every couple days a cop gets killed in the line of duty? How do we know what it’s like to be required to try to arrest someone twice your size? Maybe the last time Daniel Pantaleo put someone in a chokehold and the guy said, “I can’t breathe,” Daniel let up and the guy attacked him. We don’t know.

This doesn’t mean, in my opinion, that they should not be brought to trial. I believe that they should and they should be held accountable for their actions. But it’s an evasion of our responsibility to make this all about judging these particular men as righteous or sinners; to sort and re-route the flock. It’s a failure of conscience to make this all about getting rid of the bad cops, the “racist cops,” the “killer cops,” and exonerating the rest of us. Put any one of us in their shoes – I mean, their exact shoes – and can we really be so sure we’d be any different? This is on all of us.

The mother driven to cruelty and the cops driven to kill have had their souls crushed by a system in which we are all deeply embedded. Eric Garner and Michael Brown and countless others have lost their lives in the gears of that same system. If we really believe in what we say as religious liberals about the sacred oneness of universe and the cosmic love embracing all, we need to recognize this system for what it is: It’s a violent system that divides us and shuts down the love light in our hearts. It’s a system that denies the divine image in some of us and destroys the innocence in all of us. It’s a system that creates brutal pain for some, power for others, and fear and cynicism for everyone. It’s a system that corners people and pushes them and pushes them until they lash out.  It’s a system that makes enemies of our brothers and sisters. Is all of this any of our fault individually? No, of course not. But we are all part of it, each with different positions within it, and this – this system that mutilates the human spirit – is what needs to be indicted.

The system we can judge, and to judge it, we have to get really specific. The devil is in the details. We can judge the system of laws like the broken window policing laws that called for Eric Garner to be arrested for the petty crime of selling cigarettes. We can judge the system of policies that seek to improve so-called “quality of life,” which seems to be code for getting black men out of the public square. There was just such a “quality of life” initiative in Eric Garner’s neighborhood and cops had been told to crack down.

We can judge the utter failure of our criminal justice system that incarcerates almost one third of black men at some point in their lives. We can judge mandatory minimum sentencing, three-strikes laws, and the war on drugs.

We can judge the school system where economic inequality translates directly to educational inequality; where if a white kid throws a chair, he’s reprimanded, while if a black kid throws a chair, he’s suspended; where only about half of African-American boys in this country graduate high school.

We can judge our democracy, where voter ID laws and other restrictions disenfranchise people of color and where voting precincts are routinely redrawn to dilute poor people’s voting power.

We can judge our entertainment system where a high-profile director like Ridley Scott can claim that he had no choice but to cast white actors as the protagonists and dark-skinned actors as the thieves and villains because otherwise investors wouldn’t buy it and moviegoers wouldn’t go. And we can judge ourselves for going to see it anyway.

The good thing about convicting systems is that, unlike racism in the abstract or individuals in specific, we can change them. It takes work and it takes time and it takes commitment. But we can change laws. We can change policies. We can teach our children differently and vote different people into power. And where individuals are instrumental in the operations of an evil system, yes, we can hold those people accountable for their actions. But only for their actions, not for their essence. Because we will never know what shoes they walk in. In this sense, non-judgment day can and should come for the mother on the subway and the cops on the street. But for the systems in which they are embedded, the cold, violent, sexist, racist systems that birth them and form them and hurt them, judgment day is here.

In this season of Advent, the sounding trumpets tell of peace, joy, hope, and salvation right around the corner; a time when the lion will lie down with the lamb and people of all colors and creeds will join hands and live in harmony. Experience teaches that this is far from inevitable but faith teaches that neither is it impossible. We stand on the shoulders of great people and great movements that have rattled the foundations of society before. With love, we can do it again. And so, along with the carols, the gifts, the candle lighting, and the celebrations, let’s also acknowledge this as a time of mourning, a time of rage for the deaths that should not have happened, and a determination that we will not rest until we have remade the world in the image of sacred oneness and compassion for all. In honor of Eric Garner whose breath was taken from him, may we dedicate our breath, our voices, and our hearts to that end.