Redeemer Pilgrimage to Montgomery
A group at the Redeemer embarked on a Pilgrimage to Montgomery. Alabama, to explore the insidiousness of slavery and its aftermath, including how it compromised the integrity of both the church and society across generations. The group gathered to reflect on and process the learnings and worship together. 

Pilgrim’s Trail Day 1: Here are a few of Rev. Mike’s reflections

Traveling to Montgomery places the Christian soul close to the epicenter of great grace and great failure. The Civil Rights movement is one that both deeply implicates American Christianity while at the very same time speaks to God’s never-ending love and desire to deliver us from sin and death. The American South is a pilgrim trail with much to teach us about the past and the present. If we truly believe that God is afoot in the world inspiring and inviting us to deepen our discipleship of Jesus, then any and every road is a pilgrim trail. This one, however, speaks a word I need to hear as an American Christian.

The Pilgrim’s Trail Day 2

Confronted by the façade of Legacy Museum’s building itself is a kind of preparation for what lies within, visceral, chest-tightening. Walking the perimeter of the museum means confronting a block-length wall of rust-colored panels. Their orange-brown starkness evoked within me the thought of patina-coated iron lying abandoned in the clay-baked Alabama topsoil. The panels give way to a glass portico, clean and sober, without affectation or pretense.

Then came the waves. There’s no better way to get my attention than to confront me with the unpredictable raging of the sea. And there, at the entrance to the exhibits, you are met by a 40-foot diagonal screen that yields the tumult of the ocean in high-resolution pixels. It serves as the museum’s preface, and it tells the chilling story of the Middle Passage.

And as one passes from the ocean’s fever, one arrives at the shores of a garden of statues, buried to the torso and neck in the sands of some not-so-far-off shore. Each child, man, and woman with their keen African features symbolizes the countless dead who perished on that passage. Every statue is an individual. Some weeping, some stoic, some screaming. I was returned to the Book of Revelation:

And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.(Revelation 20:13, KJV)

I would challenge everyone to make this trip, to come and see. What I think they will find is not an accusation. That’s where so much of the power of this place resides. There is no accusation, only an invitation to come and see the forces of history that have shaped the realities of so many of our neighbors.

And if your heart is open, you will feel that pain pouring into the breach. Simply, come and see. See that of which the human heart is capable. See the inhumanity of humanity, and choose a different path.

Pilgrim’s Trail Day 3

The second section of the museum traces Reconstruction and the fragile glimmer of hope that broke through in the years immediately following the war. Then comes the horror of Jim Crow, poll taxes, poll tests, and the impassable barriers placed between Black Americans and the civil liberties so often taken for granted, even in these troubling times.

What finds the pilgrim after the advent of Jim Crow is the story of racial terrorism. Standing on one side of the exhibit is a two-sided wall lined with shelves holding two-and-a-half-gallon glass jars of varying textures and colors. As you approach, each jar comes into focus, marked with a name, a date, and a place. At first, I thought the jars might contain remains. But they do not. Each jar holds soil collected from the place where the person named on it was murdered. Lynched.

The strangest thing happened as I drew closer. My eyes scanned briefly from the bottom shelf to the middle, where they immediately fell on a name: Virgil Swanson, Greenville, Georgia, August 27, 1913. Swanson is a family name on my mother’s side. Years ago, in genealogical research, I traced a branch of my family back to that very region of Georgia. I do not know whether Virgil was enslaved by one of my ancestors, but the specter of that possibility found me powerfully shaken.

Virgil was murdered by a mob on suspicion of killing a wealthy planter. Another man later confessed to the crime. Virgil was innocent.

There are four hundred jars of soil on that wall. The soil ranges from stony to sandy, from red clay to brown mud, representing four hundred places across the South and Midwest where innocent men, women, and children, some as young as four years old, were taken from their beds, homes, or workplaces by the violence of white Americans who sought to terrorize their Black neighbors into a half-life of fear and submission. Story after story tells of complicit judges and police, and of regular, God-fearing Christians who would leave Sunday worship to participate in public humiliation and murder.

Would I have acted differently? Self-righteous hindsight is a luxury. It is easy to imagine ourselves as morally superior to those who came before us. We know better. They were ignorant bigots. I would never do that. I would have stood up to the crowd, the congregation, the mob. I am not so sure.

We are wrapped in our own times, our own biases, our own comforts, so tightly that finding a way out when the world bends toward evil is no simple thing. Only a miracle can break the violence of those convinced of their own righteousness. Only God can deliver us from the wages of our sin.

So what do we do with what we have seen?

We tell the truth, especially the truths that unsettle us, even truths about ourselves. We listen, slowly and without defensiveness, to voices and stories we have learned to ignore or explain away. We examine our own lives, our habits, our assumptions, and our silences, and ask where fear or comfort has kept us from love.

We act locally and concretely. We notice where power is exercised without accountability. We stand with neighbors when standing costs us something. We refuse the cheap comfort of neutrality when cruelty presents itself as order. For my part, that means continuing to place myself in spaces that unsettle me, allowing prayer to do its quiet work, and letting real relationship, neither abstraction nor generalization, shape my response.

This is not about saving the world in one great moral gesture. It is about choosing, again and again, a different way of being human. That is work for a lifetime. It is work for the Church. And by the grace of God, it is work we do together.

Mike+