Invoking Jeremiah: Public Prayer as Witness and Protest in the U.S. Capitol
Bishop William J. Barber II, and Two Fellow Christians Arrested While Praying
Consider the contrast between a few peaceful Christians praying in the U.S. Capitol building and the vicious crowd of insurrectionists that stormed it on January 6, 2020.
Bishop William Barber, the Rev. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, and Mr. Steve Swayne, were arrested in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on April 28, for praying.
Bishop Barber and the Rev. Wilson-Hartgrove said this of the occasion:
In the Bible, God calls public theologians to relocate their ministry when life or death issues are being decided in the public square. “Go down to the palace of the King,” God tells Jeremiah in a time when policy was decided in the King’s court. Why does the preacher need to go to the legislative body? Jeremiah is sent with a message for the legislators. “Act with justice and righteousness, and deliver from the oppressor anyone who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place” (Jer 22:3, NRSV).
Bishop Barber and his fellow witnesses were doing what the late John Lewis called getting into “good trouble.”
“Just as Jesus turned over the tables of the money changers, so we have to be willing to put our bodies on the line,” he [Bishop Barber] said. “I pray that impacted people will (come) — again, not to go to get arrested, but to arrest the attention of the nation.”
The late George MacLeod, founder of the Iona Community in Scotland, stated it this way:
I simply argue that the Cross be raised again at the centre of the market place as well as on the steeple of the church. I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified between two candles, but on a Cross between two thieves; on the town garbage heap; at a crossroad so cosmopolitan that they had to write his title in Hebrew and in Latin and in Greek (or shall we say in English, in Bantu, and in Afrikaans?); at the kind of place where cynics talk smut, and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble. Because that is where He died. And that is what He died about. And that is where church[people] should be and what church[people] should be about.*
William Barber and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove have yet more to say to us about our witness in the public square. You may want to subscribe to their Substack newsletter.
*George F. MacLeod, Only One Way Left (Glasgow: The Iona Community, n.d.), 38.
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