The Almost Alternate Ending in Charleston

According to news reports, Dylann Roof told police that he “almost didn’t go through with it because everyone was so nice to me.”

Almost.

I wonder what went through his mind as he sat in the basement room at Emanuel AME church, receiving the hospitality of those who had so many reasons for suspicion and fear. I wonder, as he heard them read the Bible and pray and welcome him into their lives, if he thought for a moment about not killing them.

But I don’t wonder why he did it. Too many people have asked why, have wondered what tragic mystery could cause such action.

It’s not a mystery. He did it, he said, because he was white, and they were black. He did it, he told them, because “you are raping our women and taking over our country.” Then he pointed his gun at his first victim, Susie Jackson, age 87, a trustee of the church and former choir member who raised her son in a low-income housing project, and then when he moved away, she gave his room to two young people who needed a home.

It is not an accident that such acts of terrorism keep occurring in black churches.

It is not an accident that such acts of terrorism keep occurring in black churches. In 1963, a bomb exploded in 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls who were there to learn God loved them. In 1964, while a registration drive was finally opening the door to black voters, nearly three dozen black churches in Mississippi alone were bombed or burned. In 2008, a few hours after Barack Obama was elected the first African-American president, three white men set the church of an African-American congregation in Springfield, Massachusetts, on fire.

On the Sunday after the shooting, Norvel Goff—the interim pastor appointed to replace the murdered Clementa Pinckney—said that the open doors of Emanuel were a message to every demon in hell and on earth that “no weapon formed against us shall prosper,” quoting the old prophesy of Isaiah promising the coming shalom.

I wonder what Bible verses they read on Wednesday night, before Dylann Roof almost didn’t kill the Emanuel nine. I wonder what prayers of worship and petition got prayed before he almost didn’t pull out his gun and riddle those bodies with his bullets.

I have gone to church my whole life. I have never wondered if someone might enter the church and kill me or kill those I love because of the color of my skin.

I have heard that verse from Isaiah many times. I have always taken it as a metaphor—“no weapon formed against you shall prosper.” Who would form a weapon against me? But weapons formed against the people of Mother Emanuel brought them from Africa, and kept them in slavery for 250 years, and declared in the U.S. Constitution that for census purposes they were 3/5’s of a person—“almost” a person; then kept them out of schools and out of voting booths and out of offices and out of the front of the bus and out of neighborhoods. And kept them out of churches, countless churches, in obvious ways and subtle ways.

I wonder where it was formed, that weapon that Dylann Roof brought into the Bible study, the weapon that he almost didn’t use, the weapon that he brought in not unaccountably; not because of random insanity, but because of the color of their skin, because as Charles Blow writes, racism is to social progress what cockroaches are to nuclear fallout—extraordinarily resilient.

And didn’t the weapon prosper Wednesday night? Didn’t the demon prosper Wednesday night? Will shalom ever not be an infinite and cruel “almost” away?

Emanuel AME church in Charleston was founded in 1816. One of the founding elders of the church led a foiled revolt against slavery; in retribution the church was burned to the ground. It was such a historic presence in the history of the African-American church that it became known as “Mother Emanuel”; a place not only of worship but also of leadership and strength and power. It is not an accident that this was the scene of the shooting.

The expressions of forgiveness from the members of that church, from parents in mind-numbing agony, are staggering to me. Jesus is in those words, for sure. Yet before I celebrate those expressions too quickly, maybe I need to listen, lest I just want to think their forgiveness resolves things. Lest I turn them into beings who have a capacity for infinite suffering that is either super-human or sub-human and means that I don’t have to concern myself with their humanity.

I wonder about the larger spiritual and moral eco-system of which what happened in Charleston is a tiny, damnable part. I wonder where the church is; at least the church I have known through my life. I wonder why the churches and college and seminary I was a part of look less like the kingdom of God—every tribe and tongue and people–than the military does. I wonder how many leaders in that church almost marched for the rights and dignity of all persons; how many sermons almost got preached; how many barriers almost got breached. I wonder why the networks and training and education and informal relationships of the church circles in which I serve still look as if the apostle had written… ‘He has almost torn down the dividing wall of hostility’; ‘you are almost one in Christ Jesus.’

God save us from our almosts.

John Ortberg is editor at large of Leadership Journal and pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in California.