Originally published Sept. 21, 2024, in The Eagle as “Use Fear of Death to Bring Good to the World”
“You are not safe.” That’s what Rev. Sharon Risher told a packed sanctuary at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary on February 16, 2016. Risher’s mother, Ethel Lance, and eight others were shot and killed on June 17, 2015, at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, while attending a Bible study. Now, eight months later, the seminary Risher graduated from was announcing the Ethel Lance Human and Civil Rights Award for future student recipients, and dedicating a space on the grounds in honor of Lance’s memory. It was on that occasion that Risher preached a sobering reminder to everyone gathered that no matter where we go in these precarious days of the ever-present possibility of gun violence, “You are not safe.”
I was there when Risher spoke those cryptic words. The thing is, though, I find them more assuring than haunting. If it is true that we are not safe, if it is true that tomorrow is not a promise, if it is true that any second could snatch us from this mortal coil, then shouldn’t that undeniable reality liberate me from living in fear so that I would be free to seize every present moment as a possibility for something good and life-giving to happen?
The phrase recorded more than any other throughout the entire Bible is “don’t be afraid.” Greg Garrett, Professor of Literature and Culture at Baylor and a visiting fellow at Oxford University’s Centre for Religion and Culture, suggests that the number of times Jesus says “Fear not” proves it is one of his central spiritual teachings. “In life—or faced with death—we are not to be afraid,” Garrett contends. In his book, The Gospel according to James Baldwin, Garrett writes that “fear is distinctly unchristian,” and that Baldwin argues, “We are called to live and love valiantly and without fear, however frightening the world may be.”
Yes, perfect love casts out fear (1 John 4:18), but, honestly, I’m still afraid. I’m afraid because a couple of weeks ago at my kid’s high school, a handgun was found in a student’s backpack in a classroom. Nothing happened and everyone is okay, but the fear of what might have happened and what could happen any moment remains. This is where Risher’s brokenhearted words return to me: “You are not safe.”
I don’t know whether Rev. Risher lives with fear, but I do know that she does not let fear keep her from living faithfully. Risher has become a fervent gun violence prevention activist. She travels to DC and across the country giving her testimony in an effort to prevent another Emanuel Nine, the name given to her mother and the eight others who died in the shooting at Mother Emanuel. She says, “I had a seminary degree and a good job working at a hospital doing something I love, and I was making decent money doing it. I thought I had it made, but now here I am…doing this.”
I’ve been to events where Risher has given her testimony since that day at the seminary. She speaks with passion, voicing a modern-day prophet’s call for justice. She’s also hopeful. It’s a peculiar thing, really, where an act of violence led to a testimony of hope that invites people to work together for a future that is unabashedly joyful. That’s what being liberated from fear delivers us into: joy that cometh in the morning after every fearful night.
For years now, each morning I’ve dropped off my kids at school or watched them walk out the door, I’ve said a prayer that starts like this: “Good and gracious God, be with my children. Protect them and their peers from bullying, harm, and violence of any kind. I ask the same for their teachers and every adult caring for them, and that they would be shown the dignity and respect that they deserve not merely by their vocation, but also by the fact that they, too, are your children, O God.” Are they absolutely safe? No. But I can suffocate under the weight of that anxiety, or I can meet it with a prayer to release me from fear, and then use that God-given liberation to do something good, bringing more life into a world petrified by the constant fear of death.
If it is true that none of us are safe anywhere, then we have nothing to lose but our fear. If we do not know the day or the hour, shouldn’t uncertainty set us free to do all we can in this life to alter cycles of violence for the sake of our neighbor, our families, and ourselves? If safety is guaranteed for no one, shouldn’t we laugh in the face of fear that tells us to remain indifferently submissive to a status quo that prioritizes gun protections over protecting our children? If we are here one minute and gone the next, shouldn't we seize the present moment to work for a world where shootings no longer threaten our kids and our communities, and where those incidents of gun violence are not passively accepted as the way things are, but rejected as tarnishes on the fabric of our common good?
You are not safe, so don’t be afraid. Be faithful, so that we would all be safe.
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