A Lenten Devotion by Liz Garrigan-Byerly
They put him to death by hanging him on a tree.
Acts 10:39
This April, I was planning to go on a pilgrimage to Montgomery, Alabama, where we were to spend a whole day at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, also known as the “lynching museum.” In preparation, I am reading “The Cross and the Lynching Tree” by James H. Cone.*
Truth be told, the lynching tree hasn’t featured much in my consciousness. I grew up 45 minutes from Gettysburg, where that great Civil War battle and historic speech of the same name occurred, and we visited often when I was a kid. Although I knew that racism existed in the North (I heard it come out of the mouths of uncles and have never forgotten the feeling of dread when we drove past a small Klu Klux Klan rally in the neighboring town), it always seemed different than that of the South. We were the ones who fought valiantly against the Confederacy; they were the ones with slavery and later separate water fountains. It was always the past.
Adulthood brought new layers of education and awareness, but the wave of realization and the weight of communal guilt came following the murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Since then, I’ve been on the painful but powerful and important journey of learning about and doing my part to undo systemic racism.
The reality is that the lynching tree is part of the American Grove of Trees. To deny that is to deny not only the pain and suffering of many of our siblings in Christ but to deny our own complicity in systemic racism and ultimately any path to healing and wholeness. So this lent, I am bringing the lynching tree into my consciousness, because I believe in a God who subjected Godself to the worst of humanity—torture and death on a cross—and then transformed it into new life for all. Surely God will do that with us too.
*Even though our trip has now been postponed, I am still reading this book and doing this spiritual work.
Holy God, give us courage to see the worst of our forest, so that you may transform it, and us. Amen.