At A Zoom Gathering To Lament the Loss Of A Beloved Friend, An Assault Of Cruel Hate

Stan Maclin's eyesight was impaired, but his insight and
his courage as a local prophet will be long remembered.

For still our ancient foe doth seek to work us woe;

His craft and pow’r are great, and, armed with cruel hate,

On earth is not his equal.

- Martin Luther, A Mighty Fortress

Stan Maclin was a strong prophetic voice against racial and economic disparities in our Harrisonburg community. I first learned to know him when he was the pastor of a Mennonite Church in Richmond, then as a respected spokesperson for a God-inspired justice in our city and county.

Many of us were shocked and saddened to hear of his fatal heart attack January 11 at age 67. Like the Biblical prophet Amos, he represented a kind of plumb line that was a steady reminder of what it meant to be upright and just in our relationships with others, especially the marginalized. 

So I was honored to be invited to meet with a group of his close friends the next week to share some of our memories and to pay tribute to his life and work.

Then near the end of our time together something totally unexpected happened. Someone hacked into the Zoom chat room and started posting an incessant series of blatantly hateful and racist statements that kept scrolling endlessly down the screen. 

The language was vile and violent, with repeated uses of the n-word, the f-word and every demonic expression of evil imaginable, followed by "He deserved to die," "He deserved to die," "He deserved to die," over and over again.

The moderator of the meeting was about to shut everything down and end the session, but one member of the group stopped him. This individual, who knew Maclin well, encouraged us to take time to simply experience the dark impact of those messages. He went on to say something like, "That is our reality, something we who are people of color have had to deal with all of our lives. Stan would have us pray for that person." 

It was a sobering confrontation with a reality I realized I knew too little about. And I wished I could dismiss it as an insane ranting of some lone, deranged individual who in no way represented any group of white citizens of Harrisonburg. We are, after all, "The Friendly City," and one which is an official "Welcoming City."

But the sad reality is that we have never been purged of our nation's, and the commonwealth's, legacy of years of brutal slavery, hate-fueled KKK lynchings, and Jim Crow-era racial oppression and exclusion. And just last week, on January 6, that spirit of evil reared its ugly head in the insurrection by anti-semitic, Nazi and other white supremacist groups at the nation's capitol.

All of that is evidence of a powerful and pervasive evil force at work that is truly "armed with cruel hate."

The apostle Paul, a Christian martyr who proclaimed a vision of a beloved community in which Jew and Gentile, bond and free, friend and enemy, rich and poor alike are reconciled to God and to each other, wrote these words, "For we are not fighting against human beings but against the wicked spiritual forces in the heavenly world, the rulers, authorities, and cosmic powers of this dark age." (Ephesians 6:12, Good News translation)

So as we consider the WWJD kind of question, let's consider what Stan Maclin would have us do, surely some of the following:

1) Initiate conversations with people who are different from us, spending at least as much time in respectful listening as in voicing your own convictions.

2) Accept diversity of opinions as healthy and potentially growth-producing, but call out falsehoods and expressions of bigotry and intolerance.

3) If threatened or assaulted, stand strong. Refuse to either retaliate or be intimidated, but choose to love, confront and pray for those who mistreat or malign us and others.

Stan Maclin would approve that message.