Pastors of African Methodist Episcopal churches in the Boston area came together Thursday evening at the Bethel A.M.E. Church in Jamaica Plain for a vigil in memory of the 9 people killed at an A.M.E. church in Charleston, South Carolina Wednesday night. The incident is also making many in Boston’s faith community think about how safe their own churches are.
A congregation drawn together from different faiths and from around the city, began the service with praise and singing, but it wasn’t all celebration— As ministers like Mariama White Hammond acknowledged, it was the tragedy in South Carolina that they came here to remember. “We’re not gathered here for a joyous occasion,” Hammond says, “but we’re here to lift our hands and to celebrate our God anyway.”
“We know that we are many many miles from Charleston, God,” she preached to the congregation. “And yet, our pain is so close. God, we lift up right now the Emmanuel AME Church family. God we thank you, that they are our sister church.”
Reverend Laura Everett of the Massachusetts Council of Churches said a prayer of peace, reconciliation and justice:
“We want that peace that passes all understanding, Lord, so come quickly to Charleston, come quickly to Boston, come quickly to Jamaica Plain. Because we need the peace that only you can bring.”
Reverend June Cooper of the City Mission Society and Old South Church had a difficult job. She prayed for forgiveness. “If truth be told, it’s hard to love our enemies, but yet we are called to do just that,” she says.
And she prayed for the family of Dylann Roof, the suspected shooter.
Rabbi Victor Reinstein followed by praying for those suffering from mental illness. “We call on you to heal the sickness that can not be seen in wounds of body,” he says. “Sickness of psyche and soul. We call on you,” he said, closing with a traditional Hebrew prayer.
The last to speak at the vigil was Bethel AME’s own pastor, Ray Hammond, who led a call-and-response, asking the 150 or so people gathered in the church to speak to one another
“Tell your neighbor,‘We are shocked,’” he instructed, as the congregation echoed him. “‘But we are not shattered.’”
“We’re not shattered because while one man committed a deed of pure evil, thousands, even millions of people have cried out against that deed,” Reverend Hammond continued. “Because people of every faith and no faith here in Boston have called, texted and emailed their prayers and support to this congregation and other AME congregations across the city. Because the mayor and the police commissioner have called, all with the same message: ‘your sorrow is our sorrow.’”
Raymond Isaac, who’s a regular parishioner at Bethel AME, was struck by all the people who came to his church to share in the vigil. “The amount of people that turned out here tonight,” he said, “you know, it’s a melting pot.”
Among those visitors was Rev. Tiffany Chaney, who’s the pastor of a congregation called The Intersection, in Dorchester. She said while many of the people here come from different religious backgrounds, they all have houses of worship where they can express their faith.
“And when that is shattered,” she says, “when that’s broken, we can understand that pain, or try to understand the pain that the family there at Emmanuel must be experiencing,”
“We send our love and we send our prayers,” Chaney says, “and we hold up the need for justice and equality and for all people to be able live their faith without having to worry about hatred coming in their doors.”
