The week’s reflection is by The Rev. Adrienne Reedy. She is a gifted writer, teacher, artist, and Cornelius Corps Board member. In this piece she focuses on a recent court case to lift up how unjust systems can perpetuate pain and injustice. She challenges us to reflect on our own complicity even as she calls us to pray for forgiveness and the courage to stand up for justice especially when it is costly or inconvenient. Please take the time to read and reflect on the honest and searching questions she poses . Peace – Jim Melson, Executive Director
I’ve been sitting with a case out of Texas (Anthony vs. Metcalf) that I can’t shake, and thought
maybe our Cornelius Corps community may want to sit with it too.
Two teenage boys. One is dead. One is nineteen and serving 35 years. A jury was seated with
zero Black members, after prosecutors struck the last three eligible Black jurors — the judge
accepted their explanation, the defense called it pretext. This past week, his attorneys sought a
new trial, and a hearing revealed something else: both sides had quietly agreed, off the record,
to keep certain truths about both boys from the jury deciding one of their futures. Jurors never
heard about racist graffiti and alleged bullying in the deceased boy’s past or about threatening
messages the defendant allegedly sent before the killing. Grown adults, managing a story that
had gone viral, made a “gentleman’s agreement” that may have kept twelve people from the
fuller truth they needed to judge rightly. The judge has since denied the motion for a new trial.
The verdict stands — but the questions this hearing raised don’t stand down just because a
ruling came in.
I don’t tell you this to relitigate who was right under that tent. I tell you this because I don’t think
we get to call ourselves people of reconciliation if we look away from how justice actually gets
administered in this country.
Scripture never lets me treat justice as an abstraction. Micah didn’t say “seek an efficient trial.”
He said do justice, love mercy, walk humbly. The prophets are relentless about courts that bend
for the powerful, gates where the poor get turned away. And when Jesus stood up in that
Nazareth synagogue and read from Isaiah, He didn’t name “release to the captives” and “liberty
to the oppressed” as a footnote to His mission. That was the mission. If I believe that, then I
can’t treat something like jury composition as a legal technicality that doesn’t belong in church.
It’s a gospel question.
A few things I keep coming back to:
Who gets to sit at the table.? A jury with no Black members in a case this racially charged doesn’t
automatically mean something went wrong — but it is evidence of a system still failing to deliver
what it promises. Batson v. Kentucky was supposed to settle this back in 1986. That we’re still
fighting about it in 2026 should grieve us.
Whose truth gets protected? I understand the impulse to lower the temperature by keeping hard
things out of the room. I’ve felt it myself, in far smaller rooms. But suppressed truth doesn’t
disappear. It resurfaces later, at a worse time, and costs us the trust we were protecting.
When the ruling comes and questions remains. A judge can uphold a verdict as fair and still
leave hard, unanswered questions about how we got there. Both can be true. A ruling isn’t
resolution.
Grief doesn’t need a side. I can hold that a mother is burying her son, and another mother is
watching her son’s life narrow down to a cell — at the same time, without picking a winner.
That’s what it looks like to love your neighbor when the story is complicated.
So here’s what I want to ask us this week: Where have we made our own “gentleman’s
agreements”? Where have we quietly agreed to keep something hard out of the room to keep
the peace — and what has it cost us?
Justice, real justice, was never supposed to be comfortable. Jesus wasn’t comfortable when He
said it out loud in that synagogue either.
A Prayer
Lord, You who love justice and hate a corrupted court, forgive us for the times we’ve chosen
comfort over truth. Give us the courage to bring hard things into the light instead of quietly
agreeing to hide them. Comfort the mother who buried her son, and be near the mother whose
son sits in a cell. Where our systems have failed to reflect Your justice, raise up people willing to
say so out loud. Make us a people who do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly — even when it
costs us something. In Jesus’ name, Amen.