Wake Up, Look Up

Hello everyone, and thanks for listening to Wake Up, Look Up, a podcast where we connect events happening in real time to the gospel of Jesus Christ. I'm Zach Weihrauch, and in today's episode, I'm asking the question, are we completely shameless? This is prompted by an article I read recently in the New York Times about an awful act that Minnesota Republicans participated in when they held a moment of silence for an ex police officer convicted of murder. if you remember years ago in the George Floyd incident, police officer, at least at the time, Derek Chauvin, went viral for basically kneeling on the neck of George Floyd after he had been arrested and was laying on the ground kneeling on his neck to the point of George Floyd actually dying. Chauvin was later charged with murder and convicted in a Minnesota state court. It was a lightning storm, lightning rod of all kinds of political and racial and social conversations. And those conversations were nuanced and difficult. Conversations about crime, conversations about race, conversations about law enforcement. But here are the facts. Derek Chauvin went before a court, was judged by a jury of his peers, and found guilty of murder. And that situation has been over now for some time until recently when Christopher Rocco, a delegate in the Minnesota Republican Party convention, introduced a motion and at the state party gathering for a moment of silence for the officer, basically saying he deserved a retrial, he deserved a federal pardon, and he had not received a fair trial. And they actually passed the motion and had a moment of silence for a convicted murderer. Now this, as you might imagine, spoke volumes to the black community in Minnesota and beyond and to the larger world about the state of the Minnesota Republican Party. Because again, regardless of what you thought about any of the issues related to law enforcement or crime or protests or any of that, Derek Chauvin is a convicted murderer convicted by the state court of Minnesota. And apparently that doesn't mean anything to the Republican Party. When I read this article, I gotta be honest, I just had an eye roll moment because. Because there are two things going on here. one is that this is yet another example of a political party saying that the rules don't apply to them. This is the party, by the way, this is their point. Derek Chauvin was doing his job as a law enforcement officer. And we shouldn't question those whose job it is to uphold the law. We should support them. That's their argument. And then making that argument, they say to the Minnesota state court whose job it is to hold trials for criminals, that we neither support you or believe you're qualified in Doing the job you've been given to do. The doublespeak here is overwhelming. But the second thing here is this didn't accomplish anything except for getting Christopher Rocco's name in the news and basically signaling to all other conservative people who think the way he thinks, about just how shameless he really is, about how willing he is to ruffle feathers. You know, when I read this, I thought of Deuteronomy 16:19, where God tells Israel, right on the eve of going into the promised land, do not pervert justice or show partiality. Saying that a convicted murderer deserves a moment of silence is a perversion of justice. It's saying that the legal system says he's a murderer, but. But we don't think so. And you know why we don't think so? We don't like the person that he killed. But the second thing it is is it's showing we don't actually care about justice or about people or about larger issues or about nuance. We care about signaling to our base that we will ruffle feathers and cause shock just to get our name in the news. This is the state of American politics. This is the state of. Of American government. And it's part of the reason we're really not heading anywhere good as a country. I hope this story doesn't make national news and I hope it doesn't induce anything more from Republicans and Democrats than in eye roll. I hope that's true. And in fact, even in the article, there are some Minnesota Republicans themselves saying, I can't believe we did this. We should never have done this. And by the way, this is not a Republican issue. Both sides engage in this kind of ludicrous behavior, and it's time for it to stop. Justice is justice. The courts do the work of the legal system. We should respect that, acknowledge that, appreciate that, and live with the consequences. And we should care more about people than about scoring political points. Hey, thanks for checking out. Wake Up, Look Up. For more content, be sure to visit the Christ Community Chapel app or website cccchapel.com.

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