Op-Ed: In a Sea of Silence

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.

Say his name.

Before he became a headline, he was a husband, a father, a son, a coworker. He was a man whose family knew his laugh, his habits, the work of his hands, and the shape of his love long before the rest of us ever learned his name. As a pastor, I have learned that grieving families never begin with politics. Standing beside hospital beds and open graves, they tell stories about ordinary things: the song someone always sang in the car, the joke they never tired of telling, the meal they made better than anyone else, the quiet ways they cared for the people entrusted to them. Death has a way of stripping away everything that was never most important.

Pastors learn names before opinions because people come before positions.

Christians believe that every human being is God’s beloved. That belovedness is not conferred by a government, affirmed by public opinion, or diminished by the categories we use to describe one another. It does not depend on citizenship, innocence, productivity, or whether the evening news tells someone’s story sympathetically enough for us to feel their loss. Our belovedness is older than any nation, deeper than any political identity, and beyond the reach of any human authority because it begins in the heart of God.

That is why I have found myself wondering why Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s death has settled so quietly into the background.

Was it the absence of video? The relentless pace of the news cycle? Geography? The politics surrounding immigration? Some unexamined bias? Perhaps all of these. Perhaps none of them. There are likely as many explanations as there are readers. Before we rush to explain our silence, however, we should first be willing to notice it, because what we overlook often reveals as much about us as what captures our attention.

His family tells us who he was.

His death tells us something about who we are becoming.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed by agents of the state. The legal questions surrounding his death deserve a careful investigation. They should be investigated thoroughly and honestly.

But legality is not the same thing as righteousness.

Christians have always known this.

Jesus was legally executed.

The cross should forever make us wary of confusing what the state permits with what God blesses.

Throughout Scripture, God shows a persistent concern for what happens when those entrusted with power forget the humanity of those over whom they exercise it. Again and again, the prophets raise their voices on behalf of lives treated as expendable. Again and again, Jesus refuses to pass by the people everyone else has learned to overlook. He sees them before others judge them. He calls them by name before others define them. He reveals their belovedness before anyone else has the opportunity to deny it.

That is still the church’s calling.

To speak truth to power.

To bear witness to the belovedness of every human being.

To refuse the temptation to look away when violence is carried out in our name.

To insist that no one becomes so powerful that they no longer have to answer for how they use that power.

I am angry that a human being can be killed by those acting in the name of the state and that so many of us seem prepared to move on before we have even learned his name. I grieve that his death has not awakened the same public lament that has followed other acts of violence in recent weeks. I cannot fully explain why that is. Perhaps no single explanation exists. Yet the silence itself deserves our attention. It asks uncomfortable questions about whose deaths linger in our collective conscience, whose stories are amplified, and whose lives quietly disappear beneath the weight of our assumptions.

The calling of the church is not exhausted by private compassion. We are called to embody the presence of Christ in the world by telling the truth about God’s beloved children, especially when power has obscured that truth. We are called to speak when fear tempts silence, to stand with those whose humanity has been diminished, and to remember that the measure of our discipleship is found not only in the prayers we offer but also in the people for whom we are willing to raise our voices.

Every generation of Christians is remembered not only for what it said, but for what it left unsaid.

In a sea of silence, let the church tell the truth.

That every human being is God’s beloved.

That power is never beyond moral accountability.

That no life should disappear into indifference.

Say his name.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.

The Rev. Molly Carlson currently serves as the Interim Conference Minister for the South Central Conference of the United Church of Christ. Prior to serving in this role, Rev. Carlson served in local, regional and national settings of the church.  Her ministry has taken her to Indiana, Kentucky, Oregon, California, Idaho, Pennsylvania, Washington and Tennessee.  She currently lives in Dekalb, IL with her husband, Michael, their two young adult children and several pets.

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