"My phone and texts just started blowing up -- they all said, 'they found him not guilty,'" Lee said.
Realizing that he was going to have to preach in the morning, the pastor began thinking of what he would say to his largely black congregation called Community of Hope outside of Washington, D.C. Many in the congregation have lost loved ones to gun violence, and are simultaneously grieving and seething from what is being widely experienced in the black community as an injurious miscarriage of justice.
"I knew I would be wearing my hoodie while preaching," Lee said, "and I wrote to all the pastoral staff that hoodies are welcome."
As church communities gather on the Sunday after the "not guilty" verdict in one of the most racially fraught trials in recent memory, black pastors are offering both pastoral and prophetic responses from their pulpits.
Lee is preaching on the topic "Where Do We Go From Here," in which he uses the Martin Luther King Jr. speech of the same title.
