Monday, January 29, 2018

"THANKS FOR STRONG WOMEN"


“ A YEAR LATER – THANKS FOR STRONG WOMEN”

            After last week’s blog, one of my friends reminded me that the Women’s March was part of and a sign of the growing resistance to Trumpian America, and I must agree.   I am grateful for all the women political candidates who are emerging in this election cycle, and let’s hope that we have the good sense to organize and turn out the votes for them, including Georgia’s own Stacey Abrams, who is running for governor.  If elected, she would be the nation’s first African-American woman governor.  She spoke at Oakhurst several times during my tenure there, and I was blessed to have her speak at my retirement celebration. 

            The women political candidates are wonderful, and the education of us all on equity and justice for women must go much deeper.  The MeToo campaign, and the horrors of Larry Nassar, allowed by the US Gymnasitcs Committee and Michigan State, remind us that there is deep resistance to the empowerment of women, and indeed that the fear and hatred of women is deep in patriarchal culture.  And, let us all be reminded that we indeed live and breathe in patriarchal culture, just as we  live and breathe in racist culture.  One of my FaceBook friends posted a sentence uttered by Donald Trump at the “anti-life” rally over the weekend, in which he seemed to misspeak, a frequent habit of his.  He said:  “Right now in a number of states, the law allows a baby to be born from his or her mother’s womb in the ninth month.  It is wrong.  It has to change.” 

            At first, it was humorous to me, but then it turned chilling.  I don’t think that it was a misspeak so much as it was a glimpse deep into his anti-women, bedrock patriarchal thinking.  Trump wants to take away agency from women, whether it is birthing babies or not birthing babies or choosing not to get pregnant or to be pregnant. A quote right out of Margaret Atwood’s  “The Handmaid's Tale.”   And, of course, women would not be allowed to have any kind of power or agency in Trump World.  He was elected in order to make it clear to everyone that white males have been ordained to run and control the world.

            So, it is a time of continuing resistance, and I am grateful to the women and men who are working and marching and speaking out and organizing so that the ideas of equity and justice and reparations can be put back on the table.  I have been fortunate to have had strong women around me all of my life, and they have educated me and challenged me and called me to see my humanity not as rooted in domination but rather in partnership and equity and community.  My mother, Mary Stroupe, raised me as a single mother in the 1940-50’s, and I am ever grateful to her for the role modeling of a woman who refused to be defined by men.  She certainly had the power of patriarchy in her, but she worked against it in so many ways. 

            My spouse and life partner, Caroline Leach, was a feminist in the early days of the 1960’s and 1970’s.   She was the 21st woman to be ordained as a pastor in the former PCUS, the Southern Presbyterian Church.  In those days, women had to fight, fight , fight for those kinds of steps, and I have been greatly blessed to have been educated by her in so many ways.  When she graduated from seminary, no church would consider calling her as a pastor or associate pastor. Thanks to Rev. Woody McKay, she was called as an associate campus minister at Georgia Tech, which as usual, was ahead of the church on this.  Women students were coming into Georgia Tech, and Caroline was called to help them find their way in the maze of patriarchy.
In our first pastorate in Norfolk, Virginia, she would be a founding member of the first shelter for battered women (as they were called then) in Norfolk. 

            Our daughter Susan has proved to be a strong advocate for equity and justice for all, especially for women.  In the plays that she has written and those that she has directed, women are seen and heard as agents and creators.  I vividly remember her thesis play for her MFA at Towson.  It was entitled “The Book of Lilith, the Gospel of Eve.”  In it an exiled Lilith returned to the Garden to seek to help instruct Eve in how to survive with integrity in the patriarchal world.  More recently she directed “Harry and the Thief,” by Sigrid Gilmer, in which Harriet Tubman is portrayed as a real woman with many complexities and struggles in the intersecting worlds of patriarchy and racism.  She continues to educate me and so many others!

            Our daughter-in-law, Erin Graham, is a member of the East Lansing School Board, and is an outspoken advocate for rights for girls and women.  She and our son David have made a formidable pair in raising two great daughters and in teaching them to expect to be treated as equals in a world dominated by patriarchy. 

            So, this is how the resistance works – being found by those who believe in and who seek to live in equity and justice, surrounding ourselves with those friends and prophets who call us into our deeper selves, and beginning to find the glorious freedom of the children of God.  I want to say so much more about this, but I’ve run out of space, so I will return to this soon, and certainly in March in Women’s History Month.  Next up is Black History Month, and I will begin with the essence of the modern idea of intersectionality, the great and prophetic Ida B. Wells.

Monday, January 22, 2018

"A YEAR LATER"


 “A YEAR LATER”

            This is the first anniversary of a couple of things important to me.  First, I retired officially a year ago on January 15, and it has been a good year for me and Caroline.  I greatly miss the people and the life of Oakhurst, but I don’t miss the meetings and the stress of the building (and I am so grateful to Dave Hess for relieving so much of that building stress over my last couple of years.)  I have enjoyed traveling and writing and not having a schedule.  Thanks also to our daughter Susan who suggested that I write a weekly blog – it has been fun for me, and I hope that it has been helpful to you! 

            Second, this is the first anniversary of Donald Trump taking office as president.  He wanted to eviscerate the idea of “government,” and it is no small irony that the government shut down on his anniversary weekend.  He is part of a long history of leaders who see government, especially the federal government, as enemy to domination by the powerful and rich.  Ronald Reagan is the modern incarnation of that belief, but it has continued to flow through Newt Gingrich and Dick Chaney and Tom DeLay and Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan and Donald Trump. 

            Another part of that modern reincarnation is the role that the federal government reluctantly played in finally supporting the civil rights movement.  Growing up in and believing in white supremacy as a white Southerner, I remember the deep hostility that we had for the federal government, and many of the speeches that you will hear on the floor of Congress this week are a direct descendant of that hostility.  We do not want our white, male domination questioned or interrupted, and that is at the heart of the resistance to approval of DACA.  Roy Moore spoke for many white Southerners when he indicated during the recent Alabama Senate campaign that things were just so much better when slavery was permitted.  Yes, he was defeated (thank you!), but only because he was caught with his pants down with underage girls, and some of those girls, now grown to women, had the courage to speak up.

            I grew up with this white supremacist mindset, and I know it well.  It was only later as a young adult that I learned how reluctant the federal government had been to intervene in the civil rights movement.  Thanks to the political savvy and commitment of Martin Luther King, Jr., Diane Nash, A. Philip Randolph, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bayard Rustin and others, the Kennedy brothers were forced to come in to the struggle.  Indeed, many speculate that President John Kennedy was assassinated in part because of his support of the civil rights movement.  The history of the United States has been a struggle over the very idea of equality that drove the civil rights movement, from the decision to approve slavery and to make African-Americans 60% human beings in the Constitution, to the repudiation of Reconstruction, to the re-establishment of neo-slavery as “Jim Crow,” to the lynchings from Duluth, Minnesota to Elaine, Arkansas, to the coup in Wilmington, North Carolina. 

            Fortunately, we have had many witnesses who have been inspired by the idea of equality and who have continued to call us back to that hallmark phrase of the Declaration of Independence, that all {men} are created equal.  Even that linguistic attempt to limit equality to white males keeps failing.  Women and other people of all racial and economic classifications have heard this idea and have not believed the propaganda that it is meant only for white men.  They have heard that they too are included in this powerful idea.  We celebrate those who have called us out and called us to be who we were meant to be, and we celebrate those who are doing it now in our midst.

            That brings me back to the “one year later” idea.  We are a time of crisis with a dangerous president, and of course the root of “crisis” is both problem and opportunity.  It is time for all of us to listen, learn, and act for the powerful idea of equity and justice.  Let us join in the great cloud of witnesses.

Monday, January 15, 2018

"MLK"


“MLK”

            I don’t remember when I first heard of Martin Luther King, Jr.   Those of you who read my recent article in The Atlantic about my engagement with him in 1968 know that he was and still is a very important figure in my life.  My earliest memory as a boy about him is my thinking that he was a Communist, a money-seeking agitator who was duping black people and even some white people.   My earliest memory of him was seeing him on a billboard near Marianna, Arkansas, near my hometown of Helena.  He was sitting in a rocking chair with an older white man next to him, with a caption reading something like “King trained at Communist school.”   As I’ve written in other blogs, I later learned that the older white man was Myles Horton, and the “Communist school” was the Highlander Folk School in east Tennessee.  It was the same place where Rosa Parks was trained the summer before she refused to give up her seat on the bus in Montgomery in December, 1955. 

            Where did I learn this terrible stuff about Dr. King?  I don’t remember anyone sitting me down to lecture me on the dangers of believing that those classified as black were equal to those classified as white.  It simply was “in the air,” in my southern white culture as a boy.  Those of you who read this blog regularly know that I love the phrase “the prince of the power of the air” from the New Testament Letter to the Ephesians.  I breathed in this racism from those who loved me, and from those I loved.  I was receiving it and agreeing with it long before I became aware of it.

            I first really engaged Dr. King when he gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in August, 1963.   I was a rising senior in high school, but our school had not yet started back up after summer vacation.  I listened by myself, and I told none of my friends that I was watching it, because I did not want them to think that I was opening myself to such propaganda.  I’m not sure why I decided to listen, but I did, and his speech made a small opening in the wall of racism that surrounded my heart and my consciousness.  First, I was surprised at the number of people who attended – I had believed that this was a very small movement, led by agitators and Communists.  What I saw on that day was far beyond what I had been led to believe.  I told myself that something different from what I believed was happening here.  I wasn’t quite sure what it was, but I knew that I would have to find whatever else there was.

            Then Dr. King spoke, and THAT VOICE!  His voice got my attention, but his content kept my attention.    He spoke in metaphors of the American Dream, a dream on which I had been raised, and now he was expanding it and deepening it.   I almost let myself be inspired by that speech, but I had to hold back, because I felt that it would be too dangerous for me to move towards that inspiration.   But, he had opened a little crack in my dividing wall of racism, and I began to see the world and myself a little differently.   Baby steps at this time, but steps nonetheless.  I had one teacher at that time who I felt I could share this shift with.  Her name was Vera Miller, and she was a Jewish woman who taught English.  She heard me, and she suggested that I read “Cry the Beloved Country” by Alan Paton, and it is about apartheid in South Africa.   Even though I had seen and had engaged black people all my life, I met my first black person in that novel, the Reverend Stephen Kumalo.

            I was a senior in college in Memphis when Dr. King was assassinated there, and I have written of that time in the article in The Atlantic – if you haven’t seen it, here is the link:  https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/doubting-mlk-during-a-strike-in-memphis/550118/

            As I began to loosen the captivity of race in my life,  I allowed myself to be inspired by Dr. King’s 1963 speech.  We began an MLK Breakfast at Oakhurst Presbyterian in 1985, and ever since then we have used his witness, his ideas, and his vision to inspire us and our actions.  I’ve since come to like two other speeches better:  “The Drum Major Instinct” preached at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he was pastor – he preached it two months before he was assassinated.  The second is “A Time to Break Silence,” preached at Riverside Church exactly a year before he was killed.  In this latter one, he came out publicly against the Vietnam War for the first time. 

            So, though I never met Dr. King, I give thanks that he was one of the powerful influences that pulled me out of the morass of captivity and on towards the light of justice and equity.  Next week, I’ll have more on his struggles, but for now, it’s “thank you.”

Monday, January 8, 2018

"2018"


“2018”

            January is named after the Roman god Janus, a personage who had two faces:  one looking back and one looking forward.  It is a good name for the first month of the year – looking back at the year that has just passed and looking forward to the new one.  2017 was quite a year.  It was the first year of my retirement, and I must say that I enjoyed it.  I missed the people of Oakhurst Presbyterian (I’m not allowed to return there for a good while yet), but I did not miss the meetings or the stress.  And in this terrible cold snap, I have not missed worrying about pipes freezing or heat failing in the old building.  Many thanks to Dave Hess, who lessened my fears considerably over the last few years about heating issues at Oakhurst.  They are still in the search process for a new senior pastor, so please keep them in your thoughts and prayers.

            On a national level, many of us exhaled that we kept out of a major war for 2017, but the presidency of Donald Trump has been a unmitigated disaster and disgrace.  When he got elected in November, 2016, I consoled myself a bit that he seemed like Ross Barnett or George Wallace or Orval Faubus, all Southern governors who were racist and oppressive, but we made it through them.  I also told myself that the Trump era would likely be like the Reagan era, but I must admit that Reagan looks so much better in comparison to Trump.  It took me awhile to realize that Trump was a continuing voice of the Reagan Revolution, in which angry white people sought to turn back the clock to regain the “rightful” place of white males ruling the world.  And, then to add Trump’s deep insecurities and narcissism, and we have a very dangerous person as President in a very dangerous time.

            The Republicans in control of Congress remind me of the Democrats in power in the South in the 1890’s and in Congress in the first half of the 20th century.  They seem interested only in gaining power and in the repression of those who are poor and those who are not classified as “white,” all leading up to the continued and even enhanced domination of the rich.  The heinous tax cuts passed at the end of 2017 will be a lasting legacy of this imprint, and it sounds like 2018 will be a year when they will seek to cut benefits for poor and middle class and turn Medicare, Medicaid and even Social Security from their “community” orientation to an expression of more individualism.  Programs like Social Security were never meant to enhance the “individual.”  They were meant to build up the common good, all the while assisting individuals. 

            So, on these levels, 2018 looks like a grim year.  There are signs of hope, however – the Democratic victories in Virginia, New Jersey, Georgia, and Alabama offer us some hope of a substantial change in the November elections.  Voter turnout will be a key, and here we have a lot of work to do.  A friend of mine posted on her FaceBook page that her state of Tennessee ranks last in the nation in voter turnout, and I know that it is low all over the country.  That will definitely have to change, and it is relatively easy to do – mainly folk like us getting friends and strangers to vote.  Key folk are young people who seem to see no point in voting, and I hope that the election of Donald Trump has disabused them of this notion.   Young people are also part of this sign of hope – many of them seem to be in disbelief that we are where we are, and many of them are leading protests around the country.  The hopeful breakthrough of women’s voices is also a sign of hope.  What we have seen is only the tip of the iceberg, but at least people are beginning to speak up and are not totally dismissed.  These are among the signs of hope, and we should all be working to keep our society from reverting back to the 1890’s where repression and racism and sexism rooted themselves in our collective hearts for the next 70 years.  Let us not repeat that scenario.

            It remains a dangerous time.  As the revelations about obstruction of justice increase for Donald Trump, he will likely seek to take over the Department of Justice, and he will definitely take us into a major war.  His lack of self-esteem will not allow him to take the revelations that will be coming this year.  I don’t know if a Republican congress will be up for impeachment, but the revelations may be “criminal” enough that they will have no choice.  And, if the Democrats can win both houses of Congress, they can impeach him,  though a 2/3 vote in the Senate seems unlikely.   As we look backwards and forwards here in January, 2018 will be  momentous year in American history.  Let us work so that the arc can move back towards justice in this new year. 

Monday, January 1, 2018

'LOVE IN A TIME OF FEAR"


“LOVE IN A TIME OF FEAR”

            The days after Christmas can be depressing, especially in the USA where we emphasize the consuming of presents so much.  After all the presents are unwrapped, what is there to do next?  The world seems too much with us, and in these days, many of us are afraid.  We tremble for what 2018 will bring us.

            As we have seen, “Don’t be afraid” has been a clarion call throughout these Advent and Christmas stories.  Mary was told:  “Don’t be afraid.”  Joseph is told “Don’t be afraid.”  The shepherds are told:  “Don’t be afraid.”  These stories are well acquainted with the power of fear in our hearts.  And, the Christmas story in Matthew 2 ends with a gruesome tale that reminds us that these stories are told in the real world – the world where we live our lives. 

            The second chapter of Matthew begins with the arrival of the magi, the leaders from the east, who come to worship the new king of Israel.  The first twelve verses of Matthew 2 are the sweet and sentimental part of the Christmas story:  the wise leaders come to the baby Jesus, to bring him gifts.   It is part of the manger scenes for thousands of crèches around the globe. 

            Yet, even in this “sweet” half of the story, there are warning signs that this might not be such a sweet and sentimental story.  First, these magi are Gentiles, outsiders considered “dirty” by the insiders.  The story of the insiders vs. the outsiders remains a constant in human history, no matter what the names of the group are or the century in which we live.  Second, these magi, these outsiders, come to Jerusalem, the seat of present and future Israeli hopes.  They ask the ruler of Jerusalem, King Herod, “Where is the child who has been born to be king of the Jews?”  And, of course, Herod “and all Jerusalem with him,” are afraid.  Who is this that is a threat to Herod?  Will there be another civil war?

            Despite these warning signs, the first half of the story in Matthew’s gospel ends well enough.  The magi are directed to the baby in Bethlehem, and Herod has asked them to send him a tweet with the baby’s address so that he can worship him.  The magi do find the baby, and they honor him, but they are wise enough not to contact Herod to give him the GPS coordinates for the location of the baby.

            That leads to the terrible, horrible, awful second half of this story:  Herod is enraged and sends his soldiers to kill all the baby boys of Bethlehem.  The baby Jesus is saved only by the visions of his adopted father Joseph – he takes his family and flees to Egypt, a country where there is no wall, where the borders are not closed.  They welcome the refugee family.  Herod’s soldiers do slaughter the boys of Bethlehem, and the killing is horrific.  Matthew quotes from the Hebrew scriptures to describe this toxic masculinity:  “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children.”
            So, as we close out this Christmas season and this year of 2017, let us note that these Christmas stories do not take us to “sweet and sentimental land,” but rather to the world in which we live, the world of violence and domination and death.  It is here that these Christmas stories root us.  No escape into consumerism here, no sweet pause before the world floods over us again.  Rather, these stories take us into our own lives, where violence and domination seem to have the upper hand.   These stories remind us that God knows where we live.  These stories ask us to know the power of love in a time of fear.

             Herod does act out of his insecurities – that is one model of the male response to these events.  Joseph, however, shows us a different male reaction to the power of fear.   He goes to the margins, and he allows love to dominate him rather than fear.   We’ll all be having that choice in 2018, so let us continue to keep our ears attuned to the power of love.  The blood of the boys of Bethlehem did not conquer the power of love.  The blood of Jesus on the cross did not chase God away from us.
Empty womb and empty tomb!   That is the promise and hope of these Christmas stories.  May we keep them close to our hearts in the year to come, so that we may know the power of love in a time of fear, so that we may keep Christmas with us all through the year.