"EARTH DAY"

 “EARTH DAY”

This year marks the 55th anniversary of the official beginning of Earth Day.  I remember when Earth Day was officially recognized in 1970.  It had been semi-officially started in 1969 by Iowa native and later Californian John McConnell.  Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin got it going nationally by calling for a country-wide teach-in on the environment on April, 22, 1970, using the model of the teach-ins against the Vietnam war.  It caught on, and I remember that Caroline and I started observing it in worship in our church in Norfolk in 1976.  As we all know now, we are at a crucial point in the earth’s life, and many think that it is already too late.  I prefer to think that we still have a chance, and in that mindset, I’m sharing a poem by Mary Oliver that may us shift our way of thinking about the earth and all of creation.  It’s called “The Sun.”  The last lines describe Trump and his transactional henchpeople.

“THE SUN”

Have you ever seen

anything

in your life

more wonderful

than the way the sun,

every evening,

relaxed and easy,

floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,

or the rumpled sea,

and is gone–

and how it slides again

out of the blackness,

every morning,

on the other side of the world,

like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,

say, on a morning in early summer,

at its perfect imperial distance–

and have you ever felt for anything

such wild love–

do you think there is anywhere, in any

language,

a word billowing enough

for the pleasure

that fills you,

as the sun

reaches out,

as it warms you

as you stand there,

empty-handed–

or have you too

turned from this world–

or have you too

gone crazy

for power,

for things?

"RESURRECTION!"

 “RESURRECTION!”

We are in the season of Resurrection. Easter was yesterday, and whether or not you believe that Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead after he was given the death penalty by Rome, the power of Resurrection still speaks to all of us.  The power of the Resurrection is not so much what happens to us when we die.  The power of the Resurrection is that we are offered the opportunity to experience new life now, to see life and ourselves and others in a new way.  

In this sense, Resurrection is always contemporary, because we are always in captivity.  Those of us seeking liberation can use the power of Resurrection as a metaphor for helping us to find new life and new vision.  In this time when Trump would be king, it is sometimes hard to feel and to experience the power of Resurrection.  There is a hopeless malaise hanging over us, like an early morning fog that robs us of our ability to see clearly.  Indeed, that is what Trump wants – for us to give up and give in to his move for imperial power.  

In this kind of time, let us recall those first followers of Jesus, who felt the power and vision of Resurrection.  They lived under the oppressive power of imperial Rome, and they were so unimportant that no Roman historian recorded their names or their actions or their histories.  They could have been crushed at any time by Rome – they had very little agency in regard to political power.  When the word first began to spread about the Resurrection, Rome did not tremble or even notice – another little sect with some weird theory.  

    Yet, even Rome would yield to the power of Resurrection.  Several hundred years later, Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity as the religion of the Empire.  This was not a good development for Christianity, but it did show the lasting power of Resurrection, once it takes hold.  Many Christians were tortured and executed by Rome, but still they kept coming – they still were driven by the power of Resurrection.  It’s sort of like the Freedom Riders on the buses into the South in the early 1960’s.  Even after all the violence and deals and orders to stop the Freedom Rides, they kept coming – no one could stop them.  They were inspired and fired by Resurrection, and they grabbed hold of that vision and kept riding it.

    In John’s version of the Resurrection in John 20, Mary Magdalene comes alone to the tomb of Jesus to anoint his dead body for burial.  The body is gone, however, and she thinks that the body is stolen.  Later in the passage, she sees the risen Jesus standing right in front of her, but she does not recognize him.  She sees him and talks with him, but she does not recognize him, because she is captured by the power of death.  She is not looking for life because her perceptual apparatus belongs to death.  She finally recognizes the risen Jesus when he calls her name:  “Mary.”  Then her eyes are opened, and her heart leaps.  She runs to tell the other disciples: “I have seen the Lord!”  Rome and men still rule over her body, but now she has a new vision of herself and of life.  She is fired up – she has seen the Lord!  Indeed, Mary Magdalene is the primary witness to the Resurrection – she is the only witness mentioned in all four Gospel accounts.

    Her witness now seeks viability in our time, too.  We live in a scary and dangerous time, and for many of us, the great experiment in democracy (flaws and all) now seems in deep peril.  We don’t know what the longing-to-be-king Trumpster will do next, but Resurrection gives us promises about our lives and about life itself.  We are promised that the final word in each of our lives and in all of our lives is not death, but rather life and love.  We are also promised that the Spirit will not fail us, that even in these dismal days, God is moving and shaping possibilities for life and love and justice.  

    Our calling in this season of Resurrection is to acknowledge that like Mary Magdalene, we are captured by the power of death – in these Trumpian days, that acknowledgment is not a far stretch.  Despair has us in its grip, and it is difficult to recognize the work of God that is moving among us.  Like Mary, let us listen for our names being called, and let us hear them and respond as Mary did.  Let us be witnesses for a different view of life, a different understanding of what it means to be a human being.  And, let us join Mary in sharing the stunning news of Resurrection: “We have seen the Lord!”

"LONGING FOR LOVE, BUT BELIEVING IN DEATH"

 “LONGING FOR LOVE, BUT BELIEVING IN DEATH”

On Palm Sunday, 1865 (April 9 that year), General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Virginia, and the Civil War, which began in April of 1861, began to come to a close. There was relief and celebration in DC and in the North (and to some in the South), but by Good Friday, that relief would turn to shock and horror when President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated – he would die the next day.  It was a stunning Holy Week that year.

The biblical Holy Week begins on a note of triumph and expectation.  Jesus of Nazareth, the great healer and wise teacher, is entering Jerusalem during Passover in a politically charged atmosphere.  His followers celebrate him – they have experienced love and healing and a new vision of what life can be.  They are fired up, and who can blame them?  Can this be the time that Jesus will overthrow Rome and reform the Temple? 

           The Roman governor Pontus Pilate has left his comfort in the villa on the Mediterranean Sea and has paraded into Jerusalem with his imperial army – coming to quell any thoughts of seeking liberation by Jewish folk during the Festival of Passover.  These two leaders of very different parades do not know each other, when Jesus enters Jerusalem on the first day of the week.  Their paths will intersect soon, however, and things have never been the same since their engagement with one another.

       These early days of April seem to justify why T.S. Eliot called April “the cruelest month” – so many assassinations and executions.  Jesus, killed on Good Friday.  Abraham Lincoln, shot on Good Friday and dying the next day.  Martin Luther King, Jr., assassinated in Memphis 57 years ago on April 4.  The death that closes out Holy Week seems to abide in all places and in all ages.  The followers of Jesus enter Jerusalem longing for love, believing in love, but finding death.  Jesus executed, Lincoln shot down, MLK shot down, children shot down, women disappeared.  Holy Week begins in excitement and anticipation but ends in death, despair and flight – the world indeed seems dominated by death.

    Holy Week shows us the drama of our lives – we long for love, but we believe in death.  We want to believe in this Jesus of Nazareth, but the world seems so much with us, a world dominated by corrupt and egotistical leaders, a world that believes in the power of violence and death.  Holy Week walks us squarely into the midst of this struggle – no fading away here, no sentimentality allowed.  Holy Week looks squarely at one of the most difficult truths of our lives:  we long for love, but we believe in death.  Holy Week asks us to sit with this uncomfortable truth this week – to think about our visions lost or visions diminished, about our hopes being dashed, to think about our compromises that make us gradually lose hold of our dreams and hopes.  Holy Week asks us to stay with that process in our own lives and in the life of the world.

    This belief in death, this yielding to death is so powerful, and it even enters into the incredible story of God with us.  Holy Week asks us to remember that process, to acknowledge it even now.  This power of death is not the end of the story, but it is a central pivoting point of The Story and of our story.  We won’t be left wailing at the Cross, but we are asked to acknowledge that we are, indeed, there when they give Jesus the death penalty.

"THE RESISTANCE"

 “THE RESISTANCE”

Caroline and I were privileged to be among the 30,000+ people who marched through Atlanta on Saturday and gathered at Liberty Plaza across the street from the Capitol to join in the “Hands Off” protest against the Trumpster tricks and his move to crush history and dissent.  As we got on MARTA at the East Lake station, we were glad to see longtime friends gathering too.  When the MARTA train pulled into the station, it was almost full, burgeoning with protesters going down to the rally.  We saw that repeated at the next stations.  It was reminiscent of our going to the Obama inauguration in 2009.  We got on the Red line at Siver Springs at 5:30 AM, and as we came to various train stops, people were pouring in to go to the inauguration in 20 degree weather.  One big difference, though – at the 2009 gathering, there was excitement and hope and joy.  Yesterday, there was excitement that so many people were showing up, but we were fueled mostly by anger, disgust and determination.

There were many great speakers at the “Hands Off” rally.  Some made the contrast between wanting to tell the Trumpsters to keep their hands off the hard-earned rights that we have, while urging us at the same time to be “hands on” in engaging and resisting the movement to repress, oppress, and suppress that the Trumpster is leading.  As I wrote in an earlier blog about Lenten practices, we are called to engage, to resist, and to work to regain the vision of justice and equity in our culture. If you don’t remember those practices, go back to the March 3rd Blog on “Lent and Trumpism” to review them.

As the speakers wove their stories of anger and determined resistance, one thread stood out to me.  Andrea Young, director of the ACLU of Georgia, spoke of who we should be listening to.  She also added this line:  “And of course I will not be listening to or bowing down to a white man who grew up in South Africa under apartheid.”  And, yes, Elon Musk did grow up in the apartheid regime, and with that background, he is rooted in the white supremacy that he and the Trumpster are trying to restore in its inglorious dimensions.

There was energy, passion, longing, and deep anger in those who marched and rallied and spoke yesterday.  It looks like this was repeated all over the country, with estimates of 5 million people turning throughout the country.  And, we will need that energy and passion to be able to provide resistance to the Trumpster’s move to reinstate white, male supremacy in every corner of the USA.  He has the power, and he is using it as much like a king as we will let him.

It was heartening to see so many people, so many different ages, so many different skin colors, so many different orientations – the “Hands Off” rally was good for that.  As Caroline noted, there were older folks like us who had clearly been marching for a long while, and there middle and high school students and other younger folk who were just starting out their marching career. Caroline remembered that her first march was against the Vietnam War in downtown Atlanta in May, 1970, after the USA had invaded Laos and Cambodia.  My first march was in the fall of 1966, when I marched against the Vietnam War while I was a junior in college.  That next spring I would help to organize a march against Gammons Steakhouse because they would not admit a Black student from Southwestern.  So, think back in your own life – what was your first march for justice?  If you’ve never been on a march, why not?  This, especially, is the time to do it!  We must all find ways to resist this current administration and its anti-democratic work.  It is time to speak up and act up before that too becomes illegal.

"O, Pioneers!"

 “O, PIONEERS!”

I want to conclude this Women’s Herstory Month with a glimpse into the pioneering work of the great Caroline Leach.  Many universities and other groups studied Oakhurst Presbyterian Church when Caroline and I were pastors there.  They came to learn from Oakhurst how to do interracial and community ministry from a church that had almost died in the early 1980’s, after losing 90% of its membership over 15 years.  One of the groups who studied us was Dr. Charles Foster, faculty at Candler School of Theology at Emory University.  He and his graduate student Ted Brelsford, studied us for two years, and they published a book on their findings called “We Are Church Together: Cultural Diversity in Congregational Life.”  In that book, they described Caroline this way as they studied the church:

“Caroline, Nibs’s spouse and Oakhurst’s associate pastor, greets us also.  Caroline is striking and friendly in this setting.  For the most part, I have seen and heard of Caroline before primarily in her capacity as minister of outreach: challenging the status quo at school board meetings; taking commissioners to task for feeble and discriminating housing policies; advocating for the community health center, drug addicted children, illiterate adults, low income parents.  This morning she is not carrying those burdens.  She seems excited and buoyant.  She is delighted to meet my family and eager to make us feel comfortable.” 

Caroline did bring that “can do” spirit to our ministry together, which started in Norfolk, Virginia in 1975.  Sometimes, I would be Eyeore to her Christopher Robin, to borrow from the Winnie the Pooh stories.  Perhaps she got that from her encounter with all the male systems which sought to tell her “no.”  When she came to Columba Seminary in 1971, she was one of five women students there.  Some of the male students would accost her on campus to read to her from the Bible, especially using the Pauline gospels which seemed to denigrate women.  When she went to seminary, she was not intending to be ordained as a pastor – she was there to become a Christian educator.  Yet, the strong male resistance to her presence convinced her that only by becoming an ordained pastor would she have the power and the strength to resist such pressure and to find ways to thrive as a daughter of God.

That same resistance continued as she neared graduation from seminary – the office of student support told her that they would not refer her or the two other women students to interview with churches who were seeking a pastor.  Was this because they were unfit as a pastors?  No, they were highly qualified pastors.  Their resistance came from their gender – women were not supposed to be pastors in churches.  Leave that to the men, please.  Through her connections, Caroline found a campus ministry position at Georgia Tech, through the gracious invitation of Woody McKay, the senior campus minister there.  The number of women students at Tech was growing, and he had the wisdom to discern that he needed a woman pastor on the staff to take the lead in offering ministry to the women students.

Atlanta Presbytery was not thrilled that Caroline and other women were beginning to hear God’s call to them to become ministers.  Caroline was the second woman to seek ordination in Atlanta Presbytery, and she had a hard time getting to that opportunity.  Though she had grown up in Central Presbyterian Church in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and had been all over the church in terms of participation and leadership and service, the elders there decided that they could not sponsor her to be a candidate for ministry because they did not believe that God could possibly call women to be pastors.  Although she was deeply hurt by this rejection by her home church, she was not to be denied.  During her seminary years, she worshipped at Central Presbyterian in Atlanta.  She sought help from Reverend Randy Taylor, who was the senior pastor there, and he welcomed her into candidacy for the ministry.

After jumping through many hoops and leaping (sometimes crawling) over many obstacles, she was finally approved for ordination to the ministry by Atlanta Presbytery.  In June, 1973, she was ordained as a pastor, holding the ceremony at Georgia Tech.  She was the 21st woman ordained as a pastor in the former Southern Presbyterian Church. If you haven’t noted already, she is the senior pastor in our family by two years.

In many ways, Caroline and a few other women helped to blow open the locked and shut doors, which sought to bar women from entering ministry.  She had to come through many dangers, toils and snares in order to make it into ordained ministry as a pastor, and to help pave the way for future women who heard God calling their names.  I give thanks for Caroline’s gifts to me and to so many others in this pioneering spirit and in her determined (and yet buoyant and excited) ministry.

"AN ORDINARY PERSON FROM SHILOH METHODIST CHURCH"

 “AN ORDINARY PERSON FROM SHILOH METHODIST CHURCH” 

(This is an excerpt from Nibs’ article in the Mar/Apr, 2024 issue of Hospitality)

In 2021 Joan Browning gave a speech in West Virginia which gave a capsule of her history and her times:

“Sixty years ago, we Freedom Riders challenged a reluctant United States federal government to enforce sacrificially obtained Supreme Court rulings and Interstate Commerce Commission orders.  White supremacist state governments, that were elected by refusing the right to vote to African American citizens, said of those federal rulings: “You and what army will make us obey?”  Four hundred and thirty-six of us in 62 small groups enlisted in that army.  As historian Raymond Arsenault wrote, Freedom Riders “appeared to court martyrdom with a reckless regard for personal safety or civic order.  None of the obstacles placed in their path – not widespread censure, not political and financial pressure, not arrest and imprisonment, not even the threat of death – seemed to weaken their commitment to nonviolent struggle.”

Joan Browning was one of the foot soldiers in that army, beginning when she was 18.  How did she come to do this?   Was she a fire-breathing Northerner, come down to rescue the Black folk of the South?   No, she was a child of the South, born in 1942 to a farming family in Wheeler County, Georgia.  Her mother sewed the clothes that her seven siblings and Joan wore from flour and chicken-feed sacks.  When she was 8, her family became the first in the neighborhood to get electricity, first to get a telephone.  She grew up in the die-hard white supremacy of her time – neo-slavery governor Eugene Talmadge’s farm was only 4 miles away.  

  She was raised as a Christian, and she and her family were guided by the Micah 6 prophecy:  “do justice, to love kindness, and  walk humbly with your God.”  She was raised in her daddy’s Shiloh Methodist Church.  The launching of Sputnik in 1957 had stirred her to want to become a scientist/engineer to help the USA catch up in the space race.  She longed to go to Georgia Tech, but in 1958 it did not accept women (or Black people).  She ended up going to Georgia State College for Women (GSCW) in Milledgeville in the summer of 1958 – it is now Georgia State College and University.  

She liked the academics of college, but she felt out of place in Milledgeville, missing her family, her church, and the community in which she grew up.  Browning was a dedicated churchperson, and she attended the whites-only Milledgeville Methodist Church.  She found that it was too large and cold, and she missed her rural, family church.  She also resented that as a young white Southern lady in training, she had to wear the girdle, garter belt and stockings and hats and gloves mandated for church attendance.  She began seeking retreats for herself and found a spot near campus where she could read and meditate.  It was in close proximity to Wesley Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and she shared the retreat space with eleven year old Cassandra Mency, who introduced Joan to her father, Reverend T. Leander Mency.  They began having conversations, and soon Reverend Mency invited her to worship at his church.  In the autumn of 1960, she began attending his church with another white friend Faye Powell.  Here she found what she had desperately been seeking:  vibrant worship, a sense of community, and a genuine welcoming place. 

Unknowingly, however, she had crossed the white dividing line that had a taboo against white people and Black people worshipping together.  The president of GSCW called her into his office – his name was Dr. Robert E. Lee – and he warned her strongly against going to the AME church, indicating that 1960 was not yet the time to cross such a racial barrier.  He told her that her continued attendance there would likely result in her being expelled from the college and harm to the Mency family, possibly even the burning of Wesley Chapel A.M.E. Church.  Browning was flabbergasted – what was her offense?  Dr. Lee indicated that such racial boundaries could not be crossed, and he ordered her and Faye to cease attending the Black church.

Rather than submitting, she upped her game.  She began attending reconciliation conferences at Paine College, and while she was there, she participated in sit-ins in Augusta.  Word got back to GSCW, and she was forced to withdraw from the college or be expelled.  She enrolled part-time at Georgia State College of Business Administration (now Georgia State University), and she began working at Emory University.  While in Atlanta, she discovered the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and joined with them. Later that year, Jim Forman asked her to sign up for the Freedom Rides – this one from Atlanta to Albany.  She agreed to do it. 

In December 1961, she boarded the train in Atlanta with the integrated Freedom Riders group, and when they arrived in Albany, there were police officers waiting for them, and for the first time in her life, Joan Browning would spend time in jail, the only white woman arrested in the Albany Freedom Ride.   She was released after 24 hours, then jailed two days later for five long days.  She went to a rally at Mr. Zion Baptist Church, and she looked around in awe – the Black sanctuary was filled to overflowing.  She was asked to speak, and she noted how lonely she had been in jail but how good it was: “It’s a funny, mixed up feeling to hate being in a dirty place---but to be glad you’re there for a good reason.  We hope that you’ll keep it going.”

The sit-ins and the Freedom Rides were part of the body of civil rights work that Joan Browning developed.  She lived in Atlanta for a while, then the north Georgia mountains, then to the mountains of West Virginia, where she now lives in a doublewide mobile home on a hillside.  Ever the warrior and witness, she had these words to say in early 2023 on an op-ed piece for the Charleston Mail-Gazette:

“Now, I speak as an ordinary citizen and challenge students and others who consider themselves ordinary to see themselves as living lives of purpose, of grabbing what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. described as the “moral arc of the universe” and help bend it more toward justice.  I try to convey to citizens and students alike that even those who consider themselves as “ordinary” citizens can make a difference. My work has been recognized and honored with a long list of awards and appointments.

But now, all that many others and I are doing — and have done — is in danger of being erased as legislatures around the country, including in West Virginia, try to stifle discussion of those parts of America’s past.  For the first time in those 3 1/2 decades of speaking about the Freedom Rides, I have had two presentations cancelled because leaders in those states had issued an edict forbidding the discussion of race, diversity, equality or inclusion.

It seems that the West Virginia Legislature, through the proposed Anti-Racism Act of 2023 and other legislation, also intends to forbid me to speak about being an ordinary person who, by going on a Freedom Ride, helped take down those illegal, discriminatory signs and also inspire other ordinary citizens to help make this a better place for all of us.”

West Virginia did not pass the Anti-Racism Act (though it has returned in 2025), and witnesses like Joan Browning helped to derail it.  Browning’s life and witness remind us that we are all called out of our “ordinariness” to be extraordinary witnesses.  Let us find our places in this great cloud of witnesses.  

"DADDY'S HOUSE"

“DADDY’S HOUSE”

Several weeks ago when I preached at Antioch AME Church in Stone Mountain (via Reverend Vandy Simmons), I was privileged to meet many great people.  One of them was a Black woman named Mildred J. Mills, who bought a copy of my book “She Made a Way.”  She also gave me a copy of her book “Daddy’s House: A Daughter’s Memoir of Setbacks, Triumphs and Rising Above Her Roots.”  She indicated that our backgrounds were very similar. 

I read “Daddy’s House,” and it is a remarkable story.  Ms. Mills was one of seventeen children born to her parents in rural Alabama, in the early 1950’s. She describes it this way in the beginning of her book: “I was the third of Abraham and Mildred Billups’s seventeen children, born in Wetumpka, Alabama – a small, dusty community in the sticks of Elmore County.  Our white cinderblock house sat at the dead end of a red dirt road that ran straight through the woods at the butt end of the earth.”

Her book is the story of her wrestling with the demons in her life – racism, sexism, poverty, and a domineering and violent father.  She made the decision early on to find a way to get out of the oppression of rural Alabama during neo-slavery days, and the beginning of her book is her wavering at the front of her house as an 18 year old, right before she is to make the trip north to a college in Ohio.  She knows that she stands at the precipice of a monumental decision, and she decides to go.  Like the journey of Odysseus, she encounters many twists and turns, and she encounters her own share of monsters, as did the mythical traveler.  

Born in 1951, she grew up in a rural and racist and neo-slavery South.  One unusual aspect of her life is that though her family was poor, her parents owned the land on which they lived.  That rootedness gave her a sense of place and stability that many Black families did not have in the South.  The menacing white presence was always there, but her daily life was lived in the necessity of producing crops that her family could use to make money to live on. 

She and her siblings did the many chores on the farm that made it a viable place, especially picking cotton.  As one of the older sisters, she helped to raise her younger siblings, and they all lived in fear of her volatile father, who dominated her mother and who used the rod whenever he thought that it was necessary – and he seemed to think that it was necessary a lot.  That same dominating spirit, however, made him a formidable force who white people left alone.  In an earlier era, he might have been targeted for lynching, but like Ida B. Wells, his persona was so fierce that he exuded the mantra: “if you come for me, I’m taking as many of you with me as I can.”

     Ms. Mills encountered many obstacles on her journey, as she struggled to free herself from some of the cement blocks that sought to weigh both her body and her spirit down.  She was used and abused, but through it all, she found a way to make a way out of no way.  Throughout her fine book, she weaves the complexities of her life and her journey into an epic tale.  As I told her when we talked about her book, “I can’t believe that you made it out.  What an iron resolve you had.”

Ms. Mills recently interviewed me on her podcast “My Cotton Patch Moment,” and it will air on March 18.  Here is the link to it:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/my-cotton-patch-moment/id1676455331

During the interview, she noted that I was the first white person who she had ever encountered who would admit that they had racism in them.  We talked about how important it was to people classified as “white” to be able to deny the existence of racism, especially racism in each of us as individuals.  As my long-time friend David Billings put it in his fine book, we are in “deep denial.”

I thoroughly enjoyed meeting Ms. Mills, in reading her book, and in our conversation in the podcast.  I look forward to getting to know her better and to learning from her.  In the meantime, find her fine book “Daddy’s House, and get ready for an intriguing (and harrowing) story.