'ON TO THE MARGINS"

‘ON TO THE MARGINS”

            The first Christmas story in the Bible in Matthew’s Gospel begins with a seemingly dull genealogy, but with careful reading, it produces some spectacular insights.   It is intended to tie Jesus’ line with Abraham and David, but genetically it  does not work because Joseph is not the biological father of Jesus.  All the other genealogies have only men listed, but Matthew’s includes five women.  It is extraordinary that women are in this genealogy, but these five women are not the pillars of the faith:  Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba (though listed in Matthew as “the wife of Uriah”), and Mary.   Why not list Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and others? 

            The answer likely lies in the fact that these are all women on the margins.  Tamar has to use her wits in a patriarchal system and poses as a prostitute (Genesis 38).  Rahab is a foreigner in Jericho who assists the Hebrews in capturing the city, and some scholars believe that she was the matron of a house of prostitution (Joshua 2).  Ruth is another foreigner who sticks with her mother-in-law Naomi and leaves her land to return to Naomi’s home in Bethlehem – she becomes the great-grandmother of David (Book of Ruth).  Bathsheba, not even called by name in this genealogy, is a participant in adultery with King David, which results in the murder of her husband Uriah (II Samuel 11-12).

            As we saw last week, Mary has been asked to go even further out to the margins of life, as she agrees to allow herself to become pregnant by someone other than her fiancé.  She risks the death penalty, but she says “yes.”  She was already oppressed as a woman, and by agreeing to this request from the angel Gabriel, she has put herself in the complete mercy of her fiancé Joseph and the male-dominated system in which she lives her life.

            And now, it is Joseph’s turn to wrestle with this situation.  Matthew’s genealogy in chapter one is followed by the story of Joseph’s crisis over Mary’s pregnancy by someone other than him.  Mary’s being pregnant before marriage is not a big issue, but for Joseph, her being pregnant by someone other than him is a great offense.  While it was rarely used, the death penalty is on the table for this offense (Leviticus 20:10+).  Matthew tells us that Joseph is no longer willing to marry Mary, but he is wrestling over how to end the engagement.  The least disruptive course would be to send her back to her father’s family in disgrace.  He could also have her stoned in public as a punishment, or he could require her to go the priest and confess and be made to drink a bitter herb, with the hope of aborting the fetus.  Matthew tells us that he has decided to spare Mary as much public shame as possible and send her back to her father’s house.   As Mary’s pregnancy becomes more evident, she will obviously be in public disgrace, but that is beyond Joseph’s control.

            Matthew tells us that an angel comes to Joseph in a dream and tells him: “Don’t be afraid.”  It is the hallmark call of these Biblical Christmas stories: don’t be dominated by fear.  The angel is not identified in this story, so we don’t know if it is Gabriel or not.  Gabriel’s appearances tend to be in public, not in private, so perhaps this is another messenger from God.  The angel tells Joseph to listen to Mary, to listen to women.  It is asking Joseph to move out form the center of patriarchy towards the margins, where God is moving and acting.  The angel asks Joseph to take Mary as his wife and to offer her the patriarchal protection that he has as a man.  The angel asks Joseph to move from the center of patriarchy to the margins, to allow himself to give up part of his power as a man in a male-dominated system.

            In a great surprise, Joseph also says “Yes,” and he becomes the father and protector.  He takes Mary and the baby-to-be under his male protection.  He gives up some of his status and power in order to protect this family.  He moves toward the margins, and we are glad that he did!  This move is costly to Joseph – we never him speak in the Gospel accounts;  he doesn’t have a “Magnificat” like Mary does; no visionary prophecy like Zechariah had when John the Baptizer is born.  Indeed he disappears after the birth stories.

            Joseph gives up some of his male privilege and power when he claims Mary and Jesus.  And, perhaps he serves as a role model for the boy Jesus.  As Jesus grows to be a man, where does he learn that stuff about giving up power and privilege, that losing of self?  It sounds like he learned it at home, from his father Joseph and his mother Mary.

            In this Christmas season, may we dream dreams, as Joseph did.  In these crazy and scary times, let us be listening for God’s messengers to us, asking us not to afraid, asking us to move towards the margins, asking us to follow Joseph’s path, towards love and justice.

AVE MARIA

“AVE, MARIA”

            The famous song about Mary resonates in the Christmas season.  It was written in 1825 by Austrian composer Franz Schubert, and my first encounter with it was to hear my Catholic friends in high school say that they had to say so many “Hail, Mary” prayers to get her intervention with God on their behalf.  The song, like Mary herself, has a complicated history.  It was based on Sir Walter Scott’s poem “Lady of the Lake,” written in 1810. 

            Mary’s story in Luke’s Gospel does not begin in splendor but rather in terror and complexity.  She is a young woman engaged to be married to a Galilean carpenter named Joseph, and it is no doubt an arranged marriage.  The angel Gabriel appears to tell her that she has been chosen as a possible candidate to birth the Messiah.  Gabriel gets around in the Bible – he appears also to Daniel to help him interpret his visions, and he has just encountered Zechariah earlier in Luke’s Gospel to tell him that he will have a son who will become John the Baptizer.  Gabriel also appears in the Qur’an, consoling Adam after the Fall and giving Mohammed messages and guidance from Al’lah. 

            In Luke’s gospel, he greets Mary with strange words:  “Hail, O favored One!”  They are strange words because the words that he shares with her don’t seem favorable at all.  He asks her to allow herself to become pregnant with the Messiah, to become pregnant by someone other than Joseph her fiancé.   These are troubling words because they require that Mary allow herself to be moved further to the margins.  She is already marginalized as a woman, and now she is asked to put herself at risk of the death penalty because she will be pregnant by someone other than her betrothed.  She is the property of her father, being passed on to be property of her husband.  She has no agency in most of her life, but now Gabriel is asking her to have agency and to say “yes” to this dangerous request.

            Obviously Mary is afraid, and Gabriel responds with the words that resonate throughout these Christmas stories in the Bible:  “Don’t be afraid.”  Don’t be dominated by fear.  Gabriel tells her that God’s power will come upon her, and she will be filled with the fertile power of God.  She will become pregnant in the famous but incorrectly named “Virgin Birth” – it is rather the “Virgin Conception.”  The silly Alabama official who sought to justify Roy Moore’s abuse of young girls by citing this story obviously had completely misunderstood (or perverted it, more likely) it.  The point of the story is that males had nothing to do with the conception of Jesus – Joseph did not get Mary pregnant by abusing her.  Or, as Sojourner Truth put it so well at the Women’s Convention in Ohio in 1851:  “Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from?  Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman!  Man had nothing to do with him!”

            We don’t know what motivated Mary to say “yes,” but she does say “yes.”  As she puts it:  “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord.”  She puts herself at great risk to be the loving source of the power of God.  This decision to say “yes” has been used by all sides over the centuries – in the early part of the 20^th century, belief in the “Virgin Birth” became a requirement to be ordained as a minister.  Margaret Atwood understood how this radical decision could be misused and entitled her famous novel “The Handmaid's Tale” based on Mary’s words.

            If we seek to put this “yes” back into its original context, it is a reminder that God often asks us to take radical steps of love, steps that take us towards the margins.  When she says “yes” to Gabriel, Mary yields any small vestige of power that she might have – she has truly allowed herself to be moved to the outer margins of society.  Her political fate now rests in the hands of her fiancé Joseph, and next week, we will look at his response.  While God is working in her and for her, it is Joseph and the patriarchy who will decide if she will live. 

            Even in this precarious position, and perhaps because of if, Mary’s eyes and heart are opened wider.  After she receives the support of her cousin Elizabeth (now 6 months pregnant with the fetus who will become John the Baptizer), Mary’s vision deepens and sharpens.  She sings what has come to be known as “The Magnificat” in Luke 1:46-55, in which she sees the Christian vision of God’s turning the order of the world upside down:  “God has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich God has sent away empty.”

            As we have seen in the election of Donald Trump, the rich are exceedingly threatened by such a vision.  As we think about these things in this Christmas season, and as we are tempted to think of sweet baby Jesus, let us remember what a dangerous and political and surprising story this is.  And, may we hear Gabriel’s words to us: “Ave, Nibs….” Ave, {put your name in here}.”  May we hear how we are being asked to have God’s Spirit born in us.  May we have Mary’s spirit of courage and love to say “Yes.”

PREPARE YE THE WAY OF THE LORD!

‘’PREPARE YE THE WAY OF THE LORD!”

            “You children of snakes!  Who told you to run from the fire that’s about to bust over your heads?”  These are the harsh comments that John the Baptizer has for the religious leaders when they come out to the Jordan to inspect him and to see what is so powerful and so scary about what he is doing in his ministry.  My quote is from the Cotton Patch Version of the Gospel of Luke by Clarence Jordan.   You can hear Nat Turner’s voice in these words.  You can hear the mommas who watch their sons and daughters sold off into slavery.  You can hear the voices of the Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina.

            John is a man on fire, cajoling and pleading for God to come and intervene in human history to provide justice and mercy.  He challenges the religious establishment by attacking Temple worship at Jerusalem, a worship that we are seeing revived by President Trump’s endorsement of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.   John’s emphasis is that it is time to get right with God, and the way to do that is not to go to the Temple in Jerusalem but rather to come out to be baptized in the Jordan River. 

            Luke begins his gospel not with the birth of Jesus but with the conception of John the Baptizer.  Luke tells us that John’s parents have been unable to have children, and as usual, the wife named Elizabeth is blamed for it – Luke 1:7 tells us that she is barren. Since they have no children, however, how do we know that the husband Zechariah isn’t the barren one?  An angel appears to Zechariah the priest right before he goes out to lead worship – the appearance is an announcement that he will have a child.  Zechariah is stunned and not quite sure if it is true, but the angel brooks no dissent.  Zechariah loses his voice – a terrible thing for a preacher – until his son, who will be named John, is born.

            In the middle of this story the angel Gabriel goes to Mary to engage her, and we’ll look at that next week.  After the birth of John, we don’t hear anything else about him in Luke until he bursts on the scene in Luke 3.  John comes from the margins, from the wilderness, and he challenges those at the center of life to shift their social location, to come out to the Jordan and find a new life.  He also invites those at the margins to find a new definition of themselves, to hear that they belong to God, not to any of the powers who seek to claim their loyalty, even as they are told that they belong at the edges of life rather than at the center of life.

            Both Luke and Matthew’s gospels begin John’s adult story with quotes from Isaiah 40 about preparing the way of the Lord, in which every valley shall be lifted, and every mountain made low.   From the beginning there is a sense here of great reversal, and indeed the Christmas stories are full of such reversals:  Mary’s song praises God for lifting up the lowly and sending the rich away empty.  The baby is born not in a fine home or medical center but on the streets in a cowbox.

            As we jump into the Advent and Christmas season – maybe some of us are dragged into it – let us remember John’s fire, those pushed to the margins, and our own dreams about our lives.  This season is a time of memories, hopes, fears and longings.    As the preacher Phillips Brooks put it in his famous song that has become a favorite Christmas carol “O Little Town of Bethlehem:”  “the hopes and fears of all the years are born in thee tonight.”  May we know the birth of that baby in our own hearts and find the fire and vision that led John the Baptizer.

DON'T BE AFRAID

“DON’T BE AFRAID”

            We have stepped into the season of Advent when the church begins a new year.  It starts with the birth of Jesus, and only Matthew and Luke have stories about the birth of Jesus.  John’s Gospel has a powerful theological introduction about the birth of Jesus, but he is not interested in the historical details as Matthew and Luke are.  Luke especially wants to place the birth story in the middle of the messiness of history, and his approach describes a feeling very similar to our time.  We should note that Luke does not begin his story with the birth of Jesus but rather with John the Baptizer, and we will look at that story next week. 

            When Luke does get to the birth story in chapter 2, he sets it squarely in his understanding of secular history.   Octavious, nephew of Julius Caesar, and avenger of his uncle’s death, has had himself crowned as the first Emperor of Rome, Caesar Augustus.  He orders a census for tax purposes, and Luke tells us that a couple in Nazareth, engaged to be married, head for the man’s hometown of Bethlehem.  This combination of an emperor/dictator and taxes brings it home to us in our age, as all of us tremble for the future of our country and of democracy with President Trump’s leadership.  Is he looking to be emperor?  Does he want to be dictator?  However one answers those questions, it seems clear that he wants all power to flow through him.

            Luke sets his story right in the middle of these kinds of fears and anxieties.  Indeed, the Christmas stories are full of humans engaging our deepest fears and our deepest hopes at the same time.  As we will see later, when the angel Gabriel appears to Mary and asks her to allow herself to become pregnant with the Beloved, he tells her not to be afraid, even though he is asking her to assent to an action that will place her in danger of receiving the death penalty.   In Matthew’s account, when Joseph is wrestling over whether to allow the death penalty to be given to Mary, an angel appears to him telling him not to be afraid.  In Luke’s story on the appearance of the angels to the shepherds, the angelic chorus begins with the same phrase:  “Don’t be afraid.”

            The Greek word for “fear “ comes from “phobeo,” which is where we get our word “phobia.”  The admonition about fear in these Christmas stories is not about repressing fear but rather not allowing it to become a phobia, a dominant force that makes us unable to receive the gifts of God.  There is every reason to be afraid in these stories – Mary is subject to the death penalty;  Joseph is asked to take himself from the center of patriarchy to the margins of life,  and to allow himself to be hunted by government soldiers;  the shepherds are asked to leave their jobs and live under a new vision.  These Christmas stories, then, are not sweet and sentimental stories about the birth of a baby – there is obviously sweetness to them, but their point is to interrupt our lives in the midst of our fears and in the longings of our hearts.

            These Christmas stories ask us to consider an alternative vision of life in a time of hatred and violence and patriarchy and death.   These stories are not asking us to leave the world behind.  They are asking us to step more deeply into ourselves and into the world.  No escapism here, no matter what the culture does to these stories.  These stories are realistic about us and our lives and about life in the world.  They ask us to move from domination by fear to domination by love:  to act as Mary did and say “yes;”  to act as Joseph did and say “yes;” to be inspired by a new vision as those shepherds were.  As we enter this Christmas season in a time of great fear and trepidation, let us seek not an escape but the deepening of our lives and a consequent commitment to the power of love that is at the heart of this season.

            Howard Thurman put it this way in his fine book “Moods of Christmas:”

            “I Will Light Candles This Christmas”

            Candles of joy, despite all sadness,

            Candles of hope, where despair keeps watch,

            Candles of courage for fears ever present,

            Candles of peace for tempest-tossed days,

            Candles of grace to ease heavy burdens,  

            Candles of love to inspire my living,

            Candles that will burn all the year long.

           

LORD, WHEN DID WE SEE YOU...?

“LORD, WHEN DID WE SEE YOU….?”

            The Gospel lessons over the last three weeks have been the three parables from Matthew 25, which are the Waiting Bridesmaids, the Parable of the Talents, and the Parable of the Last Judgment. This Sunday’s lesson was the Parable of the Last Judgment, where the Beloved of Humanity gathers all the peoples of the earth at the end of time for the final judgment.  The story in Matthew 25:31-46 calls him the “Son of Man,” but the word for “man” in Greek is “anthropos,” from which we get our word “anthropology.”  So, it is easy to make “Man” to be “humanity.”  In this time when the toxicity of patriarchy is so clear to us all, I want to change the “Son” part to what it really means:  “the Beloved.”  So, it is the “Beloved of Humanity.” 

            It is important to note that these three parables are the last stories that Jesus tells the women and men disciples before he is betrayed, arrested and executed.  He begins with the parable of the waiting bridesmaids, who have to make a decision when the bridegroom is delayed.  Half of them stay awake and keep their lamps trimmed and burning, and we get the powerful gospel song “Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burnin” from this story.   The next parable is the Talents, where the master goes on a long trip and distributes talents to his servants to use in his absence.  Two of the servants use their talents and make more, but the third is filled with fear and hides his talents.  When the master returns, he is delighted that the two have multiplied the talents, but he is greatly irritated that the third has hidden his talent.  This is a strange and quirky story, and it has so often been used as a defense of capitalism and making money. 

            In these final teachings, Jesus seems to know how the meaning of the Parable of the Talents will be twisted, so he uses the third parable to tighten it up and to make it clear what the talents are.  He talks about the Beloved of Humanity gathering everyone for a final judgment, drawing on an image from Daniel 7.  He uses a metaphor of goats and sheep for the peoples - putting the sheep on the right, and the goats go on the left.  One of the unanswered questions here is whether this is “stage right” or “house right” – it obviously will make a huge difference!  He tells the goats on the left to go into eternal punishment because they did not feed him or clothe him or offer him water or visit him or care for him when he was sick.  The great American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr reminds that there is great surprise for everybody in this parable.  Those who are sent away are astonished, and they ask the Beloved: “When did we see you hungry or thirsty or naked and not tend to your needs?  Lord, if we had seen you in this condition, we surely would have served you!”  The Beloved replies that when they did not serve those in need, they were refusing to serve Him. 

            We should also note that those who are blessed in this story are just as surprised as the “unrighteous.”  Niebuhr calls this the “surprise of the righteous.”  They also ask the Beloved:  “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or in prison and serve You?  We don’t ever remember serving You.”  And, the Beloved replies:  “Whenever you served those in need, you were actually serving me.”  Here Jesus is emphasizing that what he wants are compassionate hearts and compassionate acts.  The talents that he is leaving for his servants to use are compassion and love and justice and mercy.    We should recall once again that this is the last teaching of Jesus to his disciples.  It is as if he is saying it one more time, one more time, one last time – these are the talents that I am leaving you, this is how you should live your lives.  If you remember nothing else, remember this last teaching:  just as God has been compassionate with you, so you should be with one another. 

            In these days of confusion and individualism and self-seeking, we would do well to remember the parable of the talents and this parable of the last judgment which tells us what those talents are:  feeding those who are hungry, giving water to those who are thirsty, clothing those who are naked, visiting those in prison, and caring for those who are sick.  This is who we are;  this is how we will experience Jesus.

CALL TO WORSHIP FOR NATIVE AMERICAN TRADITION

CALL TO WORSHIP FROM NATIVE AMERICAN TRADITION

(FACE EAST)

L:  From the East, the direction of the rising sun, we receive peace and light and wisdom and knowledge,

P:  We are grateful for these gifts, O God,

(FACE SOUTH)

L: From the South comes warmth, guidance, and the beginning and the end of life,

P:  We are grateful for these gifts, O God,

(FACE WEST)

L:  From the West comes the rain, purifying waters, to sustain all living things,

P:  We are grateful for these gifts, O God,

(FACE NORTH)

L:  From the North comes the cold and mighty wind, the white snows, giving us strength and endurance,

P:  We are grateful for these gifts, O God,

(FACE UPWARD)

L:  From the heavens we receive darkness and light, the air of Your breath, and messages from Your winged creatures,

P:  We are grateful for these gifts, O God,

(FACE DOWNWARD)

L:  From the earth we come, and to earth we will return,

P:  We are grateful for Your creation Mother Earth, O God,

ALL:  May we walk good paths, O God, living on this earth as sisters and brothers should, rejoicing in one another’s blessing, sympathizing in one another’s sorrows, and together with You renewing the face of the earth.  Amen.

In this call to worship which we used at Oakhurst, I am reminded of how far ahead Native Americans have been of Anglos and others in regard to environmental issues.   One of the early Anglo arguments to justify the taking of land and life from Native Americans was that they let the land lie fallow and refused to develop it.   The rapacious and unchecked capitalist spirit ran over everything, including the people who lived on the land.  That spirit obviously continues and seeks to strengthen its destructive ways.   Developers in metro Atlanta destroy 50 acres of trees a day in our stunning destruction of the earth in order to get money.   As we watch the environment make a huge pivot in response to our Western-driven desire for more and more stuff, we can hear the echoes and the current calls for re-orientation and change in Native American life.  There is little doubt, except among those like Roy Moore and his ilk, that unless we change and re-orient our relationship to the earth and the environment, we will all choke and drink and eat and smash ourselves to death.   Many scientists and educated observers believe that it may be too late already.  Would that we had listened, or even now would listen, to a different cultural point of view!  No romantic, guilt-driven acknowledgment of Native American life, but rather a sense of a life-saving orientation toward humanity and toward the earth and its creatures.

            In his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” written in 1785, Thomas Jefferson ruminates on whether other cultures really have equal humanity to that of Anglos.  Not surprisingly, he does not think so.  He is fairly certain that those of African descent will never be human beings equal to Anglos, but he wonders a bit about the equality of Native Americans.  He does not believe that those who were here when the Europeans came are currently equal to the Anglos, but he opines that he does not yet have enough scientific evidence either way to say whether they ever would be.  That sense of entitlement, that sense of the ownership of equality has plagued all of us for so many centuries in the colonizing of peoples and lands by Europeans and in the struggles of the American experiment.  Perhaps it is time to recognize that if there is some group who is not “equal,” it is the Anglos, it is those who created “race” and used that idea to do all sorts of terrible things to those who were deemed outside of the circle of humanity.

So, let us all consider these proverbs from the Native American tradition, as we gather for Thanksgiving this week.

“When all the trees have been cut down,
when all the animals have been hunted,
when all the waters are polluted,
when all the air is unsafe to breathe,
only then will you discover you cannot eat money.”
—Cree Prophecy

“Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was
loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our
Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children.”

FINDING MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE

“FINDING MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE”

            There is a legend in Decatur where I live that there was a loose boundary at the Dekalb County courthouse square between the Cherokee and Creek Indian tribes.  There would obviously be skirmishes around those boundary lines, but it was also a place where diplomatic, economic, and political exchanges could be made.  In this Decatur square is also a monument (erected in 1908) to the Confederacy, which both the Decatur City Commission and the Dekalb County Commission have now voted to remove.  Also in this same Decatur square is a “cannon” monument, a “relic of the Indian Wars of 1836,” erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1906.  It celebrates the defeat of the Creek Indians and the beginning of the Creek Trail of Tears, driving them out of Georgia and Alabama.

            I’m thinking about these things as I contemplate Native American Heritage Month now in progress.  As a boy growing up in the segregated South, I drank the Kool-Aid on many issues, and the history of Anglos and Native Americans was one of those issues.   Watching double feature westerns at the movies on Saturday afternoons in the segregated movie house as a boy in Helena, Arkansas,  I was frightened to the depths of my soul by the Indians of the West.  They were portrayed as being so savage that I could not imagine why any white person would ever go West, and I could not understand how any white person ever survived their savagery.   Those portrayals were part of a larger story that were the narrative of the manifest destiny of Anglos to take the land.  

            As Robert Frost put it in his poem “The Gift Outright,”  which he recited at the inauguration of John Kennedy as President in 1961: “The land was ours before we were the land’s.”   The “our” in this poem are not Native Americans but Anglo-Americans.  In my young adult years I discovered this poem, and I loved it because of its connection between life and land, of its connection to the idea of the “city on a hill” image from John Winthrop’s sermon in 1630 as the English approached Massachusetts on the ship Arbella. Then I encountered Dee Brown’s book “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West.”  My eyes began to be opened on yet another front to discover the powerful racism that I had learned (and had believed) from good white people.  It was yet one more part of a huge turning in my soul, in which I became aware of my captivity to the power of the prince of the air, to use the powerful metaphor from Ephesians 2:2.

            Wounded Knee was the site of a slaughter of Sioux people by Anglo troops in South Dakota in December, 1890.  It was partly in response to the “Ghost Dance” movement that was sweeping through the Native American tribes of the West.   One of the principal beliefs was that Christ had returned as a Native American and that the end times were near, with Native Americans finally receiving justice from God.   This movement frightened Anglos on many levels, but some Anglo agents advised a cautious approach.  Yet in our usual “shoot first, ask questions later,” approach in both domestic and foreign policy (sound familiar today?), Sioux leaders were rounded up, jailed, and many were lynched.  The final blow was a slaughter of Sioux people at Wounded Knee, including a few men but mostly women and children, and the killing was during the Christmas season in 1890.

             It is reminiscent of the response of King Herod to another messianic vision in Matthew 2.  When Herod hears that a new leader of the Jewish people may have been born in Bethlehem, his response is not caution.  He sends the soldiers to Bethlehem to kill the baby, and while a vision to the baby’s father Joseph enables the baby Jesus to escape as a refugee to Egypt, all the other baby boys in Bethlehem are killed by Herod’s soldiers.  Matthew’s Gospel responds with this quote from the prophet Jeremiah: “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children…”  The killing at Wounded Knee in the season of this baby Jesus resonates with the same lamentation.

            So, I’ve had to reconsider the narrative of my life and of our life together.   In my formative years,  I severely misunderstood the truth of American history.  It turns out that the savages of the West were not the Native Americans but my Anglo ancestors.  In our consideration of Native American Heritage Month, we must all start here.  More next time, but I’ll close with a quote from Chief Seattle that must be the beginning point, as he addressed Anglos in the area of Washington now named for him:  “We may be brothers {and sisters} after all.”  It turns out that we are, and there we must begin.

ALL SAINTS IN THE LAND OF AFFLUENZA

“ALL SAINTS IN THE LAND OF AFFLUENZA”

            As we pass through All Hallows Eve and All Saints Day, I give thanks for all those saints who have nurtured and challenged me and loved me.  If you have not already done so, I hope that you will take time to name and give thanks for the saints in your life.  Buddy and Anne Hughes became part of Oakhurst Presbyterian when they retired from the PCUSA in the 1990’s, with their most recent position being in Nicaragua.  They quickly became our teachers in the land of “affluenza.”  

            In one of his first sermons at Oakhurst entitled “Affluenza,” Buddy told a story about taking a walk with his young granddaughter in a comfortable, white Decatur neighborhood.  As they were walking, the city garbage collectors were going through the neighborhood doing their work.  As they passed Buddy and his granddaughter, Buddy said “hello” to the man collecting the garbage and thanked him for his work.  After they passed the collectors, his young granddaughter asked him:  “Granddaddy, did you know that man?”  When Buddy said “No,” she admonished him:  “Grandaddy, you should never speak to strangers.”  While he understood her perspective on one level,  he was saddened by her comments, because it meant that the sense of community was broken.  He also noted that it was symptomatic of what he and Anne had discovered had happened in America in their absence:  we had come down with a disease that Buddy called “affluenza.”  Buddy defined it as the power of materialism to overtake us and make us think that we did not need one another.

            We give thanks that Anne is still with us, but Buddy died in 2010.   The Oakhurst sanctuary was filled for his memorial service, and we noted in both joy and sadness the powerful love that Buddy had shared with so many of us.   I recalled a Jewish legend that fit in with my Calvinist sense of total depravity.  Along the lines of Abraham’s argument with God over Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 18, the legend indicated that most of us were fitfully captured by the power of sinfulness. Because of this, God’s wrath was great that we had messed up Her creation so much.   Yet, the legend indicates that God lets the world survive because there are forty “saints” whose lives reflect the glory, love, and justice of God.   I noted on that day that someone would have to step up, because with Buddy’s passing, we had just dropped to 39 saints.

            Buddy’s emphasis on “affluenza” reminded me of the idolatrous belief that we have in America in the power of materialism to make us somebody.  It causes us to use people as slaves and to pollute the air and water and land – we are driven by a desire for “stuff.”  It makes us believe that we do not need one another, that indeed we are enemies to one another because we are competing for the same stuff, the stuff that we believe will give our lives meaning.  The drive for less taxes in the new proposal in Congress reflects this belief – the more money we have, the less we will need the community and one another. 

            It is this belief that made us easy targets for a narcissist like Donald Trump.  His belief in his own power and ability has gathered a tribe around him, and we have seen the power of that tribal belief.  He wants to reign over the USA, and our institutions will be sorely tested during his presidency.  He is “affluenza” to the nth degree,” and the question for us is whether we can regroup and build an authentic community based on the values of equity and justice and love.  Right now the tribal view of exclusion, revenge, and wrath seems to be prevailing.  We’ll need more folk to step up like Buddy and Anne and many other saints.  Will we join the saints in marching in?

LUTHER AND THE MODERN WORLD

“LUTHER AND THE MODERN WORLD”

            One of my colleagues and friends from Ecuador, Laura Nieto,  commented on last week’s blog that only 25 years separated the landing of Columbus in the West in 1492 and the posting of Martin Luther’s “95 Theses” in Germany in 1517, a posting which was the match that lit the Reformation.   I was invited to speak with some Lutherans in Atlanta a month ago to talk about multicultural ministries, and one of the speakers addressed the question of whether Martin Luther would approve of multicultural ministries.  While noting that Luther was a man of his times, he felt that Luther had sown the seeds of the dignity of the individual, and that this idea has led to the ability and validity of some of us seeing people of other cultures as sisters and brothers rather than just “other.”  History suggests otherwise, however.

            Some authors like Richard Marius have called Luther the first “modern man.”  While this does seem to be a stretch, Luther’s sense of the lonely individual dominated by anxiety and existential angst, unable to find home and meaning in a brave new world, seems to resonate strongly in our post-modern world.  I am intrigued with Laura’s connection of Columbus with Luther, and it is striking that one of the outcomes of the liberation of the individual from the confines of medieval Europe and the Roman Catholic Church was not greater dignity for all people but  rampant racism and exploitation of peoples around the world by the enlightened and beginning-to-be-liberated Europeans.  The idea of “race” developed post-Reformation in the Western consciousness as a way of acknowledging the dignity of individual European human beings while exploiting those who seemed human on one level but weren’t really human under the classification of race.  To paraphrase George Orwell’s phrase in his futuristic novel “1984:”  “All human beings are equal, but some human beings are more equal than others.”

            The forces unleashed in the Reformation are still rolling through us 500 years later, and the anxiety that drove Luther to his revolution still speaks loudly in our lives, only amplified to the nth degree.  All of our community attachments seem to be disappearing, and there is a strong connection to the fact that in the 20^th century when we had such technological advances and empowerment of the individual, we also had more people killed in wars, revolutions, and genocide than in all the other centuries of recorded history combined.   I am not laying this development at Luther’s feet, because he would have never placed the individual above the community.  I am noting that the anxiety that drove his great insight that our sense of meaning and salvation and home are gifts rather than being earned, that anxiety has grown exponentially in relation to the empowerment of the individual and the diminishing and importance of community.

            So, I’m wondering if this is a time of another Re-formation, if someone(s) out there are already feeling and formulating a new way of balancing the importance of the individual with the necessity of authentic community.   We individuals cannot bear the weight of creating our own meaning.  Sooner or later we will turn to community to provide the meaning for our lives.  If we are fortunate, we will be drawn to a community grounded in authenticity, where the values of both individuals and communities are affirmed and valued.  Most of us, however, will be drawn to inauthentic communities where individuals are crushed, where the community is valued over all other entities, and where strong boundaries must be drawn against the “outsider” in order to strengthen the community.   I call this inauthentic community “tribalism,” but I’m hesitant to use this word because it has such strong resonance in many cultures.  For awhile, I tried calling it “clans,” until one of the participants in a workshop I was leading indicated that when they heard the word “clan,” they thought of the KKK.   I’ve stayed with “tribalism,” but I’ll be glad to hear from those who have a better term. 

            By tribalism, I mean the movement to join others in closing ranks and having strong boundaries to keep the “other” out, no matter who the “other” is.   We are seeing that movement now in the Trump election and presidency, as the tribe of Trump seeks to consolidate power and to hold on to it by seeking to make America great again, i.e. to make America white again.  Tribalism means that we must see the other as enemy, or at least a threat.  The anxiety that drove Luther to a great Reformation is now driving us all, and the white supporters of Trump are seeking to return to boundary-fixing, wall-building, “enemy” speech which they believe will end their anxiety and bring meaning to their lives.

            There is another way, and we’ll look at it next week.  For this week, let us all seek to find where anxiety is leading us to move toward tribalism and away from our own humanity and the humanity of others.

500 YEARS AGO

“500 YEARS AGO”

            October 31 is the 500^th anniversary of Martin Luther’s posting of the famous “95 Theses” for debate on the church door at Wittenberg, Germany, in 1517.  This event is generally cited as the beginning of the Reformation, the movement that sundered the 1000 year old Roman Catholic and produced the movement known as the “Protestants.”  Of course, in our modern, deconstructionist age, many historians believe that the events of October 31, 1517, never happened.  There is no doubt that  Luther had a number of theses that he wanted to debate with the church, but there is not much documentary evidence for the dramatic nailing of the theses on the doors of the Wittenberg church, calling for a church and public debate.  To paraphrase Marcus Borg, the events may not have happened in just this way, but there is profound truth in this story.

            I went back and re-read the 95 theses last week, and I was struck by their medieval nature but also by their invitation into the modern age.  Luther was greatly irritated with the church practice of selling “indulgences,” and his call to debate is largely centered on seeking an end to this practice.  Indulgences were pronouncements by the Pope and his hierarchy that would get an individual or a departed loved one out of  “purgatory.”  Purgatory was the place that some souls went after death, souls who were not yet ready to be with God.  To use a modern description, in purgatory one would see things a bit more clearly and have opportunities for personal growth before being allowed to pass through the pearly gates.  While it was not hell, which has permanent separation from God and the power of love,  it was not yet heaven either, where love and justice reign.  Depending on whether the local church needed to raise funds, purgatory could be a better or worse place for the soul to abide for awhile.   Whatever the state of purgatory or of the individual soul, indulgences permitted those still living on earth to buy the soul of their loved one out of purgatory and send them on to heaven.

            Firing Luther also was a sense of the sovereign and gracious power of God.  It appalled him to think that the church believed that it controlled salvation and access to God.  He could not believe that the church taught that people could buy their way into heaven.  Perhaps the most modern of his 95 theses is #27,  which says:  “They preach only human doctrines who say that as soon as the money clinks into the money chest, the soul flies out of purgatory.”  For all those luxury-loving preachers out there, Luther has called us out.  

            Indeed he came to believe the very opposite – we do not and cannot do anything to win the grace of God.  There are no programs, no seven steps to salvation, no church doctrine that will win over God’s heart and make Her bend towards us.  Though Luther did not think in terms of individuals cut loose to be on our own in terms of the ultimate meaning of life and of our own lives, the forces that aligned with his initial movement in this disputation with the church drove us into modernity.  The shift from life centered on community to life centered on individuals had begun.  Luther would never have placed the individual over the church in terms of conscience or of doctrine or even of salvation, but his engagement over taking some of the money bags out of the church’s hands led to a revolution which brought us to our modern predicament:  if there are no communal sources of truth, are we all left out on our own to figure things out?  The technological revolutions of the 20^th and 21^st centuries are taking us back to the questions which Luther (and Calvin) raised and wrestled with:  what is the source of the meaning of life?  What is the source of the meaning of my life? 

            Though Protestants gave up the hierarchy of the priesthood, we still are not yet ready to let go of the authority and power of the church to shape and bring significant meaning for individuals and for the larger world.  The story of the 21^st century will largely be the same story that Luther and Calvin engaged so many years ago:  what is the source of  truth?  Is it science?  Is it spiritual?  And what is the source of our meaning?  In its best days, science leaves the idea of meaning to others, but there is a growing sense that science is banishing the idea of “meaning.”   The difficult and dangerous truth is that we as individuals and cultures cannot live without a source of meaning.  There will always be a yearning for truth and meaning from outside ourselves, and that discovery and reminder from Martin Luther and others is one of the lasting legacies of the Reformation.  More on this next week, but check out the Reformation in this week!

AMERICANA

“AMERICANA”

            A few weeks ago Atlanta Interfaith Broadcasting (AIB) showed an interview that Angela Harrington Rice had done with me in the spring of this year.  It is part of a series that they are doing on long pastorates and our spiritual journeys.  The interview was about 90 minutes in the Oakhurst Presbyterian sanctuary, and they did a good edit to bring it down to about 28 minutes.  If you’d like to see it, here is the You Tube link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKynR-z0BM8&feature=youtu.be&start=139&end=276

            In another shameless advertisement, my book of sermons, edited by the great Collin Cornell, and entitled “Deeper Waters:  Sermons for a New Vision” has just been published by Wipf&Stock Books.  You can order it from them or from Amazon or from me. 

            This process brought back a lot of memories, and it fit in well with a journey that Caroline and I recently took to Baltimore and DC, in which we experienced a microcosm of American history.  We drove up to Baltimore through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, so important in the Civil War.  We cut through part of West Virginia, passing by Harper’s Ferry, remembering John Brown.  We went up to celebrate Susan’s birthday, and we had a great time doing it.   We visited with our long-time friends Ed Loring and Murphy Davis and shared a basketball game in the back of the new Open Door Community Baltimore.  Susan took us to a play centered on black people and HIV/AIDS, and it was very powerful.  The play was interactive, and we all began in a crowded clinic, with a lot of waiting.  When the nurse asked for our insurance cards, I gave her a blank sheet of paper, and she said that it had nothing on it. I replied that it was a Trump Insurance Card!

            We also visited the Babe Ruth Museum in honor of my love of baseball – yes, it has been my lifelong dream to play professional baseball, but alas, I was done in at about 12 years old, when the pitchers began to throw curve balls!  I am a baseball fan because it is so much like life – the best hitters only succeed 30% of the time, and there is no clock to time the game and pronounce that it is over.  We also ate supper one night at a new restaurant named Ida B’s, after the great Ida B. Wells.  I was reminded of her powerful witness, a witness so relevant to today’s world.

            On our last day in Baltimore, Susan graciously arose at 6:30 AM to seek online tickets for that day for the National African-American Museum in DC, and she got some for us!  We had been there last year but were able to see only the bottom 4  floors.  We had only a couple of hours this time, so we went to the arts/sports/food floor, and it was once again so powerful!  The best part of DC, however, was staying with our friend Dr. Gayraud Wilmore.  Some of you may know Gay, and some of you may remember that he volunteered to be my adopted father – yay!  So, thanks to Caroline, we presented him with an “official” certificate of adoptive fatherhood.  He was meeting the next week with a PHD student at Vanderbilt, who is doing his doctoral dissertation on Gay and his ministry. If you don’t know Gay’s long and fine ministry, look him up online!

            We closed out our DC trip with a visit to Frederick Douglass’ home in Anacostia.  It evoked many feelings, as we re-visited the history of the most famous African-American of the 19^th century.  He bought this house on Cedar Hill in 1877, a momentous year in American history, when Congress voted for Rutherford B. Hayes as president in exchange for his pulling the last Federal troops out of the South.  Douglass bought this home in an all white neighborhood, and I’m wondering what he thought as he moved in such a difficult year.  We give thanks for his witness!

            On the way home we spent the night in Mt. Airy, North Carolina, and took time to visit the Andy Griffith Museum.  It was at the other end of the spectrum – whiteness all over the place, and I remember being such a big fan of his show and of Mayberry when I was in junior and senior high school.  Even though I cringe at them now, some of his scenes with Don Knotts as Barney Fife still make me laugh!

            One caveat to all this whiteness in Mt. Airy – attached to the museum was a smaller museum honoring Eng and Chang Bunker, the first “official” Siamese twins.  Born in Siam (now Thailand), their parents sold them to an American sea captain in the 1800’s, and they became a media hit of their day.  They eventually settled in Mt. Airy, married sisters and had 22 children between them!

            In all of this, we missed the visit of Hurricane Irma to the Atlanta area, and our home escaped damage too – thank you!  Let us all remember and pray for the people of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean who were attacked by Irma and Maria – and let us practice what we pray!

THE BROWNING OF AMERICA

‘THE BROWNING OF AMERICA”

            I had intended this blog for last week, but the Anglo events in Las Vegas last weekend caused me to change to our Molechian worship of guns.  Because of our deep and powerful worship of guns, I now understand why the death penalty was prescribed for those who worshipped Molech (Leviticus 20:1-5) and who sacrificed their children to Molech.  I don’t agree with it, but I understand the urgency.  We all feel it now in the USA – we are sacrificing our children every day to the god of guns. 

            I had intended to write on the impact of Hispanic and Latinx heritage in our society as part of Hispanic Heritage month.  And, indeed the terrible slaughter by an Anglo man in Las Vegas (Hispanic feminine version of “the meadows”) happened in territory previously owned by Mexico and ceded to the USA in 1848 as the result of our imperialist war, part of whose motive was to expand slavery.  Molech makes his case.

            I remember seeing my first Hispanic people when I was in middle school.  We called them Mexicans (and much worse names too), and they began to show up in downtown Helena on Saturdays to go shopping, as did everyone else on the big shopping day of the week. I could not figure out why they were in Helena, but the farming kids let us know that they had come to work in the fields.  They came because African-Americans had been driven out by mechanization and by the oppressive working conditions and the huge system of injustice.   It was our first time to engage another racial group other than “white” or “black.”  It would take me years to realize that these folks were part of a developing network of people from Mexico and other parts south of the USA, who were becoming the primary work force for harvesting farm crops in America.

            My next conscious engagement with Latinx folk was in the early 1970’s when I participated in the boycotts of grapes and lettuce in support of the United Farmworkers in California.  I was living in Nashville at the time, and I remember going to the stores there to ask store managers not to carry California grapes or lettuce unless they were certified UFW grown.  In the non-union, “right to work” South, they looked at me and the others as if we were from outer space.   Cesar Chavez and Delores Huerta co-founded the United Farmworkers movement in 1962 in California, but of course the work of Ms. Huerta has largely been forgotten.  A new documentary called “Delores” seeks to correct that, so go see it to get a sense of the history of “brown” people as well as the power of patriarchy and the determination of oppressed people to find justice.  It also outlines the cost of such work. 

            While I was pastor at Oakhurst, I was reminded of the costs and the depth of captivity in myself and in others.  Thanks to PCUSA, to Caroline and some of our members, we became involved early on in the movement of the Immokalee Workers in Florida, an organizing movement to raise wages and working conditions for tomato pickers in central Florida.   They stayed at our church several times on their way to Chicago and other places north to seek to develop support for their boycotts of Taco Bell, Pepsi, KFC, Burger King, McDonald’s, and others – their request was to seek 1 penny more per pound of tomatoes picked.  Our church participated in the boycotts. Their union was almost all dark-skinned people, most of Hispanic descent, but some of African descent.   They usually brought 50-75 people on these trips.

            On one occasion, they stayed in our church and in North Decatur church over

the Easter weekend of 2007.  Not a great weekend from an ecclesiastical point of view, but they were leaving after worshipping with us on Easter – many thanks to Loretta Jefferson and Buddy Hughes who coordinated our efforts!   They were headed to Chicago to drum up support for their boycott of McDonald’s. Sometime on Saturday, their organizer called me to ask if they could stay over on Easter Sunday night too.  My heart sank – Holy Week is especially demanding on pastors and churches, and I knew that we would all be exhausted.  I checked with Loretta about it, and she said “Sure – we’ll work it out.”  The layperson once again teaching the clergy, but I was still grumpy about it.  A full sanctuary on Easter Sunday, with so many Hispanic folk and with translators for part of the service, helped raise my spirits.   Still grumpy, though!

            We fed them lunch on Easter Monday, and they were on their way.  On Tuesday their lead organizer called me and thanked me profusely for letting them stay over an extra day.   I felt guilty for my grumpiness, but then she added:  “We were involved in secret negotiations with McDonald’s at the Carter Center, and because of your hospitality, McDonald’s agreed to our demands on Monday – thank you so much!”  So, I gulped and was reminded of God’s grace and power – sometimes even in grumpy soil, the fruit comes! 

            In this time of celebrating Hispanic/Latinx heritage, let us all be mindful of the browning of America, with folks of African and Hispanic heritage changing American culture profoundly for the better.  And Hispanic folk do many other things than farm work! There is obviously great resistance to this browning,  and the election of Donald Trump as president is part of that resistance.  So, let us all examine our individual and collective hearts and find that soil where the fruit of God’s grace can grow and blossom in us all in the browning of America.