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.

GOD, GUNS, AND AMERICA

“GOD, GUNS AND AMERICA”

            I had another blog ready this morning, but the events in Las Vegas overnight compel me to write on the sacred power of guns in America.  Ever since the Ronald Reagan Revolution in the 1980’s, the worship of guns in American life has deepened and increased.  I was just reading an article on guns in American life in American Heritage Magazine from 1978, and its subject was the continuing power of guns.  In the article, its author John G. Mitchell indicated that we as a culture were in a fight for our souls over the availability of guns.   That fight is just about over – we have put guns at the center of our lives, as seen by the mass shooting in Las Vegas,  apparently the largest one in American history. 

            It joins a long list of such shootings – Pulse in Florida last year, Charleston, SC and Redlands, California in 2015, Aurora, Colorado in 2012, Virginia Tech in 2007, and many others.  And, of course , the kicker for me in pronouncing that guns are sacred in American life, came in 2012 when 20 of our children were gunned down in Sandy Hook, and there was no outcry in Congress.  It was as if I were back in Leviticus 20, where sacrificing children to the Ammonite god Molech was strongly prohibited.  Such a prohibition means that there was such Molech worship, and the gravity of such a rivalry between God and Molech meant that the death penalty was given to the offenders.

            Today in the initial reports we are not getting any mention of such a rivalry.  What we are getting are mentions about mental health, about terrorism, about “loners.”  Only a few commentators on the left dare to mention that today’s shooting and the ones that preceded it are a result of our worship of Molech, of our belief in the divine power of guns and the violence that they bring.   The Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville, the re-militarization of our police by the Trump administration, the rise in the price of gun stocks today all point to this belief held deeply in American culture – we believe in the divine power of guns.   There is no other way to put it.

            There is no mention of the Las Vegas shooting being an act of terror, and that is chiefly because the shooter was white.  Our culture does not believe that white people do terrorism, that Dylan Roof’s mass killing of African-Americans in a church in Charleston was not terrorism but rather a sick individual.  This refusal to connect whiteness with terrorism points to why guns have been given Molechian, divine power in American culture.   Those of us who are classified as “white” have a deep fear of those classified as “black,” and we believe that we must have our guns to protect us from black people, especially black men.  The lies and propaganda of American history have sunk deeply into our collective white souls – those classified as “black” and as “native Americans” are the savages, and those of us classified as “white” are the victims.  The historical record is so clear on this that it begs the imagination – those of us classified as “white” are the perpetrators, not the other way around.  

            I felt this powerful, Molechian fear when Roy Moore of Alabama pulled out his gun last week at a rally before he won the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate.   It was a religious rite designed to speak to the deep fears of white people in Alabama and throughout the country.  I could hear the Mississippi Plan of 1890 to the Scottsboro boys of the 1930’s to the assassinations of the four girls in the Sixteenth Street Church in Birmingham in 1963 to the killings of Jimmie Lee Jackson, Jonathan Daniels, and Viola Liuzzo in 1965.  In these acts of terrorism, we must sacrifice our children and our people to the god of guns that made white America great – Molech is ever with us.  I shouldn’t be surprised – but I am – when a little over a week after this religious rite was performed in Alabama, Molech called forth one of his followers to kill and slaughter.

            I’m not hopeful on this, but I wish that I were.  The belief in Molech, guns, and America is just too deeply rooted in our cultural life at this point.  Even here, however, I must remember that a Palestinian Jew named Jesus moved the world with just a few women and men followers.  So, let us pray that the God we know in Jesus will make that kind of move in us, and I am grateful for those who are working heart and soul on this – that movement is our only hope.  Let us practice what we pray!   Otherwise it is the grim words from Leviticus 20 about Molech worship – God will give us the death penalty.