MARCHES AND PARADES"

“MARCHES AND PARADES”

            Hundreds of thousands of people marched and gathered on Saturday to protest our insane Molech-craving worship of guns in American culture.  Molech and his worshippers are condemned in Leviticus 20 because that false god requires that children be sacrificed to him.   We see our worship of Molech over and over again in this country, as our children are slaughtered in mass school shootings, in police killings of black and Latinx children and adults, and in individual acts where the belief in redemptive violence re-enacts itself over and over again.

            These marches came the day before the beginning of Holy Week in the Christian tradition.  Holy Week begins with a march also, a march that Jesus of Galilee develops in order to galvanize his followers and to put the religious and political leaders on notice that there is a new and growing vision of the God movement in the world.  In Matthew, Mark and Luke, he is entering Jerusalem for the first time.   He chooses Passover as the time to enter the holy city, a festival that commemorates the liberation of the Hebrews held as slaves in Egypt.  It is a festival filled with revolutionary thoughts and ideas - the idea that God desires freedom and justice, the idea that God is indeed moving to bring these into fruition. 

            As his band of followers enter Jerusalem, there is shouting and joy and celebration and hope for a new vision.  Because of this, the Roman Empire takes no chances.  The Roman governor of the province, Pontus Pilate, brings a huge band of soldiers into Jerusalem also at this time.  While the descendants of the Hebrews are shouting and celebrating the possibility of liberation, the Romans want to remind them who is in charge.  The Romans want to remind them that some TALK of liberation will be allowed in their Passover celebration, but that they must control themselves and remember to whom they really belong: the Roman Empire.  The Romans ride in with drums beating, dust swirling, and heavily armed soldiers parading.

            In his parade, Jesus mocks this Roman show of force.  Instead of a powerful general riding in a chariot or on a strong horse, Jesus rides in on a jackass.  No intimidating weapons or military formations, no disciplined soldiers, no imperial drapings – rather palm branches and cloaks and excitement.  And, yes, it is the excitement and determination that scare the religious and the political leaders.  In Luke’s version (19:29-44), the leaders tell Jesus to order his followers to be careful in their enthusiasm, to temper their excitement and their vision – similar to those who dismissed the youth and young adult leaders of the March 24 parades and gathering.  Those of us who are captive to the fallen powers, those of us who continue to worship Molech – we hear the excitement and determination not as a new and life-giving vision, but rather as a severe threat to our way of life.

            Luke’s version reminds us that while this vision is powerful, its fruition in the short term depends on us.  In Luke 19:41-44, Jesus weeps over Jerusalem because its leadership will refuse this new vision, because Jerusalem did not recognize its time of visitation.  As we know only too well, this Holy Week will not lead to this new vision taking over Jerusalem.  It will instead end in the Roman execution of Jesus, the threatening revolutionary.  The crucifixion is not the end of the story, but Holy Week reminds us that we are always leaning towards killing Jesus rather than being transformed by his love.  It is a reminder that we all are captives to the power of Molech.

            The marches and gatherings of March 24 are a reminder also of that new vision, of that idea that the God movement is always presenting itself to us.  Like the parade of Palm Sunday, it is led not by the powerful of the world but by the vulnerable and the suffering ones of the world.  It is the time of our visitation in American culture, and may we react better than did the leaders and people of Jerusalem in Holy Week.  May we say “yes” to life and liberation, and may we find that life-giving vision that drove those followers of Jesus into Jerusalem.  Molech and his guns and his demand for child sacrifice are deeply held beliefs in our individual and collective hearts, but let us hear and believe in this new vision. 

            We give thanks for those young people who are firing us with this new vision and commitment.  The religious leaders told Jesus in Luke 19:39-40:  “Teacher, order your disciples to be quiet.  Jesus answered: “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones themselves would shout it out.”  May we be like those stones, and may we see the Resurrected One who bears the marks of crucifixion.  May we know the time of our visitation, and may we shout it out and live it:  justice and equity and mercy and peace.

"STRONG WOMEN"

“STRONG WOMEN”

            In early March, Caroline and I went down to Helena, Arkansas, where I grew up.  A beloved tenant there, Debbie Reece, living in my mother’s house, had died very suddenly.  She had been living there since my mother died in 2004, and she had taken very good care of my mother after Mother broke her hip in the middle of chemo for terminal lung cancer, which she was doing over here in Atlanta while staying with us.  Mother had insisted that she wanted to go back home at some points in the middle of the treatments.  We tried to talk her out of it, but she felt lost and disconnected here, even though the women of Oakhurst Presbyterian did so much to make her feel welcome.   She had lived in that house since 1948, almost 60 years. 

            So, we relented and took her back 3 or 4 times, including Christmas, which was her beloved season.  On the last of the trips, she slipped and fell on her porch and broke her hip.  The hip was repaired, but her health declined rapidly from there, and she required 24 hour care, which she insisted that she receive at home.  Debbie coordinated that care and stayed with Mother in those last months, so I was glad for her to live in the house after Mother died.  We went down to Helena to clean out and close out the house.  We sold it to a young African- American man who sees a future in Helena, which I do not as an old white guy.  Selling the house was difficult – it means saying good-bye to a longtime physical and emotional space for me. 

            The house was meaningful to me not because of the space but because of the two strong women who raised me there:  Bernice Brown Higgins, whom I called “Gran.” She was the sister of my great-grandmother, and she owned the house after her husband died.  We lived with her from my earliest memory.  The primary strong woman, of course, is my mother, who worked hard as a single mom and as a beautician.  Gran was like a grandmother to me, and she was an Associate Reformed Presbyterian, raised in the strict tradition.  I remember that at times she would refuse to take the quarterly communion at our Presbyterian church, because she had not lived worthily enough in that quarter to receive it.  As an adult, I came to disagree with that view, but I sure admired her sense of the presence of God in her life.  She had a sweet spot for me, though, and of course, I drank that in. 

            My father abandoned my family when I was an infant, and I never saw him until I was 23 years old.  While he did send child support sporadically, he never contacted me or came to see me.  And my heart longed for him.  My mother sought to fill in the void and be both mother and father to me.   I remember many summer evenings when she would walk the mile home from her beauty shop, after having been on her feet all day.  As she came up into the yard, I ran out to greet her and to ask her to play “pitch” with me.  I’m sure that on occasion, she declined, but I don’t remember her ever saying “no” to that difficult request.  There are so many other stories that I don’t know where to begin, but I will share a couple.

            My mother was a woman of her times, so she allowed the racism of our white culture to wash over her and into me.  I do remember that she would not let me say the “n-word” in her presence, even though I told her that all my friends did it.  Of course, as a child of racism, I used the “n-word” often but never in her presence – it was a “switchable” offense, meaning that I would have to go get my switch and get hit with it by my mother.  She would also never let me call any adult by their first name, without a “Mr.” or “Miss” or “Mrs.” with it – again, a revolutionary rule in a world where white children and adults consistently demeaned black adults by using their first names only.

            After my mother died in 2004, Debbie Reece read my first book entitled “While We Run This Race,” about the continuing power of racism and published in 1995.  In it I described how my family and many other “good” white people had taught me racism.   After Debbie read it, she told me that she was surprised to hear that I included my mother in those who taught me racism, because Mother’s reputation in the neighborhood was that she was too close to black people – she even let her black colleague come in the front door, and the neighborhood was scandalized!  News to me, but a powerful witness.

            So, in this Women’s History Month, I want to honor all those strong women, including Gran and Mary Stroupe.  Although it took me a long time to realize it and to admit it, being raised by these two strong women made all the difference in my life.  So, to paraphrase a song made popular by Martina McBride (“This One’s For the Girls”), this one is for all the women who have done so much to make this world a better place:  you’re beautiful the way you are.

"BATES IS NOT A FOUR LETTER WORD"

“BATES IS NOT A FOUR LETTER WORD”

            Last month I wrote about my intrigue with the overlapping of Black History Month and the Season of Lent.  The same goes for the month into which we are now entering:  Women’s History Month.  Though we have seen extraordinary gains in women’s rights during my lifetime, it is jut as if we are at 1 AM on the historical clock.  As we have seen in the #MeToo and many other movements, the power of male domination is still so deep and strong, and the desire of white men to turn back the clock to midnight resulted in the election of Donald Trump.

            When I was growing up in segregated, small town Arkansas, I was not allowed to curse - or “cuss” as we called it – at all, much less in public.  My mother told me never to say the “four letter” words, such as s**t, hell (seems pretty tame these days), damn, c**t, and the f-word.  Of course, by the time that I was in the second grade, we boys used them all the time, except around adults. To caution ourselves, we used a little ditty that others know also:

“Don’t cuss, call Gus,

He’ll come on the bus

And cuss for all of us.”

            There was one cuss word that I was allowed us say, however, and that was “Bates,” although it was 5 letters.  I did not learn this cuss word until 1957, when I was in the 6^th grade.  All I knew then was what my elders were teaching me, that Daisy Bates was the terrible, communistic, n-word woman who was helping to organize the Little Rock 9 to seek to integrate the public schools in Little Rock in the fall of 1957.  And, of course, for my white supremacist background, such a person was Satan incarnate.

            Later when I learned about my captivity to race, I found that there was another side to Mrs. Daisy Bates, whom I had cursed so much without having any idea what I was doing.  I don’t have any trouble relating to that uttering on the Cross from Jesus in Luke 23:  “Forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.”  That was definitely me and my white culture in the fall of 1957.  Daisy Bates was born in Arkansas near the Louisiana border.  She was never quite sure what year she was born because when she was an infant, her parents were attacked by white supremacists – her mother was raped and murdered, and her father fled for his life.  Daisy Bates was raised by neighbors, Orlee and Susie Smith.

            In 1941 she married Lucius Bates and moved to Little Rock, where they founded a black newspaper – The Arkansas State Press.  She became editor, and given her history, she was determined to use it as a tool to gain rights for women and black people.  In 1952 she was elected president of the state NAACP, and that began to set the stage for the conflicts of 1957, which led to “Bates” being designated a cuss word in my white supremacist culture.  The Little Rock school board was the first in the South to issue a statement of compliance with the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, and work was begun to gradually desegregate the schools.

            Elections intervened, however, and in 1956 Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas proclaimed that he would not allow the integration of any Arkansas schools.  Daisy Bates led the fight to bring Arkansas into compliance, and during the summer, the 9 black students selected to integrate the schools met often at Bates’ home to get ready.  As we know, it was quite an ordeal, culminating with President Eisenhower taking over the Arkansas National Guard and ordering the Screaming Eagles of the 101^st Airborne Division of the US Army to protect the 9 students.  And, they did. 

            There were many more twists and turns, but on May 29, 1958, one of the Little Rock 9, Ernest Green, became the first black student to graduate from a previously all white school in the South in the age of neo-slavery.   Daisy Bates had endured all kinds of threats, violence, heartache, and disappointments, but nevertheless, she persisted.  We give thanks to women like her who have refused to accept the patriarchal definition of themselves, and who have stood up and sat down and showed us a better way.

            We’re still not sure if we believe Plessy v. Ferguson of 1896 (separate but equal) or Brown v. Board of Education.  Those battles of male and white supremacy still rage, and we give thanks for people like Daisy Bates who remind us of the call to equality and justice and equity.  They are in our midst now.  Let us find them and cherish them AND follow them.