"IS THIS STUFF TRUE?"

“IS THIS STUFF TRUE?”

            I preached at Hillside Presbyterian Church yesterday as part of “B” team ministers all over the country preaching on the Sunday after Christmas, known as the First Sunday After Christmas.  I used the Epiphany text in Luke 2, where two old people, Anna and Simeon, are struck by lightning when Mary and Joseph bring the baby Jesus to the Temple to be dedicated to God.  Mary and Joseph have also come so that Mary can be cleansed from the “unclean” blood of the birth of Jesus. 

            Jewish law required that women giving birth go through a ritual of purification because all the blood flowing in childbirth has made them unclean.  From a literary point of view, we know that this is at least 33 days after the birth of Jesus, because the law required that.  If Jesus had been a girl (and that would have really changed things, wouldn’t it!), Mary would have had to wait 66 days to come for purification, meaning that the uncleanliness of women was much deeper than the uncleanliness of men.  That same old song of inequity continues to the present day.

            They also come to dedicate Jesus to God, but they do not intend to leave Jesus to be raised in the Temple, as Hannah did with her Samuel (I Samuel 1).   The law requires that they buy a sheep from the Temple and sacrifice it to God there.  That will satisfy the requirement.  Luke’s story tells us that they buy two birds instead, a sign that they are poor and have very little money.  While they are going through this process, lightning strikes two old people who are in the Temple that day:  Anna and Simeon.  Simeon’s story comes first, and he has been waiting to see the Messiah.  He takes the baby Jesus in his arms and blesses him and gives thanks that he has been allowed to see the Messiah: “our eyes have seen Your salvation.”  He has several surprising parts in his prophecy about this baby:  he will offend many people;  he will reveal the hearts of many; and perhaps most surprising of all in this center of Judaism:  this baby will be a light to the Gentiles, to the unclean ones.  He closes out his prophecy with an acknowledgment of the price of this baby’s witness – a sword will pierce the heart of his mother.

            Also in the Temple that day is an aged, widow woman named Anna.  Anna is marginalized in several ways:  she is a woman;  she is old;  she is a widow.  Because she lives at the margins, she is able to see who this baby is, and she begins to tell everybody she meets about this message from God.   Luke’s story lifts her up as the first named evangelist in his Gospel.  The shepherds in the fields precede her in sharing the story of Jesus, but none of them are named.  It is highly unusual for women to be named in the Bible, but here she is:  Anna the evangelist.

            As we stand on the cusp of a new year, rounding out Christmas and heading for 2019, let us remember these two old folks who are the first named people to recognize this revelation from God.  We long for this story to be true – whether the details are exactly like this does not matter as much as the central theme:  at the heart of the universe is the power of love and justice and equity, at the heart of our lives are love and justice and mercy.  Is this true?  Most of us do not experience it as true, so we tend to box up the Christmas story and put it back in the attic, just like we do the decorations.  At best it is a nice diversion from this crazy world.  At worst, it is sentimental slop which we use to sell a lot of products.  And we do live in a crazy and chaotic world!  The stock market seems to be correcting and perhaps collapsing.  The Trump presidency IS collapsing, and we wonder what is next:  will Trump be indicted?  Will he resign?  Will he start a war overseas as a diversion?  Will he encourage a civil war here in order to hold on to the presidency?  We all tremble at these prospects, but we know that something is coming in this year.

            In the midst of this kind of world, we are asked to hear this Christmas story again and keep it with us.  Let us have hearts to see as Simeon did, and let our hearts dance, as did Anna’s, so that we too can share this good news of love and justice and equity.  Let us too be evangelists of this view of the new reality in the world.  I’ll close with my final Howard Thurman poem from his book on Christmas (“The Mood of Christmas”):

“Christmas Is the Season of the Heart”

The Time of Forgiveness for injuries past,

The Sacrament of sharing without balancing the deed,

The Moment of remembrance of graces forgotten,

The Poem of joy making light the spirit,

The Sense of renewal restoring the soul,

The Day of thanksgiving for the goodness of God,

CHRISTMAS IS THE SEASON OF THE HEART.

JOSEPH IS BORN AGAIN

“JOSEPH IS BORN AGAIN”

            This Christmas season is about birth and renewal of life, having gathered around the date of December 25 (in the West) partially because that date was the time of celebrating the beginning of the return of the sun after the winter solstice.  In the Christmas story, a young woman named Mary places herself in great danger by agreeing to become pregnant before marriage by someone other than her fiancé.   Her courageous decision likely would have been nullified, if not for the re-birth of her betrothed Joseph.  As I wrote a couple of months ago in relation to the Kavanaugh hearings and toxic masculinity, Joseph swims in those waters as part of the patriarchal system.

            We can imagine his reaction to the news from Mary that she was pregnant by someone else – and that “someone else” was not human but was God.  “Well, that’s a new one,” is Joseph’s likely reply.  Yet he already indicates that he is not totally immersed in patriarchy, because as Matthew’s Gospel tells us, he is not insisting on taking her before the elders to have her stoned to death.  He will break off the engagement quietly and send her back to her father’s house – who knows what will happen next – the streets for Mary?  Though he is not as toxic as other males might be, he still has male supremacy at his core.  Instead of the direct death penalty, he will give Mary the “slow” death penalty – rejection, isolation, disgrace, poverty, selling her body for economic survival, life on the streets.

            Matthew’s gospel tells us of a new birth for Joseph, however.   In Matthew’s genealogy that begins the Gospel, we see feisty and boundary-breaking women listed in the genealogy of Jesus.  It’s stunning that Matthew lists women at all in the genealogy – it is perhaps more stunning that he does not list the accepted matriarchs like Sarah and Rebecca and Rachel and Leah.  Rather he lists outliers like Tamar, who uses her skills to navigate the oppressive patriarchy (Genesis 38), and Rahab, the enterprising Gentile businesswoman surviving in the outpost of Jericho (Joshua 2).  He also lists another foreign immigrant, Ruth, who becomes the great-grandmother of the beloved king David – almost as if the author of Ruth is speaking to President Trump from many generations ago.

            Matthew’s Gospel tells us that Joseph is born again, into this circle of equity and justice rather than patriarchy.  In a vision from God, he hears that he is to adopt this baby-to-be as his own and is to affirm Mary and the baby.  He also is to give them his protection of being male in a patriarchy.  He is asked to step out of the center of patriarchal life and move to the margins with his pregnant-out-of-wedlock fiancé and with the baby who is to be born.  Joseph agrees – he is born again, and it rocks his life.  Luke’s Gospel tells us that the Roman government forces him and his family to make the long and dangerous trip to Bethlehem.   There his baby will be born on the streets, on the margins of life.   Matthew tells us that the predecessor of Donald Trump - King Herod as he is known – sends soldiers to Bethlehem to kill the baby, but Joseph has already taken his family and fled to Egypt.   Never mind, says King Herod – kill all the boys of Bethlehem – no one defies him!  We can only wonder where we all would be if Egypt had made the Holy Family wait at the border of Israel, while seeking asylum.

            In this scary time in our land, let us recall that Joseph was born again, through a new vision from God.  We don’t know how many visions God had sent Joseph prior to this, but at least one got through to Joseph.  In response, he re-oriented himself and softened his heart from the meanness and oppression of the patriarchy in which he lived.  In this Christmas season, let us pray that God will continue to send us visions, and that we will receive them and find new birth ourselves.  May you and your loved ones know the love and justice that is inherent in this Christmas story.  Here’s another poem from Howard Thurman to describe what that new birth looks like.

“The Sacrament of Christmas”

I make an act of faith toward all {humanity},

            Where doubts would linger and suspicions brood.

I make an act of joy toward all sad hearts,

            Where laughter pales and tears abound.

I make an act of strength toward feeble things,

            Where life grows dim and death draws near.

I make an act of trust toward all of life,

            Where fears preside and distrusts keep watch.

I make an act of love toward friend and foe,

            Where trust is weak and hate burns bright.

I make a deed to God of all my days-----

            And look out on life with quiet eyes.

"BIRTHING THE NEW VISION"

“BIRTHING THE NEW VISION”

            Oh, God, how contrary

            You chose Mary

            My feeble attempt at a haiku brings forth the shock and irritation and astonishment of the birth story of Jesus the Christ.  The heart of the Christmas stories in Matthew and Luke and John is that God has come among us as a human being, as a baby nonetheless, dependent upon us to nurture this vision of what has come to be known as the Incarnation.  God chose as Her vehicle for revelation a peasant girl, engaged to be married, rooted deeply in the system of patriarchy.  God asks Mary to become pregnant without intercourse with males, and if she says “yes,” she will face the death penalty, as a teenager pregnant before marriage.  From the beginning, God is telling us that this new vision will be different – it will be focused on the margins of life, not the center of life. 

            Mary seems to understand this too.  After she says “yes,” she announces the new vision in her “Magnificat,” indicating that in her saying “yes,” and in Joseph’s saying “yes,” the vision will come anew.  Her song of praise (found in Luke 1:46-55) announces that in the Incarnation, God is continuing to do what She has been doing: regarding those on the margins, scattering the proud and mighty, exalting those on the bottom, feeding the hungry, sending the rich to the ash heaps of the margins.  In the birthing of this new vision, Mary announces that the world is about to turn. 

            In the Christmas season, we have so sentimentalized the whole story and glorified Mary as a genderless holy woman, and in so doing we have missed the point of the story.  It is certainly about a woman on the margins of life, devoted to God.  It is certainly about a woman wiling to put herself in harm’s way.  Yet, it is mostly about the contrary nature of God – She reveals Herself in unexpected and irritating ways.  Birthing the new vision is a labor of love.

            Mary brings to mind Fannie Lou Hamer, who was born in 1917 as the youngest of 20 children to a sharecropping family in Mississippi.  She began working in the fields at age 6 and dropped out of school at age 12 to support her family.  In Sunflower County, Mississippi, about 80 miles from where I grew up in Arkansas, she was married and working as a sharecropper in 1962 when the angel SNCC appeared to her to ask her if she would allow a new vision of equity and equality to be born in her.  She had been sterilized without her permission, but the angel got through to her birth-giving spirit.  She said “yes,” and though she did not officially suffer the death penalty, she was arrested and beaten because she began to register people to vote.  Her song, which magnified the Lord, was entitled “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”  Her vision gave birth to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which ended (for the moment) neo-slavery in the South.  Like Mary’s vision, her vision is still unfolding and has many ups and downs.  Fannie Lou Hamer, the modern Mary, did not receive the death penalty in one day, but she received it more slowly – her deteriorating health because of her lack of adequate health care, finally took her life at age 60 in 1977.

            As we gather around this Christmas story once more, let us not get lost or distracted by the sentimentality that often belies this season.  Let us not get diverted by the call of the products to give us meaning.  Let us remember the contrariness of God in the visions that She gave to Mary of Nazareth and to Fannie Lou Hamer of Mississippi.  And let us try to find those visions.  As we do, let us seek to be guided by a much better poet than me, Howard Thurman, in his poem “The Work of Christmas:”

When the song of the angels is stilled,

When the star in the sky is gone,

When the kings and princes are home,

When the shepherds are back with their flock,

The work of Christmas begins:

            To find the lost,

            To heal the broken,

            To feed the hungry,

            To release the prisoner,

            To rebuild the nations,

            To bring peace among {siblings},

            To make music in the heart.

"JUSTICE AND LOVE IN THE CHRISTMAS STORY"

‘JUSTICE AND LOVE IN THE CHRISTMAS STORY”

            The Gospels have three versions of the Christmas stories.  Mark, the earliest written Gospel, doesn’t seem to consider the birth story important, so he (or she) doesn’t mention it.  Matthew and Luke have the traditional ones that we know, the ones that get blended together in the Christmas narrative.   John’s Gospel flies off into high and powerful theological atmosphere in his version of the birth story:  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God…..and the Word became flesh and moved to our neighborhood” (to paraphrase Eugene Petersen’s and Fred Rogers’ translations).

            Matthew and Luke want to hunker down more in the muck of human life, rather than stay up in the rareified theological atmosphere of John.  Matthew begins his birth story in Chapter 1 with a genealogy of Joseph and Jesus, and as I mentioned a few weeks ago, Matthew makes a huge break with tradition and includes women in his genealogy – and, oh, the women whom he names:  Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, the wife of Uriah (Bathsheba), and Mary.   All five of these women are at the margins, and I’ll address that more next week when we take up Mary’s story.

            Luke begins his version not with the birth of Jesus but with the birth of John the Baptizer.   John the Baptizer is born to a couple who are older, and who have no children.  As usual in the patriarchal style of the Bible, the woman named Elizabeth is blamed for the lack of children – Luke’s story tells us that she is barren.  The father-to-be is a priest named Zechariah.  John’s conception is announced in dramatic fashion.  Zechariah is a priest, and he has a rare opportunity to lead worship in the Temple.  While he is preparing to lead worship, the angel Gabriel appears to him and tells him that he will have a son.  Zechariah indicates that this is not possible, given their biological circumstances.  Gabriel replies by taking Zechariah’s voice away – so much for leading worship!  

            John is later born to Elizabeth and Zechariah, and he grows up to be prophetic ball of fire and preparer of the way of the Lord.  John has his own distinct identity, though, and he challenges the religious powers by inviting people to come to be baptized in the Jordan River, in order to be reconciled to God.  The Temple and synagogues are where such activity usually takes place, so John’s new way is a direct challenge to the religious establishment.  John doesn’t just stick with individual spirituality – he challenges those who would follow his way to seek to do justice.  When they ask John what they can do to be saved, he replies in Luke 3 that they should share their food, share their clothing, and shun corruption. 

            John remained a strong voice for justice.  He later baptizes Jesus, believing that Jesus is the One.   John is later arrested for challenging the authority of the ruler of Judea, and he believes that his arrest will trigger the revolution.  But, nothing seems to be happening.  He sends messengers to Jesus asking him “Are you the One, or should we look for someone else?”  Jesus replies that he is doing what he is supposed to do, and his answer points to the tension between John and Jesus.  It is a tension that is often posed as the tension between justice and love.  John burns for justice;  Jesus burns for love.  While this is a bit simplistic, it does capture the ongoing tensions between love and justice.  Can  love be genuine without  justice?  That is a tension that exists between John and Jesus and a tension that flows throughout human history.  As Christians, especially in the Christmas season, we often tend to move towards a sentimentalized version of love, a love without consequences or challenges to our views of the world.   John the Baptizer challenges that view, reminding us that justice is what love looks like in public, as Cornel West once put it.

            The tensions between John and Jesus often remind me of the tensions between Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X.  As James Cone put it so well in his fine book on them (“Martin and Malcolm and America’), King started with love and moved towards an emphasis on justice, while Malcolm started with justice and moved towards love.  Whatever their differences, they were both assassinated because they were black men standing up for love and justice.  And, whatever the differences between John and Jesus, they were both executed by the state for their emphasis on love and justice.  In our individualistic culture, we much prefer a softer version of love that has no reference to justice, and that tendency comes out no more clearly than in the Christmas season.  Here’s one of Howard Thurman’s poems on that, entitled “Christmas Is Waiting to Be Born:”

When refugees seek deliverance that never comes,

And the heart consumes itself, if it would live,

Where little children age before their time,

And life wears down the edges of the mind,

Where the old man sits with mind grown cold,

While bones and sinew, blood and cell, go slowly down to death,

Where fear companions each day’s life,

And Perfect Love seems long delayed,

CHRISTMAS IS WAITING TO BE BORN:

In you, in me, in all [mankind}.

"WE NEED A LITTLE CHRISTMAS"

“WE NEED A LITTLE CHRISTMAS”

            Yesterday was the 159^th anniversary of the execution of John Brown in 1859 in what is now Charles Town, West Virginia, an event that led quickly to the Civil War.  Saturday was the 63^rd anniversary of the Rosa Parks’ sit-down on the bus in 1955, an event that joined with the Brown V. Board SCOTUS decision and the lynching of Emmett Till to ignite the modern civil rights movement.  Now we are in a time when much of the gains recognized from those events seem to be in doubt.  It is a crisis in the most profound root of that word in Greek:  a time of great danger, but also a time of great opportunity.

            In the midst of this time of crisis, I think that it is time for Christmas.  To borrow from the commercial song, “we need a little Christmas.”  That song was written by Jerry Herman and debuted by Angela Lansbury in the 1966 Broadway play “Mame.”  The song came in the play in response to the stock market crash of  1929, and it was an attempt to recover the spirit of hope and love.  Of course, nowadays, we probably would sing: “we have way too much of Christmas,” since the stores start advertising it in September.   The Christmas that I need is not the commercialized, sentimental, capitalist, Santa Claus kind.  The Christmas that I need is the loving, enduring, courageous kind seen in the biblical witness – the kind that happened at the margins of life.

            During this season, I’ll be looking at some of the narratives of the Christmas story in the Bible, but we should be noting that the story itself is an invitation into our deeper selves as individuals and as a culture.  It asks us to consider that at the heart of our lives is not the evil or even tragedy that we all experience in our human journeys but rather a sense of love and even justice.   In Christmas we proclaim that the God who is the center of all things, this God has come into our midst and has proclaimed solidarity with us.  This Incarnation, as it came to be known, did not occur in the halls of power.   No appearance at the Christmas parade, no edict from the Roman emperor, no conquering general riding into town on a horse or a tank, no address at a joint session of Congress, no stock market bull run, no celebrity with the cameras flashing and the spotlights heralding.

            Rather, this Incarnation came at the margins of life, where oppressed people try to cross borders, where pregnant teen-agers wonder how they will survive, where women build community for themselves, where children are born on the streets, where males wrestle with sharing power, where emperors order populations to be on the move – places where vulnerability is evident and where courage endurance are called out.   In this story are the themes of home and longing and memory and love.   Why did God choose to appear this way?  Why become so dependent and vulnerable to us, to come among us as a little baby?  Why depend on the human beings who prefer money and weapons and race and sexism to the saving values of love and equity and justice?  Here’s a clue that we’ll be exploring in this season:  this story is not about bright lights and presents and trees and selling products, although I like most of those.  From its beginning, this story has asked us to look beneath the surface of our lives, both our individual lives and our cultural lives, to look for the values that sustain us and give us life.

            So, in this season of great discontent and crisis and danger, we do need a little Christmas.  I’m hoping that in my own life, I’ll find the Christmas story as it was meant to be: an invitation into our own lives as children of God.  And, I’m hoping that you’ll find that too.  I’ll be using the poetry of Howard Thurman during this season, from his book “The Mood of Christmas.”  Here’s one entitled: “At Christmastime:”

            The tides flow out from the Inner Sea

            At Christmastime:

            They find their way to many shores

            With gifts of remembrance, thoughts of love---

            Though the world be weary and the days afraid

            The heart renews its life and the mind takes hope

            From the tides that flow from the Inner Sea

            At Christmastime.

"IBA B. WELLS!"

IDA B. WELLS!

                        I have my 72^nd birthday tomorrow, and I am grateful to be alive and to be in relatively good health – thank you!  I am working with Dr. Catherine Meeks to complete the manuscript for our book “Passionate for Justice,” which is a book about the importance of the life and witness of Ida Wells for our time.  We are meeting this week and rushing to complete the manuscript, which is due to the publisher January 1.  We’d like to get it done before the Christmas holidays really begin, so lift us up in that endeavor.  Catherine was born in Arkansas, as was I, and we grew up in neo-slavery about 50 miles from one another.   We bring a unique perspective to this work on Ida B. Wells – Catherine was raised in a racist atmosphere that sought to tell her that she was inferior because of the color of her skin.  She was also taught that women were inferior, so she received the double curse.  I was raised in that same atmosphere, telling me that I was superior because I was classified as “white” and because I was gendered as male.   Fortunately for her (and for us all), she did not inhale the poisonous air of racism and sexism, though she obviously had to breathe it in.  She was taught to believe it, but she never did.  Unfortunately for me, I not only breathed in these poisons, but I also inhaled them and believed them.  It has taken me so many years to come to terms with this captivity, and indeed, I am still wrestling with it.

            I first encountered Ida B. Wells in 1986, as I was preparing to begin a series of sermons on Black History Month at Oakhurst Presbyterian.  That series was so powerful that we continued it until my retirement in 2017 – we would preach about different people in American history who had been witnesses for racial justice and against the oh-so-powerful current of racism that runs through American history, like the powerful currents that drive the Missisissippi River down from the small overflow stream of Lake Itasca in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico below New Orleans.  I first read about Ida Wells in Dorothy Sterling’s fine book “Black Foremothers:  Three Lives.”  Wells was born in Marshall County, Mississippi, where all my forebears were also born, so I had an instant connection.  And the breadth and depth and richness of her witness was so stunning, from 1878-1931.  I could not believe that she was so little known at that time.  She has since been rediscovered, and that is great news.   A banner at the Belmont-Paul National Women’s Monument in DC put it so well:  “You can’t spell formidable without Ida B!”

            We’ll be looking at her witness in our book, and I am so grateful to Catherine for being willing to take on this project in the midst of her busy schedule, while working with the Episcopal Church to help them acknowledge and begin to fight the power of racism in their midst.  Ida Wells was fearless, ferocious, formidable, and feminist.  I like this alliteration, but today Wells would likely respond that she was “womanist,” not “feminist,” in order to note the differences and tensions between white women and women of color, especially women classified as “black”.  Of course she knew fear, but she did not allow herself to be dominated by anxiety.  She took herself into places that were scary and dangerous, but “nevertheless, she persisted.”  Such a witness is important for herself and for others.  It was a vision and a power that made her a powerful witness in whatever area she worked.

            Her witness reminds us that in this time, and indeed in any time, we are always called to be to be fearless, ferocious, formidable, and feminist.  “Fearless” because the powers of racism and sexism and materialism and others want us to be dominated by fear, to have anxiety at our core, so that we will be afraid to speak and act on behalf of justice and equity.  “Ferocious” because the powers will roar at us and seek to make us timid in the face of its power.  The witness of Ida Wells echoes to us to remain steadfast in our consciousness and in our work, and whether we will feel as if we are ferocious or not, the world will see us as such.

            “Formidable” because our keeping our integrity and persistence in the face of race and other powers will make us seem much more powerful than we actually may be.  Our culture of white supremacy is not accustomed to people of any racial category standing up and proclaiming a different way.  “Feminist” because Ida Wells’ witness reminds us of the importance of “intersectionality,” the reality that many categories overlap and inform one another in the areas of oppression and liberation.  Wells knew well that it was just as important to free women of all racial categories from male dominance as it was to free those classified as “black” from racial oppression – all included, no one left behind.  This affirmation of women’s rights cost Wells dearly in the work for justice, but she would not yield on this. 

            So, thank you, Ida B. Wells – we look forward to wrestling with you and learning from you!

"A New Wave?"

A NEW WAVE?

            I was disappointed but not greatly surprised that Stacey Abrams barely lost the election for governor of Georgia.  When the primaries were held in Georgia last spring, the Democratic candidates got 50,000 less votes statewide than the Republican candidates.  Stacey had to make up 50,000 votes, and though she ran a fantastic campaign, she just could not do it.  Stacey did ramp it up, though – she received more votes that any state Democrat ever has, and her defeat is testimony to the racism and sexism and voter suppression of the old, white South.  In an ironic twist, the early returns show that more white women voted against Stacey than did white men.

            Stacey Abrams is an impressive candidate, so much so that an op-ed piece in the Washington Post last week suggested that the Democrats name her to be the new Speaker of the House of Representatives.  She brings to mind another African-American candidate who rose quickly on the national stage:  Barack Obama.  She does have an advantage over President Obama at this stage – she has great experience in using political power.   She may run for Senate in Georgia, but I’m hoping that she will run for President in 2020. 

            Whatever Stacey does, we must celebrate that she is part of a new wave of voters around the country.   I am hoping that this is part of a new wave in American electoral politics.  It’s not just that the Democrats took back the House of Representatives – a great relief to act as a check on Donald Trump and his dictatorial tendencies.  It is how they did it, and it is also that they brought along many states with them in seeking to build a party that reflects the need and the desire for justice and equity.   With Muslims and Native Americans and more women and Hispanic and African-Americans elected to Congress, it feels like we are witnessing a shift towards policies that will bring relief to so many of us.  And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is helping us to see that young people can and will vote and get involved.

            And, it’s not just on the federal level – great gains were made in many states and counties.  In Georgia, the suburbs went for Democrats for the first time in several decades.  That switch helped to elect an African-American Democratic woman in Newt Gingrich’s old seat.  In the Houston area of Texas, all judges elected in Harris County were Democrats for the first time in years and years.   The newly elected attorney general of New York, Letitia James, is the first woman and first African-American to be elected to that position, as well as the first African-American to be elected to statewide office in New York.  Perhaps more importantly, she emphasized that she wants to investigate the Trump Foundation, which has its charter in her state.  Our daughter-in-law Erin Graham is on the East Lansing school board in Michigan, and though she was not up for re-election, she was part of a coalition that helped the Democrats regain power in that state. 

            There are still very ugly realities – Trump seems able to hold his base, and the Senate, which will continue to confirm terrible federal judges, gained votes for Republicans.   Unless John Roberts is worried about being compared to Roger Taney, SCOTUS seems to be firmly entrenched in white, male supremacy.  And, being from the segregation days of white, Southern life, I don’t want to hope too much, because I know that the power of racism and sexism and materialism and militarism and homophobia is deep and wide.  To use Biblical language, we are captive to the power of the prince of the air (Ephesians 2:2), and we are wrestling with structures of power that are deeply entrenched, so that it seems that when we defeat one, many more pop up to contest our struggle for justice and equity.  It will be a long, hard journey. 

            And yet, in this week of Thanksgiving, I am grateful for this movement, for the women and Native Americans, African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Americans and Muslim and white folks who put so much energy into starting a new wave – may it grow stronger into a tsunami for justice and equity.  And, if you are in Georgia and Mississippi, don’t forget to go back to the polls for important run-offs!

"DOCTRINE OF DISCOVERY"

DOCTRINE OF DISCOVERY

            This month is Native American Month, but tomorrow is also the end of the election time in the USA.  If you voted early, thank you!  If you have not voted, please do so – your future and all of our futures depend upon it.  

            I attended our denomination’s consultation on anti-racism work in October.  This consultation was in response to an overture that our General Assembly passed earlier this year.  It endorsed the idea of the Decade of the Intercultural Church beginning in 2020.  Its central foci will be a celebration of all the cultures that comprise the Presbyterian Church USA and deliberate work on diminishing the power of racism in our 90% Anglo denomination.  We clearly have our work cut out for us. 

            At the October consultation we experienced a very powerful presentation by Native American representatives on the Doctrine of Discovery.  I had heard a bit about this previously, but it struck me very strongly on this occasion.   We began the consultation by noting the native peoples who had lived on the land prior to the Europeans’ arrival. We gave thanks for their witness and their continuing ministry.  We expressed our remorse that Anglo culture had led the way in removing them from their land, and we lamented that some native cultures had been obliterated by the European hunger for cheap land and labor.

            The Doctrine of Discovery was the “official” church and political doctrine that enabled Europeans to steal land and labor from indigenous people all around the world.  In America, it began in U.S. law in 1823 when the US Supreme Court decided in Johnson v. McIntosh that the native Illinois and Piankashaw tribes had no right to sell their land to speculators in Philadelphia and Baltimore, some 50 years after the purchase.  Justice John Marshall wrote for the majority that only the US government had the right to sell native lands, because the “doctrine of discovery” gave land title automatically to European, Christian nations when they “discovered” lands (and people) previously unknown to Europeans.  This was so, even though indigenous people had occupied and used the land for millennia.

            This doctrine did not originate with SCOTUS, however.  It began during the Crusades in 1245 when Pope Innocent IV wrote a paper, which indicated that Christians had property rights to lands occupied by non-Christians, when the Christians “discovered” the land.  This doctrine continued through the centuries, and indeed, Justice Marshall cited a patent case issued in 1497 by King Henry VII to John Cabot, articulating the doctrine of discovery.   This doctrine continues in effect to this day, with the struggle by the Standing Rock Lakota tribe against placing an oil pipeline under the Missouri River being the most famous recent example.   

            Our PCUSA denomination repudiated this doctrine at its General Assembly in St. Louis this summer, and as usual, we were one of the last mainline denominations to do this (Presbyterians were the last mainline denomination to re-unite after the Civil War, waiting until 1983 to do so).  That repudiation included a confession by Presbyterians that we were complicit in the doctrine of discovery, and it also included instructions to begin actions of repair, usually known as reparations.  It also included instructions for all General Assembly groups to begin their meetings with an acknowledgment of whose land the meeting is being held on and a welcome from the indigenous peoples currently living on the land.  If you’d like to read more on these actions, here is a link to the General Assembly action: 
https://doctrineofdiscovery.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Doctrine-of-Discovery-Report-to-the-223rd-GA-2018.pdf

            Those of us who are not indigenous peoples must begin our acknowledgment of Native American Month in this way.  I am not seeking guilt here – rather recognition and repentance, to use the first two steps of my list of Seven Steps that we must use to engage the power of racism in our individual and communal lives.  The entire list will be brought into use on this:  recognition, repentance, resistance, resilience, reparation, reconciliation, and recovery.  Especially in this month of November, when we celebrate Thanksgiving, let us recall the indigenous peoples who made European survival possible in the harsh conditions.   The peoples already here did not see the land as the enemy or as possession but rather as partner to be nurtured and celebrated and protected.  May we learn from them in the midst of our drive to get so much stuff that we are destroying the planet for us all.

            Let us non-indigenous people begin this month with recognition.  Our son David taught us about this in 1992, the 500^th anniversary of Columbus bringing the doctrine of discovery to the western hemisphere.  David was a 6^th grade student, and he was given the Good Citizenship Award by DAR (the Daughters of the American Revolution!)  On the day he received the award, he wore a shirt with a slogan, which repudiated the doctrine of discovery – “how could Columbus have discovered America when there were people already living here?”

"REMORSE, ANGER AND ACTION"

REMORSE, ANGER, ACTION

            These are some of my reactions to the events of this past week – pipe bombs mailed out, two African-Americans killed by a white supremacist in Kentucky, eleven people shot to death in a Pittsburgh synagogue, the latter ironically named “Tree of Life.”  I am remorseful that it has come to this, that white supremacy has felt emboldened to crawl out from its pit of iniquity and not just speak hatred and racism and anti-Semitism ad sexism, but to act them out in public also.  As a white man, I need to remember that many people in this country live this every day – my white male privilege has kept me shielded from much of these kinds of events.  This past week was not one of those shielding weeks.

            Second, I am angry that my white brothers feel the need to kill and maim and terrorize the “other.”  I am angry that this kind of action is part of the bone marrow of United States history.  What we saw this past week was nothing new – it grew out of the deep reservoir of white supremacy that is in our American DNA.  I’m also angry that our President not only calls this up – he stokes it and revels in it.  His base is reacting to his sermon on white supremacy, just like a call and response.  Though I pray every day that the President will change, I can’t imagine that he will.  He seems to live for this kind of stuff, and his very self-image seems to depend on his having an enemy.   The slaughter in Tree of Life Synagogue is only the latest manifestation of this deep sickness of white supremacy.  And, oh, the guns!  The guns!  How our manhood depends on them!   As the prophet Ezekiel put it:  “the parents have eaten bitter grapes, the children’s teeth are set on edge.”

            The third reaction is the call to action.  We can no longer wonder what is wrong with President Trump.  We must no longer wonder why the Republican Party is so captured by his white supremacy.  We must no longer wonder if there is anything that we can do.  Yes, we must take action.   The midterm election ends in 8 days, so it you have not voted, go do it tomorrow.  Get your friends to do it.  Get your colleagues and friends to do it.  There are simply no more excuses, no more chances.  It’s either stymie Trump and his white supremacists or risk becoming Nazi Germany.  

            After you vote, go get involved somewhere in the political realm.  By “political,” I don’t mean choosing a political party, although that would be fine.  I mean for us to get involved in discerning and changing how power is distributed and used in this country – that’s what “political” means.   I’m committing to working on getting the cannon removed in the Decatur square that celebrates “the Indian wars of 1836.”  Yes, that is the beginning of the Trail of Tears, ordered by a Presbyterian, Democratic President Andrew Jackson.   I’m also going to join a court watch program somewhere in order to be a presence and hopefully a mitigator of the Mass Incarceration program arm of white supremacy.  These may not be your places of engagement, but I hope that you will find some.   All of our lives, especially those lives on the margins – all of our lives depend upon our choices over the next few weeks.  Just remember – RAA – remorse, anger, action. 

"ON VOTING"

“ON VOTING”

            Caroline and I are in Louisville, attending an anti-white supremacy, anti-racism gathering sponsored by our Presbyterian denomination PCUSA, whose headquarters are in Louisville.  I won’t have time to write this week’s blog, but I am posting, with Susan’s permission, our daughter’s fine FaceBook post in 2014 about my mother and her commitment to voting.  I must confess here that I violated our family commitment to voting in my very first year of eligibility in 1968.  I had worked hard for Eugene McCarthy and felt like he was cheated out of the Democratic party’s nomination for President.  So, in my bitterness, I joined many other young, white people in refusing to vote for anyone so that we could protest the corruption of the system.  Does this sound familiar for 2016?  In 1968, I wrote in my friend David Billings’ name for president rather than holding my nose and voting for Hubert Humphrey.  The result was a narrow victory for Richard Nixon.  Nixon’s victory began the long, white male reaction to the civil rights movement and to the women’s movement, which has now culminated (I hope) in the election of Donald Trump.  I chastised myself greatly after that, and I have voted in every election since then.  Here is Susan’s post about my mother and the importance of voting.  As you read it, remember the power that we voters have in our hands, and please don’t be an ass like me and skip voting this fall.

            “Since we are still near Day of the Dead, here is a Voting Day story about my grandma, Mary Stroupe, who died almost exactly 10 years ago: after working for many years as a hairdresser and beautician in Helena, Arkansas, and raising my father as a single mother in the 1950s and 60s, she retired from being a practitioner to teaching at the local community college. The majority of her students were black--men and women who were working toward their beauticians' licenses. My grandma was a product of her time--raised in an entrenched and (to her) unnoticeable segregation that firmly defined which races of people were worth more than others. My father was also raised in this system, but as he came of age, his mind was transformed toward justice, and my grandma, because of her own intelligence, her devotion to my father, and a friendship with a black woman who was her peer and fellow teacher at the community college (Jessie Weston) began to change as well. Grandma was insanely stubborn: a trait which allowed her to be a single mother, and a trait which also served her students in community who would rather conserve the ways of fearful separation than become vulnerable to change. 

            On every election day, my grandma would only let in students who brought proof that they had voted before coming to class. In her early years of doing this, she had students come in saying they were being prevented from voting by election officials. The story goes that Grandma stopped class and led all of her students and her five-feet-on-a-good-day self over to the polling place, demanding of the men blocking the door that her students be let in to vote, as was their constitutional right. They relented, and her students voted.

            So I have my sticker, and I think of my grandma. I also think of my great-grandmother on my mom's side, whom I never knew, but am told that although she did not support women getting the vote in 1920, after the amendment was passed, she voted in every election until her death in 1979. We don't take enfranchisement lightly in this family.”

"THE OPPOSITE OF POVERTY IS NOT WEALTH...."

“THE OPPOSITE OF POVERTY IS NOT WEALTH…”

            Caroline and I are on a trip to visit our long-time friends, David Billings and Margery Freeman, in McComb, Mississippi, traveling through Alabama.  Though these were not states when the Constitution was adopted, this is the land of the original “originalists.”  One of the central dynamics of the Constitution was to preserve privileged, white male power.  There is no mention of the rights of women.  African-Americans and Native Americans are deemed to be only 60 % human.

            I thought about this a lot as we visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum in Montgomery.  They are the work of the Equal Justice Initiative and are powerful testimony to the past and current injustice and inequities in American history.   The National Memorial is an artistic rendering of the terror and power of lynching in American history.  Sculptures hang down, representing people lynched.  The initial sculptures are by counties, and there is seemingly no pattern to them.  I kept wanting to put them by states, but it was chaotic and unpatterned.  It took me awhile to allow the art to penetrate my senses.  The purpose of these initial pieces of art is to give us a feeling of chaos, of terror, of inability to know when or where the next lynching is coming.  It is a reminder that for those classified as “black” in US history, lynching is always on the table, no matter the locale, no matter the time, no matter the economic status.  

            I was looking for one particular sculpture, that of Phillips County, Arkansas – my home county.  There, in and around Elaine, Arkansas, over 230 African-American people were lynched in two days’ time, in 1919, the largest number of African-Americans killed in lynchings in US history.  On the second turn, I found it, and it was depressing and sobering and angering and defeating.  Some of my forebears were in on that.  They may not have participated in it.  In fact, I am assuming that they did not, but I do not know.  I never knew the magnitude of the executions, and I never thought to ask my mother or other relatives – it was taboo.  Yet, whether they pulled the triggers or not, they supported it.  Difficult stuff.

            After the initial round of sculptures, we finally came to the state groupings, and there were many more in Arkansas counties than I had previously thought.  For some reason (actually I know the reason), I thought the lynchings were confined to the Deep South east of the Mississippi River and to the River Delta on the Arkansas side where I grew up.  After that, the staff invited us to climb the small incline to view all the monuments.  The purpose of the viewing was to allow the spirits of those people who were lynched to cry out to the perpetrators, and it was a powerful time to listen to the voices.

            Next we went to the Legacy Museum, which proclaimed to us that lynching was still with us, that it had now evolved to DWB, police brutality, mass incarceration, skewed income tax tables and deductions, red-lining, destabilizing of the public school system, and many other forms of the racism that has informed our national heritage since its beginnings.   I was struck by many things in this exhibit – one was the jars of dirt collected from some of the known sights of lynchings.  Another was an announcement in the Hattiesburg paper in June, 1915, that John Hartfield would be lynched the next day – no spontaneous anger here, but rather an announcement of a murder to come.  Many brought picnics to watch, and many sold picture postcards afterward – almost 10,000 people gathered to watch a man murdered.  So, for those who feel that our national love of violence is a new thing, please hear that it is in our marrow and DNA.

            Bryan Stevenson, the person behind these profound exhibits put it this way:  “The opposite of poverty is not wealth.  The opposite of poverty is justice.”  Wherever we are, whatever we are, let us recall these words.  Let us recall the idea of equity and equality that is part of our national heritage, an idea that so often loses out to racism and sexism and materialism.   We have three weeks left to make some small movement back towards equity and equality -  please, please vote, and make sure that your friends, colleagues and neighbors vote.   

 Because this is what looms over us:  for those who think that this is only ancient history, please note that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh join Alioto and Thomas as “originalists” on the Supreme Court, with Roberts now being the swing vote.  That is a scary thought!

            The voices of the people who have been lynched - and who will be lynched – now cry out to us.  Let us hear and act in behalf of their humanity and of our own.  It won’t end with the election, of course, but it will be a start back towards justice.