"ON CHILDREN"

“ON CHILDREN”

            Our son David will turn 40 this week – wow, that is hard to believe! I remember the night that he was born in Norfolk, Virginia.  It was snowing as I drove Caroline to St. Vincent DePaul Hospital there – they were the only hospital in the area in 1980 that allowed Lamaze births and allowed the spouses to be in the birthing room.  It snowed 6 inches overnight, and over the next 6 weeks, it snowed 40 inches in Norfolk – nothing moved for days!  David rolled on down the birth canal, and it looked like a relatively easy birth, but he got stuck at 8 centimeters – his head was so big!  It has served him well eve since! Finally, 12 hours later he emerged at 9 AM, snorting as he came.  I got to cut the umbilical cord, but there was some concern that his breathing was not normal, so I carried him to the neo-natal ICU for observation.   It turned out that his breathing was fine.

            Caroline and I were conflicted on children – she wanted them, but I did not.  Abandonment by my father had made me leery about having children.  I did not know how to raise children, and I was afraid of developing such an intimate relationship.  My childhood had been so painful, seeking and longing for a dad who would never choose to show up.  Caroline obviously prevailed, but we chose not to do any internal prenatal testing to tell us the gender of the fetus and if there were any abnormalities.  Caroline was 32 and had already had a miscarriage, and I was 33, and in 1980, that was seen as “old” to be having a first child.  We chose not to know anything about the fetus – we would just take what we got.  And, we got him, with all his fingers and toes.

            David (and Susan) have been great gifts to us.  Since David was a boy, I got to work out some of the fathering, that I never received as a boy, in my relationship to him.  In a weird way, I received the gift of fathering from my engagement with David (and Susan).  In fathering them, I received fathering.  I discovered depths of emotion and soul work in myself that I had long since repressed, that I thought that I never had.  They have been wonderful gifts to us, and we even made it through adolescence with very few problems.  I’d like to think that it was our great parenting that made this possible, but I’ve been a minister long enough to have seen plenty of good parents go through hell with their children.  We did do sincere and diligent work as parents, but I also know that we have been greatly blessed, with no trivializing of that word intended.   Through their work and our work and God’s grace, they have turned out to be fine adults.

            Our ministry at Oakhurst taught us that it truly takes a village to raise children, and we are grateful to those teachers, youth group leaders, carpool drivers, child care givers (Melody, Stephanie, Kentria, Samantha, Jon, Dacia and others) who stepped into the breech for us.  It is a reminder that our children are not our children.  I first heard this line in a Sweet Honey in the Rock song, and I later learned that it was from a poem by Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran entitled “On Children.”  Here is some of that poem:

“Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

They come through you but are not from you,

And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,

Which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them,

But you cannot make them just like you.”

So, thanks, David, for these 40 years!  We’d love to see the next 40, but we know that you (and now Emma and Zoe) dwell in the house of tomorrow, and we will have to  turn you loose to it.  Thank you so much for deepening and tending my soul.

"MLK DAY"

“MLK DAY”

            For my blog this week, I am going to share part of an essay on Dr. King by the poet and essayist June Jordan – it is the best essay that I have ever read on King.  If you don’t know her work, please look her up – many of her poems transformed into songs by Sweet Honey in the Rock.  She died of breast cancer in 2002.  This sharing is from her essay on Dr. King “The Mountain and the Man Who Was Not God,” given as an address at Stanford on the second King Day in 1987.  It is from her book of essays “Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union.”

            “He made big mistakes.  He was not a wonderful administrator.  He did not abstain from whiskey, tobacco, or sex.  He was not a fabulous husband, or father.  He committed adultery.  His apparent attitude towards women was conventional, at best, or strikingly narrow, or mean.  He loved to party: dancing, horsing around, heavyweight southern cuisine, and pretty women.  He did like him a little sugar in his bowl,  He was not a god.

            And I remember listening to WBAI-FM radio in 1963 the way my parents long ago used to listen to AM radio broadcasts of the Joe Louis fights, only I was following the evolution of the Civil Rights Revolution.  I was following the liberation of my life according to the Very Reverend Dr. King.  And when, one afternoon, that fast-talking, panic-stricken newscaster in Birmingham reported the lunging killer police dogs and the atrocious hose water and I could hear my people screaming while the newscaster shouted out the story of my people, there, in Birmingham, who would not quit the streets – when he described how none of that horror of nightsticks or torrential water pressure or mad dogs on the attack could stop the children of Birmingham from coming out again and again to suffer whatever they must from freedom, I remember the positively stunned sensation that engulfed me:  I knew that we winning;  I knew that we would win.

            And before those demonstrations and underneath the melee and after the bleeding and the lockups and the singing and the prayers, there was this magical calm voice leading us, unarmed, into the violence of White America.  And that voice was not the voice of God.  But did it not seem to be the very voice of righteousness?  That voice was not the voice of God.  But does it not, even now, amazingly penetrate/reverberate/illuminate:  a sound, a summoning, somehow divine? That was the voice of a Black man who had himself been clubbed and stabbed and shoved and shot at and jailed and spat upon, and who, repeatedly and repeatedly, dared the utmost power of racist violence to silence him.  That was the voice of a leader who did not tell others to do what he would or could not do:  bodily he gave witness to his faith that the righteous cause of his activity would constitute his safety………

            Almost twenty years ago, Dr. King, standing alone, publicly demanded that England and the United states both act to isolate South Africa through unequivocal severing of financial or any other connection with that heinous regime.  In that same year, Dr. King stood forth, opposed to the war in Vietnam, and thereby suffered the calumny and castigation of his erstwhile peers as well as the hysterical censure of his outright foes. 

             Evaluating America as “the greatest purveyor of violence in our time,” in 1967 Dr. King, with a breadth of determination and rectitude unimaginable even now, undertook the launching of a revolution aimed against that violence, a revolution pitted against America’s inequities, a revolution riveted against an American poverty of the spirit that allowed us to uproot , and decimate, a host of strangers while denying basic necessities to the homeless here at home.”

             

"SETTING THE WORLD ON FIRE"

“SETTING THE WORLD ON FIRE”

            “I have come to set the world on fire!”  Those are Jesus’ words about himself in the 12^th chapter of Luke, where he indicates that he has come to bring division, not peace.  I want to suggest that this side of Jesus comes from his relationship to the man on fire, John the Baptizer.  But, before I do that, I must note that a lot of the world is on fire, whether it is the wildfires in Australia, or the rainforests in the Amazon River basin, or the wildfires in California, or the drones falling from the sky in Iraq.  The world is on fire, and it is a scary time, especially with the kind of leadership that we see in the White House and the Senate.  Let us be clear here – it is not a lack of leadership that is holding us back from dealing with climate change.  It is a very deliberate style of leadership that wishes to divert us from the problems of climate change, so that the rich can get richer and build alternatives for themselves when the fires burn even more out of control.  If you want to know how that turns out, read Octavia Butler’s novel “The Parable of the Sower.”

            But now, back to John the Baptizer.  In Luke’s gospel, he seems to be the cousin of Jesus.  In John’s gospel, he seems to be the rival of Jesus.  In all four gospels, he is seen as the forerunner of Jesus, the one who prepares the way for Jesus.  John’s style and substance is about doing our own individual soul work and in seeking justice as one of the main results of that soul work.  On one level, John preaches repentance in the old-fashioned way that I grew up on in the white, supremacist South.  It emphasized that I (and other individuals) needed to get right with God and stop drinking and smoking and chasing hedonistic pleasures.   My religious upbringing not only denied that justice and community equity have anything to do with salvation – it actively worked to put asunder spirituality and justice.  Like white evangelical religion now in the USA, the idea is to maintain white patriarchy and to deny the importance of justice in the eyes of God.

            Even a cursory reading of John the Baptizer’s life in the gospels will show how ridiculous that kind of a notion, that kind of a split, is in relation to John’s ministry.  When the religious leaders like Franklin Graham come out to hear John the Baptizer speak, they ask him what they should do to get right with God.  Per my upbringing, I always believed that John answered by saying that they should proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.  Once I went back to actually read the New Testament stories about John, this is what he gave as the answer:  “If you have more than one coat, give the second (or third and fourth) to those who have none;  if you have more food than you can eat, give it to those who are starving.”  For John, salvation was intimately connected to a life of recognition, repentance, and reparations.  No worries about getting into heaven for John – the main emphasis was to be set on fire for God in this life.  Being set on fire for God meant seeking equity and justice. 

            If you are wondering if I am making this up or twisting the narrative, go back and read it for yourself, as I did.  And, please note that John is also arrested and executed by Herod (not the same Herod of Jesus’ birth, but not far from him in temperament) for calling Herod’s ethics into question.   Jesus’ leanings towards justice and equity in his movement are undoubtedly derived in part from his relationship to John the Baptizer.  

So, if you are like me and grew in the stream of American Christianity that makes the goal of our lives seem to be getting into heaven when we die, check out John the Baptizer.  If you let him, he will set you on fire, as he did Jesus.   We need these kinds of folk desperately in our time - folks willing to do soul work in an age of superficiality, folks able to see the intertwining of justice and spirituality, folks willing to be set on fire for the God movement, as were John the Baptizer and Jesus of Nazareth.  Let us listen for John’s voice and John’s calling out, and let us find the fire within us, so that the fires we set will be ones for justice and equity and not those of greed and destruction of the earth and humanity.

           

"THESE ARE DANGEROUS TIMES"

“THESE ARE DANGEROUS TIMES”

            The assassination of the Iranian general by order of President Trump deepens all of our peril in the world.  It is not surprising that these events happen at the end of the Christmas season, where Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus ends in violence and destruction.  Today is Epiphany, the day in Western Christianity when it is remembered that magi, likely from Persia (modern day Iran), arrived at the house of infant Jesus in Bethlehem to honor and worship him as a special gift from God.  Yes, the Holy Family is in a house by this time, though we do not know from whence it came.  Maybe Bethlehemians believed in housing the homeless.

            There are many ironies in this account, one being that in Matthew’s story the first people to acknowledge Jesus are foreigners in a land known for its distrust of outsiders.  No one knows their origin, but most scholars have guessed that they were Persians.  They are not great diplomats, because they go to Jerusalem to ask King Herod the Great where the next king will be born.  As Matthew tells us, all Jerusalem is afraid, because they know how Herod will react to such a question, just as we know how President Trump will react to people who question his judgment.

            Herod reacts by sending soldiers to Bethlehem to kill all the boys two years old and under, but Jesus is spared the execution this time because his adopted father Joseph has led the family out of Bethlehem across the border in Egypt to escape Herod’s wrath.  They are refugees seeking political asylum, and fortunately for us, Egypt had not adopted Trump’s anti-immigrant policies.  Matthew then tells us that all the boys of Bethlehem are slaughtered, so the Christmas story ends not in the glories of the angels singing over the manger but in slaughter and bloodshed.  This is an awful story, but it is probably the most realistic of the Christmas stories.  Herod’s reputation was that of a man of slaughter – indeed, Josephus, the early historian of the Jesus movement, tells us that Herod ordered the execution of his political enemies on the day of his death so that there would mourning on that day, even if it was not for him.

            Matthew wants us to understand that the Christmas story is not one of sweetness and light, coming to tame the world and make it a sane and loving place to live.  Rather, Matthew wants us to understand that while the Christmas story is one that describes to us the depth of love that God has for us, it also comes to us in a world that believes in violence and death and despair.  Jesus is born in dangerous times – Matthew wants to make sure that we know that and that we remember it. 

On this first full week in 2020, we surely know that we live in dangerous times.  No other Biblical character reminds me as much of Trump as does King Herod in Matthew’s account.  Anxious, loving violence, brooking no disagreement with his understanding of the world or of himself, he has brought us to the brink of war with the ill-advised assassination of the Iranian leader.  The Sunday paper in Atlanta even had a discussion of the reinstatement of the draft for the US army.  We know that the boots of the tramping soldiers are coming – where and when are the questions.  An ominous beginning for 2020, but in light of the coming impeachment trial, a beginning that surprises few of us.  It’s the kind of world that we have made.

            It’s the kind of world into which the Christmas stories come.  The Persian magi keep coming, across those deserts and plains, coming to ask us to consider a different vision, a vision of love and equity and compassion, born of struggle and suffering.   This Christmas vision is not easily put back into the boxes to go into the attics of our homes and hearts.  Oh yes, most of us do it that way, as heard from W.H. Auden last week.  But, Matthew’s account asks us to stick with it, to be like those Persian travelers who took the long haul, who took circuitous routes, who risked alienating the powers, but who showed us the vision.  May we be inspired and motivated by their journeys, as we go on our own in these dangerous times.