"SO MANY ANNIVERSARIES"

 “SO MANY ANNIVERSARIES”

This week in May brings so many anniversaries!  Caroline and I got married 47 years ago on May 18 on a hot Saturday afternoon in 1974, in an outdoor wedding in Decatur, Georgia.  We had met in the spring of 1973 in Nashville when Caroline attended the wedding of Robin and Linda Williams in a communal house where I was living with some other folks, including my longtime friend Harmon Wray and Robin’s cousin Les Davis. Caroline was friends with Murphy Davis, Les’ sister (and Robin’s cousin also), and she accompanied Murphy to Nashville to attend the wedding.  I had completed my CO in late 1972 and was seeking to discern my next steps, trying to decide whether to go back to seminary.

My friend Ed Loring was then on the faculty of Columbia Seminary in Decatur, and he had been urging me to resume my seminary career and to do it at Columbia.  Caroline and I had gotten along quite well at our meeting in Nashville, and since she lived in the Atlanta area, that was also a drawing card to go to Columbia.  She has always wanted to make it quite clear that we did not meet at Columbia, and that is true.  She had already graduated from Columbia and was already ordained as a pastor, serving as an associate campus minister at Georgia Tech.   She was the 21at woman ordained as a pastor in the PCUS, the former Southern Presbyterian Church. 

    We started dating when I moved to Atlanta in the summer of 1973, and we got married the next year.  Caroline and I would later become the first clergy couple to serve in a local church together in the PCUS.  We were called to a small church in Norfolk, Virginia, where the church had only 12 members but had the potential for a huge community ministry because it was located in a 5,000 resident low-income apartment complex.  It would begin a long career for us of working together as a clergy couple and serving in urban churches.  

    This time period has many anniversaries in it, including the 67th anniversary of the 9-0 SCOTUS decision in Brown. V. Board of Education, which overruled segregation in public education facilities on May 17, 1954.  That decision itself overturned the May 18, 1896 8-1 SCOTUS decision in Plessy v. Ferguson that established segregation and neo-slavery as the law of the land.  So, yes, our wedding anniversary is the same day as Plessy v. Ferguson, which I did not know at the time of our wedding.  Our country is still in the battle between those two powerful SCOTUS decisions – our white-dominated society is still not sure if we want to provide quality education to Black and Brown kids, and the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol was year another blow in that struggle.  

There are a couple of other anniversaries in this week: May 14 was the anniversary of the landing of the Anglo settlers in the land that would become Jamestown, Virginia in 1607 – more on that in another blog.  As the war between Israel and Hamas rages right now,  I am reminded that on this date 73 years ago in 1948, the nation of Israel drove Palestinian natives off their land to establish the modern nation of Israel.   I have no quarrels with the existence of the state of Israel, or with their persistent and insistent quality of maintaining the state of Israel.  Although Israel and Judaism are not the same,  modern Israel exists because they can still smell the ovens of Auschwitz and Dachau.  They rightly know that they cannot trust the West, or anyone else for that matter, to stand up for Judaism.  They must be the ones to enforce “Never Again.”  They look like they intend to do it, or to make the world pay a great price if it seeks to return to the Germanic approach of the 1930’s and 40’s.

            Yet, today the democratic nation of Israel looks more like apartheid South Africa or the white South in which I grew up in the 1940’s and 50’s.   The day of May 14, 1948, Palestinians call “Nakba,” an Arabic word for “catastrophe.”  It marks 73 years since the Israelis drove the Palestinians from their homes and off their land, never to return again.  Buildings burned and houses razed, and now non-Arab Israelis moving into those places.  I wish that I could say that justice will be served, but I’m sitting on my porch right now in Decatur, sitting on land once occupied and owned by Muscogee Creek people, removed themselves by President and Presbyterian Andrew Jackson.

So, this is a big week of anniversaries – I give thanks for my spouse and partner in ministry Susan Caroline Leach.  It has been quite a trip!  I also give thanks for Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall and Barbara Johns and Chief Justice Earl Warren who got SCOTUS to the Brown decision.  Yet, I’m also aware of the continuing and powerful forces of death and destruction that continue to occupy us – in our native land, in Palestine, in Israel.  May we find our places in the cloud of witnesses who have walked and talked and kept our minds stayed on justice.