"LET THE FIRES OF YOUR JUSTICE BURN"

"LET THE FIRES OF YOUR JUSTICE BURN" 

        In his powerful hymn based on Mary's Magnificat (in Luke's gospel) called "The Canticle of Turning," Rory Cooney writes these words in the refrain: "My heart shall sing of the day you bring/Let the fires of your justice burn."  In this hymn, he has caught the essence of one of the most powerful songs of justice in the Bible.  Last week I looked at the "love" part of the Christmas story.  This week comes its counterpart: justice.  These two themes must always be in tension with one another:  justice keeps love from being only sentimentality, while love keeps justice from being too harsh.

        In Luke 1:39-56. Mary is visiting her cousin Elizabeth, who is also miraculously pregnant.  In this visit there is a strong aura of love, community, and solidarity that are shared.  Basking in that love and community, Mary sings a song which begins "My soul magnifies the Lord," which leads to the traditional title of the song "Mary's Magnificat."  In the midst of the sentimentality and consumerism of the Christmas holiday, we would do well to read and to sing this song of Mary's.  It is a song of justice based on the birth and ministry of Jesus, a song often forgotten (and ignored) in all the to-do lists of the holiday season.

        Mary's song is a call to justice:

"God has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts,

God has pulled down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those who are crushed,

God has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich God has sent away empty."

        These are not words from a Marxist or a communist or a socialist - these are words from the Mother of Jesus.  They are based in the continuing vision of Mary, as she agrees to be the vessel for the coming of God in our midst.  Her vision reveals that the birth of Jesus will not only point towards peace on earth and goodwill to all.  The birth of Jesus also points towards justice: the rich brought down, and the poor lifted up. The idea of justice and reparations ring throughout the story of the birth of Jesus.  Not many Christmas hymns emphasize this theme - we prefer the "good will to all" part that promotes charity but not justice.  Mary's agency and vision include not only her "yes" to God but also a ringing call to generations to come: the birth of Jesus is a call to justice.

        The third stanza of "Canticle of Turning" interprets well this dynamic of justice that is embedded in the Christmas story:

            "From the halls of power to the fortress tower, not a stone will be left on stone,

            Let the king beware, for your justice tears every tyrant from their throne,

            The hungry poor shall weep no more for the food they can never earn,

            There are tables spread, every mouth be fed, for the world is about to turn."

        As we think about the meaning of this Christmas story, let us remember Mary's Magnificat and its call to justice.  Let us find our place in that parade of witnesses, set on fire for justice by the birth of Jesus.

            

"THE POWER OF LOVE"

 "THE POWER OF LOVE"

        Last week I noted that at the heart of the Christmas celebration are the twin themes of love and justice.  These themes are difficult to weave together because the sentiment of love is often clashing with the demands of justice.  Yet each tempers the other - justice prevents love from becoming captive to sentiment, and love prevents justice from placing punishment and retribution over humanity.  

        At the heart of the Christmas story is God's love. "God so loved the world," as John's Gospel puts it.  God comes into our lives in the Incarnation - God becomes flesh in a human being.  At the center of this Incarnation is a young unmarried woman named Mary.  She is engaged to be married and in that waiting period, she has a vision from God.  The vision asks Mary to allow herself to become pregnant with the Incarnation, with the baby who will be Jesus.  The church as put a high value on this "virginal conception," often calling it the "virgin birth."  The important part of this story is not Mary's virgin status, but that it is God who is the initiator.  Mary will be the vessel for God's love.  Yet, the story also recognizes that Mary has agency - she can say "No" to God.  She is not the passive and pure vessel that she is often portrayed to be.  Though she describes herself as a "handmaiden" of the Lord, this is no "handmaid's tale."  Mary recognizes that in saying yes, she has placed herself in a precarious position: pregnant by someone other than her fiance (a death penalty offense), turning her life upside down - but believing in the power of love that she sees in her vision.

        The love that Mary experiences in her vision is demanding.  Will her fiance Joseph accept her?  Will he have her stoned or beaten?  Will he disavow her and send her back to her father?  The love of the Incarnation is also demanding in another way.  God is not coming to us as a superhero who rises from the sea or who descends from the sky.  God is coming to us as a baby, as a vulnerable human being unable to walk or talk or feed themselves.  God will depend on the love and dedication of Mary (and Joseph) to develop this vision and this baby. In this Christmas season, it is important to remember that love asks us to be vulnerable, and that may be the most difficult task of all.  God's Incarnation is a partnership from the beginning.  God's agency meets our agency, and let's see what develops from there.

        Mary does say "yes" to this invitation, but it is a scary venture.  Luke's account tells us that she makes a trip to see her cousin Elizabeth, who has just become pregnant in her old age with her first child.  Mary goes to Elizabeth for comfort, for encouragement, for strength to carry out this decision.  When Caroline first got ordained (the 21st woman in the former Southern Presbyterian church), her friend Murphy Davis gave her the sculpture that accompanies this blog.  Murphy got it at Grailville, Ohio, which is a women's center dedicated to the empowerment and justice for women.  The sculpture depicts the two vulnerable women in an embrace, showing us the power of love, a power that gives us courage and vision and hope in the midst of difficult times.  

        Mary is strengthened greatly in this communal sharing with Elizabeth.  It is a reminder that love calls us out of ourselves into the life of the world, into the lives of others.  Love asks us to consider our own humanity and the humanity of others.  Strengthened as she is by the communal sharing with Elizabeth, Mary's vision grows and deepens.  In this process, she shares one of the most powerful calls to justice in the Bible, and we'll look at it next week.  In this Christmas season, may you and your loved ones know this transforming power of love.  

"AT THE HEART OF LIFE"

    "AT THE HEART OF LIFE"

        We have arrived at Advent, and Christmas is coming on fast.  The secular culture begins early on this in order to sell us the products, to sell us the items that will make us feel better, that make us feel as if we are somebody.  The standing joke in our family was that like the woman with the unstoppable flow of blood who sought healing simply by touching the hem of Jesus' garments, we are taught that all we have to do to find healing in American culture is to touch the hem of the products.  Who needs Jesus, when we've got the products?

        Yet no matter how cynical one becomes about this season, there is something about it. Something that asks us to reach down into our core values and find ourselves and find others,  Advent and Christmas are like magnets, pulling on our souls, asking us to consider one more time, asking us to believe one more time that life has meaning, that our lives have meaning.  The Christmas story asks us to consider one more time that at the heart of life, at the heart of out lives, love and justice are the core values.  

        I went to the hospital this week to see an Oakhurst member, and I can never go in a hospital in the Christmas season without thinking of the Christmas of 1993, when my mother was a passenger in a horrible automobile wreck on Highway 61 near Tunica, Mississippi.  Mother and Bob and Mary Wetzel were on the way back from Memphis after Christmas shopping, when they were hit head on by a drunk driver, who was coming back from the first casino that had opened in Tunica.  The drunk driver was hardly injured, but Mother and the Wetzels were seriously injured and were not expected to live.  I flew out to Memphis the next day, and that trip began a long journey for all of us.  Mother was 74 years old, but she fought to recover, and after several major surgeries and three months in the hospital and rehab, she returned to her beloved Helena home, as did Mary and Bob Wetzel.  All during this sojourn with Mother, i was met by love and caring by family members (Caroline held us all together), relatives (Jean Armour Burrow), neighbors, Wetzel family members, by old friends (Brown and Kaye Higgins chief among them), by Oakhurst church which raised money for my frequent trips back and forth to Memphis to check on Mother and to help her recover.

        That memory of Christmas 1993 is both painful and joyful.  As I wondered whether Mother would survive (and how she would survive, if she did), I was met in all the hospital rooms with signs of Christmas, signs of hope and joy and peace.  It is a reminder that even the most cynical of us are drawn to Christmas because it offers us a glimpse of hope.  Some see Christmas as a respite of the woes and worries of the world, but I see it as a vision that seeks to go deeper into the layers of life, that seeks to help us have eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts to receive, as did Mary and Joseph and Zechariah and Elizabeth and the shepherds and the magi, and a host of other characters.  

        Christmas asks us to consider that life has meaning, that at the heart of life are love and justice,  In today's world - but in any world - that is a crazy assertion to make, but Christmas asks us to consider it.  We tend towards sentimentality and consumerism in this season, but love and justice are the answers to these human tendencies.  Justice because it asks us to expand the borders of our hearts and our imaginations, to see a vision that is deeper and broader than we thought possible.  Justice because it prevents love's longing at Christmas from becoming simply sentimentality, because it slows down the fading of Christmas long after the decorations are back in the attic, and the brutal winter of January shrinks our hearts and our vision.

        Yet, at the heart of Christmas is love, the power that is necessary to bring us out of ourselves and to see others as those like ourselves.  Christmas asserts that love is at the heart of the universe, and only its power can call us out of ourselves and our narrow vision.  Working for justice requires love (without it, seeking justice will only burn us out and shrivel our vision).  Seeking justice prevents love from becoming only sentimentality, but without love, all our efforts are just noisy gongs or clanging cymbals, as the apostle Paul once put it.  Christmas asserts that life has meaning - that meaning is that love and justice are intertwined and are at the heart of life. We'll be looking at those in this season - may you know those powerful forces in these days.

"ON THE ROAD TO MONTGOMERY AND BETHLEHEM"

 "ON THE ROAD TO MONTGOMERY AND BETHLEHEM"

        Caroline and I were in Montgomery, Alabama for a couple of days last week.  I did a presentation on Ida Wells and did a book signing at the Read Herring Bookstore in downtown Montgomery.  Montgomery is a complex and complicated place.   It was the first capital of the Confederacy.  It is where newly elected governor George Wallace made his infamous "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" speech at his inaugural in 1963.  Yet, it also has some of the most powerful civil rights museums in the country.  We did not have a lot of time to explore Montgomery on this trip, though we had already been a couple of times to the moving National Lynching Museum.

        On Thursday afternoon we went to the Freedom Rides Museum, located in the former Greyhound Bus Station where the original Freedom Riders were attacked and beaten in 1961.  It was powerful to stand in that same space, to read the narratives of those who participated in the Freedom Rides.  There were people who dedicated themselves to civil rights who rode these buses, but there were also "ordinary" citizens who volunteered to take these rides.  When the first Riders made their trips and were beaten and arrested, instead of shutting down the movement, that courage in the face of violence and repression opened wide the gates.  When the Kennedy administration and the governors of Alabama and Mississippi and the organizers of the Rides had made deals to negotiate the release of those who had been arrested, many thought that the Rides were paused for a while, if not completely over.  

    But, others heard the call and took up the cause.  Diane Nash and James Lawson in Nashville organized carloads of Nashville students and citizens to go down to ride the buses.  It was such a bold move that Attorney General Robert Kennedy asked one of his deputies "Who the hell is Diane Nash?" But not just Nashville responded - small groups of citizens all over the East coast started integrating and riding the buses together down South.  There was no main organizing group at that point - only the Holy Spirit calling people to serve justice and their country.

        That same Thursday, December 1, was also the 67th anniversary of Rosa Parks' refusal to move out of her seat in the white section of the Montgomery bus.  On Friday we went to the Rosa Parks Museum, located at the very spot where the white bus driver stopped the bus on that day in 1955.  He ordered Rosa Parks to get up out of her seat so that white people could sit in it.  She refused and was arrested right there at the spot on which the Museum in her name is now located.  The Museum had a powerful presentation, and we doubly benefitted because we tagged onto an all Black boys group that was also touring the Museum.  

        Rosa Parks' decision did not come in a vacuum.  She was a member of the NAACP, and in the summer of 1955, she had attended Highlander Folk School in Tennessee.  There she had come under the tutelage of Septima Clark, an organizer and teacher from South Carolina. Clark helped her to see the necessity of resistance to the unjust laws of segregation, and Parks also discovered that there were white allies available.  In that same year in late August, Emmett Till had been kidnapped and lynched in Money, Mississippi, and his brutal murder was on the mind and heart of Rosa Parks on that December day when the Holy Spirit spoke to her.  It led to the Montgomery bus boycott, which changed the course of American history, and which also brought Martin Luther King, Jr to the public and national eye. Her actions were one of the four in the 1950's that motivated the determination that led to the changes of the Civil Rights Movement:  the Brown v. Board SCOTUS decision of 1954, the torture and murder of Emmett Till, the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56, and the Little Rock Nine (led by Daisy and LC Bates) of 1957.

        As we enter the Advent and Christmas season, we are joining Mary and Joseph on the road to Bethlehem.  There are many similarities between the road to Bethlehem and the road to Montgomery.  The neo-slavery of white supremacy was strong in Montgomery in the 1950's, just as the oppressive power of Rome was great on the road to Bethlehem.  Indeed, according to Luke's gospel, Mary and Joseph were going to Bethlehem under the order of Rome.  In this season, we are invited to consider our own journey and where we might be traveling - what will be born in our hearts in this season?