"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?

"BIRTHDAY: A SONG OF MYSELF"

 "BIRTHDAY! A SONG OF MYSELF"

    Yesterday was my 76th birthday - I never thought that I would live this long, but I am grateful that I have. I want to take a moment in this blog to "celebrate myself," as Walt Whitman put it so well in his "A Song of Myself:"

"I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,

Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,

I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,

Hoping to cease not till death."

    

        Granting that I am not 37, I am still grateful to be able to give thanks, to work and to witness.  I am

grateful for all my birthdays, but I want to cite four that come to mind today.  The first one in my memory

is a birthday somewhere in early junior high school (our segregated school on Columbia Street

encompassed 4-8th grades).  I received a bicycle for my birthday, but I was scared to admit that I was not 

sure about trying to ride it.  My self esteem was so low that I was afraid that I would be a big failure, and 

that I would be exposed.  My cousin Brown came to my rescue.  Sensing my anxiety (as he often did),  he 

told me: "Nibs, you can do this - just get up on it and try it. "  So, I did, and he gave me a push to go 

down a hill by my house.  Unfortunately, he had forgotten (intentionally?) to tell me how to use the hand 

brakes, so I went over into a small ditch.  I was not hurt, however, and I got up grateful to have tried it.  

Brown was laughing as I rode it back up the hill, and I laughed too.

        When I was a year or two older, my mother allowed me to have a sock-hop, dancing-to-records party 

at our house.  I was surprised because our house was so small and because I did not know that my mother 

was so hip!  We pushed all the furniture back in the living room/dining room combo, and we had girls  

and boys over.  A lot of people came, and I kissed a girl for the first time, behind our living room 

couch.   One of my lesbian friends once replied to my question: "When did you decide to become 

attracted to girls?" with the answer "About the same age as you did."  It took me a moment to see her 

point.  Before that birthday party, girls were something to avoid.  Now my world had changed.

    My third birthday memory is my 50th, a milestone in so many ways.  For that birthday, our 

longtime friend Inez Giles wanted to throw a party for me at a night club called The Tropical Vibes.  We 

had a great time!  We danced to island music, and Angela Giles (Inez's oldest daughter) and I won the 

dance contest, doing the twist.  In the middle of the party, I was ushered into the bathroom, and when I 

came back out, everyone at the party had on face masks with my photo on the mask!  It was like seeing 80 

of me - a scary thought!  I am so grateful to Inez, who has continued to host a birthday party for me every 

year since, except for 2 years.  She has encouraged me to sing a song of myself, and I have tried to do it.

    My fourth birthday memory is from 2016 when I turned 70.  I had announced in 2015 that I would 

retire in mid-January of 2017, and Oakhurst Church gave me a huge and lavish retirement party the 

weekend before Thanksgiving.  We had a great time, with speakers including Congressman Hank 

Johnson, Stacey Abrams, Dekalb County Commissioner Mereda Davis Johnson, Decatur Mayor Patti 

Garrett, Dr. Keisha Scales, Dr. Chris Boesel, and many others.  Our kids David and Susan also told stories 

and created a song for the occasion.  David and Erin and Emma and Zoe would not be able to return to 

Georgia for Christmas, so in that week, we crammed in my retirement, my birthday, Thanksgiving, and 

on the Friday after Thanksgiving, we put up the tree and celebrated Christmas - quite a week!

So, happy birthday to me - I give thanks to all of you, to circles of friends and family and church who 

have helped me understand that I am a child of God.  Thank you!

        

"A PRAYER OF THANKSGIVING"

For my blog this week, I am using a prayer by my colleague, the Reverend Irv Porter, pastor of the Church of The Indian Fellowship in Tacoma, Washington.  He is also PCUSA Associate for Native American Intercultural Congregational Support, and he is a descendant of the Nez Perce, Pima and T'hona O'odham tribes. He and I served together on the Presbyterian Intercultural Network Board.  I also give thanks to North Decatur Presbyterian Church for printing this in their weekly newsletter.

A PRAYER OF THANKSGIVING

Creator God,

From the rising of the sun in the east to its setting in the west, you have blessed us with life, family, food from creation and spiritual ways drawing us closer to you.

You gave us this land, Turtle Island, to care for, to live in and to preserve for coming generations. Stop our ears when talk of destroying the land for temporary gain is heard. Teach us to respect the land and all her gifts of life. We are all related so what happens to any part of Creation affects us all. We are reminded that the land holds our ancestors, making it sacred.

As we work to end intolerance of people and cultures and our tolerance of historic injustice, open our hearts to reflect your image, your peace and your love to all. Open our spirits to peace and healing with those from all nations.

The wind, the sunrise, the sound of water moving forward, the songs of the bird, the beauty of the butterfly — all these things are where we find you, always. Help us to find you in this beauty and grant us lives centered upon you, Creator of the universe.

For all these blessings and more, our hearts are full of thanks. At this gathering of family and friends, this great feast of blessing, we thank you. Guide us to know your ways with respect. Hear our prayer of Thanksgiving. Let it be so.

Amen.

---

"WHERE ARE WE?"

 "WHERE ARE WE?"

        I was glad that the Democrats did better than expected in the midterms, but it still looks like the Trumpsters will take over the House.  I was disappointed but not surprised that Stacey Abrams lost her gubernatorial bid in Georgia.  Kemp had stood up to Trump, but he had also shored up his conservative base with actions on guns and controlling women's bodies.  Plus, the economy in Georgia was relatively in good shape.  Stacey's main hope was to get a huge turnout, but that did not materialize.  Indeed she got 114,000 less votes in 2022 than she did in 2018.  The Republicans demonized her as a "national" figure, casting her as a surrogate for President Biden.  They also used the white supremacist fear of a Black woman in charge of white people, especially white men. The Republicans succeeded in projecting that her profile seemed larger than Georgia, and I think that is reflected in the lower turnout for her.  She received 132,000 less votes than did Raphael Warnock, an indication to me that some of the voters supported Brian Kemp for governor but crossed over to vote for Warnock for senator.  Stacey is a very talented and hard-working person and politician, and it will be interesting to see what she does next.  I hope that she will keep her ground game in place to support Warnock in the December 6 run-off.

        I was disappointed and surprised that Reverend Warnock did not beat Herschel Walker outright for the Senate seat in Georgia.  Walker is clearly not qualified to be a senator, but his football legacy obviously carries a lot of weight in Georgia.  His campaign team brought Coach Vince Dooley from his last days before death to endorse Walker.  The runoff will once again boil down to turnout, and historically, the Republicans have dominated in recent runoffs, with one big exception.  That exception was in January, 2021, when both Warnock and Jon Ossoff won Democratic Senate seats, giving the Democrats control of the Senate.  Let's hope that history repeats itself.  One advantage in 2020 was that Donald Trump gave such mixed messages to his loyal base, so that many of them stayed home on the runoff day in January.

         One of the ironies of the runoffs is that white supremacist Democrats established them in the South to seek to prevent a Black candidate from winning in a primary or general election.  The grandchildren of those Democrats are now Republicans in the South, and now they long for a Black candidate to win, or at least a Black football hero candidate.  Walker kept his distance from Trump this fall, even though he had been handpicked by Trump to oppose Reverend Warnock.  It will be interesting to see what Trump does for the runoff on December 6.  It looks like Trump is tying himself in knots, scheduling a special announcement about his political future tomorrow.  

        One of the themes of this recent election period is that both white male leaders of their parties were kept at a distance by many candidates.  Trump's endorsement of candidates seemed to hurt them more than help them, and I know that this fact galls him, even though he has tried to shift the blame to others, as he always does.  He even blamed Melania for talking him into supporting Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania.  I'm assuming that Trump will announce for President tomorrow, if he indeed makes an announcement that day.  Given the dismal showing of his candidates this fall, it will be intriguing to see how many Republicans step up to challenge him for the Presidential nomination.  I counted him out in 2016, so I want to be careful here, but he seems damaged politically.  And, of course, there are the legal challenges hanging over him and around him.

        I was glad that President Biden came out better than many predicted that he would in the elections this fall, but he was kept at a distance by some Democratic candidates, including Senator Warnock.  Since control of the Senate will not be at stake, I'm guessing that President Biden may not make some appearances for Senator Warnock in the few weeks ahead.  But, I am hoping that President Biden will not seek a second term as President - he is simply too old to do it.  He saved the country by running and winning in 2020, and he has had significant legislative wins in his term. Yet I don't think that he can win a second term. Plus, it would be a hard grind to have two white males in their late 70's run against one another yet again for President.  It is time for younger and more diverse leadership, and these next 6-8 months will be interesting to watch (and scary).

        Whatever you think about Trump and President Biden running again, if you are a resident of Georgia, please vote on December 6.  And, if you live outside Georgia, make sure all your friends and acquaintances in Georgia turn out to vote! 

 “ALL SAINTS’ DAY”

All Saints Sunday was yesterday – it is the time when we remember those who have gone before us, whose lives gave us hope, love and courage.  In these days of “monsters in America,”  we need these “good” ghosts to re-visit us to give us a vision of being people of justice, compassion, and equity.  If you have not done so already, please take some time this week to give thanks for those saints who been forces for good in your life.  I have many in my life, for which I give thanks.  I’ll use today’s space to name three of those, recognizing that they have had a great influence in my life and also recognizing that there are many others.

The first saint in today’s list (and in every list that I will produce) is my mother Mary Armour Stroupe.  She was born in Byhalia, Mississippi in 1919 and was valedictorian of her high school class.  She had hoped to go to college, but her family had no money for it, especially in the grips of the Great Depression.  She scraped up enough money to go to beauty school (now cosmetology school), and she worked in that profession until her retirement in 1986.  During the last 10 years of her work life, she was the lead instructor at the school of cosmetology at Phillips County Community College.  There she worked with many women – and a few men – seeking to become cosmetologists.  But, for me, her sainthood lies in her raising me as a single, working mother after my father abandoned her and me.  She dedicated so much energy and time to me, and I will ever be grateful to her for all the gifts that she shared with me.

The second saint is the Reverend Harold Jackson, who became the minister at First Presbyterian Church, which was my home church in Helena, Arkansas.  He arrived there in the late 1958 and stayed there until late 1964.  First Presbyterian was a central pillar in my life, and as flawed as it was – it would not allow Black people to worship there – it was a source of strength and meaning to me.  J. Harold, as my mother called him, was our minister through my late junior high years and high school years.  He was not a dour Calvinist; rather he brought a sense of life and possibility to church life, a sense that God loved us and sought us to be vessels of God’s mercy and justice in the world.  Most of all, for me, he made the ministry seem like a viable profession.  He had passion and joy and a great sense of humor, and he retained both his humanity and masculinity in the church world which seems to require that male ministers leave behind the world and their identity.  He also introduced me to the need for justice in the world, and he strongly urged all of us to been involved in that essential work of God.  I stayed in touch with Harold until his death in Nashville in 2019.

The third saint in this list was one of the pivotal members at Oakhurst Presbyterian Church in Decatur, Georgia, where Caroline and I were co-pastors for 30+ years.  Azzie Preston was one of the first Black members at Oakhurst, and she became a key figure in enabling the power and dynamics of Oakhurst to shift from being a white church with Black members to a multiracial church with power shared among many people.  We came to Oakhurst on 1983, just as the former Northern Presbyterian denomination merged with the former Southern Presbyterian denomination, after the Southern denomination had seceded in 1861.  The merger - after 122 years – made changes in the governing structures of churches, and it enabled congregations to open up the nominating process for leadership.  Azzie volunteered to coordinate that process, and in so doing, brought forth new leadership which changed the dynamics of the church.  Later that same year, at the death of a Black Oakhurst member, she came to me and said:  “I know that you have never done a Black funeral before, and I’m going to coach you on how to do it.”  She was also a witness for racial justice in her workplace, and she often received death threats at work for that witness.  Azzie taught me (and Oakhurst) so many lessons, and I am grateful for her life and witness.

I give thanks for these three witnesses and saints in my life, as well as for many others.  So, take time to remember these kinds of folk in your life and to give thanks for these “good” ghosts.  And, since the end of the voting period in this country is this Tuesday, don’t forget to vote and to get others to vote.  Be like my mother – vote as if your life depended on it, because in this election in 2022, it does.

"MONSTERS IN AMERICA"

 "MONSTERS IN AMERICA"

        Today is All Hallows Eve, which came to be known as Halloween.  Like all such holidays, its origin is murky. It is partially rooted in the idea that October 31, the day before All Saints Day or All Hallows Day, is a time when the spirits of those who have died are allowed to return to earth, for both good and ill.  Hispanic Culture recognizes this in its Day of the Dead on November 1 also.  In the current Halloween story, ghosts of those who have died seem to return only for mischief or malevolence.  It's rare that ghosts return for "goodly" purposes.  Yet,  All Saints Day remembers those who have been witnesses for good, and I want to remember those too.  So, I'll divide my thoughts on these into two parts:  ghosts for good, and ghosts as monsters.  This week, the monsters; next week the good.

        When I was a boy, I had a recurring nightmare in which I was on a train cutting through the countryside, with fields on each side of the train.  As the train passed one barn, I saw a Frankenstein type monster step out of the barn and begin to run towards the train.  I seemed to be the only passenger on the train who was aware of the monster's pursuit of the train - everyone else, including the engineer, was having a happy time as the train meandered its way through the countryside.  The monster was getting closer and closer, and it became clear that he was after me.  Yet no one paid attention to this developing danger.  I wanted the train to speed up so that I could make it safely home to my mother.  The dream always ended in such pursuit - the monster getting closer and closer, and my scramble in trying to get the engineer to speed up the train.

        I was thinking about this dream and about the idea of monsters after I heard about the attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of Speaker Nancy Pelosi.  There seems to be a letting loose of monsters, of Frankensteins in American culture.  The Trump presidency, the January 6 attack on Congress, the slowness and even reluctance of Republican leadership to respond to these threats - all seem to point to the loosening of monstrous forces in our time.  To me, it is reminiscent of people pouring into the territories of Kansas and Nebraska in the early 1850's.  Congress decided to allow those two territories to decide on whether they would allow slavery to exist inside their boundaries.  It led to terrible slaughter, a prelude to the Civil War.  Indeed, John Brown honed his skills in the killing fields of Kansas, before he headed to Virginia to seek to ignite a revolt by those held in captivity as slaves.

         Such monstrous forces seem to always exist close to the surface of American life, and in many eras, they break through the surface to seek to dominate life in America.  The late 1870's until early 1900 was a time dominated by the monstrous forces of white supremacy, seeking to put Black people back in the places that white people believed that they belonged.  After white legal and political power was re-established for all to see, lynchings became the monstrous way to enforce it.  Up until 1965 when the Voting Rights Act was passed, the monsters of neo-slavery held to our Frankenstein power tightly.  Since then those of us classified as "white" have used the criminal injustice system and police power as monstrous forces to keep people of color in the place designated by white people.  

        The attack on Paul Pelosi is a another sign that Frankenstein has stepped out of the barn and is now in pursuit of those who would expand the American idea of equality to include those who have been excluded by the creators of the monstrous forces of injustice, oppression, and white, male supremacy.  The monsters are on the loose.  The results of the November elections (and the denial of those results) will tell us a lot about where we are headed.  

        At this point some 8 days until the election period is over, it looks like the Republicans will take back the House.  If this is the case, a difficult battle will come to the forefront.  If you have not yet voted, please do so before the election period is over - and get your friends and neighbors to vote also.  Abraham Lincoln asked us to move towards our better angels, or "good ghosts" as I would call them. In today's culture, we seem to be moving towards the monstrous side.  Let us move towards the "saints" part of All Hallows rather than towards the monsters.  

"VOTING"

 "VOTING"

        Voting for the midterm elections began last week, and it is helpful to think of the period before November 8 as the time of voting, rather than the usual name of "early voting."  I prefer to think of November 8 not as election day, but rather the end of the period of voting.  That shift in thinking implies to me that voting is so important in the USA that a period of at least 3 weeks is needed for voting, so that everyone who is eligible will have an opportunity to vote.  If you have not voted yet, please take time to do so this week, or at least by November 8.  It is vital in every election, but it is especially important this year, because this may be our last legitimate election, depending on the outcomes. 

        The first time that I was eligible to vote was in 1968, and while I took voting seriously, I chose not to vote in the presidential election between Democrat Hubert Humphrey and Republican Richard Nixon.  I had watched the debacle in Chicago at the Democratic convention that summer, and I was a Eugene McCarthy supporter.  I felt that McCarthy had been mistreated at the convention, and I also felt that justice had been squashed by the police state tactics of Mayor Richard Daley.  The recent movie about the Chicago Seven will give you some of the dynamics of those times, if you do not know them.  After the convention, I joined thousands of others who decided not to vote in protest of the oppressive tactics of the Democrats in Chicago. Richard Nixon was elected President by a narrow margin, and I've always wondered if our disenchantment and refusal to vote gave us one of the most corrupt presidents until Donald Trump.

        The context of the struggles of 1968 are instructive to us in these days.  The Voting Rights Act, passed three years before in 1965, had ended neo-slavery in the South.  Its empowerment of Black  voting was at the heart of the wrestling in Chicago.  The right to vote for Black people - a the 15th Amendment of 1870 - was finally ratified by law in 1965.  The Voting Rights Act took a giant step towards the political empowerment of people whose humanity had been denied in the US Constitution.  My decision not to vote in 1968 looks so much worse in that context - a privileged white man deciding that the blood, sweat, tears, and deaths of so many people over so long a time was not worth enough to vote.  1968 also brought the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.  It seemed like a time on the brink of chaos, and voting seemed so insignificant to me that year.

        Over the decades, I have seen the importance of voting.  I remember that when my mother was the lead instructor in the school of cosmetology in her local community college, she would not allow her students to come to class on Election Day if they did not have on a "I Have Voted" sticker.  I also note how much our white culture has worked to restrict access to voting since the end of neo-slavery in 1965.  In a terrible decision in 2013, SCOTUS struck down a central enforcement mechanism of the Voting Rights Act.  Ever since then, states around the country have constricted the right to vote again and again, hoping to return us to the vision of the "originalists," those who would limit voting to "white" men of property.

        We are in such a time of retrenchment now.  We see it in the "election deniers," who demean any election results that do not show them or their candidates as the winners of the election.  Donald Trump was the most prominent of these "deniers," but he is not the first nor the last to take this approach.  It has been a theme in American history ever since the Constitution denied the vote to women and defined African-American and Indigenous People as 60% human.  The "originalists" want to take us back to those days, and in many ways that is a main theme of the midterm elections of 2022.  Will we continue to to affirm the idea that all people are created equal and that all American citizens are entitled to vote?  Will we continue to affirm the idea that the people should continue to decide who our political leaders will be?

        We've tried this experimental idea of democracy for only 57 years now, since the end of neo-slavery with the Voting Rights Act.  That Act has already been significantly weakened, but still most of us have the right to vote.  Many candidates in these midterm elections of 2022 want to weaken that Act even more.  These "originalists" understand the power of the vote, and they want to restrict it as much as possible.  Caroline and I have already voted, and I urge you not to reflect my 1968 self in your approach to voting especially this year.  As President Obama put it so succinctly:  "Don't boo - Vote!"  May it be so with us.  If we don't, many of us may lose that fundamental right.

        

        

        

"100 For Oakhurst!"

 "100 For Oakhurst!"

        This past weekend culminated the 100th Anniversary celebration for Oakhurst Presbyterian Church - they have been celebrating on a monthly basis for the past year.  We attended the 100th Anniversary service at Oakhurst yesterday, and it was fun to see old friends there.  The church was founded on September 25,1921, in a tent meeting at the corner of East Lake and Second Avenue in Decatur.  Caroline and I were pastors there for over 30 years, almost one-third of the existence of the church.  Our kids grew up there, and it was a good place for them to be nurtured in the faith and in the multicultural world.

           Oakhurst is a remarkable place, and I want to share a short summary of its history.  If you want a fuller story, see the book that Caroline and I wrote about it: "O Lord, Hold Our Hands: How a Church Thrives in a Multicultural World."  It was a white, mostly working class church in its beginnings and throughout the first 45 years of its history.  It grew to be a church of almost 850 members, but by that time in the early 1960's, changes were underfoot.  Atlanta had decided to go to the Big Leagues in sports teams, so Black housing was taken for stadia for the baseball Atlantans, the football Falcons, and the basketball Hawks,  The people who lived in that housing began to move to the east Atlanta area, which included the Oakhurst neighborhood in Decatur.  White flight in the neighborhood and in the church quickly took place. Oakhurst Presbyterian went from 850 members to 80 members in about 20 years.  It was a demoralizing time for the church.

        During this difficult time, the church had strong leadership from its pastors and its members.  Jack and Joy Morris, Dr. Lawrence Bottoms (the first and only Black Moderator of the former southern Presbyterian Church), Jeanine Wren, and Bruce Gannaway were all remarkable pastoral leaders.  Oakhurst also benefitted from the PCUS consolidating all its denominational offices into one city:  Atlanta.  The Stated Clerk of the denomination, Jim Andrews and his spouse Elizabeth became members at Oakhurst. Other denominational leaders like Evelyn Green joined, giving Oakhurst a sense that it could survive.  The white membership who was left at Oakhurst were very conservative theologically, but they were also tenacious about Oakhurst - they were determined that it would survive, even if it meant inviting the new neighbors in, the neighbors who were Black.  The first Black member joined Oakhurst in 1970.  Atlanta Presbytery provided financial support, paying off the mortgage on the building, and providing financial support for the operating budget for over 30 years.  Some white people stayed, and sone Black people came - enough to form a nucleus for a new church. 

        When Caroline and I came to Oakhurst in 1983, the executive of the Presbytery told us that he would give us two years to show that Oakhurst was viable.  If there were no signs of progress, they would cut off the Presbytery funding.  On one level, that was a big advantage.  We told the elders of the church that there was no time for gradual changes - we had to move towards being a multicultural church as quickly as possible.  Caroline worked on Christian education and community ministry, getting in families with children.  I worked on worship and on opening the doors to Black leadership in the church.  At that point we were a white church with Black members, and we worked to make it a multicultural church with shared leadership in worship style and in church government.

    We lost some white members at first, but eventually the vision began to take hold.  Black people took a chance on the church and on us.  We used art and music and education and sermons to begin to shape a new congregation - in today's language, it would be called a new church development.  We changed the main stained glass window of a white Jesus in the sanctuary to a brown Jesus, and we began to seek publicity throughout the metro Atlanta area.  The plan worked - John Blake of the Atlanta Journal Constitution (now a CNN online columnist) did a full page article on the church.  Christine Callier invited Sylvester Monroe of Time Magazine to join us in a Supper Club discussion of his book on growing up in Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago.  He was so impressed with Oakhurst that he wrote a full page article in Time in April, 1995.

    We began to move from trying to survive to the idea that we could thrive.  We ordained an openly gay elder in 2002 (we had ordained another gay person in 1992, bur they were not out yet).  There were many books and studies of the church, and in 2003 Oakhurst Presbyterian was named as one of 300 Outstanding Congregations in the country by a Lilly study.  The church grew, and we had several capital campaigns for the old building.  We were grateful to have been part of such a vital community of faith - as our evangelism slogan described us: "Multicultural, Bible-based, Jesus-centered, Justice-seeking."

    In 1989, the Rev. Joan Salmon Campbell was the first clergy woman ever elected as Moderator of the Presbyterian Church.  She was an African-American preacher from Ohio, and she preached at Oakhurst in September of that year.  In her sermon that day, she shared one of my favorite quotes about Oakhurst:

    "It has been a long, long time since I have worshipped in a congregation quite like this one. I celebrate who you are.  I dare say that you are one of the best kept secrets in the entire denomination, for rarely do I see a congregation so diverse, as you represent so many different kinds of people.  Rarely am I in the midst of God's people who bother to take the time to hear the concerns of the people in the pew, and then intentionally lift them up before the Lord and rejoice.  I thank God for you and for the privilege of being in your midst this morning."

    We give thanks for Oakhurst!

"ON PERCEIVING A NEW WAY"

 “ON PERCEIVING IN A NEW WAY”

After our daughter Susan graduated from Macalester College in 2005, she signed up for Americorps.  She worked for two years in Albuquerque in an arts center, some of whose clients were adults with learning challenges.  She and other colleagues developed arts pieces with these young adults, especially using theater and drama.  Caroline and I went to visit her on several occasions, learning more about the Southwest, which neither of us knew much about.  We would usually stay with a west Tennessee cousin of Caroline’s dad – Bill and Joanne Claybrooke were great hosts to us in those days. Bill had been in the area since he went to work as a photographer for the atomic work at Los Alamos, and he knew all the back roads and places to visit.

  On one of our excursions, Bill took us to the Acoma Pueblo, which was astonishing.  It is a group of Native Americans who live on a mesa high in the New Mexico landscape, and on this Indigenous Peoples Day, I am thinking of them and of our visit to their home.  Acoma Sky City is located on a mesa that is 350 feet high, and it is one of several Acoma towns.  There are about 5,000 people left in the Acoma clan, and they are descendants of the Anaasazi people.  The town that we visited is the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in North America.  Written records date back to 1150 CE, but their oral tradition takes it back to the BCE/CE era divide.  

     While the Acoma people  do limit contact with those classified as “white,” they also recognize the need for cash flow in the community, so they allow tourists to pay for tours and to purchase their incredible art works.  At that time in 2006, there was only one road up to the town, and it was often blocked to public traffic, except for the tour vans.  Like all indigenous people in this country,  their lives have felt the deep sting of invasion by those of us classified as “white.”  They also limit contact with “white” people because they understand the deeply infectious disease of consumerism, which has captured white culture.  This was one of the first insights that I would gain from our visit with them – the resistance to “white” people is not based so much on the arbitrary system of “race.”  It is based on their empirical observation that people in white culture (and those influenced by it) were held captive to the idea of consumption, that the meaning of life is found in using something completely up in order to gain its benefit.

    This observation was tied to the Acoma idea (and the idea of many indigenous people) that beings on the earth, and indeed existence itself, were sacred and to be honored, even when they were used as food and shelter.  They had prayers to use when eating plants and animals, prayers to use when utilizing other parts of earthly beings.  They recognized the fundamental connection between them and all existence, and nowhere was this more clear than in their connection to water.  Their area averaged 7 inches of rainfall per year (Atlanta’s annual average is about 49 inches). To them, water was obviously precious, and they prayed for rain every day. The idea of wasting water, of using water for other than a fundamental human purpose, was not conceivable.  

    They also saw their ancestors in much of the existence of the world that surrounded them – in plants and animals, in rocks and in the few trees nearby, even in the sand and hard dirt.  It was not a question of “to be or not to be,” it was a question of seeing a fundamental connection, a fundamental community of all of life, even all of existence.  I was impressed by this observation and by its power.  In my context of a metro area full of trees (though less so every day, with all the continual development), I’ve thought of their insight in this way:  which perception is more helpful to humanity – to see a tree as the dwelling place of the ancestors, or to see a tree as lumber, as a house to be built.  

    I was also intrigued by a less philosophical tenet that they shared with us.  Maybe it was my Calvinist leanings, but my ears perked up when they discussed the distribution of power in the tribe.  The men held the political power, and as I heard this, I thought “What else is new?  The same old same old.” But, they added, the women own the property rather than the men, with property being passed down in a matrilineal system.  As one of our female guides put it: “When the men make a bad political decision, guess where they won’t be sleeping that night?”  It was an insightful decision on the separation of powers, to keep one another accountable and to emphasize the power of community.

    On this Indigenous Peoples Day, I give thanks for these Acoma and similar approaches to life.  I am well aware of how much we of European descent have vandalized their lives.  Yet, I am also grateful for the gifts that they offer us.  In our days of shrinking resources and the dissolution of community, these insights from people who have existed continuously for at least 1000 years give me hope.  They offer us a different way of perceiving ourselves and perceiving others, a different way of living our lives, a way that emphasizes connection and community, rather than dissolution and individualism.  To use Jesus’ approach about his storytelling and indeed about his life, let us have ears to hear, eyes to see, and hearts to receive.  

"ELAINE MASSACRE"

 “ELAINE MASSACRE”

I grew up hearing vague stories about the Elaine Race Riot, stories which came from white adults.  They indicated that a few Black folk had been killed in my home county in late September in 1919, because the Black folk did not know their place in a society centered on white supremacy.  Because I was a captive to the idea of white supremacy, I believed them.  As I became a young adult and began to find some freedom from my captivity, I began to doubt the veracity of the stories that I had heard about what was called “the Elaine Race Riot.” It would not be until 2015 that I would learn much more of the full story.  

    Bryan Stevenson and his Equal Justice Institute published a history of lynchings in the USA, especially in the South.  I heard from my longtime friend David Billings about the EJI report:  “It looks like our home county lynched more people than any other county in the country.”  Sure enough, at the top of the list of despicable acts of lynching, there was my home county of Phillips County, Arkansas, where over 230 Black people had been lynched in a white reign of terror over 3 days, from September 30-October 2, 1919.

During the “Red Summer” of 1919, many Black people were lynched because they began to stand up for their human rights.  Black tenant farmers in Phillips County had begun to organize to seek to get higher pay for the cotton that they picked.  They met several times in Black churches that summer, and much of their work was seeking to organize a union to work for better conditions.  On September 29, 1919, they meet in a Black Baptist church in a small community called Hoop Spur, just a few miles north of Elaine, Arkansas.  White deputies came out to break up the meeting, and those deputies fired into the church building.  The Black farmers had expected white violence, so they were somewhat prepared, returning the fire and killing one of the deputies.  The Black farmers drove the deputies away, but the Black farmers were not prepared for what followed.

Mobs of white people gathered in my hometown of Helena, which was the county seat.  They called the return of Black farmers’ fire in response to the white shots fired – they called it an insurrection.  The white people recruited other white people from surrounding towns, and they put out the word to white people in other states.  On that same day, white mobs began killing Black people in unprecedented numbers in Phillips County.  The murdering continued over three days, a reign of terror that killed hundreds of Black people.  Counts of those killed range from 237 (EJI estimate) to 800+, one of the biggest peacetime massacres in American history. 

It was not a “race riot” that killed a few Black people, as I had been told.  It was a “race massacre” that killed hundreds of Black people, carried out 103 years ago in my home county.  Adding great insult to grievous injury, some 120 Black people were arrested for murder and insurrection.  Eventually twelve Black men were convicted of murder and sentenced to death.  Ida B. Wells, the NAACP, and a courageous Black lawyer named Scipio Africanus Jones became advocates for the twelve men wrongly convicted in this case.  Jones became the lead attorney for the men, and it was his vision and endurance and strength that carried the case to the US Supreme Court.  In 1923 in Moore v. Dempsey,  SCOTUS decided to overturn the death verdicts of the black men convicted in the Elaine Massacre.  It was the first time since the Civil War that the Court had overturned a criminal case verdict in a state court decision. 

The Elaine Massacre was horrific and on one level seems far away and long ago.  But, it speaks to contemporary forces.  In 2019 a monument commemorating the victims of the Elaine Massacre was dedicated in Helena across from the Phillips County courthouse, and my friend and colleague Dr. Catherine Meeks was a guest speaker for that dedication.  Caroline and I attended that ceremony, and I wrote about it in my October 7, 2019 blog.  That monument is a reminder of the depth of racism and white supremacy that courses through our arteries and veins as individuals and as communities.  The rise of Trumpism is a stark reminder that this power is vicious and capricious and always dangerous, a stream that flows through American history,  always ready to break out into seditious and deadly violence.  I don’t know if the times in which we live are like the 1850’s, that decade that boiled over into the Civil War, but in these kinds of memories, it sure feels like it.  Find your place and take your stand. 

"EVERYBODY KNOWS ABOUT MISSISSIPPI"

 “EVERYBODY KNOWS ABOUT MISSISSIPPI”

I continue to sort through my files and papers to send them on to the Presbyterian Historical Society for archiving.  One would think that I would have finished by now, but you know how preachers are.  One of my good friends, Inez Giles, once gave a painted rock to her dad, an AME Presiding bishop, and the same one to me.  It said:  “Preachers never die – they just go on and on and on and on…..” I’ve had that feeling in continuing to sort through all my files!

This week I came across a program from the Ole Miss/Kentucky football game of Saturday, September 29, 1962.  Growing up as a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals, I had sports memorabilia from them (including the aforementioned autographed photo of Stan Musial), but I have given most of that to our son David.  I found the Ole Miss program in a different folder – a political one.  I had saved that program because I had attended that football game with my cousin Brown (and, yes the same Brown of the Stan Musial story) and his dad in Jackson, Mississippi.  It was the game where Governor Ross Barnett made an impassioned defense of his refusing to allow a Mississippi citizen to attend the University of Mississippi.  

That citizen was named James Meredith, born and bred in Mississippi, and he was an Air Force veteran who had finally been accepted into Ole Miss.  This week marks the 60th anniversary of that series of events, including a white race riot on the campus.  At the football game on September 29, Governor Barnett vowed never to yield to the “integrationists” of the federal government, and he demanded that the crowd stand and sing “Go, Mississippi.”  Brown and I were segregationists at this point in our lives, but to teenagers – we were starting our junior years in high school – this seemed like an embarrassing thing to do.  Yet, when the entire white crowd at the football game stood and belted out the song, we did too.

James Meredith had started applying to enter the University of Mississippi in Oxford on the day after JFK was inaugurated as President in 1961.  The Board of Directors twice rejected his application.  Meredith decided to take his case to federal court, and it worked its way up to the Fifth Circuit, which ordered the University of Mississippi to accept James Meredith to the college.  The state appealed the decision to the US Supreme Court, and in an emergency order, SCOTUS ordered that Meredith be admitted.  The state legislature met quickly to pass a law to try to manufacture a criminal charge against Meredith to keep him from being accepted as a student at Ole Miss.  Again, the federal courts threw that out, and Meredith was on track to enter Ole Miss in September, 1962.  

Governor Barnett twice refused to admit him, but in secret phone deals with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, he agreed to allow Meredith to enroll if Barnett could save face by continuing to rant against “integrationists.”  Even as he cajoled us to sing “Go, Mississippi” at the football game and proclaiming that he would never allow Meredith to enter, he had already made the deal.  The white supremacists gathering at Oxford, however, thought that Barnett was sincere. On that same football weekend, they began a riot on the Ole Miss campus, and after three days, it was finally brought under control by federal marshals, the National Guard, and US Army troops.  Two people were killed in the riot, and three hundred people were arrested, but Meredith was admitted.  He was guarded 24 hours a day by federal marshals and reserve troops, and he graduated in August, 1963.

It would be convenient to blame this on the state of Mississippi, because as Nina Simone sang, “everybody knows about Mississippi.”  The inconvenient truth, however, is that this story is part of a much larger stream in American history.  One of the fundamental truths of our history is that racism and white supremacy have been part of the narrative since the European beginnings of the country.  Neo-slavery ended only in 1965, and we have continued to struggle with this powerful force in the 57 years since then.  The rising tide of white supremacy, called out by Trumpism, is not a new thing in our history.  It seems to always be with us, sometimes overt and menacing and oppressive, sometimes driven underground by the power of the idea of equality, but always lurking nearby, awaiting the call from the likes of Ross Barnett and Donald Trump.  Each of us - and all of us – are called to find our place and make our stand in this historic struggle between equality and white supremacy.  Where’s my place? Where’s yours?

. 

"NICKEL AND DIMED"

 “NICKEL AND DIMED”

Barbara Ehrenreich died earlier this month at the age of 80.  She was a prolific and profound writer, and I read several of her books.  The most famous of her books – and the one that stuck the most with me – was “Nickel and Dimed,” published in 2001.  In it she went undercover to work in low wage jobs in America to expose the self-interest of the wealthy in indoctrinating people in this country to work in such jobs.  She did her research in the “boom” years of the late 1990’s, and her work proved to be prescient, being as contemporary as possible in a re-reading here in late 2022.

Having grown up in the South, I was very familiar with the subjects and outline of her research, but what I remembered the most from “Nickel and Dimed” was her description of her attending a tent revival not in the South but in Maine.  In the chapter entitled “Scrubbing in Maine,” she indicated that in Maine, it would be easy to go undercover, because most of the low-wage workers were classified as “white,” as she was.  One Saturday night, boredom drove her to a tent revival in a small town there, I’ll turn over the rest of the story to her, in these quotes from that narrative.

“The marquee  in front of the church is advertising a Saturday night “tent revival,” which sounds like the perfect entertainment for an atheist out on her own. Unfortunately, from an entertainment point of view, only about 60 of the approximately 300 folding chairs are populated.  I count three or four people of color – African and, I would guess, Mexican Americans; everyone else is a tragic-looking hillbilly type, my very own people, genetically speaking (Ehrenreich is a name acquired through marriage; my birth name, Alexander, derives directly from Kentucky).

But before anything interesting can happen, the preaching commences.  A man in shirtsleeves tells us what a marvelous book the Bible is and bemoans the fact that people buy so many inferior books when you really need just one……Next a Mexican American fellow takes over the mike, shuts his eyes tight, and delivers a rapid fire summary of our debt to the crucified Christ..  Then it’s an older white guy attacking “this wicked city” for its heretically inadequate contribution of souls to the revival – which costs money you know, this tent didn’t just put itself up……

The preaching goes on, interrupted with dutiful “amens.” It would be nice if someone would read this sad-eyed crowd the Sermon on the Mount, accompanied by a rousing commentary on income inequality and the need for a hike in the minimum wage.  But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse -the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say.  Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again, so that he can never get a word out of his mouth.

I would like to stay around for the speaking in tongues, should it occur, but the mosquitoes, worked into a frenzy by all this talk of His blood, are launching a full scale attack.  I get up to leave, timing my exit for when the preacher’s metronomic head movements have him looking the other way, and walk out to search for my car, half expecting to find Jesus out there in the dark, gagged and tethered to a tent pole.”

So, thanks Barbara Ehrenreich for your life and witness, for all your work, and especially for this pithy and precise insight to 400 years of white American Christianity.  An angry, death-dealing God whose only interest in human life is the corpse of Jesus. A powerful summary of how American Christianity - imbibed by slavery, neo-slavery, white supremacy, patriarchy, and consumer capitalism – is seeking to make its comeback in a narcissist like Donald Trump and crass power mongers like Mitch McConnell and Ron DiSantis.  

"SUSAN STROUPE!"

 “SUSAN STROUPE!”

Caroline and I were  playing balloon ball with 2 year old David  in our duplex in Nashville in the late evening of September 11, 1982 – years before that date became one of infamy in American history.  Caroline said:  “I think that my water broke – I believe that the baby is coming.”  It was a few days early, and I was skeptical, but I’ve learned that Caroline (and other women) may know more than I do on this subject.  We went to the birthing room at Vanderbilt Hospital, and Mary Susan came out a couple of hours later early in the morning of September 12.  We have been celebrating her ever since.  

We moved from Nashville to Decatur five months later, so baby Susan was a hit at Oakhurst Presbyterian for many reasons, including the fact that she was the only infant there.  She grew up there, and it was a great blessing to her and to us – many grandmas and grandpas, aunts and uncles.  She also learned how to be a good listener there – hearing many different cultural approaches and voices.  With so many African-Americans at Oakhurst and so much African-American music there, she learned to clap on the back beat!  

Though we are her parents, she has been (and continues to be) our teacher on so many levels.  She took us up into the cold north when she went to Macalaster College in Minnesota.  She majored in English and drama, and we were introduced to the world of theater in a way that I never thought possible.  We took a trip to the headwaters of the Mississippi River at Lake Itasca one year when she was there.  I was amazed that I could walk across the beginnings of the River that swirls and eddies and flows fast in its mile wide crossing at my hometown of Helena, Arkansas.

        She worked for Americorps for two years in Albuquerque, and we learned a whole new world of the Southwest.  Given her compassionate heart, she worked in Albuquerque with adults with developmental disabilities.  She made lifelong friends there among the artists in that Americorps Center, and they helped their students do a play by Shakespeare.

She moved to Baltimore in 2009 to work on her MFA in theater at Towson University, and she has been thriving and growing in Baltimore ever since.  We have enjoyed getting to see her develop her personality and leadership.  She joined the church choir at Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church.  Soon after that she called me to ask if I knew who Taylor Branch was.  When I replied that of course I knew who he was because I had read and used his great trilogy on MLK, she said:  “Well, he sings with me in the Brown Memorial Choir!”  She later joined the church as a member (with some sadness about transferring from Oakhurst), later chaired the Worship Committee there and now is an elder on the Session.

As an artist in American culture, Susan has to cobble “day jobs” together for income, but she has been blessed to find theater-related jobs in order to do this, for which we are grateful.  She is one of the founders of Submersive Theater, a group of colleagues who approach works of art in an “immersive” way.  Yes, another learning for us – “immersive theater” invites the audience to be participants in the performance of the play itself.  For those such as I who like linear plots, I’ve had a learning curve on this.  But, it is great and pleasing to watch Susan develop and perform so well in these contexts.  As Susan put it to me, “There’s a lot of similarities between worship and theater, and I learned a lot of this in worship at Oakhurst: the willingness to not rely so much on script; the belief that the congregation/audience are integral parts of the performances; the necessity of recognizing and learning to cross cultural boundaries without colonizing the other.”

Susan is deeply passionate for justice and has a deeply compassionate heart, a combination that makes her so impressive and such a good theater (and church) leader and performer.  She has been a gift to us ever since she popped out of Caroline’s womb in 1982. We had not done amniocentesis during the pregnancy to determine the gender identity or anything else about the baby whom Caroline was carrying in 1982, and we were expecting a boy.  We even had a mild disagreement on the way to the hospital about what name we would give a boy, but we were agreed that if we were blessed to have a girl, we would name her “Mary Susan.”  When Dr. Betty Neff helped to slide Susan out of Caroline, she said: “Welcome to the world, Mary Susan!”  And Caroline almost leaped up from the birthing table in joy – the girl that we so wanted.  Susan has been blessing us and teaching us ever since, and we give so many thanks for her on her birthday today!