"EARTH DAY"

 ‘EARTH DAY’

On this Earth Day weekend, I am up in cold and gray weather in northern Michigan, near the shore of Lake Michigan.  We came up to hear our granddaughter Zoe perform in a concert at Interlocken Academy for the Arts, where she is spending her first academic year.  Susan also came over, so we have also enjoyed the mini-family reunion.

Perhaps it is the “winter” weather up here at the end of April that makes me think of a very familiar yet still powerful poem by Mary Oliver: “The Summer Day.” It has also come to mind and heart because Earth Day, officially started in 1970, calls to us loudly about the climate crisis.  Oliver’s poem speaks to us about the attitude that we must seek to develop in our hearts about our relationship to nature and the earth, if we want to take on the climate crisis in earnest – which obviously we must do if we want our grandchildren like Zoe and Emma to have a life.  Find yourself in Oliver’s poem and then decide what you will do with your one wild and precious life.

“The Summer Day”

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean—

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver

“House of Light”, 1990

"LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM JAIL"

 “LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM JAIL”

Sixty years ago this month, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dr. Ralph Abernathy, and others were arrested in Birmingham.  They were leading protests in Birmingham in April, 1963.  City leaders obtained a state court injunction telling King and Abernathy and others not to continue their demonstrations and protests for basic human rights in Birmingham.  King responded to the court injunction with these words:  “ We cannot in all good conscience obey such an injunction, which is an unjust, undemocratic, and unconstitutional misuse of the legal process.”  Complicating this situation was the fact that SCLC was out of bail funds, and they could not guarantee bail funds for themselves or for anyone else who was arrested in the cause.  King was one of their main fundraisers, and if he went to jail, funding might dry up.  Harry Belafonte, Stanley Levison, and others went to work to raise the funds.

After much internal and external debate, King and Abernathy decided to demonstrate and to get arrested.  They were arrested on Good Friday, April 12, 1963, and King was placed into solitary confinement.  While he was there, he read a letter from eight moderate white pastors in Birmingham, sent to him and the other leaders of SCLC.  It was published in the Birmingham News, and it urged King and SCLC to stand down from the demonstrations, in order to give the moderate white leaders time to work things out and to move Birmingham in a more progressive direction.  During his time in jail, King responded with “The Letter from Birmingham City Jail.” He wrote it on the edges of the very Birmingham News newspaper in which the letter asking him to stand down had been published.  

King’s “Letter” has become a classic of American documents and of Christian documents worldwide.  If you have not read it lately, please take time to do it this week, the week of its being written 60 years ago.  It was first published in Jet Magazine in May, 1963, and it began to set the moderate and liberal white world on fire.  

Here are the opening paragraph of his Letter, and a quote from it midway through.  They should whet your appetite to read the entire Letter.

“While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling our present activities ‘unwise and untimely.”  Seldom, if ever, do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas…..But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will, and your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I would like to answer your statement……

“My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure.  History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.  Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor;  it must be demanded by the oppressed.  Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct action movement that was “well-timed,” according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation.  For years now, I have heard the word “Wait!”  It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity.  This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.”

Is this Letter only a relic from 60 years ago, dusted off as a testimony to the great work of the past?  Is this Letter only a reminder of how complicit people classified as “white” were in the development and sustenance of neo-slavery?  This Letter qualifies as both of those, but it is also a letter addressed to those of us classified as “white” in the 21st century in 2023.  In these crazy days, it is also a reminder of the growing number of Black “white supremacists” who become apologists for the rising tide of racism that is crying out for a return to a time when everyone agreed that white supremacy is God’s way and nature’s way. 

     If you have not read it in 2023, please do so this week and ask yourself:  what would Dr. King say today to those of us who are classified as “white?”  What is he saying to me in this letter?  Let us find ourselves in this Letter, and in this anniversary month of both King’s Letter and his assassination 5 years later.  Let us pledge ourselves to the streets and to the courthouses and statehouses to work for human rights, as this Letter so powerfully calls us to do.

"RESURRECTION"

 “RESURRECTION”

We are now in Eastertide, the season of the Resurrection.  Most of us are not sure what to do with the doctrine of the Resurrection, because it seems so supernatural, and at most it applies only to what happens to us when we die as individuals.  We like Easter and its springtime arrays of new life surging forth, but we are not certain about the idea of Resurrection.

In that reluctance, we join a long list of witnesses who are not sure what to do with the Resurrection.  The primary witnesses to the Resurrection in the Bible were not considered trustworthy by their culture – they were women.  In that culture (and in ours), we are not sure that women are trustworthy.  The male disciples did not believe the women’s testimony about a risen Jesus, and indeed Thomas says that he won’t believe anyone’s testimony about the Resurrection until he can put his fingers into the wounds of the crucified Jesus.

But the women disciples themselves struggle with the Resurrection.  In John’s Gospel, Mary Magdalene cannot recognize the risen Jesus, even when he stands right in front of her, talking to her.  And, the earliest Gospel account of the Resurrection in Mark finds the women running from the empty tomb, saying nothing to anyone.  Indeed the Gospel of Mark ends on an incomplete sentence, with most scholars believing that the original ending has been lost.  But, what if the author of Mark wants it that way, leaving it up to us, the future readers, to complete the incomplete ending?  What if part of the power of Resurrection is that it requires us to complete it?  We know that the women eventually told the story of the empty tomb and of the Resurrection, and what if that is our calling in response to the Easter story?  

I grew up believing that the doctrine of the Resurrection was about what happens to us when we die.  Over the years I’ve come to shift my understanding of the Resurrection.  Its meaning is not to tell us what happens to us when we die.  Its meaning is to tell us what is happening to us while we’re living.  I’ve had many resurrections in my life – on racial classification, on gender identity, on weapons, on the power of economic class, and on many others.  

In this season of the Resurrection in 2023, perhaps its central power is where it leads us into new life in this life, not in the life to come.  May we be able to see the risen Jesus standing right in front of us – if we cannot, may we listen to the witnesses who tell us about the risen Jesus.  It will change our lives – I know that it did mine, and it continues to do so.  

In his fine essay on the Resurrection called “He Is Risen,” Thomas Merton put it this way in 1975:   “We are called not only to believe that Christ once rose from the dead, thereby proving that he was God. We are called to experience that Resurrection in our own lives by entering into this dynamic movement, by following Christ who lives in us.” In a time of the killing of children, of the indictment of an ex-President, of the expulsion of two Black members of the Tennessee legislature, these words of Resurrection from Merton and others are, indeed, words to live by:

    “We are called not only to believe that Christ once rose from the dead, thereby proving that he was God. We are called to experience that Resurrection in our own lives by entering into this dynamic movement, by following Christ who lives in us.”

"LONGING FOR LOVE, BUT BELIEVING IN DEATH"

 “LONGING FOR LOVE, BUT BELIEVING IN DEATH”

On Palm Sunday, 1865 (April 9 that year), General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Virginia, and the Civil War, which began in April of 1861, came to a close.  There was relief and celebration in DC and in the North (and to some in the South), but by Good Friday, that relief would turn to shock and horror when President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated – he would die the next day.  It was a stunning Holy Week that year.

The biblical Holy Week begins on a note of triumph and expectation.  Jesus of Nazareth, the great healer and wise teacher, is entering Jerusalem during Passover in a politically charged atmosphere.  His followers celebrate him – they have experienced love and healing and a new vision of what life can be.  They are fired up, and who can blame them?  Can this be the time that Jesus will overthrow Rome and reform the Temple?  

    The Roman governor Pontus Pilate has left his comfort in the villa on the Mediterranean Sea and has paraded into Jerusalem with his imperial army – coming  to quell any thoughts of seeking liberation by Jewish folk during the Festival of Passover.  These two leaders of very different parades do not know each other, when Jesus enters Jerusalem on the first day of the week.  Their paths will intersect soon, however, and things have never been the same since their engagement with one another.

    These early days of April seem to justify why T.S. Eliot called April the cruelest month – so many assassinations and executions.  Jesus, killed on Good Friday.  Abraham Lincoln, shot on Good Friday and dying the next day.  Martin Luther King, Jr., assassinated 55 years ago on April 4.  Young children shot down in school in Nashville last week.  The death that closes out Holy Week seems to abide in all places and in all ages.  The followers of Jesus enter Jerusalem longing for love, believing in love, but finding death.  Jesus executed, Lincoln shot down, MLK shot down, children shot down, women disappeared.  Holy Week begins in excitement and anticipation but ends in death, despair and flight – the world indeed seems dominated by death.

    Holy Week shows us the drama of our lives – we long for love, but we believe in death.  We want to believe in this Jesus of Nazareth, but the world seems so much with us, a world dominated by corrupt and egotistical leaders, a world that believes in the power of violence and death.  Holy Week walks us squarely into the midst of this struggle – no fading away here, no sentimentality allowed.  Holy Week looks squarely at one of the most difficult truths of our lives:  we long for love, but we believe in death.  Holy Week asks us to sit with this uncomfortable truth this week – to think about our visions lost or diminished, about our hopes being dashed, to think about our compromises that make us gradually lose hold of our dreams and hopes.  Holy Week asks us to stay with that process in our own lives and in the life of the world.

    This belief in death, this yielding to death is so powerful, and it even enters into the incredible story of God with us.  Holy Week asks us to remember that process, to acknowledge it even now.  This power of death is not the end of the story, but it is a central pivoting point of The Story and of our story.  We won’t be left wailing at the Cross, but we are asked to acknowledge that we are, indeed, there when they give Jesus the death penalty.