"DAVID STROUPE!"

 “DAVID STROUPE!”

We were grateful and blessed to have our family with us over the Christmas holidays – Susan, David, Erin, Emma and Zoe.  While we were together, we wondered what the holidays would look like in 2024 – would we be able to get together as usual?  If so, what kind of mood would we and the country be in, just after the presidential election of 2024?   

    We have all gone now in different directions – Emma to Paris for a semester abroad; Zoe back to her senior year in high school at Interlocken Arts Academy in Michigan;  David and Erin back to teaching at the University of Utah;  Susan back to all things theater in Baltimore.  Caroline and I will be celebrating our 50th wedding anniversary this summer – mark your calendars now for Saturday, June 22, when we will gather at Hawkins Hall in Legacy Park Decatur to celebrate.

    This week we are celebrating David’s 44th birthday on Wednesday, January 31.  He was born on a snowy night in Norfolk, Virginia, and before he was a year old, we moved to Nashville to be closer to family.  When he was 3, we moved to Decatur in 1983 to be pastors at Oakhurst, and he would have Decatur as his home base until he moved to Houston in 2002.  He has since lived in Seattle (where he got his PhD in science education), in East Lansing, Michigan, where he taught and rose in the field to get tenure and become an associate professor at Michigan State, and be an award winning author.  Just this month we learned that he has been named the winner of a big award for his book  "Growing and Sustaining Student-Centered Science Classrooms".  It is the AACTE Gloria Ladson-Billings Award.  Here's the link if you want to read about it. https://edprepmatters.net/2024/01/university-of-utahs-david-stroupe-to-receive-2024-aacte-gloria-j-ladson-billings-outstanding-book-award/.  He and Erin moved last summer to Salt Lake City, where they are both teaching at the University of Utah. 

    We remember that during his elementary and middle school years, he would learn vocabulary while jumping around the house and making up all kinds of sports games to occupy his body while his mind worked on studies.  He has great hand/eye coordination, and he was a good soccer player in his youthful days.  Indeed, when he was playing on a club soccer team in middle school, his coach came to us to tell us that David had great potential as a soccer player.  He lacked one thing, however – he did not have the competitive, killer instinct.  The coach indicated that he could teach this instinct to David, but he wanted to ask us about it first.  We appreciated the coach coming to us first, and we told him so, but we also indicated that we preferred David’s instincts the way that they were.  We had worked hard to help David develop a compassionate and loving heart, and that would serve him well all his life.  David ended up switching to tennis as a sport – no hitting anybody, no knocking anybody down.

    David still has his compassionate and kind heart, and we give thanks for all his work to develop that and to maintain it in the kind of hard and mean world in which we all live.  He has expanded that kind heart to the world of creatures, and when he would catch fish in a Mississippi pond as a kid, he would throw them back into the pond. And he even likes snakes!  He has dedicated his career to making certain that all students, regardless of income or racial classification, have access to quality public education.  

    So, this week we are giving thanks for our son, David Armour Stroupe, who has brought us so much joy and has taught us so much.   Thank you, David!!!!  Thanks for being who you are!

"DEMONIC FORCES"

“DEMONIC FORCES”

I’ve been preaching lately, using the lectionary gospel readings from the first chapter of Mark.  Mark doesn’t waste any words on the birth of Jesus – he gets right to the point with a short intro of John the Baptizer and then launches into the preaching and healing tour of Jesus.  In his healing work, he encounters many people captured by demonic powers.  I have always been puzzled by this idea of “demonic forces.”  In many cases in the New Testament, the stories seem to imply that these people are mentally ill, but their captivity is seen as being possessed by a harmful, destructive spirit.  Later in Mark 5 (and in Luke 8), Jesus encounters a man possessed by a demonic spirit so powerful that he gives up his identity to the spirit.  

The definition of “demon” is a force that seems to be a malevolent supernatural entity.  I do think that there is something to the mental illness angle of someone’s being possessed by demonic forces, but I also want to consider that there is a deeper and more powerful type of demonic possession.  This kind of possession is communal and difficult to root out, because it is seen as normal, as the way life is, or perhaps the way should be.  I have been possessed by demons, and their power in my life is so strong that there are still moments of such possession.  My first encounter with such a demonic force was in engaging my captivity to racism.  In many ways and for many years, I did not know that I was possessed by the demon of race and white supremacy.  I did not think that I was possessed because I thought that white supremacy was normal, and indeed had been ordained by God.  This connecting of racism to being a demonic power has helped me to understand the reality that is described when the Bible uses concepts like “demons.”

I thought that racism was normal because it had been taught to me by good white people like my family and my church and my segregated school.  It took me a long time to understand that I was captured by a demonic force, a force that told me that people classified as white were superior and that all other racial classifications were inferior.  I have struggled with this demonic force of racism and white supremacy all of my adult life – it took me reaching adulthood before I even realized that I was a captive to this demonic power.  I have written in other places about my journey on this {“While We Run This Race” and “Passionate for Justice,” to name a couple of books), and I will expand on that story in a forthcoming memoir on my mother and me, that I hope will be published this year.  

As I think about this coming year of 2024 and the upcoming presidential election, I’m returning to this elemental way of thinking, that many of us in the USA are captive to demonic powers.  Trump’s hold on the Republicans seems to be a prime example of a demonic force.  I’m not saying that Trump is a demonic force (though one could make a case for it) – rather, I am saying that he has called out some primeval demonic forces that have always flowed through our veins as American people.  He understands the deep captivity to race that lives in the hearts many of us who are classified as white, and he seems to be a master at developing the fears that reside in our collective white hearts.  So, this looks to be a crucial year and crucial election for all of us.

Yet, I don’t want to remain in captivity, and I’m hoping that you don’t either. There are plenty of demonic forces that hold us in captivity: racial classification, gender identity, economic status, materialism – the list is endless.  Jesus comes on the scene in Mark’s gospel, proclaiming an opportunity for beginning to gain liberation from our captivity, to see ourselves and others as children of God, not as children of one of the many categories of the world.  In this scary and crazy year, let us remember that Jesus burst onto the scene with a radical message:  the world belongs to God; we belong to God; we belong to one another.  As we fret about this year, let us remember this message from a Jewish peasant who was given the death penalty by the state of Rome.  Jesus means freedom, as Paul put it in Galatians, and that is what we are offered in this time of captivity.  Let that be a source of hope for us.

It will take a lot of work to begin to find this freedom.  It has taken me a lot of work to begin to find some liberation from my captivities.  In regard to race, I listened to new and different narratives.  I put myself in the presence of people whom I had been taught to fear, and I learned (and continue to learn) so much from them.  I worked for justice and peace and equity, and I continue to do so.  I say this not to praise myself but to seek to be realistic about the kind of work that it takes to seek to find liberation in the midst of our captivities.  And, yes, this could be a grim year, but it could also be a time of beginning to find a new definition and a new way of seeing ourselves and seeing the world around us.  In these days ahead, let us choose the way to life and liberation. 

 

"THE MEANING OF DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR."

 “THE MEANING OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR”

I don’t remember when I first encountered Martin Luther King.  My earliest memories come from my captivity to white supremacy – I understood MLK to be a communist, maybe a con artist duping Black people and some white people, hoping to get big bucks from them.  But, the SCLC actions in Birmingham in 1963 made something stir just a bit in my heart.  Seeing the fire hoses, the police dogs attacking the children – those things made me begin to wonder in my junior year in high school – did I know the whole story? Or was there more to it than I had been taught?

It was in this context that I decided to watch MLK’s “I Have A Dream” speech at the March on Washington in the last week of August in 1963, just before I began my senior year in high school.  I was astonished – there were 250,000 people there of all colors and walks of life – could all of them be fools, be communists?  And then there was Dr. King and his stunning eloquence and powerful ideas and calls to action.  I knew then that I did not know the entire story, that my captivity to white supremacy had severely limited my imagination.  I was not converted yet, but I knew that I had a lot to learn.  Whenever I think of Martin Luther King, Jr, I think of that sweltering day in August, 1963 when he opened a small window in my heart and my imagination.

Yet, it was not just white folk like me who were moved by Martin Luther King, Jr.  Black folk too were astonished at his courage and his audacity, and I want to return to part of an essay by poet June Jordan to share the perspective of Black people in response to Dr. King.

  This excerpt is from the best essay that I have ever read on King.  If you don’t know her work, please look her up – many of her poems were transformed into songs by Sweet Honey in the Rock.  She died of breast cancer in 2002.  This sharing is from her essay on Dr. King “The Mountain and the Man Who Was Not God,” given as an address at Stanford on King Day in 1987.  It is from her 1993 book of essays “Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union.”

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

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

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

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

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

So, as we celebrate MLK Day and seek ways to honor his witness and life, let us find ways in our time to step into the fray as he did – check out the criminal injustice system; speak out and act out about the continuing power of white supremacy and racism; stand against and march against the slaughter in Gaza; fight against the tide of patriarchy seeking to roll back the gain in women’s rights.  As Dr. King put it in the sermon played at his funeral, let us be known as drum majors for justice.  Let’s honor his life and witness in those ways.

"SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM"

 “SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM”

     Christmastide ended in the West on Saturday, January 6, a date which the church has traditionally named as Epiphany, to celebrate the arrival of the magi to worship the baby Jesus.  That story in Matthew 2 is filled with intrigue and slyness and violence.  The magi arrive in Jerusalem, announcing (undiplomatically) to King Herod that they are searching for the baby born to be king of the Jewish people.  Herod is greatly troubled but gets advice from his prophets that the baby is to be born in Bethlehem.  He tells the magi that he wants to worship the baby too, and he asks that they inform him where the baby is, so that he can come and pay homage.  The magi have eyes to see and hearts to discern, however, so they return home by another way after they have found Jesus.

    Herod is infuriated at this slight and at his lack of intelligence gathering, so he sends soldiers to slaughter the boys of Bethlehem.  In the meantime, Joseph has also had a vision and has taken his family to Egypt to escape the carnage, much as many other Palestinian families are now seeking to do in the midst of the Israeli bombardment.  The Christmas story doesn’t end on a sweet, sentimental note – it ends with the slaughter of the baby boys of Bethlehem – this story lives in the same world that we do.

      I’m grateful to be alive and in relatively good health as we begin this new year of 2024.  We had a great visit with Susan and with David and his family over the holidays.  Susan has returned to Baltimore, with David and Erin going back to Salt Lake City.  Emma will spend this semester abroad in Paris (tough duty), and Zoe is a senior at Interlochen Arts Academy.  So, I have plenty to give me an attitude of gratitude, but I’m also feeling anxious and depressed about 2024, with its political campaigns and its elections.  I wish that President Biden had decided not to run for a second term – he has had a great presidency, but he seems frailer by the day.  And the Trumpster is looming – he is a scary man, and with Biden’s frailty, there is a distinct possibility that he could win the Presidency. I’m still holding out a faint hope that Biden will recognize the error of his decision and step down to allow the next generation to step up.  

    I’m beginning to think that this year is resembling 1968, when Lyndon Johnson’s presidency collapsed early that year, and he announced in March that he would not run for re-election that year.  That opened up a maelstrom of craziness and chaos and violence, with Martin Luther King Jr being assassinated on April 4, and presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy being assassinated two months later.  It ended up with Richard Nixon being elected President.  I was a young man then – indeed it was my first year to vote.  Because I felt that the Democrats had cheated Eugene McCarthy out of the nomination and because of the police violence at the Democratic convention in Chicago that year, I joined thousands of other young people who decided not to vote, thus giving the election to Nixon.  

    Although I have seen the error of my ways, I fear that the same thing may happen this year with this generation of young people.  I hope that I am wrong, but I have this growing feeling that this may be a disastrous year for our country, and that puts me in the mood to hear and think about William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming,” written in 1919 at the end of World War 1, in the middle of the Russian Revolution, in the midst of a growing crisis in Europe, and as Red Summer was growing in America.  His poem catches my mood at the beginning of this new year, so I’ll close with it:

“The Second Coming”

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?