"THE COMPETING VISIONS OF HOLY WEEK"

 “THE COMPETING VISIONS OF HOLY WEEK”

“Ride On, King Jesus, no one can hinder us!”  This adapted line from the African-American spiritual tells us so much about Holy Week.  I used to love it when the Sanctuary Mass Choir, led by Ms. Joann Price, sang this anthem during the Lent and Easter season, and always at funerals.  It is a powerful song, so if you haven’t heard it lately, find it online and be lifted up.

Jesus does ride on in Holy Week, which began yesterday, and which takes us through his execution on Friday and resurrection on Sunday.  Whether you are a believer or not, take time this week to notice the dynamics of the story of Holy Week.  Jesus rides into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, and he knows that this is the time when his vision must take hold – this is the critical week.  His followers are fired up, and why shouldn’t they be – he has healed their bodies and their spirits; he has fed the hungry; he has cured the sick; and he has given them a new vision of life and how to live their lives.  This is it – this year, Jerusalem!

Part of the fervor comes from the time of the Jewish calendar – it is the season of Passover, the commemoration of God’s defeat of Pharoah, a defeat that brought the Hebrew people out of slavery in Egypt and into the liberation of the wilderness.  Part of the Seder meal for Passover has the phrase “Next year, Jerusalem!”  And, as Jesus enters Jerusalem on a jackass to celebrate Passover, his followers are ecstatic – the hated Romans will be overthrown, and the corrupt religious leaders of Judaism will be replaced with compassionate and righteous leaders.  “Ride On, King Jesus!”   But, Rome is watching.

  While Jesus and his followers parade into Jerusalem from the north, another parade is entering from the west.  It is a Roman parade, led by Governor Pontus Pilate, bringing a garrison of Roman soldiers into Jerusalem at the time of Passover.  Their purpose is a display of power, to warn those pilgrims who come to celebrate Passover.  Their parade is impressive – calvary on powerful horses, infantry soldiers armed to the teeth, flag-bearers displaying the banners of the Roman Empire, the golden poles with the Roman eagles atop them.  Trumpets blaring, drums beating, an imperial demonstration of might and power, all designed to send a message to the Jewish folk who celebrate Passover:  “Pay Attention- remember who is in charge!  Celebrate your religious holiday all that you want, but remember that Rome is in charge, not the God of Jesus. Pay attention or risk imprisonment or death.  No liberation talk allowed here!”

    Jesus leads a parade based in love, justice, compassion, and healing.  Pontus Pilate leads a parade based in violence and domination and death – two competing visions of life.  We will see that drama played out in Holy Week.  The disciples began with hope and excitement and determination, but the power of Rome shrinks their hearts and their vision and their resolve.  By the end of the week, they too are crying out “Crucify him!”  All the male disciples desert Jesus when he is arrested, although Peter seeks to go a little way with Jesus – but he too fades away quickly.  Only the women disciples remain faithful to Jesus, and as we wonder whether women should hold power in the church, we should recall who stayed with Jesus and who the primary witnesses were.

Holy Week reminds us of the struggles in our hearts also.  We are longing for love, but we are believing in death.  We so desperately want to believe in the vision of love and justice and compassion, but the powers of the world roar at us or bedazzle us, and we fall in line.  For those of us able to hold out a little bit, as Peter did, the powers wear us down – we turn our hearts over to money, to racial classification, to redemptive violence, to gender identity, to class, to nation, to the Trumpdemic, to any number of other powers who compete for our devotion.  We seek to resist these powers, but they are so pervasive and so invasive, that we often yield, as did Peter.  We may not holler out “Crucify him!”, but we do say “Ride on, King Jesus?  Yeah, just ride on out of here, so we can get on with our lives.” We come to agree that Jesus deserves the death penalty.

The drama of Holy Week reminds us of the hopes and failures of our lives – we long for love, but we believe in death.  We know that is not the end of the drama of Holy Week, but for this week, seek to stay with it.  The stories in Luke’s Gospel from chapters 19-23 are a good companion, so check them out.  Let us acknowledge this struggle in our hearts between these two competing visions, and let us seek to be like those women disciples – choose love over death, choose compassion over redemptive violence, and seek to find our way to life, even in the midst of death. 

"WHAT DOES A WOMAN DO WITH A PHI BETA KAPPA KEY?"

 “WHAT DOES A WOMAN DO WITH A PHI BETA KAPPA KEY”

This question was asked of our friend Joyce Tucker, as she appeared before the Committee on Examinations of Atlanta Presbytery for ordination as a pastor in the late 1970’s.  The inquisitor was a prominent male minister on the Committee.  Her dossier indicated that she had graduated from Duke and was welcomed into the Phi Beta Kappa Club there because of her outstanding academic work.  She could not respond as she would have liked to this question, because that committee had the power to determine whether or not she would be accepted for ordination.  She was eventually certified for ordination by the Committee.

That question was just one of thousands of questions and rejections of women as leaders and pastors in the Presbyterian Church.  This year marks the 60th anniversary of the ordination of women as pastors in the PCUS, the former southern Presbyterian Church.  The Presbyterian Church split over slavery in 1861 at the beginning of the Civil War, and we were the last mainline denomination to reunite, doing so at a special worship service in Atlanta in 1983.  The former “Northern” (but really-the-rest-of-the-country) UPCUSA church had voted to ordain women as pastors in 1956, and first woman ordained as a pastor was Margaret Towner that same year.

There had been many discussions and attempts to approve ordination for women in these branches of the Presbyterian church.  In 1916 the PCUS had approved ordination of women to be deacons, and the UPCUSA had done it in 1922.  The UPCUSA had approved ordaining women as ruling elders in 1930, but the PCUS would not take it that far.  In the 1950’s the southern Presbyterians began to work for allowing women to be ordained as pastors.  The PCUS governing body sent a recommendation to ordain women as pastors in 1956, but it failed to get a majority of presbyteries to approve it, losing 44-39.  In 1963, the governing body again recommended approval of women’s ordination, and in 1964, the presbyteries agreed by a vote 53-27.  It became church policy, and the shift became an article in  the New York Times.

The first woman to be ordained in the former PCUS was Dr. Rachel Henderlite, who was the daughter of a pastor and who had a PhD. In ethics from Yale, under H. Richard Niebuhr.  She had taught for a considerable amount of time at the Presbyterian School of Christian Education, when she learned that her salary was not equal to that of the male faculty members. She worked hard for that equity, and her work became well known.  She was approached by some male ministers in Hanover Presbytery, where Richmond was located, asking her to seek to become the first woman to be ordained in the former PCUS.  She agreed, and after some struggles with the Presbytery, she was approved for ordination.  She was ordained at interracial All Souls Presbyterian Church in Richmond on December 12, 1965. She indicated that for many years she received a postcard annually from a male minister in South Carolina, reminding her that she had broken Biblical law by becoming a minister and that as a result, she would rot in hell.

There are many stories like Dr. Henderlite’s, including Caroline’s (she was ordained in 1973 by Atlanta Presbytery after many machinations).  A lot of southern churches paid no heed to the policy that allowed the ordination of women to church office of deacon, elder, or pastor.  My home church was one of those, and in the late 1970’s, the women members, including my mother, made a push for women to be ordained as elders.  The clerk of the Session and the pastor were opposed to the ordination of women, but at the congregational meeting, some women nominated the daughter of one of the wealthiest members of the church to be an elder.  When the pastor refused to accept the nomination, the wealthy father spoke up and indicated his displeasure at his daughter being rejected.  The pastor then allowed the daughter’s name to be placed in nomination, and as planned by the women, she then declined the nomination. But, the door had been opened for Maud Cain Howe to be nominated.  She was nominated and elected to be the first woman elder at the 125 year old church.  

    Maybe that’s what a woman does with a Phi Beta Kappa key does – she uses it to unlock doors for folk, doors that men have locked to keep people out.  We are grateful for the tenacity, creativity and determination of so many women and men, who have worked and cajoled and marched and sat in and testified to the fact that God shows no partiality.  May we find our place in this great cloud of witnesses.

“WE ARE EACH OTHER – THE WORK OF SONYA CLARK”

 “WE ARE EACH OTHER – THE WORK OF SONYA CLARK”

Caroline and I were blessed to be able to attend the High Museum of Art’s exhibit of Sonya Clark’s textile work on its last weekend in town in mid-February.  I’m not much on textile art (one of my many shortcomings), but this was a stunning exhibit, and I want to lift her witness as part of Women’s History Month. She was born in 1967, and this is what she said about her heritage:

"I was born in Washington DC to a psychiatrist from Trinidad and a nurse from Jamaica. I gained an appreciation for craft and the value of the handmade from my maternal grandmother who was a professional tailor. Many of my family members taught me the value of a well-told story and so it is that I value the stories held in objects.”

The title of her exhibit at the High was “We Are Each Other.”  She was inspired by a Gwendolyn Brooks poem “Paul Robeson” (1970) which closes with, “we are each other’s harvest/we are each other’s business/we are each other’s magnitude and bond.”  The emphasis of the exhibit was that in our age of extreme individualism, we all belong to one another, and we all are collaborations of many folks.  In one interview, she noted that she herself was the result of a collaboration of her parents, hopefully for more than twenty minutes, as she put it.  Her themes of collaboration and interaction and engaging our diversities were powerfully demonstrated in the High’s exhibit.

Clark’s work is no sentimental hope that we all should just get along.  Her work invites the observer to participate in her art work and to develop the collaboration as we go.  Because of space limitations, I’ve chosen five projects that crossed many boundaries with a deep amount of integrity.  The High exhibit began with her “Beaded Prayers Project,” begun in 1998, in which found objects were woven, glued, tied, into a larger background.  I counted 135 of these panels, most of which have been made by observers and participants in Ms. Clark’s art work.  It is an ever-expanding work, in which people are asked to acknowledge their roots, note their pain, and look to the future.

Second was a wall hanging of Madame C.J. Walker, the first African-American woman millionaire, having made her fortune through selling products for Black women’s hair.  The wall hanging was made entirely of plastic hair combs – combs that are used to shape and beautify Black’s women’s hair.  The hanging was huge, and as we got closer to it, we noted that various parts of the combs were missing, the newly shaped pieces fashioned together to make up the portrait of Madame Walker.  Black women’s hair has long been a central focus of the struggle against racism’s desire to demean and diminish the humanity of those classified as “Black” in our culture.  The need and the desire to straighten Black women’s hair so that it looks like white women’s hair is still a powerful force in American culture.

Clark took on this power of white supremacy to seek to dictate Black humanity and beauty in her Hair Craft Project.  She and fellow artists noted the power and the resonance of the curliness of Black people’s hair, and Clark worked to note that this power was not only symbolic but also inspiring.  She and other artists noted the many curls of Black hair, and they developed a new language, using the curly turns of Black hair as the basis for a new alphabet for Black people.  The exhibit at the High had examples of the new alphabet and included sentences in the new language.  This project itself will take a lot more work, but it is all built on Clark’s idea of collaboration.

The last two parts of the exhibit that I want to note relate to the continuing power of the Confederacy and white supremacy.  Clark notes the stubborn tenacity of white supremacy in American culture, and she offers two approaches to it.  The first is the “Unraveling Project,” in which the participants are asked to reflect on the continuing power of the Confederacy and white supremacy in our country.  She seeks help in unraveling particular Confederate battle flags, and she notes that in this work, many of the flags are very difficult to unravel – a reality and a metaphor for the difficult work of overcoming and dismantling racism. 

I could go on and on about her work, but I want to finish on the one that touched me the most.  Ms. Clark indicated that she had been to the Smithsonian Museum of American History, and while she was there, she saw an exhibit with Abraham Lincoln’s top hat.  Right beside it was a tea towel used by Robert E. Lee when he surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, thus bringing an end to the Civil War.  The tea towel was white linen with a subtle red stripe at the bottom, and the tea towels that were at Appomattox were cut up and distributed to various soldiers on that day of surrender.  Clark wondered aloud (though she knew the answer) why that tea towel had not become the symbol of the Confederacy rather than the battle flag.  She wants to make the Confederate tea towel much better known, and she made a huge hanging of the towels woven together.  She also encouraged us attendees to make our own Confederate tea towels and asked us to help make this the symbol of the Confederacy.  Maybe Donald Trump’s supporters will use the tea towel symbol when they storm the next government building.

Sonya Clark is a stunning and remarkable artist – if you don’t know her work (which I did not), look her up and learn from her powerful insights and provocative art.  She teaches at Amherst, and we are all the better off for her artistic vision and work.

"SHOULD JOE GO?"

 “SHOULD JOE GO?”

I am thinking and worrying about the Presidential election in November.  I started to name this blog “Joe Should Go,” but I couldn’t quite bring myself to do that.  The time is running short, but if President Biden wanted to step down as the Democratic front-runner, there is still a small window left.  Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not run for re-election at the end of March of 1968.  That did not turn out well for the Democrats, but Bobby Kennedy was on the rise until his assassination in June of that year, and I believe that he would have beaten Nixon had he not been killed.  There are a lot of parallels between 1968 and 2024 – a sitting President whom many in his own party have great doubts about their chances for re-election; the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, which turned into a disaster for the Democrats, as Mayor Richard Daley manhandled the anti-war demonstrators; and a scary Republican candidate.

Up until the Michigan presidential primary, I was feeling OK about President Biden’s chances to defeat Trump.  Michigan was the first presidential primary with significant urban centers, and for me that meant that it was a key reflection of what we might see in November.  The numbers in Michigan were not good for Biden beating Trump.  There were the noteworthy “uncommitted” voters  totaling over 101,000 in the Democratic primary, many of them a protest vote against Biden’s failure to uphold human values in the war in Gaza.  

    More disturbing to me, however, were the vote totals in the primaries.  Some 768,000+ voted in the Democratic primary, and Biden won over 80% of those.  But, over 1,102,000 people voted in the Republican primary, meaning that 334,000 more people in Michigan voted for Republicans than for Democrats.  Indeed, Trump received almost as many votes as all the Democratic candidates combined.  I recognize that the Republican primary was more contested than the Democratic, but the vote differential is staggering to me.  It means that many Democratic voters stayed home for the primary, and while they may not stay home in November for the general election, making up 334,000 votes is a tall order in such a swing state. 

    I’m thinking that Joe should go.  There are strong Democratic candidates waiting in the wings – Kamala Harris, Gretchen Whitmer, Cory Booker, Stacey Abrams, Gavin Newsom, to name a few.  The time is exceedingly short, but with Trump’s legal troubles, there is much more of an open window for new Democratic candidates. Obviously, none of them will step in unless Biden steps out.  Every time that I see President Biden on tv, he looks more and more frail.  He has done a good job as President, but he is simply too old to run for a second term.  If he stays in the race and gets the nomination, I will work hard for him and vote for him, but I do not believe that he can beat Trump, given what the Michigan results look like. 

     I feel today as I felt when President Biden announced for re-election on April 24 last year– he is too old to run for re-election.  As Trump’s legal woes mount (and his age is showing too,), there is a good chance for a Democrat not named President Biden to win the presidency.  And, given the nature of Trump’s self-delusional narcissism, it is absolutely imperative that he not return to the Presidency.  I’m guessing that is why Governor Nikki Haley is staying in the race, figuring and hoping that Trump’s legal troubles will do him in before the election in November.  And, I do not think that President Biden can beat Haley, if she were the Republican nominee.  The New York election interference Trump trial at the end of this month will tell us a lot, but with all the delays, none of those are a given before the election.

So, I believe that President Biden still has time to bow out of the Presidential election, but only a few weeks.  As I wrote in an earlier blog at the beginning of the year, this year of 2024 will be one of the most chaotic and most consequential of many in recent history.  We have a lot of events left to occur and to digest, but I do believe that Joe should go.