THE CHURCH: A FIRE FOR JUSTICE

THE CHURCH:  A FIRE FOR JUSTICE

            Today (July 16) is Ida B. Wells’ birthday.  She was born a slave in Marshall County, Mississippi, the county in which all my forebears were born.  Over the next 69 years, she would be a powerful voice and activist for justice for people of African-American descent, for women, and for those who were poor.   She was an “intersectionalist”  long before that term came into vogue.  She did all of this work as she experienced white society strip away from African-Americans the hard-won rights of the Civil War.  Because of her lifelong work for justice and mercy on so many levels under such difficult circumstances, she is a woman for our time and indeed for all times.  I’ll be writing more about her in another forum, but if you do not know much about her, check her out!

            She learned this fire for justice from her church and from her family.   She obviously grew up in the black church, because many of the white churches in her time were fleeing from the idea of justice, hoping to avoid any need for confrontation with the powers who were re-instituting slavery and oppression under another name:  Jim Crow, or “neo-slavery,” as Doug Blackmon named it.  I grew up in one of those churches.  I experienced love in my home church, as I noted in last week’s blog, but I was not taught to have a fire for justice.  Teaching our church members to have a fire for justice is a dangerous thing, so in Ida Wells’ time, in my time, and in the current time, most churches of all colors now settle for teaching a weak version of love at best.

            In the 10^th chapter of Mark, a rich man comes to Jesus to ask him what he must do to find the meaning of his life.  This engagement is an important one because it is included in all 3 synoptic gospels.  Like the church, he has lived a good life in his area, but he has missed the overall point of a life with God at the center.  Jesus tells him that in order to find his definition as a child of God, he must sell all his possessions and give the money to the poor.  At that moment, he hears, perhaps for the first time, that money is the center of his life.  Jesus offers him the opportunity to find his center, his true north.  Like so many of us, he is unable to do make that move, and he goes away sad.

            One of the great legacies of the Jewish tradition, - a tradition in which Jesus the Jew lived and breathed and had his being - is the idea that justice must be at the center of life of the people of God.  The prophet Micah put it bluntly as he wondered what God required of humanity and especially of the people of God.  In Chapter 6, he goes through a litany of liturgical and ecclesiastical requirements that God might require, but then he proclaims the requirement that he believes is central:  do justice, love mercy, walk humbly.  

            The church faces this same dilemma in every age.  We are asked to center our life together on building an inclusive and welcoming community, on strong love, and on teaching and doing justice.  As I experienced, we have done OK on love;  we have waffled on building a welcoming community;  we have failed pretty miserably on centering on justice.  It is sad to say that when people think of the church, not many  think: “a place where people learn about the importance of justice.”   In our current time, we as church seem to be going in the other direction.  Indeed some of us are afraid that we are currently building a road to a theocracy. It would be one thing if that theocracy were built on the road to justice, but as always seems to be the case, the road to theocracy is usually built on meanness and repression and injustice.

            Justice requires that we consider others to be possibilities rather than problems.  Justice requires that we consider our own participation in the structures of injustice and seek to change that participation.   Justice requires that when we look at the community of faith known as the church, we delight in saying:  “it’s the place where I learn about equity and justice and love.”  

THE CHURCH: COMMUNITY

THE CHURCH:  COMMUNITY

            I don’t remember how old I was – I was a young schoolboy – but I do remember the rainy, cold day.  I had walked from school to the beauty shop in the Cleburne Hotel on Cherry Street, where my mother worked as a beauty operator.  It was now time to walk home in the cold rain.  I bundled up, shivered and set out, wondering why I had to do this.  I crossed Cherry Street and looked up Porter Street, where my home was a mile away.  I was walking past Plaza Drugs when I heard a car honking at me, and I turned to hear and see Mrs. Lyda Kitchens roll down her window in the rain to ask me:  “Do you want a ride home?”  My heart leapt up, and I said “Yes, M’am,” and I ran to get into her back seat.  On the ride home I do not recall what she said, but I shall never forget the feelings of warmth and acceptance and gratitude that this woman had rescued me from a cold rain.  

            Lyda Kitchens was a wealthy white woman, and I was a poor white boy, but the church connected us – we were both part of First Presbyterian Church. Though class boundaries remained strong in my town, in my church, they were less clear.    Our Presbyterian church was a mixture of white society, and in this milieu, I didn’t really notice class as a harsh barrier.  When Mrs. Kitchens gave me a ride on that cold and rainy day (can I say it one more time?), my first thought was not: “OK, a rich white woman is picking me up!”  My first thought was gratitude that anyone with a car was picking me up!   The church had linked us together, and I was grateful, especially on this kind of day.

            It was this kind of community that Jesus sought to build in his ministry – rich aligned with poor, women sharing leadership, those who were healthy paired with those who were sick and frail.  In Mark 1, Jesus encounters a man with leprosy, and the man calls out to Jesus:  “Lord, you can heal me – IF YOU WANT TO.”  The person with leprosy not only wants healing for his body.  He also wants healing for his soul.  The words in Greek call him  “a leper,” an indication that he has been pushed to the margins.  His humanity has been taken, and his identity is now the disease which wreaks havoc on him.  He is asking Jesus to return his humanity to him.  “Jesus, you can heal me……if you want to……do you want to?  Or, are you simply like everyone else, who sees me as unclean and unworthy and inhuman?”  Jesus replies:  “I want to,” and he breaks the law by touching and healing this man whom society has deemed “unclean” and has pushed out of the community.

            The church can do this – it is our mission and our lifeblood.  We are called to be that body which can help break down the dividing walls between us and to build community.  We are privileged to offer the opportunity to all of us to recover our humanity, to help each of us hear that our primary definition is not whatever the world tells us, or even what we tell ourselves.  Our primary definition is that we are the daughters and sons of God.  I felt this in my church as a boy.  I believed this stuff – I believed that class was not important in the church.  I believed it because I experienced it.  At its best, the church can be a place like this, a place where each of us and all of us can find our home, can find our “true north.”  We, of course, have failed miserably in this calling as church, but I know that it can be done, because I experienced it as a boy and as a youth.  And, I experienced it as a pastor.  The church can be a powerful place to build community, to build the interdependence that it is at the heart of the gospel.

            My experience is a key component in this story, but it is not the only component.   Even as I experienced the gift of a warm ride in a cold rain, my imagination had not yet seen – nor was it allowed to see – that our vision was severely truncated.  Strong community that we were as church, we were very much afraid to engage an even larger barrier to community:  the power of race.  No people of African descent were allowed in worship or membership.  In that sense, the community of church that felt so warm to me was far shallower than I had imagined.  The corrective glasses that we as white people needed were the lens of justice.  To that we shall turn next week. 

WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS...

WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS……

“I’m aware of my condition because of what’s been missing,

human rights for all the people of color

The white man’s disease is the same across the seas

He’s full of greed, he’ll stab his own mother”

            These are words from the song “Battle for My Life” by Evelyn Harris, and I first heard them sung by Sweet Honey in the Rock.  They reflect the deep ambivalence in the American experience about Thomas Jefferson’s powerful and famous words from the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

               When he wrote it, and when it was approved by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, the word “men” meant propertied males classified as “white.”  Fortunately for all of us, this idea of equality has taken hold of our hearts and minds, and we have been in a struggle ever since to see if this fundamental idea of equality applies to all human beings or just to a select few, as the “originalists” now indicate that it meant.

            Women heard this “self-evident truth” and felt that it applied to them.  People held as slaves heard this idea and felt that it applied to them.  Indeed people like Frederick Douglass castigated this contrast between the self-evident truth of equality and the reality of slavery in America, when he spoke to the Rochester Anti-Slavery Society in 1852 in celebration on July 5:

            “Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak

              to you here today?  What have I, or those I represent, to do with your

              national independence?.....What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of

              July?  I answer: a day that reveals to {him}, more than all other days in the

              year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which {he} is the constant victim.”

            Poor people heard that it applied to them, and many others have been moved and fired by this idea originally meant for white men of property.  All kinds of people, who had been pushed to the margins, have heard that this self-evident truth applied to them also.

            In the revival of Trumpian America, we see this same struggle more clearly again.  Those in political and economic power are seeking to take us as far back as they can towards the time when “all men” meant only white men who had property.  Let us not be naïve enough to believe that it is Donald Trump who is causing this.  His election is not the cause but rather the symptom of the continuing race, class, and gender struggles that have been part of our history from its European beginnings.  Trump is certainly a crude version of it, but those who elected him as President of the United States had this idea in mind:  get us back to the “original” version of that self-evident truth. 

            So, as we celebrate this powerful idea of equality this week, let us recall not just the white men (many of whom owned people as slaves) who articulated this vision of equality in 1776.  Let us recall and celebrate that great parade of witnesses who have marched and fought and struggled and died so that the idea of equality could be expanded to include as many people as possible.   Fortunately that list of witnesses is very long, so please be lifting up the names on your list this week,  and I’ll add a few here:  Harriet Tubman who escaped slavery and helped others to do so;  Ida Wells who was an “intersectionalist” long before it became a modern concept – fighting on issues of race and gender and class;  Charles Hamilton Houston who trained a generation of African-American lawyers to fight for equality; Myles Horton, who helped to found the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee which fought for labor and civil rights;  Delores Huerta who worked with Cesar Chavez to bring this vision to Latinx farmworkers.

            And now, of course, it is our turn.   On the second floor of the Atlanta Human and Civil Rights Museum, there is a powerful multi-media exhibit called “Move, Free, Act Gallery.” It flashes photos of people from all over the world fighting and struggling for equity and justice.  In the middle of that exhibit comes a powerful voice with these stirring words of inspiration and command:  “FIND YOUR VOICE….FIND YOUR VOICE…FIND YOUR VOICE.”  May we find our voices as individuals and as communities in this season of self-evident truths. 

THE CHURCH????

THE CHURCH????

            Over the years I’ve come to believe that the purpose of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth was to create the church as the primary locus of the mercies and justice of God.  Given the history and the current state of the church, this sounds like one of the most ridiculous statements that I could make.   My experience in the church as a boy, however, bears out some of this purpose and power of the church.  First Presbyterian Church in Helena, Arkansas, was a place of refuge and love for me in a world where my heart was hurting.  Besides my immediate family, friends, and baseball, it was the main place where I began to hear that I was loved, that I could find the meaning of my life in the God who was at the center of the church.

            I left home and went to college and had other experiences where my worldview would be broadened and deepened, and it was in these places where I began to encounter difficulties with the church.  I discovered that the white people in my segregated home church worshipped the power of race as much as they worshipped God.  I learned that God intended women to be partners of men, not property of men, and I knew that the church had taught me this idea of women as property.  In my childhood, I had not even considered that God created people who were attracted to people of the same gender, so that was not even on my radar.  In my conversion on these and many other issues, I discovered that the church had often tied its identity to the social and political beliefs of its members and culture, instead of allowing God to be at the center of its life.  The church where Caroline and I served so long as pastors, Oakhurst Presbyterian, had a huge crisis of faith when its white members had to confront the idea that they worshipped race more than God.  Oakhurst lost 90% of its membership when white folks fled the church and the neighborhood when African-American families started moving in.  So the idea that the purpose of Jesus of Nazareth was to create the church seemed silly and laughable – if this were the case, God must have been playing a joke on the universe!

            Over my many years as a pastor in the church, I began to shift a bit.  Part of that shift was obviously self-serving – I was a pastor in the church!  Yet I also had to admit that there was something about this institution, an institution that retains great potential even as our relevance fades in a post-modern world.   So, over the next month, I want to look at four areas of vital importance to human life that the church - in our best moments and even sometimes in our worst moments – is uniquely qualified to provide in the 21^st century world:  meaning, love, justice, community. 

            We live in a world of super-humanly empowered individuals with our technology, but we still need and long for a sense of meaning that is greater and deeper than ourselves.  It is at the very nature of our existence, in that gap between biology and chemistry and consciousness.  We long to hear that we are loved; we long to experience that we belong to others; we long to believe that the arc of the universe bends toward love and justice.   Because we live in this longing, we are easy prey for false meaning, as we see in today’s world – tribalism and clannishness seems to be everywhere.  In these crazy and difficult times, this longing is especially deep.  This is where the heart of the church comes in – our very essence is to proclaim through ritual and action and life together that life has authentic meaning, especially in times like these, at the same time admitting that we often trade that birthright for a political bowl of porridge. Yet this connectedness in love remains our calling.

            In this 21^st century when the individual is so powerful and is asked to bear so much meaning, we point out that individuals are not capable of carrying such a heavy load by ourselves.  The fading world of the Enlightenment still hears this proclamation as having a low regard for human beings, but in actuality, we have a high regard for humanity.  We simply want to remind everyone that we are not able to be heroic individuals, and if we believe that we are, we open ourselves to all sorts of demonic powers.  It is not coincidental that as our scientific and technological power grows, so does fundamentalism in Christianity, Judaism and Islam.  This is not to slam science – it is rather to note that “facts” can’t give meaning by themselves.   That meaning must come from a different source, and the religious community has a long history in doing this.  We often bring a meaning that is sordid and mean and repressive, but that is not the meaning that Jesus brought.  How do we know if we are bringing authentic, life-giving meaning?  We’ll turn to that next, as we look at the markers of love, justice, and community.

DREAMS OF MY FATHER -- PART TWO

DREAMS OF MY FATHER – PART TWO

            Caroline and I were blessed to be with our children David and Susan over Father’s Day weekend.  I was reminded of the gifts of parenting and grandparenting – thank you!  As I noted in last week’s blog, I did not know my father except in his absence and neglect, so as I celebrate Father’s Day, I am aware that not all of us are fathers and not all of us had great relationships to our fathers.  My father died over 30 years ago, but I still carry his neglect in my heart and soul.  So, the father with whom I wrestle is not my biological father, but the one I carry in my heart.

            Father’s Day (and Mother’s Day) is a time that calls us back to our origins and to the meaning of our lives.  Biology is fate, but it is not destiny.  We have certain limits within which we must live our lives, but not all is determined for us.  Not all of us are fathers or mothers, but all of us had fathers and mothers.  Whatever our relationship is to our parents, we are called to live our lives in a way that we bring mothering and fathering to those we engage.  This is certainly what happened in my life, as recently as last week.  After reading last week’s blog, one of my older colleagues and friends, Gayraud Wilmore, mailed me to say that he wanted to be my substitute father, and I said “yes!”  In that great image from Isaiah 58:12, many men (and women) have stepped into the breech of my absent father for me, and I am truly grateful to them.  I have tried to do that also in my ministry, with some success and some failures, but I have tried to be there for those who have not known their fathers or have had terrible relationships with their fathers. 

            I have counseled many people in my ministry, and although I try not to project too much of my story onto theirs, I have noticed that an overwhelming number of people are dominated by anxiety and feel unworthy of being loved.  I know that story!  I have sought to be a vessel of God’s love to them.  I hope that I have helped them to hear that God wants our passion, not our perfection.  I have certainly heard this from those who have shared the power of God’s love for me.  I recently assisted the Open Door Community in moving from Atlanta to Baltimore.  As I was driving in the moving van with my good and longtime friend Ed Loring on the way to Baltimore, we talked of theology, politics, compassion and other subjects.  As we got to the question of whether our personal identity would survive death, I indicated that one reason that I hoped for it was that I wanted to know, finally, that I was loved and not abandoned.  In the middle of my sharing, Ed blurted out:  “Nibs, your father’s not coming for you!  He’s dead!  But, you are loved!  I love you, and many others love you.  Live out of love, right now – don’t live out of anxiety and abandonment.” 

            And, that hit home.  It will take awhile to sink down into the lower depths of my soul, but I am grateful to Gay and Ed and many others who have demonstrated and shared their love and God’s love for me.  As I reflect on Father’s Day and the  opportunity it provides to think about the power of love and pain in our lives, I return to President Barack Obama’s first book “Dreams From My Father,” where he wrestled with his absent father.  In his newer (2004) introduction to that book, President Obama (don’t we miss him now!) wrote that if he had to write that book again, it would be “less a meditation on the absent father and more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life.”   I know that part of the journey.  For most of my childhood, I was dominated by the absence of my father, and I rarely ever consciously considered the loving presence of my mother.  I remember one of my great therapists asking me:  “You know, Nibs, I’m wondering why you choose to center on the absent father in your life.  Why not center on your mother, who stayed with you and loved you and nurtured you.  Why live out of absence and anxiety rather than out of presence and love?”  I am grateful to Robby Carroll for sharing this insight with me years ago, giving me time to begin to turn the ship around – and to let my mother know it too before she died. 

            So, to close out these Father’s Day blogs, I’ll paraphrase Carl Sandburg’s poem “let joy kill you – there are enough little deaths.”  I give thanks for those who have loved me and fathered me in joy and who have taught me joy, even as I have longed to live in fear and anxiety.

DREAMS OF MY FATHER

DREAMS OF MY FATHER

            Borrowing from President Barack Obama and his meditation on his father and his father’s absence  in his book “Dreams From My Father,” I approach Father’s Day with trepidation and ambivalence.  I never knew my father – he left my mother and me when I was an infant, and I never heard from him or saw him again until I met him when I was 23.   I never really dreamed of him – it was more a deep longing for him to come see me, to acknowledge me, to tell me that I was loved.  I was always hoping, hoping, hoping, but he was never coming  - painful, painful, painful!

            I did have a dream about my father’s family last week, the first dream that I can remember that related directly to my father.  My father was not in the dream, but I met my half-brother in a convenience store, and the first thing that I noticed was that I was taller than him!  In my one actual encounter with my father, I rejoiced that I was taller than him also!   That rejoicing barely mitigated my enduring sense of loss and anxiety that it was my fault that my father was absent, that my father left me because I was not worthy of his staying.  On one level, it is deep but silly that  I blame myself (as a six-month-old) for driving away my father.   Yet it has been an enduring, core belief in my soul, a belief with which I have wrestled many times.  I wasn’t worthy as a son – that’s why my father left and never came back.

            After we got married in 1974, Caroline and I waited awhile to seek to have children.  Part of it was the work of ministry, but the main part was my hesitancy to have children.  Since I did not experience fatherhood in my childhood, I was terrified at the thought of being a father.   I did not think that I could do a good job at being a father, and I did not want to re-open those old, “absent father” wounds.  When we finally had David and Susan, I discovered that I could receive some fathering for myself, in my fathering of them.  Although I made plenty of mistakes - and I’m sure that they can enumerate them! - I found an immense joy and satisfaction in being a father.  If I am honest, part of that joy came not only from the wonderful development of David and Susan (they are great children and now adults!), but from the fathering that I received being their father. 

            So, I am feeling a bit better about my father’s being absent and unaccounted for in my life, but my ambivalence about Father’s Day remains.  He died in 1983, and I never took the opportunity to talk with him about these kinds of things.  I still don’t know what to think about my absent and unacknowledging father.   I received many gifts from many people who helped me to hear that my primary definition is not child of an absent father but rather child of a loving Father (and Mother) God, the God we know in the Black Jesus.  My mother (as I have written previously for Mother’s Day) and Gran (my great-great aunt with whom we lived), my church, pastors, youth leaders, teachers and coaches, friends and mentors, counselors and therapists, and of course, Caroline – all these folk and more have helped me to hear that I am loved and valued.  For their investment in me, to paraphrase Wendell Berry’s poem “Meditation in the Spring Rain,” I send up my praises at dawn each day.

            I wrestle often with my absent father. I feel like I continually re-live Genesis 32 where Jacob wrestles with the angel! I have discerned one powerful gift that I did receive from him: I have always had a compassionate heart.  I did not will this or really work to develop it – it was simply there for my use or for my repression.  Part of that gift came from my mother and Gran, from being raised primarily by women, who I believe are culturally and maybe biologically trained to value community and the necessity of compassion to build and sustain community.  Part of it, however, came from my absent father.  While my situation was far superior to many in the world, I felt marginalized by being the son of an absent father.  His absence did not derive from being killed in World War II, but from having consciously chosen to abandon me (and oh, yes, my mother).  So, I internalized the definition of one who is not worthy, and because of that, my heart has usually tended to move to those at the margins, who are told that they are not worthy.  It is not an act of my will – it is gravitas – the gravity of my soul pulls me that way.  It has complicated my life, and I have not always used it wisely, but it is a gift from my absent father.  More on this next week, but for now, I do have dreams from my father, though not in the way either of us intended. 

PENTECOST!!!!!

PENTECOST!!!!!!

            As we enter the liturgical season of Pentecost, we must note that the modern Western church has always felt uneasy about this church holiday.  Those of us who are Presbyterians are especially uncomfortable with Pentecost, especially the idea of the Holy Spirit who might not be so decent and orderly, as we see in the Acts account of Pentecost in Chapter 2.  One of our major founding documents, the Westminster Confession of Faith of 1648, did not even have a chapter on the Holy Spirit.  We didn’t add one until 1942, almost 300 years later.  Yet, it’s not just us Presbys who feel uneasy.   A few years back, the common liturgical calendar dropped the long season of Pentecost and replaced it with “Ordinary Time.”  After many protests, we all now have the option of keeping the season of Pentecost.

            Why such dis-ease with such an important church holiday (perhaps the most important)?  There at least three reasons for our uneasiness:  the messiness of the Holy Spirit (God is beyond our control), the birth of the church in a multicultural and equitable way, and the church itself being cast as a boundary-breaking, many-cultured, possession-sharing, joy-filled locus of God.  The first reason for our discomfort is that in our age-of-reason church, we are quite uncomfortable with the idea that God might break some of the laws of physics or at least of psychology.  In my modern mind, I’m finding myself feeling uneasy with the idea that God might break the laws of physics – how could God be so unreasonable!  I do not want to align myself with the anti-science, climate-change-denying folk, but I do understand the underbelly of the opposition – is this all there is?  Is God at work in the world or not?  Pentecost answers with a resounding “Yes, She is!!!”  In our quantum physics, cybernetic, brain as computer world, this is difficult to accept. 

            Second, we often forget that the church is born in a multicultural setting, far beyond the imagination of those first disciples – those who hear the Good News will not be stopped by the boundaries of culture or language.  This is not to obliterate cultural norms and differences – many of them are specifically named in the Acts 2 text.  It is to affirm that there is a deeper connection, a broader boundary that does not end cultures but rather encourages us to seek to hear our common humanity across cultural and economic lines.  In America today, we elected a president who wants to take us back to cultural hegemony, to a “Mad Men” world where white men ruled the world, and everybody accepted it.   Pentecost tells a different story, and even those who told it on that day had no idea that God would still be moving – Gentiles would soon be welcomed!  How could that be?  Surely God does not understand how the world works!

            Third, the church is supposed to be a place where we can work out our salvation and our spiritual issues, work out our relation to the world, and get ready for life after death.  Pentecost, though, brings an explosion of the spiritual issues, challenges us to confront our worship of materialism, and reminds us that God is interested in us finding life in this life.  No staid liturgy here, standing forever, people knowing their places, women stepping back, money giving us status.  The story that we see in the first 4 chapters of Acts, the Pentecost church, is a stunning reversal of the world’s order.  This small group of women and men disciples, afraid and confused, waiting to be arrested by Rome, this small group stuns the world – the immediate world and the larger world.  In our rambunctious, depressing, dangerous days, let us remember the first Pentecost and the Spirit of God who drove them out of themselves and their categories, who drove them out into a world that they knew could not and would not understand the message. 

            For these three reasons and more, the modern church is uneasy with Pentecost.  We don’t understand it, and we don’t seem to want it.  We prefer that God stay within our boundaries and within our understanding.  Multicultural and intercultural?  No, too much white domination!  Sharing possessions?  No, too naïve, no pension plan.  Breaking down barriers?  No, that’s for poor people and those at the margins – let us keep our worship liturgy and ways of doing things intact! 

            Yet, in many ways, we are like those first group of followers of Jesus of Nazareth.  We are fearful and shrinking and wondering.  In these days, maybe Pentecost is a way to life.  In our waiting and wondering, in these fearful days, may we seek that Pentecost Spirit also.