"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.