lenten journal: walking with martin

As I drove to the Duke restaurant this afternoon, Talk of the Nation was my soundtrack, as is often the case. I happened to join the program just as Tavis Smiley began talking about his program MLK: A Call Beyond Conscience, which looks at Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” that he delivered at Riverside Church in New York City one year to the day of his assassination. Though Neal Conan timed the interview to coincide with the broadcast, that it falls in the middle of Holy Week seems worth noting as well, even though it was unintentional.

One of the most moving aspects of Jesus’ journey to the Cross is that he never responded to violence with violence, though he had opportunity over and over again. One of the things I find in the Empty Tomb is the promise that peace outlasts violence. Any time we choose violence as a solution -- out of frustration or pride or power or convenience – whether we’re talking Vietnam or Iraq or Guantanamo, we choose to trust a fallacy that will only lead to deeper conflict. We choose to be cynics. We choose to sell ourselves short.

King’s decision to speak out cost him deeply, but he knew the cost before he spoke. Listen to what he said:

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1954; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I'm speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this One? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

And finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.

In the middle of all of the discussions and arguments that are going on about our growing national deficit and our need to cut back spending, the conversation stays stuck on cutting social programs, when slashing our defense budget hardly enters the discourse. We spend a ridiculous amount to prepare ourselves to be the biggest, baddest SOBs in the valley of the shadow; we have convinced ourselves that being the most violent will somehow make us safer. It hasn’t worked. We may think of ourselves as the most powerful, yet we live motivated primarily by fear. We have more weapons than anyone else in the world and we continue, year after year, to spend more on defense than anyone else in the world and we are not safer or saner or even more secure. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result, we have proven ourselves insane, driven crazy by our fear while abandoning our faith.

At the risk of quoting King too much, I go back to the speech:

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Imagine the explosion had their been twenty-four hour news channels in 1967.

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word."

Imagine what could happen if we took these words to heart in 2010, even as we follow Jesus to the Cross.

Peace,
Milton

start the revolution

Mondays are long days in the restaurant at Duke because, in the parlance of the kitchen, we have to “rebuild our prep”: we have to make all things (0r most things) new. We are open Monday through Thursday nights, and, well, we don’t really want to serve stuff that has sat around while we were gone. Some stuff can go in the freezer or gets used or taken home, but some things we have to let go and make new come Monday. Today that list included cutting fresh steaks, breaking down whole chickens and roasting them, cutting pork chops, cutting the calamari rings and preparing the dredge mixture, making the “tobacco onions” (onions sautéed and then cooked in equal parts molasses and Worcestershire sauce), making the pasta sauces (rosemary and marinara), making the desserts (brownies, apple crisps, chocolate chip pan cookies, banana nut bread pudding), preparing the sweet potato pancake mixture, cooking fresh pasta, making rice, mashing potatoes, prepping the side vegetables, making the macaroni and cheese pastries, and baking cornbread.

Like I said, Monday is a long day.

At the Durham restaurant, the whole menu changes four or five times a year, in large part to maintain our commitment to seasonal and local food, but also for some of the same reasons we prep new stuff on Mondays: to keep things fresh and interesting, to help us sharpen both our skills and our imaginations, to keep us from getting complacent about our cooking. It also requires we stare down our fear to risk. After a month or two, a menu becomes comfortable and reliable, and customers become attached to particular dishes. Replacing all the entrees means knocking off the favorites and asking our diners to risk with us. For the most part, they do.

Seeing both things as metaphor has been on my mind today after finishing Parker J. Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation, where he spends a good bit of time talking about how the working metaphors for our lives affect how we live them out. He also talks about leadership, and the “shadows” we have to live through in order to find the lights of inner strength and outward community, one of which he describes as the “denial of death itself,” and he says:

Within our denial of death lurks fear of another sort: fear of failure. In most organizations, failure means a pink slip in your box, even if that failure, that “little death,” was suffered in the service of high purpose. It is interesting that science, so honored in our culture, seems to have transcended this particular fear. A good scientist does not fear the death of a hypothesis, because that “failure” clarifies the steps that need to be taken toward truth, sometimes more than a hypothesis that succeeds. The best leaders in every setting reward people for taking worthwhile risks even if they are likely to fail. These leaders know that the death of an initiative – if it was tested for good reasons – is always a source of new learning.

The gift we receive on the inner journey is the knowledge that death finally comes to everything – and yet death does not have the final word. By allowing something to die when its time is done, we create the conditions under which new life can emerge.

I had the morning off on Friday before going to work on a catering gig, so I went with Ginger to hear a discussion at the Duke Divinity School being moderated by one of our church members. One of the presenters asked, “How do we think about our Christian tradition in new and radical ways?” She went on to say, for instance, two of the archetypal themes of Christian history were radical generosity and iconoclasm. The Christian tradition has, at its core, a stream of a radical re-looking at our blind spots and asking, “Who is being denied their imago Dei?” We do better, she said, when we chose to see revolution as normal in our lives of faith.

On Saturday morning, I was a part of a deacons’ retreat at our church. We worked hard with an eye to how we can help our church grow to be stronger and more vital in our witness to our community. I gotta tell ya, it’s easier to latch on to revolution as normal when it is a grand idea in a seminar than when it is talking about line items in the budget of a local congregation. I thrive on change probably more than most folks and I also understand every institution, large and small, requires a certain amount of steadfastness for the sake of self-preservation. The paradox of that preservation is that it is less secure in keeping everything the same than it is when things are allowed to die and revolution is allowed its natural place in the order of things. We are evolutionary creatures; we were created to thrive when we grow and change; we were not built to stay the same.

I’m grateful to say I saw some seeds of faithful insurgency planted around our table Saturday morning. I’m looking forward in seeing what takes root in our hearts, even as I am aware of the fledgling rumblings of revolution within my own heart. What would that be: a coup de coeur?

That I’ve been reading Palmer is no accident. I’m working hard to listen to my life because there is much to hear. These are days full of invitations to follow, which also means being willing to follow and fail, and learn and grow. As much as it makes for great devotional writing, the prospect of failure gets more foreboding with age, or the attachments and entanglements that come with being on the planet for over half a century. It’s just tougher to strip the gears and head a new direction, that’s all. On the other hand, when I look ahead believing I am far from finished with my time here, why would I not want to let it all ride on the next big adventure, the next chapter in the story, the next menu, if you will?

Why not, indeed.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: jesus goes postal

I’ve been struggling with a story today.

“Jesus cleansing the Temple” is the way it usually gets titled for those of us who know the story. It shows up in all four gospels and I’ve heard it over and over; it’s not new to me. Jesus was going into the Temple in Jerusalem during Passover and saw the mall-like atmosphere that had grown up in the outer court where people could exchange money for Temple currency (to the profit of the money changers) and buy animals for sacrifice (also at a serious markup, I’m sure). He made a whip out of some cords and sent the money changers and merchants running for their collective lives, leaving tables turned and everyone wondering what the hell happened.

We read John’s version this morning, being good lectionary followers, which comes early in his gospel – Chapter Two, to be exact. The first chapter is full of the poetry I dearly love – the Word became flesh and dwelt among us – and the second begins with Jesus at the wedding at Cana, which is a story I love because of the interaction between Jesus and his mother.

On the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus also was invited to the wedding with his disciples. When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, "They have no wine." And Jesus said to her, "Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come." 5His mother said to the servants, "Do whatever he tells you."

First, who gets away with calling his mother, “Woman”? Second and speaking of performance criticism, wouldn’t you love to be able to hear the tone in the voices of both Jesus and Mary? Third, we get a picture of a pretty cool Messiah in this opening miracle. Drinks are on him.

A sentence later – that’s right one sentence, however much time actually passed --he’s in the Temple going off on the moneychangers like Chuck Norris on a drug dealer. Two sentences after that, before the dust can even clear or anyone straighten the tables, Jesus is quietly talking to Nicodemus about being born again.

One of the ways I was taught to look at Bible passages was to begin by noticing what came before and after the story of interest. How do I make sense of stories that show Jesus going from wedding to warrior to welcomer? More than that, and regardless of what comes before and after, what do I do with a story where Jesus responds with violence? He made a whip out of cords, which I’m assuming was intended to be more than symbolic, and he stormed the Temple, turning over tables and chasing everyone from the sellers to the sheep out of the room. Whatever his motivation, whatever prophecy he fulfilled, he was violent and he did damage. The blessed-are-the-peacemakers-turn-the-other-cheek guy was whipping people to get his point across.

As I said, I’ve been struggling with the story.

I went back to the beginning of John and looked at the order of things once again:

• the Prologue
• John the Baptist points him out
• Jesus chooses his disciples
• the wedding at Cana
• Jesus clears the Temple
• Nicodemus comes to see Jesus
• some more John the Baptist stuff

Chapter Four opens with Jesus’ encounter with a Samaritan woman, which is one of my favorite stories. At the end of their conversation, he told her he was the Messiah. Could it be John was giving us an account of how Jesus grew into his identity? Could he be showing us how Jesus got started and found his way to a true sense of his calling?

(By the way, these questions are not rhetorical. And, yes, I understand the are problematic since the other gospels place the story late in Jesus’ ministry because they only record one Passover where John records three. And I’m not trying to get into a theological debate here; I’m trying to figure out what to do with a violent Messiah. This blows my mind.)

To say Jesus lost his temper doesn’t satisfy me because I don’t think he is out of control in his actions. We don’t need to retitle the section, “Jesus Goes Postal.” The recent church shooting is too fresh in my mind to think that Jesus was just freaking out. He knew what he was doing. He seemed full of righteous indignation, as Ginger says. The main victims of the merchants and moneychangers would have been the poor because of the price gouging. Jesus came to liberate the poor, to turn the world upside down; we see that over and over. Yet, only this once does his defense of the poor come in the shape of a fist.

Years ago, I heard Tony Campolo speak and he said, “Everyday, over and over, we have to make a choice of how we are going to respond to the world around us, and we are always choosing between whether we will respond with love or with power.” Here is a story of the One who incarnated Love responding to a situation with power, not love. Jesus took the strong hand and slapped me silly.

Part of my struggle is with myself. I have heard this story my whole life in church and never let myself see what troubles me about it until today. I allowed myself to be blinded by familiarity; I wasn’t looking for anything new. Jesus chased the bad guys out of the Temple, which is what good guys do. But he did it violently. This can’t be one of the go-and-do-likewise kind of stories. Had Jesus made it a pattern, he never would have gone through the Cross to the Resurrection.

I suppose this would be the paragraph where I tie it all together and tell you have I’ve come to terms with the story in some new and insightful way. It’s not. And I think that’s OK. My struggle is not a crisis of faith, as though I somehow think Jesus is not who he said he was. My struggle is to have the wherewithal to think and feel through my new understanding of the story (new to me, anyway) and see what it has to say about my faith and my growth as a human being.

As we say in the UCC, there is more light yet to break forth.

Peace,
Milton

I've just got to use my imagination

in the beginning was the Word
and the Word was with God
and the Word was God . . .

and the Word became flesh
and dwelt among us

Those familiar words from John, along with the rest of the first seventeen verses of Chapter One, were the text for Ginger’s sermon. As she talked about the Word – the Logos – she offered a twist on the translation, looking at word roots:

in the beginning was the Logic of God
and the Logic was with God
and the Logic was God . . .

and the Logic became flesh
and dwelt among us

John was saying what happened in the Incarnation gave us a look into the mind of God, into the way God thinks. The God of Creation and Incarnation is one who thinks relationally enough to become human and say things like, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” As she talked, another translation ran through my mind

in the beginning was the Imagination
and the Imaginaton was with God
and the Imagination was God . . .

and that Imagination became flesh
and dwelt among us

I thought about it again tonight reading a piece on the Israeli attacks in Gaza by Gene Stoltzfus, Director Emeritus of Christian Peacemaker Teams. Before I quote him, I have to set it up a bit. Last night, Jon Stewart did his own bit on situation, called “Strip Maul,” in which he showed clips of various American leaders – George W. Bush, Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, Jon Corzine, Mark Sanford, George Will, and Michael Bloomberg -- giving unabashed support to Israel’s response to violence with overwhelming violence. Bloomberg “brought it home” by saying:

If you’re in your apartment and some emotionally disturbed person is banging on the door screaming, “I’m going to come through this door and kill you,” do you want us to respond with one police officer, which is proportional, or with all the resources at our command?

A couple of things. One, the Palestinians are not emotionally disturbed or crazy. The people who are being killed in the Israeli attacks are mostly civilians – now over 500 of them – who have nowhere to hide. Two, if all the imagination our leaders can muster to respond to what is happening is to validate the violence, we are in serious trouble. What they describe is not what is happening. Here is a video clip from CBS News.



With all of that on my mind and heart, I was glad to come across Gene Stoltzfus’ statement because I could see some of God’s imagination seeping through his very thoughtful and faithful words. And I quote:

Today I grieve over what is happening in the region of Gaza. Is there anything I can do? Am I limited to government statements, last minute diplomacy, or immobilizing personal outrage? How do I respond from this place of despair? What do I tell the children? Is this the time when the posture of prayer may provide the oppenness toward a solution waiting for recognition?

When people are pressed to the limit of their flesh, they find a way to struggle. The people of Gaza -- whose democratically elected government more powerful nations rejected and who have been suffering under Israel's crippling blockade -- are not the first people to do so. Suicidal missions happen in most wars. Soldiers serving a cause in which they believe -- freedom, empire, democracy, or religion -- know they may die for the cause. They believe, sometimes with positive outcomes, that their sacrifice might reach beyond the limits of today's reason into tomorrow's solutions.

Where do those of us outside of Palestine and Israel, those of us who reject violence, turn for a resolution? Thousands of boardrooms, staff meetings, and grand peace councils set up to deal with crises like this have not produced solutions. As diplomats desperately grope for chimeral ceasefires, those involved in the conflict feel despair and guilt over lost opportunities. Will solutions ever come from diplomacy or councils? Will the sixty-eyar stalemate continue for another forty years -- a full century of explaining the conflict to Christian, Jewish, and Muslim children?

Or can the Gaza crisis of 2008-2009 ignite our imaginations? Can we believe that our collective imaginations might help? Have we received one more opportunity to sharpen our senses for what divine mystery wants to reveal to us?

Religious and secular people committed to social justice and peacemaking are suspicious that meditation belongs only to the pious and those who hide behind spiritual exercises to avoid engagement. This split between people of action and people of prayer is a false dichotomy that appears in every tradition. If political analysis or raw activism could have provided the basis for peace in this region of God's earth, it would have happened long ago. What has been lacking is the acknowledgment of unknown forces at work among and through patterns of violent conflict in Israel and Palestine.

The war in Gaza today invites me to prayer. I share our common desperation for a breakthrough. I don't promise that prayer will enlighten my imagination in a fresh way. I will try because I know that liberation from false myths of security is born in times of violence. When a sign or a nudge to action comes, I hope I have the courage to follow it. And if it comes to you or me, we can share it with the people in the peace councils, in diplomatic corps, or organizations -- share it with all the people on this journey with us. We may be here for just such a time as this.

Surely we are in this world to do more than justify the violence we see around us. This particular sentence challenges me:

I will try because I know that liberation from false mythis of sercurity is born in times of violence.

To see possibility in such an intractable conflict is Imagination become flesh. Perhaps it was what John had in mind when he said, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot put it out.”

May we be infected by the inextinguishable imagination of our God.

Peace,
Milton