In Case You Missed It ...

Well, in case you missed this story, the church I serve has been much in the news during the past week. It has been interesting to say the least. I'll blog on it after the media buzz dies down and I've had some time to reflect. In the meantime, it is worth noting that the response to this decision has been overwhelmingly positive. The full policy is available on line. We welcome all thoughtful responses -- hate mail we can do without.

A Good Read on a Good Question

I've never claimed to be a "moral giant," but it doesn't take a moral giant to understand that torture is wrong. It just is. One visit to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial museum is more than enough to teach most of us that simple truth. So I've been wondering just why the administration seems so determined to hold open the torture option against overwhelming public opinion and the express wishes of a near-unanimous U.S. Senate. After all, we've fought wars before against brutal regimes who used terrorism and torture (see the link above or consider Vietnam). But even in the worst of those conflicts, the nation never articulated anything evan vaguely resembling an official sanction of torture. Now the administration balks at inscribing in law a prohibition against torture. Why?

A post on Common Dreams today offers the best theories I've read.

The Unexamined Life

The news this week brought together two seemingly unrelated stories that are signs of the times, although it's tough to tell just which way they're pointing. First, Tony Blair last a key vote when parliament voted down a security bill. Closer to home, an appeals court judge told the Tampa Bay Bucs to stop patting down patrons upon entering the stadium to watch NFL games.

Defenders of the patdown policy and of Blair's proposal said such restrictions are necessary because "we are at war."

That may be, but I still do not believe it when they tell me that limits on our freedom are necessary to stop the terrorists who, we are told, hate our freedom. Such justifications make me wonder why, if the terrorists hate freedom, they don't attack Canada or Sweden or one of the dozen or so democracies around the world that are arguably more free than we? More than that, though, I do not believe it when they tell me – through their actions – that the unilateral projection of American military power is going to make me safer and the world more free.

If we are to make ourselves more secure and the world safer for freedom, we would do well to turn back to Plato now – not in moderation, but in following the Delphic oracle’s other wisdom: the unexamined life is not worth living. We are living a remarkably unexamined national life. Our actions as a nation since the crimes of September 2001 have been those of a wounded animal, and no wounded animal can make the world safe for itself or for others.

Indeed, if we are, as Aristotle argued, the “rational animal,” our actions since September 2001 have completely dehumanized us. Leaving aside the insanity that is Iraq, so many domestic actions have been completely irrational. Policies promulgated under the so-called Patriot Act and under numerous state and local initiatives only appear rational when one accepts their premise of extreme risk. But the premise itself is based not on reason but on emotions – chiefly deep-seated fear, constant unease and a deep desire to exact revenge for the horrors of September 11.

Fear rises subtly every time one stands in security lines at an airport, yet reason would tell us that any one of us is still far more likely to die in an accident on the way to the airport than to be the victim of any air piracy. This is true even as we see the latest news of bombs in Jordan. Fear rises subtly every time one walks through a security checkpoint to enter a museum on the Mall, yet reason would tell us that we are far more likely to die walking across the Mall from heart disease than we are to be the victims of bioterrorism. Fear rises subtly at each report of another horrific suicide bombing, yet reason would tell us that we are far more likely to be the victim of random street violence in our nation’s capital than we are to be the victim of terrorism, even if we lived in Jerusalem rather than in DC or New York or LA or any other large American city, never mind any smaller American city where the irrational fears still rule the day. And yet we do not question or remark upon the public and economic policies that, in large part, reinforce the life styles that are at the root of the very real dangers of heart disease, traffic congestion, home-grown violence, and so on and on.

And finally, fear rises subtly whenever the national security budget is defended by reference to September 11, yet reason – or, at least, history -- would tell us that we are made far less free and even less secure in a hyper-militarized state than we would be in a nation whose aims were less overtly imperialistic.

Reason has given way to fear, and as my favorite philosopher, the Jedi master Yoda, reminds us, fear is the path to the dark side.

Indeed, if we would pause for a long moment in our head-long rush toward a militarized police state, we might realize that fear is what drives our “enemies” toward the dark side. When internet polls – admittedly far from scientific but nevertheless interesting indicators – suggest that more of the world’s people fear the United States than fear Iraq or North Korea, a people with even a shred of capacity for self-reflection ought at least to be curious about that fact. Rather than ask, as so many did four years ago in wide-eyed naivety, “why do they hate us?” we might better ask “why do they fear us?”

A reasoned dialogue would no doubt raise questions about the rise in religious fundamentalism in the developing world, and the lack of effective public responses to religious violence in many (especially Middle Eastern) nations. That same reasoned dialogue ought to press the nations of the world toward increased responsibility for their home grown fanatics. And that reasoned dialogue may well acknowledge some clearly defined uses for international military force where the fanatics have gained control.

My own deeply held commitment to Christian nonviolence insists that any such role be limited to policing and peacekeeping, but sometimes my Calvinist roots remind me that in a broken world our choices are never between a perfect good and a clear evil, but rather more often between lesser evils. At such points, I reach the end of reason and am reminded that fear is, after all, the opposite not of reason, but of faith. And clearly, such times as these call forth deep faithfulness.

But no matter what questions any reasoned dialogue raises about “them,” if such dialogue raises questions about “us,” about our national life, then we have a responsibility to address them. And clearly such a dialogue will raise questions about such things as America’s role in the vastly unequal distribution of the world’s resources; about such things as the remarkably undemocratic international institutions -- beholden to America and its interests -- that underpin global inequality; questions about such things as America’s role in supporting repressive regimes over the course of the past half century and overthrowing them when their utility is exhausted; and questions about such things as America’s perceived and articulated imperial intentions.

We have a responsibility to address those questions. More than that, as Reinhold Niebuhr's great prayer for serenity reminds us, we have a responsibility to act on them. For if serenity, comes from accepting the things that cannot be changed, then justice and the peace that rests upon justice comes with the strength “to change the things that should be changed.” Until we engage in a faithful and reasoned dialogue, we cannot lay any claim on the wisdom to know the difference.

One could certainly argue that “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” (sic) requires such reflection and such action, and I would agree. But more than that, we owe it to ourselves and our posterity. If an unexamined life is not worth living, nothing short of our national life is at stake. If we are, indeed, rational animals, nothing short of our own humanity is at stake. If we are, after all, children of a loving God, nothing short of our deepest faith commitments and our ultimate concerns are at stake. Let the national examination begin.

Still Walking With the Wind

I was going through some old files this morning and came upon a sermon that got me fired from a job about five years ago. As the congregation I currently serve announces a new policy concerning weddings and holy unions (we will no longer function as agents of the state in an unjust system that unfairly denies to same-sex couples the full legal rights and recognitions of marriage), it struck me that the words from half a decade ago remain pretty fresh. It's a little long for a post, but I am wondering again, as I consider a job lost years ago, "was it something I said?"

Almost 40 years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave voice to a vision. He articulated a dream that many of us still share: a dream of a beloved community, a community gathered at table, a community, he said, where “black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics” would be able to sit together at one table and sing together in one voice: free at last, free at last.

This morning, I want to suggest to you that the work of dreaming is not yet done; the vision of the beloved community is not yet realized; there are yet more places to set at the table of brotherhood … and sisterhood. I have a dream today to share with you.

You see, I am utterly convinced that if Dr. King were alive today, his roll call to the table would have sounded something like this: black people and white people; sisters and brothers, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, gays and straights … singing together, free at last.

Dr. King claimed that his vision was deeply rooted in the American Dream, and so it was. But his vision was also deeply rooted in gospel truth. In expanding his dream today, my vision is deeply rooted in the American Dream. It is deeply rooted in Dr. King’s dream. And it is deeply rooted in gospel truth, as well.

Now some might say it is a risky rhetorical strategy to lay claim to the American Dream at a time when there is shrinking support in legislative halls for expanded protection for gays and lesbians. And some might say it is risky strategy to lay claim to Dr. King’s vision and image knowing full well that King was quite conservative with respect to sexual politics. And still others might say it is risky strategy – indeed might charge that it is heretical -- to lay claim to gospel truth when the church seems bent on narrowing its vision.

Nevertheless, as our denomination debates an amendment to our church constitution that would bar our ministers from performing ceremonies of Holy Union between same-sex couples, the Sunday of the holiday weekend honoring the life and memory of our nation’s greatest prophet of freedom and justice is the right time for some risk taking. It is the right time to say “no” to Amendment O.

So let’s examine these three rhetorical risks and see if we can uncover together a prophetic truth that outstrips all rhetoric just as it touches real lives in our churches.

The first risk is the easiest to answer. Even in the midst of our deepest divisions about church polity, the Presbyterian Church has stood firmly for full civil rights and protections for sexual minorities. We do not struggle there. We proclaim with one voice – albeit a bit of a weak one from some quarters in the church – that all Americans are entitled to their full claim on the American Dream. So my vision is deeply rooted in the American Dream.

The second risk is a bit tougher, because here we are moving into the realm of interpretation. King died before the sexual revolution made it remotely possible for gays to leave the closet and lay claim to full civil rights, much less full ecclesial ones. But in choosing this day to speak to these issues, I am in pretty good company. Members of Dr. King’s family, including Coretta Scott King, and many of his closest aides have argued persuasively that Dr. King’s vision of the beloved community was evolving at the time of his assassination, and they believe he would have been out front in the march toward justice for sexual minorities.

In his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” Dr. King answered his white clergy critics who had called him an “outside agitator,” saying, “I am in Birmingham because injustice is here.”

For Christians, any understanding of justice must be based on love. Dr. King understood this and preached it often. In his letter from jail, King challenged the church to join the struggle, because his dream was founded first and foremost on that gospel truth of justice based on love.

Unfortunately, in the midst of the current crisis, it is precisely the church that is framing issues of justice on a legalistic interpretation of a handful of passages of scripture, while ignoring the very real pain suffered by individuals who are locked out, left behind, ignored, scorned and even hatefully spited because of their sexual identity. And this injustice is done in the name of a certain conception of the gospel.

So my most risky rhetorical strategy is to lay claim to that same gospel truth. But truly, this is the only claim that matters.

Now some will argue that scripture is clear with respect to issues of homosexual behavior. Those who disagree with me – and let’s be clear: there are many who do -- will point to the Sodom and Gomorrah story, to the Leviticus Holiness Codes, and to Paul’s letters to the Romans and the Corinthians as the seven citations of the Biblical witness against homosexuals. There are almost as many interpretations of these passages as there are interpreters. And the interpretations vary widely with respect to meaning, context and centrality of the passages.

But without dragging through the mud of exegesis here, let us at least agree that what’s going on here is precisely that: the interpretation of texts. I am interpreting several this morning: the “text” of the American Dream; the “text” of Dr. King’s dream; and the “text” of gospel truth. We cannot come to any text – holy scripture or the Sunday Times – without interpreting.

Let us also agree that the central text at stake – the Biblical text – is inherently a living text. It is the live word of the living God, as the theologian Walter Brueggeman puts it. And the evangelical truth of scripture is focused on and lives out of its main claims not its lesser claims, as Brueggeman argued last fall at East Liberty. The dispute lies here: what is central, what is provisional in scripture?

The sodomy of the Sodom and Gomorrah story, the particulars of the holiness codes, the examples in Romans and Corinthians are lesser claims, just as those passages that for so many years were used to deny women their rightful and ordained places of leadership in the church are lesser claims. Issues of context and translation support that claim strongly although we do not have the time this morning to trace out the arguments.

Indeed, as the Methodist clergywoman Maurine Waun writes, “The pain of sexual minorities is, at this moment, so ponderous and so enormous that the church is missing the mark by not even daring to look beyond the scriptural debate toward the hurts and issues of persons who are bravely and genuinely struggling in their everyday experience.”

No matter where you stand on Amendment O, or on ordination standards, these genuine struggles – and this deeply felt hurt – compel us to be welcoming and open to individuals in this house no matter what their sexual orientation.

Looking beyond the scriptural debate, however, does not necessitate looking beyond scripture. Our passages this morning from Amos and Isaiah are central. They are central to my sense of call and ministry. They are central to my understanding of justice. They are central to my understanding of gospel truth.

We must come to these texts with imagination. We are called to do so, and we do so all the time. Through our faithful imaginations the live word of the living God moves beyond itself in ways that were previously unavailable to the community of faith. Dr. King imagined a beloved community in which, as Amos said, “justice would roll down like water and righteousness like an everflowing stream.” Dr. King dreamed that “every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places shall be made plain, and the crooked places shall me made straight and the glory of the Lord will be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.” Now Amos, in chapter 5, and Isaiah, in chapter 40, were not thinking about Martin Luther King having a dream … but he did.

And now, so we are called to dream, to catch the wind of the Holy Spirit blowing afresh and anew and carrying us toward the beloved community. We stand, on this Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday Sunday morning, in a long line of heroes of the faith who have caught the wind and walked with it.

Congressman John Lewis, who, as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in August of 1963 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial delivered the speech preceding Dr. King’s, relates a story in the introduction to his memoir of the Civil Rights Movement. Now you should know that John Lewis is, along with Dr. King, one of my heroes of the faith. Lewis was born less than 100 miles from where I was born. And this story goes back to his rural Alabama roots. Let me read it to you:

On this particular afternoon – it was a Saturday, I’m almost certain – about fifteen of us children were outside my Aunt Seneva’s house, playing in her dirt yard. The sky began clouding over, the wind started picking up, lightning flashed far off in the distance, and suddenly I wasn’t thinking about playing anymore; I was terrified. I had already seen what lightning could do. I’d seen fields catch on fire after a hit to a haystack. I’d watched trees actually explode when a bolt of lightning struck them, the sap inside rising to an instant boil, the trunk swelling until it burst its bark. The sight of those strips of pine bark snaking through the air like ribbons was both fascinating and horrifying.

Lightning terrified me, and so did thunder. My mother used to gather us around her whenever we heard thunder and she’d tell us to hush, be still now, because God was doing his work. That was what thunder was, my mother said. It was the sound of God doing his work.

But my mother wasn’t with us on this particular afternoon. Aunt Seneva was the only adult around, and as the sky blackened and the wind grew stronger, she herded us all inside.

Her house was not the biggest place around, and it seemed even smaller with so many children squeezed inside. Small and surprisingly quiet. All of the shouting and laughter that had been going on earlier, outside, had stopped. The wind was howling now, and the house was starting to shake. We were scared. Even Aunt Seneva was scared.

And then it got worse. Now the house was beginning to sway. The wood plank flooring beneath us began to bend. And then, a corner of the room started lifting up.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. None of us could. This storm was actually pulling the house toward the sky. With us inside it.

That was when Aunt Seneva told us to clasp hands. Line us and hold hands, she said, and we did as we were told. Then she had us walk as a group toward the corner of the room that was rising. From the kitchen to the front of the house we walked, the wind screaming outside, sheets of rain beating on the tin roof. Then we walked back in the other direction, as another end of the house began to lift.

And so it went, back and forth, fifteen children walking with the wind, holding that trembling house down with the weight of our small bodies.

More than half a century has passed since that day, and it has struck me more than once over those many years that our society is not unlike the children in that house, rocked again and again by the winds of one storm or another, the walls around us seeming at times as if they might fly apart.

It seemed that way in the 1960s, at the height of the civil rights movement, when America itself felt as if it might burst at the seams – so much tension, so many storms. But the people of conscience never left the house. They never ran away. They stayed, they came together and they did the best they could, clasping hands and moving toward the corner of the house that was the weakest.

And then another corner would lift, and we would go there.

And eventually, inevitably, the storm would settle, and the house would still stand.

But we knew another storm would come, and we would have to do it all over again.

And we did.

And we still do, all of us. You and I.

Children holding hands, walking with the wind.

Today in the church we are buffeted by winds of strife. That wind, that strife, threatens to tear the house apart. The splinters are evident already and when the wind of strife blows them they strike deep wounds into individuals in the house.

But we are called, by another wind, to join hands, to walk with the wind and to hold the house together. For in the midst of the wind there is a dream. In the center of the house rests a table. And around the table, we can still be gathered: black folks and white folks, Protestants and Catholics, gays and straights -- one people sharing one hope, one faith, one Lord. Free at last. Free at last.

Signs of the Times

You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, said Dylan. Of course, Jesus said you can tell the signs of the skies and still not know the signs of the times. All I know is Cheryl Swoopes is out of her closet while Harriet Miers is going back into hers. Here in Washington it is chilly today. The winds are calm. The grand jury is quiet. But I think I can begin to see a little light in a dark sky.

Choose Hope

One of the most pernicious false gods that we cling to here in the new Rome is the illusion of control. But even here, we have no control over the time in which we live, and often no control over the events that mark our lives.

Nevertheless, we are given the choice of how we shall live in the time we are given and how we shall respond to the events that mark our time.

Most of us have very little control over the institutions where we work or go to school, we have no control over our family of origin, but we can choose how we respond to the stresses of our jobs or school life or family life. It is often overwhelmingly tempting to respond to work or school or family with cynicism.

In fact, it is often hip, stylish and celebrated to be cynical. Sometimes it’s fun, and it can often be genuinely funny – think Seinfeld for a moment. And in this city in particular, it is often expected and it is certainly easy to turn to cynicism.

But cynicism is not a faithful response to the world. We are called to a stewardship of attitude.

This is not a call to naiveté, or to Pollyanna-ish living. Critical engagement with the world is crucial. But when life places before you hopelessness and hope, faith demands that we choose hope.

That may just be the most difficult choice we are ever called to make. Choosing hope requires taking responsibility. Abandoning hope lets us off the hook. At the same time, choosing hope requires that we trust others. Abandoning hope allows us to slip into a splendid isolation where we can wallow in hip, detached despair or sink into genuine depression. Choosing hope draws us deeply into the messiness of real life and real community. Abandoning hope allows us to dwell in dark fantasy.

The Future?

I watched Seabiscuit last night with a group from church. It's a charming film with a classic triumph of the underdog theme. Throughout the movie, Charles Howard, played by Jeff Bridges, aims at "the future." As the American waster frontier settles, the sky becomes the limit. As the American economy falls into the Great Depression, Howard still believes in the power of the future.

It was an interesting film to watch with a group from a church whose future has been in doubt for many years, and continues to be an open question as we stumble along from one crisis to the next.

It leaves me wondering, is there a future for the progressive church?

We all know that the so-called Christian Right is an extremely powerful cultural and political force in the nation. The Christian Right dominates the cultural perspective on Christianity so much that most folks outside of the walls of progressive churches do not even know that such a thing as progressive Christianity exists.

Years ago, when I worked for a short while on the Nuclear Freeze campaign, I recall the shock that a friend expressed when he learned that I was going to the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. "What’s a good progressive like you doing in a divinity school?” he wanted to know. I tried to explain that there was a tradition of progressive Christianity, but he had never encountered it. Most folks haven’t.

For most Americans, Christianity has become synonymous with a particular legalistic, conservative, evangelical movement whose vocal, media-savvy leaders are quick to condemn anyone who sees the world differently than they do.

Gays and other sexual minorities? An abomination. Women? Remain silent and “gracefully submissive,” in the words of the Southern Baptist Convention. Jews? In need of salvation. Feminists, lesbians, the ACLU, People for the American Way? Responsible for September 11, according to Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.

At a meeting of conservative Presbyterians a while back, one speaker said that liberals were like bugs devouring the foundation of the church. He called for stomping as the appropriate response to such an infestation. I’m not sure, but I believe they broke into a spontaneous version of “Guide My Feet” at that point!

In the face of such attacks from some conservatives and such widespread ignorance from the population as a whole, we have to ask: is there a future for progressive Christianity?

As for me, I firmly believe and have dedicated my own life to the conviction that God is calling forth a progressive, inclusive, engaged, diverse church upon which to build the beloved community. Now this future remains to be worked out in our living together as church.

Yes, there is a future. But whether it is a future of exile, decline, death and memorial stones or a future of foundation stones and building together and vibrant worship and call and response … remains to be worked out in our living together as church.

Indeed, the foundation was laid for a progressive, inclusive and diverse church by Jesus himself, as one can see in passages such as Mark 7:24-37, where Jesus encounters the Syrophoenician woman.

What might the future look like, if we live into our calling? A progressive Christianity will not be afraid. It will welcome contact and dialogue and deep conversation with other cultures and traditions including with our conservative, evangelical brothers and sisters, and it will be open to being transformed itself in and through such relationships, just as Jesus was transformed in his meeting with the Syrophoenician woman.

Now most commentators don’t want to read it this way, but the plain and clear story line here shows us that Jesus is changed by his encounter.

Jesus went to a Gentile region to get away. A Jewish healer and prophetic teacher ought to be able to rest in quiet anonymity for a while in the region of Tyre. Yet a gentile woman comes and pleads for healing and wholeness for her daughter.

Jesus tries to brush her aside – after all, he is Jewish and is focused on the spiritual condition of his own people. Yet her faithful pleading opens him up to the possibility that his mission is broader than he had previously understood.

In this moment, Jesus comes to more fully understand that, as William Sloan Coffin put it, “There is no way that [faith] can be spiritually redemptive without being socially responsible. A [faithful person] cannot have a personal conversion experience without experiencing at the same time a change in social attitude. God is always trying to make humanity more human.”

In this encounter with a marginalized woman, Jesus becomes more human, he becomes more clearly a child of a loving, merciful, just creator.

As Bonhoeffer put it, “Jesus tells us: You are standing under God’s love; God is holy and you, too, are to be holy.”

And in this story from Mark, Jesus radically expands the reach of that good news. For the good news is not just to one sect, defined by a set of legalistic boundaries designed to keep folks out. No. The good news is for everyone, for we are all heirs to the promise of wholeness and healing that is proclaimed through Jesus.

There is no East or West, male or female, slave or free, Gentile or Jew, black or white, straight or gay – for we are all children of the same God.

Jesus goes way out of his way to demonstrate this when he travels to the Decapolis on his way back to Galilee. Going by way of the Decapolis is like traveling from DC to New York by way of Cleveland – only more so, for the Decapolis was an unclean region avoided by Jews. Perhaps more like Pittsburgh!

His route and his actions – healing a Gentile from an unclean region – proclaim good news for all people. Jesus shows us here that grace is abundant; that the power of healing and wholeness is everywhere for everyone.

The people were astounded beyond measure, scripture tells us. Why? Was it the miracle healing? No doubt that was part of it, but healers were not uncommon. The larger miracle was this: for a people used to hearing that they were unclean, excluded, beyond salvation, Jesus proclaims this good news: God’s radically inclusive love for all people brings healing and wholeness to all of our wounded and broken lives; God’s radically inclusive love brings peace into our warring lives; God’s radically inclusive love for all creation brings light into the present darkness.

This is the foundational truth upon which we will build the future for progressive Christian faith and life. This is the bright light that will illuminate the way for that progressive life and faith to journey toward the future of God’s calling. And this promised future marks the most profound difference between progressive Christian faith and life and its other.

For, as William Sloan Coffin suggests, the theology of the Christian Right offers a present that has only a past. To that I say God calls forth a bright new morning -- in this place; at this moment.

God is calling us to risk the new day, to step into a bright new morning – a new morning of restored relationships following a long night of barriers and barbed wired; a new morning of reparation in our streets following a long night of injustice; a new morning of peace following a long nightmare of warfare; a new morning of light and more light following a long dark midnight. Arise, our light is come!

Hey, maybe the progressive church is just a beat up old undersized race horse that just happens to be the wave of the future. It could happen.

Katrina Diaries: From the Gulf Coast to the Gulf War

I left the coast Thursday evening and drove as far as Birmingham before sleepiness caught up with me. Even there, in the lobby of the hotel where I spent the night, I found reminders of what and who I was leaving behind: FEMA forms for reimbursement for those seeking shelter from the storm.

On Friday morning I detoured into downtown to walk through Kelly Ingram Park past the 16^th Street Baptist Church. There, while sitting on a statue commemorating the children of the Birmingham campaign of 1963, I was reminded of others seeking shelter. A homeless man approached me and asked for a couple of dollars for food. I asked him if there was somewhere nearby to eat and he pointed across the park. I said, “are you hungry?” and, when he nodded “yes,” I said, “come on, I’ll buy you some breakfast.”

We walked through the park and shared bits of our stories. His name is Theodore. He is 30, African-American, born in Huntsville. I am almost 45, white, born in Tuscaloosa. Two sons of the Southland whose journeys crossed momentarily in this park in which the right to journey together was secured.

We talked a bit about what had happened in the park when I was a child. I shared with him how my own sense of ministry, and my own feeling of being called into ministry were shaped by the memories of what people of faith had done in places like Kelly Ingram Park to transform the world we grew up in.

He told me he wanted to find a job as a painter. I asked him if he had any construction experience and, when he said “no,” I suggested asking the folks at the 16^th Street church to connect him to someone who could teach him to hang drywall. If you can hang drywall you can make a living on the Gulf Coast for years to come. There will be jobs for drywall workers far after the last volunteer pastors have left the coast.

In the grand scheme of things, hanging drywall – or ripping it down when it’s been flooded out – are probably more necessary jobs than pastoral ministry. In any case, such work certainly offers the great satisfaction of immediate results.

I left the Gulf Coast in time to make it back to Washington for the major demonstration calling for an end to the Gulf War. Alas, that work offers no immediate results. It is, however, inextricably bound to the work on the Gulf Coast and to the fate of folks like Theodore in Birmingham and in cities across the nation.

As Martin Luther King said in calling for an end to the war in Vietnam, “a nation that year after year continues to spend more money on national defense than it does on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

Signs and symptoms of spiritual death are all around us in the American empire. We continue to be, as Dr. King noted 40 years ago, the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. Our coarsened culture has become also the greatest purveyor of cheapened sexuality, mass consumerism and hyperindividualism.

Despite what some preachers will contend, and despite what some passages of scripture seem to suggest, I cannot believe that God sends down huge storms to destroy wayward societies. But the still, small voice of God does speak through the whirlwind, calling us in the wake of Katrina to refocus our priorities, to rebuild the commonwealth, to restore justice to the public square and repair the breaches of the cities’ streets to live in. In such work, a profound joy meets our time’s deepest need.

Katrina Diaries: Pretty, Witty and Gay

Another day of moldy drywall. It remains hot and humid and we are so disgusting that I can barely stand to be in the same room with myself. In the heat of this afternoon, two irrepressible young women who have joined us from Indiana broke into song. With sweat streaking the dust on their faces they sang together, “I feel pretty! Oh, so pretty!” When they got to the phrase, “I feel pretty, and witty …” my friend, Tom, chimed in, “… and gay!”

The deepest joy I have discovered in this journey has come in watching Tom exercise his immense gifts of organization, leadership, energy and good humor. The entire team has been moved by his capacity for compassion – for true suffering with and alongside the families we are serving. We have been guided by his experience with plumbing and electricity, too, and have managed to remove fixtures from bathrooms and kitchens without making a bad situation worse and without electrocuting anyone! His ministry here is surely a sign of the reign of God in the world.

It’s a shame – one might call it a sin – that the world does not recognize such ministry. The church and the broader culture are torn apart by issues concerning gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people, yet the people themselves remain often invisible. Whether it is ordination issues within the church, or marriage and other civil rights issues in the society, GLBT people are painted with broad brushes and their individual lives are obscured. As a result, the conversation is diminished. Indeed, it is not even ever a conversation, because conversation demands partners rather than stereotyped images.

For this one week, at least, conservative and progressive people of faith have shared a common mission: to serve the people in most need along one small stretch of the battered Gulf Coast. Remarkably enough, through this shared mission, genuine conversation has emerged about precisely the concerns that divide us. But the conversation has an entirely different tone to it among us, because we are not talking now about “an issue” but rather about an incarnation, flesh and blood human beings who may be “pretty, witty and gay” or not.

Houses may not be the only thing that is rebuilt along the Gulf Coast. Perhaps a richer, fuller national conversation about the issues that divide us can also be constructed out of the relationships built among those who are sharing in the common struggle to respond to the unprecedented need in places like Gautier. God is not a Democrat nor a Republican, but God’s people come as each and as neither. Only when we can begin to see one another as individuals, created in our rich variety in the image of an unfathomably creative God, will we be able to reach beyond the lines of difference we have constructed. In any case, it’s clear that the folks down here whose lives Tom has touched are less concerned about his sex life than about the faith life that drives him to service in the name of Jesus.

Katrina Diaries: Theological Storms

Rita swirls out in the Gulf, bringing sporadic rain and a steady breeze with sweet relief from stifling heat and humidity. No amount of wind can clear the air of the bad theology that clings to the aftermath of Katrina. The other day I heard a radio preacher talking about the judgment of God on the voodoo-welcoming people of New Orleans.

Never mind that a god so narrow minded as to wipe out people seeking various ways to the divine does not deserve praise and worship. A god who discounts as collateral damage the hundreds of people who probably shared the radio evangelist’s faith doesn’t even deserve respect. A jealous and angry god is one thing – perhaps even a Biblical thing – but a god with such lousy aim is worthless. A god who unleashes flood waters on poor people trapped in New Orleans by a system that forgot to evacuate them is not the God of Moses who parted the waters for a people escaping a system that enslaved them.

I met some folks today at a church that sits right on the coast in Biloxi among a row of houses built just after the Civil War. The homes on either side of the church were destroyed, but the church itself escaped with nothing more than a flooded basement and a few damaged doors. One of the people I met there said, “God must have been watching out for his house.”

Less than two blocks away, 30 people died when the motel they were in collapsed. Here’s a god with pin-point precision but confused priorities. A god too busy watching over a temple of bricks and mortar to protect the flesh and blood next door is not the God made known in Jesus Christ, the suffering servant.

But when you wander through streets that look like a war zone, it’s hard not to wonder who and where God is in all of this.

Desmond Tutu has written, “The God we worship is the Exodus God, the great liberator God who leads us out of all kinds of bondage. Do you remember what God told Moses? [God] said, ‘I have seen the suffering of My people. I have heard their cry. I know their suffering and am come down to deliver them.’ Our God is a God who knows. Our God is a God who sees. Our God is a God who hears. Our God is a God who comes down to deliver. But the way that God delivers us is by using us as […] partners, by calling on Moses, on you and me.”

Ah, and therein lies the rub. Lousy theology lets us off the hook. It is fatalistic rather than faithful. If spirit is wind and fire – pnuema and ruah – then surely God can speak to us through the ferocious winds of Katrina and Rita, and surely part of the message is simply this: “here I am; where are you? Here I am, come and join me.”

Katrina Diaries: Justice Among the Ruins

Today I heard someone remark that those who had the most lost the most while those who had the least lost the least in this storm. While that may be true from a certain market orientation, people of faith are called to measure according to a different economy. There’s more than lousy politics going on; there’s lousy theology, too! Moreover, even within the framework of a market economy it would be more accurate to say that those with much lost much but those with little lost everything.

Within a more comprehensive economy, perhaps the economy of the kingdom of God, there is no accounting of the things that have been accumulated against what’s been swept away. Rather, we are accountable for treasure that has been given away and for hearts that have been swept away. As Albert Einstein put it, “not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts.”

All of the folks we’ve been trying to help down here count themselves blessed and lucky. All of them lost homes, but none of them lost loved ones. Still, it is heartbreaking to pick up stuffed animals encrusted in mud, to find graduation pictures plastered to moldy furniture, to find a photograph date-stamped “December, 1974” and know that someone’s memories will be forever diminished by such losses.

Walter Brueggemann has said that the Biblical definition of justice amounts to sorting out what belongs to whom and returning it. In the wake of Katrina that is an improbably huge task.

Some things are easy. Today we were hanging drywall in the home of a soldier whose entire leave has been spent gutting his house and trying to get at least a little of it livable for his wife before he returns to active duty the last week of September.

I asked him if he was a fisherman. He said “yes,” and, pointing toward his back yard, I said, “well, at least your boat looks like it’s in good shape.” He said, “that’s not my boat. It belongs to the guy four houses down and across the street. It wound up there when the water went back down.”

Other things are more difficult. Another neighbor was cleaning out his house – a trailer he’d lived in for more than 15 years. His insurance was cancelled a few weeks before Katrina hit because the company was getting out of business in hurricane prone areas. No other company would sell him a policy until the end of hurricane season.

What belongs to whom? How can it be returned? Courts and legislatures will have to do some of the sorting. People of faith across the nation will be called upon to remind public officials that food belongs to the hungry, clothing belongs to the naked, healthcare belongs to the sick, jobs belong to the unemployed, and shared risks belongs to the commonwealth. Such sorting is the work of justice.

Among the few households we were able to help, the work of justice was on a smaller scale. While the folks we worked with counted themselves lucky, they were also experiencing an almost unfathomable loss and grief. Papers rescued from a crushed desk unleashed anger at an insurance company. A picture pulled from the muck brought on a torrent of tears. Some losses exceed any calculus.

What belongs to those whose losses cannot be counted? How can it be returned? Working at the level of compassion, perhaps the first gesture of justice is recognizing that dignity belongs to the suffering. The first part of this relief effort lies not in gathering scattered possessions but in helping the suffering restore their fractured dignity.

Elementary school playground. 

On the coast road where Trent Lott had a home. This roof was still in good shape -- it's just the house beneath it that was gone. 

Close to the coast. 

After the deluge. 

On the ground in Mississippi. 

Katrina Diaries: The View from the Front Porch

Another multi-analgesic day: gutting the interior of Alfred Jackson’s house. Mr. Jackson, an 82-year-old African-American man, has lived his entire life in the house we stripped to studs today. Katrina was the first storm to flood his house, and she left it under eight feet of brackish water.

The work is brutal in the 90-degree heat, and it doesn’t leave much time for conversation so I don’t know much about Mr. Jackson’s eight decades in Mississippi. I do know he had built a nice home with beautiful paneling on many of the walls, and shelves filled with books and the mementos of a long life.

Katrina’s winds and water swept away the books and many of the mementos. They ripped the veneer right off the walls. They also ripped the veneer that has glossed over racial politics in America. But they left behind a Bible, a bit worse for the beating it suffered, but still carrying the promise that someday justice will roll down like mighty water and righteousness like an everflowing stream.

An octogenarian in Mississippi has probably seen a lot of water roll by. He could be forgiven for a certain sadness in the wake of these angry waters, yet as he sat in the shade of a tree in his front lawn watching us carry out the stuff of a lifetime, Mr. Jackson’s eyes were still bright, hopeful and focused on the future as he told us – eyes twinkling – that he’d been thinking about redecorating anyway.

Yesterday we drove along the beach front road where Sen. Trent Lott’s house was destroyed. President Bush joked about sitting on the front porch again when it is rebuilt. I don’t suppose the president will ever sit out under the tree in Alfred Jackson’s front yard.

He should. Familiarity does not breed contempt; it cultivates concern and compassion. Many political observers have noted President Bush’s apparent discomfort with poor folks in general and poor African-Americans in particular. The First Lady may be honest in her insistence that Mr. Bush cares for all Americans; nevertheless, her heated defense of her husband does not change the fact that folks like Alfred Jackson will never be among Mr. Bush’s circle of familiarity and concern.

As for me, in better – and cooler – times, I am pretty darn sure that I’d rather spend an afternoon sitting in Mr. Jackson’s front yard than on Trent Lott’s front porch. The view of the Gulf of Mexico may be much better from Sen. Lott’s porch, but the view of America is better from Mr. Jackson’s.

Katrina Diaries: Lord's Day

The best way to describe this Sabbath is that it has been a four ibuprofen day. We made of our work a worship, and recalled with our backs that the Sabbath was made for humankind not humankind for the Sabbath.

The “worship” began with prayer at 8:30, followed by a chorus of chain saws at 8:45. Before dinner was mercifully served at 7:00 we had gutted one house down to its bare studs and removed a ton or more of trees and debris from outside of another.

We are in an area spared the worst of the storm, and still the devastation along the shore is indescribable. Tornados reduce homes to matchsticks; hurricanes do the same thing and then sweep the matchsticks out to sea.

Such storms strike with a great egalitarian furry, sweeping away mansions and shacks alike. Along the beach road in Pascagoula we passed what, we were told, was the home of the wealthiest man in Mississippi. It is now a see-through – or, perhaps, sea-through – structure. The neighbor’s car rests in a swimming pool. One perfectly intact roof sits squarely on the foundation of a house swept away by the storm surge. The roofers would be proud of their work, but a bit mystified as to the whereabouts of the house they did it on.

Two blocks inland the homes are far more modest – two bedrooms on a slab qualifies as middle class; working class folks inhabit trailers. Just a few days ago all were six feet under the Gulf of Mexico.

Of course, while the wind and waves were no respecter of class, the economic structures that will determine the course of rebuilding are entirely class driven. There is a class of folks who are insured and another class of folks who are not. There is a class of folks who can afford to rebuild and another class who cannot. The wealth on the coast line here is not as deep as the flood waters were, and thus the outpouring of volunteers is crucial. Free labor is all some folks can afford.

But it will not, on its own, be enough to ensure the return of ordinary working folks – the shipbuilders, the fishers, the shop owners, police, fire fighters, school teachers, service employees and factory workers who have lived along this coastline in homes just a stroll away from the water.

Ensuring their return will take a massive influx of public money justly distributed. These days, the tens of thousands of folks all along the Gulf Coast need the concern of the federal government.

They certainly aren’t getting the concern of some insurance companies unless they have flood insurance. Homes utterly destroyed by the 25-foot storm surge aren’t covered by standard policies because the damage was caused by water not wind – never mind that the wall of water was driven by 150-mile per hour winds.

One home we worked on today was totaled by the storm surge. It had to be completely gutted, which we did. The insurance agent told the home owner to expect $10,000 to cover the roof of their shed, which was blown off by the wind, but to expect nothing for their house which was under eight feet of water when the surge rolled through. The family of five is homeless, but their shed will have a nice roof.

For now, the kindness of strangers is all that holds together many such families. Such kindness marks the first step on the road to recovery. There’s plenty of work to be done. Will there be enough strangers to do it?

Katrina Diaries: Heroes Highway

It is a long, long, long way from Arlington, Virginia, to Gautier, Mississippi. My butt is molded to the seat of this minivan! In my road stupor I am convinced that I rolled through northern Alabama listening to Jackson Browne singing “After the Deluge.”

The long, low ridge that emerges from the broad coastal plain just south of Birmingham marks the southern end of the Appalachians, and it seems to me utterly disconnected from the rest of those mountains. The distance is more than geographic and may be measured better in time than in miles. History in the south is Faulknerian: “the past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.”

I cannot drive through Birmingham without recalling its critical place in the Civil Rights Movement. The pictures from the Gulf Coast of black people fleeing raging water are more helpless and, perhaps, hopeless, than the pictures from four decades ago of black folks fleeing water aimed with rage by Birmingham police. After the deluge there were no buildings fit to keep the children dry.

I am a southerner, born in Tuscaloosa just a few years before Gov. Wallace stood in the doorway at the University of Alabama promising “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” I know intimately, having graduated from Chattanooga High School with a class that was 50 percent white and 50 percent African-American, that the South has changed.

But sometimes I think those remarkable changes have been overtaken by other equally significant yet almost unremarked upon changes in the broader culture. The Civil Rights Movement itself reminds me of a time before we all became consumers instead of citizens, before we became bound more by a common market than by common humanity. I cannot think about the Movement without recalling the music that kept spirits high; a recollection that makes the destruction of music-filled New Orleans all the more dispiriting.

Yet driving down the “Heroes Highway,” as the interstate from Montgomery to Mobile is called, I saw a few signs of hope as I sped along in an ad hoc caravan of concern. Trucks hauling mobile homes for FEMA, Red Cross crews, other church groups – all heading for the battered Gulf Coast in an effort to close the distances that have separated us one from another for far too long.

Even after the deluge and amidst the apparent triumph of consumer culture, we remain, each of us and all of us, creatures of one earth. Perhaps we may recall this fundamental truth and live into it again as creation reveals its secrets by and by.

Katrina Diaries: A Long Day's Journey

I've been down on the Gulf Coast for a while, with no access to the cyber world but need deep in the muck of the real world. Over the next several days I will post reflections on my time in Mississippi.
If Frederick Buechner is right – if call emerges at the intersection of deep joy and deep need – then I am less called than confused. Why am I heading to the Gulf Coast to join a group of volunteers from National Capital Presbytery? The pictures from Katrina’s wake are compelling, to be sure. I am a pastor, and pastors are supposed to serve, right? After all, I have some experience in cleaning up after hurricanes and in leading mission trips. In addition, to my great surprise, an openly gay member of my congregation is heading down with the team. I am surprised at his participation not for doubts about his gifts – he holds a construction e license – but because the last time he joined a Presbytery mission trip he and his partner had to reenter the closet for the sake of the sensibilities of their Kenyan hosts and the experience was more than a little abusive. I am going, in part, to support Tom.
So I feel obligation and duty, longing and loneliness but little joy as I drive south. Already I miss my children and my wife and wonder about the faithfulness of leaving them and the congregation I serve behind.
Of course, while I may sense little joy as I embark on this journey, the dire need that awaits us in Mississippi is not in doubt. The images that have flashed across screens for the past two weeks are unprecedented in my lifetime. Although we’ve seen utter destruction before and too many times, the scope of Katrina’s devastation exceeds any natural disaster in the United States in the past half century.
On top of the breadth of destruction, the storm’s effects have clearly split along lines of class and race, and thus made clear the deep divisions and fault lines still running through American society. What most Americans don’t want to know or believe about their country has been laid bare in the Third World images beamed out of New Orleans. The commonwealth has collapsed.
A generation of Reaganomics and neo-conservative policies has eviscerated the public sector, intensified the radical individualism of American culture and widened the gap between the haves and have nots to a distance not seen since the Gilded Age. Grover Norquist, who has been called “field marshall of the Bush plan,” once famously remarked that he would like to shrink the federal government to the size where it can be flushed down the bathtub drain. The response of FEMA as New Orleans and the Gulf Coast were being flushed down the drain suggests that Norquist’s dream has come true – with disastrous consequences.
Meanwhile, right-wing Christianity, with its focus on narrowly circumscribed personal piety and individual salvation, has played chaplain to this movement.
In the faces of the women, children and men abandoned in the rising flood waters we are confronting the limits of the conservative social and theological imagination.
The deep need of the world is in those faces. They call forth both the immediate response of disaster relief – the hands on, boots in the mud work of thousands of volunteers, and also for a sustained political engagement confronting the powers in the board rooms of the corporations that will profit from this misery or fail to cover its victims adequately, and the hearing rooms of a Congress that still seems more interested in cutting the taxes of the wealthy than in meeting the needs of the poor.
Christ is in those mud-smeared faces, too. The incarnate one is in our midst: homeless, poor, feeling as abandoned as on the cross. As I drive toward Mississippi, I am realizing that it does bring me deep joy to witness to the reality that some still seek Christ in such places. When that joy of encounter meets such desperate need, Christ beckons – calling us to the public square and to public squalor to be repairers of the breaches in both places.