BLOGGING-THOMAS

Sermon preached at St. Thomas’ Parish
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Dr. Wayne Whitson Floyd
Audio Podcast Available

Choosing Nonviolence Download

“You yourself created my inmost parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I will thank you because I am marvelously made; your works are wonderful, and I know it well.” (Psalm 139)

Of all the ways in which human beings are indeed so marvelously made, one of the most wonderful is our capacity for memory. It is in the process of remembrance that we assemble the pattern of the formative moments of our personal identity. Anamnesis Plato called it – reminiscence, remembrance. Anamnesis is at the core of our Eucharistic theology; Holy Communion isn’t considered valid without invoking the Holy Spirit (epiklesis) to transform the bread and wine to bear the presence of Christ, first comes anamnesis, remembrance, of the deeds that give significance to the communion elements. “On the night before he died,” the Celebrant reminds us. So “Do this in remembrance.”

Our own memories, likewise, and those of the communities to which we belong, that give significance to all that we have become over a lifetime. In my own memory, the spring and summer of 1968 left an indelible mark. I graduated from high school that spring and left home for the first time to begin college late that summer. All of my classmates who shared those experiences would forever remember the first half of 1968, but unfortunately not for any of the reasons we might have imagined when the year began.

Through our parents and grandparents, our lives already had been shaped by the turmoil and terror of World War II, and then Korea, and now Viet Nam. Closer to home, violence had slashed through our junior high years, when just before Thanksgiving of 1963, President Kennedy had been cut down by gunfire in Dallas. Now just five years later, our high school graduation was bracketed in time by two other assassinations by gunfire, The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis on April 4th and JFK’s brother Robert Kennedy on June 5th.

Barely a year later other dramatic events for a while overcame the notoriety of these deaths with equally graphic and iconic cultural images: the first manned moon landing on July 20th, 1969; Woodstock that August; and between them the Stonewall Riots in New York on June 28th that began the modern gay rights movement. And then just a year after that, arson struck St. Thomas’ Parish church in the summer of 1970. There was only one Woodstock; and decades have passed since the last person walked the face of the moon, leaving us with but fading memories of those glory days. But we are still playing out the consequences of the violence of the 1960s and the ways we have learned, or refused to learn, how to deal with it.

The commemoration tomorrow of the birthday of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is an act of remembrance celebrating a remarkable life and recalling a painful and transformative period of our national history, a time when the effectiveness of his strategy of resistance through non-violence could seem like a pipe-dream when surrounded by the smoke of arson and the brutality of war and racial and social upheaval. Who could have imagined Barak Obama in the White House less than fifty years later, or that incessant war would still consume so much of our country’s resources across so much of the globe.

With Dr. King and the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, however, world history took a turn towards the possibility of a more redemptive future. The pains of social dislocation were the birth pangs of the culture of radical hospitality and inclusion that have now a half-century later come to define St. Thomas’ Parish. We in this very room are heirs to the legacy of the riots at Stonewall, NY, as well as those on 14th Street just blocks from here, and those that left Columbia Heights and the U Street Corridor that lay in ruins. And Dr. King’s commitment to non-violence needs to be remembered as the essential backdrop for the dream we currently explore with Bishop Gene Robinson to establish a Center for Non-Violent Communication in the new church we are building. In looking back, we frame our future, with gratitude to those who have shown us the way, however painful those memories often are. Read more

Opening up the newspaper or going online for news recently has been far more of an adventure than even many news junkies and sensationalism mongers could have expected.  I was on vacation, but couldn’t get away from news about

• the country, if not the world, teetering on the verge of an economic cliff
• hurricane Irene and an earthquake on the east coast in a single week

And then this morning’s headlines warned of a “specific but unconfirmed threat” of a car-bomb terrorist attack in New York or Washington this weekend. 

The economic crisis was a human- not a natural-disaster, and could have been avoided by different decisions being made.  And the hurricane and earthquake, we must remember, were natural-disasters, but not vengeful “acts of God.” While the Weather Channel let us see the former coming, despite the fact that we couldn’t do much but hunker-down until it passed, the earthquake caught absolutely everyone by surprise, leaving Washingtonians and others up and down the east coast literally as well as psychologically rattled in the aftermath.

Terrorism, however, is a very different beast.  It is the result of human actions, and at the heart of any act of terror is the desire to remove all of the potential victim’s sense of control from the victim, leaving no action that can be taken to prevent it.  Whenever “they” threaten to strike, “we”  feel helpless to do something in advance to guarantee a lack of success.  In spite of this, there’s no way to hunker-down until the threat is gone, like in a monster storm, because by its nature the threat of terror is ongoing – it does not pass us by to move on elsewhere.   Yet like earthquakes, acts of terrorism catch us off guard, and once we’ve experienced one, they leave us with varying degrees of PTSD responses.

So what are we to do?  Make preemptive strikes against potential terrorists?  Close off streets around public buildings or install detectors that seek to ‘see’ a threat before it materializes into action?  Be on guard against ‘them’ by racial- or ethnic- or religious-profiling?  Install walls and fences at our borders to keep ‘them’ out?

The fact is, we have as a people tried all of these, and many people still find such responses ‘necessary’ even if ‘unfortunately’ destructive of the very patterns of normalcy that terrorists’ themselves wish to bring about.  This is what I’ve come to think of as “the terror trap” – becoming so paralyzed by our anticipatory anxiety that we lose a large measure of our quality of life, even as we “succeed” at temporarily forestalling the next attack.

“The Terror Trap” is what happens when we allow ourselves – consciously or unconsciously – to internalize the strategies of terrorism into our daily lives with one another, for example, through bullying behavior or actual domestic- or societal-violence.  We walk around trapped in our fears of others.  And we also use our financial or social or political power to entrap others in their fears of us and what we might do to them, such as stealth drone attacks in the night in Afghanistan.

However, “evil,” according to the great western Christian theologian Augustine, is not some “thing” with it’s own reality that needs defending against because “it” may otherwise get us.  “Evil” instead is what is left when we remove the “good” from our own lives or the world around us.

• The absence of intentional acts of goodness entraps us in the void of what we experience as “evil” — those places where love, compassion, forgiveness, justice, and radical hospitality no longer empower who we are or what we do.
• The “evil” of terrorism is that it threatens to entrap us in places of suspicion, rather than love; self-interest rather than compassion; retribution rather than forgiveness; unfairness rather than justice; and exclusion rather than hospitality.

“The Terror Trap” isn’t really something that “they” control; it is a trap that we build inside ourselves that captures the goodness that resides in each of us and holds it hostage to fear, doubt, suspicion, and anger.  We have a lot more control over this than we usually realize, but we hesitate because it means changing the habits of our hearts to free the goodness that we allow otherwise to remain trapped within us.  Terror is a trap, whether external or internal, that sucks the air out of the room and leaves us smothering in the void; and in the absence of the good, we begin to create the very terror we abhor.

I’m not ‘religious’ about reading JIm Wallis’ “SojoMail” missives; sometimes they sit in my inbox, beckoning, until like old lettuce lost in the back of the refrigerator drawer they get purged for the sake of the ‘fresh’ stuff.  Today, however, I bit.  To shift the metaphor, Sojourners dangled the bait in front of me, a subject line in Outlook mail that said, “What Would Jesus Cut?”  And like a fat, lazy bass on the bottom of a safe, still lake, I took it “hook, line, and sinker”!

Asking why I read today’s email-missive, and not yesterday’s, is like asking why “the big one” takes the lure when you jig it to the left instead of the right.  When you get a strike on the end of that slender rod, lure-lore fades and all eyes are on the fish.

Jim Wallis wrote:

Right now Congress is considering a budget plan that would make a 9 percent cut in discretionary spending while giving a 2 percent increase for military spending. This would be devastating for domestic programs that provide basic nutrition, health, and opportunity to poor children and international aid programs that save lives every day.

As a country, we face difficult financial choices, but one thing that should not be on the table is to abandon the poor and vulnerable while allowing more military spending.

As Christians we ask ourselves, “What would Jesus do?” to make sure our actions reflect our deepest held values. So when it comes to decisions about our national budget, we ask, “What would Jesus cut?” …

The biblical prophets make clear that a nation’s righteousness is ultimately determined not by its GNP or military might — but by how it treats its most vulnerable people. Jesus says our love for him will be demonstrated by how we treat the “least of these.”

The scene shifted for me — almost thirty years back in the mid-80s at the start of the Reagan Revolution. I was writing my doctoral dissertation and working as a “crisis intervention counselor” for the Region X mental health association, with services provided from the emergency room of the University of Virginia Hospital in Charlottesville.  The stories I can tell.  Another time.

What Jim Wallis made me remember, first, was that I lost my job due to Reaganomics.  But everything isn’t about me, I’ve learned.  So my memory refocused a bit, and I recalled with startling clarity that it may have been “morning in America again” for some, but in the mid-1980s U.S. government services for “the least” of God’s children saw the sun set.

Already state mental hospitals like Western State across Afton Mountain from Charlottesville had disgorged most of their entire population onto the streets of towns and cities, and what had seemed like such a humane beginning turned into the inhumanity of people with chronic mental disorders being left on the street with nothing to take the place of the hospital setting from which they had been ‘mercifully’ discharged.

“Crisis Intervention” many times meant taking care of society’s “scratch and dent” people who had been through so much, had so much to give, and yet were being tossed out to fend for themselves.  “Crisis Intervention” was necessary because without the structure of someone simply to help them take their medications, bank their disability check, and pay their rent, many chronic cases started inexorably falling through the cracks, into unending crisis, which for some was like a Groundhog Day from Hell.  When “morning in America” dawned in the 1980s for those who made enough to have taxes to cut, the sun rose  on towns like Charlottesville, were even the slim resources for people who had been forced into crisis were being cut back or eliminated.

Losing my job wasn’t even a gnat on an angel’s wing for God, I came to imagine; I would get another job, but “the least” of God’s children were going to get the least that America could get away with giving them.  So the remainder of the time I lived in Charlottesville, I saw many of my former clients on the streets, slowly devolving into chronic-crisis as a way of life.

I saw their faces today as I read “What Would Jesus Cut?”  And all I can say for sure is that, like Jim Wallis, I know what Jesus wouldn’t,

So the question for me now isn’t about what Jesus would do, but “What Should I Do, Jesus?” — knowing what I do, and who “they” are — the most vulnerable of our sisters and brothers, whose faces look, too, like children caught in inner-city drive by shootings, LGBT teens being taunted and bullied, or the millions in the global south dying from the lack of malaria-preventing mosquito nets.  Let’s save them, even a few at a time, and add their faces to the balcony at next year’s State of the Union, or to the End Zone at next year’s Super Bowl.  It’s “the least” we can do.

I blew it.  I was so sleepy Wednesday morning that it never occurred to me to go invest in history and plunk down 50 cents for a Washington Post.  I’m told I could have found one until about 10 a.m., had I looked hard enough.  The problem was that I didn’t think about it until 7 p.m. last night.

I needed to go out to walk for exercise anyway (as my spouse reminded me!), so with audacity I put on my navy HOPE hooded sweatshirt and pants (from the college, not the campaign), and loped on over to Georgia Avenue NW, which angles through my neighborhood.

It’s a sort of liminal zone between two economic, although not racial, worlds — on both sides live mostly “people of color” (predominantly and historically African American), although the colors represented now are salted with caucasians here and there.  Economically, however, the divide is more stark.

The neighborhoods on the side of Georgia Ave where I live manifest different levels of hope … and fulfillment.  But for everyone, hope is a plausible proposition.  When you look at the dc.gov website’s crime statistics, though, the little circles marking crime sites in the past year litter Georgia Avenue itself.  Even lots of NE (Northeast) DC is now “on the way up” — but Georgia Ave has blocks and blocks of tiny neighborhood stores notable for their bullet proof plexiglass cages for the cashiers and burglar bar coverings on every inch of explosed glass.

Last night, these were the establishments that called my name.  I went out cruising about twenty blocks of Georgia Avenue looking for the most elusive commodity in Washington, DC: an “Obama Makes History” edition of the Washington Post!

Which led me to the only establishments that were open (besides a couple of drug stores, a smattering of fast food restaurants, and two tiny, sad liquor stores) — those little markets that usually don’t look all that inviting even when the chain-link is off the windows and the lights are on and the doors are open.

Last night, however, I was a man with a purpose.  Four quarters in my sweat pants pocket, I tried the first one I came two.  Two Hispanic men looked up as I asked, “any newspapers left?”  Then seeing a rack with El Tiempo Latino and La Nacion, I added, “Washington Posts”?  At which point both men smiled, saying almost in unison, “Obama?”  “Si, Obama” I squeezed out. “No, no, no,” they replied, and then an avalanche of Spanish I didn’t understand.  I smiled back, waved goodbye and went on my way.

My whole walk went like that.  I’d walk in a store, point at the empty newspaper rack and say “Obama?” and almost before I could get out “Do you have anymore Washington Posts?” either the clerk or other customers would smile and say, “Obama!” followed by sad “No, no, no’s” about the newspaper and then cascades of laughter and banter in several languages I honestly couldn’t identify — maybe Korean in one store, and finally English in at least two or three — but always happy, sometimes boastful, othertimes self-congratulatory, never inhospitable words about the miracle of their new President: “Obama!”

I know it won’t last.  Just remember the shift from 9/11 to the anniversary of “Shock and Awe” and it’s clear that this honeymoon won’t last forever.  Things will happen that will dim the memory and tarnish the glow a bit and re-insert suspicion into our exchanges with even our neighbors.

For a few days, now, though, I can walk down the sidewalk in 16th Street Heights, or stand at the 14th Street bus stop, or get off the Fairfax Connector in Herndon, VA, and my neighbors, fellow commuters, and even Ziggy, the middle-aged Coptic Orthodox Ethiopian engineer who I often visit with as we walk from the bus to our respective places of employment — all of us, with the utterance of just one word, smile, and are joined together: “Obama!”  And there’s a story to tell.

And there’s hope!  Hope that change really is on the way.  Hope that we’re all up to it.  Hope for what we share, not what in many cases still obviously divides us.

No.  I never found a Post.  But in the spirit of full disclosure, I just read online that the Post is printing 350,000 more commemorative-edition copies that will go on sale in the morning.  I’m headed to Georgia Avenue first thing tomorrow morning, this time to the CVS Pharmacy, which is listed as a Post distributor for these treasures.  And … this is hard to admit … just in case, I just bought a copy from Cafe Press for $9.95 + postage and shipping.  “Obama Makes History.”  And I admit I want a piece of it while it lasts.

It was a long and at times unbelievable ride last night – at one moment I wished I was in Grant Park, then I was glad I could trundle upstairs and go to bed at 2 a.m. instead of trying to get on a CTA train with 100,000 other people.

It made me think of the sermon Martin Luther King Jr. preached at Washington National Cathedral, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.”  On the one hand, last night I felt “fired up, ready to go.”  And on the other hand, my deep fatigue reminded me how hard it is going to be as we move forward to remain awake, and carry through the revolution that lies in front of us, not just the one we can see in the rear view mirror.

I thought it was very fitting to find this morning that bloggers already had begun posting prayers for the new president, not just congratulatory accolades.  For in Peter Baker’s words in today’s New York Times: “No president since before Barack Obama was born has ascended to the Oval Office confronted by the accumulation of seismic challenges awaiting him”

We woke up today understanding a little better what poet Audre Lorde meant when she wrote that “revolution is not a one time event.” It isn’t a one-act performance, but a very long play. The danger now is that, tired out from the exertions it took to get us here, we will lie down, doze off, and sleep through the real revolution that still is to come.

If the debacles of the past eight years were a forest fire, at 11 p.m. last night we were reassured to find it is now 52% contained.  The dangers are not past — a still sinking world economy, Americans fighting in two wars, Russia thumbing its nose at the West, and a country where 46% of us, voting figures tell us, woke up today less hopeful, rather than vice versa.

Still, the majority of us declared on Tuesday our intention to seek to move beyond the bitterness, divisiveness, polarization, demonization, and greed that have run amok for so long.  As Kevin Merida said in today’s Washington Post, “The magnitude of his win suggested that the country itself might be in a gravitational pull toward a rebirth that some were slow to recognize. Tears flowed, not only for Obama’s historic achievement, but because many were happily discovering that perhaps they had underestimated possibility in America.”

But we must not doze off.  While California was electing Barack Obama, it also was voting to ban gay marriage, as did Arizona, which went for John McCain, and Florida, which went for Obama.  Arkansas was voting to deny gay couples the right to adopt children.  Nebraska and perhaps also Colorado voted to end affirmative action.  Electoral College maps can obscure the extent of the enduring divisions between urban and rural, young and old, rich and poor.  We are united, but still not yet fully capable of providing  equal access to the the American dream for each and every person in our land.

Enlightenment, the Buddha discovered, was simply the ability to stay awake and fully mindful of the reality of the world around him, when all others grew distracted, disinterested, and forgetful.

Our work has just begun. Together we can do it, “yes, we can.” But only if all of us stay awake for the revolution, as participants, not couch-potato spectators.  Then when someone one future day says with a yawn, “I dozed off … what happened?” we can say: “I can tell you. We remained awake for a great revolution. I was there when we changed the world.”

Voting for the first time in a new neighborhood, I arrived at my polling place this morning at 6:30 a.m. to find a line down one side of the block and halfway up another. Just in front of me was an octogenarian African American matriarch, dressed to the nines, and proudly refusing all offers to move up in line or to sit down in someone’s folding chair.

I took my place in line at the same time as a twenty-something young man, who with the air of entitlement that only youth can fully muster, loudly complained: “How long ago did this line start, anyway?!”

“Honey,” the elder in front of me replied, “…This line began a looooong time ago … way, way, way before even your mama was born!” “Speak it, Sister” somebody further in front of us chimed in, in response to which the sage of Farragut Street added her parting shot to all who would listen: “You need to know that I can remember when we couldn’t even be in line to vote! So don’t you mouth off about the line being sooo looong! All you had to do was show up!”

Baby boomer child of the deep south that I am, I suddenly realized with a bit of existential horror that I, too, remembered when African Americans couldn’t vote in my home state of Mississippi. Beginning in 1890, the state Constitution had required anyone who wished to register to vote to be able to read, write, and provide an interpretation of a section of the state Constitution selected by a local white official. A grandfather clause had effectively exempted illiterate whites, but not blacks, from the literacy test by relating qualifications to whether one’s grandfather had voted before a certain date. Furthermore, poll taxes, based on the number of heads in a voting registrants’ family, made it financially impossible for most blacks, many of whom had large families, to qualify to vote anyway.

It wasn’t until the 24^th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1964 that these poll taxes were finally outlawed in federal elections. And when the next year the federal Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965, still less than 7% of blacks in Mississippi were registered to vote.

A great many of these owed their voter registration to the tireless and fearless work of Fannie Lou Hamer, who in 1962 was a 45 year old former sharecropper from Ruleville, MS. After learning for the first time that year that blacks had a constitutional right to vote, on August 31^st she was part of a group of 18 blacks who traveled by bus to Indianola, my home town, to register to vote. All failed the still-required literacy test. I know because my mother was working as usual across the hall from the voter registration office that was administered by the white Circuit Clerk of Sunflower County, who was the father of one of my classmates. 

Ms. Hamer failed again in December 1962. Then on her third try in January 1963 she passed and was registered to vote. Then she really got to work.

For the next 14 years until her death in Mound Bayou, MS, in March 1977, the year I began my Ph.D. at Emory University, Fannie Lou Hamer was a constant thorn in the flesh to all those whites who stood in the way of black voter registration.

During those years my mother was the Deputy Chancery Clerk in the Sunflower County Courthouse and best friends with her counterpart in the Circuit Clerk’s office across the hall, who knew firsthand what these literacy tests entailed. Although I have no certainty about my own mother’s precise role in the disenfranchisement of black voters, I know that she and my father knew full well what was going on there, and like other whites, at the very least condoned it with the silence of the collaborator. 

Fannie Lou Hamer’s favorite Bible passage was Luke 4:18: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.” Ms. Hamer was known not only for her fearlessness and perseverance but also her sharp wit. My favorite was a line she is said to have used often during the Voting Rights campaign: “Whether you have a Ph.D. or No D., we’re in this bag together. And whether you’re from Morehouse, or Nohouse, we’re still in this bag together.”

When my neighbor this morning exclaimed, “This line began a looooong time ago,” my eyes suddenly teared-up in realization of the debt we all owe to Fannie Lou Hamer. I learned again how precious a thing it is that “We’re still in this bag together.” And I was so proud to be there in line, and so humbled that for all my life, all I’ve had to do is to show up.