The King and Dr. King

Yesterday, my family, church, and I celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. day by helping update the cafeteria of the Salvation Army in downtown Little Rock.  On a daily basis, this room feeds the hungry and homeless breakfast and dinner.  Throughout the day, I thought about Dr. King's words about racial reconciliation, peacemaking, and economic justice (by the way, why do we so clearly remember what he said about racism but neglect his preaching on nearly every other subject?).

In Arkansas, however, Dr. King shared the day with Robert E. Lee.  How one day can hold that ironic juxtaposition of figures together, I'll never know.  I guess someone thought the day was big enough for the both of them.  Chalk it up to one more example of how the south is trying to make peace with the ghosts of our past, although the ghosts make for awkward dance partners.

Both Lee and King cared passionately for their causes.  However, one sought to bring about change through proclamation and the other sought to prevent change through force.  One used the raw materials of language and dreams.  The other employed guns and cannons.  One was willing to pay the price of war.  The other was willing to pay the price of peace.

And yet, one could argue that both were engaged in a sort of warfare.  Lee's warfare was physical, involving blood, guns, and cannons.  And yet, while the Civil War changed our country in innumerable ways, it did not, and could not, address the depths of the issues that remained until the civil rights movement a century later (and some would argue remain today).  Truly, the battlefields of the Civil War were not where the real battles took place.  Instead, the Civil War was the result of years and years of a dehumanizing ideology that seeped into the politics, economics, religion, and social structures of the day.  This ideology shaped "reality" in those days, so that people couldn't even imagine an alternative way of living.  The powers and principalities had a grip on that society in ways that people couldn't even see.  Slavery didn't exist simply because the wrong people were in control; slavery existed because the wrong people were telling the stories- or they were telling the wrong stories.

That is, until a preacher became a drum major for justice and peacefully spoke truth to those powers and shattered the paradigms of his day.  Dr. King's dreams did more to correct the injustices than all the battles of the Civil War.  His sermons pulled back the veil of "reality" and revealed the lies for what they were, naked affronts to the truth of God's good news.  A preacher did what years and years of violence and bloodshed couldn't do, and never will be able to do.

To be completely honest, there are days when I wince when someone finds out I'm a minister (or even worse, a preacher).  All sorts of loaded and false expectations arise, and the conversation either ends at that point or it shifts towards some fake, say-Jesus-in-every-sentence sort of direction.  I think part of my discomfort stems from the fact that ministry has become a sort of harmless vocation.  We preachers bless little children, give nice talks, and say nice things when the elderly die.  Ministers simply speak to captive audiences, drink a lot of coffee, and pray behind stained glass windows.  For many, ministry is an exercise in banality.   Meanwhile, the real movers and shakers are those who get things done:  doctors, lawyers, politicians, generals, financial planners, etc…   

Occasionally, however, I'm reminded of the sheer potency of the spoken word.  In Genesis 1, God speaks creation into existence.  In many of the other creation stories in the ancient world, the deity creates the world through an act of violence, but in Genesis, God peacefully speaks reality into existence.  Last week I was reading in Mark 1 (verse 38 to be exact) where Jesus, in the midst of numerous acts of power, declares, "Let us go somewhere else to the towns nearby, so that I may preach there also; for that is what I came for."  Preaching was primal for Jesus, as he sought to announce God's ultimate reality amidst all the other false realities.  And yesterday, while painting walls at the Salvation Army, I was reminded that MLK's words shaped our country more than Robert E. Lee's troops did.  Dr. King's dreams captured us in a way that no general's commands could.  In a way reminiscent of Genesis 1 and Mark 1, Dr. King stood high on that mountain, looked to the other side, and pronounced a new reality into existence.

So I'm going to begin paying more attention to my words.  I'm going to guard them as if they are as potent and explosive as cannonballs.  I'm going to pay more attention to dreams, for a dream is nothing short of a down payment towards a new reality.  And today, I take new pride in my vocation, in the hopes that all of us would-be-preachers speak a new reality into existence Sunday after Sunday.  I'm even beginning to believe that those whom we allow to mold our notions of reality (cue the poets, musicians, writers, and artists amongst us) carry greater weight than those who control us from positions of power.

Yesterday, Arkansas honored a general and a preacher.  While the general captured the enemy and shaped the South, the preacher captured the imagination and shaped our consciousness.  Lee's influence, while significant in his day, has come and gone.  King's voice echoes on because he tapped into a power that outlives him.  To be sure, preaching is a strange, baffling, and mysterious reality in which we participate- but so is the Kingdom of God.  And our words have a power that power knows not of.

Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote, "To pray is to dream in league with God."  For Dr. King and Jesus, preaching was doing the exact same thing.  

Today, I give thanks to the King for Dr. King…and for all preachers everywhere who preach the truth in love.

The Great Advent Scandal

Dom Helder Camara, "When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint.  When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist."

For the last couple of weeks, I've had the Magnificat on my mind- Mary's song in Luke 1.36-46, which she sings after receiving the news of her miraculous (yet scandalous) future.  Mary was a lowly peasant girl, living in a man's world.  Many scholars believe her to be a young teenager at the time.  Most of us wouldn't have trusted her to baby-sit our children, yet here God is placing the redemption of all creation in her womb.  Mary runs off to see her old aunt Elizabeth, who is dealing with an impossibility of her own.  It's a magnificent scene of unthinkable impossibilities becoming reality.

And so, Mary bursts out in song.  She praises God for choosing her in her low estate.  She celebrates a God who lifts up the humble and brings down the proud.  She claims that this God will feed the hungry and send the rich away empty handed.  It reads, not like a normal Christmas carol, but like a song of social subversion and reversal.  To be sure, some people spiritualize this text and others dismiss it altogether, but the gospel of Luke doesn't allow you to do that.  In Luke's gospel, salvation has EVERYTHING to do with economics, and while Jesus was concerned with more than money, he wasn't concerned with less.  In Luke 4, Jesus returns to Nazareth and proclaims good news to those who seem far removed from good news:  the poor, the prisoners, the blind, and the oppressed.   He was reading from the prophet Isaiah, but you get the feeling this truth could have easily been transmitted through the umbilical cord.  In the sermon on the plain in Luke 6:17-49, Jesus says, "Blessed are the poor" (not the poor in spirit as in Matthew), and he says "woe to the rich."  Compassionate justice seems to be the core issue of the story of the rich man and Lazarus (see Luke 16:19-31), and salvation comes to Zaccheus' house shortly after he claims to right fiscal wrongs (see Luke 19:1-10).  Social and economic justice are front and center in the gospel of Luke.  Mary is simply the first one to give voice to it.

Just last week, a political talking head accused the pope of being a Marxist because of his concern for the poor and his call for economic justice.  But it's not Marx who prompted the Pope to call for justice.  It's Mary, Luke, Jesus and the long line of saints from Ur of the Chaldeans to Rome to Little Rock to cities across the world who believe that God's Kingdom is an alternative reality indeed.  Mary's song also indicts those who so quickly cry about an imagined "war on Christmas," but are so slow to see that our blatant social injustices are more of an affront to this season than any, "Happy Holidays," greeting from the 18 year old girl working the Target check out line.

Truth be told, whenever I hear sweet little Mary singing her song, I can almost feel the ground rattle under my feet.  Some people, whose only lens is politics, will claim this song is scandalous.  Others, whose imaginations have been suffocated by "reality," will claim this song is impossible.  Maybe it is.  But so is the pregnant virgin singing it.

All Saints Day

According to the holy calendar, today is All Saints Day- a day set aside to remember the faithful who have gone before us.  To be honest, the Baptist tradition (of which I am a part) has not done a good job of remembering the saints throughout the ages.  It is so easy for all of us to forget that the church spans time, even as it spans space.  It is so easy to forget that many of the churches of which we are a part existed long before we frequented the pews.  It is so easy to forget that the faith we now cherish has passed down to us through the blood, sweat, and tears of the "great cloud of witnesses".  We are stewards of the faith we inherited- not creators of it.

So today, I've been thinking of the saints who have been canonized (in my mind at least).  I see the faces of my parents and grandparents who provided my first glimpses of God's love.  I see the the people in the churches of my youth who taught me the stories that shape my life.  I see the professors who not only stretched my thinking and faith, but also my character and commitment.    I see the faces of congregants whom I've pastored, people who cultivated more faith in me than I in them.  I think about those in years past who worked to make Second Baptist what it is today, from those who opposed the oppressive racism of the 1950's to those who ministered to AIDS victims in the 1990's.  I think about the lay leaders who sacrificed because they cared more about building God's kingdom than building their own.

And I think about the nameless saints on whose shoulders we now stand.  I think about those who gave their lives for the church and the good news which had so captured them.  I think about those whose thinking propelled the church into unknown futures.  Or those who preserved the scriptures that we tend to take for granted.  I think about the nameless pastors who have served in small churches for a glory not their own.  Or the missionaries who abandoned the comforts of home to make the lives of other people better.  I think about preachers who courageously announced truth when it wasn't in their best interests to do so, and the lay leaders who selflessly gave time and money to a cause that now outlives them.

For all these people I know and the multitudes I don't, I offer a humble, "Thank you."  Today, while many people disregard the church because they judge it by its worst, I give thanks for those who embodied it at its best.  

And today, as I look my boys in their eyes, I'll pray that- when they reflect on their canon of saints- I might be among them, even if I'm in the corner somewhere.

Blessed are Those Who Mourn

Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted.  (Matt. 5.4).

Over the last several weeks, this verse has taken hold of me for reasons I don't fully understand.  Maybe it's because I've participated in two funerals in the last week, and at both funerals we celebrated and mourned simultaneously.  I am part of a community that shows up at funerals.  We hurt when someone we know dies, and we experience the loss viscerally.  We mourn- not in an overly pious kind of way- but in an authentically human way.  We pray.  We argue with God.  We cry.  We hurt.  We sing.  We reread the promises of God in the hopes that we might newly experience them as we read them.  We bring broccoli casseroles.  We tell stories.  We laugh.  We mourn.   

Or perhaps it's because I'm preaching through the Sermon on the Mount, which is composed of some of the most unorthodox statements in human history (not the least of which is the one mentioned above).  I usually offer those who are mourning my condolensces, not my congratulations.  In what reality can Jesus dare congratulate the mourning?  How can he see mourning as a station of blessedness?  I don't know about you, but when I am in mourning, "Congratulations!" isn't the greeting that seems appropriate.  Sometimes, I think I'd laugh out loud at Jesus if I wasn't exalting him as Lord of all.  Congratulating the mourning seems so foolish and counterintuitive. 

And yet, there are days when I begin thinking that we've lost the capacity to love and feel compassion for another human being.  Through a variety of means, our culture numbs us to the suffering and loss around us.  The media bombards us with bad news without giving time and space for us to absorb the suffering fully.  As a result, we understand the suffering around us but we no longer feel it enough to act upon it (or what Neil Postman calls an imbalance in the information-action ratio).  Our technology allows us an unimaginable breadth of connections, but it struggles to help us deepen them.  Seriously, how many funerals could you attend where you knew whether or not the preacher was lying through his teeth about the deceased?  We frame our ethical debates in terms of "rights" (absolutist language), but our conversations all too often lack the compassion and care for others that fueled Jesus' ethic.  If compassion for others stoked the same fires that personal liberties do, we would be a different culture indeed!  In all of these ways and more, we are conditioned to keep pain, suffering, and loss at arm's length.  Of course, in an effort to keep pain, suffering, and loss at arm's length, we must keep each other at arm's length too.  I cannot love you without exposing myself to pain because love demands mutuality and symbiosis.  I can't shield myself from human suffering without automatically diminishing my capacity to love another.  The moment I begin to resist sharing your suffering, I also begin to resist YOU.  One's capacity to suffer and one's capacity to love are exactly congruent.

In this way, only those who risk pain can truly love.  Only those who mourn death can be said to have ever appreciated life in the first place.  Only those who mourn loss truly valued it before it was lost.  Only those who mourn truly shared in the existence of another.  Maybe those who are mourning are the only ones who are fully ALIVE.  

I'm reminded today that the first people who experienced the reality of resurrection were those who were mourning.  Those women experienced the pain of loss, and they arrived at the tomb prepared to continue their mourning.  And yet, it was into their loss that the living Christ spoke to them.  It was in a cemetary that they first uncovered a life so subtly overwhelming that it changed the nature of their tears.  It was in their grief that they first experienced the risen Jesus.  Joy came in the morning.  Joy also came in the mourning.   

And so- blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.  (C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves).

The Slaughter of Innocents

So I've given myself some time to process- as a minister, as a father, as a human- although the more I process the events the more befuddled I become.  I'm assuming it's the same for you. 

26 people. 
20 children.  (6 years old, 6 years old, 7 years old, 6 years old...)
6 adults, including teachers/administrators- some of our greatest public servants. 
Assault weapon. 
Elementary school. 

In what world do those phrases have any sort of convergence?  How can this happen?  How can we live in the face of such inexplicable violence and irrational darkness?  Yesterday, I mumbled a few words to the congregation, although I felt like I was whistling into a whirlwind.  All I knew to do was "believe out loud," so here goes.

Truth be told, I was getting ready to hunker down with the shepherds and Joseph and Mary one more time.  I was ready to gather at the manger- Norman Rockwell style.  I've seen the portraits of the Nativity- the ones that portray the manger as a fairly nice crib and the stall as a sanitized delivery room.  The ones that give baby Jesus an incandescent glow rather than that strange purply color of most newborns.  The ones that portray Mary as saintly beautiful rather than in need of more pain meds.  I was settling into the sentimentality of the season, when suddenly the events of Friday knocked the sentimentality and romanticism right out of it.  Silent Night was about the farthest song from my mind on Friday.  All was neither calm nor bright.

At some point along the way- I remembered the way Matthew tells the story.  The birth of Jesus is told with such brevity you almost read over it without noticing it.  Matthew tells of the birth of Jesus in one verse- "She gave birth to a Son: and he called his name Jesus" (1.25). 

In the next verse, Matthew begins the story of King Herod, who upon hearing of one born "King of the Jews," set about to remove the threat.  In his paranoia and insecurity (to which history attests), Herod initiated a policy of death, systemically killing children 2 and under throughout the region.  This event has been popularly deemed "The Slaughter of Innocents."  I've never seen Norman Rockwell make an attempt at this one, nor have I seen this depicted on a Hallmark card.  And yet, this is the backdrop for the birth of Christ in Matthew's gospel.  Infantcide.  Irrational evil.  Immeasurable darkness.

Furthermore, the scandal of it all is that this story isn't about God's absence (as some have argued about our most recent tragedy)- but God's presence.  GOD IS WITH US- Immanuel.  God shares in every pain, every death, every tear, and every loss- because God exists in close proximity with us.  When the voices cried in Ramah (2.18), Mary's, Joseph's, and Jesus' voices were among them.  In his inexplicable love and irrational concern, God became one of us.  It was love that drove God to the manger.   The manger was a donkey's feed trough.  The stable was anything but sanitized.  The birth was anything but romanticized.  It was as real as life is- and as messy and painful.   

Honestly, I take some peace in the fact that Jesus' birth left little room for the sentimental and the romanticized because neither my life nor our world is sentimental and romanticized.  Jesus was not born into a Norman Rockwell world; he was born into our world.  Death, evil, and suffering are realities in our world and must be acknowledged as such.  In our frail humanity, we stare into the abyss day after day, sensing an expansive darkness that brings us to our knees.

What we most need is good news that comes to us in the midst of our realities, not that which ignores them.  What we most need is a presence that calms our souls in ways that answers never will. 
What we most need is a God who draws near suffering, not a God who runs away from it. 
What we need is a love that is as irrational as the hatred and fear.
What we need is an inexplicable light that shines amidst inexplicable darkness.
What we need is a peace that comes from open doors, not that which only exists behind triple locked ones.

And so, the last few days I've returned to the story and rediscovered the news.
Shepherds.
Angels.
Glory to God.
Peace on Earth.
Manger.
Virgin.
Baby.
Savior.

In what world do those phrases have any sort of convergence?  How can this happen?  How can we stare into the face of such immeasurable love and irrational peace?  Truth is- I can't get my head or heart around what happened in Bethlehem that night any more than I can get my head or heart around what happened in Sandy Hook Elementary School last Friday.  But the only way I know to move forward after last Friday's darkness is in the light of this other story.  The only way I know to move forward is by trusting that there is more truth and meaning in that one verse in Matthew than in the thousands of reports we've consumed in these days.  While Herod's violence lives on in this world, so does Christ's peace.

No matter the depths of the darkness.  No matter the breadth of the pain.  No matter the statistics of death.  No matter the power of fear.  No matter the layers of despair.  Jesus comes to us one more time.  It's in times like this that we cling to Immanuel like our lives depend on it.  Because...well... they do. 

She gave birth to a son and he called his name Jesus.

This news brings me to my knees as well.