don't eat alone

My father and I shared a love of hymns.

Actually, it would probably be truer to say I learned to love hymns in large part because of my father. Though he rarely sang outside of the house, he loved the songs of faith. One of his favorites in his later years was Gloria Gaither’s “I Then Shall Live,” which was written to the tune Finlandia. The tune is also a favorite of mine, but to other lyrics: first, “Be Still My Soul” and then “This is My Song.”

August 3 marks the second anniversary of my dad’s death. Today in church I began scribbling lyrics of my own to the tune and I finished them tonight. Here is my offering with gratitude for my father and how he taught me to love songs that speak to my heart.

so I shall sing

so I shall sing
although my heart is broken
a song of hope
informed by grief and pain
a song of love
that knows the path of losses
a song of joy
though sadness still remains
so I shall sing
this song as old as mountains
with all my heart
I’ll join the deep refrain

grief’s melody
has colored all creation
yet there is love
that lasts beyond the grave
both things are true
the hope and, yes, the heartache
their harmony
the music of our days
so I shall sing
and pray my heart stays open
to loss and love
and grace that can amaze

Peace,
Milton

Though it may come as a surprise to many who know me, I am an amazingly average athlete. I appreciate sports as metaphor as much as anything else, which is probably why I am such a big baseball fan: there is lots of room for stories in between pitches. Growing up in Africa, however, I first thought of a pitch as the place where we played football—soccer. I still love watching game played well, which means I have loved watching the US Women’s National Team over the last few weeks.

One of the soccer stories I carry with me has nothing to do with the game being played well. It goes back to the days when my nephews lived in Memphis. They played soccer as little boys, which means, of course, they played “herd ball”—all of the little guys moving up and down the field with the ball in the middle. My youngest nephew, Scott, was on a team that won their league because the coach taught them to do one thing: “Run to the open space,” he said, “and let the ball find you.” The words stuck with me: run to the open space. Look up. Look out. Create options for you and those around you. Don’t feel like you have to have the ball; be the one who gives options the one with the ball, who creates the chance to work together.

My nephew is in his mid-twenties now. A week ago, he became a father not long before the US Women’s Team began to hit their stride in the World Cup. The Final on Sunday gave me another soccer story to remember. (I should say here I watched the highlights; we were at a Durham Bulls game during the first half of the match.) Carli Lloyd and her teammates were amazing. I never imagined four goals in sixteen minutes, but that’s not what I remember most. The moment that has stayed with me was Lloyd’s third goal—you know, the long one. She was running with the ball right at midfield, pressed by a couple of defenders, when she shot just as she crossed the midfield line and the ball blew by the goaltender, who was playing too far up. GOOOOOOAAAAAAALLLLL! It was beautiful, unexpected, and packed with metaphor.

The more I thought about the goal, the more I realized it was no accident. In the midst of everything happening at mid-field, Carli Lloyd had the wherewithal to look down field, even if for a split second, and see that the goalie was out of position. And she took the shot into the open space.

The danger of any metaphor is the temptation to take it to far. I could keep adding layers, but I think I’ll let it rest here. When life presses in it’s easy to keep looking at our feet and to overcome by all that surrounds us. The challenge of those moments is to look up, look out, and see what lies beyond our present circumstance, what shot we have to take, what waits in the open space.

NOTE: My friend Jeff said some things in a comment below that are worth adding here:

Let me add another layer (or just a dash of seasoning), something I told my players: you won’t always have the ball, and you don’t need to; you don’t have to run every second, but you do need to think all the time — think about being in the right place at the right time, and be ready when the moment to contribute arrives.

Yes.

Peace,
Milton

It’s been a while since I have posted here. Most of the reasons are personal: I was finishing a book manuscript and trying to get a cookie business off the ground. Over the past several weeks, there have been several times I thought about writing in response to tragedy around the country, but I didn’t either because I felt like someone else was saying what I wanted to contribute or I didn’t want to add to the noise, so I remained silent.

As I sat in church this morning and we prayed for the people at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, one of the phrases uttered, which I have heard often these past few days, is we need to “break the silence,” and I thought I need to speak up even if I am just preaching to the choir, or it has already been said.

Two things about Dylann Storm Roof struck me from the first, other than his middle name: one was the Rhodesian patch on his jacket and the other was his words about the blacks “taking over.” When I was one year old, my parents and I moved to Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia, which was a British colony at the time. As independence loomed, Ian Smith and his party of White Supremacists made it evident that racism would rule the day, so my parents moved to Northern Rhodesia, which became Zambia, a truly democratic and African state. There was nothing to emulate or respect about Ian Smith’s government. They turned their fear into power and, in turn, set the stage for Robert Mugabe to do the same in reverse. The kind of oppression the Rhodesian government pressed on the African majority, similar to that of South Africa’s apartheid regime is evil because it makes control an ultimate value and sets up a system that dehumanizes everyone and destroys the possibility of relationship. I turn to my friend, Tim Tyson’s comments in regards to Roof’s concern about losing control.

Dylann Roof told his victims that he came to kill black people because they are “raping our women and taking over our country.” Both claims date back to the white supremacy campaigns of the 1890s, one of which overthrew the government of North Carolina, by the way. These ideas did not just percolate up inside of his mind; this is not ordinary “bias” or suspicion of people different from him; someone had to teach him these elaborated historical traditions. (Watered down versions of them are ordinary enough in mainstream politics.) He gunned down nine people at a historic black church, historic enough that he might well have selected it intentionally; Emanuel AME has been at the center of the civil rights struggle since the early 19th century. The Denmark Vesey slave rebellion of 1822 was organized out of this church, and the slave revolt that it was designed to launch was planned to occur on June 16–the anniversary of Dylann Roof’s massacre; of course, there is no evidence that he knew this history, but no evidence that he didn’t, either.

Roof said he wanted to start a race war; this is a common theme among white supremacists and depicted in their favorite book, The Turner Diaries, which also helped inspire Timothy McVeigh to commit the Oklahoma City bombings. He is part of something, and something dangerous. America in general and South Carolina in particular are generously sprinkled with white supremacist groups. (In Shelby, where he was caught, the White Patriot Party committed a mass murder some years back; the man who ordered that murder committed mass murder at a synagogue in Kansas City only a few years ago. The road Dylann Roof was captured on, Thomas Dixon Blvd, was named after perhaps the most illustrious white supremacist in the history of the world, apart from Hitler, though there is no evidence he knew this, of course, nor that he didn’t.) Roof’s probable mental frailty most likely have made him susceptible such influences. It’s almost certainly both/and with respect to mental illness and white supremacy, but there is at least as much evidence for the latter as for the former.

What Dylann Storm Roof did was racist and evil. Though he acted alone, the fact that the South Carolina legislature both allows the Confederate flag to fly and did not even go so far as to lower it half-staff shows his racist attitudes are far from solitary. As Jon Stewart said, the roads in South Carolina are named after Confederate generals. In my state of North Carolina they just changed the name of Saunders Hall on the UNC campus because it was named for a nineteenth century KKK leader. Those however are the obvious connections. The predominantly white legislature in my state have torn apart the Voting Rights Act, requiring voter identification and shortening early voting availability because too many nonwhite voters were going to the polls. (They give other reasons, but the impact speaks for itself.) The gerrymandering of congressional districts is racist, pure and simple. Not just partisan. Racist. The point is to make sure whites stay in control.

The language of control and safety plays well because it is fear based, and fear has been the common currency of American politics since 9/11. The justification for the actions of police in Ferguson and Staten Island and Charleston and McKinney has been one of control: they were enforcing order. The other cop on the video in McKinney who actually talked and listened to the teenagers demonstrates another way. The point of life is not to be in control or to dominate; the point is to be together.

Evil is intentional. Those who would explain away what Dylann did are making a loud statement about their own worldview. Ginger says often we are called to choose relationship over doctrine. Let us also choose relationship over politics, over privilege, over control, over safety. Roof’s intentional act of terrorism reminds me that I am called to more than random acts of kindness. Love is a choice. Love is intention incarnate. If evil is real, then love is real-er.

The nine who were murdered in Charleston were just going to church, as were the four little girls killed at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in the sixties. Dylann Storm Roof was welcomed because the people at Emmanuel AME intentionally welcomed strangers into their midst. I heard their former pastor interviewed on NPR this week and the reporter asked if this would change the open door policy of the church. His response, as I remember it, was to say no: they keep the doors open because of who they are, not because of who comes in.

The church in Charleston bears my favorite name for Jesus: Emmanuel—God With Us. In the Incarnation, God identified with humanity and called us to do the same with one another with intention, speaking the truth in love, and choosing relationship over any other option. May we choose to be fully human all that we say and do with and to one another. May we choose to live beyond our fear and trust one another in love.

Peace
Milton

The good people at West Raleigh Presbyterian Church read my book for their church-wide Lenten study and asked me to come preach this evening to close things out. Here is my sermon.

______________________

“Passing the Peace”
A Sermon for West Raleigh Presbyterian Church
April 12, 2015
John 20:19-31

I have to say my favorite characters in the Gospel accounts are failures. Favorite may be a bit misleading. The characters I find most meaningful to my life are the failures: Peter, even Judas — and, from today’s passage, Thomas. The Twin. The Doubter. These folks are windows that allow us to see how grace shines through — or not. Judas didn’t know how to see beyond what he had done; he wasn’t able to trust the possibility of resurrection.

Our nickname for Thomas reveals our tendency to hang on to failure, to allow it be what defines us, or how we define one another. Last night I watched the NCAA Men’s Ice Hockey Final and the goalie for Boston University, a perennial champion, caught the puck in his glove with no one around and then dropped it and it rolled into the goal, allowing the team from Providence to tie the game and go on to win it. The highlight clips today will not show his other forty saves; we will only see his failure. Mention the name Bill Buckner to anyone connected with Red Sox baseball and they will tell you about one play—on October 26, 1986—when he let a routine ground ball go through his legs, allowing the New York Mets to win the Game Six of the World Series, and ultimately the championship. After Sox won the Series in 2004—for the first time in eighty-six years—they invited Buckner back to throw out the first pitch of the next season. Failure was not going to be the final word for either the team or for him.

Before Thomas appears in our passage for today, Jesus had appeared a couple of times to the disciples. On the evening of Resurrection Day he had come through the locked door into the room where they were gathered in fear—even though some of them had seen him. Thomas was not there that night; we don’t know why. We are told when he found out Jesus was alive he said he would need to see for himself. The reason this passage shows up most every Sunday after Easter is it was on this night that Thomas was in the room and Jesus entered once again. Even after a week there is no real indication that the disciples’ fear had abated or that life had gone back to some semblance of normal. When Jesus arrived, he said the same thing he had said before: “Peace be with you.”

That’s right: he passed the peace. All that is missing in the story is the disciples responding, “And also with you.” His turning to Thomas and offering the opportunity for him to touch the wounds is an extension of that peace offering: “don’t disbelieve; believe” is how it is often translated. In Greek, however, faith is a verb and our English translation is a weak substitute. Jesus is not inviting Thomas to an intellectual assent. He’s calling him to trust, to stake his life on what he sees, and Thomas responds, “My Lord and my God.”

Then Jesus said something that gets quoted often separate from the story: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” How do we read that sentence? What was Jesus saying? Was it Messianic Passive Aggressive Day? (Almost good enough, Thomas.) Was it an admonishment on the heals of the grace Jesus had offered his struggling disciple? Either one of those readings rings false for me. I don’t think Jesus was taking a shot at anyone. Instead, I think Jesus was leaning in to those who weren’t in the room, who had not been at the tomb or on the beach for breakfast or on the road to Emmaus; Jesus was speaking to those who would come after he was gone, to most everyone who would become a follower of Christ after that initial group. He was speaking to us, for we are those who have not seen and yet we trust the story, we trust our lives to the Risen Christ.

How can it be that we are sitting here over two thousand years later, still passing the peace and trusting the story? In my book I tell of an experience Ginger and I had at the Mother Church of Christian Science in Boston, which we have visited many times. One time we entered the sanctuary and it was much brighter. When I asked the docent about it, she told me they had been repairing the roof and found skylights that had been painted over during World War II out of fear of Hitler bombing cities on the East Coast. The church had been inhabited everyday, and yet they forgot they had painted the windows until fifty years later because they quit telling the story. We were in Winchester, Massachusetts this week for the ordination of a dear friend. A studio from Hollywood is filming a movie in the church and had pulled up the red carpet on the altar only to find an intricate and beautiful tile mosaic underneath that no one knew was there because somewhere along the way they quit telling the story. We have sat around the tables tonight listening and telling stories of the dishes we brought for the potluck; how long those dishes continue to mean something in our families will depend on how well we tell the story.

Jesus passed the peace to the disciples and they passed it on to us. We are the incarnation of God in our world. The companion passage for today in Acts shows the early church told the story by sharing everything in common. We are the physical manifestation of the risen Christ for our time—we who were not there, who did not see, and yet have come to trust Jesus with our lives. We are the ones who are called to offer our lives as invitations to trust the love and grace of God that we live out in our life together or the truth of the empty tomb will ring hollow and the story will fade away. And here’s how the story gets told in a way we can trust it without having been there: hand to hand, eye to eye, face to face—passing the peace the way we pass the potatoes: as family, as equals, as people who need for grace to be true and for love to have the last word.

The peace of Christ be with you.
Amen.

_____________

Peace,
Milton

vigil

the night is almost over
and I am searching the shadows
for words to describe the dawn
that doesn’t just break, but breaks through
if stones can be moved, so can
hearts; if death can be defeated,
so can bitterness and hate;
if love is real, then hope is more
than things turning out alright.
trace it back to its roots and
hope means trust and confidence—
we’re the ones who’ve watered it
down to wishes; now we need
it full strength: rise up, o men
and women of God—be done
with lesser things. the night is far
gone, the day at hand—go
and tell the others he is
risen. he is risen indeed.

Peace,
Milton