International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, in which we remember and honor those that were murdered by the Nazis in the concentration camps.  This date was chosen because it is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.  I have not had the privilege of visiting any of the former concentration camp sites, but I have visited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem on multiple occasions.  This picture is one of my favorites that I took on one of the visits, it is taken of a train cattle-car that was used to haul innocent people to their deaths.  Most people see this from eye level, but I walked around and took this from below, it is appropriately called – train car to oblivion.

On this remembrance day, I hope you will take time to pause and remember.  But don’t stop there — look for ways that you can bring peace.  Peace to your family, peace to your community, peace to the world.

I am almost finished with one of the most disturbing books that I have read in a long time.  It is Assassins by Mike Bond.  My high school English teachers would have a field day with the writing style and syntax, but it was the themes that disturbed me the most.

The story begins in Afghanistan, as the US takes the decision to use the local Afghanis to bottle up the Soviet Union who had invaded the country.  The main protagonist is Jack, and the book tells snippets of his life story, as we learn he is a paramilitary commando hired by (I assume) the CIA. I found the beginning of the book fascinating.  As the story continues we move from the 1982 all the way to 2015 with “Jack” involved in all kinds of undercover operations from Iraq to Pakistan.  There were two things that I found disconcerting.  First, he touched on my deep and hidden Islamophobia.  Time and time again, he made my prejudices come to the surface.  Sometimes he challenged that phobia, other times he massaged it and made it more comfortable.  The second issue was with his take on the history of the period.  I found myself going back and forth, looking up claims that he made about the US government and its role in events from US funding of the Mujahedeen and Taliban, to the knowledge and role that Bush played in 9/11.  Did the US government know about the potential attack on the twin towers beforehand?  Did Bush know that there were no WMDs in Iraq?  Did we have opportunities to eliminate Osama Bin Laden earlier and intentionally let them pass?  All those and other perplexing questions are left for you to wrestle with.

In the second half of the book, the story gets lost in all of these questions, and at times I am not sure of the point he is trying to make.  But clearly the overall thrust is found when he quotes Longfellow about ⅔’s of the way through the book.

If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

In the end, I think Bond is trying to remind us that violence is a vicious circle and the more we use violence to quash our enemies, the more enemies we make.  His storytelling is okay, but it gets lost in his trying to outline what went wrong with US policy in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Not sure I would read another one of his books.

Cancel Culture and Dr King

One of my traditions over the years was to preach on, or about Dr. Martin Luther King on his birthday weekend. One year, the weather was horrible and very few people came to church, so at the last minute we decided to invite random parishioners to read selections from King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail.  It was one of the most powerful Sunday worship services that I have been a part of. If you have never read it, I highly suggest you take the time.  But be warned, it is a damning letter to those of us in the white Christian privileged community.  His words ring true today as much as they did when he wrote them in April of 1963.  Today at church, the pastor shared a sermon that was centered around Martin, and I appreciated being reminded of another great speech of his that is often forgotten: The Drum Major Instinct.  Martin invites us to ponder and ruminate over what we want to be remembered for.  He gave that sermon in February of 1968, we all know what happened just a few months later in Memphis.

Right now, we are on another one of our “cancel culture” silliness campaigns.  A while ago, it was reported in the media that gas stoves are dangerous and there might (and I emphasize that it is only a MIGHT) be a plan of banning gas stoves in the future.  OMG you would have thought the world was coming to an end for some people.  It brought out all those who screamed about a private company coming to the realization that their brand was racist (which it was) and they needed to change their image.  Can you imagine if they decided to try pass seat belt laws today??  Or stop cigarette ads?  We would all go crazy and lose our minds.  Or if they decided to ban regular gas because it was more harmful to the environment, oh wait, they did..  I love gas stoves, I prefer a gas stove, but recognizing that most houses do not have adequate ventilation (or we don’t use it) is a good thing to be reminded how potentially dangerous they can be.  I am thankful that there are people out there who are trying to make our lives safer (and also trying to save us from destroying our planet).

A number of times when I have preached about MLK I have quoted from his sermons.  When I quote from someone's material I try not to change it, although if I am honest, sometimes I do.  But this particular time I quoted Martin using the n-word.  For me, it seemed important to acknowledge that once upon a time it was a common word to use, and that we have moved beyond it.  But hearing that word, I think, in context, can help us understand better how powerfully negative it could be.  

Following the service, I got reamed out by a young person.  They were offended that I used that particular word.  I tried to explain that I didn’t use the word, but that Martin did and he was trying to show how disgusting it is.  It didn't matter, in their mind I needed to be canceled.  I took their concern seriously, and I don’t know what I would do in the future, but I certainly don’t want the word canceled from the historical record.  It is a reminder of how thoroughly we denigrate our brothers and sisters.

A lot has changed since 1968, but a lot has stayed the same.  We still tend to put people into boxes to identify them.  We still tend to try and better ourselves, at the expense of others.  I am grateful for Dr. Martin Luther King: he set a model for me to attempt to follow in my life.  One of the most humbling experiences  of my life happened after the floods that devastated Northwest Indiana in 2008.  At a North District United Methodist meeting, the district superintendent singled me out for my role in LARRI (you can learn about it here), the flood recovery group I was a part of from 2008-2011.  She called me the Martin Luther King of the area, because we were seeking justice for our neighbors who were devastated by the floods.  I am no MLK, but to be even mentioned in the same breath reminds me of my Drum Major Instinct.  My prayer is that Dr. King will continue to influence each of us to strive to become our best self.   Peace my friends.

Abraham, Martin & John by Dion 

This is a great version by Tom Clay

You Are Loved

On this Sunday in which we celebrate and remember the Baptism of Jesus, I wanted to take a moment and share some thoughts. It is fascinating experiencing church from the other side.  Having now had seven months to deprogram the way that I have always experienced church, I am beginning to see things with different eyes. One of the things that has come into clearer focus is the language that we use to describe our relationship with God.  How do we understand the relationship between us and God?  

Of course this can go a number of ways.  When we describe God — what are the words that we use?  Male pronouns, father, neutral terms, or even as mother?  Is God angry, vengeful, full of wrath, or compassionate and loving?  The funny thing that I have noticed is that often we describe God in multiple, often contradicting ways.  God is a God of love, but God also needs to have us confess our failures (to earn that love?).   It doesn't always make sense and it can cause mental whiplash, or at least some deft mental gymnastics.  My guess is that most of us don’t even notice because we have become accustomed to the verbal descriptions. 

But the biggest thing we often do (and I hope it is subconsciously and not intentionally) is use God to shame us.  Shame is an interesting thing, and from what I have heard, one of the biggest reasons young people don’t go to church.  They want to be challenged, but they don’t want (or need) to be shamed. And there is a huge difference in inviting someone to grow without telling them how bad they are.

I am sure that you can all point to times when I used shame — and for that I am extremely sorry.  It unfortunately, is such a big part of religion that at times we don’t even realize that we (me) are doing it. There has always been in the back of my head a saying my mother taught me: “You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.”  I am not sure why the church hasn’t understood that principle.

Too often our prayers are ones of shaming us about the things we are not doing, instead of encouraging the strides we are making.  No, I don’t think we should hide our failures, but instead of rubbing our noses in them, we need to use them to “fail forward.”  Richard Rohr has been influential in helping me to stop making everything transactional — to recognize that life isn’t about winning.  It's about relationship with God and each other, even when those relationships are not perfect.

If you have never read Nadia Bolz-Weber’s book Shameless, I recommend it to you.  I guarantee that she will make you feel uncomfortable, and challenge some closely held beliefs, but she also will help free you to see yourself (and the people around you) in a new way.

On this day of remembering the baptism of Jesus, let us also remember our own baptism.  Feel the waters that mark you as a follower of Jesus.  We are baptized not because we are evil or bad, but because we have chosen to follow the way of Jesus.  We are saved not from the fires of hell, but into a new way to see each other and all of God’s creation.  You are loved — a beloved child of God!