Welcome. It's the end of a school day. My students have left, the light is failing outside, and a three day weekend looms ahead. Today we had a great talk and discussion about Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks, as well as a talk about the civil rights movement as a whole. It wasn't very long ago that our nation was caught up in the grips of racism and segregation. Such attitudes die reluctantly within a nation. Remnants remain.
I remember the adventure I took to Africa back in 1976. I went with a group of United Methodist youth and adults to three nations in Africa: South Africa, Kenya and Zambia (where we spent about 3 weeks.) South Africa, at that time, was embroiled in racial conflict: Apartheid reigned supreme. It was difficult to imagine a change in that country's future except through the sword and fire... Nelson Mandela was still very much in prison, Soweto was rioting, blacks could not vote, and the whites lorded all things over them... But then within fifteen years everything changed. In 1985 I witnessed and participated in new protests in the streets of Berkeley: protesting investments in the brutal South African regime (or at least that is what the Berkeleyites called it. I was after all in BeZerkley, heart of leftwing activism...). I remember seeing Archbishop Desmond Tutu actually fly in with a helicopter while thousands of students and activists chanted and let the walls of UCBerkeley resound with cries of protest against apartheid. It was stirring. Within a few years, due to protests across the world, South Africa changed. Nelson Mandela was freed. A year later he was elected President of the nation that had kept him in gaol for decades. Amazing. All without fire and the sword... or at least the bloodbath some had foretold. Gone are the segregated restaurants, buses, drinking fountains, post offices, schools... Just like the USA in the fifties and sixties. We can change. We have changed. We can still change, grow wiser, become more humane.
So here's to new growth, and a thank-you to Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks and Nelson Mandela, along with a host of others who helped all of us change nonviolently ( as much as we could ...)
Friday, Jan. 14th, 2005
6 comments:
Whew, good stuff. To have been in Africa (or Berkley for that matter) during those times!
The places we've come from are truly earth-shaking... so much has happened in our lifetimes! It rekindles my hope that change for the better continues - that God is still active in this world He loves so dearly.
Yet in considering major victories in social justice, I wonder: have Christians turned their backs on social justice in exchange for a hyper-politicized "moral-justice?" Jim Wallace dedicates his "Sojourner's" ministry to keeping human-rights issues on our radars... but I worry that such ethics hold a distant second place among American Evangelicals, next to the socio-political agendas of the Religious Right.
My Young Men's Bible Study the other night got to talking about the position of Christians in society. We lamented the spiritual complacency and lack of compassion in the Church, and I recalled Phillip Yancey in "The Jesus I Never Knew." He wrote about the political fervor of today's church, and said, to paraphrase, that he worried little about the Church's loss of public standing in America. Rarely, if ever in history, does Christianity flourish outside of direct oppression.
"Thanks for the free publicity, Constantine, but I think we'll go this alone..." There are days I wish our country didn't manage to hold such a delicately balanced Christian/hedonist dichotomy. Give me more public ridicule and light the fire of my faith!
...It is sad, though, that our spirituality is so dulled by social comforts...
There is a problem when Christianity is so widely accepted or is seen as acceptable. Once we get comfortable with being in the mainstream, and have politicians proclaiming a Christian faith, then we are in greater danger of having simply a civil or civic faith that embraces a nationalistic vision of heaven on earth, and tries to blend or meld Americanism with the timeless/nationless/ethnicless Faith of countless believers that have had nothing to do with the USA over the past two thousand years.
So many evangelical, conservative Christians act as it Christianity was birthed here in America about a hundred years ago...or maybe it all began with Billy Graham. No, the Truth, Way and Life far transcends Republican family values or the Religious Right. Indeed the Religious Right confines itself as soon as it defines itself as being what it is. Jesus was not Right or Left. He wasn't Conservative or Liberal. Neither Sadducee nor Pharisee. Neither Samaritan or Merely a Jew. He was, is and will ever be: Alpha & Omega. Very Bread, Living Water, Mover of Spheres, Redeemer of Humanity, Lover of my Soul, the Crucified and Risen One. "I AM." And so He is.
Amen.
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