Prayer 3043: On the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre

God of Justice and Mercy,
we kneel before you in humble prayer
acknowledging our sins and divisions,
emptying ourselves of our pride
asking your aid as we seek your wisdom.

Give us the courage
to seek the truth where it is under assault,
and to seek to repair the breaches in our communities.
As children of truth,
may we acknowledge and repent
where we have profited from the lie,
and work to right the wrongs of our past
which have continued consequences today.

Holy One, we mourn for those
who lost their livelihoods and their lives
to the evil of racism, violence, fear, and envy.
We mourn for those who were forced into silence
by the demands of their tormentors
to preserve the edifice of power
founded upon the rock of exploitation and threat.

May we stand alongside the survivors
and work for true justice
as the foundation of peace and fellowship.
May we call for redress and reparation
to mend the fabric of community
and demand equity for the wronged.

Blessed Lord, give us the will
to put our shoulders to the wheel of unity
that is your vision for our lives together.
Help us to persevere
in the pursuit of righteousness and integrity
that is our duty to one another
as your children, O God of Our Ancestors.

Grant us the blessing of hope, O Eternal Light,
and rest your protection on those
whose cry is to You.

Amen.

Entangled Loves: Sermon for Trinity Sunday B

 

It’s a blessing that Trinity Sunday falls the day before the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre. On May 31, 1921, a white mob attempted to lynch a black man accused of rape in an elevator in downtown Tulsa. Even though the police were dubious about the entire story, they arrested the young man. The Tulsa evening paper called for him to be lynched. Black veterans showed up at the jail determined to protect him, and a gunshot went off when a white man tried to seize one of their weapons. 

 

Within the next hours, forty square city blocks of one of the most prosperous black communities in the United States was reduced to rubble and ash. Twelve hundred buildings—churches, homes, businesses-- were destroyed, some by firebombs thrown from airplanes. Machine-gun fire raked streets filled with those trying to escape. Probably 300 African Americans died, bodies dumped into the Arkansas River or unceremoniously into unmarked mass graves. Although at first Tulsa’s leadership was appalled, soon, the story of that terrible time and the truth of the deadly consequences of division and hatred were buried, unmarked, as well. The estimated death toll of that day makes May 31, 1921 the day of the worst act of domestic terrorism in United States history.(1)

 

This massacre began with the great evil of division—the sin that denies our common bonds as humans, that encourages murderous jealousy and greed, that tries to divide us so that we are isolated and weak.

 

It is an unfortunate fact that we humans often find it easy to tear things down into their constituent parts. We categorize and separate. But to take a step back and see how all is connected, and to feel that as a reality, is a spiritual as well as a imaginative challenge. Yet scientists are discovering all the time how things we formerly thought were separate are actually united in community.

 

And so it is with us. We have a tendency to break ourselves off from the rest of creation as humans, and then we have the tendency to divide ourselves up further still, by race, language, gender, sexual identity. Chop, chop, chop. Some people even use the Bible to justify such division.

 

But creation tells a very different story, and science is just now beginning to catch up.

 

Physicists now talk about something called quantum entanglement. This is a phenomenon where when a group of particles come into proximity or relationship with each other, they remain influenced by each other even after being separated by distance. Though they separate, they behave as a singular whole. Ironically, many of these same physicists who are also people of faith see the similarity – including the difficulty of describing what this means—in the concept of the Trinity. 

It also reminds us of how even fleeting relationships can change us and remind us of our essential similarities. Even botanists are now seeing similar unifying principles where once only separateness was admitted.

 

In Fishlake National Forest in Utah, in the south-central part of the state, near Kanosh, just east of Interstate 15, south of Salt Lake City and Provo, there is one of the oldest and largest organisms on earth, nicknamed Pando. He covers over 106 acres, but Pando is estimated to weigh 13 million pounds, so he certainly is both more visible and largest in term of weight than any living thing found so far on Earth.  He is also 80,000 years old, born in the Pleistocene epoch, during the last Ice Age. He spent the three-fourths of his life before humans ever stepped foot on this continent approximately 15,000 years ago—indeed he has been alive for half the time that homo sapiens has roamed the planet. He survived and flourished at about the time of a massive die-off that killed three-fourths of large mammals in North America.

 

He (for he is male) is a colony of Quaking Aspen that has been named “Pando” (Lat. “I spread”) by the scientists who have studied him since his discovery in 1968. Above the surface of the ground, he appears as if he is simply 47,000 individual trees. However, under the surface of the ground, Pando is actually one genetically identical organism that spreads via vegetative reproduction, developing a complex and expansive root system that from which shoots rise to pierce the surface of the ground. 

 

Probably there were other seeds that sprouted on that same day and in the long years since. Yet Pando was born at the right time, and in the right place, and with the right characteristics for survival and endurance, as the rest of his generation have themselves subsided back before memory. As he grew, he raised his arms toward the sun, and with all the other trees of the forest, he sang songs of joy and praise before God, dancing in the breeze like David before the Ark. 

 

Pando was already old and wise by the time that stories of Moses were being passed from generation to generation at the juncture of Asia and Africa, thousands of miles away. He had barely begun living alongside humans by the time, half a world away, a wandering teacher named Y’shua began calling disciples along the banks of a small sea called Galilee. 

 

And Pando is not a solitary example. We are now finding that trees talk to each other through their root systems even across species. The beat of a butterfly’s wing on one side of the world can generate a storm on the other. All of this leads to one thing: Separation is an illusion. It also leads us to deny the nature of creation, and the nature of God. Being is relational. Our lives are entangled with others even when-- especially when-- we can't see it.

 

Trinity Sunday is our dedicated yearly reminder—hopefully we think about this more than once a year—that community lies at the very center of God’s inner reality. When the Bible insists “God is love,” it says so because at the heart of the mystery of God lies the Trinity: Holy Spirit, Son, and Father, all drawn together in mutual love that the flows outward to all creation. I deliberately wrote those in a different order than that to which most of us are accustomed, because even as some theologians affirm that each "person" of the Trinity is equal, there often seems to be a preferencing for God the Father to always come first, even though scripture itself often uses other orders. 

 

Why does this matter? Because it puts a sharp point to the lie that our lives within God are hierarchical, solitary, individual, or self-centered. God’s essence is joyful community, equality, affirmation, sharing. The relationship within the Trinity is often described as a dance, and there’s even a fancy word for that: perichoresis.  God’s very self exists in love, kinship, and community, and we are called to be children of God. Further, God draws us into the loving relationship of God through Jesus as Incarnate One in particular. 

 

There’s a story of a monk who was asked by a man if Jesus Christ was his personal savior.

 

“Nope,” the monk replied. “I like to share him.”(2)

 

Sharing is at the heart of God. It is at the heart of the life of faith. And it is at the center of the web of life and love that makes up the universe.

 

We are made in the image of God, and whatever that vague phrase might mean, it has to mean that we are called, with our free will, to choose to live a life worthy of God. To live a life in which we see the concept of the Trinity as a beautiful mystery, yes, but as a beautiful challenge to us all to let love’s call sing out in our lives. If we might truly take hold of the truth that our lives were meant, from the time of creation, to be entangled with each other in love, fellowship, and kinship, how might we be changed?

 

Through Christ, the Beloved Son, we are taken into the very heart of God. We are called to inhibit the same spaces and graces that Jesus himself inhabited as one of us. And it IS possible to love that much and that freely. It’s countercultural, but it is possible. We are called to live as Jesus lived, here on earth, yes—a life that had a beginning and an ending. 

As theologian Mary LaCugna states:

 

“Living trinitarian faith means living God’s life: living from and for God, from and for others. Living trinitarian faith means living as Jesus Christ lived, in persona Christi: preaching the gospel; relying totally on God; offering healing and reconciliation; rejecting laws, customs, conventions that place persons beneath rules; resisting temptation; praying constantly; eating with modern-day lepers and other outcasts; embracing the enemy and the sinner; dying for the sake of the gospel if it is God’s will. Living trinitarian faith means living according to the power and presence of the Holy Spirit: training the eyes of the heart on God’s face and name proclaimed before us in the economy; responding to God in faith, hope and love; eventually becoming unrestrictedly united with God. Living trinitarian faith means living together in harmony and communion with every other creature in the common household of God.”(3)

 

We are all one, held together by the love of God that is the heart of God. May we rejoice in our entangled lives, and our entangled loves. Only then will we know the peace and justice of God.

 

Amen.

Preached at the 10:30 am online Holy Eucharist at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

Readings:

• Isaiah 6:1-8
• Romans 8:12-17
• John 3:1-17
• Psalm 29

Citations:

1) See Tim Madigan, "Remembering Tulsa: American Terror" in Smithsonian Magazine, April 2021, at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/tulsa-race-massacre-century-later-180977145/

2) Related by Scott Cairns, in "The End of Suffering," in Image Journal, Issue 52, 2006, at https://imagejournal.org/article/the-end-of-suffering/  

3) Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God For Us: The Trinity and Christian Life, 400-401.

Prayer, day 2026: On the Feast of Jonathan Myrick Daniels

O God,
You tenderly hold our souls in your hand:
hear our prayer.
Teach us, O God,
to act so that we are a blessing to others.
Bring forth in us perfect love,
in which we see all life as connected and mutually dependent.
Make us more prone to wonder than to wander,
grounding us in your Wisdom,
uplifted by grace.
Strengthen us
to offer our lives to one another,
and ground ourselves in your Beloved Community.

Cradle us to You in our pain, despair, or fear,
and brush away the tears of those who mourn,
O Loving One.
Open our eyes to the blessings we have
even in the midst of trouble.

Help us hold fast to your hand as little children,
trusting always that You are with us.
Hear the sighs of your beloveds,
and send your Spirit to comfort and bear up
those we now name.

Amen.
570, adapted in 1662

Prayer 501- in honor of the 70th anniversary of the Normandy invasion

AP photo from June 6, 1944

In honor of the 70th anniversary of the Normandy invasion:

Almighty God, You are our strength and our shield: hear our prayers. You fill our hearts with courage when fear closes over our head like a tide. You place our feet upon the strand and carry us through the breach. You bear us up like a gentle wave, and catch us when we fall. You shelter us from tempests and tumult, and bring us through fire and withering heat. You guide us through trials and shield us from storms, for your love is everlasting. You enclose us in your embrace when night falls; our final thought is of your wondrous love. Gather to You all the fallen who have sacrificed in the name of peace, for You are our home. We place our hearts, hopes, and fears in your hands, O Loving One, especially for these we now name.

Amen.

Dog eat dog

There is a gospel of the Good Old Days that runs as an undertow in American economics and politics, rolling silently and deadly, seeking to drag under the unsuspecting. It is based on a truth-- that America is certainly not as great as it once was. We know this. Here we sit in an alleged recovery that has skipped by most of us like a stone. We are struggling to get back to where we once were. The latest blow was the analysis published recently that showed that the median household has lost nearly 40% of its net worth since the start of the recession in 2007. But the reasons for our decline lie in the very gospel we are told to believe.

It is a gospel that looks back on the past with a rosy eye and seeks to restore a business climate based on unequal distribution of income that this country has not seen since the Gilded Age of the late-nineteenth century or the "Roaring" 1920s. And in each instance, the inequality was unsustainable and actually diminished us as a people, much less as an allegedly Christian nation, as so many are wont to proclaim us, then and now. And yet the gospel of wealth that was propounded then and now actually was a gospel of poverty for the vast majority of the American people.

First, let's consider the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century. This was a time when the average workers lived in squalor in tenements no matter how hard they worked, a world in which public high schools were rare luxuries, and most Americans were lucky to get five or six years of rudimentary schooling (my own grandmother, born in 1890, had perhaps a third grade education, because she had to help take care of her brothers and sisters). It was a world in which there was no such thing as illegal immigration-- any who could come were welcome, most of whom to be shunted into the mills to be ground to grist in the machinery of the rising American industrial machine, and who were also conveniently used to prevent unions from gaining traction to challenge the political power of those same industries.  It was a world in which there were often recessions and panics caused by speculation in land. Death came early for most-- the average life expectancy was under 50 years of age. The average worker earned less than $1.75 a day, and only 45% of American workers earned more than the poverty line of $500 annually. 92% of the 12 million families in the US made less than $1200 a year. This was the situation that spawned the middle-class supported Progressive movement, that introduced political reforms including the direct election of senators, woman suffrage, income tax, consumer protections such as the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, the initiative and referendum process, and the secret ballot, to name a few. And it was lucky for the wealthy that these economic and social reforms were enacted. Yes, lucky. Because in other countries, when the poor have felt that they had no voice, revolution has inevitably been the result. This is one of the reasons why people on both sides of the political divide supported Progressivism. Its reforms probably prevented a much bigger and more violent reorganization of the social order from occurring.

But by the 1920s, in the shock against the brutality of World War II and the failed Treaty of Versailles, conservative isolationists once again took control of US government, and their business philosophy sought a return to the 1890s. Wealth once again was concentrated in the hands of the very few while America developed into a consumer society-- two situations that can not logically coexist. Add in unrest in a Europe beset by economic devastation as a result of the First World War, and the worldwide Great Depression was the result. We are more familiar with the economic situation that occurred during this time, so I won't elucidate in the depth I used in the previous paragraph. However, here is one sobering fact: during the 1930s, for the first time in decades, life expectancy DECREASED in the US. And once again, recovery required Americans to work together to resolve the crisis. The New Deal programs laid the groundwork for recovery, and the collective action required by all citizens upon American entry into the Second World War sealed the deal, although it certainly wasn't simple. Nonetheless, we recovered and contributed to the defeat of Fascism only by working together. Everyone's sons-- rich and poor-- were subject to the draft; everyone was subject to rationing and urged to recycle and conserve for the war effort. By the end of the war, America was at the apogee of her power and influence in the world. We used the Marshall Plan to rebuild western Europe, which benefitted us greatly both economically and politically. We used the GI Bill to expand levels of education to heights never before even dreamt of, which furthered the growth of the American economy for the next forty years. We expanded the roles of those receiving social security even under Republican presidents because people could still remember how horrible the conditions were without such programs mitigating the excesses of an unrestrained capitalism. The biggest public works program ever-- the Interstate Highway Act-- connected the country and physically unified the scattered population centers. Our country began to finally, fitfully, tentatively, even reluctantly fulfill the promises that the Civil War was supposed to deliver to our African American citizens. The postwar world was a conservative world-- and yet we used government as it was supposed to be: by, of, and for the people, as Abraham Lincoln so cogently reminded us in a plea to encourage Americans not to turn on each other.

And that is the situation we are in now. So many of us feel insecure economically, and rather than attempt to diagnose and ameliorate the situation, some of our leaders encourage a fearful bunker mentality which turns American against American. As the number of the poor multiply, we are told to fear them, to hate them, to despise them as parasites-- even as ever larger numbers of us edge toward poverty ourselves. We are told that only tax breaks create jobs, and yet thirty-five years of tax breaks have left us at record levels of unemployment not seen since the end of World War II not to mention at record levels of debt. At a time when more Americans than ever are losing jobs or are chronically underemployed, we are cutting state Medicaid programs, food stamp programs, and cutting funding for education and infrastructure. We tell workers to blame other workers for their economic insecurity rather than the government and business policies of the last forty years. We tell parents that their only hope is the demise of public schools without pointing out the fine print-- that once public schools are imploded, and vouchers are instituted, the only thing that will happen is that private schools will be able to raise tuition --thanks to that flood of tax dollars-- to still keep out the undesirables. And the collapsed public school systems will become warehouses for those who have disabilities in earning as well as learning.

Here's a sobering fact: from 1983 to 2004, from the midpoint of Reagan's presidency through the midpoint of George W. Bush's presidency, 94% of all the wealth created went into the hands of the top 20% of the American population (and 42% of the new wealth went to the top 1%!). That means that during that same time period, eighty percent of the US population only earned 6% of the wealth  created. Is this an indictment of the work ethic of the 80% of the US population? Can we really believe that most Americans are lazy deadbeats who want a handout? And furthermore, given our consumption-based economy, this disparity has suppressed the ability of Americans to purchase goods, even with relatively easy access to credit up until the last few years, which in turn suppresses the growth of the economy (which was supposed to be a founding promise of supply-side economics).

We should just vote the rascals out, right? But we are told that we should be suspicious of democracy by people who claim to be patriots, when that sounds like the most un-American claim possible. But it makes sense: If you create a tiny oligarchy of the wealthy, you have to undo democracy to prevent the majority from using their sheer numbers to protect themselves. If the wealthy are legally enabled to devote sizable chunks of their wealth to buying themselves a colossally disproportionate voice in the political process, the job is more than half done.

Worse, this oppressive situation is the opposite of the gospel that many of us claim to guide us as Christians. It is time for us to come out of the trance we have been under by the beautiful lie that wealth can be concentrated in the hands of the few not through the hidden hand of the marketplace but only through the co-option of our political processes, only through being able to use excess wealth to create political committees who then purchase the voted of our representatives who themselves are hardly representative of the average American in terms of income. This situation is inimical to our own self-interest, much less to the gospel call to attend to the interests of the least in society.