Monday Morning Preacher - The Spirit-Storm

Today's text: Acts 2:1-13

In this story from the book of Acts, the disciples have gathered after the death of Jesus. Suddenly, there is a noise, as if a wind is blowing. The people are lit up, as if there are flames coming from them, and they start speaking about God, spontaneously, in foreign languages they don't even know.

What would it be like to be in the middle of this strange storm of holiness? When a regular storm is about to blow in, there is a charge in the air. The wind picks up speed, and there's a sense of danger and anticipation. Have you ever had your breath catch at the first sound of thunder? Or the smell of those first raindrops kicking up the dust on the sidewalk? Has a powerful blast of wind ever made you want to shout?

Jesus' return from death to life brings on this strange storm of holiness. The disciples are caught up in it, as though they were in the clouds before the lightning. It charges the air with energy and joy, and it is a shared experience. They all feel it, they're all caught up in it, and the power of it is so great that even people who never knew Jesus can hear and see the difference. The disciples are breathing the breath of God.

Of National Lies and Racial America

Hi folks -- I got this e-mail from one of my volunteers, and it's really good at tying together a bunch of different threads. Tim Wise is a white man who is active in combating racism. If you are white and haven't done a lot of thinking around race (what, my blog posts don't count?) prepare to be challenged.

Of National Lies and Racial America by Tim Wise.

Here are some quotes that said things I wanted to be able to say, but better:

...[A]s much as white America may not be able to hear it (and as much as politics may require Obama to condemn it) let us be clear, Jeremiah Wright fundamentally told the truth.

Oh I know that for some such a comment will seem shocking. After all, didn't he say that America "got what it deserved" on 9/11? And didn't he say that black people should be singing "God Damn America" because of its treatment of the African American community throughout the years?

Well actually, no he didn't.

Wright said not that the attacks of September 11th were justified, but that they were, in effect, predictable. Deploying the imagery of chickens coming home to roost is not to give thanks for the return of the poultry or to endorse such feathered homecoming as a positive good; rather, it is merely to note two things: first, that what goes around, indeed, comes around--a notion with longstanding theological grounding--and secondly, that the U.S. has indeed engaged in more than enough violence against innocent people to make it just a tad bit hypocritical for us to then evince shock and outrage about an attack on ourselves, as if the latter were unprecedented.

Jeremiah Wright becomes a pariah, because, you see, we much prefer the logic of George Bush the First, who once said that as President he would "never apologize for the United States of America . I don't care what the facts are."

Indeed, what seems to bother white people more than anything, whether in the recent episode, or at any other time, is being confronted with the recognition that black people do not, by and large, see the world like we do; that black people, by and large, do not view America as white people view it. We are, in fact, shocked that this should be so, having come to believe, apparently, that the falsehoods to which we cling like a kidney patient clings to a dialysis machine, are equally shared by our darker-skinned compatriots.

Whites are easily shocked by what we see and hear from Pastor Wright and Trinity Church , because what we see and hear so thoroughly challenges our understanding of who we are as a nation. But black people have never, for the most part, believed in the imagery of the "shining city on a hill," for they have never had the option of looking at their nation and ignoring the mountain-sized warts still dotting its face when it comes to race. Black people do not, in the main, get misty eyed at the sight of the flag the way white people do--and this is true even for millions of black veterans--for they understand that the nation for whom that flag waves is still not fully committed to their own equality. They have a harder time singing those tunes that white people seem so eager to belt out, like "God Bless America," for they know that whites sang those words loudly and proudly even as they were enforcing Jim Crow segregation, rioting against blacks who dared move into previously white neighborhoods, throwing rocks at Dr. King and then cheering, as so many did, when they heard the news that he had been assassinated.

The Sugar Mill

Last year, I was doing some repair work as a volunteer for a family that lived in a town with a sugar mill. The mill smelled so bad, I had to breathe through my mouth or shirtsleeve until I got used to it. It was terrible - almost metallic, but also an organic burning smell. Indescribable and distinctive. The first thing our volunteer coordinator told us when she met us was, "They say it's not supposed to be dangerous."

At the house toward the end of the week, the white owner told us that the black people living close to the sugar mill got some kind of a subsidy in exchange for putting up with the smell. He was jealous of them, and wanted a subsidy himself. They got all the breaks, in his estimation.

I didn't say anything at the time because the man was seriously ill, and was being very gracious about letting us help out. What I wanted to say, though, was that his problem wasn't with the people living in the stench of the sugar mill, it was the sugar mill itself.

There's a saying that if you can't face your real enemies, then you should pick smaller enemies. I think that's exactly what racism does - distracts people from their real problems, and keeps them from teaming up with people who are living with the same awful smell that they are.

Angry Black Man

I think what is really going on with these clips of Jeremiah Wright's sermons is that most white people aren't used to the traditional black style of preaching. Part of the deal is that you bring emotion and passion to it. So, compound that with a common white tendency to fear any black man, and to really be afraid of angry black men, and you'll realize that these video clips are fear-mongering, manipulative, and directed straight at white people.

If racism is still negatively affecting the lives of black people - which it is - then some anger is in order. Anger, by the way, is not the same thing as hatred. It is possible to be angry with someone you love. I, for one, am angry right now with white Americans who don't realize when they're being manipulated.

The HIV Question

So, I saw the clips. And it looks to me like most of what Jeremiah Wright said was about on-target. Easy to take out of context, and maybe with a little hyperbole thrown in, but for the most part, he's making some important points.

There was one clip I disagreed with, though, which was when Pastor Wright said that he believed the US government had invented the HIV virus to destroy people of color. I don't believe that. But I think I can understand the suspicion of the medical establishment, because as late as 1972 the US Public Health Service conducted experiments on black men by infecting them with syphilis and waiting for them to die of it so they could conduct autopsies. Here's the story about the Tuskegee Syphillis Experiment. And a second article here on it. A relevant quote:

In 1990, a survey found that 10 percent of African Americans believed that the U.S. government created AIDS as a plot to exterminate blacks, and another 20 percent could not rule out the possibility that this might be true. As preposterous and paranoid as this may sound, at one time the Tuskegee experiment must have seemed equally farfetched.

Who could imagine the government, all the way up to the Surgeon General of the United States, deliberately allowing a group of its citizens to die from a terrible disease for the sake of an ill-conceived experiment? In light of this and many other shameful episodes in our history, African Americans' widespread mistrust of the government and white society in general should not be a surprise to anyone.

Obama's Speech on Race

Hey folks,

I really liked Obama before this speech. Now I know he is a leader.

Here's the NY Times posting of the speech.

To be completely honest, I didn't think the things I'd seen from Jeremiah Wright were all that bad. Racial oppression is still a problem in the US. It seemed like he was just being honest, and that it's something a responsible pastor should address: the pain his congregation is experiencing.

Anyway, I think Obama takes this to a whole other level. My response: Yes, exactly! Now what can we do?

Another - Heard on NPR

The new movie "21" coming out in theaters soon is about some MIT students who figured out how to game Las Vegas without getting caught (for a while anyway). Apparently, the four main characters from the book it's based on, Bringing Down the House, were Asian (and were partly able to pull it off because of this). Interestingly, most of the "21" cast is white (and all the guys I saw in the trailer definitely were).

Heard on NPR the other day

I appreciated this quote from a conservative commentator on NPR a couple days ago:

"I feel bad for Hillary Clinton. She's trying to conduct a job interview while [Obama] is on a date."

Religion Stats, Part III

So, the last thing I wanted to say about this religion survey is that I was interested to learn that 16% of the US population is unaffiliated/agnostic/atheist. Many of those people were unaffiliated, moreover, because they had left a religion. I think something I am slowly learning is that people leave religions, usually, because of bad personal experiences.

Sometimes those experiences have to do with the reaction they get when they question the religion's belief systems. But more often, it's experiences in which the religion doesn't live up to its own ideals, and people get hurt in the process. Not that everything is determined by our experiences, but it's a lot harder to know God when the people you meet who claim to speak for God don't actually embody God's love, beauty, and open forgiveness.

Obama Speech Part II

So, I've been doing a little more reading about the principles of tax law (any comments, my lawyer friends?), and it seems like the UCC might be in the clear if we consider the fact that Obama's appearance was not an endorsement of his candidacy by the church. It was probably supportive to his candidacy, but the basic purpose of the UCC is not to funnel money to Obama outside the campaign finance laws, or for other hidden/secret political purposes. We have some other stuff to do. So I'm feeling a little more hopeful.

Here's the Associated Press article.