1. "Whoever does not love does not know God, for
God is love” (1 John 4:8).
2. Legend has it that a relative of mine named Edmund Ruffin fired the first shot on Fort Sumter. I visited there last summer and there are exhibits that support the claim. So a Ruffin may have fired the shot that started the Civil War. I’m not ashamed. But I’m certainly not proud.
3.
Sometime during my boyhood, I was telling a
friend how proud I was that our country had never lost a war. He said, “Well
actually, Georgia was one of the Confederate states, so we lost the Civil War.”
This upset me, since all children think it’s possible to win all the time. So I
asked my father if the South in fact lost the Civil War. He gave me that
sideways look and said, “Yes, and be glad we did.”
4.
Once a dear lady in a church I served placed a
new headstone on the grave of her Confederate Army veteran grandfather. She
told me she was going to hold a dedication service and asked me if I’d pray. So
my Good Wife and I went to the cemetery at the appointed time. The program
called for the saying of the pledge to the flag of the Confederate States of
America before the saying of the pledge to the flag of the United States of
America. My Good Wife asked me if I was going to say the pledge to the
Confederate flag. I replied, “No, because I am not now, nor have I ever been, a
citizen of the Confederate States of America.” Neither has anyone else who is
alive today.
5.
The first sermon by an African-American preacher
I ever heard was in a Mercer University chapel service around 1977. I don’t
remember his name, but I remember something he said. He was preaching on the
text in Genesis 2 about God forming a man from the dust of the earth. He said,
“It’s hard to understand how one speck of dust can think it’s better than
another speck just because it’s a different hue.” That made sense to me. It
still does.
6.
General Robert E. Lee said this about putting up
monuments after the Civil War: “I think it wiser not to keep open the sores of
war, but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate
the marks of civil strife and to commit to oblivion the feelings it
engendered.” We should have heeded his advice.
7.
The “alt-right” is all wrong.
8.
It’s a strange kind of Christianity that
condones hate, much less honors and promotes it.
9.
Some of those white nationalists marching in
Charlottesville on Saturday were probably raised in church. What on earth did
they hear? Some of them probably went to church on the Sunday after they
marched. What did their fellow parishioners say to them?
10.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (using the words of
the nineteenth century minister and philosopher Theodore Parker) famously said,
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Indeed it
does.
11.
I am completely befuddled that any American can
see swastikas on our streets and not be filled with indignation and sorrow.
12.
Heather Heyer cared deeply about people and tried
to help the oppressed and disenfranchised. She was going to join those
protesting against the Klan and Nazi marchers in Charlottesville when the car
crashed into the crowd. She was killed. She was thirty-two years old. She is a
hero.
13.
I understand dislike, irritation, and misunderstanding.
But I can’t understand hate.
14.
“No one is born hating another person because of
the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to
hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes
more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” (Nelson Mandela)
15. "All you need is love. Love is all you need." (John Lennon)
15. "All you need is love. Love is all you need." (John Lennon)
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1 comment:
Yep. Spot on.
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