Arc Voting

Well, here we are, three weeks from Election Day. We’re in the stretch drive. It’s a sprint to the finish. This one’s for all the marbles. (Apply other cliches as you see fit.) 

 I guess we think every election is potentially world-altering. Maybe they all are. There’s no doubt that events would have unfolded differently had any election gone the other way. I mean, imagine if the two most recent presidential elections in which the winner got the most electoral votes but not the most popular votes had been won by Gore rather than Bush and by Clinton rather than Trump. Some of us think things would have been better, others of us think they would have been worse, but I’m sure we all agree they would have been different—and drastically different at that. 

I recently heard an interview with a history professor about the upcoming presidential election. The interviewer asked the professor if this election would be as consequential as it felt like it might be. The professor said something like, “Well, if you think things such as democracy, civil rights, and healthcare are important, then yes, it will be a very consequential election.” It will also be a consequential election if you think things such as international relationships, economic fairness, and basic human decency are important. 

As a Christian (and an ordained minister too) and an American, I think about how Christian Americans vote and about how they decide how to vote. We really can’t talk about “the Christian vote,” because there are all sorts of Christians who focus on different issues in making their decisions. Every now and then I see a post on social media (always, I think, copied from somewhere else) that says something like, “As a Christian, I will vote for the candidate that takes the following positions on select issues,” then lists a few of them with a Bible verse (or verses) purporting to back up each one. The ones I see are always from what I think can fairly be termed a conservative evangelical perspective. 

Christians with other perspectives could do the same thing. So, for example, I could say that as a Christian, I will vote for the candidate that supports the following positions. 

1. Economic justice. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives…” (Luke 4:18; see also Isaiah 1:17; Proverbs 29:7; Exodus 23:6). 

2. Better treatment of underpaid, oppressed, and migrant workers. “Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts” (James 5:4). 

3. Protection of the environment. “Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture, but you must treat down with your feet the rest of your pasture? When you drink of clear water, must you foul the rest with your feet?” (Ezekiel 34:18; see also Jeremiah 2:7; Revelation 11:18). 

4. Universal healthcare. “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’” (Matthew 25:37-40; see also Proverbs 21:13). 

Now some of you will check my references (Well done! I do that too!) and say, “When we read those verses in their context and apply rigorous interpretive methodologies to them, they might not quite support the positions you name.” And you may be right. At least in some cases. At least somewhat and partially. But you see, that is the problem with relying on prooftexts to support a position: if we fail to take context into account, we may inappropriately apply a Bible verse to our position. 

We really need to take the overall trajectory of the Bible into account. We need to take what I call the trajectory of the Spirit into account. Where is the Bible pointing? Where is the Spirit leading? I believe that creation, including this blue globe that is our home, is moving toward being all that God intends for it to be. 

Some Christians used to think that if we worked hard enough to make the world as good as possible, it would finally become good enough for the kingdom of God to come in its fullness. Events like World War I and the Great Depression pretty much ended such thinking. Other Christians believe that the world is inevitably going to get worse and worse until God finally has enough and brings it to an end. That strikes me as a defeatist position that allows you to ignore the problems that oppress, marginalize, and harm people. 

Count me among those Christians who believe that in Christ, God is working God’s purposes out, and that in the meantime we should live in hope, doing all the good we can and making things better as much as we can, not because we believe such actions will bring in the kingdom, but rather because we believe that such living is our privilege and responsibility. 

Dr. Martin Luther King, paraphrasing an idea first expressed by the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker not long before the American Civil War, said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” 

So does the arc of the Bible. So does the arc of the Spirit. And I work, write, and vote in the fervent hope that the arc of the United States of America does too.

Sixty-Two

I turned sixty-two years old on September 24. My college students think that makes me ancient. Some of you think I’m still young. Those of you were also born in 1958 are probably thinking, “Yeah, me too.” To my contemporaries, I say, “I’m glad we made it.” I also say, “I wish we all had.”

Anyway, turning sixty-two is no big deal. 

Then again it is. For one thing, I’m now old enough to retire. I’m not going to retire, but I could if I needed or wanted to do so. I feel a sense of accomplishment in this. I’ve worked my whole life. It’s nice to know I could stop. 

On the other hand, I wouldn’t stop working even if I retired. I mean, I’d stop going to the office every day, but I’d still work. I wouldn’t be an editor anymore, but editing is only one thing I do. I’m also a writer, a preacher, and a teacher. I hope and plan to keep doing those things for as long as I’m physically and mentally able to write and talk in coherent ways. (I started to say in ways that make sense, but I’m perfectly coherent now, and I’m fully aware that much of what I say doesn’t make sense to some folks.)

Another reason turning sixty-two is a big deal to me is that I’m getting to the point where I can say I’ve lived a lot longer than my parents did. My mother died at fifty-three and my father at fifty-seven. I suppose until I passed fifty-seven, I had the thought in the back of my mind that I might be genetically predisposed not to make it to sixty, but now I’m two years past it. There’s no deep meaning to that fact, but I have lived long enough to be within shouting distance of a golden wedding anniversary (if I shout real loud), to still be here for my grown children, and to get to know my grandchildren, none of which my parents got to do. I’m grateful.

A third reason that turning sixty-two is significant to me is that I had to live sixty-two years to get here. They have been sixty-two full and meaningful years. I have had sixty-two years of experiences that have brought me to this point in my life. 

I’ve had sixty-two years of knowing and being known. I’ve had sixty-two years of loving and being loved. I’ve had sixty-two years of studying, learning, and thinking. I’ve had sixty-two years of growing, evolving, and changing. I’ve had sixty-two years of falling down and getting up. I’ve had sixty-two years of failing and succeeding. I’ve had sixty-two years of relating to people and of trying to get away from people. I’ve had sixty-two years of being amazed at how wonderful life can be and of being shocked at how terrible it can be. I’ve had sixty-two years of befuddlement peppered with glorious moments of clarity. I’ve had sixty-two years of the joy of growing closer to some and of the sorrow of growing apart from others. 

In other words, I’ve had sixty-two years of life. As the old man in the Jimmy Buffet song says, “Some of it’s magic, and some of it’s tragic, but I’ve had a good life all the way.”

Thanks be to God.

Wounded Leaders

A man named Jacob is one of the lead characters in the biblical book of Genesis, and he’s a fascinating one. 

He and his brother were twin sons born to a woman named Rebekah, who was married to Abraham’s son Isaac. While Rebekah was pregnant with the boys, she was having so much difficulty that she asked the Lord what was going on. The Lord told her that two nations were struggling within her, which explained a lot. 

The competition continued as they were being born—Esau was born first, but Jacob was holding onto his brother’s heel. Thus he received the name Jacob, which means “heel-grabber” or “supplanter.” 

This sibling rivalry continued as the brothers grew. Fueled by ambition and gifted with shrewdness, Jacob cheated his older brother out of the special benefits and blessings that in ancient cultures fell to the firstborn son. Esau responded by declaring that as soon as their father Isaac died, he was going to kill his brother. Jacob found it best to get out of Beer-sheba and head up to his mother’s home territory of Haran. 

On his way, Jacob stopped to spend the night. He had a dream in which he saw a stairway between earth and heaven with angels going up and down on it. God spoke to Jacob, promising to be with him and to bring back to the land he was leaving. So Jacob named the place Bethel, which means “House of God.” 

He then continued his trip, no doubt fortified and encouraged by the vision he’d seen and the words he’d heard. 

Believing they’ve heard God say that God is going to protect them and give them success puts a person in a challenging situation. How will they receive such a word? Will they receive it with arrogance, or will they accept it with humility? Will they strut forward proudly, feeling justified in crushing anything and anybody that stands in their way? Or will they proceed humbly, trusting God to show them how to approach obstacles and to deal with opponents? 

Jacob spent the next twenty years in Haran. A lot of things happened to him there, some of them positive, some of them negative, and many of them a combination of positive and negative. But after two decades, the bottom line was that Jacob had a large family and much wealth. God had indeed protected and blessed him. Now, he was ready return home. 

As the caravan neared Canaan, an advance team reported to Jacob that Esau was coming to meet him with four hundred men. Not knowing if his brother still had murderous intent after two decades, Jacob devised some strategies to try to appease his brother and, if necessary, to try to preserve at least some of his family and his holdings. 

On the night before he was to meet Esau, Jacob spent the night alone beside the Jabbok River. There someone wrestled with him all night. As the new day was breaking, Jacob’s opponent hit him on the hip and put it out of joint. Jacob believed that had been struggling with God; he named the place Peniel, which means “Face of God,” because, he said, “I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.” God changed Jacob’s name to Israel, which means “One who strives with God,” for, God said, “You have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.” 

Again, how does someone receive such a pronouncement? Do they receive it with arrogance? Or do they incorporate it with humility? 

We see the answer, I think, in the way Jacob approached Esau the next day. Jacob didn’t boldly charge up to Esau. He rather bowed down seven times as he approached his brother. Jacob is now Israel. The one who seized Esau’s place is now the one who survived a wrestling match with God. 

But Jacob walks away from the encounter with God with a limp. I suspect this means that Jacob’s entire life experience had left him with a limp. Jacob’s life with God, his life with others, and his life with himself has left him wounded and humbled. 

Jacob was a great leader. His new name Israel would be the name of the nation that would descend from him. But he was a wounded leader. I suspect his best qualities developed from his wounds. 

I believe that men and women whose wounds have blessed them with humility make better leaders—make better people—than those whose privilege has saddled them with arrogance. 

(This article first appeared in the Barnesville Herald-Gazette and the Pike County Journal-Reporter.)

On the Front Lines

I’m sure you join me in appreciating those who are on the front lines of the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic.

When we think about the front line warriors fighting the pandemic, medical professionals probably come to mind first. We are grateful for the doctors, nurses, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and lab technicians who deal directly with sick people. We appreciate the support staff who help with the process. We are grateful for Emergency Medical Technicians who treat and transport people in medical crisis.

Whether they work in hospitals, doctors’ offices, walk-in clinics, or public health departments, medical professionals put their health and lives on the line to help us stay healthy or get well. They are doing valiant work to stem the tide of the pandemic. They are heroes.

We can now add teachers to those who are on the front lines of the fight against the coronavirus. While this applies to all teachers, I especially have our public school teachers in mind (and on my heart).

Teachers in our area are in preplanning. In addition to their usual work of preparing their lesson plans and classrooms, they are also preparing to create and maintain an environment in which students and teachers will be as safe as possible from the spread of COVID-19. When students report for school soon (assuming plans don’t change), teachers will add pandemic curtailment to their already vital tasks of education and socialization.

It’s more than they signed up for, but they will face it head-on. Their courage is but one element of their dedication. We need to appreciate, encourage, and support our teachers as well other school personnel, including paraprofessionals, administrators, school nurses, librarians, lunchroom workers, custodians, and bus drivers (and anyone else I didn’t mention).

What can we do for our teachers as they begin this more challenging than usual school year?

First, we can pray for them. We can ask God to help and protect them.

Second, we can support adequate funding for our schools. We can advocate for prioritizing public education in the budgets adopted by our national, state, and local representatives. We can resist efforts to redirect funding from public to private schools. We can insist on the importance of public education in moving us toward more equality and toward greater security and insist that it be funded at levels commensurate with its contributions to our society.

Third, we parents, grandparents, and other family members can guide the students in our families to follow the guidelines laid down by their schools that their teachers must enforce. We can respect science. We can learn how to differentiate between information and misinformation and teach our children how to do the same. If we espouse conspiracy theories, dismiss the pandemic as a hoax, downplay the seriousness of the situation, and refuse to follow reasonable guidelines of social distancing, mask wearing, and handwashing, our children will pick up on it and will likely follow our lead, which will make the teachers’ jobs that much harder. It will also increase the chances of our children getting sick.

Our teachers and all others who contribute to our children’s education are on the front lines in the battle against COVID-19. They are heroes. Let’s give them our full support.

What Makes You Cry

It was summertime, sometime in the late 1960s. I was, as many children did (and I hope still do), participating in the public library’s summer reading program. I was reading Fred Gipson’s 1942 novel Old Yeller.

I knew the book was about a boy and his dog. I didn’t know much else about it. I’d never seen the 1957 Walt Disney film based on the book. It might have aired on the Wonderful World of Disney by the time I read the book, but I wouldn’t have seen it because I never saw the Disney program because it came on during Sunday night church time and my parents thought we had to be there every time the church doors were opened and that was that.

(I also never saw the Ed Sullivan Show for the same reason. I mean, who needed to be introduced to the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and the Rolling Stones when you could sing the same old hymns and hear another sermon instead? But I’m not bitter. Nope, not at all.)

Anyway, I didn’t know that Travis (the boy in the book) has to shoot Old Yeller because the dog contracts rabies. It broke my heart. I went crying to my mother.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“The boy had to shoot Old Yeller,” I sobbed.

“You shouldn’t read things that are going to make you cry,” she said.

I stopped crying and looked at her. “Well, I couldn’t know it was going to make me cry until I read it, could I?”

My mother gave me a lot of good advice during my growing-up years. The advice she gave me that day wasn’t good. In fact, it was downright bad.

We shouldn’t avoid the things that will make us cry. Besides, we couldn’t if we tried. Why do I say that? Because the only way to avoid the things that make us cry is to avoid life. If we live, we’re going to experience hurt, loss, grief, sadness, and sorrow. If we live, we’re going to cry.

There’s been a lot to cry about lately. There is the COVID-19 pandemic, which has cost us life, health, in-person interaction, and prosperity. There is the systemic and institutional racism that has long afflicted our nation, but which some people are just now waking up to (victims of it and their advocates have long been aware of it). There is the political polarization that has divided us since the 2016 presidential campaign and that may get worse (I hope not) during this 2020 campaign.

We can try to ignore it all. We can try to wish it all away. We can pretend the crises don’t exist. We can justify such approaches by telling ourselves that it’s all too painful to deal with. We can tell ourselves, to paraphrase my mother, “We shouldn’t look at things that are going to make us cry.”

But I say that we should look at these and the other crises facing us. I say we should let the horror of it all sweep over us. I say we should acknowledge the problems with their accompanying pain and let the tears flow.

We should then wipe our eyes, stiffen our spines, examine our hearts, and join with those who are trying to do something to make things better.

I’ll Have to Say I Love You in a Column

Writing is what I do. I try to observe life—both the life I live, insofar as I can see it, and the lives that others live, insofar as they allow me to see them—and then write about what I see. I am a Christian writer, by which I mean I am a Christian who writes.

My writings don’t always live up to some folks’ standards and expectations of Christian writing, by which I mean I don’t always quote the Bible, mention God, or refer to Jesus. But I can no more separate my identity as a Christian from my writing than I can separate my breathing from my existing. I write everything I write from the worldview I’ve been given over half a century of doing my best to accept and offer God’s grace, love, and mercy as I have experienced them in Jesus Christ.

The heart of this Christian writer is breaking over what I see happening in and to our nation. And I want to write about it, not just because writing is what I do, but because a writer is who I am. Writing is how I react. It is how I respond. It is how I try to contribute to a solution.

I suspect that some of you think I write what I write because I want to be contrarian or because I enjoy stirring up controversy. Some of you may also think that I write just to insist that I’m right and others are wrong or just to prove how smart I think I am. I can’t claim that my motives for writing what I write are always pure; in fact, I’m sure they aren’t.

But I’ll tell you one thing: I try my best to have love be my main motive. I look at the world, I look at the nation, I look at the local community, I look at the lives of my family members and my friends, and I try to address situations with love that shows itself in compassion and empathy. Whether I’m writing about religion, politics, or anything else, I’m trying to present ways of thinking that might lead us toward a better world, nation, and community.

I’m also an American. I love this country. I want us to always be moving toward living up to our ideals. As a Christian writer who is also an American writer, I want to write about what’s going on right now.

Out of love, I want to write about the many instances of excessive force used by law enforcement officers against young black men. I want to write about the anger, the fear, and the discrimination that fuels much of the upheaval we are experiencing in these days. I want to write about how hard it is for black parents to have to teach their children how to respond to authorities in a way that won’t get them killed.

Out of love, I want to write about our society’s deeply ingrained economic inequities. I want to write about how the ever-increasing hording of wealth by a few people and the doling out of barely subsistence wages to millions of people (many of them minimum wage-earning workers deemed “essential” during the pandemic) is an unsustainable economic model. I want to write about how frustrations over social and economic disparities can be tamped down only so long before some act of injustice causes them to erupt. I want to write about how some of the worst looting that goes on in our country is done by some of our richest people, our largest corporations, and our most powerful politicians.

Out of love, I want to write about how worried I am that we are moving toward authoritarian rule that tramples all over the Constitution and that cares nothing for anything except attaining and preserving wealth and power.

Out of love, I want to implore us to wake up, to realize how wrong and harmful the direction we’re headed in is, and to do all we can to turn things around. I want us to commit to doing the long and hard work of addressing the systemic problems in our nation that contribute to racial division and economic disparity.

Out of love, I want to pour my heart out in this column so you will know how troubled I am about where we are and where we’re headed, and so you’ll think about why you should join me in being troubled.

I believe that it is God’s love working in me that compels me to write the things I write. As best I can tell, I write what I write out of my love for you, for our nation, and for our world. You may not think that I write what I write out of love. Even some of my fellow Christians may not think so. If you’re one of them, please allow me to ask you a question: what is God’s love working in you compelling you to do?

I hope and pray that God’s love will compel us all to do what we can to overcome our divisions and to heal our brokenness.

Time, Standing Still and Marching On (A Poem)

The Black Lives Matter march
in my hometown of Barnesville, Georgia,
on Saturday, June 6, 2020, began
at the courthouse, went through
downtown, crossed the railroad tracks
where Main Street becomes Mill Street,
turned left at the E. P. Roberts Community
Center (named for the long-time educator who
was the principal at Booker T. Washington
School before the long-awaited, way late, and
poorly executed desegregation of Lamar
County’s schools in 1970, when he became
principal of Forsyth Road School, which was,
physically speaking, the same school, but which
was in every other way much different than
Booker, and so was the first African American
principal I ever had), and ended at Myles-Wimberly
Park (named for two more prominent African
American educators: Robert Myles, my seventh
grade homeroom and math teacher in that first
year of desegregation, and thus my first African
American teacher, and Coach Oscar Wimberly,
for whom I wish to this day I’d kept playing, rather
than giving up on basketball to take an after-school
job, because even though I would have warmed the
bench, I would have learned so much about life from him).

We stood in the park for ninety minutes, steadily
warming up in the late spring Georgia heat and
humidity, listening to several excellent speakers
offer inspiring and challenging words.

To me, the most moving part of the ceremony
occurred at the beginning when event organizer
Krystal Banks (to whom much gratitude is due)
asked us to be silent for eight minutes, forty-
six seconds, the amount of time that police
officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee onto
George Floyd’s neck in Minneapolis on May 25.

It felt like a long time to stand there, being
quiet, listening to the birds' continual singing
and the neighborhood dogs’ occasional barking,
our breathing stifled just a little bit by the masks
we wore because of the ongoing COVID-19 threat.

Breathing was very, very slightly difficult in
those conditions, but it was nothing like trying
to breathe with someone’s knee on your neck,
making breathing more and more difficult
until it finally becomes impossible.

I thought about how the experience of time
passing is relative, depending on the extent to which
you are able to exercise your inalienable rights of
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I thought about how much things have changed
since 1970, and yet here we are, fifty years later,
marching to insist that Black Lives Matter.

I thought about how the Barnesville march
occurred on the anniversary of D-Day, when
American troops, along with British and Canadian
forces, landed at Normandy to drive racist
totalitarianism from Europe, and yet here we are,
seventy-six years later, having to drive it
from the United States of America.

I thought about how we’ve been singing
Mr. Dylan’s song “The Times They Are
a-Changin’” since 1962, and yet here we
are, fifty-eight years later, hoping,
praying, marching, voting, and working,
so that this time, they really will.