When We Live in the Midst of History, What Are We Called to Do?

When we live in the midst of history, between the times, we question, doubt and are confused. We live between Easter and Ascension Day, this year April 1 and May 10. We know what happened on Pentecost and after, but the disciples did not. All they knew was that after his suffering, Jesus presented himself alive to his disciples, appearing to them during forty days, telling them not to leave Jerusalem and to wait (Acts 1).

This year we live between the 50^th anniversaries of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, April 4, and June 6, 1968. Looking back, we realize that year was full of turmoil and uncertainty. On March 31 Lyndon B. Johnson, embroiled in the Viet Nam War, announced, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”

On April 3, King delivered his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech and made plans for a march to be held on April 5. But the evening of April 4 at age 39 he was shot.

During Holy Week 1968 the nation was swept up in grief and anger, named riots. Around 3,500 people were injured, 43 were killed and 27,000 arrested. Would this nation, as violently divided as it had been since the Civil War, survive? We did not know.

Just weeks earlier, the Kerner commission established to investigate the 1967 riots, provided explanations for the deadly upheavals. “Segregation and poverty have created a destructive environment.” “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” After a summer of turmoil, political uncertainty and violence, Richard Nixon was elected president in November.

I heard a young reporter ask last week, “Were the riots worth it?” That’s not the question.  Any more than “Is the fatigue of the daily news stories unfolding today worth it?” or “Was the disciples’ uncertainty during those 40 days called for?” When you are in the midst of history unfolding, you don’t know what to think or do or feel. Riots were not the plan to be deemed later “worth it” or not. They were the context.

The Fall of 1973 was another such time. I remember it well. October 20 became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre.” Attorney General Richardson and Deputy Attorney General Ruckelshaus resigned in the same night after refusing Nixon’s order to fire Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor appointed to lead the investigation into Nixon’s reelection campaign. News media that night worried on-air about our national Constitutional crisis.

After two years of bitter public debate over the Watergate scandals, President Nixon on August 8, 1974, bowed to pressures from the public and leaders of his party to become the first President in American history to resign. While the President acknowledged that some of his judgments "were wrong," he made no confession of the "high crimes and misdemeanors" with which the House Judiciary Committee charged him.

How do we live in the in-between time, when history is being made?

We live, meanwhile, with the complexities of our daily lives, personal, professional, familial, and ecclesial.

During the uncertainties of the national Constitutional crisis: “How will this turn out?” a Lutheran Church Body, the schism in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod unfolded. The New Orleans convention was in the summer of 1973. On Jan 21, 1974, the students of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis voted 274-92 to “walk out” (until the church body declared which of their professors were being considered false teachers). Then followed the faculty walk out and the beginning of the “Seminary in Exile.”

Lives were changed. Lives are changed. History is changed. How? How do we know? That schism may have contributed eventually to the formation of the ELCA, joining together of the LCA, ALC, and AELC (outcasts of LCMS) in 1988.

What if Johnson had decided to run again? What if King had not been assassinated at age 39? What if Robert Kennedy had been able to win the democratic nomination and Nixon had not won the election in 1968?

What if the disciples had not waited together in Jerusalem, but had scattered?

How do we live in the in-between time, when history is being made?

I, too, have a hard time watching/listening to the news each day. And, to which news stream do I turn? There were fewer channels in 1968; all showed the same pictures of over 100 cities burning.

The disciples were called to wait together in the city of Jerusalem.

Today IS a difficult time, a dangerous time. Investigations, special counsels, constitutional issues, questions: “What is truth?” Indictments, firings, resignations, primaries, mid-term elections, campaign financing. How will this all turn out?  Trade wars or not? Diplomacy or not? Nuclear escalation or not? Bravado. Fear. Can’t we just turn the page of history and find out?

But we are called to live in the midst of history. To wait, yes.  But also, to watch, and to be peace-making, community-building, equality-seeking, truth-telling, witness-bearing, radical Christ-is-alive living disciples. Pentecost is May 20.