The Dangerous Deception of White Supremacy

Why do people believe in white supremacy? Why do they need to? What a dangerous deception. I am white and therefore benefit from white privilege. The fear of losing what never rightfully belonged to privileged people increases fear of the "other."

 So we hear the same words from the shooter in New Zealand: "immigrant invaders" as we do from our leader about the "emergency" need for a wall because of "immigrant invaders." Fear reigns. Terrorism prevails. Does hope fade? 

However, also yesterday high school students around the world demanded a future of an earth safe for them to live on. And yesterday, while snow remained outside, four little birds returned to the rafter roof above our deck. They remembered their home and came in hope. 

So I am called to remember that this world is home to all and to work to make it so, well into the future.

"Snow Shut-Down" Brings Constant State of Uncertainty

There he was at 5:00 a.m. plowing out the parking lot across the street.  Faithful, he’s plowing now so people can use the government services building even though the man will have to plow again because the storm is predicted to not stop until evening.

The upper Midwest has been living in “snow shut down” for weeks.  National media shows storms as they move to the East Coast. They report airport delays and difficulties for “commuters.” Well, in small cities most of us don’t “commute.” We simply live and work here.

 And by now, school students aren’t rejoicing in having a “day off.”  They haven’t had a full week of school since the beginning of the 2019 term. They value education and are concerned how far behind their sessions are.

We live in a constant state of uncertainty. To cancel or not cancel.  And will the rescheduled date for our activity be cancelled again? I know, I know, a day snowed in means I have the time to clean closets, but the sneaky depression of snow shut-down does not provide incentive for closet cleaning. 

However,  we are thankful people: for a warm place to live and enough food.  And we are careful and aware of road accidents and heart attacks while shoveling. We worry about and reach out to care for those who don’t know where they will sleep in this snowy cold. 

The CEO of the Health Care Center around the block is also out. He and a few others with four-wheel drives are picking up their staff who can’t make it through the storm. Good Shepherd doesn’t have “snow days.”  They are needed to serve.  Thanks be to God for them.

WHY THERE’S NO NEED FOR A HONEYMOON PERIOD IN MINISTRY: Beyond Valentine's Day

God’s Love goes beyond Valentine’s Day. God’s love is more sustaining than any “honeymoon” period in ministry.   It’s not just about flowers, candy, one short day. God’s love is sustaining and unconditional.   

But that “Honeymoon” advice lingers: “Get as much done as you can right away before the normal life sets in with all the complaints and difficulties of really living together.” They loved your paperwork and were impressed with the interview. And you liked the looks of them. They loved the former pastor and will love you, too. Or, maybe they didn’t, so this will be a better “fit.” If we all put on our best behavior for a while, Valentine’s Day can last for a few months. Ah, beware of the “honeymoon” period in ministry and trust that God’s love endures beyond Valentine’s Day. 

Creation:  Before we came, God had created the congregation.  God is still creating—putting us together. Build on those foundations.  Rather than giving in to the temptation to change things quick before people notice, we need to ask and listen and give Valentine-like thanks to the faithful saints at work through the years. Then, together, we can create with the Creating God.  Oh, there will be suspicions that we are going to rip up everything and plant our new ideas. We can bring fresh ideas without totally ripping out what may simply be slow to grow. Creation involves change, but God didn’t rip things up each month and completely start all over.

Beyond favoring those who might seek our favor with Valentine-like flowers or candy, we need to seek out those less known people, those less appreciated.  We can walk around the neighborhood, and as a congregation build new relationships all over the place among those thought to be “outsiders.” We can give valentines to those who don’t usually receive them. God’s love multiplies.  

Christ: God’s love incarnate is among and between us.  Not that we need to fall in love with each other in Valentine-card ways. We are called to love before we even know each other. We are already the body of Christ, now being joined together, even when old congregational wounds need to be healed by the wounded One, Jesus. This will not be just a one-day celebration of being nice, or until the  liking-each-other period runs down.  Christ’s forgiving, reconciling love, which won’t let us down, even when we let each other down, is the forever kind.  

The Holy Spirit:  When I was called to serve a congregation years ago, I had to remind them I was not the coming Messiah. God had not sent me to “save” them. However, we could expect to be surprised by the Spirit. How would God be growing us? By pruning? By transformation? By numerical growth or some other kind of growth? By listening to each other and hearing everyone’s voice? By reaching out in radical hospitality without fear? (Grafting strangers on to the tree?) By building trust and trying new healthier patterns of making decisions? By really incorporating new people (corpus of Christ), and building more trust?

Happy Valentine’s Day all year long, my beloved sisters and brothers, as we live together in the trustworthy, unconditional love of God.

(based on a conversation with Rev. Christopher deForest)

Martin Luther King Jr. Did Not Build Walls

Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Monday, Jan. 21, cannot be just one more day of counting days.  It must be a call to remember King’s goal is to create a beloved community. Hear his words:

“Love is creative and redemptive. Love builds up and unites; hate tears down and destroys.” No walls.

 “Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation.” We need NATO and the United Nations. The world needs interdependence. “I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.” “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

A few short weeks after the March on Washington August 28, 1963,  where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream Speech, at the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, Sept. 15, in an act of white supremacist terrorism bombing, four African American Sunday School girls were killed.

Still our Rep. Steve King cannot understand why terms like “white nationalist” and “white supremacist” are offensive. Two years ago he tweeted “We can’t restore our [white] civilization with somebody else’s babies.” He has long proposed a border wall with electric barbed wire on top, saying “We do it with livestock all the time.”

Children still die: at the U.S. southern border and from bombings in the Middle East. But to be a U.S. [white] nationalist means it is too expensive for us to care. We must pull out and pull inward lest we become “overrun” with “them.”

Martin Luther King Jr.: “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” “Justice too long delayed is justice denied.” “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’”

Now as the Year Turns Again, Give us Peace Beyond our Fear

There we were! Don Weber and I happened to be kneeling beside each other at the altar rail as hundreds came forward for healing yesterday at Trinity Lutheran Church in Mason City. Years ago I  turned 18 and he 30 when I worked in his family’s carpet business while attending my first two years of college.

 Now I am 80 and he is 92. The years have turned. How many times each of us has heard the Gospel and received communion since then.  I have gathered in churches all over the world. I felt the presence of all those saints as the sign of the cross was made with oil on our heads Sunday.

 Pastor Dan Gerrietts had invited us to come for healing for ourselves, for others, for our nation, our world. Now as the year turns again,  “Healer of our every ill, light of each tomorrow, give us peace beyond our fear . . . Teach us all your way of healing.”

While Walls and Fear Kill Children . . .

Luke: “Because there was no place for them.”

Matthew: “Flee . . . for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” Herod was infuriated and “killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under.”

In the midst of a government shutdown over a wall, when a leader is infuriated, when children die, when the world becomes more dangerous because of targeted fear, and when, as always, there is no room for the stranger, God incarnate comes. Peace to you, brothers and sisters, always and everywhere. Jesus is here among us and everyone.

Advent and Slain and Imprisoned Journalists

Saturday is Bill of Rights Day.  The first Amendment to the U.S. Constitution includes the free exercise of religion and the freedom of the press.

This week TIME Magazine named its 2018 Person of the year: “Guardians and the War on Truth”: slain and imprisoned journalists.

On Sunday we light the third Advent candle. Little might the world notice unless we Christians ourselves pay attention. We have lit two. We still can light the third, and the fourth. Most of us will not be imprisoned for doing so.

We, like the shepherds, can “go now” and “see this thing that has taken place,” seeking out the truth, finding the Christ who is the center of all truth and making it known. We will need to be as astute as the wise men in searching diligently for the child born king, worshiping, and then choosing “another road” rather than playing into Herod’s wicked plans.

Our advent journey is a time to pay close attention, to reflect, repent, and focus on the Truth so that we might tell publicly the news which prevails.

Remember the Centennial of Armistice Day, not the Glory of Nationalism

Eleven days until Election day. I urge you to vote (if you have not already). Also remember the 11^th hour of the 11th day of the 11^th month of Nov. 1918. This is the 100^th anniversary of Armistice Day, the end of WW I, the “War to End all Wars.” Now called Veterans Day in the U.S. and Remembrance Day in Canada and other nations. French President Macron, hosting world leaders for the centennial, will have no celebration of national triumph. No tanks or missiles in the streets. 

In the U.S. we need peace for our press, freedom of the press--not bombs for them. We need no military at our borders; we need nuclear peace treaties. My father was a veteran of WW I. My uncle was gassed in that war. Remember that war did not end all wars. Nov. 6 is a time for voting. Nov. 11^th is a Sunday, a day of Remembrance, not of the glory of nationalism, but of the Christ who died to end death and of Resurrection: for new together life for all.

Voting Matters. Every Single Person Matters

We voted yesterday! First day polls are open at our County Court House for absentee ballot voting. Our neighbors, new to Iowa, voted, too. It was a friendly, welcoming process. No voter I.D. required. All was in order, carefully done. Now we are free on November 6th to help others go to the polls! Democracy means that we all work to make sure everyone is able to vote!

Commentators wonder which way the final vote on the Supreme Court nomination will swing in the Mid-terms.  Will the Republicans be more fired up? Will the Democrats' determination to change things hold? We cannot know, of course. But I do know these things: We absolutely have to make sure that those people whom others want to keep away from voting are supported.  How many names are being erased? What can I do? Who needs an I.D.? What can I do?  Whose polling place has been changed without someone knowing about it? How can I let them know?

What can I do locally to make sure that information is correct and widely known?  Whom can I tell that their vote matters and that they matter? That they really matter? 

"No" to Gender Justice and So Many Other Rights . . . for Years to Come

With Senator Collins and Senator Manchin just announcing they will vote “yes” to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to be an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, I raise again the concerns of the National Council of Churches: (Below) Also today, after decades of work by women and men, the Lutheran Church of Australia again denied women the right to be ordained (2/3 vote needed; only 59.7% received). 

National Council of Churches Statement this week: “Kavanaugh’s political record is troubling with regard to issues of voting rights, racial and gender justice, health care, the rights of people with disabilities, and environmental protections.  This leads us to believe that he cannot be an impartial justice in cases that are sure to come before him at the Court.” October 5, 2018, a day full of clouds here.

Ordinary Days: Do We Have a National and International Emergency?

Each day was so ordinary. Burton and I were seminary graduate students, just a few weeks married, during the Cuban Missile Crisis in the fall of 1962. We had books to read, papers to write, but the real question was whether Soviet Union nuclear weapons would fall on St. Louis or on any other part of the U.S.

I had the laundry sorted out to be washed on a Monday morning in the summer of 1967 when it became clear we would need to  leave Detroit by side streets because of shooting on the freeways as the Detroit Rebellion—called riots—were spreading. Fires spread further in 1968. Would the country survive?

I was writing while watching TV in New Haven, Ct. in 1973, as John Dean testified before Congress about Richard Nixon as the nation began to understand the President’s involvement in the Watergate break-in and the cover-up. How much more would we find out?

Our family was at a camp in New Hampshire summer 1974. Burton had a radio with him. People huddled around as we listened to the announcement that Richard Nixon had resigned. No U.S. president before had done this. We could not imagine what would happen to the nation.

September 11^th 2001 was the first full week of the semester at Wartburg Seminary. Craig Nessan and I were teaching Church Administration and Mission class while planes hit the Twin Towers in New York City. We found out more as students and faculty walked toward chapel.

This Friday September 7, 2018, people are busy with ordinary things.  I am preparing for a presentation at my church next Wednesday evening: “Civility: Conversations as Christians in a Pluralistic World.” Earlier this week, after considering whether to prepare a hand-out, I told the Education Director that I thought not because I didn’t know what might unfold in the country during the coming days.  Well, things have unfolded: Committee hearings on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh for associate justice of the Supreme Court; publication of Bob Woodward’s new book, Fear; a New York Times op ed on the test of the presidency.

The news media is focused on “who” wrote the op ed piece, the many denials of authorship, and the “volcanic” reaction of the president.

However, history would have us ask, “What comes next?”  Is this just more about an unpredictable president? Simply one more account, particularly Bob Woodward’s book, of a chaotic White House? Or is this an emergency within the nation and a truly international danger laid out clearly about a man with a preference for autocrats and dictators, a U.S. president who has singular authority to make nuclear decisions.

The president’s self-congratulations to the contrary, talk of impeachment and use of the 25^th amendment grow. But these are not merely political questions. The question is a serious one about to whom this nation turns in an emergency? We now know about 1962, 1967 and 1968, 1973 and 1974, 2001. What about now?

Is it up to the “quiet resistance” of unelected but dutiful officials within the White House to contain this president? Are they—are we—depending upon Congress to act? Will this end up in the hands of the Supreme Court? And will this Court have a new associate justice who has argued that presidents should not be “distracted” by civil lawsuits and criminal investigations while in office?

The New York op ed piece ends quietly with us: “the real difference will be made by everyday citizens. . . . Americans.” So, what might we ordinary citizens on this ordinary day be prepared for? Be prepared to be? To do?

Hero's Funeral in 2040?

     Hero’s funeral in 2040 ?

Guest blog by the Rev. Dr. Peter Kjeseth, 

    (Peter is Professor emeritus of Wartburg Theological Seminary, former colleague, dear friend, and justice advocate with a global perspective)

The week-long mega-funeral of Senator John McCain is still being analyzed and evaluated by our pundits and even by those of us who are not experts.  Noteworthy has been the value placed on the negative:

     Who was NOT invited, Trump and Palin, and what was NOT said about his heroism.

     In praising McCain’s courage in the Vietnam war, none of the elite speakers affirmed that he and his fellow warriors won the war for us.

     We lost that war.  Rather he was praised for refusing to be freed before his fellow prisoners of war.  The overriding theme of praise was for his unflinching and bipartisan support of “American values”.

     Fair enough – and deserved!

    But do we dare ask ourselves today who and what might be celebrated and praised -or condemned and rejected – in some hero’s funeral in, say, 2040?  What sort of heroes will emerge from US military involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and even Yemen?

   Hard on the end of the McCain funeral, which won global headlines, we see the much less celebrated event of the retirement of General John Nicolson, long time head of US forces in Afghanistan.  His farewell message was unflinching: “It is time for the war in Afghanistan to end.”  This after our 17 years of serial redefinition of mission and total failure.  Will the military/industrial complex and the present Republican leadership seriously consider any real alternative to another round of redefinition and restarting of our “mission” in Afghanistan?  Good luck to incoming General Austin “Scott” Miller, who has already had to report and more-or-less justify a US soldier’s death.

   Even more morally problematic is our ‘proxy’ involvement in the devastating war in Yemen.  Saudi Arabia has now admitted that the August 9 airstrike in Yemen’s Saada Province that killed dozens of people including over 30 children riding a bus to a holiday event was a mistake.  Many voices across the world and in the UN name this event, and others like it, as war crimes.  Our military spokespersons tepidly explain that we ‘only’ provide inflight refueling of aircraft, intelligence help in defining a mission, training and other services.

   Lockheed Martin MK 82 bomb parts are clearly identified in Yemen.  If we dare look at it, there is ample evidence of our massive military supply to the perpetrators of the war in Yemen.

  When we look back on this day from the perspective of 2040, will there be anything heroic to celebrate?

  A question worth considering.