Sunday, September 22, 2013
Sunday Reflection: Today's Sermon
Here is (most of) the sermon I will give today at First Covenant Church in Minneapolis.
First Covenant Sermon
September 22, 2013
“Advocacy for the Marginalized”
Text:
Luke 6:17-26
You
know, sometimes the Bible is not so reassuring for a fairly affluent, straight
white guy from Edina. This is one of those times.
Jesus
is talking about turning everything, EVERYTHING upside down. The poor
have the Kingdom, while the rich face woe. The hungry will be filled,
while those who are full will be hungry. Those who are reviled will
be blessed, and it’s bad when all speak well of you.
Just
as Jesus said about the temple, in our own lives no stone would remain
unturned.
This
is dangerous. And I know the dangerous Jesus.
As
was mentioned before, one of my projects has been trying Jesus on a capital
charge in a variety of churches and schools in death penalty states. The
point is to put into juxtaposition the political and faith beliefs of
Christians who support the death penalty. My job at the trial is to serve
as the prosecutor—I am arguing that Jesus is so dangerous that he must be put
to death.
It
is a very dark enterprise. It sets the prosecutor in me against my very
faith. I argue to the jury (the congregation) that Jesus is a threat to
four pillars of our society. He is a threat to our economy, to
capitalism, because he tells the rich to become poor. He undermines our
national security, because he teaches that we are not to resist an
evildoer. He threatens our families when he reveals that he will divide
mother from daughter, father from son. Last, he challenges our heritage
when he chooses leaders who are illiterate fisherman, people who have no access
to the rich traditions of our culture.
It
exhausts me to do this. The worst part is that each bit of it, all that I
discuss, judges me.
I am a teacher of the law, affluent, centered on family, and comfortable with
my safety. He challenges every bit of this.
Where
does this leave me? Maybe it means we must impoverish ourselves. I
am not going to do what too many people in pulpits do with that, which is to
say that Jesus somehow meant the opposite of what he was saying—“woe to you who
are rich” is pretty clear in its meaning. At the very least, we must
ally ourselves with the poor, the hungry, and the reviled. Their interests must be
ours. Christ commands it.
What
does it mean to ally ourselves with the poor, the hungry, the reviled?
1)
Work for social justice
The
last time I preached, it was at the Wren Chapel, on the campus of the College
of William and Mary. I was invited to do so by Joanne Braxton, one of the
most influential teachers I have had, who is a skilled preacher herself.
She is one of those teachers that mark you for life as one of theirs.
The
next day, we sat in her office and she pulled something from her desk and laid
it carefully on the table, her fingers resting on top of it like the gem that
it was. It was a gift, a paperback edition of Ernest J. Gaines's "A Lesson
Before Dying."
I
waited until I was in a calm, quiet place to read it, surrounded by tall pines.
The story is about a man condemned to die, in a time when black Americans saw
Joe Louis as the kind of hero we find hard to imagine anymore, a man who
carried the dreams of a people on his broad back.
The
part of the book that stopped me cold, as Professor Braxton knew it would, was
this:
“And
my mind went back to that cell uptown, then to another cell, somewhere in
Florida. After reading about the execution there, I had dreamed about it over
and over and over. As vividly as if I were there, I had seen that cell, heard
that boy crying while being dragged to that chair, "Please, Joe Louis,
help me. Please help me. Help me." After he had been strapped in the
chair, the man who wrote the story could still hear him cry "Mr. Joe Louis
help me, Mr. Joe Louis help me!”
It
stopped me cold, because I get letters that cry out like that. I run a
clinic that creates clemency petitions for prisoners serving very long terms,
desperate men and women. They pile up on my desk, white rectangular
envelopes with neat penciled-in addresses on the front and return addresses in
those remote corners where we warehouse men and women: Victorville, California;
Florence, Colorado; Alderson, West Virginia; Bastrop, Texas.
Inside
each, laid out in painstaking handwriting, is a story. It is always a tragic story.
They are from men, and sometimes women, who are in prison for very long terms
and have exhausted their appeals. They have no more hope through the courts, so
they write to me. They think I will know a way to get them out of prison after
20 or 27 or 35 years for a narcotics case almost no one else remembers. It is
emotionally draining to read these stories. Sometimes, I sit and stare at a
letter, not wanting to open it and let that tragedy out. Instead, I look at the
neat row of stamps, purchased with prison wages of 45 cents an hour.
Perhaps
writing to me is as hopeless as crying out to Joe Louis.
Maybe. Perhaps. But I can’t throw the letters away. I have to try something, so I do. I try to get the law to change, try to
get the President of the United States to take seriously the constitutional
duty of showing mercy through the pardon power, try sometimes to work with my
students to save just one of them.
I
have to. They are Jesus, who said when
you visit those in prison you visit me.
Their mothers, the ones who often write to me pleadingly, who have tried
to win freedom for decades, each one is Mary, Jesus’s mother, dutiful and
steadfast.
2)
Create reconciliation
Our
criminal law, particularly in relation to narcotics, is about retribution. It is about our society’s impulse to
hurt those who have done wrong.
It’s that urge that Jesus rails against, that he upsets in the midst of
turning everything upside down. We
can’t pretend that we do what we do, imprison millions, because it solves a
problem, because by now we know that it hasn’t. We can’t pretend it deters people, because it hasn’t. We do it to hurt people, and it does.
Mercy
is hard work, and our society too often is built in a way designed to push away
grace.
When
I do the trial of Jesus, I get the defendant (Jesus) a public defender. He is indigent, after all. The public defender is Jeanne Bishop,
who is a real-life public defender in Chicago. Her story goes deeper than that, though.
In
1991, her family—mother, father, three sisters—gathered at a restaurant in
Chicago. They were celebrating
something wonderful: The youngest
sister, Nancy, was pregnant. She
and her husband were ecstatic, as was the rest of the family, as they looked
forward to the first member of a new generation.
After
dinner, Nancy and Richard returned home to Winnetka, Illinois, a comfortable
suburb. David Biro, a 16-year-old
from the same town, was waiting for them.
He had a gun. First he shot
Richard in the head. Then,
apparently seeing that Nancy was pregnant, he shot her in the belly. They all died, on the floor of their
home. Nothing was stolen. Biro killed because he could.
This
year, for the first time, Jeanne Bishop did something remarkable. She decided to go visit David Biro in
prison. She had decided that
forgiveness, real Christian forgiveness, required that she have a relationship
with him.
That
first time, when she went to the prison, she was told to sign in. One of the items on the sign in sheet
was “relationship to the prisoner.”
The choices were “family member,” “friend,” “spiritual advisor,” “legal
visit.”
Jeanne
called the guard over. There was
no box for what she was, a forgiving, broken person. Too often, our broader community is that way; there is no space
for reconciliation.
We
are the ones to change that.
3)
Make ourselves vulnerable
Finally, to ally
ourselves with the poor, with the hungry, and with the reviled, we must make
ourselves vulnerable. That is a
part of the deal—it will not be safe and painless.
I
told you why Professor Joanne Braxton is remarkable now, with her gift of the
perfect book. I want to talk, as
well, about a lesson she taught me in college.
One
day in class, one of my fellow students had a headache and was in obvious pain.
Prof. Braxton paused and told us about something she had seen in Haiti: The
"snatching" of a pain. She explained that the snatcher would cover
the forehead of the subject with their hand, rest and feel the warmth of that
person, and then make a snatching motion. If done successfully, the subject was
free of the headache-- but the snatcher would now have it. It struck me, if
nothing else, as a wonderful model of empathy in that it involved not
"fixing" someone's pain or erasing it, but literally taking it on, as
an act of self-sacrifice. Christ, of course, did this very literally.
Many
years later, I found myself with a group of people on the roof deck of a bar
near Wrigleyville. It was very
late, and there was a small group of us around a table in the Chicago summer.
We
were talking about headaches, and I told the story of what I had heard in Prof.
Braxton's class. One woman I did not know, who was about 31 or 32, turned to me
and claimed she had a headache and dared me to snatch it. So, I did. I put my
hand flat on her forehead for a moment, feeling the warmth of her, resting her
hair in my other hand, and then... snatch! I was faking it, sure, but still, what happened…
It
floored me.
I
didn't get a headache. Instead, what I got was a deep and profound sadness that
was totally alien to me, like a dark cloud that filled me up. It was specific
sadness, too-- the regret that I didn't have a child, and might not ever have
one. Certainly, this was not my cloud of dread (I was 23 or 24 at the time). It
wasn't a guy thing... it was entirely hers. It was with me for weeks; I
couldn't shake it.
When
we ally with those who hurt, we will hurt. It is where Christ sends us.
My
dear colleague Susan Stabile leaves for a pilgrimage on the Camino in Spain in just
a few days. I will miss her
deeply, but a conversation this week let it make sense to me. She will leave everything behind. Her family. Her comforts.
Everything, really, that she cannot carry on her back. I was thinking about it wrong, though,
in wondering what could possibly be worth that sacrifice. She explained, kindly, that she doesn’t
do it despite vulnerability;
she does it because of the vulnerability.
Going without is not the sacrifice; it is the blessing.
She seeks grace and truth by making herself vulnerable.
Grace
can come, our unclean spirits cleansed, if we acknowledge in our hearts the
essence of humility: that there is a God, and it is not me. The God that is turns this world upside
down.
Sunday, June 23, 2019
Sunday Reflection: Blowback and Harry Potter
Since the publication of my op-ed in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that defended First Covenant Church-Minneapolis's choice to treat LGBT people as fully human, I have (predictably) gotten a lot of feedback. The emails, posts, and letters pretty much fall into three categories.
First, there has been a significant number of supportive messages, which I really appreciate. Many of those include a story about the writer, usually about themselves or a loved one being pushed out of a family or a faith because of bias against gay men and lesbians or those who support them. They are heartbreaking even as they are encouraging.
The second group contains the angry missives of those who think I have done something terrible. They often (and this is very odd) say I should be thrown into a lake of burning sulfur. It's really hard to believe these people are reading the same gospels I do.
Finally, there is a third group that consistently asks the same question-- it is remarkable how this same view comes up again and again. They pose this dilemma: "Didn't Jesus tell sinners to go and sin no more?"
It's not a bad question, and I will answer here. Jesus did say that, to both the woman at the well and the woman about to be stoned for adultery. But I don't think that means we are to go around doing that.
Most importantly, we are not Jesus. We are the person in sin. How people look at the John 8 story and cast themselves as Jesus-- every time!-- is beyond me. There are all these other characters in the story: the woman about to be executed, the Pharisees, the people with the stones. Clearly, we are those people, not the incarnation of God on Earth! What arrogance to always cast ourselves as the savior-- and yes, I have done that, too.
One problem with making yourself Jesus is that we lack Jesus's ability to identify sin. He knew the true nature of it, and often surprised people with his mercy (he even tells the woman in John 8, "neither do I condemn you"). Our lack of such an ability makes it especially dangerous to go around pointing fingers. Moreover, Jesus never reproves someone for being gay. It it really was so important, you think that would have been a significant part of his life.
Perhaps most clearly, what Jesus teaches over and over ("the log in your own eye," "judge not, lest ye be judged," etc.) is that we are not supposed to go around judging one another. Isn't that what's most important? What Jesus actually teaches us mortals?
But, I suppose, we all want to be God, not the sinner. And thus, the sin compounds.
In the larger scope of the church world, the restrictionists-- those who define themselves by who they exclude, who squander their religious freedom on judgment of others-- are going to lose the same way that segregationists always do in the long run.
And Harry Potter plays into this.
When the Harry Potter books were coming out, I lived in Waco. Many people there tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to bar their children from reading the books, believing that they were Satanic or at least somewhat witchcraft-y. And, of course, there is a lot of witchcraft in a series of books about witchcraft. These people are the same ones who recoil at the thought of gay parishioners in their church.
At some level, those people were scared that Harry Potter taught a set of values other than their own. They were right, too, but not in the way they thought.
The core moral value in the Potter books was inclusion. Harry and his friends were good, because they fought for inclusion of people outside the wizarding mainstream (the "mud bloods"). The bad guys-- Voldemort et al-- were exclusionists. They wanted purity. It was the love of others that saves Harry from danger, again and again.
Love and inclusion are, of course, also core values that Jesus taught. The only people he cast away and vilified were the judgmental and exclusionary Pharisees.
The Harry Potter generation is going to take over your church. It is inevitable, a function of time. They will bring with them values that overlap between the gospels and the Potter books. In the end, love wins. That is how this story ends. And that's ok.
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Faculty Profile #3: Jim Wren
Today the spotlight swings to Jim Wren, Baylor Law's newest practice court guru. Prof. Wren, who assumed his new responsibilities at Baylor on Jan. 1, 2006, has been a partner in the law firm of Williams Squires Wren Brown & Gilliland, L.L.P. since 1997. His significant cases included a $1 billion verdict against the Southground Corp, and a settlement in a medical malpractice case in excess of $4 bazillion. His firm specialized in lawsuits involving people who did something wrong, and he now turns his attention to Baylor students and the possibility that there may be some things that they do wrong.
Wren graduated with cum laude honors from Baylor Law School. He served as an editor of the Baylor Law Review and as a member of the Baylor Moot Court Team, the Baylor Mock Trial Team, the United States Olympic Judo Team, and the Hairquest 2000 Styling team. He has served for many years as an adjunct professor at Baylor Law School, teaching the Management of Totally Complex Multi-District Confusing Litigation course to third-year law students.
Wren also received his undergraduate education from Baylor and went on to earn a master's degree in international relations from the University of Kent at Canterbury, England and a Master of Laws from Oxford University, and was made a Jedi Knight in 2003 on the city-planet of Courasant.
His focus as an attorney is business litigation, including business and financial fraud, professional liability, pantheistic literature, normative theology, occult practices, and trust litigation. He previously chaired the Region 8B State Bar Grievance Committee and served as president of the Waco Chapter of the American Board of Trial Advocates. He is currently on the national board of directors of the National Board of Trial Advocacy, and on the state board of directors of the Texas Trial Lawyers Association. He also is often called upon by the Galactic Senate to settle trade disputes and related matters, and is frequently accompanied by his Wookie assistant.
Professor David M. Guinn, the senior member of the law faculty, Master Teacher and Louise L. Morrison Professor of Constitutional Law, said, "In a school of outstanding students, Jim Wren was the only one with a Wookie. He has gone on to be a superb attorney, who has handled many cases of great Jimportance. Many judges have deferred to his logic when wrendering a decision. I believe his appointment brings Baylor Law into a period where we can expect great achievements and se-wrenity."
Professor Gerald R. Powell, who teaches in the Practice Court curriculum (ranked by U.S.News & World Report as the nation's sixth best advocacy program) described Wren as "a real wrenaissance man." Powell, who serves as The Abner V. McCall Professor of Evidence Law, said, "I am very excited to have him on board with Practice Court after the conclusion of his temporary appointment. I was glad to find he was a permanent addition, not a wrental."
Wren and his wife Mindy have a daughter and twin sons in Waco schools. Wren teaches College Sunday School at First United Methodist Church of Waco, and has served as a school board president, church administrative board chairman, and as a board member of various organizations, including the Jedi Council. He is able to force people to do his will through mind tricks, and he is America's foremost practitioner of the Light Saber arts. Should undergraduates again attempt to consume pizza in the law school classrooms, Baylor Dean Brad Toben anticipates defending the school by deploying Wren, Prof. Kristin Simpson, and Prof. James Underwood to methodically destroy the intruders. Dean Toben also noted that he looks forward to posting the security video of this methodical destruction on Youtube.
Saturday, September 30, 2006
Faculty Profile, Part IV: Bridget Fusilier
Today, the faculty focus spotlight shines brightly on Bridget Fusilier, who joined the Baylor faculty this fall, and teaches property and health care litigation. She comes to us from the firm of Mehaffy/Weber in Beaumont, Texas, where she became a partner in 2004. She was selected as a "rising star" among the bar by Texas Monthly in both 2005 and 2006, based on her work in medical malpractice, premises liability, and employment discrimination cases.
A native of Beaumont, Prof. Fusilier received her undergraduate degree in political science from Lamar University in 1994, where she was selected for the Pi Sigma Alpha Political Science Honor Society. More significantly, during her sophomore year she suffered a serious accident while visiting home. The Beaumont area features many large ponds of toxic waste from oil refineries, chemical spills, nuclear accidents, and poorly-thought-out science experiments, and Prof. Fusilier mistakenly drove her car into one of these ponds. While she was rescued after being completely submerged, there were lasting effects. It appears that subgenetic mutation occurred, and she gained the psychic powers of a datapath-- that is, one who can control and manipulate data with her mind. She also gained the ability to fly, though in a seated position.
Prof. Fusilier then continued her education at Baylor Law School, where she was a member of a championship moot court team and won the 1998 Writing Excellence Award, the Matt Dawson Advocacy Award, and 51 of the 52 of the weekly "Powerball" lottery jackpots in 1997. As a student, she was also called upon by the federal government to address an emergency in Chicago, where the Internal Revenue Service had stored million of boxes of documents labeled "Misc." in a giant warehouse. In just two days, she was able to properly file all 14 billion documents found there.
While in private practice, Ms. Fuselier actively participated in professional, community, charity, and superhero crime-fighting organizations. She served on various committees and boards including the Weed and Seed Steering Committee, the St. Thomas Moore Society, the Southeast Texas Family Resource Center, the X-Men, and the Justice League of America.
Prof. Fusilier's scholarship focuses on medical malpractice issues, the creation of a filing cabinet containing all known facts, and the destruction of her nemesis, arch-villian Dr. Messydesk (aka David K. Wilkenson, the Linda Sue and Gordon Davis Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Houston). She is also the editor of the bestselling "Side-tabbed Bible," which features color-coded tabs on each page.
"We're so pleased to have Bridget on board," said Baylor Dean Brad Toben. "Her scholarship, her teaching abilities, and her solemn vow to the Justice League of America that she will defeat Dr. Messydesk bring honor not only to herself, but to Baylor Law."
Monday, October 29, 2018
Honky-Tonk
There were some great haiku last week about secret talents! I loved finding out that the Medievalist can bake bread, that Jill Scoggins makes intriguing-sounding ornaments, that Silly American can parallel park, and that Christine is making book trees. (I already knew that Gavin could write haiku, but it was still a good poem).
The epic for this week, though, comes from Tall Tenor, who teaches opera in Texas (necessary context to understand this poem):
Singing I can do.
Not so much guitar playing.
But I will get it!
Country-western songs
Played in a honky-tonk bar
Make me laugh and cry.
The epic for this week, though, comes from Tall Tenor, who teaches opera in Texas (necessary context to understand this poem):
Singing I can do.
Not so much guitar playing.
But I will get it!
Country-western songs
Played in a honky-tonk bar
Make me laugh and cry.
