This week we will be sharing our own reflections on how the events over the last week have affected us and our acknowledgment of our need to confess and learn together. I am thankful for the writers’ willingness to be vulnerable and share their thoughts. We are not experts when it comes to talking about race and anti-racism, we are learners on this journey with you. I hope that you read our articles with grace and see them as an invitation to a conversation with me or any of us.
Pastor Joanna Mitchell
Please pray with me: Holy Spirit, you stir up the winds of change around us and lift up the voices of all people. We hear the cries of your people today, especially people of color who cry out about injustice. Help us to listen with curious ears and give us curious hearts so that we might learn and be transformed together. We pray this in the name of your Holy Spirit, who is guiding us forward. Amen
We begin with a picture from a collection of photos sent last weekend by John Anderson. They were taken during a six mile walk he made with his brother-in-law who has lived for more than 35 years four blocks from 38th and Chicago in south Minneapolis. This one struck me particularly. The yellow sign is partially obscured but reads: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice you have chosen the story of the oppressor.” The smaller white one near the bottom right says: “Kind words bring LIFE but cruel words crush your spirit!!!”
There is a word that has been used frequently since the tragedy of the Memorial Day death of George Floyd. The word is used to describe the current state of race relations in our community and across the country. Experts of one stripe or another call this the outcome of a systemic problem.
When I hear that label it is too easy for me to think O.K., so that lets me off the hook. It is not a problem of my prejudices in thought, word and deed. This is a systemic problem. I am right back to Flip Wilson’s Geraldine character who popularized “The devil made me do it.” Many of you are old enough to remember that one.
The “system” and its related problems have been around a lot longer than the past couple of weeks. For instance I grew up in eastern Nebraska slightly more than three-quarters of a century ago. My hometown was about 40 miles from the Winnebago Indian reservation and a frequently heard phrase was, “The only good Indian is an expired one.” (That’s cleaned up a bit but you get the picture.)
When I became of driving age, I was cautioned about driving above the speed limit as I went through the town of Winnebago (not that I would exceed the speed limit, of course). I was told that if I were stopped there, a certain form of bodily harm would befall me. Those insights into native American life were a part of the system which I eventually came to reject.
Last Sunday was Trinity Sunday. It happened to fall this year on June 7, the date the liturgical calendar also earmarks for Chief Seattle, the Suquamish and Duwamish chief who died on that date in 1866. Likely this observance will be lost in the observance of the Holy Trinity. So, sometime soon use your devotions to read through his speech to Governor Stevens in 1854 in response to the federal government’s offer to buy Native American land in exchange for care and protection presumably in perpetuity
In that speech he says regarding the environment and respect for the land: “Every part of this country is sacred to my people. Every hill, every valley, every plain and every grove was inaugurated by a happy memory or a sad experience of my tribe.” We have certainly seen in the century and a half or so since how well that deal worked out for Native Americans as well as the land itself. But that was then and I wasn’t there. It is the system that broke down. There is much more of value in that speech— especially his challenge of whether God is a God only of the white person.
Moving on, I have walked through the streets of Auschwitz and Dachau. I have toured the pots and pans factory of Oscar Schindler in Krakow, Poland, in which he saved nearly 2,000 Jewish folks with forged documents during World War II. These, too, are evidence of a broken system from which, perhaps, it is a little harder for us Lutherans to distance ourselves.
Martin Luther is often cited for his words in On the Jews and Their Lies as part of the rationale for the National Socialist Party (Nazi) and its persecution of the Jewish population. In that volume he wrote: “First, set fire to their synagogues or schools … This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians …” and also, “… I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed.” Some argue that Luther was not well when he wrote these things. I’m not sure that gets him or us off the hook.
In my addition to the special Grace At A Glance last week, I quoted Presbyterian Pastor Fred Rogers, better known for his TV program, Mister Rogers Neighborhood.
There he once said: When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’” This advice was meant for children; it was intended as part of a holistic approach to managing a small child’s worry during a crisis.
However in our argument of individual responsibility versus systematic crisis I fear that looking for the helpers is insufficient, at least for adults. Instead, we are supposed to strive to “be a helper.” That moves us out of using a systemic label into the realm of individual responsibility.
In the end, when I look at what’s happening to the system, I wonder if another old friend, who I miss greatly, didn’t have it right. Walt Kelly’s Pogo once said “We have met the enemy and he is us.” It was spoken in the 1960s and referred to the turmoil caused by the Vietnam War but can be helpful, I think, in assessing individual versus systemic responsibility in any era.
My brother-in-law was one of the 2.7 million women and men who served in that war and came home not to ticker tape parades, as did those in World War II, but cries of “Baby Killer!” and being spat upon. But I didn’t do those things, it was part of a breaking system and so I can absolve myself.
Jesus never met Pogo and I have no idea how familiar Pogo or Walt Kelly might have been with the scriptures but both Matthew and Mark’s Jesus seem to settle the issue of systematic versus individual responsibility, from Matthew 22:34-39 (also found in slightly different forms in Deuteronomy 6:1-19 and Mark 12:28-34): “And when the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they themselves gathered together. 35One of them, an expert in the law, tested Him with a question: “6 ‘Teacher, which commandment is the greatest in the Law?’ 37Jesus declared, ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38This is the first and greatest commandment. 39And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.’”
I think that just might be the defining word.
