Misleaders claim that your cherished American liberty is about your freedom to do what you want where you want when you want without, as they love to say, government interference. Freedom from interference, freedom to buy stuff. This superficial promise of freedom from interference has always been dangled before “the mass of men, leading lives of quiet desperation” (Thoreau) to distract them from their inner crisis and their social crisis.
“There was once, in a far-away country where few people have ever traveled, a wonderful church. It stood on a high hill in the midst of a great city; and every Sunday, as well as on sacred days like Christmas, thousands of people climbed the hill to its great archways . . . ” — a story written by Raymond MacDonald Alden
It is still night now, which bears some advantage, for you can see some things better in the dark: stars, for example, and prayers. What is the dark? Shall we say? Shall we pray?
With the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick, the founding minister of The Riverside Church, I hold– as I imagine, many of you do–that the teaching that Jesus was literally born of a virgin is not an essential of Christian faith. Faith can thrive in the presence of the hunch that “virgin Mary mother mild” is a myth.
If we pull the camera lens way back on the Bible stories, so that all of them fit in one big picture, the way all of Planet Earth finally fit in the lens of a moonwalker’s camera many decades ago; if we pull so far back that the particular stories seem like Italies and Indias did to the spacemen, yet so clearly part of something bigger, what is that bigger thing, bigger than any single story, bigger even than all of them together, yet present and full in every single one of them?
Since Derrick Bell’s death, I have been steeping myself in his sober stories that explore how the “racial bonding of whites means that black rights and interests are always vulnerable to diminishment if not . . . destruction.”
Every year in America, thousands of churches fail because they had nothing to say to the children—the grown children, that is, like Abram and his wife Sarai when Papa Terah made Haran home. Consider. When we won’t cross the rivers always known to us for lands never yet shown to us, money is always the matter.
Almost 180 years ago, the French citizen Alexis de Tocqueville traveled the new America and later described the character of our people in essays which still startle us Americans with features so recognizable. He saw, for example, our vaunted individualism. He defined it as “a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends . . .”
When something breaks, we see what at once, or search for it. But when something works, like the stairs of a stone path or the good will of a teen, who can say where the working is? Anything that works comprises an infinite quantity of good links, from the big stuff we’ve just described right down to the mysteriously bonding molecules and atoms . . .
The blunt fact is that scriptures Old and New pronounce a fulsome God damn not on foreign nations but on the prophets’ own land. Stiff-necked Bible-thumpers prefer Micah mounted in museum glass to the real thing. But if we do not take scissors to our scriptures, then those blunt words of Rev. Jeremiah Wright exactly match the purpose of the prophets: to that land which perverts equity through greed and force the word is, God damn!
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