Holy Redeemer Lutheran Church
1948 The Alameda
San Jose, CA 95126
San Jose, CA 95126
The trip to North Carolina was enjoyable, and invigorating. It was a National Farm Worker Ministry meeting. One always enjoys a few days with a group of people who are of a like mind when it comes to justice issues. One is always invigorated by talking with organizers and workers about what is taking place.
One of the places we visited was a tobacco field. It was a non-descript field, nothing special. Row after row of tobacco growing in the sun, a light breeze (the kind that is never present when workers are picking), and off in the distance a picturesque "drying barn." We talked of how the tobacco was harvested, the stoop labor involved, the carpel tunnel syndrome one can get from the constant motion of snapping off the stalks, how hot it gets in the sun when one is in the middle of a row - and we had a ceremony to honor the workers from that field, and the workers going back generations who had been underpaid, or slaves, as they harvested for the owner.
What I found particularly interesting was the huge, red-brick, white steepled, Baptist church that was right across the road from the field. I wondered what it would be like to sit in that church and worship God and then walk out to be confronted by such misery and poverty. How does one worship, and then leave the justice behind as they go out into the world? I wondered how one conducted themselves as a pastor in such a situation.
I thought, "How sad to have a faith that is so shallow. How sad it is to pastor in a place that doesn't cry out for justice and that doesn't alleviate the injustice that is right on their front steps."
And, then I stopped. Who was I to waltz into town and make such a charge? I didn't know what they were doing and not doing. What I did know was what was happening, and not happening, outside of our own front door. The prostitutes still sit on the bus bench and engage customers. The homeless still sneak onto the dark parts of our property in the hope of finding a safe place in which to spend the night. More and more people are lining up to get groceries, and to participate in the spaghetti dinner. People still pan-handle within a half a block of where we worship, and many of us pay little attention to them. I thought again: "How sad it is to pastor in a place that doesn't cry out for justice and that doesn't alleviate the injustice that is right on their front steps."
And, I knew as I came home that no matter how much we were doing we must do better - here, on this corner upon which God has placed us.
I have been reading (re-reading, after a great deal of time) Walden, by Henry David Thoreau. In his section on The Village, he writes the following:
One afternoon*, near the end of the first summer, when I went to the village to get a shoe from the cobbler's, I was seized and put into jail, because, as I have elsewhere related, I did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the state which buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle at the door of its senate house. I had gone down to the woods for other purposes. But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run "amok" against society; but I preferred that society should run "amok" against me, it being the desperate party. However, I was released the next day, obtained my mended shoe, and returned to the woods in season to get my dinner of huckleberries on Fair-Haven Hill. I was never molested by any person but those who represented the state. I had no lock nor bolt but for the desk which held my papers, not even a nail to put over by latch or windows. I never fastened my door night or day, though I was to be absent several days; not even when the next fall I spent a fortnight in the woods of Maine. And yet my house was more respected than if it had been surrounded by a file of soldiers. The tired rambler could rest and warm himself by my fire, the literary amuse himself with the few books on my table, or the curious, by opening my closet door, see what was left of my dinner, and what prospect I had of a supper. Yet, though many people of every class came this way to the pond, I suffered no serious inconvenience from these sources, and I never missed any thing but one small book, a volume of Homer, which perhaps was improperly gilded, and this I trust a soldier of our camp has found bys this time. I am convinced, that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is suffcient while others have not enough.
The active life takes many forms, [among them] work, creativity, and caring …. Work is action driven by external necessity or demand. We work because we need to make a living, because we need to solve a problem, because we need to surmount or survive. I do not mean that we are mere robots when we work, totally determined by factors outside ourselves; we may choose whether to work, when to work, how to work. But work, as I use the word here, always involves the element of necessity, and that element leads to the characteristic dilemmas of this form of the active life.
Creativity, in contrast, is driven more by inner choice than by outer demand. An act cannot be creative if it is not born of freedom. In creative action, our desire is not to "solve" or "succeed" or "survive" but to give e birth to something new; we want, for a while, to be less creaturely and more like the creator. If work reveals something of our bondage to the world, creativity reveals something of how we transcend it - and that fact gives rise to the dilemmas of creativity.
Caring is also action freely chosen. But in caring we aim not at giving birth to something new; we aim at nurturing, protecting, guiding, healing, or empowering something that already has life. The energy behind caring is compassion for others which, in turn, is energized by the knowledge that we are all in this together, that the fate of other human beings has implications for our own fate. Caring may take a personal form, for instance, when we comfort a grieving friend, But it can also take form through movements for political and economic justice, in speaking on behalf of strangers whose oppression diminishes us all.
Ever since I was a boy in Northern Minnesota I have read Native American legends. Some of them are very similar to scripture, some are vastly different. They seek to answer questions, as do our stories. Recently I have decided that I would like to share some of my favorites with you (or at least some that I have read recently that I find to be interesting). This time:
Look up into tu-omp-pi-av, the sky, and there stand poot-see, the stars, when they are not hiding behind the clouds. Poot-see sleep all day, but when the darkness begins to come you may see them waking up. The biggest and brightest stars are the gods of the night and many of the smaller ones are their families.
Tobats, the greatest god, is not there. Shinob, the next great god, is not there. Tobats and Shinob are greater than poot-see, the stars. They made poot-see.
Look up and find a family of seven with no great one - no father - among them. They are pe-ats, the mother, to-at-sen, the son, and manigee patsun, five daughters. Once they were Indians and lived on the earth. Tu-re-ris, the father, was with them and all were very happy. One day the father said, "I am very old. I am very tired. I want to rest. I will die. Make skump, the brush, in a big pile and when I am dead put my body on top of it. Put fire in the brush and run a long way off, keep-a-going, keep-a-going, keep-a-going. No one must look back."
Tu-re-ris, the father, died and his family did as he had directed. Very high they piled skump and when the father was lifted up and the fire kindled they ran away to the north. Soon they could hear the great fire crackle and roar. Ping-wan, the wife, listened to the big blaze and shuddered. She did not look back. Patsun, the daughters, heard the noise and made e-awk-I, the Indian distress cry. They did not look back. A great red light from the fire shown all around them and they were much afraid. To-at-sen, the son, was brave. He said, "I will look. I will see."
To-at-sen turned about and faced the big light. Tu-re-ris, the father, was not dead. He had come alive and was rolling off the brush pile. He saw To-at-sen look back and was very angry.
To-at-sen said to the mother. "Tu-re-ris is not dead. He is coming. He is mad. We must run. We must hide. Tu-re-ris is coming to kill us."
They ran all around in the brush to find a place to hid, but there was none. Then To-at-sen said, "He will follow us. He can smell our tracks. He will track us to where we hide. He will come here and kill us. Let us go up into the sky. We will leave no tracks."
Tu-re-ris looked all around but could not see his family because the brush was too high. He put his nose on their tracks and followed along, followed along, followed along. Soon he came to the end. There were no tracks. Aloud he said, "Where did they go? They must leave tracks. They have made a big jump. I will make a big circle. I will find the tracks again. I will find To-at-sen."
Tu-re-ris, the father, made the big circle but picked up no tracks. Then he hunted around through the brush. Again he made a very big circle but found no tracks. Tired out, he sat down to think.
All this time To-at-sen and his mother and sisters were in the sky above Tu-re-ris. To-at-sen called out loud and laughed at his angry father. Tu-re-ris looked up and saw them and in great anger called for them to come down, for he was too old to jump up to them. They laughed at him and mocked him, which made Tu-re-ris very angry. He said, "Come down or I will shoot you out of the sky," and so saying, he put a great arrow on his bow and shot it at them.
Now when To-at-sen got up in the sky he became like a god of the night. Seeing the arrow flying toward them, he turned it into three small stars. You may see the arrow yet in the sky, three small stars in a straight line pointing at To-at-sen.
Tu-re-ris saw that he could not kill them, but as the head of his family he, too, had great power. He said to them, "All right, if you will not come down I will make you like poot-see, the stars, and you must remain there forever. You can never come down."
To-at-sen answered back, "If we come down you will kill us. If you make us into stars so we can never come down, we will make you into tear-a-sin-ob, the wild coyote, and you can never come up. You will run around in the brush all night, and when the morning daylight begins to come and we fade out of sight, you will be very lonesome. You will be very sad. You will look up at us and cry and yelp and howl."
It was even so. Despite his anger, Tu-re-ris loved his family and mourns for them. When you are awakened at the first streak of dawn by the soul-piercing cry of the coyote, you will remember that it is the soul of Tu-re-ris crying for his lost loved ones.
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Stanley Njootli, Jr. is a young man at the crossroads: he's charming and amiable and has a talent for art, but he also a taste for drugs and alcohol and idling his time away in bars. In his early 20's, Stanley Jr. has already experienced homelessness, and even his drinking buddies tell him its time to go into rehab.
Stanley's father, Stanley Njootli, Sr. has a different idea: Stanley Jr. should leave the temptations of the urban world behind and come to live with Stanley Sr. in Old Crow, a small village 80 miles north of the Arctic Circle. There's no road access to Old Crow, and also no bars, restaurants, or movie theaters: satisfaction comes from work, family and friends, with radio broadcasts and community dances for additional entertainment.
Besides the absence of urban temptations, Stanley Sr. believes that if Stanley can reconnect with the traditional lifestyle of his ancestors (the First Nations Gwich'in tribe), he'll find his identity and sense of purpose. And it will give the two a chance to reconnect as well: Stanley Sr. abandoned his wife and children almost 25 years previously, in part because he did not deal well with the temptations of the "south" (the contiguous 48 states), so father and son are virtual strangers.
The experiment does not begin promisingly: his first night in Old Crow (by law a dry town) Stanley Jr. goes out to party, finds a source of homebrewed alcohol, and comes home drunk. He's not at home in his new environment, and his initial attempts at traditional skills, from managing a dog team to ice fishing with a net, do not go well.
But Stanley Sr. is patient and consistent, and gradually Stanley Jr. comes to appreciate a lifestyle which is very different from anything he's known, and to take pride in his new skills. The relationship between father and son clearly grows stronger as well, although neither is given to displays of emotion or long discourses about their feelings. Stanley Sr. does articulate his beliefs on the value of the traditional lifestyle while Stanley Jr. communicates by his manner that he's starting to agree.
But the stay in Old Crow wasn't meant to be permanent, and Stanley Jr. returns to Washington State. He gets a meal at Burger King, heads to the mall and goes out drinking with friends, but concludes that it's not as much fun as it used to be. Although Stanley Jr's future is uncertain, he chooses to return to Old Crow at the end of the film, and his time there has clearly made him a more reflective and responsible young man.
Calm is the prevailing mood in Arctic Son, as if director Andrew Walton wanted to reflect the experience of the Gwich'in lifestyle in his film. Excellent cinematography by Jonathan Furmanski and Jeff Stonehouse reveals the northern landscape as spare and harshly beautiful, and Walton allows the story to unfold at a natural pace. He shows the two men slowly journeying toward an understanding which is implied more than stated, and presents it without interpolations by talking heads or voiceovers: what you see are the two Stanleys going about their daily lives and occasionally commenting on them in matter-of-fact terms.
The elephant in the living room is global warming, which is barely mentioned in Arctic Son. At one point Stanley Sr. notes that the temperature in Old Crow has begun to reach 80 degrees in the summer time. That's no idle comment, because it can bring about a change in the ecosystem which could destroy the subsistence hunting and fishing culture which is the basis of the Gwich'in traditional lifestyle. It is further threatened by the proximity of Old Crow to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska: the continuing debate about drilling for oil in the Refuge is not just an academic discussion for the Gwich'in since it would threaten the caribou herds which form an important part of their livelihood.
Jesus was a Liberal defines a new approach to faith for the millions of progressive Christians. In this bold call to reclaim ownership of their religion, Rev. Scotty McLennan advocates a Christianity based on the humanity behind Christ's teachings. He champions beliefs that embrace progress, acknowledges that "doubt is the handmaiden of faith," and reveals the religion's compassion and understanding too often ignored by its most dogmatic believers. In building a new platform on which Christians can stand, he convincingly answers such questions as:
McLennan explains that, in fact, Jesus was a liberal. He championed rationality, tolerance, and freedom from religious authority.
Today, the press too often characterizes the national debate about religion as a fight between the religious right and the secular left. In the middle - forgotten, maligned - are millions of liberal Christians. Not only does this book seek to give them a voice, but more importantly, it builds solid bridges to all sides of the cultural divide.
"A wonderfully readable and very timely book. It makes Jesus available again, as he has not been at many times in history, to a much wider spectrum of people, and not just 'liberals.' Will be appreciated by those who want to 'conserve' what he stood for, taught and died for."
Harvey Cox
author of When Jesus came to Harvard
and The Future of Faith