Category Archives: Citizenship

The Nightmare of Talking Money

04 Saturday Feb 2017

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The nightmare began when the court declared that “money is speech.” It was a variation of the old saying that “money talks.” The door opened for many wealthy people to set up and use pseudo tax-exempt non-profit organizations to take part in partisan campaigns. Then that idea spread into the churches. Individuals who wanted to endorse candidates for office funneled money through tax-exempt churches for partisan support, expanding the cash available that was unreportable and unaccountable to public interests. This was all in the name of the First Amendment.

A candidate appeared who had his own wealth, who could go where he wanted, stay where he wanted, and say what he wanted. He lied often, long, and loudly, and captured an extraordinary share of media attention with his outrageous antics, and he didn’t need to raise funds from anyone else in the ordinary course of campaigning. Wealthy people could go elsewhere and spend even more to prop up candidates who would do their bidding and who would be accountable to them personally. The singular wealthy candidate was just another form of “money speaking,” since he could not only use his own resources, but he could use his unusual platform to increase his own resources without needing to answer to anyone else, reveal his conflicts of interest, or follow the customary ethics of transparency and disclosure. His party shielded him from investigation and exposure of foreign entanglements in the hope that they could carry out their own platforms of experimental political change and revolution while he was in charge.

The candidate pretended to be the voice of common men overlooked and ignored by the rapid transformations of global economies. Wealth sought the cheapest labor and the highest rates of return without regard to the public interest where goods were manufactured or where they were sold. His decisions, once he was elected, simply cleared the way for more aggressive domination of the multitudes by moneyed interests. Money continued to talk with a louder voice. Soon it was understood that speech was not free in any form, not in the press, not in electronic media, not in the Internet, who were all controlled by a small concentration of special interests. The old principles of the First Amendment were hollow. Personal freedoms were identified with the freedom to force others to obey the conscience of the person who chooses to discriminate, instead of the freedoms of the person who is the target of discrimination. People with money had the freedom to oppress people without money.

The only Constitutional Amendment that would could not be abrogated in any form was the Second Amendment, and the more weapons and the more powerful weapons that one possessed, the more political power a person had. The resulting condition of a heavily armed population was neither “well-regulated” nor controlled by any police or military force serving the common interest. Private military units and paid bodyguards became the norm for those who could afford them. The random, careless, and accidental use of arms to injure and kill accelerated to become the leading cause of death among all people. People had developed the habit of scapegoating strangers and different ethnic groups; finally they turned on each other, neighbor against neighbor.

Society descended into chaos. The social contract was broken. What began as the security of wealth became the reinstatement of the “law of the jungle,” and life returned to being the “nasty, mean, poor, brutish, and short” life (as Thomas Hobbes had described it) of the “good old days.”

These were thoughts of the middle of the night when the mind entertains what darkness hides. The dream does not have to end this way. The creative mind can move the ending in another direction entirely as the day dawns.

Threatened with Expulsion

31 Tuesday Jan 2017

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Appointed by the Illinois Wesleyan Student Senate in my senior year to chair the Religious Activities Commission, I presided over the committee that organized the weekly chapel series, two annual lectureships by theologians or religious leaders, two symposia on current events related to the world of religion, and coordinated several volunteer groups, including the Student Christian Movement and the Community Tutoring Program. It was my third year serving on the commission in those latter capacities, and it was turning out to be a challenging year.

 

We determined that the Fall 1967 symposium would address the issues raised by the Vietnam War, and it was customary when dealing with controversial issues to have different sides well-represented. An expert in the history of Indochina agreed to come to provide background. Several of the IWU faculty agreed to serve on discussion panels. To present the case for the continuing conduct of the war we found a U.S. Defense Department analyst, Craig Spence. The cost of bringing these experts to campus had eaten most of our available budget. I asked for more funds.

 

I began to promote the plans for the symposium, using an art student volunteer for poster design, and, among other efforts, publishing the key documents that represented the sides of the conflict, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, various statements by North and South Vietnamese leaders and assemblies, and considerations of Just War theory and applications by ethicists. These documents were left in several areas of the campus for students who were interested.

 

Four weeks until the symposium, when we still had not secured a bona fide critic of the war, the Dean of Students summoned me to her office. She informed me that I should not secure someone to present a criticism of the war, I should stop distributing propaganda representing our enemy’s viewpoints, and, if I continued to undermine the reputation of the university that she had worked so hard to maintain, I would be expelled. Anything else that she said during the minutes that followed fell on deaf ears as I prepared my case. I was not alone in planning this program; other students and faculty were just as committed to it as I was. If the university was doing its job, it would consider different positions as objectively as possible. If she thought she could threaten me into submission on this, she was mistaken.

 

The next day I learned that no additional funds would be available. I called Staughton Lynd, a well-known academic and activist, who had written and spoken extensively about the war, and explained the situation to him. We could provide a modest honorarium, and I would drive to Chicago to bring him to campus and return him to his home after the presentations and discussions. He agreed to come.

 

I confided in the college chaplain and two other faculty members about the threats from the Dean of Students, and received reassurances from them, but I didn’t see any value in alarming the other students who were involved in planning the conference until and unless they experienced the same threats.

 

The symposium occurred with high participation, full reporting by the Bloomington Pantagraph as well as the Wesleyan Argus, and Staughton Lynd made a thorough presentation to a packed ballroom at the Memorial Student Center. Craig Spence said that the war would probably last another thirty years, if we intended to win it, and an important benefit could be the destruction of China’s nuclear arsenal. If it was evaluated as a debate no one won the symposium, but as a fair representation of views it accomplished its purpose. I mostly remember the extraordinary five hours on the road between Chicago and Bloomington, learning from Staughton Lynd, who shared his experiences with the human rights crisis in the United States as well as opposition to the war in Vietnam.

 

I didn’t hear any more from the Dean of Students, but a few weeks after the symposium, the Dean of Men called me into his office, and he warned me about the dangers of the passive aggressive anger that I had displayed in the fall. He didn’t know that I had that in me.

 

Plunging Into Detroit, 1966

30 Monday Jan 2017

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In the late 1960’s the “urban plunge” was an experience recommended to those who had not lived in an urban area or who had lived in a privileged area and had no direct experience of how the “other half” lived. The Methodist Student Movement was sponsoring a conference in Detroit in the summer of 1966. I was president of the MSM chapter at Illinois Wesleyan University, a farm kid, and I decided to go to the conference and, unknown to my parents (I was 19 after all.), expand that experience with an urban plunge.

Central Methodist Church, located on Grand Circus Park, hosted the conference, and several local leaders—professors at Wayne State University, political leaders, corporate leaders, and the president of the United Auto Workers, Walter Reuther—spoke to us, addressing the urban issues of the day. Reuther was particularly impressive, laying out the challenges to the auto industry, fully integrating the workforce, and expanding the base of unions internationally; he predicted the eventual decline of domestic industry, the unions, and the urban centers in the face of global competition, since people were not preparing for it.

Outside of the conference some of us wandered around and lived on the streets of Detroit. Much of the housing in many neighborhoods sat empty and decrepit. The immense Ford Rouge Plant stood empty. Segregated housing was the rule, and public services for the older neighborhoods were often scarce. I always walked around with one or two other friends from the conference, and we slept on park benches or in abandoned houses, and went to soup kitchens and day labor hiring centers. I never had more than a few dollars on me and dressed like I didn’t have much, which, of course, I didn’t. It was one of the richest experiences of my life, meeting people on the street—the veterans who had lost their way, the guy with an armful of watches that he would sell me, the children who begged during the day and turned their money over to an adult at the end of the evening, alcoholics, drug addicts, musicians and street artists, philosophers, people of all kinds. Throughout the weeks there I perceived no threat, other than the rodents and dirt of the streets. People were friendly, curious about us (We were college students here for a few weeks of the summer just to learn what we could.), willing to talk about their own lives, frustrations, and hopes. I discovered that all of these people were a lot like me under the skin. I could learn from them, but I had little to teach. That was the summer before the Detroit riots of 1967, and I wondered how poor people managed to live in the city, knowing they had no other home to go to.

One day a female friend and I got cleaned up and dressed up and went to a new high-rise apartment building in the urban renewal area just north of the downtown. We pretended we were a newly married couple looking for an apartment. The apartments were plain, small, and uninviting, and we finally had to admit to the nice woman who showed us around that $1000 a month was above our means. I couldn’t see how or why anyone would afford such a rental. Obviously most of the people we were meeting could not. We ate that evening at a Greek restaurant, spending some of my money hard-earned from loading and unloading trucks for a couple of days. We sat and watched as people came and went, finding or leaving something hidden behind the refrigerator that sat just outside the kitchen, but not staying to eat a meal.

I searched for the church that Rev. Reinhold Niebuhr had served for 13 years that had ended forty years before—Bethel Evangelical Church, two miles west of the downtown on Grand Avenue. What would be left of the German working community he served? It had become an African-American working community, and the building continued to serve, renamed Mayflower Missionary Baptist Church. I didn’t imagine at the time that I would eventually serve old German Evangelical Churches that looked a lot like it.

It is still hard to say exactly how those days in Detroit changed me, but they did. I was humbler, needing much less, but also less confident in my own ability to find any kind of success on my own. Anything worth doing had to be done together.

Responding to the Kerner Commission Report

27 Friday Jan 2017

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hot-owl-southern-white-faced-owl-in-botswana-trying-to-keep-coolAgain in the last semester of my senior year, the Illinois Wesleyan Political Science Department gave two other students and me another opportunity to represent the school at a special gathering, the annual Public Affairs Conference at Principia College. (By that time I was also taking the first political science course of my college career.) The conference theme was “Combatting Racism.”

 

The agenda of the conference included a variety of experts. The immediate background of the theme was the February 29,1968, release of the Kerner Commission Report, formally called the President’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, which branded racism as the primary cause of the surge of riots that had recently swept several major American cities. It was the conference objective to consider and design programs and laws that would reverse the separation of America into two racial cultures that were separate and unequal. It was an ambitious undertaking, especially considering that minority groups were barely represented among the participants.

 

With the division into working groups, I found that my group had one young eloquent black man. He dispensed with the group assignment with the observation that we could imagine many fine ideas for state and federal action that would go nowhere. Instead, we could design goals for ourselves working in the families and communities in which we lived, and these might have some chance of accomplishing something if we were courageous enough to follow through. I was hooked, and so were the other members of the group. Around the circle we considered the actions and processes that would disturb the racism that prevailed where we lived. It was not comfortable, but it was real.

 

I had grown up in a northern community that was thoroughly segregated, even though it was only a few miles from Chanute Air Force Base. Air Force families of many racial backgrounds lived off-base, but only white families lived in Paxton, where people still boasted a “sunset law” that threatened any darker-skinned person who might be caught there after sunset. I had spoken about racial justice in the few sermons I was invited to preach in my home church, but I had not approached the members of the Paxton City Council that I knew, who had it in their power to renounce the “sunset” idea and prepare the town to be open to all.

 

Black friends lived in neighboring towns, but they would not risk coming to Paxton, even to take part in such common activities as bowling, seeing a movie, swimming, or roller-skating. I was welcome in their homes to eat meals and enjoy their company, and they were welcome in my home, which was miles from town in the countryside. The town’s segregating attitude had to change. That would change, I was confident, as the months went by.

 

We resolved to implement the plans we made.  The other groups reported ambitious government programs that would take large scale political action. Our group’s report seemed pale and meager in comparison. In hindsight, few of the ambitious goals that were formulated there, or in the Kerner Report, came to be embodied in actions in the decades that followed.

 

I returned to my home town and approached the public officials that I knew. To a one, they thought it was “too soon” or “too radical” to do what I was suggesting. Furthermore, the time for me to do the organizing that was needed even to accomplish such a modest goal was short, as I was preparing to marry and begin my graduate education in Chicago. There, in Chicago, I would learn what life in an integrated community was like, and how deprived my own background had been.

 

Fifty years later, returning to Paxton, finding a mix of people in the school system, working in the businesses, and living in the town, I wonder why it took us so long, and why we still have so far to go. There is still a lot of room for both large-scale and meager goals and the courage to embody them.

 

Celebrating Pierre Trudeau’s Election

14 Saturday Jan 2017

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When Pierre Trudeau was elected Prime Minister of Canada in the winter of 1968, Rick Kelsey and I were at Ann Arbor, Michigan, at a Canadian-American Conference, representing the Illinois Wesleyan political science department. I had never taken a poli-sci course at IWU, but Rick was the star student, my friend, and he persuaded Dr. Brown to take me along. Trudeau’s election electrified the conference. The status of Quebec and the possibility of its independence was one of the issues tackled by the conference, against the background of increasing division over the war in Vietnam in the USA. Trudeau was a French Canadian and an intellectual, committed to a united Canada as fully as he was to a multilingual nation. Quebec’s separatists were seeking a vote and sure to get one. Trudeau would seek to bridge the gap and keep Canada whole (which he did when four years later the vote for separation was defeated).

Canadian and US academics, students, and politicians joined in presentations and debates about the future, made murky by the hostility and polarization disturbing each of the neighbor countries. We might not be able to help each other find solutions, but at least we could commiserate and share our concerns.

A philosophical voice belonged to the leading American politician present there, Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine.  He was both realistic about the severity of the problems and optimistic about the likelihood of resolving them, uniting Canada with the new leadership provided by Trudeau, and finding a way out of quagmire war in Vietnam, with the growing awareness that US efforts could not accomplish what the Vietnamese people themselves did not support.  During that year he would become the Democratic Party vice-presidential candidate, and, as doubtful as I was about Humphrey, I felt hopeful about the man Muskie I met in a small group that evening. The Labatt ale tasted good, too.

The confidence in Trudeau was well-placed, as his leadership became an inspiration to many people around the world, providing major improvements in Canada’s welfare and economy. The political divisions continued in both countries, but persistence did resolve the issues that seemed intractable for the next generation at least.

I learned that a young man of my age, with my same name, would soon be residing in Toronto, seeking Canadian citizenship and avoiding the draft. I was in no danger from the draft, but his actions would place my name on a suspicious list for a few years. Other US citizens would trade their citizenship for the that status in Canada, and somewhat more rarely some would come south.

Fifty years can give some perspective, and make us pause and ponder. Justin Trudeau now serves in his father’s office, and Canadian separatism appears quiet for the time being. Partisan division in the US has returned with a vengeance as war and fear again provoke American reactions, and the newly elected US President brings baggage in corruption and questionable motives that remind us of the President elected in 1968. The University of Michigan still sponsors forums for commiserating with each other’s problems, and Labatt ale is still good.

Farm Worker Ministry

05 Thursday Jan 2017

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Circledance

I was elected to represent the Illinois Conference of the United Church of Christ (UCC) at the Illinois Conference of Churches (ICOC) in 1976. I considered it an honor and an opportunity to work on the ecumenical relationships that I hoped would deepen as the years progressed. As it turned out, the ICOC Forum where we served was mostly an opportunity to be informed about what the leaders of the denominations in Illinois were doing, not to exercise any influence or activity ourselves. I stayed on, learning what I could. At the end of my four-year term, I had decided that the place of real ministry, where I might contribute, was an arm of the ICOC, called the Illinois Farm Worker Ministry (IFWM). There the denominations, including the Roman Catholic Church, were cooperating in providing a ministry to people who needed and deserved it—the mostly seasonal farm workers in Illinois, although many who formerly followed seasonal crop needs had “settled out” and adapted to work opportunities in various locales in the state. I asked for a place on the Illinois Farm Worker board and received it for the next two terms until 1988.

The Farm Worker Ministry gave support to organizing efforts of farm workers on the national level and in the state, provided resource people for several locations where workers had found more or less permanent work and homes, served both spiritual and material needs as we discovered them, and, after the Immigration Reform and Control Act was finally signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, supported the educational and citizenship qualification efforts of thousands of Illinois residents. The capable leader of IFWM was Olgha Sandman, the wife of my mentor in the UCC, Robert Sandman, and soon an equally important mentor to me as well. We worked alongside farm workers to improve conditions in their work and for their families. That included such matters as documenting the use and abuse of pesticides and the exposure of people to chemicals that would harm them.

Olgha made every possible effort to bring her board members into close contact with farm worker leaders and people. We visited sites in Onarga, Princeton, and elsewhere, where farm workers were gathering, organizing, and needing services. We met and worked with scores of wonderful, hard-working, non-citizens and new and would-be citizens. The dedication of so many people who had come to work, make a living, and settle down, was evident as those who had come or been brought into the country without papers or permanent papers before 1982, and had stayed here for at least five years without any legal problems, took advantage of the classes to learn English and familiarity with US history and government. There were many who could not provide the necessary proof of their work history or long-term residency who were just as qualified by character as those who succeeded at that time, but those were the limits of the 1986 legislation, and no efforts since then have made such an opportunity possible again.

As communities of farm workers have continued to mature, most of their leadership has emerged from among their own ranks, and many of the various regional groups that used to provide a ministry have declined, including the IFWM after Olgha’s retirement. The need for people to advocate with them and on their behalf has not declined. Various industries and employers have continued to bring people into the country without papers and to employ those who are here, without the legal support or rights of citizenship, therefore taking advantage of their status to provide low wages, no benefits, and poor working conditions. In the end that has not been an advantage to either the immigrants who have come for a better life or to the rest of the workers in the country already, whether they were recent immigrants or not.

We could do much better and much more for hard-working people who come for a better life. The willingness to welcome such people has been a tradition of this country for centuries, before and after “legal papers” became an issue, receiving the vast majority of our ancestors. We have also seen the persistent practice of getting other people “to do our work for us,” and “to do what we are not willing to do,” and “to do what we have not enough skilled and knowledgeable people to do.”  

The fraction of people who have come in recent decades is much smaller than most of our history, and the people who come have proven to be less dangerous than those who already live here. A variety of paths to new citizenship are appropriate, and the church always has a duty to provide hospitality to the stranger and sojourner. Having an opportunity to know and work with farm workers leads most of us to the same conclusions.

The Problem Pregnancy Counseling Service

04 Wednesday Jan 2017

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My move to my first full-time parish at Tilton coincided with an important national decision—the Supreme Court ruling in Roe vs. Wade. Legal abortion, formerly restricted to a few states and people of wealth, was then available through qualified medical facilities to every first and second trimester pregnant woman at relatively low cost. Two local obstetrician-gynecologists and workers in the county health department realized that they had a challenge on their hands. Who would provide counseling to the many women who now had a choice that they did not have previously?

The doctors and health workers did not feel ready or able to counsel at length with women who were facing new and legal options for which they had not prepared. The two OB-GYNE doctors disagreed between themselves about the morality of the new option. The health workers had mixed feelings. They turned to local ministers, asking for ministers and other counselors who were concerned to join in providing free, confidential, and non-directive counseling to women who desired it. Eight ministers and counselors responded.

The sticking point was the need to be non-directive, not to tell women what to do, not to impose a religious position, but to be willing to listen to different circumstances and needs and religious positions, explore feelings, provide information that was as objective as possible, and let women make their own final decisions. We all faced a steep learning curve, gathering information on all options that were available, including the medical facilities that provided abortions, procedures used, and costs involved, as well as the ethical and psychological considerations that women and their partners and families might face, whichever decision they made. Available resources for supporting a new child or adoption were necessary as well. Before we began, we developed a standard list of themes that would be a part of each session, and we revised it regularly.

The Problem Pregnancy Counseling Service continued for the next seven years. The counselors met together regularly to compare and enhance what we were learning, to recruit and replace counselors, and to support one another in emotional struggles. Not everyone of the original group could maintain the standards that we had imposed on ourselves, nor did new volunteers find them easy. At the end of that time, the polarization of abortion as an issue had grown to make non-directive counseling sound like ‘permissive’ or ‘encouraging’ to outsiders, so the counseling pool had shrunk and recruitment of new counselors became politicized. Women and doctors were more familiar with their own options as people had made their separate decisions and shared them with others. Fewer women were asking for counseling. We disbanded.

What had we learned as counselors? There was no standard case of a woman coming for counseling. Women’s motivations and circumstances varied enormously, and our awareness of heart-wrenching circumstances and difficult decisions expanded. Male partners were seldom available for support. We varied among ourselves in our ability to empathize or offer emotional support to those who came to us. We also had to deal with our own grief and depend on others for support. The politics of the issue made abortion more accessible to some and more difficult for many. What had long been an illegal underground activity remained part of an emotionally charged secret, as ‘underground’ as ever, although usually without the dire medical consequences of local illegal abortions.

None of us were immune to the personal threats that were directed at us from abortion absolutists. Yet all of us had people come to us later thanking us for help in their difficult times.  We would face the same issues again wherever we were, but not with the frequency or intensity of those seven years.

A Church Finds Ways to Reach Out to Others

03 Tuesday Jan 2017

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St. Paul’s Church in Minonk supposedly had six hundred members when they called me to be their pastor. About fifty of that number turned out to have no names, but they were still a substantial congregation. Many were related to each other after four generations of German family intermarriage. The town of Minonk was 2400 in population and rapidly shrinking, due both to the elderly imbalance of its citizens and to the loss of industrial jobs in its area. Clearly St. Paul’s dominated the five congregations in the town in size, but that had not resulted in taking more responsibility for community life.

They did take part in the one social service project of the town, sponsored by the Ministerial Association (the four ministers—the fifth coming a distance only on Sunday), and that was home-delivered meals prepared by the nursing home and delivered by church volunteers. That was a beginning, anyway. Otherwise the town had only the local community services that were provided by town government, namely the police, fire and rescue services. Lions Club, Scouts, and 4-H did occasional helpful projects. As poor people moved into Minonk to take advantage of low-cost housing, there was not much more to serve their needs.

St. Paul’s had mostly looked after its own needs, caring for one another in family duty. When a 4-H club, led by congregation members, asked to use the church facilities for regular meetings, it was the first such request that any of the current leaders could remember. They hesitated, but the argument that they should serve more people in the community won the vote. There was not much sacrifice in providing a free location for a 4-H club.

The next steps were harder. It was clear that more people were having a difficult time making ends meet. Food banks were beginning to make an appearance in the larger communities in the region, and access to surplus and donated food was simple, given pick-up vehicles, a few volunteers, and a place to distribute. A few church members saw the need, provided some volunteers, two of whom loaned the use of their trucks. The city provided space in an  old city hall, if another organization took responsibility for staffing and liability insurance, which St. Paul’s insurance provider was willing to do. The Ministerial Association recruited a few more volunteers. With St. Paul’s members in the lead, the church gave its approval of the project. Food and money donations came in and the pantry was underway. (Several years later, outgrowing the old city hall, the church provided space in underused accessible rooms.)

After a few months, a local restauranteur volunteered to provide a Christmas party to needy children of the area, and she asked the food pantry to gather a list of children to be invited, along with gift requests. The food pantry clients happily cooperated. St. Paul’s and another congregation sought volunteer sponsors, and there were enough to cover the fifty children who were the anonymous recipients. St. Paul’s Youth agreed to wrap and identify the gifts with the number tags that maintained the anonymity. So, Santa’s Helpers was born, and continued year after year.

The people who had for several years gathered clothing to take to Goodwill and other groups in larger communities found that they could distribute coats and shoes and other items in town at the food pantry before they took the surplus to other places.

Requests for counseling increased as the newer residents found that they had a home in Minonk and people who cared about them. The four ministers reported that their counseling loads were increasing with people outside their congregations. We investigated the resources available in the area and places to refer people in need for those situations that exceeded our abilities.

Eventually St. Paul’s would hire an associate pastor who provided a children and family program for several years, although the funding for that effort became too great a burden to bear.

St. Paul’s Church always had plenty to do to take care of their own members, but a shrinking town population and the diminishing power of extended family ties did not keep them from growing in their care for others.

Moral Man and Immoral Society Reread

02 Monday Jan 2017

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It was 1968, for the last semester of my senior year at Illinois Wesleyan, and I requested permission from Paul Bushnell, the head of the history department, to join the senior seminar in history. That would not be surprising, but I had never taken a history course at IWU, except the History of Christianity that was taught in the religion department. My theory had been, “Why take a course in a field that was my hobby anyway?” Paul Bushnell invited me into the seminar.

He knew what I intended to do, which was to study as much of Reinhold Niebuhr’s writing as possible, leading up to his 1932 work Moral Man and Immoral Society. Another course had required the reading of that book. My interest was to trace the historical sources of his insight, that there is a “basic difference between the morality of individuals and the morality of collectives” that makes it exceedingly hard for groups to check impulses, transcend their own needs, comprehend the needs of others, and restrain their own egoism. He did not imply that this is easy for individuals, just that it is much harder for groups.

The method for the course began with collecting every essay Niebuhr had written before his book was published, and many afterwards, since 1932 was just the beginning of his application of the insight into the development of the Third Reich. In addition to English, as a German reader and writer, his awareness of German developments exceeded most of his contemporaries. I had not even begun to read German yet, so I had to rely on others’ translations of his German essays. The library of the University of Illinois was nearby, and their collection provided over a hundred essays that I could not find elsewhere, as well as a photocopier that worked, and I emptied my wallet making copies.

I was lost in a forest of insights. How could a pastor, occupied with the needs of his Detroit parish, find the time to delve so deeply into the social conditions of his nation and his world? Some relief came with the personal reflections in Niebuhr’s Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic. Niebuhr was human, after all. He was also totally immersed in thoughtful analysis of “the disproportions of power in society” and “the stubborn resistance of group egoism to all moral and inclusive social objectives.”  People hold onto their prejudices, hypocrisies, and dishonesties, and use them to justify the privileges they enjoy or seek. The powerful are more likely to be personally generous with a portion of their wealth than to grant structural change for social justice.

Essay by essay Niebuhr built a catalogue of social wrongs from police suppression of labor demonstrations, to legal and extra-legal racial discrimination, to Nazi scapegoating of Jews, Romani, and “non-Aryans.” He was a persistent witness to the continuing struggle of one group or class of people over another, seeking vengeance and employing vindictiveness in repositioning themselves, and using any and every means to justify their actions, even from a moral point of view. “Society needs greater equality, not only to advance but to survive….”

Occasionally I look over that dog-eared collection of essays and that most popular book that summarized them all, with its many underlined passages. Circumstances and characters have changed; in significant ways they remain the same. How contemporary the insights appear.

A Panegyric Upon Plymouth

24 Thursday Nov 2016

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cornfields

The only time I have been invited to preach at a college chapel service was for Illinois Wesleyan University just before Thanksgiving in 1969. I chose the presumptuous title of “A Panegyric Upon Plymouth” as my sermon title, drawing from Soren Kierkegaard’s “A Panegyric Upon Abraham” and the historical fictions surrounding the founding of Thanksgiving as a national holiday.

A panegyric is supposed to be an oration or public address in praise of something or someone. By using the scripture of the Pharisee and the publican as the scripture text for the sermon, my praise was reserved for the publican who approached God humbly and with repentance, in contrast with the Pharisee who proudly thanked God that he was not like other people because he was so much better. With no small amount of sarcasm, I compared the Pharisee to the usual message of thanksgiving in America and expressed the hope that we would learn to use the publican as a model instead.

My delivery was not so good that evening. I recall that my wife compared it to a dirge, since it was slow and halting. I was nervous and had never preached to a college audience in such a formal setting. My mentor, Chaplain Bill White, gave me the benefit of the doubt and said that sometimes it takes a while for a message to sink in and later people come it understand it better. Probably they would understand it from someone else who spoke it more effectively.

Maybe no one else understands that message better, but I do. If the legend of Thanksgiving bears any truth, it is in the generosity and good will of the Wampanoag people in helping the pilgrims to survive, even though the Wampanoag themselves had suffered the worst decade of their own existence as a people. As a result of the pilgrims and the actions of later puritans, we can attest that “no good deed goes unpunished.”

When President Barack Obama addressed the Arab nations in Egypt early in his presidency, expressing regret for some of the actions and attitudes represented in United States’ interventions in the Middle East (never using the word ‘apology’ although that was later used by Obama’s critics), my thoughts returned to my earlier diagnosis of American pride. We have not learned to be humble supplicants to a gracious and merciful God. Our ideas of American greatness are distorted and deadly to the future of the earth. We need to appreciate the humanity that we share with people everywhere, and realize the failures that also come with that humanity. We need to learn humbly from each other. We can only be grateful that God has given much more, much more than we deserve, and perhaps we will have more chances to do some good with what we have received.