Well, I’ve been putting off writing this for fear of pissing off my less enlightened brothers and sisters yet once again (you know who you are), but the postponement has made it impossible to write anything else, so there you go: I gotta do it. Besides, how do you know you’re alive if you haven’t stirred anybody up? Cemeteries are pleasant and peaceful, but they’re still cemeteries.

The darling and I have been paying rapt attention to the presidential primaries, eagerly looking forward to that day come next January when we can sing with Gerald Ford, “At last our long national nightmare is over.” We’ve even been helping to bring Camelot about by sending some shekels off to our hero, Sir Obama. This, of course, after attending to the debates. Well, okay; mostly the Democratic ones. I’ve tried to sit through the Republican debates, but they talk about a world I don’t inhabit. I caught an interview where the candidates were asked what one book (besides the Bible, thank God) they would take with them into the White House. John McCain (who is the least terrifying of those guys to me): The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith. Barack Obama: A Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin. That about sums up the differences, eh? And, oh yeah, there’s that war thing, too.

Admittedly, I’ve not read Adam Smith’s 18th century treatise on economics, published in 1776, to which I guess the discovery of the magic hand (hidden hand?—BombMaker Fred knows the right phrase) of the free market is accounted. But it seems to me that the unbridled free market let loose by Reagan has found its perverted extreme in the last decade and is now being revealed for the idolatry it is (idols, of course, always prove their destructiveness, that’s what’s meant when the Bible talks about the living God being a jealous one, methinks): human life has been diminished by our worship of profit. The rich hog the trough and more and more the little ones are pushed out to scratch in the dirt, and laws are passed to continue it. Hence a quote I shared at the preachers’ study this morning from t.s. eliot, “Choruses from The Rock”:

When the Stranger says: ‘What is the meaning of this city?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?’
What will you answer? ‘We all dwell together
To make money from each other’? or ‘This is a community’?

And the Stranger will depart and return to the desert.
O my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger,
Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.

See? I’m thinking McCain’s got something backward there. On the other hand, I did read Obama’s selection, A Team of Rivals. I read it last year, in desperate need of some light in my patriotic darkness. The book is a study of Abraham Lincoln and his cabinet, all of whom had been his political rivals for the presidency, and each of whom had his own political agenda, often at odds with Lincoln’s, sometimes even working behind his back to defeat him. The thing about Lincoln was he always respected these guys as seeking the best thing for the country even in their disagreements (and “disagreeable” behavior), and equally always spoke graciously of them, even when exposing their buffoonery. He had a way of pointing people beyond themselves toward a greater human community. Obama’s style and comments bring to mind what I’ve read of Lincoln’s writings and speeches. He calls us to live more nobly as individuals and as a nation.’Course, some may take a different position. After all, there’s Hillary, as well.

So we have a black guy and a white woman, and one of them is going to be the party’s nomination for president and get my vote. But I’m thinking of the history of my life, remembering the civil rights’ struggles of the 60’s—the televised scenes of burning cities and brutal police with billy clubs and German shepherds and fire hoses and the terrorism of the klan against a people seeking hope on the nightly news when I was a teen, and how my dad and I debated the “negro issue” and we discussed it with our pastors at Luther League gatherings and talked about it with folks at church. And later, at an age when I could most fully appreciate it in all of its dimensions came women burning bras (yeah buddy!) and working for their own full human dignity and freedom. We had to learn how to live with women clergy (yeow!) as full equals, who, by the way, still come up against that—what? skirted ceiling? glass pulpit?—in which churches shut them out of the more, say, prominent positions (e.g., senior pastor and such). (An interesting aside: women were not given the vote until about 40 years after the—obviously male—slaves were given it, at least constitutionally.) And this year I’m going to vote for either a black guy or a woman.

Ain’t history grand? Surely, along with justice and healing, the universe bends in the direction of irony.

In honor of it all, and because my pal Kerry (not to be confused with my sister of the same name, whom I love) spent a week of his daily devotions on Martin Luther King, Jr and tweaked me into a run to ye olde bookstore where I picked up A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by James M. Washington and weighing, oh, ten pounds. Here’s a story: I bought a record (vinyl) of MLK speeches and sermons a couple of years after leaving seminary, to study for my own preaching. It’s still around somewhere, I think. Beautiful stuff, though not a style one could reproduce in, say, a white rural Lutheran church (even if one had the linguistic rhythm of Black American Christianity). And now I’m finally getting around to reading his words themselves, savoring a writing or a speech a day, like a meditational reading (lectio almostdivina). Check it out, from 1960:

Whatever the cause, God has been profoundly real to me in recent months. In the midst of outer dangers I have felt an inner calm and known resources of strength that only God could give. In many instances I have felt the power of God transforming the fatigue of despair into the buoyancy of hope. I am convinced that the universe is under the control of a loving purpose and that in the struggle for righteousness man has a cosmic companion. Behind the harsh appearances of the world there is a benign power.

And another dandy from 1958:

Agape is not a weak, passive love. It is love in action. Agape is love seeking to preserve and create community. It is insistence on community even when one seeks to break it. Agape is a willingness to go to any length to restore community. It doesn’t stop at the first mile, but it goes the second mile to restore community. It is a willingness to forgive, not seven times, but seventy times seven to restore community. The cross is the eternal expression of the length to which God will go to restore broken community. The resurrection is God’s triumph over all the forces that seek to block community. The Holy Spirit is the continuing community creating reality that moves through history. He who works against community is working against the whole of creation.

Think about that, m’boy, and then:

Therefore, if I respond to hate with reciprocal hate I do nothing but intensify the cleavage in broken community. I can only close the gap in community by meeting hate with love. If I meet hate with hate, I become depersonalized, because creation is so designed that my personality can only be fulfilled in the context of community. Booker T. Washington was right: “Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.” When he pulls you that low he brings you to the point of defying creation, and thereby becoming depersonalized.

Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday; an opportunity to turn once again toward the direction of creation.