Dear Dr. King

I’m embarrassed to trivialize your experience by likening mine to it, but I’ve had a taste of what it’s like to be the victim of prejudice and discrimination and I hate it! It’s so unfair! It’s so painful! It’s so evil and destructive! Even the petty scale on which I’ve been subjected to such injustice has filled me with a vindictive anger that often seems beyond my control, and I remember you today with awe and wonder at how you were able to respond to such profound hatred and bigotry with the Christ-like spirit you did.

I was a senior in high school nearing graduation the day you were assassinated. I must confess that your murder did not unsettle me the same way that President Kennedy’s did five years earlier, or even to the same degree his brother’s did two months after yours the week of my graduation. I grew up in the proverbial lily-white suburb that was safely sheltered from people of color, ethnicity, and Democrats. It was necessary to drive to another part of the city to view your kind, and I wasn’t really so sure but what you had brought on your own demise by your insistence upon upsetting the status quo.

One of the most significant aspects of my “higher education” was moving into the college dorm where two supposed Black Panthers from Omaha lived across the hallway. In retrospect, I’m not sure that Beau and Teddy were any more genuine militants than I was the Goldwater Republican I fancied myself to be, but it was from the phonograph in their room that I first began to really pay attention to what you were saying in your speeches. Those were years that my “eyes were opened” and my “consciousness was raised” to all sorts of things, not the least of which was a whole new appreciation for your profound words: “I have a dream…”

Our world has been deprived of knowing your thoughts on what has happened to that dream over the last forty years. One would hope that part of it has been realized, while it is painfully obvious that much of it remains just that, a dream. When you accepted your Nobel Peace Prize, you said:
“Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time; the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence.
“Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.”
I think I understand why so many were offended when President Bush hypocritically placed a wreath upon your grave. We have been left with your words, but not with your comprehension.

How I wish I could spend some time learning from you your theology and Christology. What were you able to understand about Jesus’ life and teachings that seem so elusive to the rest of us? Your belief that “unearned suffering is redemptive”; that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”; and that “if a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live” is unfortunately just as contrary to contemporary mainstream thought as it was when you articulated your vision for the future.

We’re still sold on the “might makes right” paradigm, and to maintain our “superiority” through domination and oppression – even if it is violent and destructive – still somehow makes sense to us. Just as you were expected to “know your place” in the mid-twentieth century, we have embarked upon this new millennium expecting the whole world to know that our place is Number One. I’m guessing that even you might be astonished by the claim God has ordained such a worldview and the leadership to carry it out.

You grasped the concept that humility needs to displace the obsession with superiority and domination before love can truly take root and blossom. Love and arrogance are the oil and water of our times, and on this day that we have labored to set aside in your honor we need to try harder to understand how you managed to remain humble while at the same time recognizing the righteousness of your calling. I want to know the inner peace that empowered you to say on your last night with us:
“I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land…So I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man.” Amen.

“Amazed and Astonished”

Have you seen the breathtaking photos from the MER “Spirit”? Can you hardly wait to see what “Opportunity” transmits once it lands? But stop! There’s some serious editorializing going on here. Perhaps you don’t find the photos of Mars’ surface to be “breathtaking” at all, and maybe you aren’t eagerly awaiting the second rover landing any more than you did the first. After all, as we are fractionally a century past our specie’s first powered flight, the whole matter of venturing into outer space has come to seem pretty commonplace.

During our recent “Grand Christmas Tour” we were recalling Rachel’s reaction to her first plane trip. Asked upon arrival by anxious relatives what she thought of the experience, her childishly innocent response: “It was boring.” Only a four-year-old could be capable of such direct and non-judgmental honesty. The truth of the matter was that she had no basis of comparison to other forms of travel, and so for her the several hours spent in a crowded cabin staring at the bulkhead was a truly ho-hum experience.

As she matured, and in the process witnessed firsthand how long it takes to cover the same distances by car, Rachel gained a new perspective that would probably make her less apt to answer the same question in the same way. She still might not go so far as to use words like “amazed” or “astonished” to describe how the six-hour drive from Phoenix to Las Vegas is reduced to a one-hour flight, but her newfound appreciation for the difference makes it much less likely that she will ever again think of it as “boring.”

According to the NRSV Exhaustive Concordance (1991, Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville) the word “amazed” appears 53 times in the Holy Bible with the Apocrypha. Somewhat amazing in and of itself is that it is found only once in Hebrew scripture (Old Testament; Ecclesiastes 5:8). It is used predominantly by the authors of the synoptic gospels (and the Lukan Acts), interestingly found not even once in the Gospel of John. Nearly every time “amazed” is used it is to describe the reaction to Jesus by those with whom he comes in contact.

By contrast John prefers to use “astonished”. This synonym appears more frequently in Hebrew scripture, as well. Only in Acts 2:7 do the two words appear at the same time in the context of Pentecost: “Amazed and astonished, they asked, ‘Are not all these who are speaking Galileans?’” But the larger message seems to be clear that to encounter the Holy Presence results in a profound sense of awe and wonder, not unlike the profane parallel attempted by the coalition forces in Iraq with their strategy of “shock and awe.”

This is mildly interesting, you may be saying to yourself, but what in heaven’s name does it have to do with practical theology? Only this: our quest for the ultimate may not be viable if our mindset is jaded by passivity and apathy. If we cannot manage to be amazed and astonished by the landing of a robotic rover on the surface of Mars, how much hope can there really be for us? If we cannot be amazed by the miracle of new birth in our midst, what kind of a future is there for our kind? Speaking of the goings on in Washington, D.C. Stewart Udall told Bill Moyers on NOW, “The shocking thing to me is that nobody is shocked!”

The promise of the Christ is for the New Life symbolized by the birth of Christmas and the resurrection of Easter. For such a promise to have any genuine meaning, however, is going to be determined by our capacity to be awestruck by the prospect of the reality. The quality of the relationship we share with our Creator will become all the greater to the degree that we are able to be amazed and astonished by the realization that such a thing is even possible! May God grant to each of us the wisdom and maturity necessary to greet each new day with the Psalmist’s elation: “This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.” Amen.

What to Do?

I’m being picked on by my manager at work. The classic type-A personality, she has no patience for this old man that ended up sorely out of his element when I needed a job after surrendering my credentials as a pastor of The United Methodist Church. Add to this the liability of my gender for which she has nothing but disdain, and you have all the ingredients for a hostile working environment that is the most unpleasant I’ve been subjected to since the cliquish days of high school.

I was detailing my woes in an instant messaging session with daughter Rachel when she took the golden opportunity to remind me that perhaps I needed to refresh my understanding of logotherapy. Little had I known that she had been waiting for such a chance to get even ever since I suggested that the possible solution to the distress she was experiencing during her high school days might be reading Victor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.”

The premise of logotherapy is remarkably practical. As persons we have no control over many of the circumstances in which we find ourselves. The only thing that we really have control over is how we respond or react to those circumstances. Frankl’s imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp served as a horrendously extreme example of this. He had no control over being a prisoner subjected to unthinkably inhumane conditions, but he discovered that he had virtually absolute control over how his inner self coped.

I used nine sermons (October 5 through December 7) to outline my understanding of process theology. It was an admittedly primitive attempt to help make the distinction between theological concepts when viewed from either a static or dynamic perspective. While this might have seemed to have had some pseudo-scholarly appeal, my truer intent was to hopefully provide a set of tools that have a very practical application to the reality we experience day-to-day, moment-to-moment, many times without having a great deal of control over it.

This is why I have chosen to share with you an example of a circumstance in my life that presently seems to me increasingly untenable on a daily basis. So, it is not necessarily my aim to provoke your pity, even though these days I’m happy to receive it wherever I can get it. What is the point, however, – as Rachel so wisely reminded me – is to first, communicate that even the deepest thinkers bleed when cut; and second, that from this compassionate viewpoint might arise a realistic way to give some sort of meaning to even the most meaningless of circumstances.

In other words, I have a new appreciation for and understanding of what it feels like to wake up in the morning and hate to have to go to work. What’s more, from this experience I have learned that I am not alone, that there are many others who feel the same as I. The challenge then becomes to determine how my personal theology influences my perception of my circumstances and what it says to me about whether or not I am in a position to do anything with or about them. If my theology cannot do this for me, then of what value is it?

Even more to the point is the need to examine each of these high-minded ideals to see if it really has the potential for positively affecting a real-life experience. So, regardless of whether my understanding of atonement is static or dynamic, the question fundamentally becomes: does it have a genuine influence upon the way I experience the current moment? And since there is this polarity to choose between, do I find either the static or dynamic perspective to be more effective?

I have found it very easy to fall into the “static trap.” I have caught myself asking “why me?” It’s not been all that hard to fatalistically accept that I am presently caught up in some sort of preordained plot that is serving to payoff some gargantuan karmic debt that may or may not be related to something I’ve done to offend the gods. For certain, though, to place my current predicament in the context of a divinely authored script in which my role is set in stone creates a genuine sense of hopelessness.

Now, one way to try to counter this hopelessness is to continue in the vein of my static mindset. If God has dictated my current untenable situation, but if my “religion” tells me that God really does love me and wants things to be better for me, then I have to place my belief in the plot yet to be acted out in which my redemption and salvation are part of a predetermined future for which I must simply wait. This definition for “faith” I find a great many of my evangelical contemporaries subscribing to.

What I don’t like about this point of view is that it places God at such an emotional and physical distance. Atonement fails to make much sense in a predetermined environment in which a higher power has already decided upon the outcome of my personal future. What difference does it make whether I’m at one with God in such a scenario or not? My fate is already sealed, in a manner of speaking, and I’m left with little more than a superstitious wish that saying the right words or performing the right actions will magically change the ending.

When I realize, however, that I’m involved in an ongoing process of being in relationship with my Creator, atonement begins to make all kinds of sense. Once I comprehend that the Power within me is itself One, I enter into a co-creative mode that becomes mutually beneficial and satisfying to the degree that I align myself with it. From this perspective my life takes on new meaning and authenticity as I intimately work through with my “suffering companion” whatever circumstances a dynamic reality presents.

So how is this kind of fanciful thinking going to affect things when I go back to work Monday? Is my manager going to suddenly be a more compassionate person? Are the 2,000 cases that are assigned to me going to be reduced to a more reasonable number? Is the administration going to be more receptive to my opinions? I doubt it. What I do not doubt, though, is that if I continually remind myself that I am not alone such remembrance will be the source of the strength, courage and creativity I need to shape my response to whatever situations present themselves.

I’ll let you know what happens. Amen.