Month: July 2020

The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian in Community

I have been volunteering regularly at The Mission for a bit over two years now. For those who are not familiar, it was started several years ago by Vineyard Rolla, and still operates out of rented space in their building. (Their pastor also serves on the board of directors, so there is still a close relationship.) It was originally formed to fulfill a specific need: the high cost of laundromats made clean clothes a luxury for some people in the community. Soon after, showers were added to help the homeless for whom clean bodies were also a luxury. Over time, services grew to include snacks, then hot meals, then overnight shelter during the winter. I started as an overnight volunteer, then when spring came in 2018, I began cooking lunch on Fridays, a day when there previously had not been services. Since then, Saturday meals have been added so that The Mission now operates seven days a week.

In January 2018, The Mission hired its first full-time staff member, Ashley Brooks. The number and roles of staff have grown since then. Not only do they care for people’s immediate needs, but also they facilitate connections to other services and other organizations so that people can begin to work their way out of homelessness and poverty.

The growth has been entirely organic. Of course there is strategic planning, but for the most part, the people in charge (board of directors, staff, and volunteers) watch what’s going on and what the needs are in the community, and respond in a caring way. It’s a hard job, mentally and emotionally. Most of the patrons are at a low point in their lives; when they get past that low point, they no longer need the services provided, so they don’t come around much. Often the patrons have untreated health issues, both physical and mental, that nobody at The Mission is really qualified to treat. I volunteer for just a few hours a week—I can’t imagine being a full-time staff member always burdened by the troubles of the patrons.

The Mission’s success is based on love. As I said, there is strategic planning, but always in response to the needs of the community. The alternative is to imagine what the community might need and build something that would fill that imagined need. That would be self-defeating. It would be like the apocryphal story of Marie Antoinette thinking that peasants without bread could instead eat cake. As Bonhoeffer said, caring more for your own vision will destroy the community you want to help.

I have three or four other projects in my personal life to which this principle applies:

• My home church, First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. We have an aging congregation and an aging facility that does not really serve our needs. The building is all stretched out over a hill, so that there are too many stairs for people who have mobility issues (let alone the distances involved!). I think the sanctuary was designed by a sadist, or else someone criminally insane. But I suppose none of that matters if the congregation continues to shrink due to the age of its members.
• The church where I preach, First Presbyterian Church of Cuba. They have similar, but worse, membership challenges. They do not have an installed pastor, which is why I am able (and needed) to preach there.
• Common Call Campus Ministries. This is a collaborative effort by FPC Rolla, Christ Episcopal Church, and Hope Lutheran (ELCA). We have struggled to maintain active operations. In the past few years, we have twice been reduced to a single student member. We have more than that now, but not much. I struggle to know what students really need and how CCCM can provide it.
• The LGBTQ+ community in Rolla. For a few years now, I’ve had ideas about ways to serve this group. It is essential, though, that my voice is the quietest in many cases. I am not queer myself, so I don’t really know what is needed. A small group of us are working on an event tentatively titled LGBTQ+EDU, targeting October 3. It will be educational, targeting prospective allies in the community and hopefully catalyzing further activities. For example, we have talked about having monthly follow-on events. I would ultimately like there to be a queer community center in town, but that’s further down the road. Like The Mission, we need to grow organically. We need to have a group of people who are connected to each other, at least tenuously, with identified needs that we will fulfill, rather than just a “build it and they will come” attitude.

In a larger sense, the Black Lives Matter movement has some of the same challenges. It is essential that the loudest voices are Black. White people need to grow in their love of the Black community, and Black individuals, and to listen to what they are saying. We are the ones who need to change, but we don’t know how. We need to listen and learn, rather than assuming Black people are exactly like white people with darker skin, with the exact same experiences, needs, and desires. White people cannot simply imagine what Black people might need, in some patronizing way. We need to see the world and ourselves through their eyes.

Love, true love, requires humility, a recognition that other people are different in ways we do not know and cannot even imagine. Each person is loved by God for who they are, so we must also love each person for who they are, not who we think they ought to be.

A couple walks into a bank to ask about a new construction loan. The loan officer welcomes them back and discusses the options. The loan officer asks a few questions, such as the equity in their current home, their household income, and their credit. They give answers and are taken at their word to get things started. They leave with an estimate and a few forms to fill out, but are assured that the bank will find a way to help them out.

This, to me, is the way life should work. It is essentially my story from spring 2019. People are taken at their word until proven otherwise. For example, the bank did not issue the loan until running credit checks, seeing my W-2, doing appraisals, etc. However, the basic presumption was that whatever I said was essentially true.

As you read the story, what did you picture? If you’re like me, you pictured the loan officer as an older white man, the couple as a white man and woman.

The term “white privilege” is thrown around a lot lately, with predictable backlash. Mostly, from white people whose lives don’t feel so privileged, whether due to their level of education, their socioeconomic status (especially in their youth), or their geographic location. I recognize that I have a lot of unearned privilege, beyond whiteness: cisgender, heterosexual, well-educated in both a top-tier public school system and a private university. So perhaps acknowledging my white privilege is easier than for individuals who didn’t have such an easy start to life.

I think perhaps the better way to see it is that “privilege” is “normal.” That is, for people like me, systems work the way they are supposed to work. In fact, the educational, legal, banking, and other systems in America were designed for people like me. Now, I still had to work to get where I am and make the most of the opportunities, but I was afforded those opportunities as a matter of course.

For people who are not like me—whether due to race, ethnicity, language, gender, or sexual orientation—the systems do not function properly. Individuals within the system sometimes act from their personal biases, such as a police officer seeing a Black person as inherently more untrustworthy and prone to criminal behavior than a white person. Sometimes, individuals just get into certain habits due to their experiences and environment, such as a homeowner in a white neighborhood being surprised and fearful when they see a Black person unexpectedly walking down their sidewalk, but who might not be so surprised or fearful if they encounter a Black person in a store.

More often, the systems themselves are set up with implicit assumptions that do not accommodate changing demographics or other differences. For example, often, forms only have two options for gender—male and female—implicitly excluding someone who is nonbinary. Some forms ask for information about a child’s father and mother, implicitly excluding gay parents. Colleges assume that a student can expect financial support from their parents; in some economically depressed areas, the expected family contribution really ought to be negative because students are supporting their parents.

In other cases, causality is not so easy to determine. There are clear racial disparities in basically every societal measure—economic, educational, criminal. COVID-19 death rates are higher among Blacks than among whites. Is their higher death rate due to economic disparities, differential treatment by medical professionals, underlying chronic health conditions, or biological factors? My guess is that we can exclude biological factors, and the other three are all culpable in ways that cannot be easily disentangled. Differential treatment by medical professionals stems from training, experience, and implicit bias, but also from economic and geographic differences that lead Black patients to different hospitals than white ones.

“Privilege” doesn’t mean “an easy life.” It means that the rules of life are designed to work for you. It means that your inherent, immutable characteristics do not automatically exclude you from certain opportunities. Or when they do, and you rightly take offense, it is so unusual that people rally behind you, rather than simply acknowledging the exclusion as the way things are. Privilege isn’t something that should be abandoned by those that have it; it’s something that EVERYONE should have.

This Independence Day, I’m thinking about our national myth. That is, the vision of the United States of America as a glorious democracy, colonized by those seeking religious freedom, born of revolution by noble heroes who believed that all men were created equal against a tyrannical king, and purged of the sin of slavery by a leader who sought true equality. A close reading of history reveals most of that preceding sentence to be false, exaggerated, or at least selective memory.

I’m currently listening to an audiobook about Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island. First the Pilgrims came to Plymouth, who sought to establish a new theocracy, separate from the Church of England. Next came the Massachusetts Bay Company, founded by Puritans who saw themselves as still a part of the Church of England but with differences of opinion over the “right” way to worship and believe. In both cases, there was a pervasive connection between church and state, with compulsory church attendance (punished by fines), voting rights tied to church membership, and government legitimacy deriving from divine favor, not the consent of the governed. Williams’s compact governing Providence was the first in the New World—whether in English, Dutch, Spanish, or Portuguese territory—omitting reference to God. Williams himself was thoroughly religious, but believed that civil government had no authority regarding the “first table” of the Ten Commandments, that is, the first four Commandments dictating Christian duty to God. This was a revolutionary concept, and fairly unique in the colonies. Our First Amendment separation of church and state was primarily a way to accommodate Anglican, Presbyterian, Catholic, Quaker, and other Christian sects, each of which would have preferred to see their denomination raised to dominance over the others.

The public conversation these days is reckoning with the mixed record of our forefathers on racial equity. Let’s set aside the Confederate monuments, which memorialize people who were traitors, losers, and opposed to our supposed belief in equality before our Creator. Let’s talk instead about people like Washington, Jefferson, and even Lincoln, who have more mixed legacies. Washington and Jefferson led the creation of a nation that had far more freedom than its predecessors, while at the same time owning slaves and participating in all the worst aspects of slavery, including rape (e.g. Sally Hemings, a product and victim of white owners’ exploitation of their Black slaves). Lincoln’s primary motive was to save the Union, and he ultimately realized that the only way to do so was to end slavery.

The question these days is whether to literally put these men on a pedestal, that is, to honor them with statues, monuments, state and city names, etc. For answers, let’s look at the history of Israel as recorded in the Bible.

Genesis 12-50 is devoted to Israel’s ancestral history, from Abraham down to the Israelites first moving to Egypt. These are the men and women who founded a great people, the equivalent of our patriotic forefathers. The account as we currently have it was assembled centuries after the fact by redactors who combined a variety of stories into a cohesive account. The overarching message is that Israel is a chosen people, specially blessed by God. So one might think that the patriarchs would be described in glowing terms. But that’s not what we read.

Abram twice tried to pass off his wife, Sarai, as his sister. Even after God entered a covenant with him, renamed him Abraham, and promised him a son by Sarah, he did not trust in God and concocted a scheme that ended with him sending his slave, Hagar, and her son, Ishmael, into the wilderness and near-certain death in order to protect Sarah and her son, Isaac. Isaac’s son Jacob, who was renamed Israel and whose sons defined the twelve tribes of the nation of Israel, is a particularly deceitful character. He cheats his brother, Esau, out of his inheritance, and his father-in-law, Laban, out of a disproportionate share of his flock. His favoritism to two of his sons resulted in Joseph being sold into slavery by his brothers. Joseph is at times deceitful himself, perhaps taking revenge on his brothers over their mistreatment of him.

These are not impeccable, glorious heroes. These are just men who are trying to make their way in the world. The women in these stories are no better—Sarah was the one who conceived of the plans regarding Hagar and Ishmael, Isaac’s wife Rebekah helped Jacob steal Esau’s inheritance, and Jacob’s wife Rachel stole her father’s household idols. What makes them all worthy of honor are their roles in founding a nation devoted to God.

People are complicated. Only one person in all of history lived a spotless life, Jesus. The rest of us have our good days and bad days. Some of us are able to rise above our sins against God and neighbor to help their community or nation more nearly approach the Beloved Community that Martin Luther King, Jr., described.

Speaking of Martin Luther King, Jr., he was another complicated person with his own failings, a fact often pointed out by those who would defend America’s Founding Fathers with whataboutism. But a person should be judged by the totality of their life, the totality of their legacy. MLK was a powerful force for racial justice and equality, a man unfortunately lost before his vision was realized. Lincoln saved the Union and ended slavery. Jefferson was, on the whole, an excellent statesman, from his authorship of the first draft of the Declaration of Independence through his presidency. Washington was possibly the only man who could have been an effective President at the time he was chosen, and was a good enough general to defeat our British opponents.

Let us celebrate the good that these men did, not by ignoring the bad parts of their lives, but by acknowledging that they were humans like the rest of us who were able to rise above their sins to produce the flawed, but promising, nation we have.