Can you see the face in this tree? It spoke to me of the pain and the heartbreak of the Cherokee people as they saw the end of their nation coming. They had been betrayed by the US Congress, the US President, the leaders and people of the states that grew up around them, and by some of their own leaders. As we walked around this historic site, I could feel the pain, anguish, and suffering… I could also feel the anger, the pain, and the frustration…
Today I spoke about being a prophet and the challenge of not always having a message of sunshine and joy in a sermon or in my writings. This isn’t my challenge alone… it should be the challenge of everyone who calls themselves a Christ-follower. I keep coming back to the question for myself… the question of my calling and vocation. My own vocational calling, or should I say, my understanding of that calling, has deepened and been transformed by my experiences of life and ministry over the past forty years.
The young man who entered The Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky on December 10, 1941 was not the same man who wrote to Dorothy Day on August 23, 1961. Thomas Merton had entered the monastery thinking he would simply become a cloistered monk, a contemplative, for the rest of his life. He wrote to Dorothy Day about the crossroads he found himself at as a monk.
…I don’t feel that I can in conscience, at a time like this, go on writing just about things like meditation, though that has its point. I cannot just bury my head in a lot of rather tiny and secondary monastic studies either. I think I have to face the big issues, the life-and-death issues. (The Hidden Ground of Love, p. 140)
Three years earlier, he had written to Pope John XXIII about this change. It is not enough for qme to think of the apostolic value of prayer and penance; I also have to think in terms of a contemplative grasp of the political, intellectual, artistic, and social movements in this world—by which I mean a sympathy for the honest aspirations of so many intellectuals everywhere in the world and the terrible problems they have to face. I have had the experience of seeing that this kind of understanding and friendly sympathy, on the part of a monk who really understands them, has produced striking effects among artists, writers, publishers, poets, etc., who have become my friends without my having to leave the cloister. (The Hidden Ground of Love, p. 482)
Perhaps this is the calling that we need to respond to as people of faith, no matter what that faith looks like. Perhaps we are being called to look beyond ourselves and become a part of the larger discussion that is going on around us. That is what Merton seems to be challenging me to do. How will you respond, dear reader? A response doesn’t have to be gigantic. It can be small. But I believe that we are called to respond.
A beautiful reflection from my seminary classmate Shirley Hobson Duncanson!
A Prayer for the Nation Almighty God, you rule all the peoples of the earth. Inspire the minds of all women and men to whom you have committedthe …
A Prayer for the Nation
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”—Margaret Mead
“Whether they hear or refuse to hear (for they are a rebellious house), they shall know that there has been a prophet among them.” This final verse concludes the passage from Ezekiel 2:1-5 which is one of Sunday’s Scripture readings. Ezekiel, like many of the prophets, was surprised that God would call him to do the work of a prophet. That work wasn’t easy and it often got the prophet into hot water with the powers that be. When your call is to tell Kings and religious leaders that they aren’t following the ways of God, it can get a bit hairy to say the least. Yet the prophets did speak out and regardless of whether or not the message was heard and/or received, a prophet had spoken in their midst!
In the gospel of Mark, we read in Chapter 6:1-13 about Jesus’ trip to his hometown where he taught in the synagogue. The reception by the hometown crowd was chilly to say the least. In verse four Jesus said, “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.” I remember thinking about this particular story when I first preached at my home church a long time ago. I wondered whether or not the congregation would hear a preacher preaching a sermon or if they would see George and Shirley’s son who had grown up in the church. Would they say, “Oh look, it’s little Michael in the pulpit… how special.”? That was how I first interpreted this story all those years ago… I also knew that the message may or may not be heard by my home church because of that filter.
Now to be honest, I haven’t preached at my home church since graduating from seminary in 1986. My preaching has changed a great deal as well over the decades as my understanding of Scripture has deepened thanks to a combination of my own life-experiences and a healthy dose of the Spirit’s inspiration. How would the message be received? I don’t know. In fact, as I think about it, my Mom while she was alive, never heard me preach and Dad still hasn’t. I do know that some of my sermons wouldn’t exactly have made Mom comfortable, or Dad for that matter. But the point is that my calling in ministry has grown, deepened, and been transformed through the years.
Blame it on the Spirit or blame it on the Prophets… I am not called to only preach messages of comfort and joy… sometimes life calls for the words and the challenges of a prophet. And as I tell the congregation when I preach, if it feels like my finger is pointing at you… look at my hand… three fingers are pointing back at me. Try that experiment yourself, dear reader. Point your finger away from you and then slowly turn your pointed hand over… yep… three fingers pointing back at you.
I firmly believe that the voice of the prophets need to be heard in the church. Just as Jesus challenged the religious leaders of his day to stand up to the Empire, I believe we need to stand up to the Empire as well. This is the Fourth of July weekend. Signs saying “Jesus saves” have been carried into the Nation’s Capitol by people claiming to be christians (yes, lower case is intentional) as they sought to subvert the constitutional process of ratifying a presidential election. Faith and nationalism are being intertwined in a way that I believe would appall the authors of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, let along the one who calls us to put away our swords and love every neighbor… including our enemies.
Jim Forest, a Peace Activist and friend of Thomas Merton, Daniel Berrigan, and Dorothy Day, shared a letter that Thomas Merton had written him early in his activism. Merton “stressed the importance of seeing people, including adversaries, simply as fellow human beings. One of the most important things to do is to keep cutting deliberately through political lines and barriers… and emphasize that these are largely fabrications and that there is a genuine reality, totally opposite to the fictions of politics: the human dimension.” (Loving Our Enemies: Reflections on the Hardest Commandment by Jim Forest (p. 3))
During our vacation and this past week, Denise and I have been reflecting on a dark portion of American history which is often swept under the rug and ignored on a day when “Independence” is celebrated by this nation. We have literally and spiritually been spending a lot of time on the “Trail of Tears,” especially reflecting on the journeys of the Cherokee and Muskogee (Euchee) people who lived in this area and in the area near Florence, Alabama long ago. As a nation, we need to seriously come to terms with the horrors inflicted on the Indigenous people and upon the enslaved people by people who claimed to be christian. Instead of shooting off fireworks and singing “God Bless America” or “God Bless the USA” shouldn’t we reflect on both the gifts of freedom and the call to do better as individuals and as a nation in ensuring that ALL people share equally in the blessings of that freedom?
Dr King once said, “Today we particularly need the Hebrew prophets because they taught that to love God was to love justice; that each human being has an inescapable obligation to denounce evil where he sees it…”. Isn’t that what the prophets are calling us to do today? I know that they are calling me out and their voices refuse to be silenced. In the words of the Prophet Micah, shouldn’t we be doing justice, loving kindness/mercy, and walking humbly with God and with all of God’s children?
“Culture makes people understand each other better. And if they understand each other better in their soul, it is easier to overcome the economic and political barriers. But first they have to understand that their neighbor is, in the end, just like them, with the same problems, the same questions.”—Paulo Coelho
The sun has set and the Vesper Lights flicker and glow
It has been a good day for reading
It has been a good day for reflection
The reading and reflection haven’t been easy
As I consider the sins of this nation
As I consider the sins of my ancestral homeland north of us
As I consider the indigenous people of this land
My heart breaks with sorrow and shame
As this weekend continues, Lord
May you teach us about compassion and unity instead of hatred and nationalism
May we see this land as a land for all of your children
May the vision of Woody Guthrie be our vision today
This Land Is Your Land (Springsteen & Seeger)
Now as my eyelids grow heavy
I lift this humble prayer to you
Dona Nobis Pacem
Grant Us Peace
A wee prayer from the heart of your Padre…
Cemetery near Fort Payne, AL — Willstown “Mission” Cemetery…
America is surprised. Native America is not surprised.
Bodies of children buried in unmarked graves? Native America has known this for years.
kentnerburn.com/its-time-to-pay-attention/
Now is long past the time to listen… their voices cried out from the unmarked graves in Fort Payne, AL in the shadow of Lookout Mountain… on the Trail of Tears…
“I believe the interfaith movement can contribute in helping to save the world….not just through the nice words of dialogue but with our actions. It is the responsibility of human beings to fix the problems which we create – of climate change, of the widening income gap, of hate and war. God will not do this for us, we must take responsibility for our actions.” ~ His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama
“How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right.”—Black Hawk, Sauk
“Tell me and I’ll forget. Show me, and I may not remember. Involve me, and I’ll understand.”—Indigenous Wisdom
