The Road to the Swimming Hole

 

Cary’s Uncle Bob is a lovely soft spoken fellow – a rather lanky and frayed-at-the-edges man of 83 years, who makes me feel good inside, in a way that reminds me of the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz – do you know what I mean?

Remember how the scarecrow kind of swam around in his raggedy get-up, pushing back his loose straw, with a smile that was somehow both wide-eyed and humble at the same time?  Doesn’t that memory just open up your heart?

That’s about how I felt sitting across from Bob at the reception that followed Danie’s burial service.

Danie, you see, died suddenly and tragically last year, and we’d all come  – most of Cary’s family, and their hanger’s-on (like me) to bury Danie up at the Chalk Mountain cemetery, which is out past the edge of Glen rose where the wide, windy Texas hardscrabble picks up.  Danie was a powerful woman, who had a plan for all the minute details of her (and everyone else’s) life – and it was sad, but somehow beautiful, to think of her out there, for eternity, with the wind crying through the dry creek bottoms and the scrub cedar.

Back in town, I sat across the table from Bob as we worked on our pasta salad.  Around us rose the clamor of family, reuniting after years of separation.  Bob was pleasantly uninvolved.  I made a couple playful attempts to get him to talk, but I soon gave that up, figuring that I might as well just sit back and enjoy the blessing of his quiet company.  

And yet, when I think back on my recent trip to Texas, it was one of Bob’s memories that rises from all that hubbub.

We’d all left the reception and were making our way back to the hotel in our big rented van, when we found ourselves under the trees along the edge of the Brazos river.  

Bob spoke up from the backseat:

“When we were just bit over knee-high,” he said, “we used to head down this road to the swimming hole… but it was summertime and, of course, being kids, we didn’t have any shoes on, so we had to run from tree to tree, so as not to burn the soles of our feet.”     

What a beautiful picture he drew!  The precise little sketch of childhood was replete with metaphorical value.  As soon as I heard it, I said to myself…

“There’s next Sunday’s sermon!”

But how to weave it in?  

This is a tricky Sunday.  Just like a few weeks ago, when Pentecost and Memorial day landed on the same Sunday, today we find ourselves at the confluence of Father’s Day and Juneteenth – two observances that I would be remiss if I didn’t find a way to recognize. 

President Biden signed legislation to make Juneteenth a federal holiday on June 17th of 2021, so, as far as national civic observances go, Juneteenth is new to many of us.  You can be sure, though, that for our Black brothers and sisters there is nothing new about it.  If, by chance, you are unaware of the significance of Juneteenth, now is the time to learn about it so that tomorrow, when you enjoy a day off, you can give more than a passing thought to the long troubling and history of bondage and the quest for freedom that is entwined in the DNA of this holiday.

The word Juneteenth is a mashup of the words June and nineteenth.  The name refers to the date, in 1865, when Major General Gordon Granger issued an order, in Galveston Texas, that freed all the enslaved people of Texas.  The order, the text of which I have printed on the back of today’s bulletin, states clearly that 

all slaves are free. 

and that the newly emancipated people should enjoy 

absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property 

Major General Granger’s admirably clear statement loses some of its shine though, when, at the end of the order he can’t help but throw in a condescending dig at the “freedmen” who, he says “​​will not be supported in idleness…”

Even when the muscle and legitimacy of an Executive order of the United States Government was marshaled behind a law of emancipation, the very person who declared it could not resist demeaning those being freed – in the actual declaration itself!

This is subtle but revealing.  

It makes me think of the words of the civil rights lawyer, and perhaps the greatest of my living role models, Bryan Stevenson, who has written that:

The greatest evil of American slavery was not involuntary servitude but rather the narrative of racial differences we created to legitimate slavery. Because we never dealt with that evil, I don’t think slavery ended in 1865, it just evolved.

Even as Major General Granger ordered the freedom of enslaved African Americans, his off-hand comment about the “idleness” of the freedmen not being tolerated, preserved, for future generations, the “narrative of racial difference” that had made slavery possible in the first place.

If it feels nit-picky to focus our attention on Granger’s attitude rather than the excellent effect of his order, we would do well to take note of the headlines this very week, in which the results of the Justice Department’s investigation of the Minneapolis Police were released.   None of us, unfortunately, are surprised to hear that the Minneapolis Police Department has systematically applied racist methods for decades.  We are not surprised, because Granger’s painful assumption – the sneaky yet pervasive attitudes that Bryan Stevenson calls the “narrative of racial difference” – have never stopped shaping public policy all the way up and down the strata of our social fabric.  

While it is certainly true that Black Americans no longer suffer chattel slavery, to proclaim, categorically (as General Granger did) that they are “free” would be exercise in denial.  When Bryan Stevenson said that slavery did not end, but evolved, he was referring to the system of demeaning laws known as Jim Crow, and after that, the immense tragedy that is Mass incarceration.  When people push back and say, “Oh surely Mr. Stevenson, it’s not that bad…” he simply points to the prediction, made in a 2001 report by the Bureau of Justice, that one in three black male babies born in this country will be incarcerated during his lifetime. 

One in three.

Those are not good odds.

There is only one reason that we allow such a blatantly unjust system to remain in place…

Because someone benefits from it.

Who is it?

Is it us?  

Do we benefit, in some way, from the mass incarceration of a huge segment of our population?

This is the question that we must ask, if we are to follow Jesus Christ.

Speaking of Jesus Christ… I must admit to you that I have never liked the passages in the New Testament in which Jesus exhorts his followers to go out and evangelize.

I am uncomfortable with the assumption that underlies speeches like the one that Judith just read to us from the gospel of Matthew – the assumption that there is only one correct path to religious salvation, and it is the responsibility of all true believers to “save the lost sheep” so that they, too, can enjoy eternal life.

The headlong, unquestioning zealousness of this assumption feels to me more akin to a political ideology than a religious truth… 

“You must believe what I believe, or you are lost.”

This strikes me as an inherently arrogant project.

It’s also a way of being in the world that is characteristic of a lot of Dads…

Wow…

That’s not a very flattering way to honor Dad’s, Reverend Mark.

Thankfully, I am a Dad myself, and I can speak from my own experience – that there are times when I, as a father, get all worked up about things and unfairly berate my kids for not doing things the way I want them to.

“If you don’t do it my way, you’re just being a fool, and I can’t help you.”

It may be, however, that this sensibility – this arrogant insistence that the ones we love do things the way we prescribe – may come from the fatherly desire to protect…

Do it this way, and maybe – just maybe – life will go easier on you.

Maybe – just maybe – (if you try my way of doing things) you’ll find more shady trees, and less long stretches of hot asphalt. 

It is only when I imagine the self-righteous, well-to-do status-quo Christian speaking through Jesus’ mouth, that I find his words hard to take.  

When I think of Jesus Christ’s words advocating a practice of justice seeking, I find the fatherly evangelical language much less problematic.   

If I came into a town and encountered some people wearing the white robes of the Ku Klux Klan, I would not hesitate to “shake off the dust my feet” and head out of town.  

Jesus’ warnings, if they are the warnings of a loving father, caring for an oppressed people, are frighteningly realistic:

“I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Beware of them, for they will hand you over to councils and flog you in their synagogues, and you will be dragged before governors and kings because of me…

To be a follower of Jesus – as the Indigenous activist Mark Charles recently taught impressed upon me, is to experience oppression.  

A father wants to protect his children – but the best way to do this is not to pretend that life is always in the shade of the trees.

Jesus taught us that love is the most crucial thing in human life – but he did not suggest that human life would be without suffering.  Indeed he predicted that our roads would have long stretches of blistering hot asphalt, and that our feet would burn.

Accepting suffering is part of being Christian.

Relieving suffering is part of being Christian.

Both of these things are part of what it means to be a father.

Children… be wise as serpents, and innocent as doves… cause life is not easy…

It’s hard.

But someday, maybe, we shall overcome…

And with the grace of God, I’ll meet you at the swimming hole.

Amen.