“Rage the flower thrower” is street art inspired by San Francisco artist Banksy in the late 1960’s

The following post departs from the direction taken when the blog began its focus on our experience of living in San Luis Potosí México and serving with the joint Roundtable of the Disciples of Christ and Congregational Churches of México. Since our return to the States in 2015, harsh cariacatures of Mexican immigrants and immigrants from other countries have helped elect a U.S. President with a history of bigotry and racism. Building the wall along the U.S.- Mexican border has become a major theme as well as a continuing aim of the Trump Administration.

While the wall is now for many in the U.S. the most blatant example of the anti-human, nonsensical policies of this Administration, the real threat may lie ahead. The blog article below is published on the 50th Anniversary of the My Lai massacre on March 16, 1968. More than 400 old men, women and children, in a South Vietnamese peasant village lost their lives that day. Since then, there have been civilian massacres perpetrated by U.S. troops or U.S. trainees, war planes and now drones in Central America, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere. Some are asking how much farther astray must our nation go before we seriously pursue the things that make for peace.

Like many adults in the U.S. today, I am deeply troubled by how my tax dollars are spent for war and an already massive military U.S. footprint around the world. How could a nation with a long, rich history of religious belief and practice, the nation with more Christians than any other, have become the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” in the words of Rev. Martin Luther King? This blog will in the future be more theological in purpose, tone and subject matter if one embraces as I do the definition of theology as “faith in search of understanding”.

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The COURAGE of WEAKNESS

Anointing of Jesus at Bethany. Image from mudpreacher.org

I’ve been thinking a lot about courage these days. Courage in the face of health challenges, rejection, scorn, and death. I’ve been thinking of how my views on courage have changed during my lifetime.

As an eight year old and for most years of my childhood, courage took on the contours of heroism in battles. Battles of the cowboys against the Indians, of young men defending the homeland against whatever forces might menace us. As I entered college in 1964 courage was represented by the life of the recently assassinated John F. Kennedy who had commanded a PT Boat during WW II combat in the Pacific.

Then came Vietnam and wrestling with the “truth” of that War, the “truth” that is always “the first casualty in war” as the playwright Aeschylus wrote. I opposed the War and wrote a fourteen page single spaced statement for my draft board in filing for conscientious objector status. I was determined to oppose not just what the U.S. war machine was doing in Vietnam to the Vietnamese people but for what it would do in the present and the future to our nation.

Since Vietnam I have experienced the constant armed combat and arms buildup as our nation’s response to perceived threats off our shores and far away. There was no scaling down of our defense budget after Vietnam and there has been no “peace dividend” after the fall of our “Communist” adversary as represented by the Soviet Union. The fall of the Berlin Wall meant we could stand alone as the great “Superpower” in the world so we continued an unprecedented defense buildup to maintain our status as a “superpower” and further our “national interest”.

It is as though our victories in war from the American Revolution through WW II had given us sole possession of Aladdin’s lamp and the right to ask for one wish from the genie within. Vietnam might have taught our foreign policy strategists and our military that no weight of military buildup and deployment can subdue a people organized for resistance and liberation from foreign control and prepared to make great sacrifices to get it. The genie granted our wish for ultimate, unmatched military weaponry and killing power. As a result, we continue to suffer the consequences of “truth” being the “first casualty in war” in our civic dialog and the loss of tens of thousands of lives in Iraq and Afghanistan in our history as a “superpower”.

The death of my “Uncle Jim”, the last family member of my parents’ generation, last week took my thoughts on courage in another direction. I began thinking of my elders who displayed courage in their lives and none of the examples involved heroism on the battlefield of armed warfare.
The first story that came to mind was of the young seminary graduate Rev. Thomas J. Liggett in his first pastorate out of seminary. The Sunday following Pearl Harbor, on December 14, 1941 members of his small town church in Kentucky were greeted in the narthex by a photo mounted on a makeshift altar. Everyone entering the sanctuary passed by the portrait of a Japanese Christian T.J. Liggett had met, seated with his family.

Rev. Liggett served as a missionary in Argentina and Puerto Rico before becoming President of Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis. On accepting that position he told the trustees he couldn’t accept their salary package. It was too much he told them, even for a family with two children, and his wife, Virginia, confronted by fragile health. So the trustees eventually persuaded “TJ” to accept a package that included a larger pension from the seminary. My father had told me that story as a form of encouragement in my first years out of seminary.

My Uncle Jim Craddock earned a degree in aeronautical engineering as a member of the ROTC at Virginia Tech during WW II. He trained pilots after the War ended but never experienced combat himself. I associated “Uncle Jim” with courage after his retirement from a long lasting pastorate in the suburbs of Indianapolis. His last years at the church saw a dramatic demographic change in the area as African American families found relatively inexpensive housing there away from the inner city. That congregation is now a thriving African American faith community. Uncle Jim remained an active member, worshipping every Sunday and focusing his giving there. In the eyes of our American culture he had become a distinct minority in a majority black church. In my eyes he is a man of real courage.

There are many models of courage in the Bible stories. Some quickly come to mind like Daniel, Samson, Esther, the prophet Nathan and the powerful man Nathan warned, David. But the profile in courage I’ve come to focus on in recent years is the woman who anoints Jesus as told about in two of the Gospels. Her behavior, and perhaps her reputation, makes her an object of scorn but Jesus praises her passionate devotion to Him and leaves us with the assurance that her story will be told as long as His Gospel is preached.

Her story leads me to close this meditation on courage with Paul’s words which come as close as any for me to summing up the “good news” of Jesus: “Consider your own call, brothers and sisters, not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.” I CO 1:26-29

Prayer: Loving, merciful God, lead us to the faith and to the “love that casts out fear” in our living now and in the future. Amen.