Actually, The Apology Is Owed to God

David said it best in Psalm 51: “Against you, and you alone, have I sinned; I have done what is evil in your sight.” When we wrong others the ultimate offense is always against God.

I boldly I confess that all of my own past acts of insult or injury had some gradation of premeditation and purpose, and not just in the heat of the moment.  In other words, I meant to do them, seeking my own remedy, personal satisfaction, or some kind of attention-getting rise.  I feel confident that a rational (or rabid) sense of intention and accomplishment rested behind each and every action or statement for which I later apologized, but rarely to God.  

I wish others were willing to admit the same, because the many recent publicly-aired apologies of news and radio moguls, who know better, have become sickening. They are the smooth-over that pleads, “I know I have compromised my [already-sorely questionable] credibility and integrity, but I’m essentially doing this to beg to keep my job”.  The substance of these apologies is irrelevant, but we have come to expect them as America’s public appeasement, ignoring the fact that passionate remorse is difficult enough to convey, and exponentially so when the plea was preceded, just days before by venomous, libelous, misogynist, bigoted, or racist insults.

I suspect that Rush Limbaugh, Franklin Graham, and even my beloved Ed Schultz from the Ed Show, all know, as well as I do, that the silver bullet insult that fires from the mouth of your spouse or loved one is forever suspended in the air. All the flowers, gifts, diamonds, even great make-up sex, will not erase the sound of the “B”, “C”, or “D” words in the heat of an argument.  It's an even higher hurdle with a stranger, which is absent the covenantal safety net.

This week’s Gospel lectionary of Jesus turning over the tables of the money-changers in the temple is the kind of anger that will never need an apology, because it establishes that an insult against God is the ultimate insult.  Similarly, when we defile another’s personhood, integrity, intelligence, faith tradition, or humanity, we negate God’s holy creation, and the divinity for which each and every one of us was created. Matthew Fox aptly called it, Original Blessing.

During Black History Month worship services in white churches I have experienced White members passively, but passionately, apologizing to me for the centuries of oppression, suppression, and dehumanization against my African ancestors.  This always made me uncomfortable, because the fact is that those acts were everything but passive. They were blatant acts of cruelty and violence. They were done with calculated evil and conviction, supported by carefully legislated laws, and laced with thin and blasphemous attempts at corroborating them with Biblical principles. The true offense was, and still is, against God.  If anyone needs an apology, it's God.

I would like to hear Rush, Franklin and Ed take a lesson from King David and apologize publicly to God, and then maybe I will believe they are sincere.  

Franklin Graham Falls Far from the Tree AND Rolls Down a Hill

Bill Maher said it best regarding President Obama: “It’s not that these folks don’t like the food or the restaurant; they don’t like the waiter”.  Whatever he brings is unacceptable.  President Obama has persistently shown amazing calm and integrity in the face of so much ignorance. This should only serve to illumine his intellectual brilliance and character in the face of our unabashedly Babylonian Capitol Hill. Instead, it appears that too many Republicans, including those who could not negotiate their way into a bathroom stall with a full bladder, will raise any unfounded argument in an attempt to discredit him. My Mom used to say, “A drowning man will grab at straw.”  If it’s not the birth certificate, it’s his profession of faith, or it’s ridiculously disjointed statements like: “The Muslims define him as Muslim so he must be Muslim”.  Franklin Graham’s recent statements questioning the President’s Christianity are an international, racism-loaded travesty.  So what else do you think, Franklin? Is the Dalai Lama really a closet Pentecostal?

Billy Graham doesn’t have to wait to turn over in his grave; he’s probably doing donuts in his wheelchair in lamentation of his son’s humiliating ignorance. I suspect Billy’s most private moments might include some Job-like responses, such as rent garments and ashes on his head.  Franklin has proved that this apple has not only fallen far, far from the tree, but rolled down a hill into an abyss of theological ignorance.  

In Romans 10:9, Paul made it plain and simple: Confess with your mouth and believe in your heart.  The President has unapologetically and unwaveringly professed Jesus Christ with his mouth on national TV and in print several times, sometimes making emphatic statements affirming the Resurrection.  I don’t foresee him recanting this after he’s re-elected in November or even years from now.  In my own, albeit naïve, discernment I cannot imagine him stating at some future point that he “exercised a critical lapse in judgment”, in professing Jesus Christ.  

Well, Franklin, if you’re not satisfied with the verbal confession, do you wanna try your hand at medicine, too, and prove that you can botch a coronary exploration into the heart of a man of such integrity?   (Hint: Why don’t you leave the "heart" part up to God?)

Baby Boomer Check-In

We Baby Boomers have lived the gamut of racial iterations. From civil disobedience to urban infernos to Molotov cocktails, from KKK to Black Panthers to Skin Heads, from peaceful marches and unifying fire and brimstone speeches, to fire hoses, tear-gas and German shepherd attack dogs. Many of us were in grammar school during the Civil Rights era and in high school or college when race riots and unrest blazed across college campuses and major cities in the North and South. And we were just coming of age when Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X were killed.

It seems that all of a sudden, after being baptized by fire (literally) in cities and on college campuses and singing pop songs that didn’t just rap, but preached and proselytized, we were somehow lulled to sleep in our corporate or nonprofit jobs. Those moral and ethical compasses of music and dissension were traded for mind-numbing and socially deceiving “diversity” training. We responded like the nation of sheep that we are. In no time, most of what was supposed to be open and transforming discussion about the messed up muck of white racism against African Americans in this country got trumped by women’s rights and further diluted with the concerns of everybody else’s disenfranchisement. And I mean everybody.

I remember a water-cooler conversation with a white guy on my job, who was of European descent. He went on and on about the historical violence of one group of Europeans against another, and I thought, “I’ll never explain to this guy that when he and I walk into the same job interview, the fact that he’s white gives him an advantage, even if he’s as dumb as a rock.” He’ll spend the first 20 minutes establishing that he’s as dumb as dirt, because the interviewer will have trouble believing it; and I’ll spend the first 20 minutes proving that I’m not, because the interviewer will expect me to be. 

One of the funniest skits I ever saw on Saturday Night Live was when Dan Akroyd and some other well-groomed, corporate-looking white guys in business suits were on a fictitious talk show demanding that white men need to have their rights acknowledged, too – that they just wanted to be heard as white men, and were tired of being overlooked and ignored. It was hilarious! The minority melting pot had raised enough steam to cloud even white male dominance, and they were suddenly the ones pushed to the margins.

The point is that as a nation, we never got around to fixing the lingering problem between African Americans and white people – not outside the church and certainly not inside the church. No wonder so many of the most prejudiced people are adamant that they are not racist.  They thought that getting paid to sit through mandatory sensitivity training of a sort would heal them of all hatred and disdain. They thought all they had to do was learn to be curious and nice. How sadly naïve.

So I just heard through a casual conversation about a white church that is strongly resisting the cross-racial appointment of a black pastor. The gripe, which was publicly verbalized, is that their white church will eventually end up “filled with [black people] or “their kind”.  Is this a form of xenophobia? Are we still considered foreigners and strangers? Haven't we been American long enough to render our African side less foreign by now, especially in worship?

Yesterday I felt trapped by a parishioner who was negatively surprised that I support President Obama, because “sources claim that he is Muslim”. I went into this long explanation about how I had been to Trinity UCC in Chicago and there seemed to be residual admiration from years before for the grassroots work that he and Michelle did there early in their legal careers, and that he was a good and faithful Christian by all accounts – a pillar of the church and the community. I ended up down a rabbit trail about religion and politics. Good grief!

I was in junior high school when Dr. King was assassinated, so I’ve been around for a lot of the more recent struggles that led to this moment in history when a black man is President in America. So what I really wanted to say is: I’m black and clergy, he’s the first black President of the United States of America, and he openly professes Jesus Christ as his personal Savior. Vote cast.  

In fact, the night President Obama was elected, the very first phone call I got at around 11pm was from an elderly white male who grew up in Central Pennsylvania and still lives in the same farmhouse he was born in, in what is still an overwhelmingly white neighborhood.  (I was surprised he was still awake). He called to congratulate me. He said that he could only imagine what this triumph meant to me. I’ll never forget that.

In one of his outrageous stand-up comedy routines Chris Rock goes on a tirade declaring that doctors do not cure anything [expletive]. According to Chris, “the money is in the medicine”, and we are duped into a pharmaceutical malaise that is mediated by doctors, who are, in religious terminology, “fleecing the flock” while trying to push research and drugs.  It’s a disturbing observation, but he manages to make it comical.

This led me to think of the churches that on a denominational level tout a strategic mission of “curing” racism. Their goal is to “eliminate racism”, by engaging tactics of “healing the wounds” caused by it.  How arrogant and unrealistic is this goal for the church against the Jeremiah Chapter 30 prophecy that our “wound is incurable”?  For the most part, the success of our fight against this universal human indignity is gauged by activities, such as seminars, consortiums, retreats, and conferences, fronted by the kamikaze missions of cross-racial appointments.  Similar to Chris Rock’s observations of doctors and medicine, when we gather to “deal” with racism, there is money in it for the hotels, restaurants, airlines, trains, gas stations, printers and publishers, retreat centers and monastic communities.  Meanwhile, there is no real evidence of cure. We are pursuing healing for a human condition that human beings simply cannot make happen.  Jeremiah gave us a hint that some wounds are simply incurable. Just as our faithfulness relies on and derives from God’s great faithfulness, the cure for human ills is found in Christ alone through the Holy Spirit.  Only God’s mercy can prepare our hearts to be led by the Holy Spirit to speak the truth in love as Christ would do. In and of ourselves, we will never cure or eliminate racism, not even within the church. We’re obsessed and enamored with the distractions, which is where the money is. 

In the year-end fog of Advent I recall finding a moment to read an article on a major network’s website that was very offensive to 2nd-, 3rd-, and 4th-career clergy.  (This includes me). The article berated the “wave” of lazy, lecherous baby boomers, who are, purportedly, flocking in droves to seminaries for MDiv degrees. The article accuses these opportunistic wanderers of irresponsibly racking up mounds of student loan debt so they can leave the stress of the corporate workplace in order to pursue cushy preacher jobs, get free housing, nominal, flexible work hours, and free vacation expense accounts masked as retreats - in other words, retire comfortably. As soon as I read most of the article, I thought of my 60-plus year-old female colleague, who, after retiring from 30 years as an administrator, forged through a grueling ordination process to earn her clergy credentials.  She confided in me that in a church of about 200 members, she had officiated 15 funerals in less than a year – essentially more than 1 per month.  Another friend who had been serving a church for less than two years shared that she had done just as many in half that time. 

The love, devotion and commitment required of a servant leader can take its toll, and it was not much different for Jesus Christ.  My colleagues and I are not quite sweating blood, but this is a cup many of us would often like to pass and let someone else take our sip.  Only a divine calling could strengthen me enough to think nothing of someone sobbing snot into my dry-clean-only clergy robe, or cry on my shoulder so uncontrollably, that I can feel their tears trickling into my inner-ear; or to go from the intensive care unit to the cancer unit after having waited an hour for someone to come back from diagnostic testing, and then heading for the dark trip alone back to the Center City parking garage.

Serving in a cross-racial or cross-cultural appointment is an added layer of confluence that should be the least of our issues, but unfortunately, it’s not.  There are often some triumphs and victories that propel us forward through the work of the Holy Spirit. I recall my Korean colleague who could not get a dying black parishioner to look at her during a hospital visit, but melted into a smile when she began to sing. And I have learned that an elderly parishioner, who has made racist comments, could care less how dark or kinky-haired I am when I am standing by their hospital bed on Christmas Eve night reading Luke 2.  I’ve learned that the parishioner who describes me as the “colored” pastor is quick to request that I sing an a cappella spiritual at the graveside when they die. 

Suffering and mourning are no better relieved when the skin of hands that are joined in prayer or the cheeks that touch in comfort, are the same color.  And no baby boomers in their right (or wrong) minds would voluntarily spend the latter of their natural days suffering and mourning on a regular and unpredictable basis with, for the most part, social and cultural strangers.  It’s hardly a prudent or desirable retirement plan.  It’s a high calling for a peculiar people.