Today is the U.S. holiday that commemorates the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. One not-well-known fact about Dr. King’s life and work—a fact that should hold some particular interest for Presbyterians in these parts (western North Carolina)—is that Dr. King spoke at Montreat Conference Center in the summer of 1965, shortly after the Watts riots. A couple of years ago, the conference center played the audiotape of his address on the evening of the 2008 King holiday for folks, myself included, who happened to be attending a youth ministry conference that was going on at the time.

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Dr. King’s speech, delivered in Montreat’s Anderson Auditorium on the afternoon of 21 August 1965, was obviously one he had delivered many times, but it was no less powerful for that. It contained many of the famous lines—we might call them sound bites—for which Dr. King is remembered:

• “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
• “Time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. . . . Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God. . . . We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”
• And the stirring peroration: “. . . This will be a great day. It will not be the day of the white man; it will not be the day of the black man; it will be the day of man as man. And this will be the day that all over this great nation, all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Catholics and Protestants, will be able to join hands and sing, in the words of the old Negro spritual, ‘Free at last, free at last; thank God almighty, we are free at last!’”

What’s so interesting and powerful about hearing these famous lines in the context of an hour-long speech, though, is that you realize they were more than sound bites—that they were in fact tightly linked building blocks in an amazingly tightly constructed argument.

The address had three major parts: (i) a call for an end to racial segregation; (ii) a deconstruction of racial prejudice; and (iii) a defense of social action—an emphasis on the here and now rather than on the great hereafter—by Christian churches. Indeed, running through all three parts of the speech was a call for the church to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem—no small thing, and certainly not a proposition that Dr. King or anyone else in 1965 could have taken for granted. (It’s also notable that Dr. King clearly felt that the church did in fact have the power to make a difference in society, whether for good or evil—not necessarily something that we might assume in our “postmodern” context, forty-three years later.)

Dr. King concluded by building and sharing a vision of the “beloved community,” grounded in love of enemies and an embrace of the philosophy of nonviolent resistance (a particularly salient point in light of Watts). Hearing Dr. King’s elaboration on the concept of nonviolence was another reminder of how we today may not understand his ideas and his approach as well as we might think, for this nonviolence was in no way passivity or weakness or submission—rather, it was both strategy and tactic, and it was aggressive in an entirely countercultural way: you can beat us up, but we’re going to keep loving you until we wear you down.

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And so there we were, on that King holiday in 2008, a bunch of privileged (mostly white) people, conscious, thanks to a lecture we’d all heard earlier in the day, of how little we’d accomplished so far in our lives, in a conference room with the lights turned down low, listening to the scratchy, somewhat muffled audio record of a piece of history that too many of us think of as, well, history. But it’s history that happened in the month when I was born I was born, in the state where I was born, in a room whose toilets I’ve scrubbed—and to my mind, at least, those elements of closeness brought those events out of history’s fog, if only for a day.

—Dwight Christenbury

In case you missed it, a powerful and moving (and even humorous) prayer was delivered at today’s inauguration of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth President of the United States—the benediction pronounced by the Rev. Joseph Lowery (you may recognize the first paragraph as the words of James Weldon Johnson’s great hymn Lift Every Voice and Sing, which, yes, was sung last Sunday at Trinity):

“God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, thou who has brought us thus far along the way; thou who has by thy might led us into the light, keep us forever in the path, we pray, lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met thee, lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget thee. Shadowed beneath thy hand may we forever stand—true to thee, O God, and true to our native land.

“We truly give thanks for the glorious experience we’ve shared this day. We pray now, O Lord, for your blessing upon thy servant, Barack Obama, the 44th president of these United States, his family and his administration. He has come to this high office at a low moment in the national and, indeed, the global fiscal climate. But because we know you got the whole world in your hand, we pray for not only our nation, but for the community of nations. Our faith does not shrink, though pressed by the flood of mortal ills.

“For we know that, Lord, you’re able and you’re willing to work through faithful leadership to restore stability, mend our brokenness, heal our wounds and deliver us from the exploitation of the poor or the least of these and from favoritism toward the rich, the elite of these.

“We thank you for the empowering of thy servant, our 44th president, to inspire our nation to believe that, yes, we can work together to achieve a more perfect union. And while we have sown the seeds of greed—the wind of greed and corruption—and even as we reap the whirlwind of social and economic disruption, we seek forgiveness and we come in a spirit of unity and solidarity to commit our support to our president by our willingness to make sacrifices, to respect your creation, to turn to each other and not on each other.

“And now, Lord, in the complex arena of human relations, help us to make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion, not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance.

“And as we leave this mountaintop, help us to hold on to the spirit of fellowship and the oneness of our family. Let us take that power back to our homes, our workplaces, our churches, our temples, our mosques, or wherever we seek your will.

“Bless President Barack, First Lady Michelle. Look over our little, angelic Sasha and Malia.

“We go now to walk together, children, pledging that we won’t get weary in the difficult days ahead. We know you will not leave us alone, with your hands of power and your heart of love.

“Help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nation shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid; when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.

“Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right.

“Let all those who do justice and love mercy say amen.”

—Dwight Christenbury

Ever dreamed of reading John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion from cover to cover? No, seriously—stick with me . . .

I’ve recently discovered, thanks to my wife’s parents, that the Foundation for Reformed Theology, in honor of the 500th anniversary of Calvin’s birth, has come up with a plan by which one can read the entire Institutes in the course of one calendar year (sort of like one of those read-the-Bible-in-a-year programs), and you can do it by reading only about seven pages per day. (You even get weekends off!) To get a copy of the plan, click here.

Institutes of the Christian Religion is Calvin’s major work—really his life’s work. It is the foundational work of Reformed theology and an important basis (some would argue the entire basis) of Presbyterianism. If you’re Presbyterian and you’ve always wondered who this Calvin character was and what he had to say, then this is your chance to find out!

If you’re interested and could use some help getting a copy of the Institutes, post a comment to this entry, send me an e-mail (dc [dot] trinity [at] mac [dot] com), or give me a call. And if you can’t quite picture yourself actually reading the Institutes but wish that someone else would, I’m going to give it a try and will occasionally post reflections on my reading on this blog.

Happy new year!

—Dwight Christenbury

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

(John 1.1-5)

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Forty years ago today, the astronauts aboard the Apollo 8 spacecraft, orbiting the moon, took the now-famous picture known as “Earthrise.” That day, in The New York Times, the poet and playwright Archibald MacLeish wrote, “To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”

As an editorial in today’s Times points out, such optimism was a bit overstated. Still, if you can imagine seeing that picture of the Earth in space as if for the first time, it’s hard not to be awestruck by the wonders of creation. The writer of John’s gospel had no idea what the Earth looked like from space, but his words are (or should be) awe-inspiring in their own way. The light indeed shines in the darkness. . . .

All the best wishes for a peaceful and happy Christmas!

—Mark Stanley, Joe Gernoske, and Dwight Christenbury

P.S. For another lovely reflection on “Earthrise,” see Oliver Morton’s piece, “Not-So-Lonely Planet.”

[Welcome! If this is your first visit to On Faith and Life, note that entries appear on the page with the most recent at the top. Scroll down to our inagural entry, “Trinity 2.0,” for a primer on what this blog is all about.]

There are a couple of interesting pieces about Thanksgiving on the op/ed page of today’s New York Times. The first, “Where the Wild Things Were,” by Andrew Beahrs, examines the likely Thanksgiving menu from the 1621 celebration at Plymouth, Massachusetts, as well as a menu crafted by Mark Twain in the late nineteenth century, and traces how our “traditional” Thanksgiving meal has changed over the past four centuries. How do deer, ducks and geese, gooseberries, wild plums, lobsters, and “eels ‘trod’ from the nearby salt marsh” strike you?

The piece, which documents the disappearance of wild food from our dinner tables, ends with a sobering look at part of the reason why:

“The Pilgrims appreciated wild foods for their contribution to survival; Twain, for their taste and their hold on his memory. All saw the foods as fundamental to the America they knew. None would have imagined that many would one day be seen as curiosities.

“But with the exception of fish, today it is vanishingly rare to find wild foods in our marketplaces. The 10 million prairie hens in the Illinois of Twain’s day have diminished to a mere 300 birds; his terrapin struggle to survive amid wounded Eastern wetlands; his titanic Lahontan cutthroat ‘lake trout, from Tahoe’ were killed off by over-fishing and the introduction of invasive species. Tasting some of Twain’s wild things is impossible or illegal, with more limited to dedicated hunters and fishermen.

“Preserving or restoring the wild foods that remain begins with appreciating what they have to offer—extraordinary taste and smell, certainly, but also the joy of experiencing the marshes and mountains and lakes these plants and birds and animals rely upon. We have a great deal to learn from Twain’s instinctive premise: that losing a wild food means losing part of the landscape of our lives.”

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The second piece, “A French Connection,” by Kenneth C. Davis, reminds us of a little-known early New World Thanksgiving that preceded the Pilgrims of Plymouth by fifty years. A French Huguenot community, fleeing religious persecution in Europe, settled near present-day Jacksonville, Florida, in 1564, and Davis tells us that they held a service of “thanksgiving” as soon as they landed.

Sadly, these early settlers were massacred just a year later by the Spanish. The Spanish admiral who oversaw the operation hanged a number of the victims beneath a sign reading, “I do this not as to Frenchmen but as to heretics”—and a long early American tradition of stamping out religious dissent had begun:

“Starting with those massacred French pilgrims, the saga of the nation’s birth and growth is often a bloodstained one, filled with religious animosities. In Boston, for instance, the Puritan fathers banned Catholic priests and executed several Quakers between 1659 and 1661. Cotton Mather, the famed Puritan cleric, led the war cries against New England’s Abenaki ‘savages’ who had learned their prayers from the French Jesuits. The colony of Georgia was established in 1732 as a buffer between the Protestant English colonies and the Spanish missions of Florida; its original charter banned Catholics. The bitter rivalry between Catholic France and Protestant England carried on for most of a century, giving rise to anti-Catholic laws, while a mistrust of Canada’s French Catholics helped fire many patriots’ passion for independence. As late as 1844, Philadelphia’s anti-Catholic ‘Bible Riots’ took the lives of more than a dozen people.

“The list goes on. Our history is littered with bleak tableaus that show what happens when righteous certitude is mixed with fearful ignorance. . . .”

As we celebrate Thanksgiving, grateful for the blessings of family, community, and nation, let’s also remember where we’ve come from and use what we’ve learned to work toward a world in which religious violence everywhere might begin to seem as strange and distant as it does here.

—Dwight Christenbury