Living in coronavirusworld 234: almost here

 12/23

Central Park Harlem Meer

ready for Christmas

As our underground gathers, I’m taken by the fact that our friend Norm, venerated and erstwhile Old Testament scholar,  is wearing what is classically known as an ugly Sweater, complete with Christmas lights, at least a few of which still do light. I’m wearing a red and green Yankees hat, the only time I will ever wear a baseball cap that has not been part of an on-field game hat. (Well, about 90-95% true.) And a Uni Watch (The Obsessive Study of Athletic Aesthetics) ugly sweater sweatshirt. (Uni-watch.com)

Norm starts with a tribute to his friend John (Jack)  Elliott, who just died. Another cofounder with Norm of the Center and Library for the Study of  Bible and Social Justice at Stony Point Center. (CLPJ.org) Jack’s groundbreaking work was the study of 1Peter, argues that the community of scattered  “Stangers, pilgrims…” was in fact the 1st Century Christian Community of Asia Minor pushed to the margins of society in his book “Home for the Homeless.” Part of our work is organizing strangers. Jack by the way, led the efforts to organize the faculty at San Franciso University. 

Russ is talking about the one true Christmas Miracle, the Christmas Truce of 1914, as celebrated in the film Joyeux Noel and John McCutchen’s song, “Christmas in the Trenches.” When soldiers from both sides met in no-man’s land and refused to fight for one day, played soccer and shared songs and candy, brandy and tobacco. Of course those who participated were punished by their superiors. More disturbingly, SteveP talks about how it only took one more world war for white people to agree they weren’t going to kill each other anymore. And indeed, the wars of battle lines with their codes and rituals are no more. Most of recent wars have been  those of imperial powers against colored peoples of the  colonized world. Christmas truces can’t happen in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. It’s different.

Norm asks us to consider first violence as opposed to second violence., As drawn as we are to pacifism and non-violence, who do we deal with the challenge of Franz Fanon and his arguments in “the  Wretched of the earth” that violence may be necessary to restore dignity. Norm talks of the Haitian Revolution of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the first successful anti-colonial revolution of Black people. And how Haiti has suffered since. Even evangelical Haitians say that God punished Haiti for selling its soul to the devil.

We talk about Dre’s difficulties in getting people to join him in his “ Patterson Beautiful” project. And we talk of the issue of getting acceptance of the importance  of the vaccine in Black neighborhoods, given the horrendous history of Black Americans and the medical research  establishment with its horrendous imposed scientific experiments , etc. There is every reason to be suspicious. And yet this community disproportionately suffers from the virus. Someone says we need a “supply line of love.”

Lastly we talk about where songs from. Both Joel and I agree that they tend to organically appear. But then there’s the issue of writing as craft, and how hard that is for me. Until Steve P reminds me that as pastors, we wrote a song a week called sermons, And I realize he’s right. And how it’s only when you have put in hours of hard work that the  Holy Spirit can enter and take you to surprising new places. Sometime you don’t find them until  3am the night before your 11 am service. And we talk about boredom. And dead ends, And what to do with this dead end of a year. We’ve done a lot of hard work. Time for the Holy Spirit to step in. 

Christmas is almost here.