Thursday's NYT obituary, and Sunday's column by Nicholas Kristof, reflecting on the life, ministry, and leadership of the Reverend John "Uncle John" Stott, are well worth reading. Kristof's piece is golden.
I had the opportunity to meet Stott, and hear him teach, several years ago in Birmingham, Alabama. Reading about him now makes me all the more grateful for that privilege.
May he rest in peace.
Pictured: Photo by Richard Perry, The New York Times. The Rev. John Stott at Trinity Church in Manhattan in 2006. Mr. Stott exerted influence largely through his many books.
"I can only say that segregation is wrong today, it was wrong yesterday. Segregation was never right. But it is one of the most lamentable frailties of mankind that when one's wrong is most grievous, his self-justification is most passionate, perhaps in the pitiful hope that the fervor of his self-defense will somehow prove him right. But this doesn't make it so. And he doesn't fool himself."
Richard Poff spoke these words, in the summer of 1971, as he looked back, with apparent regret, on his anti-civil-rights voting record in Congress, where he represented Virginia's Sixth District. Poff died last month and this passage appeared in his New York Times obituary of July 1.
Back in 1971, Poff was hoping for a U.S. Supreme Court nomination, thus the sincerity of his statement could be questioned. Regardless, there was and still is wisdom in his words, insight into the human heart, and the human condition, insight which, if indeed we are at all awake to our own frailties, we will recognize from our own lived experience.
+
Yes, accountability is essential to any healthy human community, be it a nation, a congregation, or a family. Compassionate and mutual accountability. But, of course, for accountability to go anywhere, anywhere at all; for accountability to bear fruit, there must be a receptivity, an openness to receiving new and uncomfortable truth about ourselves.
May it be. May it be so, dear God, in our hearts, and in our own lives. For our own sake, and for the sake of those around us.
"Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope...Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness."
On this Eleventh Day of Christmas, we pass along to you (with permission) this friendly note from Amy Grigg about attending Christmas worship at St. Paul's:
Good morning, Rev. Adams-Riley,
Christmas was made richer for my daughters and me by attending the Christmas day service at St. Paul's. Later in the afternoon I paged through the New York Times and saw the following editorial with recipes for the Christmas tree. Perhaps you saw it, but if not, I've attached the link below.
A NYT editorial yesterday, with the above title, holds forth on the opportunity that the current Congress has to put an end to an unjust policy: discriminating against gay and lesbian Americans serving in our armed forces. If this Congress fails to do the right thing, surely another Congress will rise to the occasion. That being said, let's pray that this Congress makes the most of its last chance.
Also, in the name of equality, this week we released our next testimonial for the "It Gets Better/Faith Gets Better" campaign in response to suicides by teenagers bullied because of their sexual orientation. Lori Plumley, a member of Three Chopt Presbyterian Church in Richmond, reached out after learning about "Faith Gets Better" from her friend and St. Paul's parishioner Nita Jones. You can watch her video (recorded and posted with her daughter's blessing) below or on the St. Paul's YouTube Channel.
A Tuesday NYT article on the Sesquicentennial is well worth a read. My favorite line is from Mark Potok, Director of Intelligence at the Southern Poverty Law Center, "These battles of memory are not only academic. They are really about present-day attitudes."
May God help us to have the courage, compassion, and good judgment to take this opportunity (the Sesquicentennial) to do something authentic and something for the common good.
Amen, amen.
Pictured: A depiction of the battle at Fort Sumter (The New York Times)
I've written here before about Verlyn Klinkenborg and his gift with the language. His piece yesterday, "Seasonal Slippage," is wonderfully evocative, calling us into the present season and the present moment.
PS: The image above is an iPhone pic I snapped over near Fredericksburg yesterday. It's not hard to visualize Klinkenborg in the yard there, in his barn jacket.
"Let us pray on this anniversary that his service and sacrifice will be redeemed in the Holy Land and that all of us, wherever we live, whatever our capacity, will do our part to build a world where cooperation triumphs over conflict. Rabin’s spirit continues to light the path, but we must all decide to take it."
Tony Horwitz's Sunday NYT column, "The 150-Year War" is superb: he writes about the Civil War as
"a national reserve of words, images and landscapes, a storehouse we can tap in lean times like these, when many Americans feel diminished, divided and starved for discourse more nourishing than cable rants and Twitter feeds."
Amen, man! Beautiful!
And he goes on to speak of the land (our land) itself as "a vast and accessible Yosemite of memory."
Wow!
Above is a picture I took at Malvern Hill just yesterday. As Horwitz says, "In an electronics-saturated age, battlefield parks also force us to exercise our atrophied imaginations."
As we lean into the Sesquicentennial, let us pray, indeed, that the Spirit helps us exercise our imaginations, for the sake of our country, and, for that matter, for the sake of the world.
And, let us pray, may this season of reflection open us to fresher and more courageous ways of being Americans.
And, of course, this Christmas, tonight, and tomorrow, new memories are being made; a Carol sung, pure and exquisite; an old friend; warm, endearing words exchanged; a first Christmas for a new grandbaby; a candle lit, a face aglow, eyes agleam.
More than fifty times, in his published writings, Barth refers to the Grunewald image; and, indeed, usually, it is precisely in reference to John, and John’s relation to the figure of Christ; as he points.
Barth (and Grunewald before him) understood John’s sole purpose to be to serve as a pointer to Christ, a reference to Christ, a witness to Christ.
Subscribe via RSS
Thursday's NYT obituary, and Sunday's column by Nicholas Kristof, reflecting on the life, ministry, and leadership of the Reverend John "Uncle John" Stott, are well worth reading. Kristof's piece is golden.
On this Eleventh Day of Christmas, we pass along to you (with permission) this friendly note from Amy Grigg about attending Christmas worship at St. Paul's:
