The Good Old Days?

 Do not remember the former things,
    or consider the things of old.
I am about to do a new thing;
    now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness
    and rivers in the desert.
--Isaiah 43:18-19 NRSV

Recently I listened to an episode of NPR’s Planet Money about the 1980 movie 9to 5 starring Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda. If you are old enough to remember the movie, I bet the theme song by Dolly Parton is already running through your head! I remember seeing it in the theater and numerous times on TV and video. This podcast episode told the back story behind the movie and I was shocked.

Since I was a child, I didn’t really understand what the movie was about. I didn’t understand that the term “sexual harassment” (much less policies and laws) hadn’t really been invented yet. Nor did I understand that the movie demonstrated what was the truth at the time (and is sadly still the truth in many companies today) that women held all the clerical and lower office jobs while only men were in management. I had no idea that many of the scenes in the movie were not over-the-top comedic situations made by Hollywood but real stories of women being chased around the office by their male bosses, forced to run menial errands by their male bosses that had nothing to do with their job descriptions and sexist and sexually suggestive comments and actions were the norm. Then and now, women were penalized at their jobs for taking time off for pregnancy, childcare issues and family emergencies. Of course there is also the drastic pay gap between men and women for the same work—even the optimistic ending of 9 to 5 demonstrated that sad reality would never change.

While 9 to 5 may have demonstrated the plight of White women of its day, it noticeably did not demonstrate the difficulties faced by non-White people of either gender. The Planet Money podcast stated there was only one non-White character who even had a speaking part in the movie. As bad as the office situation was for White women, non-White people weren’t even in the office at all.

I’m middle aged now, and I’ve begun to tell my children and remark to others about how things were ‘back in my day.” I have to remember that my nostalgia doesn’t make up for the suffering experienced by people who didn’t look like me. White folks have told me all my life about how great the 1950’s were without realizing that time was only good for them—Black and brown people did not share in those good times. I’ve realized I’m in danger of having the same kind of myopia. As much as I might look fondly back on the 1980’s, things still were quite difficult for women, non-White people and LGBTQ people. When I speak about the “good old days,” I must remember that a lot of things might have been good for me which were not shared by most other people.

History and tradition matter, but let’s not fool ourselves into thinking everything in the past was good. God has been at work in the painstaking efforts for equal rights for all people not only in the past but also today. If we aren’t careful, our discomfort with change causes us to miss the work of God in the present along with the future God intends where all God’s children have equal value in our society.

These words may come back to haunt me someday, but I hope as I age that my cherished memories of the past won’t blind me to God’s saving work in the present and future. I hope I never get so nostalgic for the “good old days” that I stop working for a better future that all can share.

Grace and Peace,
Rev. Chase Peeples

I Want To Be a Part of Brandi Carlile’s Church

Thus says the Lord God,
    who gathers the outcasts of Israel,
I will gather others to them
    besides those already gathered.
--Isaiah 56:8 NRSV

Last week I saw the headline “There’s Room For Everyone In The Church Of Brandi Carlile” and I simply had to read the article. I can’t turn away from a sentence that includes the words “everyone” and “church.” I read the piece about the Grammy-winning Country star and I heard a story both familiar and new to me.

Carlile’s music defies categories. The list of Grammys she has won reveal this truth: “Best Americana Song,” “Best American Roots Song,” and “Best Country Song.” Her success in Nashville’s music industry which is dominated by heterosexual male music is groundbreaking since she is a married lesbian. Her embrace of faith despite organized religion’s rejection of her is remarkable. She has a new memoir which reveals the complexity of her music and her person.

Here’s the paragraph in the aforementioned article by Elamin Abdelmahmoud that stood out to me:

One of the book’s most painful points is Carlile’s description of her botched baptism when she was a teenager. With all her friends and family gathered in church, a man she only names as Pastor Steve asked her if she “practiced homosexuality.” When she answered in the affirmative — something Pastor Steve already knew — he declined to baptize her. It was humiliating and life-altering for Carlile. She writes about how this moment pushed her further into music. (For days after, she could only lie in bed and listen to Jeff Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah.”)

This kind of story is familiar to me because I have heard countless tales of people being rejected by churches, especially LGBTQ people. It’s new to me, because I’ve never heard about such a rejection occurring at the moment of baptism—the symbol of both Christ’s and the Church’s acceptance of a person. I have no words for this kind of cruelty. Stories like this make me want to cuss, quit my job as a minister and never walk into a church ever again. But then, Carlile defies categories again, and instead of pointing the finger of judgment, she offers grace even to the minister who rejected her.

Humiliation like this could be anyone else’s supervillain origin story. But not Carlile’s. Her description of the episode urges restraint before judgment. I told her it read as almost protective, as though she were holding up her hand and begging the reader not to judge the pastor. Her face softened again, and she said, “No one but me saw his face. I saw what he was going through.” She means that in her deepest hurt, she allowed the inflictor to be fully human.

Grace offered to the one who hurts you is truly Christlike. It is a sad irony that the people rejected by the church so often are more Christlike than the Christians who reject them. The history of Christianity is one long list of people doing the wrong thing for what they believe are the right reasons.

As a minister, I’ve spent most of my time in churches struggling to be more inclusive and less of the rejecting sort with more failures than successes, so I wonder if I’ve missed out on what’s been happening all along outside church walls among the church’s outcasts. In Brandi Carlile’s case and apparently many other cases too, God has been gathering together all the outcasts for a different kind of church—one where there’s room for everyone. It’s as if God got tired of waiting for church as we have known it to catch up with what God has been doing all along: gathering the rejected and outcasts to create a community where none are turned away.

At the conclusion of this article, its author Abdelmahmoud describes the ending of a concert by Carlile at Nashville’s sacred Ryman Auditorium. Knowing Carlile’s history of rejection makes her moment of triumph in this cathedral of Country Music all the more sweet. This is the kind of church I want to go to, a place where the rejected ones take center stage to praise God.

That January night at the Ryman, Carlile ended the show and wrapped up her encores and the lights went out. But just before she disappeared backstage, she darted back to the center of the stage like she forgot to do the most important thing in her life.

In total darkness, her silhouette visible only by cellphone lights, she stretched out her arms. Without a microphone, she started belting out “Amazing Grace.” Her hands invited the crowd to sing along, and soon, the Mother Church was glowing with uplift and tenderness. Carlile closed her eyes, lowered her voice, and let a choir of thousands take over. 

Grace and Peace,
Chase 

 

I Wish I was a Vampire Slayer

for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 
--Romans 3:23 NIV

In recent weeks, my 14 year-old son and I have taken to watching the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer together. Thankfully, he has good taste and appreciates Buffy for the masterpiece it is. It’s been thrilling for me to return to Sunnydale, the fictional California town where Buffy and her friends encounter vampires, demons and other creatures of evil.

I draw comfort from Buffy patrolling one of Sunnydale’s way too many cemeteries (the town is located over the mouth of Hell after all). Inevitably, a vampire or three appear, fisticuffs ensue, and Buffy vanquishes each of them with a wooden stake to the heart. The show’s twenty year-old special effects mostly still hold up as each staked vampire turns to dust with a satisfying sound effect.

If only evil were that easy to destroy.

The fun in good overcoming evil as seen in popular entertainment, whether it’s the outlaw wearing the black hat being slowest on the draw or the Death Star blowing up, is the simplicity. Good wins, evil loses and that’s all folks! Real life evil is much more difficult to ferret out, because usually it wears a mask of goodness. T.S. Eliot wrote, “Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.” Similarly, Hannah Arendt who wrote about the Nazis after World War II (remember when we all agreed Nazis were bad?) noted, “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”

Growing up Southern Baptist, I was taught the “Plan of Salvation,” a list of Bible verses mostly taken out of context which explained why one needed to “accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.” One of the first verses on the list was Romans 3:23 which declares “for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” Despite this shared understanding of all people as sinners no exceptions, inevitably some sins, and therefore some sinners, were worse than others. Abortion, homosexuality and voting for Democrats were the unholy trinity of sins preachers would rail against. Of course, my twitter feed today is filled with plenty of Christians of a more progressive bent who have their favorite sinners too. It’s a lot more fun to point out evil in others than acknowledge it in oneself.

Christian theologians and ethicists, at least the responsible kind, point out that most evil in the world is of the systemic variety. Rather than individual sins, such as lying, cheating and stealing, the bulk of sin results from our corporate actions or inactions. It’s not so easy to drive a stake in the heart of racism, climate change, violence, poverty, hunger, corruption and exploitation. Thirty-Five years ago in his book Saying Yes and Saying No, Robert McAfee Brown wrote:

While there may be differing degrees of direct involvement in evil, rendering some more guilty than others, there is no point at which any of us may claim total exemption. Some are directly guilty, for example, of the ongoing humiliation of people of color—they pass antiracial laws, or they refuse to enforce existing nondiscriminatory racial antagonism, or they speak and write against minority groups. While some are directly guilty of such things, all are responsible for their continuing. Those who acquiesce in the evil done by others bear responsibility for that evil. Those who remain quiet when the demagogue speaks give their support to the demagogue. Those who remain indifferent to the quiet voices of hatred encourage such voices to speak more loudly.

Unfortunately, most of the evil in the world can’t be destroyed as simply as Buffy slays vampires, but we can learn something from Sunnydale’s leading champion of goodness: her refusal to given in to apathy or despair. She is far from perfect, but she is always up for the fight and refuses to give into excuses for staying out of it.

The first step in tackling the evil n the world is to reckon with the evil in ourselves—the kind of stuff we may not even realize resides within us. 

No, we may not be a part of the Proud Boys or the Klan, but white folks like me were raised with privileges we were unaware of due to our skin color. 

No, we may not be thieves burglarizing homes, but much of what we buy and consume came to us via workers not paid a living wage. 

No, we may not be actively dumping toxins into rivers and oceans, but each of us everyday participate in things that hurt the air, water and wildlife of God’s world. 

No, we may not have pulled the trigger in a mass shooting, but most of us refuse to be actively involved in our communities in ways that lessen violence. 

None of it is as simple as driving a stake through the heart of a vampire, but rather than giving in to despair or apathy, we can begin with examining our own lives if we wish to challenge the great evils of our world.

Grace and Peace,
Chase
 

Loving Your Neighbor Across Time

He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 
--Matthew 22:37 NRSV

Earth Day is coming up, so let me share some of my ecologically-minded musings with you.

Sometime long in the past, I can remember reading an essay by a Christian social justice advocate who was also a mom. In her essay, she complained about the amount of plastic present in the packaging of the snacks she had to bring for her kids’ soccer games. When it was her turn to be the parent providing snacks, for safety reasons she had to make sure each was individually wrapped by its producer. Rather than buying one large bag of oranges and slicing them up on her own, she had to purchase individual plastic cups of orange slices sealed with even more plastic. I remember agreeing with her about plastic waste but also thinking, “Who cares about packaged orange slices when there are giant corporations dumping toxins all over the place?”

Fast forward more years than I want to admit, and I’ve been thinking about all the plastic my family uses. Is this something that happens to people when they have children and reach middle age? I made dinner last night and all of the food came in some kind of plastic packaging, even the organic healthy stuff, and most of it was of a sort that can’t be recycled. I just stared at the packaging for a moment in amazement.

I think like most people I don’t want to pollute the environment, and I think like most people I feel sort of powerless to make change on a large enough scale to matter. When you live in a state where your politicians hold safe seats in Congress and in the state legislature AND they routinely deny climate change is real, you can write all the letters to them you want but you are just wasting paper—paper they probably won’t recycle!

I’m well aware of the good modern plastics provide for us. I’ve seen the commercials made by the plastic companies. Plastic helps save food from spoiling and waste. Plastics help save lives with advanced medicine. Plastics can be recycled. Etc. Etc.

I’m also aware that most plastic we use never gets recycled but rather goes in landfills where it will take 10,000+ years to break down. Ever since China stopped importing our recyclables some years back, the market fell for paper, cardboard, and plastic leaving recyclers with nowhere to sell the stuff we throw in the recycle bins each week. Almost daily, more news appears about the amount of microplastics in our rivers, lakes, oceans and even the air we breathe.

All of this leaves me staring at the amount of plastic involved in my family’s average meal and wondering if that meal was worth the amount of plastic that will take 10,000+ years to break down? We recycle and even wash the food particles off our plastic, because food contaminates plastic making it non-recyclable. We compost food waste, and we try to reuse plastic whenever we can. Yet, none of it seems like enough.

As a Christian, I’ve been taught all my life that the second greatest commandment is loving others as I wish to be loved. It comes right after the first commandment to love God. So many Christians envision a future that ends with a fiery cataclysm which could come any day, but those of us who reject such a view are left with an indeterminate future. This means the command to love others includes more than just people alive now but also others in the future.

Decades ago, I read a book by a Christian ethicist named Robert Parham titled Loving Our Neighbors Across Time. I’ve forgotten what the book said—probably the same stuff most environmentally conscious Christians say—but I’ve never forgotten the title. People I will never meet will live in the far future with the plastics I use every day for the most ordinary things. Jesus commanded me to love them too. It doesn’t seem very loving to leave them my mess.

If you’re reading this, maybe your reaction is like mine was years ago when I read a Christian mom’s lament over plastic-encased orange slices. You have more pressing things to worry about. Maybe sane people don’t look at their groceries and think about their neighbors centuries in the future or maybe we are all insane not to do so.

Grace and Peace,
Chase 

A Day After the Verdict, This Father is Still Afraid

This is the message I sent out the day after the guilty verdict for the murderer of George Floyd to the congregation where I am serving as interim minister, Park Hill Christian Church, Disciples of Christ.

O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer;
    and by night, but find no rest.
--Psalm 22:2 NRSV

Not quite a year ago, PHCC folks showed grace to me.

The Sunday after George Floyd was killed by a police officer who kneeled on his neck for over nine minutes cutting off his air supply, I just had to share with you some of my pain from the pulpit. As an interim minister during the Covid pandemic, I wanted to keep my sermons on relatively non-controversial ground, but as the father of two black sons I couldn’t stay in “safe” territory.

First, I shared my fears of being misunderstood. I shared my fears of being misunderstood as hating all police officers, judging all police by the bad actions of only some, saying the wrong thing which would shut down dialogue rather than creating opportunities for understanding and leaving people feeling judged.

Then I shared my pain that every time I saw video of a black man getting killed by police I could only see my sons. I asked if there was enough room at PHCC to share my fear and pain as the white father of two black teenage boys?

You responded with a gracious “yes.”

Today I still have the same fears: fears of being misunderstood and fears for my sons’ lives.

Not quite eleven months later, the officer who killed George Floyd has been convicted of murder. I feel relieved for the verdict but no less afraid for my sons. Each day seems to bring news of another black teenager shot by police. Each day still seems to bring news of a traffic stop over something inconsequential leading to a dead black man. Both of my sons will soon be driving on their own, which is scary enough for any parent, but I also think about what if one or both of my sons does something stupid or reckless or nothing at all and ends up shot and killed.

I’m grateful for the guilty verdict in the case of George Floyd’s murderer, but I’m no less afraid for my boys than I was yesterday before the verdict was announced. So, I’m asking you again if there is room at PHCC for me and my fear? Can I share it without folks jumping to one side or another, repeating the arguments of cable news pundits? Can I share my fear of being a white man ill-equipped to prepare black sons for the conscious and unconscious prejudice they will face? Can the parents of white children imagine what it would be like if their kids were judged the same way black kids are judged? Is such a space even possible in our day and time?

I wish I could speak authoritatively about systemic racism in our culture, but the more I learn as a white man about the white privilege I was raised with, the less I know for sure. My own sense of what safety and security mean in our culture goes out the window when I think about what might happen to my sons. I don’t know much for sure other than fear.

So, I name that fear before you in the hopes you can hear it for what it is and the hopes you won’t judge or condemn me for what it is not.

This morning Chalice Press, the Disciples of Christ publisher, sent out the following prayer. It seems like a good one for me to pray. I invite you to join me.

O God, Creator of each and every one of us,

We pray for justice.

We pray for the family of George Floyd.

We pray for those who fear each day they will be the next George Floyd.

We pray for those taking to the streets—to acknowledge justice served, to protest and work where injustice remains. For all, we pray for their safety.

We pray for those who argue this verdict and hope they will someday see the error in their ways. 

We pray we will all learn how to repent of the sins of racism: where we see it in others and where it lives in us, the sin we commit knowingly and the sin we may never recognize.

Above all, we pray and work for peace. Always, always peace.

Amen.

Grace and Peace,
Chase