Memories of The East Grand Rapids Tornado 50 Years Ago

Memories of The East Grand Rapids Tornado 50 Years Ago

Douglas B. Olds (photos and text, all rights reserved)

April 2017

           Date      Magnitude          Start Lat/Log           End Lat/Log               Length       Width    

   1967-04-21          3              42°54'N / 85°46'W    42°57'N / 85°30'W    13.60 mi      400yds 

Fatalities              Injuries                Property Damage            Crop Damage     Affected County

            0              32                             25.0M                                     0                      Kent

--http://www.usa.com/east-grand-rapids-mi-natural-disasters-extremes.htm

Friday, April 21, 1967.  It had been an unusually hot and humid day, and I had stripped down to my t-shirt on the walk home from 2nd grade at Breton Downs Elementary. I stopped and played in the 2x4 and plywood skeletons of houses under construction on the newly cut Whitfield Road--blond architectural bones under a hazy blue sky. One was upon construction moved into by Brian McNamara's family. By dinner time it was stormy, and at 7pm my two younger brothers and I were in our pajamas, sitting on our parents’ bed in an upstairs bedroom (where the only TV was) waiting for the black and white serial “Marshal Dillon” to come on channel 13.  Despite the storm outside, the TV picture was unusually clear for channel 13.

We were eating bowls of ice cream for dessert as the show started. Five minutes in, the storm intensified and I looked out the window to see a wildly bouncing set of branches on the trees outside.  The surroundings had a hue of backlit pea green emanating from the sky. I went back to the show, then the house shuddered by a wall of wind, concussed by the tornado.  I’ll never forget that concussion of air.  Windows started breaking around us, and I hustled my younger brothers to the top of the stairs.  Mike, the four year old, sat down on the upper step and began to cry, so I took his ice cream bowl he had been clutching and set it aside.  

At the bottom of the steps, my 71 year old grandmother from Philadelphia was trying to close the heavy front door that had flown open. She guided us into front hall closet, but I said, “No, Nana, we have to go to the basement.”  I looked through the now flung open door and saw the rage and phosphorescent green hue and now the sound was a high whine like a freight train. 

[Picture: our garage after tornado struck:]

In the basement, our ears popped because of the change in air pressure which made the evening grow silent.  It was dark now, no more the green electric dusk.  We sat in the dark silence for some time until our parents called down to us from above. They had been out at Kent Country Club and rushed home after the police on the phone told them that our street, Tenway Drive, was one of the worst hit streets in East Grand Rapids.

After a bit, my dad and I went outside.  He told me we had to be careful of “looters.” What those people were and what activity they might engage was unknown to me, but I remember that word added to my feeling of being under siege by the environment.

Our half of the street was dark and quiet—no electricity—but we were drawn to bright lights at the bottom of the street where huge fire trucks had set up bright reflectors and shone them onto the damaged houses at the foot of Tenway, on Oxford.  At that corner, I found wrapped in a fireman’s blanket Mrs. Hyla Jacobsen, a kindly older woman--the wife of Arnold who was not in sight.  Her house was unrecognizable, almost completely destroyed. She had survived the collapse of her ceiling by hiding under a heavy dining table.  I went up to her with an 8-year old's directness: “Hi, Mrs. Jacobsen! Did you see it?”


[Hyla and Arnold Jacobsen's house after tornado struck:]

“I did. It was the most beautiful thing you ever seen. Silver and black flakes and all the colors blending in and out…gold, and the sound like music”  Just then, a fireman hustled her away by telling me she was in shock.

“What’s ‘in shock’, Dad?” I asked. He shrugged his shoulders.

Kitty-corner to Mrs. Jacobsen’s house was Mara Matthews.’ Her house had no roof.  Her mother had been giving her and her sister a bath when the tornado hit, and the mother had been hit with a flying bathroom door. She was one of the 32 injuries of this magnitude 3 tornado, which theoretically packed a windspeed of 158-206 mph. Thankfully no one was killed.

My family’s detached garage was obliterated by the tornado and my house's siding was partially ripped off so that it appeared like a molted reptile. All this part of the $25 million (equivalent to current $185M) of damage from the tornado. Other sections of East Grand Rapids were also hit.  The tornado had hopped to our street from the southwest and took out our garage, then hopped a bit more to the end of the street, where it knocked a half-dozen houses about. On its hop, it sucked a couple of intervening houses off their foundations, so that you could look into their basements from the front yard. After doing its work at the end of Tenway Drive, it touched down about 8 blocks east to just east of Breton Downs Elementary and did more damage in that portion of town.

Overall, the tornado was one of a warm front that spawned tornadoes beginning at lunch time in Missouri, passing through Illinois and Indiana.  The F3 EGR tornado was part of of a very deep shortwave trough, and it traveled from southwest of Grandville 13-1/2 miles to Ada before giving out. As it "struck the south side of Grand Rapids, 65 buildings were destroyed, and 60 others were badly damaged. 375 buildings sustained minor damage. A church and a K-Mart store were completely destroyed." (Ibid).

The legacy of that day for me was a gradually-abating fear of thunderstorms, as they been the harbinger to the tornado.  By the time I was in college at the University of Michigan, I was chasing my fears by chasing tornado sightings and going up to the top of parking garages to scan the skyline.

I was close to another tornado once, in 1980, when one flew over the pier head in Holland, Michigan, just 300 yards from where I was staying in a cottage in Macatawa Park. It gave that same green hue to the air.

The other take away of that date for me is this: when Channel 13 announces a tornado warning, don’t just dumbly sit there eating ice cream as the windows shatter about you. Take cover in your basement!


[Picture:  our garage]

[Picture 5: Oxford Drive damage]

On the Ignorant and Monstrous Mob

Douglas B. Olds

3 April 2017

People impressed by the ersatz leadership staged on "The Apprentice" or taken in by the fraud that was Trump University might not have the intellectual tools to consistently or even occasionally discern what is fake. The complex of Trump and his political mob is marked by ongoing deceit and monstrous proposals of reactionary moral vendettas: 

• The poor deserve less, while the rich more.  
• The climate is not changing, so let’s revive coal and cancel environmental regulations.  
• The aged and sick can be put on the curb. 
• Progressives aren’t Christians, so let’s show them what these guns we true Christians, "Second Amendment people," wear are all about.  
• Immigrants are terrorists who want to substitute their tribal sharia for the Founding Fathers’ religious nation.  
• Resisters are paid foreign agents and can be ignored--or beaten.

And on it goes.

These are the propaganda that foreign hackers and domestic moral cretins are exploiting to tear this country apart. And at the top of this money-fueled pyramid of deceit and fakery is the Ignoramus in Chief, entrusted with nuclear weapons.

George Orwell in The Prevention of Literature sums up the instability of an age that chooses manipulable emotion over factual truth:

 "Totalitarianism does not offer so much as an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become tolerant or intellectually stable."

And Chris Hedges writes:

"The permanent lie turns political discourse into absurdist theater...The permanent lie is the apotheosis of totalitarianism. It no longer matters what is true. It matters only what is “correct.” Federal courts are being stacked with imbecilic and incompetent judges who serve the “correct” ideology of corporatism and the rigid social mores of the Christian right. They hold reality, including science and the rule of law, in contempt. They seek to banish those who live in a reality-based world defined by intellectual and moral autonomy. Totalitarian rule always elevates the brutal and the stupid. These reigning idiots have no genuine political philosophy or goals. They use clichés and slogans, most of which are absurd and contradictory, to justify their greed and lust for power."

Climate change denial, indeed censoring, is a venue where the self-indulgent and -loathing id conspires to take over our conscience in a conspiracy of lies and propaganda.  These deniers make absurd arguments that liberals who hate economic opportunity and the Chinese are behind climate science. They adopt folk tales of a new earth: that we can trash this one because God can miraculously create the pristine healthily anew with just a word.  Maybe, but folktales do not substitute for the deliberations of science and compassionate conscience. The righteous care more about flooding among the peoples of the Indian Ocean than about Chevron’s balance sheet.

“The venal political figures need not even comprehend the social and political consequences of their behavior,” psychiatrist Joost A.M. Meerloo wrote in “The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing.” “They are compelled not by ideological belief, no matter how much they may rationalize to convince themselves they are, but by the distortions of their own personalities. They are not motivated by their advertised urge to serve their country or mankind, but rather by an overwhelming need and compulsion to satisfy the cravings of their own pathological character structures. The ideologies they spout are not real goals; they are the cynical devices by which these sick men hope to achieve some personal sense of worth and power. Subtle inner lies seduce them into going from bad to worse. Defensive self-deception, arrested insight, evasion of emotional identification with others, degradation of empathy—the mind has many defense mechanisms with which to blind the conscience.”

These techniques and propaganda of the id-driven mob degrades and drowns out the communal and private voice of God that expresses God’s will for justice and communal harmony. They drown out truth.

The Electoral College did not perform its Constitutional function to repudiate an aberrant election of a true danger to civilization and the republic. Not just the man, but his mob fomented by damaged personalities and a decadent elite. It is a mob not only unable to discern fact, it is mob that does not even care if it can or cannot.  Facts, to the slovenly and the brutal--the uncivilized--become manipulable matters solely concerned with control, not genuine deliberation.  

It is a clear conscience based on honesty upon which we must depend to resist the supremacy of the individual and collective id. A conscience guided by the Holy Spirit and the Word is required—a conscience purged of the id’s structures that hate self and hate others. Too often other-directed hatred masks a self-hatred.  To those who do not cleanse their conscience of hate, but instead give full vent to hatred, I say with Bob Coote, “shame on you, God does not speak to or through you. For God’s primary law is Love your neighbor as yourself. Your hatred is a lie.”

Listen to your conscience, listen for God’s voice cloistered from the gibberish of the depraved mob and the electronic world. Listen to the call of God to take a stand for God’s world and justice.

Albert Camus speaks optimistically of inwardness against a dialectically opposed social id:

 In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love.

In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile.

In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm.

I realized, through it all, that…

In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back."


It is the individual and collective id of a greedy and fearful mob that foments the culture of nonsense and injustice around us. Our resistance to it enables righteousness, and righteousness can help us create springtime neighborhoods of shalom--where truth, beauty, empathy and justice endure. 




[For another, more theoretical, take on this subject, see my "The Politics and Ecclesiology of Nonsense" from October of 2013.]

From Division to Fullness

From Division to Fullness

Rev. Douglas Olds, First Presbyterian Church of San Anselmo (CA)

Festival of the Holy Names, January 1, 2017

Numbers 6.22 The LORD spoke to Moses, saying: 23 Speak to Aaron and his sons, saying, Thus you shall bless the Israelites: You shall say to them,

    24The LORD bless you and keep you;

    25the LORD make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you;

    26the LORD lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.

27 So they shall put my name on the Israelites, and I will bless them.

Galatians 4.4-7 4 But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, 5 in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. 6 And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” 7 So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God

Inserted into the middle of the Apostle Paul’s most combative letter, to the Galatians, today’s scripture reading presents Paul’s minimalist birth narrative of Jesus. Unlike the birth narratives in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, there are no angels, shepherds, wise men, miraculous stars, apparitions or annunciations in the temple. No celebrity mom named Mary. No Joseph or manger or inn with animals.  No swaddling clothes, or frankincense, gold, and myrrh.   There is no Herod, census of Cyrenius, or slaughter of the innocents.  Paul’s account of Jesus’ birth omits all of these colorful particulars of the infancy narratives of Jesus.  Whether Paul was aware of them is irrelevant, for his message had always been the salvific meaning of Christ’s death on the Cross and the liberation of the Holy Spirit for the creation of a worldwide church.  In Galatians 4, Paul states the earliest creedal statement regarding what Christians call “the incarnation,” God taking on human flesh:  “when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children.”

As a Jewish child, Jesus is enrolled in the people of the divine promise: Eight days after the birth of Jesus, Mary and Joseph had him circumcised. His name was also confirmed then (Lk 2.21). It was to be Jesus, as the angel Gabriel had prophesied before Mary became pregnant. The etymology of the name Yahshua is “YHWH heals.”  In the Hebrew culture, the naming of a thing implied power, authority, or control over the thing named by the one naming it. Hebrew culture had a scruple about naming God. Paul, in naming God, Abba, Father is suggesting a most mild form of naming, thus humility in control.  God is naming Jesus through the angel. According to Paul, this new age of the people of God in Jesus’ birth and naming was to occur in the fullness of time.  So the first aspect of Paul’s creedal affirmation of the Christmas incarnation is God acting in the fullness, τὸ πλήρωμα, of time.

The medieval church celebrated this time of naming and circumcision at the first week after Christmas through the Festival of the Holy Names, which is celebrated around January 1, and which commemorates Christ’s obedience to the law in our behalf, as evidenced by his circumcision (Lk 2:21). The poet John Milton asserted that Jesus “bleeds to give us ease.”[i] Here we see a parallel of circumcision with the blood of the Cross. Christ bleeds to give us ease states a folk piety that surrounds the Feast of the Circumcision, or Festival of Holy Names.

Only one Christian church retains a contemporary ritual of circumcision, the Abyssinian Orthodox Church of Ethiopia, which administers the rite to its children between the third and the eighth day, prior to baptism. The festival of the holy name or circumcision originated in the 6th century in Spain and Gaul; and became instituted at Rome in the 11th century.[ii]

[Galatians] was addressed to uncircumcised Gentile Christians who accepted, but now were reconsidering, the message that Paul has proclaimed about God’s grace in redeeming and justifying Jews and Gentiles through faith in Jesus Christ without the works of the law. They received the “good news” that Gentiles could become [adoptive] heirs of God’s promises and equal members of the people of God by abandoning their idols and trusting God’s redemptive action in Jesus Christ, without observing the [ceremonial] law.[iii]

Turning to Paul’s image of fullness of time, we see it is one of pregnancy, whereupon time had begun counting down to some signal event.  I’m convinced that there were people who read the prophet Daniel (9. 25-27) in this context of a prophesied countdown to a new age, to an age of the anointed one.

The angel Gabriel tells the Old Testament’s Daniel (ch. 9) of a 70 times seven sequence, which suggest a Jubilee forgiveness supercycle.  As I’ve spoken of before, Ezra chapter 7 tells of a decree in the seventh year of Persian Emperor Artaxerxes’ reign that concerns Jerusalem. It is this 70 times 7 year Jubilee from then that brings us to the age of Daniel’s anointed one. Our Biblical and non-Biblical witnesses[iv] report a messianic fervor amidst both the people and the religious scholars at that time.[v] I believe this is why Jesus applied to himself Daniel’s visionary name, “Son of Man.” 

This pregnant time of the run up to the incarnation of an anointed one demonstrates how Israel’s God controlled the history and destiny of God’s people.  God controls Israel’s name. God enters into the history of a people’s struggle between faith and faithlessness to fulfill Daniel’s 490 year countdown to the new aeon. The aeon when we were to receive adoption as children by the spirit--the spirit which calls out Abba, Father in our sufferings, ensuring we will take on the experiences of the Garden of Gethsemane and of the Cross, when Jesus called out the “Abba, Father” in his agonies.  Juergen Moltmann notes, “We shall never be able to get used to the fact that at the centre of the Christian faith there is this cry of the God-forsaken Christ.”[vi]  To know God as Abba, Father is a new way to know God in religious experience. Childlike. To name God as Abba, Father is a new way to name God in human religious experience.

We receive the name of children of God, like the name of Jesus, in whom we pray. Before our adoption, we are divided, according to Karl Barth, subject to the Law of God but striving in our souls for God’s mercy. This also was ancient Israel’s lot. After our adoption, we are unified by the spirit to have the word of God, the name of Jesus, echo in our prayers and in our ears as we go about our lives. In this consciousness, we are unified in Word, thought, and deed.

How then should we treat our period of divided conscience—our period of estrangement from God—and of our children’s as when we were children before we became inspirited? Karl Barth notes there is little in the New Testament that treats the relationship of elders and children.  Paul speaks of our period of padeia –training-- when we are under the law, when we are under what the Book of Numbers calls the name of the Israelites, the blessing of the law as our first reading noted. But since we are adopted children of God, we are to introduce our own children not to the aeon of law, but to the good news of the Gospel.  Always modeling for them hopefulness--the spirit that things will get better.  In the end, the Gospel mercies triumph over the Law’s judgment of woe.  

If it often looks like the world is coming to an end, the Gospel of Jesus reaffirms the covenant with Noah that God will not allow the children of humans to go extinct. If death looks imminent, we have the authority to pray, Abba, Father!  By doing so, we are abiding in the word and name of Jesus, and we are aligning in unity our conscience with God’s name.  We pray “Abba, Father!” in Jesus name, through the Spirit as our alter ego. Think about it: we are praying through the threefold, Trinitarian name-- in Jesus name in the Spirit we are praying the name “Abba, Father.” In our greatest distress, there is no more Trinitarian mode of prayer! At the point where humans lose hope, where they become powerless and despairing, the lonely, assailed and forsaken pray Abba Father in Jesus Name. Forsakenness brings on that Trinitarian human condition! This suggests to me that in our distress and suffering there is no greater closeness to God, and that God shares in that suffering and distress. It takes a faithful constitution, my friends, to live fully and gladly in this interpretation of the human condition.

Brene Brown writes, "Hope is a function of struggle...hope is not an emotion. Hope is a cognitive, behavioral process that we learn when we experience adversity, when we have relationships that are trustworthy, when people have faith in our ability to get out of a jam.”

Life is not a comedy by this interpretation, but a tragedy, and the Gospel is God’s triage--seeking to save that which appears lost. Without the Gospel, humans are in some sense like the dinosaurs in the recent New Yorker cartoon looking at a meteor on collision course with earth with the caption, “Maybe it isn’t going to be so bad.”[vii]

The apostle Paul in Galatians 4 writes, “God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law. “By this negation of the Law’s judgment,” Miroslav Volf  writes, “Through [Christ's] judgment of grace, we will be freed from the inescapable injustice of the suppressions, lies, evasions and half-truths in which we, as bearers of memories, are presently ensnared.”  Things will undoubtedly get worse, but there is a Gospel light at the end of the tunnel, even if it is not apparent to the struggle of this life.

If humans were to go extinct, something intrinsic to God would die as well since we are in a unity with God-- to suffer. But I believe also to triumph with God as well.  Rev. 21, a regular post-Christmas scripture reading for today, speaks of a new heaven and a new earth where fear of death triumphs no more. Praying Abba Father in Jesus name is where we cement our unity with Christ to bring about a healing gesture or movement by our loving God to bring about that new earth. And which brings about new connections of peace and gladness among us--a new heaven. 

This unity of losing obsession and developing a Gospel conscience in suffering is described by a story:

The novelist Leo Tolstoy’s brother told him to sit in a corner until he stopped thinking about a white bear. Much later that day, Tolstoy remained in the corner, his mind fixated on the white bear he needed to stop thinking about. He was finally able to stop thinking about the white bear when his brother gave him permission to think about it.

This experiment has been replicated, and the result is always the same: when people forbid themselves or attempt to rid their mind of something, it boomerangs back to them with alarming consistency and persistency. ...Letting go of whatever dominates your mind (including [fear of judgement]) frees it to think of [spiritual] things such as warm breezes, the beauty of friendship, and the simplicity of enjoying a meal. We lose out on these small joys of life when our big problems take more than their deserved mindshare.[viii]  

The psalms describe this modulation of mindfulness as “Though we walk through the valley of death, we shall fear no evil.”

How then, are we to live not by our divided passions but by the fullness of our humanity? Our readings this morning suggest that it is by childlike VIRTUE that we pass our time in mitigating the worse effects of systemic decline and in blessing the light. What is important is that we become part of the story and name and deeds of Jesus. We live fully when we demonstrate his virtues of gratitude, courage, patience, kindness, silence that truly listens, empathy, self-denial, and justice.  We can't pretend that we're looking for a child in a manger when we look away from a child in a refugee camp.  

We lift up the truth in all things and protect our neighbor from hate speech and prejudice. We teach Jesus’ pattern of virtues to our children and live in prayer, fully moving our deeds and conscience within them. Not by our divided consciousness of trying to live according to a mandate of custom or a fear of ostracism, but in our lives freed by the Word and Names of God.

Happy New Year, my friends.  As humans, we continue to enter history with blinders on. The gospel takes us off the leash of our fear.  God wins! Love wins! This is the blessing of the Gospel and our confidence to move with it.  That is my message today on this Festival of Holy Names. May we institute the intimate names of Abba, Father and Jesus the Christ ever in our spirit, becoming more fully human—more fully living and loving in the Trinity--through our actions and worship that welcome the stranger as we do our Lord.  It is our calling, and it is our gift.

---

[i] Jeffrey, D. L. (1992). In A Dictionary of biblical tradition in English literature. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans

[ii] Cross, F. L., & Livingstone, E. A. (Eds.). (2005). In The Oxford dictionary of the Christian Church (3rd ed. rev., p. 1137). Oxford;  New York: Oxford University Press.

[iii] Rivera, L. R. (2008). Theological Perspective on Galatians 4:4–7. In D. L. Bartlett & B. B. Taylor (Eds.), Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary: Year B (Vol. 1, p. 158). Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.

[iv] (cf. Luke 3.1-7; Mark 1.3-8; Josephus)

[v] For more detailed Biblical chronology of Daniel’s 70 weeks and its relationship with the decree of Artaxerxes, see my internet article at http://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2014/12/expect-something-new-messianic.html

[vi] Tweet, December 18, 2016.

[vii] https://www.facebook.com/newyorker/photos/pb.9258148868.-2207520000.1480645112./10154237067253869/?type=3&theater accessed 12/1/16.

[viii] http://tinybuddha.com/blog/how-losing-all-hope-can-be-freedom/ accessed 11/27/16. My interpretation of the Tolstoy story is contrary to this author’s, who focuses not on fear like I do, but on an obsession with hope.

"Bearing Lenten Fruit"

"Bearing Lenten Fruit"

A sermon by Rev. Douglas Olds (all rights reserved)

Redwoods Presbyterian Church, Larkspur (CA)

February 28, 2016

3rd Sunday of Lent

Reading: Luke 13: 1-9

I want to begin this morning with a news item. The last of the “Angola 3,” former Black Panther Albert Woodfox was released last week after 43 years in solitary confinement in Louisiana’s Angola State Prison.  His original murder trial has been overturned, and whether he is guilty, it is necessary that no one spend 43 years in solitary confinement.  Thanks be to God for this glimmer of humanity in our prisons.  May there be more such glimmers until the sun shines through all our dungeons to transform our punitive society into something more rehabilitative and loving.

In this morning’s New Testament scripture reading, from the Gospel of Luke chapter 13, Jesus speaks of a fig tree that takes up space in a man’s garden and does not bear fruit.  The man is angry and about to pull up the fig tree when his gardener prevails upon him to fertilize one more year and look for one last harvest of figs next year.  This is a parable, so the people who hear Jesus struggle to understand about whom or what he is speaking.  Jesus tells this parable in the context of the death of Galileans and Judeans in Jerusalem who have failed to repent.  In this context, we can discern that the fig tree is the people or nation of Israel, and the fruit follows a repentance.

Thinking of oneself and one’s productive growth as an arboreal fruit—a fig—may be a lost metaphor in today’s technological age.  As fewer of us live off of nature and are consumers of produce at the grocery store, it seems easier to identify ourselves with metaphors of technology.  Of Robotics or cybernetics.  Some robots look anthropic to us, feeding our identification.  More and more we read that technology is replacing body parts, including silicon chips to enhance memory or aid in visual recognition in our future.

Technological metaphors increasing replace agricultural metaphors in our age.  Jesus speaks variously of being a vinedresser and a planter as he speaks to his followers.  We are meant to understand that Jesus through God the Holy Spirit prunes and dresses, and that parts of our personality may be painfully removed to promote further growth.

Yet nowadays, the pain that we feel as our personality undergoes alteration might feel like we are “ghosts in a machine,” a technological metaphor.  We may feel sensory deprived, like a robot, when we are numbed by failure or grief.  Jesus in his parables would keep ourselves rooted in biological metaphors as opposed to inert, nihilistic technological metaphors. 

Jesus speaks of

 [Luke 13.6] “A man [who] had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. 7 So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’ 8 He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. 9 If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’ ”

So anthropologically, Jesus sees people not as static or unmodifiable by robotic inserts, but as plants which are fertilized by nature and bear fruit in season.

Or don’t, which is serious. 

I invite you to think about this metaphor during this season of Lent, when we may go through the static rituals of giving something up, as in giving up a vice for Lent.  In our arboreal metaphor, that’s a self-pruning, a negative act.  An act of repentance.  But there is more involved in Jesus’ parable than just going without a favorite pleasure.  A new crop of fruit is expected.  It’s not only what we give up for Lent, but by what we replace it.  By what new virtue you replace that vice that brings us closer to God, that takes hold of the space in our lives previously given over to something that takes us far away from God.

As I say, bearing Lenten fruit is the flourishing of new virtues, the habits of mind and body that bring us closer to God.  Romano Guardini writes of the classical virtues in which both the Roman Catholic and the Protestant tradition used to speak in volumes.[1]  Truthfulness.  Do our words speak authentically?  Acceptance and the associated virtue of patience.  Do we wait on God and accept things that come from Him?  Reverence.  Have we cultivated a sense of awe at the miracles in nature and in life, rather than have a cynical attitude borne of too much time in front of the internet?  I confess, that’s my Lenten project this year.

The virtue of Loyalty.  Do we have friends to whom you are loyal, or is all our society expedient and careerist?  The virtue of disinterestedness asks one to develop a counterbalanced virtue to loyalty, so that we may be a fair judge, but with loyalty and truthfulness as associated virtues we are there to explain to our friends how you came to judge with fairness and disinterest.  Asceticism is a virtue, the one we often think about in Lent when we give up a pleasure, but it means more that we develop a habit and make of virtue of moving slowly toward pleasures that we share with our neighbors, so they may take their fill first.  

Gratitude is another virtue I’ve been working on, and I can tell you when I get depressed about the state of our world and society, stepping back and counting my blessings in gratitude works to give me hope, and to see God’s work within the messiness.  The virtue of unselfishness is like the virtue of asceticism, but involves a more sustained habit of heart. Asceticism we feel located in the body, in our members, while the virtue of unselfishness is an attitude and fruit of the heart. 

Guardini speaks of four other virtues: silence, the ability and habit that recognizes that our own small perspective may be unnecessary or conflicts with a holy moment.  The virtue of recollection, whereby God’s actions in our lives is recalled in a spirit of silence and gratitude, blending two other virtues.

There are two final virtues that I believe are more communitarian and social: the virtues of understanding and of justice.  For if we really understood what other’s go through, our hearts should be moved to act justly.  I think of people at the lowest income scale of our economy.  They are often maligned as “unskilled,” yet there are few if any jobs anymore that don’t require some technological interface: the wearing of back vacuum that requires troubleshooting when it jams, or the entry and troubleshooting of modern cash registers. And yet the minimum wage pays $7.25/ hour.  The studies I’ve seen now report that a living wage for a single parent with two children is between $20 and $22/hour, and yet the chances of a welfare recipient moving into such a living wage is on the order of 1 chance in 97.[2]

Our understanding of these facts I believe should move us to seek wage justice for all in society, seeking to change the debate from one of “deserving” and “skilled.”  Every employed worker demonstrates virtues deemed essential to job readiness: punctuality, cleanliness, cheerfulness, and obedience.  If we believe in the virtues for ourselves we should reward them in others, even if they are economic virtues. If our understanding is that work is a virtue, the virtue of justice we cultivate would have us reward it with a living wage.

A second arena where justice and understanding might go together in our search for Christian virtues is where we started off this morning’s sermon.  In our prisons.

There are nearly 1.6 million Americans in state or federal prison, their absence is not accounted for in the figures that politicians and policymakers use to make decisions. As a result, we operate under a distorted picture of the nation's economic health. For prime-age black men, though, the unemployment rate would jump from 11 percent to 19 percent. That's because a far higher fraction of black men — 7.7 percent, or 580,000 people — are institutionalized. “Imprisonment makes the disadvantaged literally invisible,” writes Harvard sociologist Bruce Western in his book, "Punishment and Inequality in America."[3]  These black men are not “recollected.”  They are outside our memory and our loyalty.

Society needs a virtue of justice to rectify these skewed statistics, and to allow for the imprisoned to develop their own communitarian virtues.  Prisoners need economic rehabilitation to reenter the workplace upon release, quicker release and easier parole for non-violent offenders, and the ability to exercise political virtues and political rights of voting upon release.[4]  Work and voting are political virtues, and if we understand the barriers put up to convicted criminals to reassert these rights and virtues, I believe justice would have us act to restore these political virtues so that the paroled and released can take up responsible roles in society. The virtues of understanding aligned with justice, I assert, asks this of society.  We need to recollect, restore, and assist people like Albert Woodfox whose development of political virtues have been stunted by prolonged imprisonment.  Stunted like a fig tree without fertilizer or water.

We are the figs.  At Lent, we repent—we self-prune—by giving something up that takes from God--and replace it with an attitude, a habit, or a virtue which brings us closer.  The classical Christian virtues are not only self-reflective, but exhibit understanding at the injustice and sufferings of others.  In my own life, I’ve identified patience, gratitude, and understanding as virtues needing immediate attention. You may find other virtues of justice, recollection, reverence, unselfishness, asceticism, loyalty, indifference, silence, or recollection are necessary fruits of Lenten repentance. But what I can be sure of is that need for all of the virtues cycle through my life at different stages, and that is why God has given us Lent to cycle through our church years.  So that we can take stock of what brings us closer and what takes us farther from God’s Holy Spirit of active love—for God and for others.  May it be that we prune our habits at Lent by replacing them with the virtues that act, restore, and recollect the integrity of others. May it be so for you and me.  AMEN.

---

[1] Guardini, Romano. Learning the Virtues that Lead You to God.  Sophia Institute Press, 1987.

[2] The Economic Policy Institute [in 2000] reviewed dozens of studies of what constitutes a “living wage” and came up with an average figure of $30,000 a year for a family of one adult and two children, which amounts to a wage of $14 an hour. --Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Metropolitan, 2001 (2011).p. 234; 241, n. 1.

Per http://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpid1601.pdf adjusting for inflation =$19.91/hour (2016). The Preamble Center for Public Policy was estimating that the odds against a typical welfare recipient’s landing a job at such a “living wage” were about 97 to 1. –Ehrenreich (2001).

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/26/america-has-locked-up-so-many-black-people-it-has-warped-our-sense-of-reality/?postshare=3931456505744930&tid=ss_fb-bottom accessed on 26 February 2016.

[4] In Virginia, an estimated 400,000 people cannot vote because of their criminal history. http://bit.ly/1OU55j8 

"Nothing Left for Him"

"Nothing Left for Him"

Sermon by Rev. Douglas Olds (all rights reserved)

Redwoods Presbyterian Church

January 10, 2016

2^nd Sunday after Epiphany: Baptism of the Lord

HYMN after Sermon 834. Precious Lord, Take My Hand   

GOSPEL READING Luke 3:15–22

15 As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, 16 John answered all of them by saying, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. 17 His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” 

18 So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people. 19 But Herod the ruler, who had been rebuked by him because of Herodias, his brother’s wife, and because of all the evil things that Herod had done, 20 added to them all by shutting up John in prison. 

21 Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, 22 and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

Let me tell you about a remarkable prophecy in the Bible. Not everyone knows about it, and I have spent a lot of time trying to figure it out and apply.  I’ll just outline the prophecy this morning, and if you’d like to see the details of my analysis of this prophecy, go to a link to my writing it all out.

The prophecy is known as the “70 weeks” prophecy in the Book of Daniel, chapter 9.  Daniel is being given a prophecy about a figure discussed earlier as the Son of Man by the Angel Gabriel.  Here are the angel’s words to Daniel about the Son of Man, whom he calls the “anointed prince”—anointed being Messiah in Hebrew-- and the duration left to the people of Israel to finish with sin:

Dan 9. 24 Seventy weeks are decreed for your people and your holy city: to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, and to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal both vision and prophet, and to anoint a most holy place.

25 Know therefore and understand: from the time that the word went out to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the time of an anointed prince[,] there shall be seven weeks[; ] and ["for" not in Hebrew] sixty-two weeks[.] [I]t shall be built again with streets and moat, but in a troubled time. 26 After the sixty-two weeks, an anointed one shall be cut off and shall have nothing, and the troops of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary.

Now the word “weeks” in the English translation refers to a heptad or group of seven in the Hebrew, so that people of ancient times pored over this prophecy recognizing the weeks as groups of 7 years.  If the English translation’s punctuation is disregarded—there were no punctuation marks in the earliest scriptures in the original languages, the Angel is speaking of an historical event coming upon the people of Israel in 69 times 7 years (483) from the going out of a decree to rebuild Jerusalem “street and moat.”  This decree I am confident—and check my internet link to follow my reasoning—can be dated to the second of the three imperial decrees in the Books of Nehemiah and Ezra.  This is the decree of the Persian emperor Artaxerxes, in his 7^th year of reign (Ezra 7.4), to rebuild Jerusalem as a municipal center—street and moat. The other two imperial decrees concerned rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem only.  That’s why so many people find this arithmetic difficult. The other two imperial decrees do not concern Jerusalem’s street and moat. 

From dating outside the Bible, in Thucydides and on imperial inscriptions, Artaxerxes’ 7^th year was 458 B.C.  Add 483 years to that and add an additional year for a non-existent “year zero” between B.C. and A.D., and we find this prophecy for the anointed prince—the Messiah—as coming due in 26 A.D.  At whence time the Messiah is to “be cut off,” according to Gabriel’s prophecy.  Many have taken this “cutting off” to be the crucifixion, which leaves some problem for what happens for the 70^th heptad, the final 7 years of the prophecy.

Once I discovered that the Hebrew word for “cutting off” does not necessarily mean the English word for “kill,” I discovered another messianic prophecy in Ezekiel that uses a Hebrew synonym for “cutting,” where the community of Israel is likened to a graft or cutting from a cedar and a new community or new creation set into the land by actions of God. 

Now, I believe my interpretation of these scriptures is meaningfully suggestive, and that ancient Judeans and other ancient peoples who were more invested in meditating over the scriptures waiting for their deliverance by a messiah were also considering.  I believe around 26A.D. the people of Judea were at a fervor awaiting for this time frame to be fulfilled in their lifetimes.

Let’s step back for a moment.  The first presentation in the New Testament of the birth of Jesus takes place in the writings of Paul, specifically in the Book of Galatians.  Paul’s writings predate the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.  Paul in Galatians 4.4 writes:

4 But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, 5 in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children.

“When in the fullness of time, God sent his Son.” Paul is referring to a historical fulfillment of which the Judeans of his time likely were awaiting.  Luke also at the beginning of his Gospel makes it noteworthy the date of Jesus in the time of the census of Quirinius. Luke finds it important to date the birth of Jesus for those of his readers and listeners who were aware of the 70 heptad prophecy.  Matthew’s gospel doesn’t give so much a date as a rundown of generations from the Babylonian captivity, during which Daniel is reputed to receive the prophecy from Gabriel.  So Paul, Luke, and Matthew, at a minimum, likely find it very important that this historical time-frame for the arrival of the messiah be noted.

So let’s step back into the age of 26 A.D. and the messianic fervor gripping Judea.  Many thought that John the Baptist was the messiah. He was drawing large crowds, including priests from the temple, and including Jesus himself.  In our reading this morning, John takes care to claim that he is not the anointed Messiah, but that the messiah is coming in his lifetime, soon after him.  Luke makes it a point in this story to say that Jesus is about 30 years old when he accepts baptism by John, so that puts his birth in the 4-6 B.C. range that many scholars accept, and overlaps with the final years of Herod the Great who plays a role in the visit of the Magi which we just celebrated at Epiphany.  The wise men from the East likely had access to the Hebrew scriptures as sages in their society and could expect that a birth to a man who would take responsible adulthood around 30 years of age could happen during this time of Herod the Great. Matthew’s gospel has these magi looking for an astronomical event in the heavens therefore around 4-6 B.C.  All this supports the fact that interested parties in the divine council of Heaven, which is to say most religious middle easterners, were expecting some sort of an appearance of a great deliverer during this generation of 6 B.C. to 26 A.D.

Jesus himself likely was aware, and around or before age 30 began to wander within the ascetic communities around the Dead Sea and following John the Baptist.  In or around 26 A.D. he accepted the baptism of John and according to our reading from Luke this morning heard the words from heaven that he was indeed God’s son, the beloved.

From the Gospel of Mark especially, we learn that Jesus may have been a bit reticent--even uncomfortable--at the beginning with the knowledge that he was the anointed deliverer, the messiah.  Instead, he begins to publicize himself as the Son of Man, a mysterious judge of the people noted by Daniel who was to open the covenant of God with Israel to all peoples, including the Gentiles.  Only later in his career (the final heptad or 70^th week) does Jesus during his ministry followed by Paul in his ministry begin to adopt the universal title Son of God and begin the outreach to gentiles.  Jesus begins what I believe is a 3-1/2 year ministry to the people of Israel, is crucified, and then the final 3-1/2 years is an age of Pentecost where the apostles, especially Paul, work out the messianic incorporation of gentiles into the new covenant with God.

I have found my calendrical work on this prophecy to give me a powerful way to work out the mysterious prophecy, the use of Jesus of his various titles of messiah, Son of God, and Son of Man, and the historical concerns of the New Testament in ways that shed light on God’s purposes to bring in a new creation under-girded by a new covenant with all people, Israel and Gentile alike.  Jesus’s baptism, which we celebrate in the church on today’s Sunday, is the opening of the blessings to the new creation.

But to bring in this new creation, the messianic prince is to but cut off for a time, with  וְאֵ֣ין ל֑וֹ—“nothing for him,” as Gabriel announces (Da 9.26).  Nothing for him.  The baptism Jesus undertakes cuts him off from the old creation, for which nothing is left for him.  He has no role in the old creation—

and yet Jesus devotes the remainder of his life trying to save the people of Israel’s covenant. He himself has nothing left but the people who he tries to bring forward with him into the new.  Thanks be to God for those who listened to him and repented.

וְאֵ֣ין ל֑וֹ “Nothing left for him.” His work in the life left to him was bringing something new that we could inherit: the New Kingdom.  The baptism he undertook with John—like the baptism we undertake when born again—leaves us nothing in the old creation with which we are familiar and we are, like Jesus, to work for something new and unexpected. We are to take nothing of our old lives—our old possessions, our old world views, and our old wisdoms about how the world system of sin operates—and instead work for God’s justice outlined in Jesus’s ministry and teaching about the Kingdom of God.

יוְאֵ֣ין ל֑וֹ “Nothing left for him.”  How are we to apply this message today?  Who leaves everything behind at a ritual’s notice to work on a completely new life?  I know that my growth in faith and baptism have worked with structures of both my old life and my incorporation into the New Covenant. Perhaps these texts are calling me and us to rededicate ourselves away from all that we know about how sinful systems  get us ahead in this world operate and work instead wholly according to the justice and fairness outlined in Jesus’s ministry. I can think of little better to bring as an application to these readings. Let us continue to read the Gospels as ways and means of justice for all people, announcing that God is at work in our lives when we treat people with charity and fairness.

יוְאֵ֣ין ל֑וֹ “But nothing left for him” also puts into my mind those whom have lost everything in their previous world: the refugees and especially the prisoners. There is no population which has left behind wholeness and the comfortable than the 80,000 U.S. prison population undergoing solitary confinement on any given day.  These prisoners undergoing solitary confinement are cut off with nothing left to them—even human contact, left with only their memories and struggles with their sanity—for 23 hours per day.  Even their sleep is cut off and interrupted, with prisoners on the Segregated Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison awoken every 30 minutes.  Sleep may be our most prized possession—and it certainly is in solitary confinement. But even there the prison officials cut off and leave nothing of a coveted bliss of restorative deep sleep for the segregated prisoner undergoing the torture of solitary confinement.  Solitary confinement is torture, and sleep deprivation[1] is one of the most insidious of torture techniques, designed to cut off the prisoner from sanity and a wholeness of being.

Nothing left for them. In the words of one of the men in Pelican Bay State Prison,  “The SHU (Segregated Housing Unit) is the thief that steals our souls … we measure our lives, in the ability to withstand insanity, and endure torture through days, nights, and endless years …”

Let us think of the 80,0000 U. S. prisoners undergoing solitary confinement as torture and resolve to act in a way that brings this inhuman torture to an end.  I lead an Anti-Torture team at First Presbyterian Church of San Anselmo and we have adopted pen pals in solitary confinement to bring something life affirming to the dead and frightful hours of nothing they have to them.  We participate in the Lifelines to Solitary program to cultivate pen pals and give prisoners a voice and a lifeline to another breathing soul.  To counter what one prisoner in solitary noted, “If no one hears my voice when I speak, do I make a sound? If no one thinks of me, do I exist?”  This is someone for whom nothing is left for him.  Let us like Jesus who has been cut off make it our portion to lead others who have been cut off and been left nothing, making us a lifeline to the new world—a world of compassion and companionship, community and service.

Lifelines to Solitary is only one way we can act to meet and greet those for whom nothing is left. I have chosen to highlight solitary confinement as an application of today’s readings regarding Jesus’s baptism.  There are others. Let us resolve to be aware of and ready to take the hands of those who have nothing in this world, for whom nothing is left, and bring them the precious message that their nothing is not the final word.  We are examples for whom something comes after nothing is left, and they are urged and welcome to join with us.

May it be so for you and me.  Amen.


[1] National Religious Campaign Against Torture "urges you to call the California Department of Correction today to urge them to stop the torture of sleep deprivation"



Copyright: Douglas B. Olds 2016

Letter to President Obama Regarding Accountability for Torturers

Letter to President Obama Regarding Accountability for Torturers

11 December 2015

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Washington, DC 20500

Dear President Obama,

As a person of faith working toward humanized society and the diminishing of barbarity, allow me to recommend to you and your administration to act for and promote accountability per the findings of the Senate Select Committee’s Report on Torture. It has been one year since the report’s release, and the Torture Report has been reported to remain unread in its entirety, while the designers and practitioners of illegal torture have escaped legal and historical accounting for their actions. History teaches us that in such an environment of unaccountability, torture and associated illegalities done by US bureaucracies are almost certain to recur.

I stand fully in agreement with the Physicians for Human Rights conclusions (page 15 at https://s3.amazonaws.com/PHR_Reports/truth-matters.pdf) regarding responses to the infamy of torture done by and in the name of US Government personnel. Specifically, per PHR, I request the following four actions by the United States Administration under your direction and leadership:

1.       Based on a thorough investigation, the Department of Justice should bring charges against those individuals who designed the torture program, implemented the torture program, and/or ordered torture be used.

2.       The U.S. government should release the entire Senate torture report and allow investigators access to other documents relevant to the investigation into the use of torture.

3.       Detainees subjected to torture should be provided the means to seek redress against the government and individuals who tortured them.

4.       Detainees subjected to torture by agents of the U.S. government – regardless of where the crime was committed – should be provided with a full range of reparations for their suffering and rehabilitation.

I thank you for your addressing the ongoing need for thorough accountability in this area of depravity and illegality. I stand ready to assist you in any way toward this goal.

Very truly yours in Christ,

Rev. Douglas Olds, Presbyterian Church (USA)