Category Archives: Social Commentary

Insurgency and Faith (Part 1)

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THE BACK STORY 

After the Newtown school massacre, the church in Chaska hosted a carefully prepared program of respectful conversations on The Episode of Gun Violence. The first of three consecutive Tuesday evenings would begin with the local police chief and sheriff who represented pro- and anti-gun control positions.

The three of us met over morning coffee to go over last-minute details of that first event, but the conversation took a different turn. The chief and sheriff recommended we cancel the program because of real threats of organized disruption and, perhaps, violence. The good news was they were coming. The bad news was they were coming with guns. The church decided to proceed, and declined the chief’s offer of uniformed officers to ensure peace and security. Later that day, I did as I was taught. I held a meeting with myself to clear my head and prepare for what might come. The letter from myself to myself is still on file. The rubrics have been added.

LETTER TO MYSELF (THE MODERATOR)

How do we have this conversation? Can we talk? Can we all get along?

Every word, every phrase, is a powder keg. All speech is suspect. We listen not with open ears to hear a different point of view. We approach each other with suspicion, reacting defensively or aggressively to any hint that the conversation might be prejudiced against one’s own point of view. Even a title is a land mine.

Guns and I

I love the U.S. Constitution. I also don’t like guns. My only experiences with guns have been negative. The assassinations of President Abraham Lincoln in the Booth Theater and JFK in Dallas; Martin Luther King, Jr. supporting the striking sanitation workers in Memphis; presidential candidate Senator Robert Kennedy. A gun has only one purpose: to shoot something or someone. It has no other use. Violence is often committed with one’s own fist. But capacity to hurt or destroy does not define a hand. A foot may kick, but that’s not why we have feet. A baseball bat picked up in a moment of rage is a lethal weapon, but it is not by definition a weapon; its purpose is to hit a baseball within the rules of baseball. A car can become a lethal weapon in the hands of a car bomber, but its purpose is transportation, to get us from here to there and back.

Prone to evil and slothful in good

The human capacity for violence is deep and ineradicable. It’s in our DNA. The story of Cain’s slaying of his brother Abel is not about the beginning of human history; it is one of the defining facts of human nature itself. As my tradition puts it in a Prayer of Confession, “We are prone to evil and slothful in good.”

My tendency toward evil is often the conviction that I am right. I need to be reminded that my experience with guns is not the same as it is for those who grew up on a farm or a ranch where guns serve the purpose of killing a wolf or coyote or of putting down an injured horse out of mercy. The experience in rural America is different from the small town outside a major city in which I was raised, and it is different from urban centers by reason of low population density. My ownership of a gun on the farm is not a threat to the person next door in a tenement or in the housing development of the suburb. Guns in rural America serve different purposes. And, it seems to me, the split and the suspicion regarding guns and violence in America is to a great extent defined by these two very different social experiences, demographics, and cultures.
You cannot love God unless . . .

Beyond fear and suspicion

Having spent the past two weeks trying to organize a series of respectful conversations in the wake of Newtown has brought home how difficult it is to have conversation. Fear of the other is rampant. “I won’t appear on the same program with him. He’s an extremist.” Or, “I don’t think I’ll come. I don’t like trouble.” Or, “You bet I’ll be there. We’re going to pack the house!”

But the gospel of Jesus which is the center of Christian faith calls us to live by the Spirit of the Living God, not by fear or suspicion. Christ himself was the human “other” – the one on whom every side projected its hatred of the other side – and ultimately the representative of the “Wholly Other” who is other to us all.

Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also. (First Letter of John 4:20-21).

First Letter of John 4:20-21 NRSV

Mutual Respect and Forbearance

I also find wisdom in the organizing principles of my religious tradition. The Preliminary Principles of Church Order (adopted in 1789) give some advice for how to conduct ourselves when we strenuously disagree. They are called preliminary because they lay the theological-ethical foundation for life together. They are aspirational principles to guide church members and local churches in how we interact as disciples of Jesus. As children of God, we believe:

…” that there are truths and forms with respect to which people of good character and principles may differ. In all these it is the duty both of private Christians and societies to exercise mutual forbearance toward each other.”

Preliminary Principles of Church Order (adopted at the organizing of the Presbyterian Church USA in 1789).

Can we have a respectful conversation?

I’m trying my best to do my duty. Can the pastor with strong personal views also serve as the Moderator? Can I exercise and promote mutual forbearance toward each other?  Can we talk? Tonight we will give our own answer to Rodney King’s haunting question: “Can’t we all just get along?”

 Lord, take my hand, and lead us on toward  the light.

____________________________________

The question remains and has become more urgent now. Stay tuned for the rest of the story, Gordon. February 2, 2021

Gandhi and Cornel West on the Challenge at the Crossroad

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America and the world stand at a crossroads between love and hate, democracy and despotism, and some would say, good and evil. Mohandas Gandhi and Cornel West offer reflections on what’s happening to us and how to move forward in a Qanon world.

Loving evil too much to give it up

“Must I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

— Mohandas Gandhi, NON-VIOLENCE IN PEACE AND WAR (1948), 2.74

A crucial crossroads: Making a positive difference

We are at a crucial crossroad in the history of this nation–and we either hang together by combating these forces that divide and degrade us or we hang separately. Do we have the intelligence, humor, imagination, courage, tolerance, love, respect, and will to meet the challenge? Time will tell. None of us alone can save the nation or world. But each of us can make a positive difference if we commit ourselves to do so.

Cornel West, Race Matters

A Memory of Cornel West

Cornel West’s guest appearance at the Westminster Town Hall Forum in Minneapolis stands apart less for what he said to the crowd than for what he said and to whom he said it before the Forum. At his request, he met each member of the church staff. He greeted each person with the unconditional respect due a human being without regard for role, title, or social standing.

He didn’t save the world that day. He lit up the faces of the strangers he knew were his sisters and brothers.

“Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.” ― Mohandas Gandhi

Gordon C. Stewart, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017 Wipf and Stock), Chaska, MN, January 28, 2021.

Busting Up America — a Tale for a Tail

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Conspiring to Bust up a Country

“Traters, I will here remark, are an onfortunit class of peple. If they wasn’t, they wouldn’t be traters. They conspire to bust up a country — they fail, and they’re traters. They bust her, and become statesmen and heroes.” — Artemus Ward, “The Tower of London,” Artemus Ward in London (1872).

A Tale for a Tail

There’s an elephant in the living room. It looks like an elephant, but it’s not. Elephants have long memories. This beast has none. Like the taxidermist’s safari trophies, only the remains remain. It had a trunk and tusks, but what it once symbolized is no more. The tail that shooed away the fleas and flies has been replaced by a tale.

Some folks who remember the elephant know what happened. But even they are divided on what the elephant was.

This political cartoon by Thomas Nast, taken from a 1879 edition of Harper’s Weekly, was an early use of the elephant and the donkey to symbolize the Republican and Democratic parties. [Photo Credit: Kean Collection/ Archive Photos/Getty Images]

Some remember and weep over the tale now told in its name. Others have no memory or revise their memories to suit the patriot’s tale of the trophy hunter.

How totalitarianism happens, according to Hanna Arendt

L. K. Hanson 1.2021 quoting Hanna Arendt, German-American political theorist (Star Tribune 1.25.2012)

Every Violation of Truth is . . .

“The great masses of the people . . . will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one,” wrote Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf in 1924.

“Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Prudence,” Essays: First Series (1841).

Gordon C. Stewart, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017 Wipf and Stock), Chaska, MN, January 25, 2021.

Silent Soldiers and Sedition

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Blackwater/Xe and silent professionals

The Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a pre-emptive statement declaring their refusal to put boots on the street in the event the Commander-in-Chief declares Marshall Law. Even so, President Trump is not left without options. He has other troops, like the stormtroopers who stormed through the Capitol, threatened to hang the Vice President, kill the Speaker of the House, and succeeded in driving Congress into a secure bunker, while their commander-in-chief watched the news coverage and observed an unholy silence.

More dangerous than the motley mob believes the election was stolen are later intelligence reports of the presence and front-line leadership of soldiers well trained in military tactics, whether a random collection of ex-military personnel, or something more organized, like the “silent professionals” of Blackwater/Xe and other privately owned security companies. Click Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army for Jeremy Scahill’s Polk Award book (2007, Nation Books), or take a look at this excerpt from a New York Times Worst Seller List author.

We have a private army on our own soil. Its personnel are built around U.S. military Special Forces personnel who have joined Xe. They are snipers, demolition experts and former intelligence officers, both Army and CIA. Xe has its own intelligence department that hires out to corporations and the CIA, for profit. Does anything bother us about that?

Rev. Godon C. Stewart, “Blackwater/Xe: “How did it happen that the U.S. came to rely on mercenaries,” MinnPost, July 3, 2009

The Minnpost article was written eleven years ago. It bothered me then. It bothers me more now. I have no evidence that Blackwater/Xe or some similar “security” and training center was involved in the planning and execution of the January 6 insurrection. All I have is questions about “silent professionals” and the memory of a question asked in 2019. Within days of the Capitol attack, intelligence sources identified trained professionals as leaders who led those untrained in military equipment and tactics.

Pardons and Shadows

Blackwater/Xe, pictured here in Afghanistan (since re-branded Academi) still operates in the shadows under government contracts with the U.S. Department of State to protect U.S. embassies and with the DOD in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But there are moments — like the presidential pardons of four Blackwater “guards” found guilty of a massacre of 17 unarmed Iraqi civilians in Baghdad — when Blackwater comes into public view. Following Trump’s pardon, the lawyer representing the victims’ families in Baghdad spoke to an NPR reporter.

The Slaughter of Innocents

“This was Baghdad’s Bloody Sunday,” she said. “This was the slaughter of innocent civilians who were merely going about their day when a Blackwater convoy rolled through a traffic circle after having violated orders to stand down and not exit the Green Zone — and began firing indiscriminately into cars that were carrying people going to work.” A member of a victim’s family lamented pardons, calling the Blackwater guards “criminals, murderers and thugs. expressed his shock. “Today we were surprised that the American president issued a decision to pardon these criminals, murderers and thugs. I’m really shocked. … The American judiciary is fair and equitable. I had never imagined that Trump or any other politician would affect American justice.”

Pardoned Felon Gen. Mike Flynn returns as Trump confidante and advisor

Retired General Mike Flynn, the 25th U.S. National Security Advisor, fired, indicted, and convicted felon, later pardoned as a “great patriot,” has the president’s ear again. According to multiple news reports, Flynn and Sidney Powell have advised the president to invoke Marshall Law to order the confiscation of voting machines in the states he claims to have won. Given the president’s state of mind and knowing that he will face multiple criminal indictments and civil suits after vacating the Oval Office, and knowing the nationwide civil unrest his supporters will create this weekend, is it far-fetched to imagine him declaring Marshall Law under the guise of preserving, protecting, and defending the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic?

Paying attention

Such forces, unaccountable to the people, could, if they so chose, operate in black water for purposes that are anything but democratic. The current heated rhetoric of the far right is pouring toxins of fear and hate into the political water table, the poisons of a new McCarthyism with innuendos and bumper stickers that paint a popularly elected president as the nation’s internal public enemy. Our nation’s history of assassinations and assassination attempts requires that we pay attention to what’s happening under our noses right now. A company willing to hire on as trained killers and intelligence experts under the flag of democracy and freedom is also presumably capable of hiring on for insidious purposes.

Rev. Gordon C. Stewart, “Blackwater/Xe: How did it happen that the U.S. came to rely on mercenaries?” MINNPOST, July 3, 2009.

Privatizing the War in Afghanistan

Eight years after selling Blackwater/Xe in 2009, Erik Prince broke the silence of silent professionals in 2017 with an op ed in the Wall Street Journal. “The MacArthur Model for Afghanistan” (May 31, 2017) criticized the DOD’s restrictive Rules of Engagement and proposed appointment of a Viceroy with freedom to privatize the war in Afghanistan as he saw fit. The Viceroy would report directly to the President, thereby by-passing the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

By the time of the WSJ column, Mr. Prince had sold Blackwater/Xe, and founded Project Veritas, a private intelligence company that recruits former British spies and CIA agents to conduct secretive intelligence-gathering and infiltrations of the Democratic Party, Black Lives Matter, liberal movements, groups, and labor unions hostile to the Trump agenda. Among the botched Project Veritas cases targeted was the American Federation of Teachers. Erik Prince is the younger brother of Betsy Prince DeVos, the Trump Administration Secretary of Education until her recent resignation.

Blackwater/Xe and Project Veritas are two among a host of right-of-center “security” companies that hire out trained military, intelligence, and police personnel through public and private contracts.

Days before a second wave of domestic terror hits the US Capitol and state capitols this Martin Luther King Day and the January 20 Inauguration, does any of that bother you?

Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, January 13, 2021.

Second Siege — Martin Luther King Weekend

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Capitol Sieges during Martin Luther King Weekend

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day will be different this year. “Stop the Steal” mass gathering are scheduled to convene in state capitols, as well as returning to the nation’s capitol.

After Twitter’s shut down Donald Trump’s Twitter account, The Washington Post published “Capitol siege was planned online. Trump supporters now planning the next one.” “Twitter said it was particularly concerned about contributing to a possible ‘secondary attack’ on the U.S. Capitol and state government facilities the weekend of Jan. 16-17.”

Time will tell whether this weekend will bring a secondary attack, or whether history will regard the second attack as primary. News coverage since the January 6 insurrection has focused mostly on how the U.S. Capitol was left so unprotected — a plan said to have “failed” because of a series of miscommunications, or whether the plan had succeeded, pointing the finger of blame higher up the chain of command on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Washington Post

Less attention has been paid to Martin Luther King weekend with which the “Stop the Steal!” campaign coincides. Competing events will ring the bell for freedom: MLK’s call to “Let freedom ring!” from shore to shore for all God’s children, and DJT’s call to “Stop the Steal!” that will ring out from the clank of a bell crafted by a despot’s lies.

How Could This Happen?

Dutch philosopher of religion Willem Zuurdeeg was driven by a question that deserves our attention again. What is it about being human that led Germany to salute and fall in line behind a madman? His work offers insight into how and why people, religions, and nations become fanatical. Views from the Edge will turn to Zuurdeeg’s understanding in the weeks to come.

For now, the call for deeper reflection by each of us leaps from the final paragraphs of his description of fanatical claims and the “fanatical situation”:

Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness acknowledges Zuurdeeg’s work as “the indelible ink in which Be Still! is written.” Be Still!‘s essay “Our Anxious Time” (p.16-18) looks through the lenses of Zuurdeeg and Paul Tillich. Little did I know that the week before and during the 2021 Martin Luther King weekend observance the clanking bell would ring again or that I would be so ready to surrender to my own rampage of rage.

Grace and Peace,

Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN. January 11, 2021

The Storm Is Passing Over

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What’s happening to America and Americans?

The storm that blew through the U.S. Capitol last Wednesday has not passed. What America will be and who we will be in the midst of the storm are always the questions on Martin Luther King Day, but this year the choice will be clearer.

Life on the stormy sea

Thunder and Lightning on MLK Weekend

If intelligence reports come to pass, the Proud Boys, Boogaloo Bois, Aryan Brotherhood, and other well-armed White nationalist groups will again storm through the nation’s Capitol to “liberate” their country, as did the Wolverine Watchmen who gathered in Lansing, burst into the Michigan Capitol, and would have kidnapped, tried, and executed Governor Gretchen Whitmer had the FBI not foiled the plot with advance intelligence.

Freedom and the Covenant of Mutual Responsibility

Will we be a people preoccupied by the pernicious insistence on unaccountable individual freedom? “You can’t make me wear a mask!” Will we confuse liberty with freedom from restraint, or will we place freedom where it belongs — within the context of a social covenant, a Constitutional republic — that holds the indivisible tension between freedom and responsibility for our neighbors?

The Blue Note Gospel and the Storm Passing Over

The Black church in America lives out that tension of freedom and covenant, individual liberty and community. It has a history and tradition few others share. The descendants of slavery can teach us about living in the storm while the storm passes over. They neither deny the storm nor succumb to it. As Otis Moss III describes it, the Black church preaches “the Blue-Note gospel” born of the cross of Jesus and can “Shouts the Gospel shout” because it knows the blues.

This morning, we share the soulful sound of resilience in the midst of the storm.

The Storm Is Passing Over, Detroit Mass Choir

Martin Luther King and the Storm

This Martin Luther King Weekend the storm of America’s original sin will sweep through, and the resilience of the Blue-Note Gospel will carry us through.

Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, Jan. 10, 2021.

Lock him up NOW! Before Martial Law

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George Washington taking the oath of office at first Inauguration

He doesn’t talk like us

Donald Trump’s long-time lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen reminded Congress during the first impeachment hearings that his old boss doesn’t talk like us.

“That’s not how he talks. He talks in code.”

The Code of Insurrection

President Trump’s silence in the wake of the cyber attack on America national security seemed to speak as loud as words. He stayed silent, as he had after George Floyd’s murder until clearing a lawful protest from Lafayette Park to hold up and Bible and proclaim himself our law-and-order president. The Capitol on January 6 was not protected, raising the question of how that happened.

“The plan was a failure,” by every account. Was it? The appearance of white supremacist thugs on January 6 was not an accident. It happened by the president’s invitation. It was the president who then told them to march up to the Capitol during the normally ceremonial Congressional vote to approve the Electoral College’s certification. It was Roy Cohn’s apprentice and Michael Cohen’s old boss who spoke by silence when his supporters breached the security of the building where the Constitution is meant to be preserved and protected. The president failed to defend it. He and his closest advisors watched the attack on television, smiling and laughing like guys at a frat beer party.

What was the plan? Was it a failure? Or had “the plan” been a rousing success? Why was the security presence so much less than it was the day the Administration violated the First Amendment-protected peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstration in Lafayette Park? Who refused Maryland Governor Larry Hogan’s offer of the National Guard to help secure the Capitol, and why was it refused in the midst of a national crisis? Why did some Capitol Police Officers seem to enjoy taking selfies with insurrectionists? Why was there no word from the White House or anyone in the Trump Administration while MAGA marauders rampaged through the Capitol?

Where were the Homeland Security special forces without identification that had mysteriously descended on a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Portland, Oregon? Why did Homeland Security wait until the shards were being swept from the Capitol floor to show up?

Deputy Director of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli touring the U.S. Capitol during clean-up.

A Page from an Old Playbook

“Whether he realizes it or not,” wrote Jeffery C. Billman (Orlando Weekly, September 9, 2020), “Trump has borrowed a page from the fascist playbook.

This is the truth: Whether he realizes it or not, Trump has borrowed a page from the fascist playbook.
I’m not referring to his well-documented authoritarianism or even his willingness to steal the election if he can’t win it legitimately. Nor am I suggesting that Trump is planning a genocide.
I’m talking specifically about inciting violence against leftist protesters.
That’s how fascists claimed power in the 1920s and ’30s.
The Nazis sent Brownshirts to left-wing gatherings to provoke street fights and instigate chaos, most famously the Red Wedding rally in 1927, in which more than 100 people were injured. They then portrayed themselves as victims of leftist anarchy. Sound familiar?

The Memory of a Three-year old

Like Jeffery Billman, Views from the Edge has called attention to the borrowed playbooks, Mein Kampf and The Speeches of Hitler, perhaps too often. But I’m old. I remember. I am still in part the three-year old sitting around the dinner table with my mother and grandparents, listening to the evening radio broadcast. I was my grandson Elijah’s age, fearing my father would not make it home from his air base n the South Pacific. My grandparents were conservative Republicans. They didn’t like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but he was their one and only President pledged to defend the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke complete sentences and paragraphs from his wheelchair. He didn’t give instructions by code and silence. It would not have occurred to them that the president they didn’t like could be Domestic Enemy Number One.

By reason of Insanity and by reason of cowardice

Between now and January 2021 a man who belongs in the hospital for the criminally insane remains the only human being on the planet sworn to defend the U.S. Constitution against himself. More than 100 Members of the House of Representatives and six Senators who cannot plead “Not guilty by reason of insanity” will plead innocent return to their seats in the Capitol they have failed to preserve and protect. Given the opportunity to take action to remove their party’s leader, they will fail again to keep their oaths of office.

January 17, 2021

If January 6, 2021 was unprecedented and horrifying, January 17 may be worse.January 17 is the day the Proud Boys and Trump supporting comrades will return to the nation’s Capitol. The social chaos produced by ramped-up mob attack will become the president’s public reason to save the nation by invoking Marshall Law.

Cabinet Invokes 25th Amendment

What happens next is anybody’s guess. What might have happened appeared in a June, 2018 Views from the Edge commentary. Click Trump Cabinet Invokes 25th Amendment for a tongue-in-cheek description that was, in fact, fake news.

Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017, Wipf and Stock), available in kindle and paperback.

Stop this NOW whether guilty, or not guilty be reason of insanity.

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Today Martin Luther King Jr’s successor was elected to the U.S. Senate. It was also the day Senators and Representatives wore gas masks in their chambers of the nation’s Capitol. Yesterday’s elections of Rafael Warlock and Jon Ossof in Georgia is an historic moment never to be forgotten by historians. Whether it will become a footnote depends in part on the Trump far-right occupation of the Capitol where the work of representative democracy tales place.

“We’re still fighting, and you’re going to see what’s going to happen.”

Donald J. Trump to rally in Dalton, GA, Monday, January 4, 2021.

Today we saw what was going to happen

“Liberate Michigan,” “Stay back and stand by (Proud Boys)”, and get ready for “trial by combat” (Rudy Giuliani today) beg for answers. How and why was the U.S. Capitol security left so insecure?

The President was silent until a tepid text and video that stoked the fire he lit. Where was Homeland Security? Where was the U.S. Attorney General? Where were the federal agents who cleared Lafayette Park so the president could hold up a Bible the book in front of the Saint James Episcopal Church, and return to declare himself “your law-and-order President”?

The violent insurrection that invaded the U.S Capitol today is an act of domestic terrorism orchestrated by domestic enemy #1 and supported by 12 cowardly senators and 100-plus representatives who broke their oaths of office.

Stopping it now

May Congress re-convene tonight to finish its constitutional responsibility of approving the Electoral College certification of the 2020 election. But do not stop there. Ask how and why the Capitol was so unprotected, and move now to remove the president before he does worse in the two weeks he will remain at the desk of the Oval Office: Declare Marshal Law as the guardian of law-and-order, a military attack on Iran’s nuclear research sites, and who knows what else.

Who needs foreign enemies when you have a law-and-order domestic terrorist inciting a coup d’etat in the homeland? Do it now. Before it’s too late. Do it, members of the House and Senate, before America becomes the cuckoo’s nest. Impeach him and send the men in white coats before the country loses its soul to Mein Kampf.

Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, January 6, 2021.

Two Epiphanies: the Return of the Wise

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An epiphany is the manifestation or unveiling of what is not obvious to the naked eye. Today is Epiphany on the western Church calendar celebrating the epiphany of the Magi (the Wise). One does not expect to find anything of much value in an animal shelter, let alone a child wrapped in cloth whose crib is an animal feeding trough.

Stefano di Giovanni (1392-1450) Journey of the Magi

Returning to Our Own Country by Another Way

If the appearance of the Magi (wisdom figures) bearing expensive gifts to an animal shelter far from the levers of wealth and power calls for special attention, the refusal of these wisdom figures to return to Herod represents the wisdom of the wise of all ages.

Those who are Wise refuse to be informers of a schemer. The Magi do not return to Herod, as Herod has instructed. Instead “they returned to their own country by another way” — and so must we this Day of Epiphany.

Two Epiphanies — Two Unveilings

This Epiphany there will be two epiphanies, two unveilings or manifestations, one the celebration of good news to all, the other the recognition of Herod’s scheming. “And when you have found him (the new-born king), return to me that I too may worship him.”

In the churches of Western Christianity, hymns will be sung to a babe destined to be buried the way he was born — in a borrowed place. Meanwhile, a Herodian crowd with guns drawn will gather at the Capitol In Washington D.C. while a group of Senators and Representatives, whether fearful of Herod or acting on their own ambitions to become him, will continue the schemes that threaten to leave their country in ruins.

In Atlanta, Georgia, Congressman John Lewis’s pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, will take the Wisdom of his predecessor, at Ebenezer, Martin Luther King, Jr., to the U.S. Senate floor.

Rev. Rafael Warnock on Death Row

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Georgia voters today render a verdict on Rafael Warnock. Verdicts are more familiar to Rev. Warnock than they are to most of us. Some verdicts leave a person standing. Others verdicts end a life by state execution.

Troy Davis

Troy Davis was one of the latter. The eve before his execution by the state of Georgia, Minnesota Public Radio’s All Things Considered aired this personal reflection on capitol punishment. CLICK HERE to open the MPR site; then click the AUDIO to listen to the commentary on Troy Davis in light of Innocent Project pro bono appeals attorney Joe Margulies who represented Betty Beets.

The pastor on Georgia’s death row

The Rev. Dr. Rafael Warnock, Pastor, Ebenezer Baptist Church, minister on death row

Nine years later, reading his guest article on mercy in an alumni journal, I leaned the name of the pastor who became the death row pastor to Troy Davis. Rafael Warnock is not a showman. No matter whether in the public eye as the latest successor of Martin Luther King, Jr., the home church of the late Hon. John Lewis, or out of sight standing by a condemned man on death row, Rafael Warnock has the heart of a pastor.

Georgia verdict today

Today the people of Georgia are rendering a verdict on his candidacy for U.S. Senate. Tomorrow, Jan. 6, as the Proud Boys “stand by” a treasonous defeated president on the streets of Washington, D.C. with guns drawn, another verdict on who we are, and who we will stand by in America will be debated on the floor of the U.S. Congress.

I wish Troy Davis could vote today!

Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, January 5, 2021.