I'm sending you this again

The day after Father's Day I need to tell you that my father was a racist.

Not overt, since he had to be among blacks in our town and county. But racist, none the less.

The first time he visited me in Charleston, where I served a Black Church, he came into St. James and said, "it doesn't smell like I thought it would."

That kind of racist.

Here's a sermon from not that long ago that talks about what we're going through now.

Sunday, July 21, 2019

Sunday's sermon

6^TH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST—Emmanuel, Killingworth

            Today we heard the story of Mary and Martha. Martha is fretting, doing chores, cooking and worrying while Mary sits at Jesus’ feet and absorbs his wisdom. Martha comes to complain and ask for Mary’s help and Jesus tells her, “Mary has chosen the better part.”

            I won’t ask you to raise your hands, but in the honestly of your heart tell yourself if you are more like Martha or Mary.

            I bet I’m talking to a bunch of Martha’s here today!

            Most of us, most of the time, are fretting like Martha, working on many tasks, not taking time to call out our Mary side and listen quietly to the ‘still, small voice of God.’

            That’s what we need to do, especially in these times: sit and listen for the wisdom of Jesus.

            I’m going to tell you about my upbringing a bit, because it will lead me to what I want to say later.

            I grew up in the southern most county of West Virginia, McDowell County. If you’re from there you say ‘MACK-dowell’ instead of Mac-Dowell. There were about 100,000 people in an area larger than Rhode Island—about half Black and half White.

            Though half the people in my little town were African American, I knew only two of them by name: Gene Kelly, who worked in my uncle’s grocery store and his wife, Delia, who was my uncle’s housekeeper and cook. But many of the Black adults and a good number of the kids knew my name since my two uncles owned a grocery store, a dry goods store and the Esso station and my father sold them insurance.

            I was never in a classroom with an African American until my senior year of high school though it was over a decade after Brown vs. The Board of Education. The next year the two separate school systems were going to merge, so Gary District High sent 6 students to be in my senior class: three talented male athletes and three very smart females to smooth the way. They weren’t allowed at the prom, so I didn’t attend either.

            I was good friends in college with a young man who graduated from Gary District. He would introduce me to his friends by saying, “Jim and I went to different high schools together!”

            And it wasn’t just race. When I was leaving Anawalt Junior High to go 12 miles down the road to Gary High, our Principal addressed the 9^th graders. (Anawalt was almost completely Anglo Saxon, and Black of course, but almost no people of other ethnic origins.) Principal Ramsey told us (please excuse the language but I want you to hear what he said): “The Hunks and Tallies and Pollacks down at Gary aren’t going to accept you. You will be shunned.”

            A man with a Master’s Degree told 14-year-old kids that!

            It was a dark and racist time for me growing up. Which brings me to another place—today our country seems to be moving back toward those time instead of toward more diversity and more inclusion.

            Attacks against Muslims and Jews are way up from 5 years ago. Hate crimes are increasing. White Nationalists and Neo-Nazi’s are bolder and more public now. Immigrants and even ethnic people born in this country are more fearful than they had been. Human beings fleeing, in most cases, for their lives are separated from they children and held in cages along the southern boarder.

            I’m not talking about policy disagreements. In a democracy, there are always policy disagreements—it is a sign of the strength and health of the democracy. I’m talking about the violation of basis human rights—rights all of God’s children should expect in ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’.

            Martha work is needed to correct all this—but Mary work is needed more. We need to sit with God and ponder God’s wisdom and wonder how things have gone wrong. Before Martha gets to work, Mary must drown out the rhetoric and the noise and ponder the will of God, seeking guidance for the work to be done to insure ALL PEOPLE a part of the Dream of this great and good land.

            So, let your Mary side ponder our plight so her wisdom can guide the work our Martha side has to do.     Amen.

Father's Day

Both Josh and Mimi called to wish me a happy one.

Josh put his phone on speaker so my Bradley-girl granddaughters could talk with me.

I have trouble hearing on speaker phone and when I told Bern she went into a long explanation about how I need to get hearing aids. It's not a conversation I enjoy and it went on too long.

We're actually going, next Friday and Saturday to see Mimi, Tim and Eleanor. I'm not sure how long it will take to get there and I have to get Sunday church and my sermon squared away before we go.

I think about my father this day.

He was a hero in many ways: landing on Omaha Beach on D-day, fighting across France to Germany with General Patton, caring for my mother and both their families and me.

But, he always doubted himself, wondering if he were good enough or smart enough or worthy enough.

He only finished 8th grade and my mother had a Master's Degree. So he felt deficient there. And mom's teaching made more money than working in his brother's store, or the little bar he ran after that (and left because he had to draw a gun on a drunk men), or his dry cleaning route, or his insurance business, which was his last job.

But he did well in insurance and I clearly remember the night my parents were doing their finances--I was out of high school and home from college--and my father said, with astonishment, "I made more money this month than you!" It was the first time ever.

I wish he hadn't doubted himself so much.

He was a kind and loving and protective father.

I miss him today.

Though my mother never met them, Dad know Mimi and Josh as children. In fact, I brought him to live with  us in New Haven when his dementia began. But he began to wander away and had to go to a home.

I miss him today.

Happy Father's Day to all you fathers and all those who think of your fathers today.

my family owned slaves

At least that is what my uncle Russel, my father's brother, told me as we were driving with my parents to Waiteville, WV, where my father's family comes from,

I was 12 or 13. My uncle said to my father, "Virgil, stop here", on the dirt road that went on for five miles or so to Waiiteville.

"Jimmy," he said to me, "up on that hill are the graves of the slaves your great-great-grandfather owned. There are eight graves there."

My great-great-grandfather's name was, like mine, James Gordon Bradley.

I didn't know how to process that information.

The first James Gordon Bradley had owned slaves. He lived before West Virginia split from Virginia and became part of the union.

I am still ashamed and horrified that the blood in my body once owned slaves.

All these protests touch me personally. I am part of the problem--my family owned slaves. I ponder that truth.

How can I repent for that?

What can I do to make up for that?

What penitence will absolve me?

I have no idea.

I wrestle with it in my soul.

Where can absolution come from?

That is why I am so completely and totally committed to the demands of the protest.

Finally finding 'equality' in this nation might lessen my guilt for the sins of my ancestors.

I pray it would.

And I pray we do all we can--all of us--to find a road to justice and equality in this nation of ours.

Join me in that prayer and in that movement. Please.



I 

Juneteenth

Today is Juneteenth. It marks the day, after the end of the Civil war, when slaves in Texas finally found out they were free. Union soldiers arrived and told them.

The Emancipation Proclamation was two years before, but word of it hadn't reached Texas--no cable news or cell phones or emails, remember.

June 19th has been celebrated by visiting graves, picnics and lots of singing ever since.

It is a day 'holy' to African Americans.

Which is why the President's plan to hold a rally on Juneteenth in Tulsa caused such an uproar.

As did Tulsa, the scene of some of the most vicious racial violence a century ago when whites burned black homes and businesses and churches to the ground and murdered several hundred people.

The President went on Fox News to tell people he had brought knowledge of Juneteenth to the country. The truth was, he didn't know what June 19th was about.

He asked an aid in the White House if they knew what Juneteenth was and she told him the White House staff sent out a press release on June 19 every year celebrating the day.

He didn't know that.

I have held people of color in my heart today (my way of 'praying') and held the protestors there as well.

This could--I said 'could'--be a time of a great reckoning and renewal for our country. Things could change drastically and for the much better.

I pray so. I will do what I can to make it happen, as little as that might be.

I urge you to as well.

We could find the end of the rainbow this time--peace, equality, freedom, hope and wonder.

(The opinions in this blog are mine and mine only and do not reflect on the opinions of the churches and people I serve.)

Elsie Flink

When I arrived at St. John's, Waterbury, in 1989, Elsie Flink was already there--well in her 80's--and had been for decades. She was born in Germany or Sweden (I don't remember) and came to this country when she was a young girl.

She had broken her leg and was sitting on the Green when the Rector of St. John's at that time, it may have been John Lewis, who was Rector for 40 years, met her and invited her to church, She came, and stayed.

She was a server in St. John's elderly lunch, serving people years younger than herself, which lasted until the soup kitchen took over the auditorium.

She was in the choir, as well. By far the oldest member.

She was feisty and argumentative, but gentle at her core. I came to love her greatly.

She'd spent decades working at one of Waterbury's watch factories. For years she painted the faces of clocks and watches. Since the  women doing that needed their brushes sharp, they would run them between their teeth, not knowing the paint, to stick to metal, has radium in it. Many of the women died young, but not Elsie! She was a 'radium girl', she would say, and show us how her clothes would lose their color after a few wearings....Amazing.

She lived in an apartment at the other end of the Green from the church, and walked, in all weather to church.

She lived to be, I think, 101.

And lived alone until her hospital stay that led to her death.

Remarkable.

Once I was driving her somewhere and though I knew she had serious macular degeneration, she told me stories of the areas we drove through.

I realized she could see out of the side of her eyes and had perfect recall of the places we passed.

The day she died, she told me in the hospital that she would never go into a 'home'. I believed her. As I left, a social worker was coming to talk to her. I asked the social worker what she had come to say and she told me, "I want to talk with her about a nursing home".

I shook my head and smiled. "That will kill her," I said.

The social worker laughed.

When I got back to the church the phone was ringing. It was the hospital calling to let me know Elsie died while the social worker was talking with her.

True to her word--as always--Elsie did what she said she would do.

How many of us can say the same about ourselves?

After her funeral, some members of the parish and I were cleaning out her apartment--she had no family and her only brother had died in WW I! We found weird stuff--Rosicrucian books and even stranger things. I had no idea! We also found pictures and letters pointing to a long tern love relationship with another woman. Elsie, ahead of her time.

She kept her secrets well.

God bless her for that.

I loved her and still think of her.

Elsie, wherever you are, I love you.

(This blog is only my opinions and have nothing to do with the three churches I serve.)

I've been in trouble a lot

As a priest, I'm used to hot water.

The Bishop who convinced me to come back to West Virginia after seminary, though I'd been offered a job at a huge Church in Chicago, Robert Atkinson (rest his soul) had two nick-names for me. "My rogue priest" and "my personal fire starter". (I liked both, by the way.)

I came to Charleston, WV, to serve a mostly Black church, St. James in Charleston. St. James sponsored a day care in Institute, where my son went .The kids exchanged Christmas ornaments and Josh got a strawberry. He was gravely disappointed.

It's still on our tree every Christmas.

Anyway, the chancellor of the Diocese (that's the lawyer for the Diocese) told a colleague, also an episcopalian, that the day care was run by 'uppity Negreas'. And she told me.

I told the vestry of St. James and they demanded that the Bishop fire him.

In a meeting with the Vestry, the Bishop told them the chancellor had said "Negeas", not the N-word and that since the man was from South-Western Virginia that was the pronunciation of 'Negroes' there.

I remember a member of the Vestry filling his pipe--people still smoked in public places back then--while saying, "Bishop, 'negreas' isn't the problem. It's 'uppity'.

The chancellor resigned.

Then, at the next diocesan convention, the bishop gave the former chancellor the 'bishop's medal of honor'. I fainted and fell down on the floor. EMT's interrupted the convention to take me to the hospital. J.F. (St. James' representative) and my friend Jorge were at my bedside when I woke up.

"Pretty impressive," Jorge said.

Bishop Atkinson gave me some of the best advice I've ever been given. I called him one day and said "bishop, is it ok if I....". He stopped me right there. "Jim," he said, "if you ask and I say 'no' and you do it anyway, which you probably will, l have to come down on you hard. If you just go do it and I don't approve, I'll just slap your hand."

Great advice. I've followed it ever since.

Then, years later, at St. John's in Waterbury, CT, I had put in the bulletin--"all are invited to receive communion"--which is what I always said, but writing it down really troubled a member of the parish and member of the choir, who complained to choir members who told me.

I went to him (knowing full well that under 'canon law', only baptized people can receive communion) and asked him about it. He denied he had said it and was angry with me.

A week later I received a letter from the bishop telling me to take it out of the bulletin.

I did, but you see, in my first 5 of 21 years there, I had baptized 5 people who came to the font because they had received at the table. If the font leads to the table, why can't the table lead to the font?

By the way, I never again acted on second hand information. If you have a problem with me, tell me.

Then, years later, I invited Integrity (GLBTQ Episcopalians) to use St. John's as their home.

Three (you guessed it) older white men were furious. A retired priest in the parish was Integrity's chaplain and he sat in on my private meetings with them. They were brutal.

So, with the other priest's advice, I drug the whole thing out into the open in parish wide meetings.

At the first one, one of the most respected members of the parish rose and shook his finger at the three. "My son is gay," he said, "and I am horrified that you think my son is evil."

That ended it.

The three left the parish and one came back with apologies I accepted.

I'm used to trouble.

I'm the 'rogue priest'.

I'm the 'fire starter'.

I like that.

(Everything I write here is 'my own opinion" only and does not reflect on the churches I serve.)

Water walkers all

I was looking through my sermons in my on-line file and came across this one. I was attracted by the title, 'Water walkers all', so I read it.

It's really just notes, not a written out sermon, but I liked the quotes so much I decided to share it. It's from 2014.

And where it says "tell story", I have no idea what story I told.

Preachers don't remember their sermons much. Sermons are 'in the moment' things and slip away rapidly. I always smile and nod when people talk about a sermon I gave 3 weeks ago, but I usually don't remember it. When I give a sermon without a text and Bea asks me to send it do her, I have to do it Sunday afternoon, or I'm clueless!

But I like all the quotes in this outline so much, I wanted to share it.

WATER WALKERS ALL

“The crisis of faith is the crisis of the imagination. If we can't imagine ourselves walking on the water with Jesus, how can we ever do it?” --Denise Levertov at a meeting of poets and theologians.

*Jesus calls us to be water walkers, to come to him on the water.

*tell story.

-Sea of Galilee is really a lake, but the Mediterranean Sea is only 50 miles away. Warm, wet air from the Mediterranean comes in contact with the high places and cold air of the Golan Heights to the East of Galilee and unexpected storms can occur without warning.

-that's what happens to the disciples.

-when they see Jesus walking toward them, they are terrified. But he says, “Do not fear, it is I, do not be afraid.”

What he said in Greek was “ego eimi” which means literally “I am, I am” just what Yahweh told Moses when he asked what God's name was. Those Jews in that boat knew that.

Peter goes for him and sinks.

Jesus asked “Why did you doubt?”

 But it wasn't 'doubt' that was the problem...it was FEAR.

FEAR is our worst enemy...always and every time. FEAR dismantles us, makes us weak and sinks us in the sea.

St. Cyril of Jerusalem: THERE IS A DRAGON BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD, BEWARE LEST HE DEVOUR YOU. WE JOURNEY TO THE LOVER OF SOULS, BUT WE MUST PASS BY OUR DRAGON.

Comforting our children after nightmares...do not fear, I'm here, don't be afraid

When we walk on the edge, of all the light we have

and step off into the unknown,

we must believe that one of two things will happen:

There will be something solid for us to stand on

or we will be taught how to fly.

Water walkers for Jesus, stepping into the unknown for God, trusting the Spirit will give us somewhere to stand or teach us to fly.

(The thoughts in all my posts are mine alone--having nothing to do with the 3 rural churches I serve part-time.)