I have a lot on my mind....

...things like: I'm not really sure that it was so awful that Sonia Sotomayor said that she thought that sometimes a wise Latina might make a better decision than a white male. Everyone is having conniption fits about it, thinking that she is being biased, and this shows a particular mentality, you know, "reverse discrimination", or even "racism." (I'm putting "racism" in quotes, because it's my understanding that while anyone can be prejudiced, racism has to do with the overt and assumed power of the dominant class over minorities.)

I'm thinking also that for so long it was assumed that "white male" was THE norm, and that twelve white men could be considered "a jury of your peers", for, say, a woman, a black man in the South, or any minority. Please, also, let's not forget that there was a time when only white men could serve on juries. Perhaps, as Ms. Sotomayer has said, it was a poorly worded sentence.

I'm just going to go on record that I think that sometimes a wise Latina would actually make a fairer decision than a white male.

***

So Pentecost, the third major festival of the church year, every bit as important as Christmas and Easter, almost always takes place in the summer, and just doesn't get as much pizzazz. No midnight services with candles, no special carols, no "Pentecost dinners" with the whole family coming over. We did have a choir at 10:00 this year, and the Senior Pastor's children's message was a stroke of genius. He had a children's toy, it looked like some kind of a plastic toy air pump with a plastic rocket attached to it, and he had the kids feel the little burst of air when he squeezed the pump. Then he put the pump on the ground and launched the rocket in to the air. I didn't say this, but I thought, "maybe we should have done this on Ascension." Bad me. Bad me.

I also thought of the line from Annie Dillard's book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (and I don't have the exact citation) where she said that if we really understood what was going on at worship, what we were praying for, we'd all be wearing pith helmets.

***

I'm still thinking about whether I will post my Pentecost sermon. I'm thinking so many Pentecost-al thoughts lately, and they did not all get into the sermon. In fact, most of them didn't. I thought about the Service of the Word at my Synod Assembly on Saturday, presented by Bread of Life Lutheran Church, the only Deaf Congregation in the ELCA. Did you know that 90% of deaf people are unchurched? They long ago got the message that the church considered them defective, and that somehow their disability was the result of something they did wrong. I had no idea. But Pentecost is all about the Spirit widening our circle, telling us that the love of God is bigger and wider than all of our categories and all of our prejudices and all of the barriers we can erect.

***

Here's a story:

Once upon a time there was a funeral for a grandpa. At the visitation, grandma and children and grandchildren were there, including two granddaughters. The older was was eight years old. She had something she wanted to put into her grandfather's casket. It was a letter.

It was not a letter to him. It was a letter that she wanted her grandfather to deliver to someone else. She wanted her grandfather, when he got to heaven, to deliver this letter to her other grandmother, her mother's mother.

This grandmother had also died recently. This grandmother also had lived in Korea.

Her grandfather and grandmother had never met. They didn't speak the same language. They lived on the other side of the world from one another. But this 8 year old girl was sure that in heaven they would meet, and would know each other, and would be able to communicate.

Is this a vision? I think this is a vision, and not just of heaven, but of the Kingdom of God, the kind of world God is bringing to be. It's a vision of barriers of culture and language and time and place being broken down, and replaced with a vision of the wide wide love of God

"Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy...."

What We See

When I was in about the 3rd or 4th grade, I remember getting a school assignment at about this time of year (nearing Thanksgiving, that is) to write an essay about the First Americans. I remember procrastinating for awhile, thinking for awhile, and finally getting out our set of Golden Encyclopedias to find out all I could about the Pilgrims. I loved to write, even then, and felt proud of my work.

A few days later, our teacher held up just one of our essays for special mention. But it wasn't my essay. It was one of my classmate's, a girl who lived just down the street from me. She and she alone had written her essay, not about the Pilgrims, but about Native Americans.

****

A long time later, I lived in Japan. First I lived there as a missionary and teacher of English. Later I studied some Japanese at a college in Tokyo. I used to like to go to the campus library and sit in a big chair and read newspapers from the United States.

One Sunday I read with interest an article in the Sunday New York Times called "American Survivors of the Atomic Bomb." The article was an in-depth exploration of the fates of a handful of prisoners of war who were in Hiroshima on August 6th. I hadn't known that there were any American prisoners in Japan at the time, and drank in every aspect of the long, detailed article.

A week later I read the letters to the editor. Many letters thought that the in-depth article was quite illuminating. But one I have remembered for all these years. This letter-writer took the article to task for not mentioning the many Japanese-Americans who happened to be in Japan when the war broke out. After the declaration of war, they were not able to return to the United States. Some of them had been victims of the atomic bomb, too. Why were their stories not researched?

****

A number of years ago I was working at a church in a large Western city. Our congregation was in a central-city, diverse location: large mansions and poor neighborhoods within a few blocks in different directions. Our church held a food pantry, a mental-health center, congregate dining for seniors, and a variety of other ministries. However, we were not a terribly diverse congregation.

One Sunday morning an African American woman and her two adult sons walked into our Sunday worship service. Though nobody talked about it at the time, we discovered later that several of us were thinking I wonder if they will be able to follow the liturgy.

Turns out that they knew it by heart.

****

So much of what we believe depends on what we see -- or what we choose to see.