As a member of the United Church of Christ, I have found myself unintentionally embroiled in the recent controversy sparked by Barack Obama’s former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. We have seen clips of his sermons played over and over again on the evening news, the angry Black preacher waving his arms in the air cursing the “US of KKK” and shouting, “God damn America.”
In my conversations with friends and colleagues, I have found that one’s sympathy with Rev. Wright largely depends on one’s point of view. To my friends from the inner city, members of America’s underclasses, Rev. Wright’s critiques seem right on target. The United States was founded on the genocide of the original inhabitants of this continent, grew to economic power with the kidnapping and enslavement of the inhabitants of another continent, and maintains itself as the world’s greatest imperial power through the continued exploitation of poor people in its own backyard and in the farthest-flung reaches of planet Earth.
Key Scripture - Luke 4:16-30
In our scripture lesson today, Jesus is just getting started. He has recently been baptized in the Jordan by John and tempted in the desert by the Devil. He has returned to his hometown of Nazareth to proclaim the start of his public ministry and with it, the coming of the Kingdom of God. As an observant Jew, Jesus enters the synagogue on the Sabbath to read and comment upon the Scriptures, as was the right of all Jewish men. The synagogue is filled with other observant Jews who have assembled this morning to study Torah and to pray. The attendant hands Jesus a scroll, and he begins to read. Whether Jesus consciously chose this particular passage or whether it was chosen for him by the Holy Spirit, we do not know, but it is a significant text indeed, one of Isaiah’s beautiful and poetic descriptions of the coming age of the Moshiach, the anointed one, who will usher in an era of eternal shalom, when the children of Israel will be rescued from their exile and their oppressive foreign rulers cowed once and for all. “Today,” Jesus tells the assembly, “this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” The crowd is overjoyed. They cannot believe their ears! Is this not Joseph the carpenter’s son, who now claims to be the fulfillment of messianic prophecy? Can this young man, the one they heard say his first words and watched take his first steps, really be the one they have been waiting for?
As I prepare to vote in California's presidential primary this Tuesday, I find myself reflecting upon how different the American religio-political landscape looks than it did at this time four years ago. With the 2006 release of David Kuo's Tempting Faith, an exposé of the Bush administration's unabashed manipulation of religious faith for political gain, many conservative evangelicals have become wary of handing unqualified support to the Republican Party. A failed Iraq policy and an economy on the rocks have begun to sow seeds of doubt within a faith community the GOP once took for granted.
For nine months, from October 2006 through June 2007, I participated in Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service’s Engage Training for Trainers program. Engage is a training program designed by Pace e Bene to help people in many different contexts and circumstances explore the power of creative nonviolence to transform one’s self, one’s relationships, one’s community, and ultimately, the world. The nine-month Training for Trainers program involved about a dozen people from all over the country that were interested in becoming certified Pace e Bene Nonviolence Trainers. I was one of them.
What I found most surprising about the process was the discovery that nonviolence, more than anything else, is a way of life, a spiritual self-positioning. It is not something you do; it is something you are. Often, when we hear of nonviolence in the context of Gandhi’s independence movement in India or King’s civil rights movement in the United States, we think of nonviolence as some sort of ethically pure tactic for achieving a political or social objective. This, I have come to realize, is a misunderstanding. In the messy, sticky, uncertain world of human interaction, there is virtually no “ethically pure” way to do anything; humans are flawed, and therefore our actions are flawed. It is part of the path of nonviolence to be honest and humble about this. What nonviolence does achieve is to ground us in the reality of the common humanity of all involved in a conflict; it exhorts us never to lose sight of an opponent’s humanity and never to denigrate that humanity through the use of violence.
One of the most important realizations I took away from the training in terms of practical application to my own life is the relationship of nonviolence to pace: pace of life, pace of action, and pace of thought. It was during a role-playing exercise that it hit me. We were doing a simulation of a conflict that we were beginning to resolve through deep listening and a patient, understanding spirit. I had a deep sense of God’s presence in the room. Lunchtime came, and I ate my food and resumed my life at my normal pace, making and answering phone calls, catching up on homework, etc. When we re-gathered after lunch, I no longer felt such a strong sense of divine presence. I became distressed, grasping for it, wishing for it to return, but it eluded me. One of our trainers announced that our first activity after lunch would be to engage in some shared silence, and so she rang a bell and the silence commenced. After a while, I was flooded once again by a sense of God’s presence. It seemed to come spontaneously, without my having done a thing. Upon reflection on this experience, I realized that it was the slowing down of my thoughts and deeds that seemed to allow room for God’s light to shine through. The pace of life to which I am habituated through participation in American culture allows very little space for waiting on God’s presence. It is indeed a radically counter-cultural move to simplify one’s life such that God’s still, small voice may really be heard and obeyed, and there are very few American institutions (seminary included, I believe), with which one does not have to struggle hard to put such a change of pace into practice.
Coming from a Quaker background, I believe these realities are at the heart of much of the Quaker tradition, but the Society of Friends has always had to struggle with the tension between being firmly in and involved with the world and being a peculiar people of God with a distinct way of life. Quakers have never separated themselves from those outside of their religious group to the extent that many Old Order Amish and Mennonite communities have, and so they have had to resist being consumed by the dominant culture through their interface with it. I believe that my continued involvement with Pace e Bene will help me to reconnect with my Quaker roots by reminding me of the principles like slow pace and deep spirituality that are the essence of nonviolence.
» 1 commentThe PICO model of community organizing begins with relationship. One of PICO’s ubiquitous organizing principles states it clearly: "Power is a product of relationship." This is not just any sort of relationship, however. Says Jim Keddy, an experienced pastor in the PICO network, "…our stress is on building public relationships, based on common self-interest, trust, and values…The goal of our relationships is to help develop leaders for public life…"
The development of these relationships starts with the 1-to-1, an intentional conversation between an organizer and a member of the community of about half an hour to an hour in length, designed to gain an understanding of the person’s deepest values, their fears, their beliefs, and their anger. Put succinctly, the 1-to-1 allows the organizer to get an idea of a person’s “issues.” Another PICO principle says: “Organizing is about people; people are about issues.” When communities have a clear sense of their common issues—-their common self-interest—-they can move on to their next step: research.
It has been a great first week for me at Oakland Community Organizations!
Tuesday was an exciting second day at work. I met Kamara, my supervisor, in West Oakland to observe a 1-to-1 (or, I suppose, with me there it was a 2-to-1) with Ms. Patty, a longtime West Oakland resident and OCO leader. We filled her in on the previous evening's meeting at the Mayor's Office, and asked her opinions on how we should proceed. She reminded us of OCO's efforts to pass an inclusionary zoning ordinance in order to provide Oakland residents with affordable housing, and how she felt that when OCO left it up to the city, the bill seemed to die in City Council. "We can't let that happen with this," she told us. After all, young people are dying.
Yesterday was my first day of work at OCO. I went in to the office in East Oakland for a noon staff meeting, and got to meet most of the people I'll be working alongside this summer. Happily, there were some familiar faces! Amy Fitzgerald, who I've seen at my church and talked to a couple of times on the phone, and who I can already tell is a powerful organizer, is working on affordable housing and inclusionary zoning. A very pleasant surprise was being greeted with a big hug by Pastor John Rutsinditwarne, a Lutheran minister from Rwanda who is using the PICO model to rebuild community there after the genocide. He had come to speak to the community organizing class I took during my first year in seminary and we hit it off quite well, staying in contact for a little while afterward.
Hi. I'm Ryan. I just completed my second year of seminary at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. I'm in care as a minister-in-formation with the First Congregational Church of Oakland of the United Church of Christ, and I'm on the adventure of my life learning what it takes to be a faithful follower of Jesus Christ, Love incarnate, in 21st-century America.
This summer, I'll begin a year-long project of learning and loving the City of Oakland and her people, exploring their needs, wants and dreams for the community and working to figure out how a rookie minister like me can be of service in making them a reality. This Monday, June 11th, I'll begin an eight-week Beatitudes Society Fellowship with Oakland Community Organizations (OCO), the local affiliate of PICO, a nation-wide faith-based community organizing network, where I'll be working in the area of homicide and violence reduction in the neighborhood of West Oakland.
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