Stained Glass

It was a time when I was listening to voices I'd not listened to before, voices like James Baldwin, the African-American writer, who never could shake his very religious background (his step-father was a preacher), not because he wanted to so badly but because the very comfort his father's Christianity sometimes offered was simply too comforting to finally reject. I was a kid from a deeply religious home. Reading Baldwin was a new thing.

What I remember from Go Tell It On the Mountain, Baldwin's somewhat autobiographical novel, is a scene when the music from a Black church on the street swells up toward him but seems powerless against the forces of darkness on the street--too many hallelujahs to the Lamb, too much attention to the sweet bye and bye and not nearly enough to hunger and violence on the streets. It was a clear picture I've not forgotten.

A church too taken with the world-to-come to care much about the world on the other side of the stained glass. I remember that image because, back then, I couldn't help but think it still true.

A few days ago, I listened to American Family Radio, "news with a Christian perspective," they said. One story featured the horrors of Gaza, but what was remarkable was the consistent blame for those horrors--HAMAS behind the suffering: HAMAS fomented violent mobs, HAMAS who shot the hungry, HAMAS who wouldn't allow relief convoys in to feed the people.

I was accustomed, am accustomed, to hearing the opposite: that the forces doing the horrifying damage in Gaza was the Israelis.

I'm not there. I don't know. But I can guess that "Christian" radio, these days, would side with Israel Defense Fortress. They side consistently over there on the right side of the ledger.

Yesterday, our pastor used the pattern of the Beatitudes for the morning's congregational prayer. 

We pray also as Jesus taught us 'Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons and daughters of God.' So, Lord, we pray for the peace that you give us personally and for the peace of how relate to one another, and we pray for the peace of the whole world, which you have promised to do. And Jesus, you teach us to keep on praying and never to give up, so we can yet once again--as we have for months and even years. We pray for peace to come to the Ukraine; we pray for your peace to come to Israel and Gaza and the whole Middle East. We pray your peace for all the nations of the world. . . 

That's all that was said. But Sunday morning, pre-church, I was served up horrifying pictures of hundreds of starved men, women, and children swinging pots and pans toward a few men stirring yellow-ish stew in big pots. What's happening in Gaza is not easy to look at. What's happening is mass starvation. What's happening in Gaza is a holocaust all its own.

I couldn't help thinking of Go Tell It on the Mountain. Today, a church powerless to approach a conflicted membership, some of whom listen religiously to AFA stations, and others of whom, like me, get their news from NBC.

 And I couldn't help thinking how those two distinct sides make the church powerless.

There are millions suffering and dying in Gaza, and the problem is one man, and his name is Netanyahu.

I don't think the pastor could say that, so we stay inside the stained glass and sigh righteously the colors.

This morning I can't help but wonder if those prayers--and those of millions and millions of others--got through. They must have, at least to Donald Trump because Monday, in Scotland, twice our President parted company with his buddy Netanyahu, twice he said, plainly and clearly, that the starvation was happening in Gaza, twice he said that what was going on was unthinkable. Had to stop. 

In the last fifteen years, it's not often that I've said what I'm going to say now, but it deserves my acknowledgement. In reproving Netanyahu as he did, Donald Trump did a good thing, a wonderful thing.

Good Lord, help the forces of good get tons and tons of food to the weary, sometimes dying, Palestinian people.