0.4 Miles to Go

2nd Samuel 7: 1-17, OT page 280 When we got sick as kids we’d lay on the couch in the living room, because that’s where the TV was, and Mom was OK with us watching TV for the morning, but usually around lunch time she’d abruptly enter the living room, turn the TV off and tell us that we’d seen enough. We all knew better than to protest, but without the TV being sick is pretty boring and we’d settle for almost anything to do. One day I was home from school, banned from watching television, I wandering into the formal dining room so desperate for entertainment that I sat down to watch my mother fold laundry. She threw a towel at me, which I folded, and to avoid folding anything else I picked up the book I had been assigned by my English teacher. That is the sign that I truly couldn’t think of anything else to do, that I picked up a book. I had been assigned To Kill a Mockingbird by my teacher, and when my mother finished folding laundry she took the book and started to read to me. The part I remember her reading is the scene when Scout is in the courtroom sitting next to her family’s housekeeper, Calpurnia in the balcony. Her father, a local attorney, had just defended an innocent black man named Tom Robinson, but after a long deliberation the jury still declared him guilty. My mother read the description of what Scout’s father, Atticus Finch did next: “Then he left the courtroom, but not by his usual exit. He must have wanted to go home the short way, because he walked quickly down the middle aisle toward the south exit. I followed the top of his head as he made his way to the door. He did not look up. Someone was punching me, but I was reluctant to take my eyes from the people below us, and from the image of Atticus’s lonely walk down the aisle. Miss Jean Louise? I looked around. They were standing. All around us and in the balcony on the opposite wall, the Negroes were getting to their feet. Reverend Syke’s voice was as distant as Judge Taylor’s: Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passin’.” Then my mother put the book down, not able to continue reading for the tears in her eyes. In a sense this scene captures something significant about the South. By this courtroom scene you can see that there was love and respect in the segregated South, true and honorable love and respect mixed right in with the kind of racism and cruel injustice that would declare a man guilty, not based on evidence but prejudice. I believe that understanding the South requires a willingness to face all of that – not just the love and respect but also the injustice – and not just the injustice but also the love and respect, but like most cultures, ours comes close to choosing a sort of amnesia rather than a good hard look at the truth. Our history is a mixed bag in reality, but so many prefer that it be one thing or the other – a point of pride or a point of shame. So some wave the Rebel Flag and call it heritage, others want to tear that flag down as a symbol of hatred, and the same is being done when it comes not just to flags but also to people. There’s a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest in the Tennessee State House, and I can understand the charge to move that man’s likeness into the attic. I remember the first time I saw that statue of him rearing back on his horse surrounded by all the flags of the Confederacy that you pass by on your way to Nashville – I interpreted that statue fresh out of Atlanta as a high concentration of redneck in a very small area, but the statue on 65 captures only one use of the man and not the man completely as he was. Sometimes we turn people into symbols to make a point, but how far can you go in removing a person? There is no getting away from the people in our family tree – you can put his bust in the attic but his blood still runs in our veins, his legacy is a part of this state, this region, and that’s simply reality. We can send his statue up to the attic, but there’s no getting away from who we are. That’s why these issues of our Southern Heritage get so sticky for me. There’s a part of our past that should not be celebrated, but if we go and exile people to the attic where will that take us? And who will be next? Will it be Robert E. Lee? The general who Lincoln wanted to command his troops, but who sided with his home state of Virginia – who served courageously, freed his slaves voluntarily before the war even started, and was known for his strong Christian faith? Or maybe it will be Stonewall Jackson, so brave as to face enemy fire like an immovable stonewall, called by some a fanatical Presbyterian. Or maybe the next person that we’ll try to erase from our history, the next to be exiled to the attic will be Atticus Finch. Harper Lee’s first book was released on Tuesday. Go Set A Watchman, it’s called, and you may know already that it’s set 20 years after To Kill A Mockingbird though Go Set A Watchman was written first. In this new book, Harper Lee tells us a different story about her father Atticus Finch, for in Go Set A Watchman he is an ardent segregationist who his daughter struggles to understand. “How could a man be a hero on the one hand and a segregationist on the other,” she asks in this book, but her question isn’t new. It’s no different than wondering how King David could be so faithful as to face the Giant Goliath on the one hand, yet so horrible as to seduce Bathsheba and murder her husband on the other. Scripture has a funny way of telling history that has much to teach us these days. I think of Paula Dean’s fall from public approval just a few years ago and am reminded of our society’s ability to take people, put a light on their failures, and use those failures as reason to move their statue up to the attic. Scripture is as deliberate in telling us the failures of King David as the Today Show was in the case of Paula Dean, but whereas Paula Dean will probably never be heard from again after all her sponsors dropped her, the Lord said to David through the Prophet Nathan despite his misdeeds and his shortcomings, “I will make you a house. When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom.” In this promise is the assurance that God did not give up on David, and with that promise comes the assurance that God will not give up on us, which is a complex idea that our shallow culture is unable to comprehend. So somehow we must learn that our Lord chose to be by David’s side as he sang to the sheep out in the fields as a young boy, chose to be by David’s side when he went down into the Valley of Elah to face the giant Goliath, chose to be by David’s side as he triumphed over the Philistines in battle, and even chose to be by David’s side in the Prophet Nathan who confronted him for his treatment of Bathsheba and his murder of Uriah the Hittite. The blessing wasn’t taken away, for the blessing did not depend on David so much as it depended on God, nor was history whitewashed to make God’s blessing easier to understand. In King David is the complexity of understanding our parents, our grandparents, and the legacy that we all inherit for he left his children an example to follow in some instances, mistakes to avoid in others, and in this promise in 2nd Samuel chapter 7, you see that God’s work will continue in us. David longed to build the Lord a temple, but the Lord forbid it. The author of 1st and 2nd Chronicles wrote that it was because there was blood on David’s hands, but regardless of the reason, the fact of the matter is that like David, our ancestors have left us with work yet to be done. Our country is incomplete. Promises left unfulfilled; certainly this is the case when it comes to race. After the shootings in Charleston, South Carolina our city manager and several pastors called on our community to join together for a memorial service. I was proud to have been asked to speak, and not wanting to get there late, the day before I drove to St. Paul’s African Methodist Episcopal Church to make sure I would leave plenty of time to get there. As it turns out, the church wasn’t far. In fact, I was ashamed to find that there was a church I had never been to, a pastor I’d never met, just 0.4 miles away from this one. That’s what I spoke about that night. I said that race will always be an issue so long as two groups of people can be divided by such a short distance, and as I left the pulpit to return to my seat, Rev. Dennis Lawson, the pastor of St. Paul’s took my hand and told me that we started to bridge those 0.4 miles that very night. It’s true that my ancestors have given me so very much, and while they weren’t perfect, some the perpetrators of an evil that I find deplorable, today I am convinced that the past demands more than just our judgement. The past demands that we keep running the race that they ran before us just as proudly, swiftly, and imperfectly as they did. We have to be careful about our treatment of the past. In seeing the imperfection comes a deep assurance that just as God worked through them despite their flaws, so God will work through us. The Lord doesn’t need us nearly so much as we need the Lord and the miracle we see in Scripture again and again is that humanity is sustained so often despite us, always by the grace of God. David did not get to build the Temple, God did not need him to, for God does not live with those who deserve him. God abides with those he chooses. It is the imperfection of the generations that came before us that gives us encouragement to forge ahead faithfully, knowing that God chooses to abide with imperfect people. Harper Lee ends her new novel with a conversation between Scout, who now that she’s grown goes by Jean Louise, and her Uncle Jack. In her struggle to understand her father she has reacted in anger and despair, but finally it is maturity that her uncle leads her to. “Every man’s island, Jean Louise, every man’s watchman, is his conscious,” he quoted from the Prophet Isaiah, and “now you, Miss, born with your own conscious, somewhere along the line fastened it like a barnacle onto your father’s. As you grew up, when you were grown, totally unknown to yourself, you confused your father with God.” In saying this, in helping Scout to see her father in a new light – as a segregationist yes, but more importantly as a man, Uncle Jack enabled her to live her own future, and to see clearly the living God who worked through the men and women of history despite their failures – so let there be no doubt that our God will work among us now. There are some saying that Atticus Finch was never a hero, but I will still stand in respect to this man still, only now I will stand beside him and not behind, together we all stand as servants of the Lord. And this day let us work towards completion – let us walk beyond where they have led – for they may have brought us this far, but there are 0.4 miles left to go. Amen.