the ugly crowd

D.Thomas, Jr. reporting for duty, sir. Either that or raising his d.ugly head yet one more time again where it is uncool to be out of synch with the crowd. Which often reconstitutes the crowd as ugly crowd, that goes ostracizing unto murderous with any who do not -- fit in -- who do not subscribe, who doubt or --- (shudder) -- question. It is the nature of our inhuman lunacy that if you can’t check all the blocks, we don’t want you alive, much less as a member of our group.

A Fundamentalist Christian who gives faltering responses on the Genesis One and Two literalness test. 

A black family moving into a white neighborhood in the South sixty years ago. 

A navy recruit who doesn't check no all the way down the list.

Two men marrying. Or two women.

A white driver, accidentally striking a black child who darted out in front of his truck, who stops to give aid only to be savagely beaten unconscious unto death by the child’s black neighbors.

An Obama/Biden sign in a neighborhood of Romney/Ryan signs.  

Celebrated beauty Mrs. Graff, ne’ Miss Rutledge, on the dance floor with Philip Nolan, lately Lieutenant, Army of the United States.

A southerner for Gun Control.

John Claypool as a child hosting a Muslim foreign exchange student for a schoolyear in his home, later in his Sunday school class earnestly asking his teacher, “How do we know the Bible is true and the Koran is not?” to hear the shocked, red-faced teacher obliterate him with, “How can you ask such a question, with a mother like yours?” 

My first experience with the blackball was as a DeMolay when I was a young teenager, perhaps 65 years ago. Not certain, never certain of anything, but maybe I was 14, a freshman at Bay High. Like Cubs, Boy Scouts and Explorer Scouts, all of which I enjoyed through the years, meeting an evening weekly at the Masonic lodge on the far end of Massalina Bayou, DeMolay was an organization for building character, confidence and leadership. I don’t remember the rules and wouldn’t tell the secrets even if I remembered them, which I do not; but I do remember a box on a small table in the center of the room, a box and a bowl. The box was maybe a cube, ten to twelve inches, with a hole on top. The bowl held marbles, white and black marbles. With box and balls, we voted anonymously whether to accept a boy as a new member. For “yes” you dropped a white ball through the hole into the box; for “no” a black marble or ball. Seems to me, if you got a black ball you were not accepted. Maybe it took two blackballs, I don’t remember. When I was a KA at UFlorida we had the same system of box and balls. Two blackballs and you were not. 

During my time, we used the black and white balls to vote on freshmen we met during Rush Week, whether to accept them as new pledges. In my time the box and balls were used once for one other thing. A brother had been outed as gay. Gay wasn’t the word then, I don’t remember the word, but it was spittingly contemptuous in 1954, unlike gay in 2014. The focus of the next chapter meeting was the box with the black and white balls. A brother acting as “prosecutor” read the outed brother’s letter admitting his homosexuality and offering to resign, not to say withdraw you could not quit you only could be expelled, spoke vehemently, even foaming-at-the-mouthly, about boys like him, demanded that we drop a black ball, for “expel” or our reputation on campus would be ruined. Not like us, he was out.

Everyone was/is out who does not stand in our image.

Seminary students in a mainline Christian church learn many things and Bible study techniques that they dare not take into the parish after ordination, lest they be denounced by the innocent ignorant and condemned as nonbelievers. Professors at LTSG warned that we would encounter this but encouraged us to have integrity, be honest, share our education and seek the truth with our parishioners throughout our ministries. Many of us find a heavy cost to doing this among the certitudinous who know not but know not that they know not. Just so, this morning, looking forward to reading 1st Thessalonians in Lectionary A late in the summer, I am thinking about justification and salvation, Paul’s themes. Salvation?

Jesus of Nazareth seems to have been all about love in this kingdom of the here and now. Paul was all about justification and salvation into kingdom come, which he along with the expectation of the Church of his day, believed was imminent, the end of time, the Day of the Lord in our time, the Eschaton, when those who believed in Jesus’ God, the one and only God of Israel, would be saved into the new reign of God, Jesus Christ as Head. Pending that Day, the Living should live as Christ’s own and the Dead would sleep in Jesus until their resurrection at the Last Day, Coming Soon. 

Evolutionary as the rest of Creation, the Christian Church has evolved its theologies from the ministries, teachings and beliefs of Jesus and of Paul.

Going outside at night, looking up with a telescope into our expanding universe and observing that the heavens are not after all as the ancients -- knew, a bowl speckled with tiny white lights and holding back the waters, we no longer believe that; we no longer believe a vast number of the notions of the ancients, including that the Eschaton is imminent while the galaxies are racing away from each other into kingdom come at breakneck speed. In Paul’s own time, certainty about the imminent Second Coming began to waver because Christians began to die before Jesus returned, which was not expected to happen. Paul responded to questions of the wavering, wondering and fearful in his letters to the Thessalonians, from which we shall read this summer. The dead fall asleep in Jesus until his coming again, when all shall be raised for judgment and disposition. As an optimistic story of Hope, that doesn’t swallow, doesn’t go down well. The Church has evolved to believing instead that at death we slip away into heaven, to our Mansion, me with the red Duesenberg parked in the circular drive out front. How serious and literal am I with that? How literal and serious is my evangelical Christian brother in the next block about the streets of gold?

How welcome on the Christian scene, would be a preacher who questioned the wisdom of the ages and sought the truth, come whence it may, cost what it will? Suppose the Truth were Oblivion? How welcome?

Not.

T+