Ponderings

The Webster Groves High School band concert last night was impressive and I was a proud mother. The music was great, the youth rightfully honored, and the community supportive. It was an odd juxtaposition from the news of the day. Two districts over things are not so rosy.

The Missouri State Board of Education yesterday voted to assemble a three member panel to guide the St. Louis Public Schools for three to six years. The details of the state’s intervention are still undetermined, the SLPS has been given 12 days to provide additional data. But superintendent Diana Boursaw is already crying foul, teacher’s union president, Mary Armstrong, claims the intervention is based on SLPS being a “black school district”, and SLPS board member Denise Jones shouted “Racism! Racism! Racist! Racist!”

Maybe so. Clearly a quick review of history would certainly bolster the charge.

I would like to think, though, that the State Board of Education simply wants all children to have the quality of education that my children get in the Webster Groves public school district. And I would like to think that this goal is laudable. After all, in our religious tradition (the United Church of Christ) public schools are held in high esteem. We have been steeped in the ideal that public schools offer to all of God’s children access to the pursuit of happiness.

At the concert last night I confess that I did have one moment of pause. During the opening piece, which laid the foundation for the evening. The invocation, if you will. It was a medley of service tunes, military service tunes, climaxing with the national anthem. As each branch of the military was highlighted, veterans in the audience stood and were applauded. As the piece closed with the familiar strains of ‘bombs bursting in air’, the audience stood in reverence.

I understand reverence, it’s kind of my business to understand it. Weekly I am responsible to craft an experience of reverence. As an unabashedly liberal theologian in an undeniably post-modern world, identifying the object(s) of our reverence has become an extremely important if painstaking endeavor. Not believing in a bearded man on high, yet unable to deny the power of being beyond our own, I struggle to find words that express without limiting the experience of the divine. The object(s) of our reverence, we have learned, matter.

Last night as I sat in my seat with my hands folded quietly on my lap, I confess that I wondered about the role and function of public education. Clearly we are teaching reverence, but to whom? And for what?

We don’t stand to honor the peacemakers, the Peace Corps, or the Conscientious Objectors. We only to stand to honor those wearing uniforms and carrying weapons. Watching the room at attention in memory of our country’s struggle for independence, I wondered at the irony that we are now in a war of aggression. Someday the people of Iraq, or the separate states which emerge from what once was Iraq, will stand to the tune of the song sung as the American troops went home.

Public education may be motivated by the altruistic desire for all of God’s children to have access to choice and self determination. The reality, however, is that public education even at its best functions to train a citizenry. In both of these endeavors, our local public school is very efficient. In both, the SLPS is struggling. In my more cynical moments I am fearful that the later, a trained and obedient populace, is the lasting legacy of public education and the underlying interest of the state in SLPS. As I listen to the morning’s news and the angry cries from our neighbors two districts over, I can’t help but wonder at the bitter ironies.

Home schooling beckons as the green grass on the other side. We do have wonderful and creative private school alternatives in St. Louis, but most of these schools are not accessible for many of our family budgets, so home schooling is the ‘other’ for many of us. And though I would like to think that my decision to embrace public education for my own family is reflective of my altruistic commitment to the common good, I have one more confession. It’s Friday morning at 9:45am and my house is oh so quiet as professional educators struggle to share inquisitive thought and bits of content with my adolescent children. Maybe they’ll even learn a wee bit of obedience today. All in all, I’m not complaining.

Growing up in the shadow of the Vietnam War protests, I admit to a certain amount of idealism. From a child’s vantage, the passion of the protests appeared to quell our warring madness. My parent’s consternation was further evidence that such public involvement was influential.

Growing up in a world still reeling from the horrific example of the Holocaust, I believed that a critically aware public was essential. After all, I reasoned, the Holocaust happened not in a vacuum. Millions of ordinary people wore the Nazi uniforms and allowed the terror to unfold. Without the hands and feet of ordinary soldiers, the master minds of evil would have been only that. Millions of ordinary people who were not evil became obedient pawns in the killing fields, carrying out the evil that someone else devised for no reason higher reason than obedience. Millions of ordinary people who didn’t know how to say “no”. The apparent choice was to kill or be killed.

The Nuremburg Trials were heralded in my youth as ground breaking and life giving. The trials, and more importantly the mutually agreed upon Principles upon which the trials were based, were a timeless testament to the responsibility of the ordinary person to refuse to be a pawn.

The beauty of the Nuremburg Principles are their simplicity, they do not require advanced work in logic or ethics to read. This simplicity is not accidental, the intention was that these codes were simple enough that there would be no reasonable way of misunderstanding. The principles were for me not only a piece of history but a gift of hope. Honoring these simple principles we could prevent another Nazi domination, another Holocaust.

My idealism was believing that we would honor them.

1st Lt. Ehren Watada is the test case for my idealism and it doesn’t look good. Watada is facing a Court Martial for “missing movement”. Watada has stipulated that he refused to deploy to Iraq with his unit last June. He also acknowledges that he has made statements criticizing the war. Specifically he has invoked international law in concluding that this is an unlawful war. He points out that knowingly participating in an illegal act is itself unlawful.

Although compelled by his argument, I did refer to the Nuremburg Principles for guidance. The Nuremburg Principles specify just three crimes; crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Crimes against peace are:
(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;
(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).
As always, the principles are pretty straightforward. Waging a war of aggression is wrong. Participation in a common plan for that war is wrong.

First, then, the question of whether this war is one of aggression. There is little doubt now that the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were a knowing ruse. And though reasonable people disagree on how best to disentangle ourselves from this mess, there is little question that the aggression was ours. Concluding that this is war of aggression, participation in this war is a violation of the Nuremburg Principles. Unfortunately it’s pretty simple.

Refusing to be deployed, Watada is no doubt guilty of “missing movement”. Allowing himself to be deployed, however, Watada would be a willing participant in what he believes to be a war of aggression. Both are true. And therein lies the dilemma. The Nuremburg Principles asserts that human conscience trumps soldier obedience.

My vote is with Watada’s conscience, but I’m making a care package just in case.

The Sanctuary Movement was challenging churches when I was coming of age in the 1980’s. This was the movement where churches were being asked to consider their role not only as symbolic sanctuaries but literal ones as well. Refugees from the bloody struggle for independence in Nicaragua and El Salvador were seeking safe harbor, and many sympathetic congregations appealed to a higher power as they defied the law and allowed their sanctuaries to be used for sanctuary.

As sanctuaries were used to provide sanctuary, of course, those in opposition to the movement no longer felt sanctuary in the sanctuary.

The naming of our gathering space has had profound implications for Christians. If our space is ‘sanctuary’, we expect to feel some sense of safety and comfort when we gather. But if our space is ‘sanctuary’ for the wider world, our personal sense of security is often displaced.

One of the perennial questions when EUCC folk talk about capital campaigns is the size of our sanctuary. And unlike Goldilocks, there is no objective standard of just right.

There are industry standards. A mid-size congregation with the kinds of programs and budgets we have should be able to seat about 350 comfortably. Originally that was the plan for our sanctuary. The reality is that our sanctuary holds about 180, though at six to a pew and all the way forward we can squeeze in 210. We feel most cozy at about 150.

Beginning in the mid 1950’s the norm became two worship services on each Sunday morning. During those boom years for church life there were even two Sunday Schools that ran concurrent with the two services. The two service model of the 1980’s, like our current model, offered worship-education-worship each Sunday morning with the early service serving about a third of the worshipping community. The early service meets a particular need and is solid, but small; the later service often comfortably filling the sanctuary.

Statistically and anecdotally we know that the amount of room in a sanctuary affects how sojourners feel about the community and directly affects whether they will feel welcome. Although an occasional “chairs in the back” service makes everyone feel good, people seeking sanctuary do not often find it when squished into pews beside people they do not know. Conversely, entering a vacant space in search of worship can also be disheartening.

With the later service often at “cozy” level already, the growth room for our worshipping community is at the early service. But the early service has the converse problem, too much open space for a sojourner to feel sanctuary.

To provide sanctuary for those seeking we either need to shift our own worship styles, balancing the two services with a commitment to adding a third when necessary – or build. Or both.

But that presumes that we want our sanctuary to be a place of sanctuary in a wider context. The ideal size for our sanctuary, we realize, depends upon on our commitment to being a sanctuary. And this more fundamental question is one with which we will wrestle.

Poverty has always been criminal.
Still this case is a shocker.

At the outset there is nothing remarkable about this case. Sofia Salva, a Sudanese refugee who speaks halting English, was pulled over by two Kansas City police officers because of a phony license tag in her car. The officers quickly discovered that she has outstanding tickets and warrants, the most egregious of which is child endangerment.

With a total of six years between them, the young officers had just enough experience to be callous but not yet enough to sort through the nuances.

Sofia Salva pleaded with the arresting officers for medical care more than a dozen times before they ever took her into custody for a string of poverty related crimes. She claims that she continued to plead for help when held overnight in the jail. Only when she passed a large clot, 12 hours later, was she allowed to go to the hospital. And there her unborn child was born and died.

In retrospect, with the priceless gift of video cameras, we can see with clarity Salva’s plea for medical attention and in the Monday morning light the officers’ callousness is unconscionable. But long before she met the Kansas City officers we had missed our chance to help Sofia Salva and her unborn child.

Sofia Salva had outstanding tickets in part because she could not pay them. She had been charged with child endangerment not because she had acted in an abusive manor but for negligence. Apparently Sofia left young children unsupervised in her home when she went to get food, maybe more than once. Given the reality of her uninsured and unregistered life, her choice also meant that she protected the children from being in an unsafe driving situation. Too many of the choices which confront the poor in our nation are choices between the lesser of two evils.

Disney captures the paradox of the poor hero beautifully in the lively street scene in the movie “Aladdin”. A hungry young Aladdin steals a loaf of bread for basic sustenance and then dives for cover as the police chase ensues. Even the nobility of Robin Hood’s thievery doesn’t diminish the criminal nature of his conduct. Part of the suspense of the story is the question of whether he will be caught.

Debtor’s prisons, common in the 18th century when the colony of Georgia was designed to be an experiment for the “worthy poor”, are coming back into vogue. Governor Patrick of Massachusetts has set out an initiative to loosely titled, “safety” in which the criminal is to pay for the cost of their prosecutions.

Already are court dockets are filled with crimes of poverty. People driving with out insurance, unpaid parking tickets, forged registrations, and shoplifting for basic stuff like Tylenol. Currently there are 90,000 women in prison in this country; in the year before there arrest 80% of them had incomes of less than $2000. Their most common crimes? Check forgery, illegal use of a credit card, property crimes. (prisonactivist.org) We spend billions of dollars to keep these poor criminals off our streets.

While we are investing in the corrections industry, health care in this nation is increasingly unattainable. In the midst of the most recent bankruptcy reform conversations we learned what we already knew, that more than half of all bankruptcies are caused by uninsured medical expense. Rather than address the problem of affordable access to healthcare, our most recent Congress addressed the punitive path of bankruptcy reform.

Ironically Sofia Salva, a refugee in the heartland, knew one American value. Whatever else Sofia may have learned about our American culture she had been here long enough to hear our religious platitudes naming our commitment to unborn children. She had experienced our most recent and rhetoric filled election cycle. She could not have missed the message that in our red state the unborn child is valued. She knew that she was carrying an unborn child that needed help, desperately. Tragically Sofia just hadn’t been here long enough to know that the platitudes don’t apply to the unborn children of poor immigrants.

We can continue to wage war on the poor. We can hire more police officers and build more prisons, we can even build bigger fences at the border; we have proven that it is good for the economy. But a more reasonable solution might simply be to provide access to healthcare, transportation, and food. Of course that would presume that we are serious about our promises to the unborn.