I was talking about the resurrection with a progressive friend the other day. Well, a real leftist. He wasn’t thrilled with the idea, and quoted me an old Joe Hill song about “long-haired preachers” talking about “pie in the sky, by and by.”
I didn’t get a chance to respond to my friend, but I thought I’d take the opportunity now, by relating a story about another leftie songwriter, the great Woody Guthrie.
I’ve told this story many times, preached it a few. It is, alas, probably apocryphal. It’s still a good one, and it goes like this: during World War II, Guthrie did a lot of touring for War Bonds shows, often in the company of the blues musicians Son Terry and Brownie McGhee.
On one occasion, Guthrie was invited to a banquet in Baltimore. In fact, he was ushered up to the table of honor. But looking around, he realized that his pals weren’t with him. He asked his hosts to bring them up to sit at the table, and they quickly responded that Baltimore was a segregated city, where blacks and whites were not allowed to eat in the same room.
Woody pounded the table. “This fight against facism has got to start right here!” he barked.
His hosts tried to calm him, saying that after the war, there’d be plenty of time to address segregation. Give it a few years, they said; now is not the right time.
“THIS FIGHT AGAINST FACISM HAS GOT TO START RIGHT HERE!” he bellowed. And standing up, he threw over the table and stomped out of the room.
Well, like I say, it’s probably apocryphal. But it’s also a pretty good description of the resurrection. Christ’s rising from the dead is more than just a promise of “pie in the sky.” It is a present reality–and a very insistent one at that–demanding that the broken relationships of the world be set aright now.
The realities of the resurrection are so demanding, Paul says in his letter to the Colossians, that things are as different as life and death after the turning point of Easter morning:
Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.
The task of believers, according to Paul, is to mature into their new lives by giving up the sins of their former lives:”fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed.”
This is not rule-setting, but something more subtle: Paul wants his readers to judge their actions for themselves, not look to a list of rules for guidance. Maturity, after all, calls for the internalizing of values, and the ability to set them into action appropriately.
And because his readers are now the face of Christ for the world, Paul wants them to take on their newfound maturity RIGHT NOW, doing away with “anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language” and replacing them with “compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.” The Colossians’ example is good for their own community, but more important, it is the only means many people will have to know that the world could be different.
Given the present condition of the world, it’s hard to argue with Paul’s sense of urgency. The battle against the condition of the world has got to start right here, right now. Too many are hurting, too many are dying, to wait for pie in the sky. Ready or not, Christ just kicked things off by picking up the grave and dumping it over.
So now what? That, my friends, is up to us.
Pie, anyone?
And I should have been faster given my own sig-
the terrible responsibility that arises from hope.
Why is it such a fear provoking thought, that the world is a good place? That the joy of standing up against segregation also probably meant (if it occurred) some very scared little old ladies in the banquet hall who had no idea what the crashing table was all about, and internal agonizing for Mr. Guthrie- who probably would have been very torn about his own actions.
“let the first one among ye, who hath no sin, cast the first stone”
Thanks, pastordan.
Last week I said:
“I care very much that the earth and all its creatures achieve harmony.
The disharmony is sapping me, leading to a potential spiral of self-recrimination. Can’t do anything/ didn’t do anything/can’t do anything…
Redemption in the afterlife has never attracted me, sorry. This life COULD/SHOULD be good enough.”
So I appreciate this interpretation.
I wrote a LTE last night about water conservation, as an Easter statement.
I started a comment, but it got too long, so I posted it as a diary instead. Part of the intro is “With a ‘Thank you’ to PastorDan for his many diaries and comments and sermons that offer so much food for thought for believers and non-believers alike.”
(Blimey, Pastordan. I am chasing you across the internet trying to post this in one of your diaries yet never quite seem to catch up with you. Ah well, there was bound to come a stage in my life when everything seemed too complicated!)
That’s a fine story, Pastordan. Thank you.
I have many Woody Guthrie recordings and have always enjoyed his songs and their meaning. I like Arlo as well – Alice’s Restaurant was and still is a recollection of, well if not youth, then a younger Welshman than now!
I wonder if Woody did throw over the dining table? It is a fairly violent thing to do. I could never quite equate in my mind the story of Jesus in the temple throwing over the usurer’s tables. Surely this would only have caused a confrontation that could have caused violence?
I am sure that most of my US friends on here wonder what I am prattling on about. Violence? Tipping over a table to give emphasis to opposition for extreme racial intolerance? What is with this Brit, this Welshman over there between the green hills and the Gulf Stream washed coast? Get a real life Welshman, it is a harsh world out here requiring strong responses!
I am speculating on this because I haven’t posted for a few days. There are times when music you like ceases for a time to have resonance. It has been a bit like that for me this week, here on DKos and on Boomantribune. It hasn’t quite seemed like the place that I have enjoyed these many months. It is hard for me to put my finger on quite why, but it has something to do with violence. Violence of thought and of language. Not great violence, a violence that many would not notice and, even when pointed out, would not accept is really there. I am certain that many would be horrified and would troll rate me if I said that it was in evidence in some of the diaries and postings that I was reading. After all, they were mainly responses to other people’s grosser violence, a rebuttal and a standing up to the violence in the thought and words of others.
A year before Michael Moore so dramatically pointed out the underlying fear that permeates American society, I had travelled across country from Ohio, through West Virginia and up to Washington by car. I met so much open friendliness on the way that there must be few countries in the World that could match such generosity of spirit. I am sure it helped that I was white and British, with that quaint accent, at a time when we became your main allies in the so called “the fight against terrorism”.
Yet something was wrong. I still had the memory of the one occasion when open hostility was displayed. It came when I asked two neighbours for the directions to the house of my friends on the outskirts of a small Ohio town. Hostility that only showed when they realised that I was referring to some of the blacks that were gradually moving up into the housing on the other side of the road.
What was really wrong during that time, of course, had to do with a man and a kid shooting randomly from the back of their vehicle at passers by in filling stations and coming out of stores. Everyone seemed to feel the fear and it awakened many other fears that were inside them.
It was not hard to reach a conclusion that I was later to hear from Michael Moore as to why this caused so many in the United States to hold guns and move to extremes in religion, politics and in ideology.
What is eating the heart out of so many is not that they are naturally violent but the fear of violence itself. It becomes so common place, that an angry shout of “bloody murderers” outside the Schiavo clinic does not seem an extreme incitement or “Fuck you Repthug, fascist religious nuts” does not appear to be an ugly and violent rejoinder. It is simply that, to a Brit, it is not an ordinary expression of an argument, even in a public demonstration; it is something that seems the prelude to an uglier confrontation.
My ex-wife and I were guests of honour at the annual dinner dance of the major union representing some twenty thousand employees in the public undertaking of which I was a senior director. I knew that the new national officer for the union. who had just been elected to that role, was also going to be present. I was surprised he was not at our top table. It was pointed out that he and his wife were seated at the far side of the large hall with one of the district officials.
I waited to see if we would be introduced. After two hours no one had made a move. The problem was that he had not been elected from the heartland of England from whence National Officers came. That, and the fact he was Jamaican, the first ever black National Officer.
In asides to my wife, I expressed my anger. It increased in time. She knew that I was ready to tip over the dining table. This marvellous lass, with such little political knowledge that she had once almost voted for a candidate with a persuasive election document because of black crime in her area of London without realising it was the British fascist party, disliked ugly scenes. She thought quickly. “Come on”, she said, “We’ll ask them to dance”.
There were few of us on the floor. You could feel the stares and sense the impact around the huge hall. At the end, we brought them over to the table and sat them down. No one demurred. An incident passed without tipping over tables. That union officer remained a friend even when he became head of our largest union in the UK. I don’t think he ever knew what happened that night. Nor would I want him to know.
He would have known if my more sensible and kindly wife had not shown me a gentle way to deal with the situation.
Don’t get me wrong. I boxed for my school and played a dirty game of rugger for as long as I could and still enjoy the sheer physical confrontation of these sports. Maybe, however, I am a wuss, maybe all we Brits are. This week, the French Minister of Transport urged his fellow countrymen to reduce deaths on their road by adopting some of the British courtesy and non-aggression in their driving! No wonder Michael Schumacher is World Formula One champion and not Jason Button.
I don’t know. Woody and I are brothers-in-arms on this racial hatred thing. Yet we depart from each other if it involves sending crashing the usurer’s tables or simply screaming invective. It just means someone will react by turning over your table or screaming invective back. All of which creates fear. I don’t want to live in a society like that, so I stay quietly on my small part of the Welsh coastline.
Not just actions but words can create fear. There has been too much a sense of that around this week on our blogs for this Brit. And I am probably quite alone in feeling this around the place. Which could be a pity. What a wuss I really am!
A wonderful and thought provoking diary.