September 3

On this day in 1192, Richard the Lionheart and Saladin signed the Treaty of Jaffa, ending the Third Crusade. 

Today marks the birthday, in 1938, of Sydney Jackson, Maori activist and union organizer of New Zealand. Taking inspiration from the Black Panther movement and the American Indian Movement, he founded organizations that pushed for rights and reparations. He died in 2007.

Today also marks the birthday, in 1894, of H. Richard Niebuhr, theologian who wrote the book Christ and Culture. One of his most significant contributions was categorizing the way Christians approach the relationship between their faith and their culture, seeing them as opposed, equivalent, and so on. Scholars both inside and outside the church have built upon his work.

Today marks the death, in 1967, of E.E. Cummings, American poet and mystic. 

Today also marks the death, in 1998, of George Starling, whose life Isabella Wilkerson writes about in The Warmth of Other Suns, which is about the Great Migration. He worked to organize the Black citrus workers in Florida into informal unions to resist the way owners exploited their labor. When he was tipped off that some of the white employers were planning on lynching him, he fled North and became a porter for the passenger rail system, where he continued to help others make the trek out of the Jim Crow South.

Reflection: 

Syd Jackson said: 

There is a documentary about Syd Jackson at this link.

H. Richard Niebuhr said: 

His most famous and damning critique of liberal theology is: 

I like this quote of Niebuhr’s, although I usually hear it in the mouths of conservative preachers who, I think, mischaracterize all progressive theology this way. There is, certainly, a tendency to spiritual bypassing and feel-good theology in liberal circles, especially as a reaction to the hellfire and brimstone preaching of fundamentalists. 

But I do believe in the wrath of God—I just understand it differently than a literal hell waiting for the people who conservative pastors judge to be sinners. I believe wrath, sin, judgment, and the cross all have different meanings to those of us who believe in the prophetic witness of the Bible against capitalism, croneyism, and racism—the dominant sins of this culture. 

I believe God’s mercy will be every bit as terrible as God’s wrath for those whose faith is in authoritarian religion. What could be more painful than being forgiven by the person you judged? Who but people who think themselves pious would be scandalized when sex workers go into the kingdom before them? C.S. Lewis writes about a version of hell that some people choose over heaven because if their enemies can get it, there’s no way they will stay. Hatred becomes its own kind of hell that even the grace of God has a difficult time penetrating.

A poem by E.E. Cummings: 

Prayer: Creator God, give us the courage of activists and the souls of poets, that your prophetic Word will find a place in this world to take root and grow. Amen.