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by Ken Sehested

        I once preached in the Chapel Hill, North Carolina, church were legendary basketball coach Dean Smith was a member. Smith, who died this week, was not expected to be there that morning, since his University of Carolina team had a road game, far away, the night before. Then he and his wife slip in the back about the time I get up to read Scripture. I doubled-down on the text and tried not to make eye contact during the sermon.

        In my youth I played every sport that used a ball, of whatever shape or size, from dirt yard marbles to Boys Club ping pong to Division 1 college football. I loved the college campus recruiting visits, during high school, receiving a bit of “expense” money, prowling the game time sideline with the prospective team and a pre-arranged dance date after the game. Though I always felt bad about the unlucky coed assigned to this high schooler who, to add insult to injury, didn’t dance or drink, for reasons of evangelical piety. Though I’m not an active participant in the muckraking exposure of how major college athletics programs find themselves awash in cash, I applaud that exposure.

        The capitalizing of college sports, in particular, is tragic. For example, the legendary Hall of Fame football coach Woody Hayes of Ohio State was among college football’s royalty from the ‘50s through the ‘70s, making a bit over $40,000 in later years.  The new legendary coach at Ohio State makes $4,000,000. The Great Recession mostly exempted major college sports.

        Other examples are easy to find. In 2012 Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel won the coveted Heisman Trophy, college football’s highest honor, the first freshman so selected. Manziel is known for his distinctive victory dance after scoring touchdowns, rubbing his thumbs and forefingers together in the universal “show me the money” sign language. This past January, during the televised broadcast of a college football bowl game, an ESPN reporter gleefully described one standout player as having a “big heart and no conscience.”

        The comment has a gladiatorial quality—and nothing in common with the great psychologist Abraham Maslow’s view that “Almost all creativity involves purposeful play.”

        Given current brazen realities, it's particularly appropriate to remember Dean Smith, hall-of-fame basketball coach at the University of North Carolina, who died this week.

        Part of the news coverage of Coach Smith’s passing is this tribute from his pastor, Rev. Robert Seymour, retired pastor of Binkley Baptist Church in Chapel Hill.

        “[Smith] was willing to take controversial stands on a number of things as a member of our church, being against the death penalty, affirming gays and lesbians, protesting nuclear proliferation. He was one who has been willing to speak out on issues that many might hesitate to take a stand on." He was among the first coaches in the South to recruit a black player, and he caught hell over it.

        Coach Smith’s character is testified to by his 96% graduation rate among players, many of whom he kept up with after their departure, including Hall of Famer Michael Jordan. Both his former players and coaching colleagues testify to what Smith taught them, not just about the game but also about people and about life.

        Smith has been credited with a number of tactical innovations in the game that remain, none more common—in collegiate as well as in pro basketball—of a successful shooter pointing to the teammate who passed him the ball. He took talented individual players and taught them to play as a team rather than as individual stars.

        Where I grew up, basketball was a distant second to football’s popularity. But every time I hear the round ball’s echo off a hardwood court, it makes me remember that my Mom taught me the game, she having been a high school all-state player and, for a season, a semi-pro player in one of the industrial leagues that formed during the 1940s. “I was a bit chubby then, particularly for a basketball player, and frequently got unkind remarks from the opposing team’s bench,” she once told me. “But when I kept scampering by their defenders, they shut up.”

        I suspect the ability to play and the ability to pray come from common sources. To do either well, you have to be all in, purposefully, but always prepared for surprising turns. Both invite a certain abandonment, the pursuit significantly influenced neither by desire to win nor fear of loss, the playing and the praying being their own sufficient goals. All awareness of the self as separate from the activity is eclipsed, the sheer delight overshadowing whatever difficulties accompany. A joyful freedom displaces fretful obsession.

        In the immortal words of Kris Kristofferson, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Which enables you, in the equally immortal words of Satchel Page, to “Work like you don’t need the money. Love like you’ve never been hurt. Dance like nobody’s watching.”

©Ken Sehested @ prayerandpolitiks.org

By Ken Sehested
Thursday, 18 April 2002

Yesterday came suddenly; but it seemed to go on forever. My arm no longer aches; yet the stone hurled as a curse by a young Jewish settler in Hebron struck a more tender target. Not even the bruise remains; but my heart still hurts.

Only two days prior I began a 24-hour journey to the illegally-occupied lands of the West Bank of the Jordan River. It's a long way from Clyde to the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem where we spent our first two nights. Except for the similar terrain of hills and hollows, the regions are a universe apart. The mountains of Western North Carolina may be the world's oldest; but the recorded history of ancient Palestine is among the most intense.

I am here as part of an emergency delegation arranged by Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), an organization committed to nonviolent intervention in situations of violent conflict. We are soldiers without weapons, save for the power of the Spirit to disarm nations as well as hearts. We claim neither special personal virtue nor public valor, but only this: that our lives have been gripped by the biblical vision of lion and lamb living together in peace (Isaiah 11:6); by God's promised Jubilee, when all "shall sit 'neath their own vine and fig tree, and none shall make them afraid" (Micah 4:4); by the assurance that one day all tears will be dried, when even death will come undone (Revelation 21:4), when creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay (Romans 8:21).

We have been invited to Hebron, south of Jerusalem. Beginning March 29, many cities in the West Bank, including Ramallah, Bethlehem, Nablus and Jenin, have been invaded and occupied by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). The CPT staff of U.S., Canadian and Palestinian citizens was afraid Hebron would be next.

Hebron: Reckoned by some to be the world's oldest continuously-inhabited city. Hebron: Burial place, in the Ibrahimi Mosque, of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Leah. Hebron: Initial site of King David's throne.

Hebron: Home to 130,000 Palestinians and 400 heavily armed Jewish settlers, the former guarded by a 10-member Palestinian Authority security force, the latter by 2,000+ IDF soldiers. It was in Hebron that a Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein, opened fire in February 1994 with an automatic weapon on the crowd gathered for Friday noon prayers in the Ibrahimi Mosque, killing 29 and wounding hundreds. Bullet-chipped marble and masonry are still visible. Similar damage, from a 2001 shooting, is visible on the wall of the CPT office facing a Jewish settlement and IDF rooftop post.

The U.S. "war on terrorism" has provided the perfect public relations cover for Israel's incremental measures designed to take full control of the West Bank—measures which are in direct conflict with repeated United Nations resolutions and the Geneva Convention, and subsidized with $10 million per day in U.S. foreign aid.

By the time our direct flight from Toronto landed in Tel Aviv, the threatened invasion of Hebron appeared to have passed. So after a day of training in Jerusalem, our 14-person delegation was split into three groups destined for three cities, including Hebron where my group was assigned.

Yesterday came early

Tuesday evening our leaders got word of a planned vigil in an East Jerusalem (Arab) neighborhood where a Palestinian family was scheduled for eviction. The Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions was seeking assistance in bolstering their opposing presence.

"The police probably won't arrive until 8 a.m., but we need to be ready," was the message from Jeff Halper, co-founder of the Committee. It was agreed that supporters would gather at 6:45 at a familiar location near the affected house and walk together. Which meant our group was up before dawn for the half-hour hike.

Legal wrangling, involving 500-year-old deeds, had come to a head, and the tenants were to be removed—one more small act in the larger drama of Israeli annexation. The 2,700-year-old complaint of Isaiah comes to mind as we approached our destination:

"Woe to you who join house to house, who add field to field,
until there is room for no one but you. . . ." (5:8).

There were a dozen of us initially, some prepared to risk arrest. Then another dozen drifted in, and another, until the street was clogged and the press hovered. Police arrived a little after 8 a.m., surveyed the crowd, then left. No one knew when, or if, they would return. By mid-morning our group decided our presence was no longer needed, and we agreed to continue our journey to Hebron.

Under normal circumstances the 40-kilometer drive would take 35 minutes. But nothing is normal here. We encountered the first military check-point within minutes.

No, we were told, we could not continue on this highway. Why? Security threats. Terrorism. Oddly, no such threats applied to vehicles with Israeli tags and Jewish drivers, which breezed through the road block. This particular road is not among the growing network of Jews-only highways, but the effect is the same.

Our taxi, a boxy-shaped Ford van, turned around and took back roads winding through the countryside and several tiny villages, a scenic but rugged trip over broken, sometimes precipitously narrow pavement along the edges of steep cliffs. Meeting an oncoming vehicle was always a carefully orchestrated maneuver.

After more than an hour the road came to an unnatural end. Massive cubic-yard concrete barricades forced our halt. We would continue on foot. After a quarter of a mile there were more barriers and beyond them more taxis waiting to resume the trip. Thousands of Palestinian workers and merchants endure this daily travail. Whole trucks are unloaded at one barrier, carried by hand or push-cart to the other, then reloaded onto different trucks.

House to house, field to field, even road to road: The everyday acts of humiliation and aggravation mount, the reservoir of bitterness deepens.

Finally, we disembark in a bustling market in downtown Hebron and begin the half-mile walk to the CPT office in the town's Old City. The hike involves crossing a line from one area controlled by the Palestinian Authority to another controlled by the IDF. The latter was under curfew, meaning all citizens are confined to their homes. Such lock-downs are randomly-called and can last for days. It's quite possible for a family to run out of food during such curfews. "Internationals" like ourselves are exempt from this form of collective house-arrest, as are members of Jewish settlements.

Crossing from one zone to the other felt like entry into some twilight zone—from the crowded, noisy streets to a ghost town where nothing moved except the occasional cat, the wind-generated flapping of tarps stretched across market stall entrances, and the occasional IDF patrol. For three more blocks we walked along the narrow, abandoned streets—some cave-like, with housing built above—past padlocked shop doors spray-painted with a Star of David and epitaphs like "Arabs are filthy pigs" or merely "This is Israeli land."

Yesterday came with naked malice

Yesterday came suddenly, early, and with naked malice. After settling into our quarters at the CPT office (including a briefing on water conservation—all water is used twice before reaching the sewer), we got a rooftop visual tour of the city. An IDF command and fire outpost was perched in camouflage netting on an adjacent roof. Two other encampments were visible blocks away. The fearful racket resulting from their designated mission would become apparent on subsequent nights, once with the coordinating presence of Apache attack helicopters, "Made in America" along with the modified M-16 rifles carried by the IDF.

Later that afternoon we began our "patrol," one of the more common tactics in CPT's mission of offering public presence and being available to intervene in potentially provocative encounters involving soldiers/settlers and Palestinians. As we made our way along one major road—eerily deserted, devoid of traffic—a rock thrown from behind skipped along the pavement near our feet. I turned to see a young boy, no older than ten years, scurrying to find another stone to toss. Then another, and another. His young arm and inexperienced aim made it immediately obvious that no real threat was imminent. But his sinister grin and apparent delight in this mischief froze me in my tracks. Seconds later I suddenly became aware that one of his insults was coming straight at my head, so I instinctively raised my arm, which absorbed the impact. The collision of stone with flesh is an ancient animus in this part of the world, where rocks are more commonplace than dirt.

A few minutes later our unwanted and unwelcomed presence was reinforced, again by settler children. As the six of us continued our stroll, two preadolescent girls, followed by a slightly-older third, were approaching. The two in front bore facial expressions suggesting intrigue and curiosity, maybe even a cautious smile. But as our paths converged—ours on the sidewalk, theirs a few feet out in the empty roadway—the third girl nonchalantly veered in our direction. Without warning she doused us with the contents of her chocolate milk carton. And I recall hearing giggles from the other two, very much like those I remember from my own daughters' pajama parties of years past.

Physically we were unscathed, but I was left emotionally trembling. A palpable nausea extended downward from my gut into my legs and upward into my chest and shoulders. There is something especially poignant and frightening about the petty violence of children.

Dodging bullets would have been easier.

Yesterday's over, but tomorrow's outta' sight

There is a popular saying here: Stay in the Middle East for a week, and you think you can write a book. Stay for a month, and you think, well, maybe an essay. Stay for a year, and you don't know what to say.

Does the conflict here lend itself to simple solutions? No. But fatalism is no less dishonest.

Later in this journey I overheard a fragment of a conversation between one of my fellow travelers and a journalist. The latter exclaimed: "Truth? You want truth? There is no truth here. This is the Middle East!" I wanted to butt in and respond: If there's no chance for truth, there's no possibility for a solution. And if there's no solution that makes you a scavenger, earning a living on people's misery!

There are many and diverse things to be said, however humbly. The following is my top-ten list of things needing to be highlighted.

1. The nation of Israel was created as a refuge for Jews escaping Europe's holocaust ovens, an episode unparalleled in the history of human savagery—in its systematic intention and implementation if not in sheer magnitude. Indeed, the brutal legacy of anti-Semitism (in which the Christian community shares responsibility) in many parts of the world is well-documented. Nevertheless, the Jewish safe-haven that is Israel was built on the backs of an indigenous population, one that is also Semitic, 726,000 of whom were displaced from their homes and ancestral lands.

2.Theological claims that the land of ancient Palestine was promised to the Jews by God may be emotionally satisfying but cannot be privileged in a world where gods, like gang leaders, inhabit every other block. Palestinians (both Christian and Muslim) and Jews each have legitimate claims to the land, which if not shared could become a perpetual killing field, maybe even trigger an international nuclear exchange.

3. I am among those raised on “cowboy and Indian” movies in North America, where the latter were stereotyped as barbarous, untrustworthy and bloodthirsty savages who prey on the weak and innocent. A similar portrait of Arab peoples has been painted by modern movies and news programs. Until that field of vision changes we will continue to be clueless in reading history and in charting a redemptive future.

4. The so-called "Oslo Accords" is utterly inadequate in its projected division of land between Israel and Palestine. The proposed map of the Palestinian nation is more like a patchwork of reservations, each encircled by, and thus controlled by, Israel. Jeff Halper has noted, the fact that 95% of the Occupied West Bank would be part of the new Palestinian nation is a grossly misleading statement. Inmates occupy some 95% of a prison. It's what happens with the other 5% that matters.

5. There is significant and growing evidence that Israeli leaders have no intention of returning illegally occupied lands to Palestinian control. Such policies of encroachment (particularly with the expanding settlements) amount to ethnic cleansing.

6. It is certainly true that Arab “terror networks" exist and must be stopped (just as there have been Ku Klux Klan and other terror networks in the U.S. for over a century). However, addressing terrorism by military means is, in the words of John Paul Lederach, like trying to kill flowering dandelions by hitting them with a golf club.

7. The violence of Palestinian terrorists doesn’t occur in a vacuum. "The first and worst violence," according to Uri Avnery, former member of the Israeli Knesset, "is the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land." Virtually every major human rights organization (including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, and even B’tselem, the leading Israeli human rights body) insist that Israeli demands for Palestinians to “stop the violence” actually turns reality on its head.

8. Many statements, from governments and non-governmental bodies (including churches), have been made decrying the violence on both sides of this conflict. Such statements are actually disingenuous in that they ignore the dynamics of power in the conflict. If both sides were to immediately cease all hostilities, the resulting "peace" would leave Israel in an overwhelmingly dominant position. Any peace agreement that refuses to acknowledge the imbalance of power is destined to harden the realities of injustice and thereby sow the seeds for the next war.

9. The recent plan approved by the Arab League, acknowledging both Israeli and Palestinian rights to exist within secure borders, must be affirmed as the framework for a just peace. It is not unfair to ask if Arab nations are sincere. But there is only one way to find out.

10. Finally, while the United Nations is the proper forum for negotiating a just peace between Israel and the Palestinians, numerous national and regional governing bodies will have distinctive roles to play. Among those must be a commitment by the U.S. to leverage its massive financial aid to Israel as incentive for good-faith bargaining.

# # #

©Ken Sehested @ prayerandpolitiks.org. A condensed version of this article was printed in the July-August 2002 issue of The Other Side magazine.

When we hear the word “fasting”—an historic Lenten emphasis—the initial image is associated with dieting. For most of us in North America, fasting is a foreign and somewhat threatening notion , conjuring notions of self-depreciation and ascetic mortification.

In Scripture, fasting is among the most common acts of religious piety. Yet it also comes in for severe judgment.

“Why have we fasted, and thou seest it not?” whined the people of Isaiah’s day. To which Yahweh thundered in response, “Is not this the fast that I choose: to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house. . . ?” (58:6) Similarly, in his only explicit listing of behavioral qualifications for entrance to heaven—when sheep will be sorted from goats—Jesus’ short list includes care for the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and the prisoner. That’s all. No mention of fasting or any other form of  “pious” behavior or doctrinal orthodoxy.

So why consider fasting? If spiritual disciplines are not a means of bargaining with God—for a better deal here or a bigger mansion later—why bother? Not because we are bad, although “unrighteousness” is a symptom of our predicament. But because we are blind, because we have become “conformed” to the world’s way of doing business, have lost sight of God’s intention. Such loss of sight will not give way to moral vigor or heroic willfulness. If we are to regain our sight we need to develop personal and communal practices (another way of saying “spiritual disciplines”) which clarify vision, which remind us to Whom we belong and to Whose purposes we are called.

Fasting can be an effective tool for affecting appetites which are forever getting out of control.

The Struggle With Appetites

The struggle to control appetites is a pertinent issue for those of us who live within a wealthy, gluttonous culture. When tens of thousands of children die daily from starvation and nutrition-related diseases, the fact that our media is crowded with advertising for diet plans is proof enough that something is wrong.

In 1960 the “self-storage” business was unheard of. Now there are more than 50,000 such facilities in the U.S., offering nearly 1.8 billion square feet of space. It’s estimated that if every human produced produced as much trash as the average U.S. citizen, we would need four additional planets the size of the earth to hold it all.

On a larger public scale, the issue of uncontrolled appetites is identified by Book of James as the root of war. “What causes wars?” he asks. “Is it not your passions”—your cravings, your appetites—“which are at war within you? You desire and do not have; so you kill. And you covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war” (4:1-2).

Seen in this light, our personal and corporate cravings are interconnected afflictions. Fasting encourages us to acknowledge our own personal inclination to gluttony and gives us a remedial step toward restored health. It also helps us identify with the gluttony in which we participate on a larger scale.

By fasting we come to sense the deeply spiritual roots of our own personal and corporate consumptive tendencies. We begin to understand the intimate connection between spiritual dysfunction and material distress.

Some Practical Hints

If you want to experiment with fasting during Lent, here are a few suggestions.

•As with advice for physical exercise, begin modestly. A week of fasting, or even a full day, may be too big a step. Try missing lunch, at least one day each week.

•Use that time to pray, to read Scripture or other devotional material. Clip newspaper accounts of violence and offer intercessory prayer. Begin your evening meal by mentioning these stories and offering prayer. If you have children, involve them.

•If physical health prevents you from missing a meal, substitute appropriately: a small bowl of rice, a handful of raw vegetables or a piece of fruit.

•Another way to fast is to forgo certain kinds of food or beverages during Lent: meat, sugar, caffeine, or chocolate. Or snacks between meals.

•Fast from certain other behaviors (or forge new ones). Put the television in the closet for Lent. Swear off the mall. If you work too many hours, reduce that schedule to free time for your family, for your own rest and renewal. Consider rising before dawn each morning to write in a journal or walk around your neighborhood, pausing to offer appropriate prayers: at the houses of your neighbors; at your local school; in front of local businesses; at the local health clinic.

Whether adhering to ancient traditions or creating new ones, let your imagination ride alongside your resolve.

Conclusion

At whatever point you begin, make it a point of challenge, not fearfulness. The point of fasting from food is not calories. Rather, it is to gain control over our appetites.

Bringing personal habits under control, adjusting them so that they nudge us toward health rather than heart attack, toward life rather than death—these are reasons for fasting. And as we do this, we become aware of the need to bring public, corporate habits (policies) under control; we face the need for policies that nudge our nations toward health and life.

©Ken Sehested @ prayerandpolitiks.org

 

This past Friday night [26 January 2001] I had what will undoubtedly be among the most enduring experiences of my life, sitting by my father's hospital bed from late evening until dawn. Keeping vigilance. It turned out to be his last night. I was not tempted to sleep. I had much work to do.

Part of what I did was to write. Here are some of those thoughts.

"Tonight I sit by my father's hospital bedside, straining emotionally in rhythm to his labored breathing. His breaths are short and shallow; his exhales are punctuated, frail muscles from chest to stomach rippling in brief contortion, emptying the lungs in desperation for the next gulp of air. Only occasionally does his body relax, save for the percussion of scarred lungs doing their best against impossible odds.

"He seems to stay alive by sheer strength of heart, a heart whose jerking pulse fairly rattles the aortic vein running up his neck. His heart has always had the stamina of a plow mule. Only now his other organs can no longer keep up."

In dying, as in living, he worked harder than most.

"Tonight my Dad is dying. He knows, and we know, there is nothing more to do except to wait and to pray. And so I read aloud to him from the Psalms. From Paul's letter to the Romans. From the Gospels. And I sing, all the lines from all the hymns so familiar to us both. When I forget the words, I hum.

"Does he hear? Some, I suspect. Probably in depths beyond which the mere mind can go. And that is enough.

"If I beg for his life, I know it is for my own sake more than his, for his days have been full and his time is now ripe. From comments made in recent days, during fleeting moments of lucid thought, we know he is ready for this harvest."

I pray we shall be, too.

All of us in the family were deeply touched by the sheer number of you who came here last night during visitation hours and recounted, with genuine emotion, the important ways my Dad had touched your life or the lives of those you hold dear: by faithfulness and trustworthiness in friendship; by visits in your home or at your hospital bed; by lighted eyes and cheerful greeting as you entered the church house, home to a community of faith so near and dear to his heart.

The testimonies of affection accounted by one after another after another were amazing. Who would have thought it so of a man who considered himself too unlettered to lead; too slow of tongue to speak; too common of birth to command respect.

But he did lead; he did speak; and your outpouring of affection is eloquent testimony to the respect he did in fact command.

My purpose in this tribute to my Father—to my mother's Beloved, to my and my sister's Daddy, to my children's Papa—is not to romanticize him, to apply heavy cosmetics to make him more winsome than he was. He was made of flesh and blood, like us all. He was not always the easiest person to live with. Who among us is?

He was not a saint—at least not in the sentimental, silly way we use that term. He had some hard edges. He was not perfect, and sometimes his sense of responsibility overshadowed his capacity for joy.

Early in his adult life my Dad gave up dancing, on religious ground. And Lord knows he couldn't carry a tune in a bucket! I suspect that this past Saturday afternoon, when St. Peter greeted him at heaven's gate, the first angelic assignment Dad was given was to take dancing lessons! When the day finally arrives for his dancing granddaughter to cross over Jordan, Dad will be ready; and the two of them will cut a rug from one end of heaven to the other.

And after that, singing lessons!!

Brothers and sisters, the good news of the gospel is that our flaws and failures and unflattering features do not define who we are in the eyes of God. What defines us are two things that, without question, characterized my father.

One is the practice of forgiveness. The last intelligible words he spoke came Saturday morning and were mumbled with great effort to my sister Glenda. She wrote them down. "I ask that everybody forgive me for any time I've hurt them and I want everybody to know that I forgive them if they ever hurt me. Everybody." He repeated for emphasis. "Everybody."

The practice of forgiveness is the very heart of the believer's vocation.

No matter your intelligence, your brilliance, your education—it will fail you. No matter your eloquence of speech—the sound will fade. No matter your royalty of birth or prestige of name—these will grow more stale than last week's casserole. What will endure, what matters in the eyes of God, in the heart of Christ, in the breath and power of the Spirit, is our willingness to confess, to God and to each other, and receive forgiveness.

This is my father's testimony, and I believe it to be the sure and faithful testimony of Scripture.

This my Dad would do. This we are called to do: To confess our failures and accept the gratuitous mercy of God not as an isolated act, but as a daily discipline.

The flip side of being forgiven by God, of course, is to practice forgiveness with each other. Jesus went so far as to say that the measure of forgiveness we receive from God is in direct proportion to that which we give each other. The two notes are of the same measure, the two steps are of the same spiritual journey. Being forgiven, by God, and practicing forgiveness, with each other, are mirror reflections of the same reality.

And what is the practice of forgiveness other than the pursuit of justice and the proffering of mercy? These habits, and these habits alone, hold the promise of peace.

"What doth the Lord require of you," thundered the prophet Micah, "But to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God."

My father taught me about the promise of peace in the pursuit of justice and the proffering of mercy. I can recall, for instance, as a young adolescent the many Friday nights I spent helping my Dad build a simple sanctuary for the Primera Iglesia Bautista, a Mexican-American congregation in Snyder, Texas. I think my Dad built that humble structure almost single-handedly; in doing so he crossed many of the racial and class barriers which have plagued our nation from its beginnings.

My father was experienced in caring for the destitute, in visiting the sick, in welcoming "strangers." Some of you here were recipients of his merciful presence and, simultaneously, were transferred to the seat of mercy in the process.

I have no question that my father's influence was a pivotal factor in my own chosen ministry of making peace, of pursuing justice, of calling the church to its ministry of reconciliation.

Just last night my wife Nancy discovered a note card in Dad's Bible, with a wonderful quote that is both a call to worship and a call to action. I don't know where he got it, but I know it must be old because the words were typed on an ancient manual typewriter, probably the one I inherited from my folks many years ago. This quote, as much as any other, sums up the deepest longing of my father's desire to follow in the footsteps of Jesus:

Every morning,
Lean thine arms upon
The windowsill of heaven,
And gaze upon
The face of thy Lord;
Then with this vision in mind,
Turn strong to meet the day.
[source unknown]

"Lean on heaven," is my Dad's testimony, "and turn strong to meet the day." So may we all.

Amen.

Ken Sehested
Chauvin Funeral Home
Houma, Louisiana
January 29, 2001

            This past Tuesday, 27 January 2015, was the fifth anniversary of the passing of Howard Zinn, the historian, activist and playwright who guided many an innocent, blinded-by-the-might nativist (folk like me) to understand the not-so-exceptional history of their country. Zinn was best known for his A People’s History of the United States, of which Matt Damon’s character in the movie Good Will Hunting says, “That book will knock you on your ass.”

            Such a posture, of course, is the starting point of every meaningful spiritual journey (and, typically, includes repeated encounters with that hard ground).

            Tuesday was also the 14th anniversary of my father’s passing. It would take multiple levels of interpretive work for my Dad to understand Zinn’s writing—something I never accomplished. But I kept at it because I believe that—at the core of his sense of honor, and honor was key—he knew the way of the world favors the devious. He consistently refused to give himself to that dishonoring system, though he was mostly skeptical at the prospects of release from its sway.

            He knew the world as relentlessly hard, even treacherous, and suspected joy unreliable. Decades ago, when I—giddy as a goose—called home to say their first grandchild was on the way, Dad was the first to speak, and he said, “Can you afford it?”

            Dad never grew comfortable with the fact that I refused to make “affordability” the determining factor in life choices. (Though I gained much stature in his eyes when I married, my wife who she is. And more so with each granddaughter. Safe to say, I surely married, and fathered, “up.”)

            I invite you to read acclaimed novelist Alice Walker’s remembrance of Howard Zinn, her teacher and later a friend and collaborator. To mark the anniversary, below are a few favorite quotes from Zinn’s writing. (If you haven’t already, see as well the quote at the conclusion of the Signs of the Times No. 7.)

            • “Why should we accept that the 'talent' of someone who writes jingles for an advertising agency advertising dog food and gets $100,000 a year is superior to the talent of an auto mechanic who makes $40,000 a year?” [Mechanic that he was, Dad would have especially appreciated this—though I’m pretty sure he never saw $40k pay, even with 37 years with the same company.]

            •“We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”

            •”Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders . . . and millions have been killed because of this obedience. . . . Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem.”

            •”Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.”

            •”There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”

            •”Most wars, after all, present themselves as humanitarian endeavors to help people.”

            •“I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.”

            •” I don't believe it's possible to be neutral. The world is already moving in certain directions, and to be neutral, to be passive in a situation like that, is to collaborate with whatever is going on.”

             [My homily at Dad’s funeral is posted here.]

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