[Dialogue] (no subject)

[William Alerding]

On Jun 14, 2006, at 6:20 PM, KroegerD at aol.com wrote:

>
> June 14, 2006
>
> A Life Well Lived
>
>
> Reading obituaries is a remarkably insightful pastime. Each of us does 
> it more and more as we grow older. The obituary writer obviously 
> cannot recall all the twists and turns of a single life. Indeed, for 
> the world to take note of a particular death in the obituary pages of 
> a major newspaper at all, there has to be something special, something 
> significant that lifts that particular life into a dimension of human 
> meaning. So one searches the obituaries to discover that source of his 
> or her qualification. Longevity without meaning is not necessarily 
> noteworthy.
>
> I recall that story in the Book of Genesis about a man named 
> Methuselah, who is said to be the oldest man described in the Bible. 
> The biblical text says of him: “Methuselah lived 969 years and he 
> died.” I have always thought that was a remarkably negative commentary 
> on his life. Even though Methuselah lived 969 years, all that anyone 
> deemed noteworthy about him was that he died!
>
> I thought about Methuselah a few weeks ago, while I was in Montreal, 
> Canada doing a series of lectures. Each morning I read Montreal’s 
> English speaking daily known as “The Gazette.” One day the obituary 
> page featured five persons whose deaths were treated as being of 
> national or international note. The one that intrigued me was the 
> story of an 83-year-old Mississippi woman named Florence Mars. Her 
> name called up no images from my memory bank and rang no bells of 
> recognition. Why, I wondered, was the death of an 83-year-old 
> Mississippi native receiving attention in the Montreal Gazette? 
> Reading the story, I discovered much about what gives value to human 
> life.
>
> Florence Mars was born in 1923 and grew up in Philadelphia, not the 
> well-known port in Pennsylvania, but a small Mississippi town by the 
> same name, located in Neshoba County. This town was not unlike many 
> towns in the rural south in those early years of the 20th century in 
> that its citizens seemed to believe unquestionably in white supremacy 
> and its corollary of segregation. Indeed this racist conviction was 
> called “the invisible hand” that directed the public and private life 
> of people in this region. The story of the South in the 20th century 
> was the story of conflict that arose and intensified, as this 
> prejudice was first challenged and then began to die. By the late 
> fifties and middle sixties that conflict had actually begun to recede, 
> yet in parts of the South it still fed deep emotions of hatred. In 
> 1964, ten years after the Supreme Court ruling on desegregation but a 
> year before Congress was to pass the National Voter Rights Act, three 
> civil rights workers whose stated task was to register black voters 
> came to Philadelphia, Mississippi. Their names were Michael Schwerner, 
> 24, James Chaney, 21, and Andrew Goodman, 20. That summer was destined 
> to be a hot and unforgettable time. The idealism of these three young 
> men, two of whom were white and one black, collided with that 
> unrelenting racism that had long informed the South’s way of life. 
> After a short time these three civil rights workers disappeared. The 
> official story passed around among local people was that their 
> disappearance was part of a hoax invented by outside agitators to gain 
> national attention. Some of Philadelphia’s citizens even questioned 
> whether the presence of these young men had actually been itself just 
> a rumor to agitate the local people. If their presence was deemed to 
> be nothing more than a rumor, then their disappearance was reduced to 
> the status of sheer fantasy. In that same time frame a black church in 
> Philadelphia had been burned. The Ku Klux Klan claimed credit for that 
> but the local folks dismissed even that burning as one more publicity 
> stunt orchestrated by outsiders, designed to split and embarrass the 
> white community. This “common wisdom” was generally regarded as “the 
> gospel truth” by the white community, with one solitary exception. A 
> forty-one year old local businesswoman, a daughter of the town, named 
> Florence Mars was publicly skeptical. She had actually seen these 
> three young men in Philadelphia. She knew their presence was not 
> fabricated. She also suspected that their disappearance was not just 
> real but the result of foul play, so she began her own quiet 
> investigation, listening, watching and questioning. On one occasion, 
> she confronted the editor of the local paper about his prejudiced 
> coverage of the racial violence that was gripping her town. She 
> quickly emerged as the unwanted and disturbing “conscience” of 
> Philadelphia, but her continued efforts kept the issue alive until 
> searchers finally discovered a deserted place where the surface of the 
> earth had been disturbed. Digging in this place, federal authorities 
> uncovered the bullet-riddled bodies of the three victims. However, 
> even after these murders were revealed, there was no prosecution and 
> no arrests. This crime thus entered the records of Philadelphia’s 
> “unsolved” murders. Florence Mars, however, continued to speak out, 
> making it impossible for this episode to fade into the forgotten past. 
> It, therefore, became one of the wrenching and memorable incidents of 
> the civil rights movement.
>
> The white community, eager for this crime to be forgotten struck back 
> with a vengeance at Florence Mars. She was vilified and harassed, as 
> so often happens when guilt is not allowed to be eased. She was 
> ostracized and threatened with death and violence. The KKK launched a 
> successful boycott that ruined a cattle auction business she ran, 
> forcing her to sell out at a depressed price. She was even arrested 
> and jailed on a bogus charge of drunk driving as part of a planned 
> campaign of public harassment. Pressure from members of her church 
> forced her to resign from her position as a Sunday school teacher. Ten 
> years later, she wrote a book entitled, “Witness in Philadelphia” that 
> kept the pressure on even after charges for these murders against 
> suspected Klan killers had been either dropped or dismissed by hung 
> juries. Her work finally met with success in 2005, 41 years after 
> these murders, when 86-year-old Ray Killen, a local preacher and Klan 
> member, was convicted of these murders and sentenced to jail for the 
> balance of his life. In a wheel chair, Florence Mars attended every 
> minute of that trial, overjoyed that justice had finally come to her 
> town.
>
> At her recent death she was memorialized throughout the nation. Her 
> role in this episode had made her life one of great significance. A 
> local attorney, a member of an interracial organization known as the 
> “Philadelphia Coalition,” that had lobbied for the reopening of this 
> case and the subsequent trial and conviction of Killen, said of her, 
> “I shudder to think how little progress we would have made if not for 
> Florence. She was our guide along the path to resolution and 
> redemption for our community.” Florence Mars’ single gift was that she 
> was not willing to be silenced or to be passive in the face of evil. 
> She had little obvious power. No one thought of her as a community 
> leader. Armed only with the conviction that if citizens can murder one 
> another because they do not like their victim’s opinions, then no life 
> is finally safe. In obedience to that conviction Florence Mars found 
> the courage that enabled her to absorb the slings and arrows of a 
> dying racism. She lived to see her faith in that conviction vindicated 
> and to gain the appreciation of her world. It is because of people 
> like Florence Mars that a new consciousness about what it means to be 
> human was born in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where this woman lived 
> her entire life. Because she lived her life so well serving a 
> universal human principle, her death was noticed around the world. The 
> obituary in the Montreal Gazette was a signal tribute to the power of 
> her life.
>
> Heroic activity is not always reserved for heroes. In almost every 
> sense of the world, Florence Mars was an ordinary person. She lived on 
> a very small stage, in a place not likely to be noticed by the world’s 
> power brokers. Yet in the commonplace action of raising her voice 
> against hatred and of lifting her conscience against intolerance, she 
> changed her world. She left this earth a better place for having been 
> in it.
>
> Is that not the ultimate criterion on which all life must be assessed? 
> Wealthy people who dominate great industries retire and die every day 
> and are quickly forgotten. Political figures who achieve great power 
> in one century are lost in the pages of history in another. How many 
> Americans today can relate any fact about such persons as Franklin 
> Pierce, James K. Polk or Millard Fillmore? Yet each was elected in the 
> 19th century to the highest office of this land. Millions of best 
> selling authors suffer the fate of being unknown twenty years after 
> their deaths. Who in 2050 will know the name of Dan Brown? These 
> things cause me to wonder about the value system under which we live. 
> The discovery of meaning is something that touches the dimensions of 
> timelessness and eternity and access to meaning is within every 
> person’s ability to achieve. It demands only that we escape our 
> self-centered zone of comfort and place an ideal at the center of our 
> lives from which we never waver. To enhance life is a virtue. To 
> diminish life is a vice. To seek truth is a virtue. To kill truth in 
> the service of prejudice is a vice. That is all it takes to enter into 
> the realm of meaning. Florence Mars did just that. That was why she 
> was remembered at the time of her death the world over. To serve truth 
> without compromise, to be willing to pay the personal cost of abuse, 
> harassment and rejection in the service of that truth is the pathway 
> into meaning and thus I believe the pathway into God. Truth does not 
> compromise to achieve a lesser goal like unity, popularity or personal 
> well-being. Unity is never a substitute for truth or justice. That was 
> the simple lesson that Florence Mars knew well. It is a pity that so 
> many of our political and religious leaders have not yet embraced this 
> elementary understanding of reality.
>
> Florence Mars was not born to lead but lead she did and history will 
> remember her. How many of us will it occur to the editors of the 
> Montreal Gazette to memorialize when we come to the end of our days?
>
> John Shelby Spong
>
> Note from the Editor: Bishop Spong's new book is available now at 
> bookstores everywhere and by clicking here!
>
>
> Question and Answer
> With John Shelby Spong
>
> Larry E. Farr, via the Internet, writes:
>
> Besides enjoying your audiotapes from the Westar Institute, I am 
> enjoying the audiotapes from Bart Ehrman from The Teaching Company. 
> This company also offers tapes from a man named Luke Timothy Johnson. 
> On your audiotapes of the resurrection, you mention several times a 
> Luke Timothy Johnson who has been critical of your ministry. From your 
> description of him and their description of him, it sounds like they 
> are the same person. My question is are they the same person? If so, 
> would you recommend me investing in purchasing his tapes?
>
> Dear Larry,
>
> Luke Timothy Johnson is a Roman Catholic priest, not practicing the 
> priesthood, who teaches New Testament at Candler Theological Seminary 
> at Emory University. He is bright, articulate, winsome and, in my 
> opinion, is almost always wrong. He has been particularly critical of 
> both the Jesus Seminar and of me. The basis of his criticism when 
> reduced to its essence seems to be this: “Since these people disagree 
> with traditional Christianity, they cannot be right since traditional 
> Christianity is always right.” It never seems to occur to Dr. Johnson 
> that traditional Christianity could be compromised, acculturated or 
> inaccurate. I find that a narrow, self-serving and naïve conclusion 
> that is not worthy of serious consideration.
>
> I think it is important to know all sides of a debate. So, if you want 
> the tapes then by all means get them and judge for yourself.
>
> John Shelby Spong_______________________________________________
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