Do you ever find yourself with a tune in your mind?

You’re not even conscious that you’ve got a song going on your soul, and then suddenly you hear your lips hum, your mouth sing, or even your fingers tapping out the rhythm of the beat.

I’m willing to admit that it happens to me, but I am not willing to admit how often.

On occasion, when I discover that I’ve got some notes and lyrics in my mind…and others external to me are noticing…it’s because a certain apparently random tune was in fact triggered by a word or a phrase or an event: when I’m standing before an open fridge, an exasperated, “I’m all out of milk,” becomes “I’m All Out of Love,” or while making stew I discover myself singing our family favorite lullaby “Little Potato,” or (back in the days when my beloved baseball was actually played), when I’m looking for the weather radio to take into my garden so I can hear the Minnesota Twins play (sigh), I discover that I’m humming “Brown Eyed Girl,” which, by all informed accounts, is the best song ever, and while it may have overtly nothing to do with a baseball (though I’m sure that the ‘stadium’ which is mentioned is obviously one built for baseball and no other) has everything to do with baseball, not to mention young love, the best of which has to do with baseball.

But the other day, I woke up with Tracy Chapman in my head.

 Straight away, at 5:37, eyes opened and there she was.

But because it was 5:37, it took me about 15 minutes into the day and a couple of sips of my coffee to realize that she was singing me into the day, and quite possibly into a new world.

It was released in August of 1988, and I was entering my second year of college at St. Olaf.

By that time, I’d fully embraced the Birkenstocks/head-wrapped-in-scarf/meeting-at-friends’-homes-to-make-broccoli-tofu-and-rice vibe, and therefore, in all of my hippy naïve whiteness, I loved Tracy Chapman.

I stuck her cassette tapes in the player of any car the driver would let me, I bought my mama a copy so that she could be enlightened like her daughter, and I felt so very very cool.

So, yeah; I heard her music all the time.

But I didn’t listen to her.

And I sure as the hell our nation is in right now didn’t understand her.

I’m also sure that by virtue of the color of my skin that I never entirely will.

~~~~~

Cities are in shambles, across the U.S., and I fully expect that more protests and destruction are in our collective near future, and our far future too.

Our President (may God have mercy on our souls) had his own peaceful citizens teargassed and shot with rubber pellets so that he could stand in front of a Church he never attends while holding upside down a Bible that is not his for a photo op that captured more of the moment and who he is than he intended.

~~~~~

“Thus says the Lord:
A voice is heard in Ramah,
lamentation and bitter weeping.
Rachel is weeping for her children;
she refuses to be comforted for her children,
because they are no more.”

Jeremiah 31:15

“I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe,” cried Mr. George Floyd.

And to whom did this child of God cry?

Not just to the white police officers who kept a knee on his neck while they turned their hearts away.

But Mr. Floyd cried out to and wept for his mama, his dead mama, who was no more.

~~~~~

White Christians, we are culpable for this chaos and for Mr. Floyd’s death in every possible way.

Etymologically, the word ‘culpable’ means ‘worthy of blame,’ and ‘deserving of censure.’

It’s a key point, one that we have shirked to own, itself a very sign of the privilege we are willing to own even less.

But, as Tracy Chapman says, the poor people are gonna rise up.

The tables are being turned.

People aren’t just talking about a revolution: a revolution is happening.

White culpability is being exposed, and the censure which is long in coming for whites is coming, and, in fact, may already be here.

~~~~~

All to often, Christians do not understand that our baptism and our faith change our allegiance and therefore change our lives.

As Father Robert Farrar Capon said,

“…it is not only that the human race’s business-as-usual desire to be on the side of a winner is inappropriate to Jesus’ mission: it’s that none of our usual bits of business, however virtuous or proper, has the last bearing on the mystery of redemption.

‘Follow me,’ [Jesus] says flatly. ‘…Nothing counts now expect being last, least, lost, little, and dead with me.”

I fret a lot that we don’t grasp that truth.

There is nothing of American culture, and what is indeed American religion, that emulates being last, least, lost, little, and dead with Jesus, or anyone else for that matter.

Trouble is for Christians, it is fundamentally impossible to both embrace the tenants of Christianity and the tenants of United States of American exceptionalism, and don’t even get me going on capitalism.

Can’t do it.

To be clear, it just can’t be done.

~~~~~

Christianity, turns out, is neither a social club nor a cultural norm, but is an upheave-your-life’s-identity-thing.

Christianity is not just about going to services on Sunday, but about being in exclusive service to the Lord on every day.

Christianity is more than bringing the lemon bars to church (bless those who do), and is more like bringing bottles of water or, as we’ve seen necessary these days, jugs of milk, to protests.

Christianity may be about belonging to book groups gathered in comfortable living rooms, but it is certainly about belonging to protest groups gathered at uncomfortable spaces in our society.

Christianity may move you to wear a cross around your neck, but then it should move you to walk the way of the cross.

Christianity, it turns out, may not be all that down with Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” but might hear Tracy Chapman’s “Talkin’ ‘Bout a Revolution” as a modern Mary’s song, or the “Canticle of the Turning” as a hymn for the ages and the Church universal.

And by no means is Christianity about condoning, let alone supporting, let alone remaining mum about a leader who separates children from parents, who puts children in cages, who mocks people with disabilities, who disdains the care of creation, who removes protections from GLBTQIA people, who rejects policies which care for the rich over against caring for the poor, who lies faster than fact-checkers can keep up with him, and who uses the sacred word of God as a photo op which necessitated gassing and shooting his own peacefully protesting citizens.

Instead, Christianity is a way of life, not a way of condoning, ignoring, or dealing in the ways of death.

It certainly is not about self-protective life.

It’s about living life convicted by and living according to the conviction that now that we know that death doesn’t win, there is more to do with your lives than preserve them.

It’s about being neither quiet nor passive in the face of abominations or injustice.

It’s about rejecting anything and anyone who puts their agenda before Jesus’, including our own.

It’s about understanding that this Scripture passage below (that would be this last section from Matthew 25) is not a theory, but is the mark of those who follow Jesus.

Pro tip: after reading it, note that you can’t follow Jesus and follow Trump, or, for that matter, much of the agenda of the present day GOP.

³⁷Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? ³⁸And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? ³⁹And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’

⁴⁰And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’

Christians, this is a moment that calls us to righteousness.

We are called as baptized people to renounce the Devil and all his empty promises.

Racism and systemic racism is a sure mark of the Devil.

Whites are called, therefore, to renounce it.

That means, of course, that we are called to renounce the privilege that we gain from it, and those who engage in it.

I renounce racism.

I renounce the racist policies and culture of policing in the US, and of the politics of the US.

I renounce Donald Trump.

I renounce the inexcusable repression of those who protested peacefully.

I regret the violence but I renounce that which led to its expression: when a word or a cry or a shout is not heard, even over centuries, sometimes, as Martin Luther King said, a riot is the language of the unheard.

I renounce what happened to George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery and Sean Reed and Tony McDade and a host of other names that must be said.

~~~~~

I imagine all of us have had an opportunity to wonder: if I’d been alive during slavery, during the Holocaust, during the Civil Rights moment—heck, even when Voldemort was on the run, what would I have done?

If I’d been alive when a black Jesus was being lynched by the authorities, what would I have done?

Now’s your chance to check it out.

Because finally the tables are starting to turn, and a righteous revolution is going down, right now.

These days, it’s sounding less like a whisper, and more like a holy clamor long in coming.

~~~~~

We have just entered the season of Pentecost.

Long has the Holy Spirit been imaged as a dove, also associated with peace.

She’s also, though, especially in Celtic traditions, been seen as a goose.

Geese are not pleasant.

They nip and attack and cajole you into doing what they want you to do and going where they want you to go.

They are neither peaceful nor safe.

Turns out that the same can be said of the Holy Spirit.

“Come, Holy Spirit,” we say and pray, but I do not believe we really mean that.

First thing that the Spirit did on Pentecost? Got the disciples in a mess of trouble.

We seem to forget that, we who tell children to not play with matches, and then gather these same children together for worship and pray “Come Holy Spirit, breathe your fire upon us.”

Of course, the Holy Spirit would never burn down our structures, we fool ourselves into thinking.

Just those bad ones.

Of course, the Holy Spirit would never blow away our ways of having done things, we lull ourselves into believing.

She’ll Just blow away the riff raff chaff.

Come Holy Spirit, we pray.

Just come, please and of course, and even stay, but in a respectable, predictable, controllable way.

We actually and intentionally and audaciously say that to the Holy Goose!

We audaciously say such things to the unquenchable, unrestrainable, Holy Fire.

~~~~~

I can’t help believe that the Spirit has been in the streets these days.

She’s not respectable, not predictable, not controllable.

But She is Holy nonetheless, and She is ushering in a Revolution.

~~~~~

Personal note: I very much should have written sooner about Mr. Floyd and the protests.

I am sorry.

These days have been full of heaps of personal commitments, and so I haven’t been able to string thoughts together—or, rather, amidst other clamors for my attention, there are so many strings of thoughts that I haven’t been able to pull them together.

This entry is but one of five or six blogs that I’ve set out to write, truth be told.

If you would like to follow my more…succinct and immediate thoughts, feel free to follow me on my personal Twitter @RevDrAnnaM, or find me on Facebook.

Peace, and moreover shalom, be with you all.