Daily Reflection, July1, 2020; Evil Living After

Evil Living After                     July 1, 2020                              Daily Reflection

In the Gospel lesson for the 4^th of July, the editor of Matthew is weaving a series of sayings attributed to Jesus in what has been called “The Sermon On The Mount.” One saying was; “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”

The Sermon on the Mount is one of the most beautiful, most admired and least followed parts of the Gospel, which is about loving your enemy. The usual dismissal is a petulant scowl: “So you want me to let him, (her, them), that scum of the earth, walk all over me! Do you have any idea how much evil he (she, they) are doing?”

Blindness is not a requirement to love; love is not blind, but it puts things into context. The reality is that we are both bad and good at the same time. The task of Christian love is to know we are broken and sacred at the same time, as Luther used to say “simul justus et peccator” and so are our enemies.

The task is to love the enemy and work against the evil. The evil is the target not the enemy. Evil lives long after us as we are reminded Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in Marc Antony's funeral oration speech: “The evil that men do lives after them;/The good is oft interred with their bones.”

My father was one of the kindest, gentlest, most honorable men I have ever known. He loved my mother and his children and worked for the betterment of his community. But he was a product of his time and heritage. When he was a child, he related to me in a story when we were watching a clip of the Silent film, of D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, a masterpiece of art and hate. In the film, the defeated noble Confederates must stand against those greedy Carpetbaggers and scurrilous Yankees and uppity buffoonish former slaves. The noble Confederates take to the Klan to avenge the disgrace and uphold the honor of the fragile women of the south; death before dishonor! My father laughed about when he was a young child in 1920's Asheville, N.C., he and his friends would steal the sheets from the clothes line and mount their maid's broomsticks and ride to uphold Southern honor. They were punished for messing up the sheets and brooms. Later, he considered the Klan of his day as an organization that was a Ponzi scheme to make money off of people rooted in fear and hate. But, the idea of Southern “honor” and white supremacy was reinforced daily by the school systems and governments in North Carolina. He believed the “Lost and Glorious Cause” Myth of the Confederacy.

My father, a product of his time, was a gentle bigot and we got into many of an argument about race, especially after I started to attend meetings of CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality) in the nearby city in Upstate New York. His main fear is that my future might be blighted by membership in Left Wing groups as so many of his colleagues had seen their futures cut short by the McCarthy witch hunts.

The good of my father is interred in his bones and in the hearts of his sons and daughter who survived him, but the evil, the tacit acceptance of white supremacy continues to live; and it is that we must stand against before it keeps being passed on.Tom Wilson+