Provocative Words and Images

Dr. Larry James and I were in graduate school in Memphis at the same time. We were in some classes together, and at times his degree plan took him in other directions on that beautiful campus. I remember with good humor and fondness how in one class, he wrote what students considered at the time to be an "A" paper topic, the amphictyonic league in ancient Israel. I wrote on a topic that was considered to be a "B" paper topic, the historicity of the book of Jonah. As you might guess, students had sized up things well, and our grades reflected the same.

After graduate school, our lives took different paths, Larry to more graduate school, preaching, and now work in the areas of poverty, social, justice, housing, and other important matters. You can read about the work at http://www.larryjamesurbandaily.blogspot.com/. My life took a different route, youth ministry, more graduate education, and then life here in Abilene as a professor of marriage and family therapy who gets to work with students in the area of social justice, and what you find on these pages, Black farmers in particular.

In many ways and at many times, what he writes about and what I obsess about overlap. We are both involved in various aspects of the same things that matter to us, to the Holy One of Israel, and likely to you, or you wouldn't be reading these pages. Larry's blog has become a daily read, along with Mike's, Jaime's, and Greg's for other reasons, as is obvious by their amazing words and images.

Back to this point though. Several weeks back, a good friend gave me a photocopy of an appendix from a book. It is now on my desk, where it has been since it arrived via campus mail. For some reason, I cannot bear to spend much time with it. On the one hand it is simply a chart of states, years, and a specific action summed up. It is the content of those actions or activities that I find repulsive. Yes, someone needed to chronicle those matters, tally them up, and to let people like you and me know about them.

The focus of the document surely you are asking about at this point of reading these meandering words. The page lists lynchings of African Americans by year and by state. Yes, I find it repulsive to know that such was done to human beings, and that, according to another author, that we found it in those days to be human spectacle, or human theater. There's an author who has interpreted those times and places and horrors. My best guess is that author is under-reporting those atrocities because they were likely unreported during and after those times.

Earlier this week, Larry James provided the text of a lecture delivered by a former professor of his back in graduate school. In 2006 Dr. James Cone delivered the Ingersoll Lecture at Harvard Divinity School. It is a lecture that to me can only be delivered effectively by an African American lecturer. The lecture on "the cross and the lynching tree" is provocative as it engages the reader and the listener to consider the common and dissonant themes of these two images of atrocity.

Both images stir me to the core. I wear a symbol of the cross around my neck. Decorative though it is in silver and turquoise, I have said for years that it reminds me of to whom I belong, just as surely as the ring on my left ring finger reminds me of to whom I belong on this earth. I don't know of anyone who wears a symbol of the lynching tree, but I do know people whose relatives or friends or acquaintances died that way. It's a part of their history, and it is a part of our history as Americans, though a part that we likely would wish to ignore. However, it really can't be ignored.

Cone's words are stirring as he places the cross and the lynching tree side by side: "The cross and the lynching tree need each other: the lynching tree can liberate the cross from the false pieties of well-meaning Christians. The crucifixion was a first-century lynching. The cross can redeem the lynching tree, and thereby bestow upon lynched black bodies an escatological meaning for their ultimate existence. The cross can also redeem white lynchers, and their descendants, too, but not without profound cost, not without the revelation of the wrath and justice of God, which executes divine judgment, with the demand for repentance and reparation, as a presupposition of divine mercy and forgiveness. Most whites want mercy and forgiveness, but not justice and reparations; they want reconciliation without liberation, the resurrection without the cross."

I intend to read the text Larry has lifted more carefully, and I intend to listen more carefully to the presentation of Dr. Cone.

In this day and age, people are still getting lynched by various means, and we all still need the cross and the reconciliation, liberation, and reconciliation that it brings, and we need the atrocities to stop.