44  bar rises 29.89 0mph SW dewpoint 23  Beltane

              Waning Crescent Moon of Growing

A first tonight.  A salad made from lettuce I cut from the plants in our kitchen.  Enough for two with plenty left on the plants.  So, one test of the hydroponics down, a few more to go.  I want to produce tomatoes and herbs on a year round basis, while also using the setup to start plants for the outside garden.  Flowers, too, would perk up the kitchen and the inside, especially in winter.  Slow, steady.  Learning as we go.

Kate has tomorrow off, unexpectedly, so we’re going to go over to NOW fitness and buy a new treadmill.  Tres exciting.

Looks like a couple of good days for outside work Sunday and Monday.  I have plenty to do.

I haven’t said anything here about Rev. Wright and Barrack Obama.  I’m with Rev. Wright.  I know, I know.  He comes off like a fruitcake, an angry voice untethered from day to day reality.  His sermons are strident, cut deep.  His critique of American society as a racist, vicious culture seems to describe a place none of us know.  And we don’t.

Preaching has a long and complicated history.  Its strongest and its most dangerous form comes when a minister decides she must speak truth to power.  This always, always comes from a particular situation which the minister holds up to the Christian tradition, most often scripture in the Protestant community of which Rev. Wright is a part.  The preaching task is never done in the abstract; it is always a spoken word to a people, a spoken word shaped by the scriptural and historical roots of today’s Christian church.  When the community to which you speak and from you yourself come have experienced marginilization, unearned disadvantage, then the spoken word will express the truth of God’s justice to the powerful forces aligned against your community.

This type of preaching is never easy.  It costs blood.  It often produces pain.  Clergy who insist on prophetic preaching, because they feel they can do nothing else, often lose their jobs, get branded as crazy, misguided, idealistic, out of touch.  This is just power talking back, trying to press the truth to the margins again, where it can be contained.  We, that this those of us in the white upper-middle classes do not know what it means to live as marginal persons, bereft of influence, beholden to power.  We are the main-stream, the influential, the holders of power.

Naming truth hurts.  But, as Jesus said, the truth shall set you free.  But, he might have added, only after a really long painful time.  Even so, it doesn’t make the truth any less true.   

I never served a congregation as a minister for just this reason.  I knew my politics were too radical for a congregation of Presbyterians.  The tension and pain would not have had  a constructive outcome.  Rev. Wright made a different calculation and I support him in it.