Reverend Bill Blaine-Wallace, Sunday July 14th, 2024

The Rev. Bill Blaine-Wallace

St. George’s Chapel

Tenants Harbor, Maine

Proper 10

July 14, 2024

It was like the prophets in the Bible. They didn’t have any special powers of seeing the future. They saw where the present was at, was all.

from This Other Eden, by Paul Harding

Malaga Island, Maine, about 60 miles south, is an icon through which I prayed this sermon to life.

The martyrdom of John the Baptist mirrors the fate of 52 people on a 42-acre coastal island at the beginning of the 20th century. Malaga Island not as brutal. No heads on a platter. Yet as absolute.

John’s execution and the erasure of Malaga Islanders foretell America’s latest struggle to renew, and possibly save, our fragile democracy.

Malaga Island was last occupied by a mixed-race fishing community established in the 1790’s by Benjamin Darling, a once enslaved Black man, and his white wife, a local resident, Sarah Proverbs. They had 9 children. Others found their way to the island—Irish, Scots, Portuguese. The community became a safer haven for the down and out and ostracized.

The community was mostly left to itself until the first decade of the 20th century. Four factors brought greater attention to the island community. These same factors presently shorten America’s reach for a more perfect union.

First: Reconstruction. The post-Civil War, decades-long blatant and stealth resistance to incorporate freed slaves into American society, and the influx of Roman Catholic French Canadians into Maine, outed previously more latent racial, religious, and immigrant discrimination. In the early years of the 20th century, Maine had the highest per capita Ku Klux Klan membership in the United States.

Studies show that about one third of Americans currently resist uplift for Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. A smaller and noisy percentage disavow non-Judeo-Christian religions and traditions, and stand against those outside the circle of heteronormality.

Second: Nativism. During the early 1900s, a growing number of Americans sought to protect the interests of native-born people. Nativists coalesced around the fear that immigrants threatened both the American way of life and jobs of American workers. The infamous literacy test of the Civil Rights Movement originated in the nativism movement.

Nativism is at the heart of white America’s current quest for greater ascendency and insularity. Note the present crusade to abolish diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at public universities.

Third: The Eugenics Movement of the early 20th century. Eugenics prospered the idea that one’s “blood” mattered. Purer the better. Segregation, involuntary sterilization, and other exclusionary measures were touted and applied in the arenas of medicine, education, and government.

“Purer” blood still matters. Extremists are becoming less subtle and quiet about the matter.

Fourth: tourism. At the beginning of the 20th century, tourism became and remains a major financial focus of Maine. The Malaga community did not help local property values. An eyesore.

As the chasm between rich and poor grows and the middle class shrinks, America’s current, accelerated greed-creep infiltrates and pushes aside communities that stand in the way. More and more cities turn their backs to and try to hide the unhoused. The Supreme Court recently upheld laws that criminalize sleeping in public.

The 4-fold assault against difference sealed the fate of the Malaga community.

In 1912, 47 residents of Malaga Island were evicted from their homes by the State of Maine. The remains of their dead were exhumed. 17 bodies were put into 5 caskets and relocated to lessen the incentive of the islanders to return. 8 residents were taken to the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded. Some were sterilized. The other inhabitants of the island were scattered about.

The dynamics that erased the Malaga community threaten our nation in ways and at a pace that, nine years ago, we could have hardly imagined.

In 2015/2016, seemingly out of nowhere, came a dangerous and determined agenda to steady the aging gait of whiteness. Principles and commitments of about half of the 61% of white Americans seek to divide and conquer the remaining 39% of us. The latest and clearest iteration of this agenda is the Heritage Foundation’s project 2025.

Seemingly out of nowhere. Emphasis on seemingly. Malaga is another reminder that the 2015/2016 outpouring of hate is the latest uprising of a brokenness that has been with us since the beginning of America’s experiment with democracy.

Now is not the time for despair. It is time to breath deep, hunker down, examine, and adjust our lives towards a specific love. For those of the progressive Christian tradition, the shape of love is the Jesus Movement.

Is the Jesus Movement, practically speaking, worthy of our trust and hope as hell abounds all around?

The question is what kind of hope. The goal of hope, in terms of the Jesus Movement, is not the victory of democracy over autocracy. Why not? Isn’t that what we are struggling for. Not exactly.

Last week, I talked with Paul, my long-time friend and co-commiserater. We deconstructed the June 27th debate, its aftermath, and consequences.

Paul asked if I had read David Brooke’s interview with Steve Bannon in the NYT. I said that I had not. I said that I started it. Too much. Couldn’t bare it.

Paul said that I should finish it; said Bannon had a point.

Coming from Paul, that was a lot. Paul grew up in NYC. He attended The Little Red School House. He is an economics correspondent for the PBS News Hour. You’d think as an economics reporter, he’d have moved back from the left edge of progressive politics, closer to the middle. Not so.

Paul believes betting odds are more accurate than polls. His father, Joseph Solman, funded his early years as an artist as a teller at Belmont Park. Paul knows betting.

Paul believes Bannon is right on at least one account. Fascism is a solid bet, a runaway winner. History records far more Victor Orban’s than Joe Biden’s.

Paul’s point. Don’t be surprised that hell abounds all around.

American democracy, history’s longest surviving democracy, is messy, hard fought, and breakable. Shock saps will and purpose.

In other words, stay composed, poised, and aware amid the fray.

Hope for democracy, as an expectation we sweat blood to reach, is not enough. Expectation gets about 3 miles to the gallon. Big time burnout.

Hope, in terms of the Jesus Movement, is a way of life. Regardless of the outcome.

Hope is the stewardship of decency, integrity, respect, attention, curiosity, and vulnerability between self and others. All others. “You mean even…” Don’t go there. Hope is the commitment to be less a self-in-the-making and more a self in relation, a self in and for community.

Jesus’ foundational aim was not to get Rome’s foot off Galilee’s neck or to undo Herod’s alignment with empire.

Jesus is grounded more in the particular moment, less in universal possibility. Jesus attends to what’s near and now. Less concerned about what might be.

Jesus, like the one who baptized him, stands with those presently displaced and erased by the public square and the temple.

Jesus’ strategy is different than John’s. The baptizer focused on repentance, which tends to separate, the sheep and goat thing.

Jesus focuses on a love that unites, a love that finds solidarity with the disinherited, a love that incites solidarity among the disinherited. And who isn’t disinherited in one form or another? Jesus’ reach is long and unqualified.

Solidarity is highly contagious.

Solidarity infects the ballot box. Like the last couple of weeks. Iran, the United Kingdom. France.

And maybe America. We’ll see.

In the meantime, words of Maine native E. B. White, cited last night by Heather Cox Richardson, are worth holding onto: “Hang onto your hat. Hang onto your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.”

Amen.