Monday, September 9, 2024
Memorial of Saint Peter Claver, Priest
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Servant of the slaves
When Peter Claver, SJ came to town in 1615, he had big shoes to fill. His predecessor, Father Alfonso, served slaves of the Caribbean for 40 years, declaring he would be “the slave of the Negroes forever.”
Claver spent the next 40 years filling those shoes. He baptized 300,000 slaves. He also preached in the city square and became a missionary to white sailors and traders. When he traveled he refused the hospitality of planters and other slave-owners, and slept in the huts with his friends, the slaves.
In The Sin of Certainty, Peter Enns describes four nineteenth century challenges to Protestant religion, threatening many leaders with feelings of doubt and irrelevancy:
- Darwin’s new understanding of evolution
- Archaeological discoveries of ancient texts similar to and older than the stories in Genesis
- German biblical scholars undermined long-held beliefs in the authorship of the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy). They also suggested a critical interpretation of the gospels, uncovering an “historical” Jesus rather than reading and accepting the stories at face value.
But there was a fourth challenge. How do we, inheritors of Luther’s belief in sola scriptura (only the Bible!) deal with different interpretations? Enns points out the obvious:
Once you translate the Bible into a language people actually speak and understand, they are bound to start forming opinions about what the Bible “says.” Anyone who has ever been to a church Bible study or—heaven help us—led one, knows what’s coming next. When people read the Bible for themselves, they often disagree about what it means. The Bible does not have a good track record of promoting unity among those who read it. (p 48)
History shows the hundreds of small and large groups who decided to deal with disagreement by turning the dissenters out, turning them away rather than turning the other cheek, shooting bloodshot, angry glares toward each other from a safe distance, and starting a new church.
The Civil War was not the only battle in America between children of the Heavenly King, although it baptized in blood the different ways men and women looked at slavery, the same slavery populated by the same Negro slaves Fr. Claver and his predecessor spent 80 years fighting with kindness and compassion.
But the Holy Bible refers to slavery in many ways at many times in history, and only sometimes as something evil, something to leave behind as we are born again in the kingdom of heaven. Before the Civil War began, the Baptist church among others split between north and south, the division based entirely on the scriptures they chose regarding slavery. Well-meaning (I guess) men and women chose differently.
What does not allow interpretation is Jesus’ command for us to love our neighbors as ourselves, and Fr. Claver spent forty years doing that in any way he could, seeking out those Jesus called “the least of these” to touch, to pray with, to love.
Even the slaveholders and planters, when Claver died, honored him at last.
Diana Butler Bass wrote yesterday about what might have been the first Christian baptismal creed, slightly revised by Paul in his letter to the Galatians:
For you are all children of God in the Spirit. There is no Jew or Greek; there is no slave or free; there is no male and female. For you are all one in the Spirit.
These words may well be the oldest words to survive from the ancient Christian movement. If so, that means the very first Christian creed was not about the nature of God or the Trinity or the divinity of Jesus, but it was about us — a creed of human solidarity and the breaking down of ethnic, economic, and gender barriers to create a community where there is neither favoritism nor privilege to those who the empire deems important.
After condemning immoral behavior in Corinth Paul wrote of what needed to come next:
Let us celebrate the feast, not with the old yeast of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
(1 Corinthians 5, Psalm 5, John 10, Luke 6)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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