Anniversary Sunday

This last Sunday, October 26, 2008 was a great day of celebration. We marked the 113th Anniversary of the Church of Peace. We dedicated a rebuilt echo organ. We celebrated 40 years of service by our Music Director, Mary Kae Waytenick.

Our congregation was organized in 1895 among German speaking immigrants in Rock Island, Illinois. We were a mission of the Iowa Council of the German Evangelical Church.

The pipe organ we use weekly was first installed in 1927. As you might guess, it has gone through substantial renovation over the years. The keyboard console has been relocated several times. In 1997 there was a major renovation. While the pipes themselves were retained and re-used the wind boxes were rebuilt and the mechanism for opening a valve and allowing air to blow through the pipe was totally rebuilt by the Levson Organ Company of Buffalo, Iowa. That was completed for the main part of the organ. There is a smaller echo organ chamber located on the other side of the chancel from the main organ, and this part of the organ was not rebuilt till 2008. So for the first time we heard the two parts of the organ play together again this last Sunday. This has been an expensive project. We are grateful to a generous donor who underwrote the project to rebuild the echo organ and chimes.

Mary Kae Sederquist began to play as the organist of the church in 1967 when she was a sophomore at Augustana College in Rock Island. Since that time there have been two major times away for her. The first was a recuperation from a serious automobile accident. The second was when she earned her master's degree from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Since 1976 she has been the church organist on a continuing basis. In addition to being an excellent musician, Mary Kae is a teacher and talented at organizing and calling out the musical gifts of others. She writes and arranges music for the choral and instrumental groups at the church. She encourages children and youth in their music and creates a safe environment in which they can share their music.

As you might imagine, with so many years of service and having touch the lives of so many people, it was a great day to celebrate with Mary Kae. She was surprised by having Flutes Unlimited, a group with which she has been associated, come to church and play their flutes. The church choir wrote a tribute song and sang it to her. Many musicians who know her work attended worship. Walter Haedrich played special music during the service. Carol Hubbard added to the service with keyboard music. All in all it was a great day.

Rhys Fullerlove took some video of the service which will be on the Church of Peace website. If you click on the photo of the church at the right side of the article it will take you to the website.

Niebuhr Family

When I decided to attend seminary in the late 1960s a friend of mine, Bob Wilson, kindly gave me a little paperback book called A Layman's Guide to Protestant Theology, by William Hordern. This book had been first published in 1955 by The Macmillan Company. Bob said that it would be helpful because it not only gave sketches of several theologians, but also outlined the basic ideas of the several schools of theological thinking current at the time. I read the book the summer before entering seminary in 1969.



There can be no question that Reinhold Niebuhr is the most important living American theologian. This sentence begins the chapter on American Neo-Orthodoxy. (p.147) The particular seminary I attended emphasized Process Theism, and although I read some about Neo Orthodoxy it was not something I studied deeply. I dated a woman who for a time assisted Reinhold Neibuhr in preparing documents when she was living at Union Seminary in New York City. This was where Neibuhr had taught, and he was living on the campus in retirement. He died in 1971.



When in 1991 I was called the the Church of Peace United Church of Christ in Rock Island, Illinois I realized that I was in Neibuhr country. Neibuhr graduated from Eden Theological Seminary in St Louis, Missouri. So had every minister who had served the Church of Peace before me. I had graduated from Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California.

"What did you attend that Congregationalist seminary for?" challenged Bert Kutz, the widow of one of the previous pastors who attended Eden. "I lived in California," I replied, weakly. "Swartz," Bert continued. "That's a German name. Good!" Even if I had not gone to either Eden Seminary of Elmhurst college, my forbears were German immigrants in the post 1850 period, as had most of the early members of the church. That gave us some common ground. Bert read the Christian Century magazine, which Neibuhr had helped edit for years. Her late husband, Ludwig, had read it for years, so Bert just kept it up. I, too, had been reading the Christian Century since I had been in seminary. So this gave Bert and I more in common.



I realized some time later that while Neibuhr had been born in Missouri he had grown up in Lincoln, Illinois. His father, Gustav Niebuhr, had been pastor of St. John's Church in Lincoln. Both Church of Peace in Rock Island and St John's in Lincoln had been German Evangelical Churches at their founding, and had merged with the German Reformed in the 1930s, to become part of the Evangelical and Reformed Church, and then with the 1958 with the Congregationalists to form the United Church of Christ. I snapped a photo of the historical sign at St Johns when I was at that church for a meeting last month.





I don't want to outline Neibuhr's whole career and many books here. If you Google his name you can find lots and lots of information. But I do have one or two observations.

I think Neibuhr's prominence increased greatly when he was on the cover of Time Magazine in 1948. Few Theologians are so newsworthy. You can find the cover and the cover story on Time Magazine's website. www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19480308,00.html

A few years back I read the material and realized that his point of view was far more realistic about what had been happening in Europe leading up to the Second World War. Partly that was because he was at Union Seminary with the likes of Tillich and Bonhoeffer. We often forget that the bulk of American theologians at that time were pretty skeptical of engagement in Europe and critical of war as a means of dealing with conflict. They were generally pretty optomistic about humanity and slow to realize just how bad things were becoming.

Neibuhr was far more sanguine, and considered the war against the Nazi's to be a just war. I think that the reason that he was featured in Time is that his point of view turned out to be far more correct than those of many other theologians at the time.

In addition to his general theological stance of "Christian realism" I have come to believe that the fact that his family was bi-lingual German and English, and that worship in the German Evangelical Church was for fairly recent immigrants, and often in the German language, contributed to a far clearer understanding of the situation in Germany in his family and in his church than most Americans expereinced. The German Evangelical Church and the Neibuhr family was more international in stance - they were reading the European periodicals and writing back and forth to family members who were living there. I think Reinhold Neibuhr was far more knowledgable about specifics of what was taking place in Germany than were most American theologians. His interest and knowledge was specific and he was well informed.

As you might well imagine, those of us in the United Church of Christ here in Illinois are proud of Reinhold Niebuhr and his brother H. Richard Niebuhr and the contribution that this whole family has made over the years. I am glad to have been grafted in, even though I went to that Congregationalist seminary out in California.

Redwood City

Where does the time go? Here I am with my older daughter Taylor in front of the parsonage of the First United Methodist Church of Redwood City, California. I was appointed to that church in the early 1980s. It was while I was there that Nancy and I were married. And it was while we were there that our first daughter was born. I was pastor of that church for six years and had a good time in that assignment.

I think the congregation enjoyed their "young parsonage family." We certainly received a lot lof kindly attention and support. It turns out that the Redwood City Church sponsors a center for infants and toddlers as part of their mission and ministry. So Taylor was able to go with me to church each morning and stay at the center as I did my work. This center was a wonderful blessing to our family on a personal basis, as well as a great resource to the wider community.

Fr. Mottet

This Sunday Marvin Mottet will receive the Pacem in Terris award for years of work in the community. Church of Peace became familiar with Father Mottet when he, along with our Pastor Emeritus, Ken Kuenning worked together to organize Quad Cities Interfaith (QCI) to bring together communites if faith to address social issues in the Quad Cities.

QCI has operated for many years now, with ups and downs. It is affiliated with the Gamaliel Foundation, out of Chicago, to do church based community organizing. QCI has been a beacon in the area to bring together folks from the Catholic and Protestant communities to work together for justice. On occasion it has also been a place for Jewish and Islamic communities to join the conversation as well.

Many folks have grand ideas about how to build a more just and peaceful community. Fr. Mottet and QCI has worked to bring these grand ideas to practical consequence by transforming problems into issues that we can address together.

It is interesting to note that Chicago has been, if you will, the world capitol of "community organizing" as a way of addressing how to change a community for the better. With the candidacy of Barack Obama, who has a background in community organizing in Chicago, the whole notion of community organizing is getting more discussion. We have been doing community organizing here at the Church of Peace for at least the last 30 years.

We are grateful for partners like Fr. Mottet in this journey.

Oktoberfest

When our church community was organized in 1895 it was among German speaking immigrants living in Rock Island. In fact, until about the time of the first world war the services of worship were conducted in the German language at the church. While we try not to overdo it, we acknowledge our German heritage on occasion during the year.

One of those occasions is an Oktoberfest in the fall. Oktoberfest is a fun occasion with polka music, brats and potato salad. By holding this event at the Elks Lodge it also means that there is beer available. What is Oktoberfest without beer?

The driving spirit of this event is some of the younger adults in the congregation and I enjoy it too!

Chincultic

On Saturday, July 19, 2008, Nancy and I were on a mission trip in Southern Mexico. We were staying in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. On this day our group drove south and visited an archaeological site near Comitan. The site is called "Chincultic" and since it is a Mayan word it is sometimes spelled Chinkultick - and different variations. The day we visited it was raining like the dickens.



You can imagine how surprised I was to read that on Friday, October 2, 2008 that six Mayan villagers were killed by the state police at that same site! It turns out that there is a Mayan village near the site and that the villagers had taken over, evicted the administrative personnel from the site, (allowing the archaeologists to stay), and then set up their own way to charge tourists to enter the site. The tourists were charged a reduced rate, and the villagers said that they were going to use the money to improve the roads and other civic purposes. Improvements they had been asking for from the state to no avail.



Well, the state police were sent in to break this up and the villagers resisted. Lots of people were wounded and six were shot and killed. Five state police officers are being held in the case. (If you google "Chincultic" in "news" you can get the Associated Press coverage.)







I think that this points up just how tense the situation remains in Chiapas between the government and the indigenous people. Also, since the villagers were armed with sticks, rocks and machettes and the police with guns it emphasizes the disparity between the indigenous and the agents of the state. Apparently the villagers disarmed the police and negotiated to return the firearms in exchange for villagers who had been arrested. The exchange was made, according to the news.

Tlatelolco - another angle

When I looked at the previous blog I realized that some might want to try to read the monument at Tlatelolco.

Tlatelolco Massacre

October 2, 2008 is the 40th anniversary of the massacre of Mexican students at the Plaza of the Three Cultures in Mexico City on October 2, 1968. This is known at the Tlatelolco Massacre.

In 1968 the summer Olympics were scheduled for Mexico City in October. Beginning in late July of that year there were a series of student demonstrations in Mexico City and the President Diaz Ordaz had responded with violence against the peaceful students. In August some 150,000 gathered in protest in the central square downtown, the Zocalo. Another demonstration was scheduled for the Plaza de Tlatelolco on the afternoon of October 2.



This site is known is known as the Plaza of the Three Cultures because there was an Aztec site here at the time of the conquest by the Europeans known as Tlatelolco. There is a colonial era church, San Francisco, that was built on the site. On this church there is a plaque with these words: "On August 13, 1521, heroically defended by Cuauhtemoc, Tlatelolco fell into the hands of Hernan Cortes. It was neither a triumph nor a defeat: it was the painful birth of the Mestizo nation that is Mexico today."

In the middle twentieth century a complex of bland modern architecture was built with apartments and Mexican Federal government offices. Thus, three cultures: Aztec, Colonial, and Modern.



At about 5:30 pm. on October 2 there was a crowd of some 10,000 or so demonstrators in the plaza and the military opened fire on them with automatic weapons. Some sources say from the ruins, others say from the upper floors of the modern structures. There may have been some confusion with the army firing on agents in the crowd on ground level. The demonstrators were unarmed. There were helicopters in the air and many were arrested and other demonstrators were killed. Some ran to the Church of San Francisco for safety. They were chased, beaten and some murdered.



The official government-offered death toll is 32. Other estimates are much higher.

The massacre quelled further demonstrations before the Olympics. However, according to Alan Riding in his 1985 book Distant Neighbors, "...the regime's response shattered the concept of rule by consensus and undermined the legitimacy of the entire system." (p.60) Some histories of Mexico divide history as before and after the Tlatelolco massacre. It is sometimes characterized as the "end of the revolution" which began in 1917.




I had read that a whole generation of middle class Mexican students were disillusioned by the massacre.

In August 1999 I took my daughter Taylor with me for a trip to Mexico City, after she had completed a year of High School that included instruction in Spanish. On August 3 we took one of those Gray Line tours that include Teotihuacan with the pyramids of the sun and the moon, the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Plaza of the Three Cultures.

When we were stopped at the Plaza of the Three Cultures in our little mini-bus I asked our middle-class bi-lingual guide, "Wasn't there a shooting here in 1968 involving students?"

"Shooting?" he replied. "It was a massacre!" He went on to tell us that he was then a young adult and was "in" it, and his cousin was wounded by the military. He also asserted that ovens at military installations were secretly burning bodies of students that had been transported from the scene at Tlatelolco. And our guide was a very straight guy.

This lends support in my mind to the assertion that there are many in Mexico disillusioned by the Tlatelolco Massacre.

During the regime of Vicente Fox there was an attempt to do a retrospective investigation of the events of 1968 and an evaluation of the role and culpability of President Diaz Ordaz. This fell far short of the hopes and expectations of those who had called for the investigation.

The most extensive coverage of the events of October 2, 1968 at Tlatelolco was done by the journalist Elena Poniatowska in the 1975 book pictured above. This is a series of interviews with many involved one way or another.

The top photo is the monument erected to the fallen students at Tlatelolco, with San Francisco Church in the background.