To be persons of understanding we need to have a fair and honest share of acceptance, patience and humility that point to openness strong enough to hold convictions and life directions while honestly offering goodwill to those in opposition to our beliefs and actions. This pattern is well illustrated in Moses, straightforward with Pharaoh, in a civil exchange, and waiting out the program of God that would free the people. Moses, brought up in a royal household, never lost the fact he was a son of Israel. At an appropriate time he wanted to address the matter of the slavery and suffering of his first people. He did what he set out to do gaining support even of lay Egyptians. When leaving the country, he accepted extensive gifts from Egyptian citizens to aid the wandering people through the wilderness. Moses, in meekness and humility, worked through a period of time, waiting out the matter of concern until his program was granted. He worked through objective more than accusative appeals, personal influence, prayerful search, tenacity that meant personal risk, and waiting out the vision until the time when it would be granted. The approach meant that God, in his time, would resolve the issues. It took some effort on God’s part to get Moses in position to relent to the approach. There were momentary lapses during the next forty years for Moses, Miriam and Aaron, but the pattern was set, and accepted as standard policy.
The story is told of Charles Angeletti, a professor at the Metropolitan State University in Denver – an institution of 24,000 students. He was reported as having required the students to recite a caricature of the Pledge of Allegiance to the United States. It is negative to the declaration of the original pledge. In challenge to his methods and class conduct he answered: We’re very racist, we’re very repressive, we’re very Christian oriented, we don’t tolerate other kinds of thinking in this country. He noted that the Republicans were part of the problem. Student reaction was mixed with one student noting that he avoided the class and got a B, which as a more conservative student he would not likely have received if he had attended. Another said that the grades were easy – unless you were of one party in belief, and defended the position. The remarks were all an embarrassment, or ought to be, to every College professor. One of the major duties of a teacher is to show where a decision or indicated direction has gone in beneficial or hurtful results – perhaps even a neutral or extended conclusion not yet determined. I have been a student in both Christian and secular institutions, have earned degrees in both educational contexts, and hold the highest degree offered from an accredited university. There were few negatives in every institution regarding the problems that Angelleti cited. With very few exceptions those running against the values of freedom, justice, rights, equality, and human equity were decent persons carried along by their childhood training, feelings of youthful and/or human rebellion, and fears of some loss to what they believed to be proper for self or society. They favored objectivity. This turmoil can be extended in narrative. In my observation some matters were made negative that were negative only in the minds of persons who expected them to be, or from their presuppositions interpreted them to be contradictory.
I attended two events where Martin Luther King was speaker – one at the University of Washington in Seattle, and the other in a rally held in Washington, D.C. He did more for the improvement of race relations in America than most seem to grasp. He did it with respect even for his enemies. He understood that history is pock-marked by imperfections that will likely always attend in some way as human nature wiggles its way along looking for decency and a level playing field. King didn’t do it by demeaning the documents of pledge, or to bring down the dream for the floundering people churning their way through life. He believed that he was doing what Christ would do, evading physical conflict or destruction of property, or demeaning government. He followed a course of the best part of academia and Christianity. Come let us reason together: was the appeal of Isaiah. Solutions are found in the prevailing affirmatives of God. If I were to turn the professor’s stand into a pulpit for Christ’s ministry at the university I would have rightly been fired. The Classroom is for teaching and the pulpit for proclaiming, both in humility and meekness. Both teach – one for earth and mortality, the other for heaven and immortality. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020