Sermon by Dr. Walter Skip Earl
This is NOT the same sermon I gave from this pulpit exactly 12 years ago tomorrow, June 28, 1998. I named that sermon ”Exceeding the Speed Limit “ since I had turned 66 only days before. And now, just last Monday, I began looping around the sun on my 79th round trip. So here I am again, hopefully wiser, certainly older.
I have found it helpful to frame and remember my life events as if they were a book, with chapters and footnotes. A LIFE BOOK that is a collection of conscience and intangible memories and events that make me who I am. We are molded by our past both by being structured by it and by rebelling against it. Some of you are still writing the Introduction to your LIFE BOOK. Others of you are excitedly or franticly just trying to keep up with each new chapter. Others of you are writing concluding remarks, just in case you need them in a near future.
Today, I invite you, regardless of how many loops around the sun you have made, to consider your own loopity life and its various stages and chapters. Collect the accounts mentally, record the bad influences as well as the good so that you, without guilt or conceit, come to understand better who (put your name here) Walter Skip Earl really is.
(Show my very large LIFE BOOK.) Here is a book that I have just put together in the past year, mostly just for fun. I have collected photographs, news clippings, family records and items from all kinds of sources that relate to my growing up years.
As I go back and turn the pages of this book or of my memory, there are many photographs about which I am the only one that knows the feelings, the fears, and the hopes of a certain picture or story. It helps me understand who I am and WHY I am who I am.
The first and most binding “consideration” of our LIFEBOOK is this: Everyone of us,……all of us, will ……at one time or another……die.
For the vast majority of us, our book will be lost, forgotten except for little tidbits.
I attended the United Methodist Church memorial service at the Scope two weeks ago. Twenty ministers in the Virginia Methodist Conference died in the past year and the Service of Remembrance included a one half page to three page obituary on each depart-tee listing churches served and maybe a few personal characteristics of the deceased.
And the next morning the Conference moved on to the annual business of the church: growing membership and raising finances.
For years some people will remember these clergymen. But then, like ours, the binding on their “Book of Life” will began to fray, to fall apart, except for a few pieces, to be lost or forgotten, or temporarily stored in a box in an attic until the last family member moves on.
Scientist tells us that we are born and we continue that creation, expanding in development and health, until…. we are in our mid thirties, to mid forties, and then our bodies…. began… to die.
You know that. Its called “middle age”: a new waistline, some crumpling into wrinkles of our skin, moving on to glasses or contact lens …on to hearing aids, confronted with increasing fragility, and things growing on and in our bodies that we really don’t want. Our bodies are designed by the Creator to fulfill their growth potential in about 35 years, after which they began the process of dieing.
Let me share with you some footnotes to the pages of my LIFEBOOK You will have to make your own assumptions about how these footnotes influenced me. .
I was shocked, in researching this sermon, to find that when I was born on June 21, 1932…..”Prohibition” was still in effect…. in its 12th year since the 18th Amendment was passed outlawing the possession, production, sale, or consumption of alcoholic beverages. The 21st amendment repealed the 18th on Dec 5, 1933. So I was one and a half years old, before I could have my very first beer.
The year I was born, 1932, was the year that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected the President of the United States. It was one of the worse years of the GREAT DEPRESSION.
His 1932 election was the first of four terms to which he would be elected. I grew up with the influence of FDR. He was first elected President the year I was born and he died in office two months after I became a teenager. I had just gone to bed that Thursday night when I heard the paperboy shouting down the street: (long before TV instant news) EXTRA, EXTRA, READ ALL ABOUT IT, THE PRESIDENT IS DEAD. It took the whole week’s allowance, to run out and buy that “Extra” paper. I still have it !. (show framed paper)
My grandmother keep a framed picture of FDR over the sofa in the living room, because he “invented” Social Security and because he gave the poor access to electrical power.
Wendell Willkie opposed Roosevelt in the election of 1940. Willkie was the president of the “Commonwealth and Southern Corporation” that provided electricity for 11 states. The dams were built and controlled, as oil field are controlled today, by private corporations. In the cities the high rates charged for electrical power meant that many Depression area people could not afford this new-fangled luxury. But not only city ghettoes were without lights but so were rural areas. Willkie’s company knew, among other things, that if they had to pay for running an electric wire down every country lane to the house at the end of the road, (like the one lived in by my paternal grandparents) the company could not realize the profits they needed.
Roosevelt had a more democratic view: (Willkie called it “Socialism”) that the rivers on which the dams depended to make electricity belonged to all the people. Roosevelt won the elected and made haste to create the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), with obligatory requirement to equally furnish electricity to all Americans. Federal regulations guaranteed more affordable billing rates for electricity.
But come with me, to the school yard of Hilton Elementary School the week of the 1940 national elections. I was eight year old and in the third grade.
In the school yard was a large stump, where a huge tree had been sawed down. During recess, a “Democrat” would jump up on that stump and yell “ROOSEVELT” and the nearest “Republican” would jump up behind her and push her off the stump and yell ‘WILLKIE” until that person was pushed off by a another Roosevelt fan.. We spent the whole recess pushing each other off the stump and loudly yelling our candidate’s name. Some of us returned to the classroom dirty and with bloody knees from being pushed from that stump. We were learning our first lessons about the dynamics of the American Electoral System.
I was born in Hilton Village, now swallowed up by the greater Newport News, Virginia. Hilton Village was the federal government’s first “planned Community”, built on 100 acres of land isolated on all sides by woods but connected to the Newport News Ship Yard by a trolley. It was build right after “the world war” (now numbered as World War I) to provide housing for laborers at the Newport News Ship Yard..
Hilton Village was basically five blocks deep and 2 blocks wide. The Elementary School (with the tree stump on the playground) on the James River bank was the furthest point. The land on each corner of the 100 acre square was given to a church: across from the school was the Episcopal Church and the Christian Church. On the Warwick Ave side was the Methodist and the Baptist Church. Of course, there was no Catholic Church. It was a neat little government sponsored “American Dream” community.
But…….My best friend in upper elementary was Jewish. When we got ready to go to High school in 1945, the year World War II and the HOLOCAUST ended, Yesus (not his real name), my Jewish friend told me that he was denied admission to our Warwick High School, because he was “Jewish”. Jews were forbidden to attend any public high school in the county of Warwick! Although we lived only blocks apart, Yesus had to go on the trolley to Newport News High School , in another city away from were he lived, and away from his friends.
One day while Christmas Shopping at the Hilton Five and Dime story (the real prices back then) I saw an African American in the store and realized I had never before seen a Negro in a store. I asked about it and learned that Blacks were not allowed to buy ANYTHING for themselves in any store or service station in our American Dream Hilton Village, not even buy a nickel coke on a hot day while cutting the grass with a push mower in some residence’s yard
Most of the old homes on what is now Warwick Boulevard have long ago been turned into little boutiques or stores. A little while ago, after visiting my cousin in Newport News, I went to one of them , a small restaurant with an the old fashion soda fountain that made the old fashion non-thick milk shake with no sugar added. I started to reminisce with the store owners about the old Hilton but stopped because the owner and staff were all African Americans, who looked at me blankly. I sipped my milkshake ….and then I quietly moved into a “what-if” fantasy:
(pause)
I came to the store, opened the door thinking about milk shakes. The woman at the counter said, “What do you want in here, BOY.” I answered, “can I get a milk shake?” “Get out of here white boy, we don’t allow no Honkies in here, get out before I mess up that white skin of yours,”
Fear! Hurt! Humiliation! Anger! But I could do or say nothing, or I might have that white skin of mine “Messed up”, even by the police!
That was just a moment of fantasy. That outrage would not have happened……to me.!
In my mind, I still jump up on that stump and yell. And although
I push more discreetly now, I still will never be able to really understand how I could have grown up in a “federal planned community ” that said
‘NO!” to Catholics,
“NO!” to Jews
“NO!” to Blacks.
We have changed but we have a long way still to go. We have changed but have we…. been….. forgiven?
George Carlin, Irish Catholic and not known for mincing his words, wrote. in his 2009 biography, LAST WORDS:
“It’s called the American Dream because to believe it you have to be ASLEEP!”
In my early teens, I found out about books. A “banned” book was a “must” read. Yes, I grew up when school librarians “protected” us from “wrong” ideas and removed harmful books from the shelves. I wanted to know what I was being protected from knowing. I think I read most of them, at least these:
1930 English translation (by Wheen )
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT BANDED !
1940 (Richard Wright) NATIVE SON BANDED !
1951 CATCHER IN THE RYE BANDED !
1960 TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. BANDED !
THE 1965 Claude Brown, autobiographic MANCHILD IN THE PROMISED LAND endured a 10 year censorship. And as late as 1987, the state of Oregon was still censoring MANCHILD in all schools and gave as its official reason: quote ,
“Our Students have no need to understand life in a black ghetto”
Thank heavens for Maya Angelou’s (1969) I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS and her continuing autobiographies.
And NOW there is Clarence Walker’s University of Virginia 2009 MONGREL NATION, The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, which I will use as a source for my second summer service on August 29th, “Passing for Black”.
I never got over John Hersey’s HIROSHAMA . He was a reporter of the same sensibility as Anderson Cooper. When I was fourteen, in 1946, HIROSHIMA took over the entire issue of THE NEW YORKER: there were no other articles or cartoons,. Hersey’s observations were quickly published as a book. He simply described what happened at exactly 15 minutes after 8AM, Japanese time August 06, 1945, when we dropped the first Atomic Bomb on the Japanese civilian population of Hiroshima and 3 days later on Nagasaki. He told about the patterns of flowers on a dress that were now burned into the flesh of a woman’s arm and about people bumping around the city in panic after the heat of the blast had melted away their eyeballs until they fell.. I can remember clearly what I was feeling; The war had ended but in the process the world had completely changed. We had made the most significant break-threw in the history of science----we had split the atom and released its power. But the first use of this marvelous discovery was to kill and maim a small group of soldiers, but mostly children and civilians, projected to be as many as 246 thousand deaths that August. Each blast had a kill parameter of 40 miles in all directions from the explosion site (about the distance from here to Williamsburg!). I have lived for 78 years and for all but 14 of them, I have known that we now have the potential to destroy ourselves and our world..
.And I read THE DAIRY OF A YOUNG GIRL, autobiography of 15 year old Anne Frank (translated into English in 1952). It is Not an earthshaking memoir. She wrote just like our youth wrote for their Sunday sermons recently…..only I knew, as I read what she said that this teenager, full of hopes and foolishness and the future, would be cruelly murdered, with most of her family within months of her words by the obscenity of a gas chamber pretending to be a shower room…..because she was a Jew! ….because she was a Jew?
Chapter by chapter of my LIFEBOOK made me who I am, good and bad. In my 78 passes of the sun, I have tried to change some little parts of the world and myself for the better.
And you have done that to, and you will continue to do so. In the words of PBS, “Thank you.!”
BENEDICTION selections from Proverbs 29 and 28
THE POOR MAN AND THE OPPRESSOR HAVE THIS IN COMMON: THE LORD GIVES SIGHT TO THE EYES OF BOTH. EVIL MEN DO NOT UNDERSTAND JUSTICE, BUT THOSE WHO SEEK THE LORD UNDERSTAND IT FULLY.