American culture

Happy Day-of-the Prophets!

jamescalvindavis

A sermon preached at Putnam United Presbyterian Church
Labor Day 2023

Texts: Isaiah 32:1–8; Luke 1:46–55

This holiday weekend holds a lot of personal meaning for me, and I feel it acutely these days. My dad just passed away last year. My dad was a Pennsylvania coal miner, and although he stopped working in the mines due to injury when I was still a boy—or maybe because of that traumatic moment in my family’s life—I have always associated Labor Day with my father. Too many of us treat Labor Day now as just another federal holiday, just another three-day weekend, one more chance to grill some hot dogs before the summer is over and schools begin in earnest. But our celebration of labor and the labor movement in this country should be much more profound. Labor Day is a day set aside to celebrate the American worker, all people whose work maintains this country’s productivity and vitality, but especially those who do the hard work, the physical work, the essential work few people want to do but must be done, the work that is never glamorous and seldom celebrated. Labor Day should be a day to honor that American worker.

It’s also a moment for us to reflect on the history of the labor movement and give thanks for the benefits from that struggle that we now take for granted. In order to reflect on that history, though, we have to know it, which fewer and fewer of us do. We need to remember collectively the brutalizing working conditions in coal mines, steel mills, and factories 100 years or so ago, and remember the ways that wealthy industry barons controlled every aspect of their workers’ lives, on and off the job. We need to revisit the ways industrialists and government leaders actually conspired to keep laborers from organizing, often violently. We need to remember the years it took for major industries in this country to unionize and for workers to get their seat at the negotiating table. Most of all, we need to give thanks for the employment protections that those negotiations yielded, benefits many of us take for granted: a minimum wage, a reasonable work week, restrictions on child labor, overtime pay, health benefits, disability protections, and more.

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Cancel Culture and Christian Grace

jamescalvindavis

A sermon preached in Upstate New York, June 2023

Sermon text: Matthew 7:1–5, 12

A couple weeks ago, I saw a story in the news about the play-by-play announcer for the Oakland A’s being fired after more than twenty years of broadcasting for the team. Apparently, the afternoon before his last game, Glen Kuiper visited the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. He got an extensive tour of the place, and he was so impressed with the museum and the history of the barriers Black baseball players endured, and the depth to that history that he didn’t know—even though he worked in baseball—that he wanted to talk about it during the baseball game. Unfortunately, though, when he started talking about his experience, he fumbled the name of the museum, and it came out sounding an awful lot like the other N-word that no one should say in private, let alone over a broadcast.

The reaction was swift and furious, just as you’d expect, and in came the calls for Kuiper to be fired. Kuiper insisted that he did not mean to say the wrong word, he just got tongue-tied—an explanation that seems plausible to me, someone else who spends much of his profession in public speaking. Sometimes my brain and my mouth don’t communicate effectively, and what my brain wants to say does not come out the way I thought it. And sometimes, in situations less wrought than this one, in an effort to make sure I don’t say something a certain way, I get so focused on avoiding that construction that my brain sends that signal and I end up saying it precisely the way I was trying to avoid. (I do that with names all the time.) I can imagine that Kuiper, a White man, was already feeling a little funny saying the word “Negro,” because even though it’s in the name of the museum, in a lot of other contexts it is not a positive word to use to refer to Black persons. So even that hyper-sensitivity could have caused him to misspeak.

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Labor Day: The Day of the Prophets

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I grew up in a small coal town in western Pennsylvania. For many years, Colver was a typical company town, reflecting the power differential between miners and mine owners, and reinforcing mining families’ total dependence on the company for income and services. Even the name of the town reminded its citizens of company dominance, deriving as it did from a mash-up of the owners’ names: Coleman and Weaver. But by the time my father returned to his hometown to work in the mines, the industry’s influence over the town and surrounding area was mitigated by another force, the labor union. Once free as “job creators” to dictate the working conditions and living arrangements of their employees, coal companies now had to negotiate with the collective power of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA).

For most of my childhood, the United Mine Workers were led by Richard Trumka, who passed away recently after a lifetime of advocating for the American laborer, in roles with UMWA and the AFL–CIO. For his part, my father was active in UMWA District 2, Local 860, even after a back injury ended his active employment. Dad hurt his back when I was seven, but by the early eighties his fellow miners found themselves unemployed as well, displaced by the end of workable coal strips underneath our sleepy town. The coal industry remains the centerpiece of Colver’s history, but by the time I became a teenager, the mine’s demise (and the absence of any substitutable prospect of work) was the defining reality of the present.

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Using Culture to Inform the Church

jamescalvindavis

‘Leading Theologically’ guest makes the case for fearless, faithful preaching around the Fourth of July, Labor Day — even Super Bowl Sunday

by Mike Ferguson | Presbyterian News Service

LOUISVILLE — Many preachers get a little antsy about preaching on and around secular holidays, among them the Fourth of July, Labor Day, Mother’s Day — and that biggest secular holiday of all, Super Bowl Sunday. In their minds, the culture and the church ought to be kept at arm’s length from one another.

But the Rev. Dr. James Calvin Davis, the guest Wednesday on the Rev. Dr. Lee Hinson-Hasty’s podcast “Leading Theologically,” said he welcomes opportunities for culture to inform the church.

Read more at Presbyterian Mission.