Wednesday, April 9, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Fire in the hearth
Be ready now to fall down and worship the statue I had made,
otherwise, you shall be instantly cast into the white-hot furnace,
and who is the God who can deliver you out of my hands?
So spoke Nebuchadnezzar. Prolific photographer, musician and poet Gordon Parks, black native of Kansas, wrote while living in Harlem, photographing Malcolm X and Martin Luther King for Life Magazine. Mr. Parks he knows that story, a story told in every century.
We cannot get too comfortable in our houses.
Wolves still roam the woods.
The hawk still hangs in the air
And restless generals still talk of death
In their secret rooms.
To the garish tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy played on a Hammond organ balanced alongside America the Beautiful, Parks photographs blacks collapsing under fire hoses in Mississippi and captures portraits of silent, smirking whites waiting for night, for more burning and still another lynching. Alongside Parks’ haunting music his searing images carry me back to the story in the Babylonian court.
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered King Nebuchadnezzar,
“There is no need for us to defend ourselves before you
in this matter.
If our God, whom we serve,
can save us from the white-hot furnace
and from your hands, O king, may he save us!”
Parks’ camera captures cattle stampeding down a steep hill, and then a cowboy with Marlboro, celebrating his herd with, yes, another silent smile.
But even if our God will not, know, O king,
that we will not serve your god
or worship the golden statue that you set up.
Parks knows his longed-for crusade for fairness and justice can’t be his alone. Still, he can do what he’s called to do, although in its midst he will know exhaustion and despair.
King Nebuchadnezzar’s face became livid with utter rage
against Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
He ordered the furnace to be heated seven times more than usual
and had some of the strongest men in his army
bind Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego
and cast them into the white-hot furnace.
Is not this moment famous in the stories of the Bible something like the stories photographed by Gordon Parks’ camera, stories of strength in standing firm, often to the point of beating and of death?
As for all of us ordinary humans, for a long time
I’ve entertained the impossibility of putting each one of us
Into a tiny room
Or letting us remain silent for a moment and then separately
Speak the absolute truth of ourselves,
Knowing the smallest lie could hurl us into fiery space.
Not that God our Father would do such a thing.
But still … what could be coming in the morning?
Nebuchadnezzar rose in haste and asked his nobles,
“Did we not cast three men bound into the fire?”
“Assuredly, O king,” they answered.
“But,” he replied, “I see four men unfettered and unhurt,
walking in the fire, and the fourth looks like a son of God.”
Gordon Parks visits his father’s grave in Oklahoma. He returns there when his soul feels dead with regret, pain and dread, when the history of his race and his own story within it threatens to destroy all that God made good in him.
Back in New York City, he walks across the Brooklyn bridge.
I journeyed the troubled road well into each shrunken evening,
Dreading the silence of darkness,
So cold in the unbroken spell that turned me homeward with a shudder,
My memory worrying to the chill of yet another morning on its way.
Then upon one certain dusk, upward through my window,
All was black except a single star
Of a striking light against that sill.
I slept deep that night.
How did the three boy children of Israel sleep, that night warmed by the angel of God while the king’s fires fizzled out?
Nebuchadnezzar exclaimed,
“Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego,
who sent his angel to deliver the servants who trusted in him;
they disobeyed the royal command and yielded their bodies
rather than serve or worship any god
except their own God!”
In this moment of pure happiness the king rejoiced and released those he thought were prisoners. His Hebrew boys, and that angel – they led him to his knees. On the ground, discovering his place at last, he must have laughed and laughed with joy.
Can’t this rebirth and re-cognition happen to us all?
As his film comes to its end, Gordon Parks’ face is worn with weariness and age. He plays his piano and smokes his pipe. He remembers his home on the prairie.
I distrust the wind when things get too quiet.
Having been away so long, I sometimes suspect this place
No longer recognizes me.
I always return here weary but to draw strength
From this huge silence that surrounds me.
There is warmth here, even when the wind blows hard and cold.
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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