As we approach Inauguration Day, I searched the Scripture for advice to offer the new President. It is appropriate since President Obama has apparently regularly actually gone to church. There is a beauty in faithful church attendance which Eugene Peterson calls a “Long Obedience in the Same Direction.” There are very few times in our pilgrim walk where we meet a burning bush. Usually our faith is a process which slowly joins us with the Body of Christ, offered to the world.
As I looked to see what motivated and changed other Presidents, I noticed that they sometimes chose Bible passages that they thought would give special direction to their leadership. I also discovered that 17 of the 43 Presidents have something in common. Of course, they are all men, but can you think of something that only 17 of them have in common? They are Ultachs. Their ancestors came from Ulster in Northern Ireland. I had read that the Irish have had unusual influence in US politics and Catholicism, but I could not have guessed that the Presidency had some many ties to Ulster. Ulster is a province of 2 million people, and Belfast only has 500,000. New York City, in contrast, has 8 million.
James Buchanan said, “My Ulster blood is my most precious heritage.” Ulysses Grant went to Ulster after he left the Presidency. Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan, Chester Arthur, and Grover Cleveland all had a father or grandfather born in Ulster. Five of the last seven presidents are Ultachs, including Bush, Nixon and Carter. Bill Clinton went to Ulster three times to facilitate the peace process while President. I do not remember him going to Zimbabwe or Cambodia during those years.
While President Obama is reputed to be Kenyan, or an Indonesian Muslim and ten other groups claim that he is descended from them, it seems safe to say that he is not an Ultach. What will it mean for him to assume leadership in an office that has been so connected to Ulster since 1829? With that thought I looked at the Scriptures and realized that there is a person who might give the new President guidance as he faces the pressures from so many directions and attempts to offer just leadership of all. We will introduce that Bible reading in the moments to come and offer prayers that God blesses the world with a new outpouring of peace in this new year.
Moses is a great comfort to any person connected to more than one identity. He was born to two parents from the same tribe of Levi, so his family home would not even be a tribal mixture of culture. Because of the grave threat, his mother has the overwhelming choice to make to save his life. He had to be connected to the Egyptian society or he would be killed. Isn’t that the situation with which we are so familiar? How many people break the law to enter the USA for casual reasons? In Merly’s testimony last week, she started by saying that her aunt was in the USA with ovarian cancer and needed her. I have heard conversations with people in our church who left where they were as an advance party to find more safety for their family somewhere else. Sometimes you go to first one country and then another, looking for that place where you can get connected to the point that you can send back that important message, “Come and join me.”
So Moses is simultaneously in two cultures and classes, the culture and class of the wealthy Egyptians who oppress the growing Jewish population and the culture of his parents, because the princess hires Moses’ mother to actually raise him when he is not wanted in the court.
What impact does this have on Moses? Perhaps nothing at all? Since Moses intervenes when an Egyptian is beating a Jew and kills the Egyptian, we can infer that Moses carried the tension of two worlds in his very soul. Many of us carry two identities. It is a major source of conflict in life. It seems that societies of every type want to suppress complexity. Society wants you to be one thing. You are male or female? Don’t be complex. Are you white or black? Don’t be talking to me about Hawaii where I’ve never been or a Madrassa in Indonesia. Are you also from Ulster? Well, I guess you can talk about that.
Actually, Ulster and Northern Ireland have been one of the world’s great locations of conflict, people who often appear the same by race, but oppose each other from historic political and cultural conflicts where England tried to forcibly repopulate the area. They now have new complexity, since the third most common language there is Cantonese from a wave of Chinese immigration.
Our world is at war with itself. We are each trying to find a group with which to belong, but each group wants us to drop a part of ourselves for entry. In Exodus Chapter Two, Moses acknowledges this when his first son is born and he writes, “22And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.”
My hope is that President Obama, like Moses, carries that understanding in his heart after he no longer needs it for his own survival.
Moses understood the need for justice. As soon as the Lord appears to him in Chapter 3, Moses questions his own ability, but never a question about why God’s heart is for justice. Living in two worlds simultaneously sharpened Moses’ understanding of God’s character. The Bible presents God at work in a thousand various human circumstances to give us an understanding of God’s character and purpose. I believe that a person who lives with a complex identity feels both the pressure of that life and the rich understanding that it gives on God’s heart for justice.
I believe that President Obama has an unusually tuned sense of justice, based on his complex history born in Hawaii, raised as a child in Indonesia, back to Hawaii for the teen years, in LA and NYC for college and back to Irish Chicago for his 20’s. His pressure will be to lose that perspective so that rich people can have their way. I look like a white guy. It hides any of my connection to South East Asia or anything about my family. And I find that people don’t want to allow that. I was at a meeting last week on Religion and Race – what a title for a committee. I made this exact comment and a white guy sitting near me said, “O Ron, we know you very well.” Did I feel understood? No, it gave me greater alienation. Would you lose your complexity if you could? Doesn’t it give you some of your richest moments in life regardless of the acceptability of others?
President Obama needs our prayers that his complex identity and understanding will not be suppressed by electability and favors. He really could use his history to make the United States a more perfect union.
Lastly, Moses sadly failed by using his strength too often. This brilliant wonderful man who could see the issues of the day so clearly, sometimes let that insight cloud his dealings with others. He grew angry quickly and thought highly of his own brilliance. Remember that Moses broke the tablets of the 10 commandments in anger. God let some of it pass but it was to be fatal. In Deuteronomy 32, Moses was not allowed to lead Israel into the Promised Land. He had shown his anger one more time at Meribah when the people grumbled.
So President Obama may be guided by Moses’ life – to safeguard his complex identity given to him in childhood and young adult experiences. I don’t doubt that Obama will often feel that people have little idea of who he really is inside. That’s ok. There’s a lot of people right here who feel the same way. Happily God does understand you in all your complexity and its good. It does bring suffering and alienation, but it also offers you a rich tapestry of life that many people don’t experience.
And the President should safeguard his innate sense of justice. Religious leaders, including myself, are calling on him to abolish the policy of US torture this week. I’m hopeful that his past experiences and his Christian understandings will make this a matter of his conscience.
And the President should safeguard his character once he has the power of leadership to deal with those who oppose justice and the common good. God says later in the Scriptures, “walk humbly.” As I have said on other days, the Bible tells us that we always sin out of our strengths, not out of our weakness.
And pray for the Ultach. Obama's great-great-great-grandfather on his mother’s side, Fulmuth Kearney, was reared in Moneygall, then left for America in 1850. You can’t make this stuff up. We all pray that in our complexity, South Asian, SE Asian, Caribbean, Latino, Kenyan, Ultach, gay and straight, old and young, White and Black, male and female, poor and rich – we need a President and government that makes a world that’s fair for us all. Amen.
