The Hangout with David Sciarretta
Conversations with interesting people.
The Hangout with David Sciarretta
#100 Our Fragile Democracy: A Conversation with Rev. William H. Lamar IV
I sat down with William H. Lamar IV, pastor of Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington DC, for a profound conversation about history, faith, justice, and American democracy.
Learn more about Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church: https://www.metropolitaname.org/
Watch this video to learn more about the landmark legal victory we discussed in this episode.
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Welcome to the Hangout Podcast. I'm your host, david Sharetta, and on this show we have conversations with interesting and inspiring people. For this episode, I was privileged to have a conversation with William H Lamar IV, who is pastor of Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church, located in Washington DC. Formerly, he was managing director of leadership education at Duke University Divinity School. He's also served congregations in Hyattsville, maryland, monticello, florida, orlando Florida Monticello Florida, orlando Florida and Jacksonville, florida. Reverend Lamar and I had a wide-ranging conversation that included his inspiring and powerful story of his family's history, his views on the intersection of faith and politics as expressed in scripture, and we also discussed at some length the fact that now his church owns the trademark for the extremist racist group Proud Boys. I was deeply moved by our conversation. I hope you find it interesting and engaging, just as I did. Welcome, pastor Lamar. It's a real honor and a privilege to have you on today for this conversation.
Speaker 2:I am deeply honored and I really appreciate the opportunity to share with you.
Speaker 1:I thought we could start with your origin story. You know where you come from, where you grew up, what are the currents in your life that led you to the present moment, and then we'll get more deeply into the work that you do.
Speaker 2:Sure. So I have written about my origin and I think about it often, and what I tell people is the best way to think about my early life and the lives of those who made my life is that we lived in a West African village, transplanted to Macon, georgia, transplanted to central Georgia, the multiple generations living in close physical proximity. I knew great grandparents, so at one point there were five generations of us living together, loving together, caring for one another. And Georgia, for my people, was not a hospitable place, because we are persons of African descent and because the state of Georgia was brutal in its slavocracy and in its political repression. But our people lived lives of love and joy and my parents have been together since 1966, married in 1973.
Speaker 2:I'm the oldest of three and what I tell people is that I was surrounded by a kind of love. I was surrounded, my two siblings were surrounded by a love that caressed us and corrected us, by a love that demanded excellence from us but provided us rich empathy. It was a joy to be in the presence of elders, now ancestors. We delighted to be with grandparents, with aunts, with uncles, with cousins, and the blood family situated us in a real way. But there was a larger reality of the communal family that we knew in church and neighborhood. And I cannot speak well enough I don't have the vocabulary to express the profound gratitude for the ways that our parents, our ancestors, our elders sacrificed, loved and modeled for us what it means to be human in a place that does not always treat all of us humanly does not always treat all of us humanly.
Speaker 1:Thank you for sharing that, especially in the context of a nation now where it seems that families are so fragmented. It's very rare to hear of two generations in close physical proximity, let alone five. Walk us through from that very rich background to where we are today.
Speaker 2:I was again born in Macon, georgia. My father's family, from multiple generations, from as far as we can trace back through slavocracy and the armed labor camps that America euphemistically calls plantations. They were not plantations, they were armed labor camps. My people were forced to work and they would have been killed had they not worked, and they worked without wages. So, as far as we know, my father's family worked on those Georgia armed labor camps in and around Bibb and Jones County. My mother's family worked on those armed labor camps in South Georgia and around Sylvester, georgia and Brunswick, georgia, glynn County, georgia, coastal Georgia. My mother's family eventually left coastal Georgia, south Georgia, and came to what we call Middle Georgia, which is Macon. Both of my parents, they were high school sweethearts. They graduated from high school. My father went to college in one place, my mother in another. They married after they graduated from college.
Speaker 2:I was born first and my brother, my sister, was educated at a Catholic school, st Peter Claver Catholic School. Until the sixth grade my father worked in the insurance industry. We moved first to Jacksonville, florida, then to Tallahassee, florida, where during those times my bibliophilia, love of books and knowledge, was nurtured and nourished by my parents. They exposed us to the world. They exposed us to ideas. I am doing what I'm doing. My brother and sister, part of me, are educators. So we are just being committed to service, not to extraction in the world, but to service in the world, not to oppression, not to exploitation, but service and forming human beings into beautiful, joyful, justice-loving creatures, which is possible for us all. And so during those times after high school I went to Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University and I must say that the HBCU tradition, the Historically Black College and University tradition, is the tradition that changed America, that if we just had people who went to Harvard and Yale and UC Berkeley and University of Texas and University of Michigan, those students did not fundamentally challenge America's injustice. Students at North Carolina A&T, students at Florida A&M, students at Morehouse Spelman fundamentally challenged the American system, fundamentally said that this nation claims to be democratic but it is not. There's an apartheid system.
Speaker 2:One thing to remember is that my family lived in American apartheid until my generation. I am the first generation and I often am sickened by the way America congratulates itself. I am 50 years old and I am in the first generation of my family that did not grow up in American apartheid. We must remember that South Africa came to the United States to learn how to do their racist program. The Nazis came to America and studied.
Speaker 2:And what's very important for me is, in the midst of all of those swirls, my family, my ancestors, my faith, tradition produced not people of violence or hatred, but people of love, people of sacrifice, but also people who will confront. Also, people who will not speak euphemistically about this nation's past, nor will we speak in a Pollyannish way about its future, but we will deal lovingly with all who will come together to make the world what it ought be. And so I leave college, I go to Duke Divinity School where I earned my Master's of Divinity degree, come back and begin my pastoral ministry in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which began in 1999. So I'm on my 26th year of the pastoral life and thankful to pastor the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington DC, which is the national church of our denomination.
Speaker 1:When we spoke prior, you talked about this inflection point where you were considering the law and the ministry or divinity studies. Can you talk us through what that was like for you, oh yes.
Speaker 2:So in my mind, the ancestors live and dance and thrive and argue and smile and cajole. And so my reading brought me into proximity with Thurgood Marshall and Pauli Murray and Martin King and Malcolm X and Frederick Douglas, elijah Muhammad and Henry McNeil, turner and Jarena Lee, all of these divines and lawyers, these visionaries, these artists of the possible, of the possible. And I decided, as I was preparing to determine what would be next after my undergraduate studies were completed, that either I would follow the path of the law in the tradition of Charles Hamilton Houston, thurgood Marshall, pauli Murray, constance Baker, motley, that is, applying America's less than perfect legal system in the interest of the liberation and freedom of all people, especially those in the American democracy who are erased or excluded. That was one half of my struggle. The other half was I'd grown up in the church and while I still, even as one who has given my life to the church vocationally, have lover's quarrels with the church, deep quarrels with the church, with the church, deep quarrels with the church, I thought of the tradition of King and of James Cone and of Pauli Murray, and of Prathia Hall and of Fannie Lou Hamer. Those who had been formed in the church called of spirit to not just do church stuff but to join the revolution unleashed in the ministry of Christ. It was a revolution of liberation, of justice, of love, of compassion, of abundance feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, healing the sick and providing for those who were oppressed and turning over the tables of oppression that created their poverty, their challenges. And so those two streams which are alive in the Black prophetic tradition which produced me, tradition which produced me, that those are the waters in which I swam and I determined, really I said, okay, I'll go to get a seminary degree, then I'll go back and get a law degree.
Speaker 2:What is interesting is in the beauty of the way life unfolds. I'm really still doing a little bit of both. I am doing the pastoral work, but a lot of my work is policy work. A lot of my work is organizing. I will be on Capitol Hill this week advocating for laws and policies that I think to be just that, I think to be fair. I was on a call yesterday with the board that I chair, and I'm chairing a board of folks who are doing the work of fair and just policy in Milwaukee, in Virginia, in Washington, in Connecticut, so that work of the gospel of Christ, which is also justice, joy and abundance. I have stayed in the river where both of those realities swirl. Those realities swirl and I'm thankful that, although I didn't get a law degree and I'm not trying to be a lawyer, the work that I saw, that the law did, that was positive. I get to participate that participate in that as well, so for that I'm thankful.
Speaker 1:The. As I hear you speak, it sounds as if the for you scripture, and activism and policy, and you know being rooted in the real world, those are all integrated together, right, so that scripture is not just an abstraction? Can you talk to us more about that?
Speaker 2:Oh sure, I think that the biggest identity theft in the nation over time has been perpetrated upon Jesus. His identity was stolen from him for the purposes of building an American church that would, by and large large, ignore the gospel. So Jesus says the spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he's anointed me to preach good news to the poor, to release the captives, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord, which harkens back to the Jubilee year, which was an economic vision that people would not be oppressed, that land would be returned to its rightful owners, that those in debt would be forgiven, those in bondage would be set free. And so the gospel of Jesus Christ is a gospel that challenges the systems, the authorities, the powers. He says to preach good news to the poor, and that Greek word there means those who have been made poor.
Speaker 2:Poverty is the result not of immorality, it is the result of injustice, and Jesus came fighting those things. And it becomes incumbent upon those of us who say we follow him, that our worship and that our spiritual lives thrust us into the arenas of the world, to do that same liberative work. And so for me there is no difference, there is no cleaving, there is no separation between the work of being a disciple and the work of disrupting a world of injustice and building a world of love and peace for us all. What's interesting is Pope Francis talked about the fact that right now we are fighting World War III in pieces because of all of the violence and destruction in the world.
Speaker 2:Martin King talked about the triple E's in America of racism, militarism and materialism. Slash capitalism and we build and love the kind of world that we believe that God intends and the kind of world that we see being made in the life and the ministry of Jesus. But we also are clear that there are powers arrayed against the work of God At the end of Jesus's earthly ministry. He was not given a Nobel Peace Prize, he wasn't brought to the White House and given a Medal of Freedom. He was lynched and we must not forget that.
Speaker 1:How do you see the role of your congregation, your work, your leadership, your facilitation in the context of a generation pardon me, that may be skeptical about religious traditions, especially younger people, connecting them to not only traditions but then making those be alive and relevant in the activism that you reference?
Speaker 2:Well, sir, you've got an advantage on me because you are the father of apparently a very bright and energetic young lady, and congratulations on her graduation. Thank you To you and your family and to her, especially one of the things that that I've noticed as a pastor in a place like Washington DC Now you will you and your listeners, I think, will resonate with this. Washington DC curates an interesting aggregation of people. The young people who come to Washington want to change the world. They want to work in Congress, they want to work in the social sector, they want to make the world a better place. I run into a lot of those young people in my work and I'm just going to be very clear. They don't care about doctrine, they don't care about the esoterica of theology, the esoterics of theology. They want to see faith embodied. They want to see an ethical tradition that loves mercy, that does justice and that walks kindly. And at our best, metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church, the church I'm privileged to serve at our best, that African Methodist Episcopal Church, the church I'm privileged to serve at our best. That's what we do. And so the young people. Let me give you a very tangible example.
Speaker 2:Every second Sunday of the month we have what we call Talk Back, where we gather in a room in the church and we have a conversation about the sermon, about the world, whatever people want to talk about. We talk for an hour and we fellowship. Most of the people in that room are younger than I. I'm 50 years old. Most of the people in the room are younger than I and they are completely ecstatic about having a place in the context of church where people aren't just talking at them but also listening to them and they question, they question me, they question the tradition, they disagree with me, they disagree with the tradition, but we hold a space for joy, for laughter and for seeking to embody, however imperfectly, the best of the tradition. So, from where I sit, young people want a space for rich spiritual depth.
Speaker 2:We began that conversation this month and every month with two or three minutes of stillness and silence so that spirit can speak in the midst of the human cacophony all around us. We can hear from spirit, then we hear from one another and then we have a conversation and we stretch one another and push one another and press one another, laughing together, praying together, loving and holding people, because Washington right now is a city that is experiencing a certain kind of trauma. Those who are currently leading the government said they wanted to inflict trauma on government workers, and those people are my parishioners. I mean, this is what the leader of the Office of Management and Budget said. And so we do the pastoral work because we believe those human beings should not be traumatized, but all human beings should be loved, regarded and respected, and so that's the work that we do sounds as if there's this balance between your church being a sanctuary, a spiritual sanctuary, as you talk about that quiet space, and also a place of activism, resistance, hope, all of those mixed together.
Speaker 2:And what I would say is what some would call activism and resistance. I call following Jesus. Yeah, because that's exactly what he was doing, when you strip away all of the stuff America has done to make Jesus a good American citizen citizen, as a matter of fact, what I have shared is, under current American policy, jesus could not have found sanctuary here, like he and his family found sanctuary in Egypt. We need to be very clear about who we are, where we are, where we are going, and the people who challenged our system met the same fate that Jesus met by challenging his system. These systems have a way of mimicking and mirroring one another, and so it is an activism, a resistance, born of what it means to read the gospels and to seek to live them and to follow a tradition, that of being human and connected with God that stretches even beyond Christian knowledge and Christian history, because humans did not come to know the divine 2,000 years ago. Human beings have danced with God and God has danced with us from the beginning of time. Every human being, whether they go to church or not, is a child of God, because I believe that in each of us is the breath of God. So all human beings, wherever they are, whomever they are, are holy, beautiful, made in God's image and likeness, and it is for us to build the kind of community where I mean when I hear you talk about your daughter. The way that you love your daughter is the way that the divine loves each and every one of us, each and every one of us, no exceptions, no matter what people believe or don't believe, who they love, where they live, what they have, what language they speak.
Speaker 2:And a taxonomy of people saying Christians are this and these people are that, americans are this. God is not an American, jesus is not. When I tell people Jesus was not a Christian. Jesus lived and died a faithful Jew. So all of our categories, if we scrutinize them, don't hold up to the vast and rich human loving anger, producing love that characterizes God. Because I think the thing that makes us most angry about God is that God didn't hate the people we hate. God loves everybody. The thing that ticks off Jonah is that God has mercy and God has to say over and over I am God, I will have mercy. On whom I will have mercy? What we want is we want God to obliterate our enemies, because they're our enemies. They're not God's enemies, they're God's children. And if we could get that in our heads in a place as stubborn as America and other places around the world we might be able to live in ways that honor God together.
Speaker 1:As you were mentioning that, I flashed on this idea, this concept that I face very often in the school leadership world, where something will happen and a student will commit some infraction, they'll get in trouble for something. They're, you know, adolescents, and so that's part of the journey. And then other parents want this public. You know shaming and justice and punishment, and so we have this term that gets thrown around a lot of restorative justice, restorative practice, but what people really mean is I want restorative justice for my own kid, but can you have, can you please impose some public retribution for someone else's child? And so I was. I can't quote scripture when I lead in the public sector, but in my heart I'm going to be thinking about what you just said, because that's that's what happens, right? People want to see someone else's kid in the town square being punished, but we need to give their own kid a second chance.
Speaker 2:And let me ask you this, because you're on the front line, so let's think about this. Well, I mean, I have an idea, but I'm really good. I don't know why we can't practice seeing ourselves as the other and the other as ourselves. It's really the only way that we can live together. It's the only way way that we can live together. It's the only way. So, to quote King, we live together, as what I would say today siblings, he said, as brothers, or we die together as fools.
Speaker 2:And I just was listening to a podcast. There's a new book out called King of the North about King and his family, and most of us kind of keep his ministry in the South, but he spent a whole lot of time in the North and spent a lot of time in Europe and a lot of time in Africa and the Caribbean. Very young man, 39 at the time of his execution. But one of the things that this scholar has unearthed about King is that when he was a cargo, he loved the gang members. He lived in vice lord territory and the vice lords would come to his home. He would listen to them. They would laugh together. He would listen to them, they would laugh together. He did not judge them. They worked together.
Speaker 2:I just wish, like today, our politics is based largely on you see those people over there. They're the wrong people. They're taking this, they're doing this and I just I don't know. I guess I have to admit that that othering exists in all of us. But I think that we can continue to exercise the kinds of love and ethics that will diminish that proclivity.
Speaker 2:And the good thing for me is I, I have generations on my side, because the generations that came before me, as I said, I can stretch back one, two, three, four, five generations and they practiced an unbridled love. And I just, I quite honestly and I'll stop here what you have said about how parents want their children protected and regarded but they want a public spectacle to be made out of the offender. Really there is very little space between that and violence. Yeah, very little space. As a matter of fact, there's no space. The only space that exists between that and violence is because you and others have the authority to make sure that whatever is done is done according to policy and law. But if that weren't the case, how quickly human beings devolve and it's so sad, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's why I don't have much hair left.
Speaker 2:That's why I shave mine every other day. It just makes life easier.
Speaker 1:That's right. That's right. This kind of landmark case involving your church and and the, the defacing and defamation that occurred at the hands of proud boys or some extension of that group, Can you, can you talk our listeners through what happened, what your experience of it was, and then leading through the policy, the legal struggle and all of those pieces?
Speaker 2:Sure. So we've got to go back to the end of 2020. An election had taken place. There were many who disagreed with the outcome. This is Washington DC, and those people were hanging around here for many reasons, because this was, as many call it, the interregnum between one administration that had not been voted in and a new administration coming in at the beginning of 2021. So those groups, principally the Proud Boys there were others were hanging in and around Washington rallying, involved in some criminality, some intimidation.
Speaker 2:Our church is only five or six blocks from the White House. One evening, while we and I also have to say in that period of time we were in COVID protocol, so we could not worship in the sanctuary safely without spreading COVID, so we were worshiping virtually. I was leading worship via Facebook from the basement of our home, from the basement of our home. I got up that Sunday morning in December of 2020, my phone was dancing and jumping because people were texting and offering their regards, offering their sympathy, offering their support, and I had no idea what was going on until a friend of mine, a fellow pastor, sent me a link, which was a link to the Proud Boys Twitter feed. There's a picture of them in the front yard of our church, front yard of our church. They were happily, joyfully, gleefully, exuberantly recording trespassing into the yard of our church, chanting vitriolic, racist statements, tearing down our property, and also they were recording tearing down the property of other congregations. They burned the sign of one of those congregations, and so that's what I woke up to that Sunday morning when I saw what had happened.
Speaker 2:I had to figure out what I would do, because I still had to preach, I still had to lead the service. So I sat down on my steps, very much like I said to you at our talk back, I steeled myself and quiet, which is the way that I pray. I pray by listening and not talking. So I listen for the voice of the divine, I listen for the voices of ancestors. I did what I do as a pastor and afterwards we began to get communications from, first the former president of the NAACP and others, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, and what they wanted to do was to sue. They were already thinking and they wanted to know if we would join a suit against them and my answer was yes, but I am not the church, I am the pastor of the church. So I called together our leaders about 40 of them and they unanimously decided that we would sue the Proud Boys.
Speaker 2:Now, suing the Proud Boys came at a cost. They sought to intimidate us. They threatened us. One month our security cost was $18,000. We sued them for $2.8 million. We won that suit. They refused to pay, not just to make a spectacle, but we meant to get money. We meant for them to have an economic punishment for what they did to us, to deter them from thinking this is a wise course in the future. And so our lawyer's strategy was to attach ourselves to something they owned of value. What they owned of value was their trademark. We sued for their trademark and now we own the Proud Boys trademark.
Speaker 1:So ostensibly. That then means that any revenue that comes in attached to that trademark goes to your church.
Speaker 2:What it means is something a little how shall I say that there's a little more legalese to it, should not? They legally cannot sell anything with their logo because we own it and they do not. They are not able to profit from it, but, just like if you have ever been in any downtown in the United States, there are people who are selling knockoff brands, right. So, of course, that still happens, but it is illegal. What we have done because, of course, you can possibly never stop all of that is that we have gone to online platforms that they would use To get the word out and to sell stuff, and we have had them deplatformed. So I want you to think about the major online and digital platforms. We have gone to them and they will, at the request of our lawyers, deplatform any Proud Boys activity. So we are getting them really in the virtual and digital marketplace, which is where they make their money and where they amplify their message.
Speaker 1:It's like a sounds like a cease and desist type of a thing that you'd see between companies. Yes, this has the layer of the social element to it too. Right, it's a community that's saying, hey, cease and desist, we own your trademark. It's just such an intriguing, interesting and and um, groundbreaking, at least in my mind. I mean, I don't know there might have been other cases like this, but but oh, yes, and I will tell you there have been.
Speaker 2:for example, we stand in the line of our ancestor, beulah donald, who, a wonderful woman of African descent whose son was lynched by the Klan, she sued the Klan and won Klan property and resources. There are a number of other cases where Black women especially went to great lengths to sue white supremacist organizations and own later their property, got their resources. So yes, it is not a legal innovation. We stand on the shoulders of those who did similarly.
Speaker 1:Well, and as I mentioned to you when we spoke prior, I didn't want to have our conversation defined nor bookended by this, because I know your work is so much greater than that attack and your church's response to it. I wanted to, in light of the polarization that you've spoken about, the national stance, national policies coming from the White House around using the word attack or suffer, you know, having groups of employees suffer, where do you find hope? Where do you find hope in America right now?
Speaker 2:I find hope in America, in communities of people who say no to injustice and hatred and who are doing the hard work of building, within this nation, democracy. My argument is that democracy has never lived here. I tell people that I was born in 1974, I tell people that I was born in 1974 and I'm the first generation in my family to have full citizenship rights at birth. But here's the kicker my sister's children, their voting rights, are now less protected than my parents' voting rights were in the early 80s because of the decisions that have come from the court, the Supreme Court and others. So this nation has never, ever committed itself, never really committed itself to democracy for all of us. It has committed itself to democracy for all of us. It has committed itself to democracy for some and exploitation for others. In the instance of indigenous folk, folks of African descent, very okay with that. In the present moment. Not only are those people still put upon, but we're okay with democracy for some, but exploiting the immigrant laborers. My argument is that until we can first look in a mirror to see what America really has been, to confess that and to say we do not want to bequeath this to our children, and the same way that during hot Philadelphia summers, the so-called founders decided to create a system where they would use democratic language yet extract and exploit. We need to come up with a system of democratic language and democratic practice for all of us, and I know it is possible.
Speaker 2:My argument is that it'll probably take. It's going to take more time than you or I have. It took 250 years to get here. It could take us 250 years to get there, and all along the way as we make progress, there will be people who will do everything they can to destroy the progress. But what we do and what we must do is what I saw my ancestors do, is what I saw my ancestors do. When people huff and puff and blow your house down, you rebuild your house. You rebuild your house until they realize that this huffing and puffing is an exercise in futility, because I cannot keep these people from being human, from loving one another and from building something different.
Speaker 2:So the great poet Sterling Brown of Howard University put it this way strong men and women keep coming, and so we got to keep coming. We have to keep coming, and that's the only hope I have. The hope I have is not about singing Kumbaya songs and you know Black people having dinner with white people and Jewish people having dinner with Muslims. Oh, that's good, but that doesn't change systemically what we see. The hope I have is in people who are willing to risk who they are and what we have to build and protect something different.
Speaker 2:I'll put it this way you are a parent. New life is fragile. Your daughter was born. If you took your daughter as precious as she is to you, as precious as she is to the God who gave her to you and to your wife and your broader family and community If you took her and sat her in the middle of Main Street and walked away, she would have died. Democracy is as fragile as a newborn and what we do is we take democracy for the newborn that it is umbilical cord, just cut after birth, just scooped out of the mouth, and lie the child down in oncoming traffic and say do the best you can. It'll never grow that way, it'll die. It'll keep dying. Democracy never existed for the generations of my family, but they built something akin to the kind of system, even though they were locked out of it. It can be done, but together we have decided that we want to do it.
Speaker 1:Thank you for that. I'm facing some challenging situations at work right now with you. Know, as a leader, you face currents and sometimes oppositions within a community, so your words around keep rebuilding and going forward, ring, ring, especially appropriate and apropos for me at this time. You've been extremely generous with your time and I wanted to. I have one last question for you, but before I get there, is there anything that we haven't touched on, that has been kind of rattling around for you, that you'd like to share about your work?
Speaker 2:Well, I'll tell you what might be helpful to me to share, and it's similar to the thinking about how fragile new life is. We worship in a building that has been where it is since 1887. We are always having to do something to care for that building, always. And I think what we need to understand is this nation is older than that building. If you think of the nation as an edifice and there are portions of the nation.
Speaker 2:We don't have the same paint on the walls we had in 1887. We don't have the same floor covering. We don't have the same plumbing system. We don't have the same floor covering. We don't have the same plumbing system. We don't have the same climate system. You cannot build a building, walk away from it and say it is habitable for eternity. The structures of this nation, the constitution itself, laws how we elect, whom we elect, for how long we elect, whom we appoint, how we appoint. We cannot keep doing 250 years nigh what we were doing 250 years ago. It is. It makes the same sense as building a building, building in 1887 and saying, okay, this is the roof we're going to have in 2025.
Speaker 2:Right now, we're having to replace the roof of the church, so we want to build in the labs. Right now, we have issues in the basement around moisture. It's going to cost us tens of thousands of dollars that we didn't plan for, but that's the cost of living in an old building and we'll find a way. We live in an old building that was not designed for all of us, that we must redesign and repair at the same time If we're serious about living together, loving one another and being who we can be at our best.
Speaker 1:As you mentioned, that a friend of mine, a dear friend of mine, runs a Buddhist temple in San Diego and I'm on the board of his temple. Oh wow, it seems like every time we have a board meeting we're talking about the roof, the windows, the drainage. I'm going to have to send them a text and say hey, man, this is houses of worship that are over 50 years or so. This is what you get.
Speaker 2:This is how God loves us all equally. Let me add to the plumbing issues and we have. We have storied stained glass windows, probably irreplaceable, Though we have a million dollars worth of stained glass work we need to do. So we just, we just keep doing what we got to do. Keep doing what we got to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'd imagine the I don't know what it is lead or whatever that's between the panes of glass that does that has a certain shelf life.
Speaker 2:And yes yes, yes, but just like you and I can laugh about this and you keep going to the meetings, I have a meeting tonight and we're going to be talking about toilets and plumbing and roof. That's how I'm going to spend my evening tonight. But we do it because you as an educator, and you making sure that temple thrives and me making sure the church thrives. Here's the thing the temple and the church in this nation ought to thrive together. I have no investment in the temple not existing, and the temple has no investment in me not existing. I don't want the temple to join the AME church and the AME church doesn't want the Buddhists to become. Let's allow one another to be who we are. We're not in competition. Your thriving does not hurt me. This idea of a pie where you get a slice and I don't get a slice, this zero-sum mentality my thriving does not hurt you. Our entire politics today, based on this group, is taking something from you. No, they are not. It is enough for all of us to thrive. They can grow and you can grow alongside them.
Speaker 2:Think about how stupid this is. How trees in the forest don't say you're taking my sword, you're taking my sunlight. Only foolish human beings do that, and we do that not in the service of anything or anyone other than self-aggrandizement and building up our own power, which has nothing to do with the community. No tree. I'm at home. I'm looking out. We got a lot of trees in a park behind us. These trees don't spend their evenings arguing about you taking my soil. It's raining right now. I don't see the trees fighting over who's getting the rainwater.
Speaker 1:I was listening to someone talk about how, as human beings, we're the only creatures on earth who have this concept of accumulating and hoarding, uh even thinking about passing it on, passing that on to future generations. Squirrels hoard nuts only because they have this imperative for one winter, but they're not thinking, oh, three generations from now, these little baby squirrels are going to be out there. So I'm going to hoard now and accumulate and take it away from the squirrel who lives in the next tree so that my grandchild squirrels can have a little more.
Speaker 2:Oh my God, I love it. I love it. But let me tell you I mean we're laughing at it, but really we're laughing to keep from crying. Both of us, that's right. We literally. I mean I mean your humanity is so rich and beautiful. I mean I just I'm connecting deeply and literally I could weep right now because you know you have given your life to educating our children. You know what that foolishness costs us. You know what it costs us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you. The last question is a hypothetical. Let's say you have the opportunity to create a billboard. Every time I ask this, people say, well, I don't believe in billboards because it pollutes the view. But just stay with me on this thought experiment. I will. It could be written in smoke too, by one of those, the sky writers or whatever, but your billboard is the opportunity for you to send your message or your beliefs or what you think the world needs, as people are rushing by on the freeway, distracted in a million ways. What does Pastor Lamar's billboard, or skywriting, say?
Speaker 2:One word love. I just wrote a book and I'm reading through the editor's last proofs and my last paragraph is really what you asked. I'm like what do we do? And I say, essentially I have nothing other to offer than to say we have to love each other. And I say in the book I mean I got a pretty good vocabulary and I feel like I'm missing something or I'm not being strong enough or thoughtful enough. But the only thing that can make us who we ought be, individually, collectively and systemically, as we build the systems that take care of us our political system, our economic system, our theological systems if based on love, everything changes. And the last thing I'll say is this People blame God. I mean, you know you're talking to a pastor about what we said. I said God did not do this. We have done this to ourselves. God is not responsible. God is the cheerleader saying you all don't have to live like this and I've given you everything. You need to live differently. So my billboard says L-O-V-E.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us on the Hangout. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Pastor Lamar. Please be sure to give us a five-star rating wherever you listen to your podcasts and tell your friends and family about this show. If you are interested in supporting the show with a donation, there is a link in the show notes to do so. Thank you in advance for your generosity. No amount is too small and it helps us keep the show going with quality and engaging content. I also once again want to underline the fact that this show is entirely independent from my day job and, as such, all views and opinions expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thanks for coming on in to hang out.
