22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time (Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23)
We love to look at people and judge them on the basis of what we see. We looked at Lance Armstrong and saw a guy who beat cancer and won Tour de France titles. We saw Bill Cosby as a barrier-breaking comedian and father figure.
As I write, our nation is debating the place of the Confederate battle flag. It began as a drive to take down the rebel flag at the South Carolina state capitol, following the slaughter of nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston by a white supremacist. It turned into a wider conversation about the role of the flag in the public square.
Here in Minnesota, Wade Yarborough, a business owner from the suburbs south of Minneapolis, wrote a letter to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. It’s about his father, the flag, and an incident that took place in suburban Minneapolis in 1967.
Wade’s father, who was raised in the South, was stationed at a local army base and then stayed in the area to raise a family. He would fly the Confederate flag every January 19—Robert E. Lee’s birthday.
