earth as it is in heaven

Grace, Love, and Living

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Broadway) — Sun, 13 Sep 2020 22:07:00 +0000

The paragraphs below are from a post I started writing in February. It was my last effort on the blog for months. It still represents a big part of what has gone on in my life since that time. There were other things going on in my life that I wanted to write about in February. A few days after this, a series of events began to snowball that changed the path that I thought I had been on. I was working slowly and steadily on getting my house in order, as described below. And then the world became aware of the pandemic. Within a month of writing the words below, universities were closing, businesses were closing, and well...you know. I'll put a few more words from today at the end.

February 7, 2020

I want to take a break from heartache, drive away from all the tears I’ve cried.
I’m a wasteland down inside.
In the crawlspace under heaven,
in the landscape of a wounded heart, I don’t know where to start.
But the wild geese of Mary pierce the darkness with a song
and a light that I’ve been running from and running for so long.
As their feathers spin their stories, I can still cling to my fears,
or I can run, but they come along and we both disappear
just like all…
All these broken angels, all these tattered wings, all these things
come alive in me....
All these broken angels, all these scary things, all these dreams
are alive in me. ("Broken Angels," Over the Rhine)

I'm basking in the joy of a visit from David, my son of 33 years. He has watched me struggle to deal with my boxed up life that goes back for a decade. Some of it got packed up at the end of our children's public school years, at the time we moved to Texas. Other parts of it come from those years in Texas, which were interrupted by the time of Everly's illness and death. Some of it is what I packed up there to move back to North Carolina in 2014. When I moved to NC, I had an initial burst of energy to sort and organize all the gathered fragments of a life that had drifted away. But it didn't last, and I eventually found myself walking the maze of boxes, bins, and bags that I could not face. It has been my hidden shame as I closed myself behind the doors and walls of my house.

God's grace of children comes in many ways, and in this time, it is David looking on his dad and realizing that the parent sometimes can't cope without a loving, helping hand. So at Christmas break, he cleaned the house, rearranged the living room, got rid of empty boxes stacked in the dining room, and began to scheme what it would take to get Dad on his feet in a home, not just a storage building. Then he planned a trip to spend a week with me going through boxes, getting things sorted for giving away, throwing away, recycling, and as a last resort, for keeping. We've been working on that for a few days now.

As I started writing last summer (2019), I had arrived at a moment when it seemed it was time for something new to happen. I could see glimpses of living a life that I had put on hold for almost ten years. There was a book project that had stalled when Everly's cancer took center stage for all of us. I had not seen a path forward, but took a big step in 2018 by working on the missing parts to give as a lecture series at Hong Kong Baptist Theological Seminary. A friend helped me get the book project moving by giving me access to a time share for a week last summer, and I produced a fully organized book proposal. I took other opportunities to work on the project, and will soon be able to send a proposal with several sample chapters for consideration by publishers.

Another part of David's visit has been several very helpful conversations. I had already begun talking with a therapist about my mental and emotional block when it came to the boxes in my house. I had made tiny steps of progress, three or four boxes now and then. But David's wisdom and love is blessing me in ways I could not have anticipated. He commented about the things I was saying, "That sounds like a lot of negative self-talk going on." Dang! That's kind of what a Dad might say to his kid. Of course, it was right on.

The next day I remembered an experience with my own dad. In 1985, W.D. had landed his dream job. Always a good fund-raising pastor, he was hired to work for his alma mater, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, in the development office. His duties were to work the Houston area, with special attention to the SWBTS satellite campus there. He was loving the work, but his health was not responding well. Finally, his doctor told him that the pollution in Houston was making him sick, and he was on the verge of a serious respiratory condition. The doctor advised him to quit the job if it required him to be in Houston. It broke his heart. I went to visit, only to have him pour out his heart about the sadness he felt about both the health danger and about giving up the job he had wanted for so long. He was 55 when that happened. Now David is helping me through my challenges at age 62. The leveling that comes with maturity has allowed a kind of give and take that I would not have imagined a few years ago. The gratitude in my heart runs deep.

As my regular readers know, I often call on the poetry of song lyrics in these blog posts. I'm not alone in being a person who often finds a soundtrack for my life in the songs of my favorite artists. Anyone who has read my blog knows that Bruce Cockburn, Kate Campbell, Michael Card, Kyle Matthews, Darrell Adams, and Carrie Newcomer have been favorite poets of mine. But in the past few months, the music of Over the Rhine has been on repeat.

A couple of years ago, I think I arrived at the conclusion that Bruce Cockburn's song, "Pacing the Cage" had become the best interpretation of my life.

Sometimes you feel like you've lived too long--
Days drip slowly on the page.
You catch yourself
Pacing the cage.

I didn't see much left for me in life. There were many things I had not accomplished, and I doubted I would ever have the energy to change that. I still hoped there was more life ahead, but I just couldn't see it. I could still get energy in bursts and feel the old drive to work on issues and tasks that I had cared about for many years. I could be happy to be with my family and friends, so don't take this to mean that I hoped to die. But where my life was headed and what it might take to get started on a visionary path were seeming to be out of my reach.

At that point in the blog post, I was trying to find words to describe something new in my life. I thought I had stumbled onto some changes that were revealing a sense of what could be unfolding. One voice had planted a seed in my mind and heart, "Mike, you are good enough." My next step in writing this piece was going to be to explain that I was thinking about how another song from Over the Rhine, "Days Like This," might speak to who I am beginning to imagine myself to be: "Days like this, you think about the ones that love you. All I want to do is live my life honestly....Every regret I have, I will go set it free, and it will be good for me." Six months later, I think it still speaks to my hopes, dreams, and possibilities.

But I was not seeing clearly how things would go and would have soon had to change my assessment of what was coming next. At least I wasn't alone in that. No one was seeing ahead clearly in the budding Ronaworld. Within a few days, my world had turned upside down in so many ways.

As March progressed, I began planning to uproot and go to Texas to care for my Dad, who turned 90 years old in July, so that I could help keep him safe during the pandemic. I thought I would stay two months--so many of us fooled ourselves to think it would be over by summer. I ended up staying three months. I never came back to this blog post until today. I did quite a bit of writing, filling up a blank book with handwritten nearly daily reflections for several months. I had a lot of magical thinking to talk myself out of. Then I stopped that. I spent about a month back at my house in Durham in July, making much more progress on cleaning out old boxes and making the house livable. I didn't finish, but the changes are already dramatic. One person asked me the obvious question during that time, "When do you think you will get back to your writing?" I'm sure I mumbled out some uncertain answer.

Now I'm in Texas in the middle of a planned two month stay. And I'm like lots of people dealing with COVID-19: wondering how this transformative crisis should change the way I expect to live the rest of my life. I know that when and if Rona ever winds down, it's not going to be the same world I was imagining before. It's about time I started writing again.

Something on Tragedy

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Broadway) — Fri, 27 Sep 2019 14:36:00 +0000

Early in his career as a theologian, Stanley Hauerwas challenged the pattern of public Christian rhetoric by claiming that much of the thinking and living of the church in the U.S.A. had lost its understanding of the tragic nature of human existence. Some kinds of scientific rhetoric seek to provide a theodicy of necessity; in pop culture, the harshness of nature becomes "the circle of life." Thus the horrors of the world can be put aside as somehow inherent in the system. I'm not trying to claim that any of my scientist friends participate in this kind of reductionist philosophy, but I'm characterizing a kind of rhetorical repositioning of the aspects of life that one might call tragic.

It happens in other ways, too. Self-help gurus try to convince us that we can avoid the tragic by simply aligning our lives the right way, taking the right steps, making the right friends, using the right techniques, and focusing on the right goals. Positive thinkers try to make sure they have the right thoughts and say the right words so that they do not become the cause of their own pain and problems.

All of these kinds of philosophical convolutions help to hide from consciousness that the world does not happen strictly according to human choice and plan. Part of the truth of tragedy is that an element of existence in this created world still can be called fortune. Good fortune and bad fortune are not to be confused with a supernatural power of fate or determinism, nor to be confused with a quality attached to a person making him or her lucky or unlucky. Fortune is a term naming what we acknowledge as factors beyond our control.

A hurricane hits land on the coast of one state and not another. A tornado strikes one neighborhood and not the next one. One person develops cancer, and another person with a very similar set of life circumstances does not. One child grows tall and athletic, another excels at taking standardized tests, and another has physical features deemed beautiful by the culture. I am not making an argument that these are utterly random occurrences, but they also are not matters strictly under human control. When there is an understanding of fortune as an element of our existence, then it is also possible to conceive of the tragic.

We do not choose to be born. When we are born, we do not choose our parents and their ancestral heritages. We don't choose the neighborhoods in which our parents live when we come into the world. We don't choose their religious and cultural background, nor the language that they speak and will teach us to speak. All of these are elements of fortune. Sometimes fortune allows a person to avoid many life difficulties. Other times, it opens one up to the tragic.

One major example of how the absence of fortune and tragedy have hindered biblical interpretation is the well-known conversation Jesus has about wealth and poverty with his fellow diners and disciples. The people having dinner are not very sympathetic toward a woman who comes to the dinner and anoints Jesus' feet with an expensive jar of perfumed oil. One complains she could have been more practical and sold the perfume for a high price, using the money to help the poor. Jesus is not very patient with that statement, and suggests that the speaker has surprised him with a sudden concern about poor people that was missing on the other days they had been together. This is the story in the foreground when Jesus says, "The poor will always be with you."

Another biblical text is in the background, as Jesus' perspective on how to live is rooted in his study of the scriptures. His statement is a quotation from one of the most important economic passages of the Bible: Deuteronomy 15. This text provides the divine mandate for economic justice, for the safety net and economic security for all. It says, "There will be no need among you," explaining that God will bless the community with what they need. But it also says, "there will never cease to be some need," because things happen. Bad fortune comes along. Sometimes people make bad decisions, but more often, they find themselves in untenable situations. Maybe the person in the home who contributed the most to their economic well being becomes sick or dies. Maybe another family member requires close care, making it hard for workers to get the necessary work done to keep the house supplied with food and other goods. Maybe a storm or flood or fire harms some households. Maybe criminal behavior or war affects the viability of some people's economic situation.

Deuteronomy instructs the people to keep their hands open to the poor. Don't be tightfisted. Give what is needed to fulfill that mandate: there will be no need among you. When the community finds people in need, they share the bounty of God. Some will experience tragedy. We cannot eliminate all tragedy. But we can be present to make sure that tragedy does not leave people hungry or homeless.

Deuteronomy is reminding us that tragedy is part of life. Our responsibility is to care for those who face tragedy. Moreover, if there are ways to prevent some kinds of tragedies, if they are caused by systemic injustice, then we ought to be doing work to prevent the continued influence of those unjust systems. Thinking good thoughts will not keep tragedy from happening nor make it go away. No amount of self-help practices can allow persons to control their lives to the point that tragedy cannot strike. The tragic is part of human life, part of creation's finitude. It is in the commitment to one another, to walk together, to share the goods of creation among us all, to bear one another's burdens, to live as beloved community for which we were created and which is our purpose for living--there we find our defiance against the power of tragedy to control us.

Seven Years Between Haircuts

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Broadway) — Fri, 20 Sep 2019 18:39:00 +0000

On May 20 I wrote about a hermeneutical flight of imagination. I had realized that it was 70 months since Everly's death. I had realized it had been seven years since Everly's first harsh and nearly deadly dose of chemotherapy, when her hair fell out from the poisonous effects. Those numbers recollect biblical images of fullness, completion, and specifically the number of years associated with the exile of Israel after Jerusalem was destroyed. I don't need to repeat everything I said there--you can go back to it. But in summary, I said that I'm not claiming the verses of ancient texts are directly about me; rather, they interact with my life through imaginative comparisons and reflections.

I've continued to think about whether I should see this period of my life as marked by new beginnings. Is there something I might learn about my own time and place by thinking about the end of Israel's exile? "I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?"

One thing that occurred to me back on that day was that maybe the time had come to cut my hair. Some people know that I started growing it out to its full length when Everly's hair fell out from chemotherapy. Since 2012, seven years ago, I have had only a few trims when my mom or kids urged me to get the ends cleaned up. I've not been much of a hair stylist. I just let it grow as it will, and tried to keep it clean and combed.

I've told that story to many people who might have wondered why the Baptist preacher had such long hair. I've explained when people inquired about the old man's unusual non-fashionable hair style choice. I would say, "I started growing it when my wife's hair fell out from chemotherapy. After she died, I kept it. So far I haven't thought of a good reason to cut it." I'm not sure what I thought a good reason would be. But on that day, I thought maybe a reason with symbolic sense had come to me.

A few days later, I was talking with a friend who told me she had a discipline of "harvesting" her hair. She grew it out to a full length, then periodically cut it off to send to an organization which used it to provide wigs for cancer patients. She had done this cycle many times.

I also had sent my hair to a cancer support group once before when I experimented with growing out my hair for few years. It seemed to be one more reason to add to my hermeneutical reflection about possibly cutting my hair. I started planning to get a haircut. I even leaked this plan in conversation with a few people. One person, knowing my mischievous side, suggested that I wait to cut it until I made my out-of-state trip to visit my dad in Texas. That way, when I returned to North Carolina, I could anticipate getting the "maximum shock value." I settled on that plan. Dad was extremely happy to be a partner in getting my long hair cut off, as he was never fond of it. We took care of it right away after I arrived.

The shock value plan worked. I've had a great time showing up to my usual activities and encountering people's amazement. A few have felt the need to tell me I look younger, which is not my goal. I'm proud of my years achieved. I'm not surprised that many emphasize that I "look great." I know that having that long, shaggy mop of hair was in part a way to make myself distasteful to people's expectations, of thumbing my nose at conventionality. I didn't expect people to like it. One fellow minister said that if I could get a haircut, it was another sign that "with God all things are possible." The locally owned pharmacy staff, with whom I've been doing business every month for a decade or more, had to ask my name when I came in to get my refills. It's been fun to reappear in Durham as a new person.

Aside from the shock value and the fun, getting my hair cut is also for me a symbolic change. Growing my hair was a sign of solidarity with Everly when her hair fell out, and it continued to be that for the remaining months of her life over the next year. After she died, keeping the long hair involved shifting from solidarity with her in her living to a symbol of grieving her loss. From year to year, I did not see a reason to cut it. Perhaps at some deep level I was wearing my hair like a veil of mourning. I sometimes entertained that idea, but never formally adopted it as my rationale. I simply could not bring myself to the point of wanting a change.

In May of this year, as we were approaching what I had come to call my "sad season" between May 24, my wedding anniversary, and July 18, the anniversary of Everly's death, once more the weight of grief pressed upon me. But under that weight, I found myself in the midst of a complexity of emotional and intellectual ferment.

Intellectually, I had arrived at a moment in my research and writing that had been very slow coming. About ten years earlier, Willie Jennings and Dan Rhodes had coached me toward developing a book idea based on thematically similar essays I had written. Dan even helped me create a possible outline and suggested a title I might use. Yet as he and I talked through the structure of the project, I realized that there were severe gaps that I would have to fill before an outline of the book would make sense to me.

So I started working on those particular tasks. I wrote and presented papers in the next few years that took important steps toward filling those gaps. In each case, when I reached the temporary end of an assignment, I realized that I still had more work to do. My pattern of scholarship over the years would have meant that I would pick up these topics again and complete the research as I prepared to present at an academic conference. That process was interrupted in 2012 when Everly was diagnosed with cancer. All of my energy and focus shifted toward supporting her "in sickness or in health." I stopped writing new essays for a number of years afterward.

Eventually I started to get back on track, but the great breakthrough came about because of the invitation to give lectures at Hong Kong Baptist Theological Seminary last October. They agreed to my topic for Baptist Heritage Lectures as "Baptist Ecclesiology After Whiteness." The three lecture topics corresponded to three unfinished gaps in my research and writing. The gift of a place to stay and focus on writing allowed me to bring all three topics to a satisfying point of development.

Building on that progress, I wrote an essay for a conference in May which further built upon the critical work necessary to write the book I was envisioning. A month later, on a week-long writing retreat, I put together a full outline of the book, with chapter summaries, a new prologue, and a fleshed out proposal so that colleagues could help me refine it before sending it to a publisher.

Yes, something new is happening in this year of my life. I am emerging from a season of intense grief toward what my buddy Willie has been pointing me for a couple of years. He has told me a few times that he is seeing signs that "I'm still living." In similar tone, Curtis Freeman keeps reminding me that I have important work to do and things to say that he and many more people need to hear. He told me that my presentation in May had him and the entire room "spellbound." I'll take the complement even if it may be an exaggeration. And my colleague in organizing, Tim Conder, keeps reminding me that there are things that I need to write that no one else he knows is able to say the way I can say them. I'm not inclined, at least in my saner moments, to believe with Elijah that I am the only one left to do God's work, but I appreciate Tim's reminder that the distinctive person I am and the life that I have lived entail a message and calling from God that I need to faithfully carry out in my scholarly work.

Part of what is new in my life is also the rising up of joy after a long valley of sorrows. If any of you followed my blog over the years, you know about the grief I have waded through. It has not been only grief, but I have sometimes wondered if I would forevermore be known to many of my friends as the sad widowed man. I wondered for myself whether I would have strength to be more like the visionary and committed servant of God that Everly once chose to share her life with. Or would I be confined as the broken man who struggles to find the energy to finish out an academic career. It's an exaggerated contrast, but it isn't lacking in truth.

In May, and June I started writing in this blog about the emotional transformations I was recognizing and working through. I wrote about friendships, and about taking to heart my responsibility to enrich and expand those relationships with people who care about me. I wrote about friends who were influencing me, encouraging me, and inspiring me to fulfill what they could see in me, even if I did not always see it for myself. I'm not going to repeat what I wrote in those posts, but I will reiterate that I'm striving to live not only in the shadow of a great loss, but in the light of a community of friends and the hope of joy in sharing life with them.

My deepest theological convictions tell me that we are put into this world to play our parts as builders of loving, just community wherever we find ourselves living and working. We receive the blessing of those who come our way. We recognize the failures of justice and love and commit ourselves to repair and restore the goodness that ought to be.

I can't do that if I'm shrunken into myself and pulling away from the liveliness of caring for one another.

A few days ago I was looking through my Facebook account and noticed that it said I am married to Everly. I guess I never felt the need to change it. But now it seems as if the symbolic meaning of keeping my hair long aligns with the symbolic meaning of continuing to list myself as married. My marriage with Everly brought fulfillment, gave us three children, and I believe blessed many other people. It is okay to acknowledge that our anniversaries ended at 33 years, and the household we built did not continue as long as we had hoped. I've been saying it for many years--I am widowed. So I quietly changed it on the worldwide software platform, too.

Recently I was looking at some photographs in a blank greeting card display. One of the photographs showed a trail through a plush woodland, thick with green undergrowth. The picture showed the trail bending as it appeared more narrow, extending farther into the distance. Around the bend, no one can yet see. I can't be sure what is ahead, but I do believe this is a season of new things. I've cut my hair after seven years (for now). I'm opening my daily routines and my heart to build loving friendships here and now. I'm in the midst of compiling many years of work into a book. I'm looking ahead to see what might be next. "From this time forward I will make you hear new things, hidden things that you have not known." I hope y'all will walk with me.

Wondering If We're Ever Gonna Get Home Tonight...

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Broadway) — Fri, 20 Sep 2019 17:22:00 +0000

Some days just call for listening to the blues, and my go-to blues singer is Ruthie Foster. For those who don't know her music, here's a little bio blurb from her website.

   In the tight-knit musical community of Austin, Texas, it’s tough to get away with posturing. You either bring it, or you don’t.
   If you do, word gets around. And one day, you find yourself duetting with Bonnie Raitt, or standing onstage with the Allman Brothers at New York’s Beacon Theater and trading verses with Susan Tedeschi. You might even wind up getting nominated for a Best Blues Album Grammy — three times in a row. And those nominations would be in addition to your seven Blues Music Awards, three Austin Music Awards, the Grand Prix du Disque award from the Académie Charles-Cros in France, a Living Blues Critics’ Award for Female Blues Artist of the Year, and the title of an “inspiring American Artist” as a United States Artists 2018 Fellow.
   There’s only one Austinite with that résumé: Ruthie Foster. And with the release of her latest album, Joy Comes Back, the Recording Academy might want to put its engraver on notice. Because every note on it confirms this truth: It’s Ruthie’s time. The small rural town of Gause, TX, had no chance of keeping the vocal powerhouse known as Ruthie Foster to itself. Described by Rolling Stone as “pure magic to watch and hear,” her vocal talent was elevated in worship services at her community church. Drawing influence from legendary acts like Mavis Staples and Aretha Franklin, Foster developed a unique sound unable to be contained within a single genre. That uniqueness echoes a common theme in Ruthie’s life and career--marching to the beat of her own drum.

Having introduced Ruthie to any novices, let me get back to thinking about some of her songs.

Lots of times, when I've got some emotions to sort out, I will turn to some of my favorite singers to search for a lyrical line and a musical phrase that will help me dig deeper into what I am feeling. In this case, the song just kept popping into my consciousness, so I knew I would have to dig into my Ruthie Foster collection and play "When It Don't Come Easy." It's a song written by Patty Griffin, sung and recorded by Ruthie Foster on The Truth According to Ruthie Foster. I linked the album version, and here below is a live version that lets you see her onstage performance. (And here is another live version with Patty Griffin and Melissa Etheridge, including a very touching story about music and healing when going through chemotherapy.)

It seems like I'm doing a lot more driving on the highway lately. More meetings at work mean I'm driving back and forth to Raleigh more often. Working on building better friendships means getting out on the road to go around the Triangle or around NC to meet up with folks. I'm also spending more time with a specific friend who, as we have gotten to know one another better, has shown me how we've been able to bring goodness into one another's lives. Living a couple of counties apart gives me another reason for driving.

The other side of those trips is that I have to drive back home. And it is that moment the other night when this song kept pressing itself on my mind. "Red lights flashing down the highway...wondering if we're ever gonna get home tonight." There is a kind of feeling that comes when I have to leave, kind of like the feeling that comes at the end of visits with my kids or my dad. All the joy of the shared presence seems like it starts draining out, opening up a little space of emptiness, a kind of heavy emptiness.

I don't mean to be overly dramatic, and I don't think I'm describing something unique. It's something that many people feel when they have to leave what has been a time of blessing with loved ones. A version of it can come after a moving time of worship, a great discussion in class that has to end, and a deep conversation with a friend over dinner. But I felt it as I got in my car to drive home that night, and this song kept asking for my attention. I put it off and listened to the baseball game on the drive home; then, at home I fell asleep early. But the next morning, it was waiting for me when I woke up, so I got out the Ruthie Foster music to listen.

There's a part in the middle of the song that seems to articulate images of what is stirring my own thoughts and feelings these days.

I don't know nothing 'cept change will come.
Year after year what we do is undone.
Time gets moving from a crawl to a run.
Wondering if we're ever gonna get home...

You're out here walking down the highway,
And all of the signs got blown away.
Sometimes you wonder if you're
Walking in the wrong direction.

I remember being twenty years old and not knowing what the future would bring. But it seems like the not knowing at twenty years old is pretty different from the not knowing at sixty-one years old. As a young adult, growing up middle class, single-family/nuclear family living, white, college-educated, church-going, called to ministry--there was a script written for me that I had largely accepted and agreed to act out. I would marry after college, go to seminary, learn about adult life and decisions, find a job, consider further graduate school, have some kids, and follow a ministry or academic career trajectory that looked like the lives of people I had been watching for many years.

The script is never quite as complete as we imagined it would be. Your companions often have a different version of the script. You find that there are missing pages, rewrites, conflicting plot lines, and eventually that it fragments more and more into various possible directions without providing an ending. But at the beginning, those things are not so obvious. Thus, an uncertain future at twenty seems way more like a clear plan than an uncertain future at sixty-one. Now one's life may have the look of either mid-career or of the final stage of a career, but which one is not certain. Many of my students in graduate school come in their late fifties or sixties, starting a new phase in their lives after retiring from another career. Am I at a point like they have found themselves? Or am I just getting my stride in the place where I am already?

Being this age, according to demographic trends, is far from the end of one's life, even though I've been called a senior citizen for a decade already. My dad is eighty-nine and thriving. That's almost three more decades of living if I keep his pace. On the other hand, Everly and Mom didn't match the years of their husbands. And the fact that my dad and I live so far apart during this time of his life is another one of those nagging thoughts asking whether I need to make a change. So life is ahead, and behind, at the same time. The signs all "got blown away" is an image that makes lots of sense to someone who has lived through at least a dozen hurricanes in his lifetime. When things get most uncertain, it really can seem that I might be walking in the wrong direction. "Don't know nothing 'cept change will come."

Ruthie's version of the blues can stare straight ahead into the despair, as in "Ocean of Tears," "Harder than the Fall," or "I Don't Know What to Do with My Heart." As the bio says, she isn't confined to one genre, and she sings plenty of soul songs that share the wisdom of her community heritage, such as "Mama Said," "Heal Yourself," and "People Grinnin' in Your Face." Her gospel formation also appears in "Up Above My Head," "Woke Up This Morning," and "Lord, Remember Me." Actually you can't quite separate these songs into a single or discrete genre, as blues, gospel, soul, jazz, and more intermingle into a mass of healing-struggling-hoping-sad-defiant songs.

However, many of her blues songs intermingle the pain with hope, as is not uncommon in blues tradition. Foster returns again and again to a kind of hope that has been learned over time because of friendship, family, and community. She has known and places confidence in friends and loved ones who show virtues of faithfulness in hard times and readiness to reach out, listen, and lift up when one feels lost and alone.

"When It Don't Come Easy" is one of those kinds of blues songs. It delves into the confusion and pain that arises in our lives. It expresses the lostness of feeling like one has nowhere to turn, or one who is questioning whether the hard times are ever going to end: "wondering if we're ever gonna get home." But the self-focused sense of loss gets turned around in the refrain and becomes a message of empathy. The singer looks away from her own struggle to realize that those she loves also are wondering about getting home. Sticking with the image of driving down a highway, the song imagines a loved one's car breaking down on some lonesome road.

But if you break down,
I'd drive out and find you.
And if you forget my love,
I'd try to remind you,

Oh, and stay by you
When it don't come easy.

This refrain stands out as the song's hook, the powerful message of connection and care that will not be broken even by the power of disappointment and uncertainty. The song doesn't depart from the blues genre and get simplistic and goosebumpy. It doesn't tie up all the loose ends with a closing about living happily ever after. The final stanza is back to the beginning, driving down a dark road and wondering if home will ever be there. It keeps things real about life's struggles and our emotional ups and downs. But sewn into the lining of the blues is a reminder that we can get through things together if we will stand by one another, if we will show mercy to ourselves and those we love, to get through the hard times.

A moment of critical self-assessment requires that I not simply hear and believe these words through the normative gaze. The refrain could easily play into the cultural formation of white men (which I know personally from my own psyche) to imagine ourselves as the heroes of every story. Conrad framed it through imperialistic and colonialistic eyes as the "white man's burden" to uplift the lesser races (and gender) toward the fullness of humanity. Hollywood retells the story again and again through white messianic figures who enter into complex issues of socially structured racial and gender politics to fix the problems out of their inherent goodness (and superiority).

I have had to learn through marriage and parenting the hard lesson of interrupting this narrative in my own imagination, to stop trying to fix the problems of my wife or children, and to learn to listen and "stand by" them as they make their way toward using their own strengths, their own power. I'm not the guy in every story who has a monopoly on power. I'm not the hero of every struggle that touches the people I care for. Caring for someone and needing to be the fixer of all problems are not the same things. But the steady caring, the readiness to give of myself for others, the walking alongside in the struggle--those are the real things toward which the song can encourage my aspirations to be human and to be good.

Ruthie doesn't write all of the songs she sings and records, although she has written some great ones. But she fills each of them with a soulfulness and power that doesn't leave me asking whether this is "her song" or someone else's. Thanks, Ruthie, for trying "to remind" me that even when by myself and feeling a little empty, the music can fill up that space with memories and commitments made to "stay by" one another "when it don't come easy."

A Prayer in the Midst of a Horrifying Night

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Broadway) — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 04:29:00 +0000

I've been trying to get through some academic writing, so telling myself I don't have time for blogging. But tonight I need to write this piece.

On the way to church this morning, I wanted to hear some meditative music, so I started a series of songs from Fernando Ortega. The first one was a piano instrumental hymn interpretation. The second one was one I had not heard. When the lyrics started, they sounded somehow familiar. Eventually I realized they were the words of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, as he spoke with his closest friends about the burden of his heart.

My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow
To the point of death.
My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow.
Stay with me here.
Stay with me here.
Stay with me and keep watch with me.

The words come from the story that unfolds in Mark 14:32-36. Another version is in Matthew 26:36-39. They are the words of a breaking heart. They are the words of one who has seen what the world and its systems of domination can do to the ones who challenge it, and to the ones it deems disposable. They are his cry for those he loves to stand by him in these moments.

Jesus had spent his public years fighting the injustices perpetrated against the poor by those who had the power to do so. Landowners who had accumulate the livelihoods of their neighbors through foreclosures treated their victims as if they deserved their poverty. So-called decent people ignored the blind, lame, and other disabled neighbors who were marginalized and forced to beg for food. Patriarchal laws and structures forced women into sex work, condemned women for sexual sin while excusing men, devalued women's work, and kept unmarried women in poverty and vulnerable to abuse. Religious opportunists overcharged pilgrims in Jerusalem, doing dishonest commerce on the very grounds of the temple.

Jesus saw what happened to his mentor, John the Baptist, because he dared to challenge the injustices of the land and its rulers. They arrested and executed him. He knew that every time he came to the centers of power, the Sanhedrin and the colonizing Roman leaders began to plot his death. He knew of the recent arrest and condemnation of Barabbas, another rabble rousing leader among the people.

Jesus knew that the people in power would do whatever they needed to do to keep their power and prosperity. Their willingness to crush the masses of the poor were evidence of their greed and willingness to abuse power for their own benefit. They would have no qualms about doing their worst against him if he continued in faithfulness to proclaim the Jubilee economics God calls all people to follow. His message of liberation would bring their harshest retribution.

In the garden Jesus was exceedingly sorrowful. His grief was overwhelming. He had come on a mission to proclaim good news for poor people, release of prisoners, a place for the marginalized, the Jubilee year of the Lord. He had raised the hopes of the masses, and they had followed him and cheered his entrance to Jerusalem. Such a crowd of supporters only solidified the intention of the rulers to destroy him. His heart cried out for someone to stay by him in this hour.

Some would say Jesus failed in his mission. I have no doubt he was disappointed in the way things had turned. Yet I also believe he had eventually realized that it would come to this. If he continued faithfully in his mission, the powers that be would do what they must to stop him. Committed to a loving path, a non-violent way, Jesus was unwilling to arouse his followers to violence. He would therefore receive violence without returning it.

Rulers knew what to do with Barabbas's ilk. Those who raised a violent hand against the system deserved to see the punishing violence of the system. That is the proof of the system's "justice." Unauthorized violence must be put down by authorized violence, a paradoxical virtue of good order. Even the oppressed should theoretically be thankful for an orderly system of violence to prevent the chaos of uncontrolled violence. Executing Barabbas would be "redemptive violence."

Jesus was harder to deal with. He did not come at the state with violence, but with the challenge of a social vision of justice and beloved community. He was hard to battle. It was not obvious that he needed to be punished. But he was as great a threat as Barabbas, and maybe worse. So he must, of course, be stopped. The people with power must be allowed to define justice, not a small-town outsider who has listened to the cries of the poor and created false hopes in the masses.

Around midnight in the garden, Jesus was grieving the dream. He would rather have seen the Romans and the Sanhedrin persuaded to begin restoring justice to the land and its people. He knew that many had been won to his challenging vision of society. But others had hardened their hearts. For this reason of power or that reason of power, they would see him dead before they would join his cause.

Jesus was grieving the continued oppression of the poor and marginalized. He knew that his execution would be intended and used as an example to the poor and the masses. He would be killed in public view on the highway to show what happens when someone challenges the powerful. Hearts would be broken and discouraged. Some would feel like giving up. The poor would be hung on a cross on that day as every day before. But not everyone gave up. Some told and retold the story of his campaign for justice, eventually writing it down and passing it through generations.

On this day in 2019, the shoppers at the most noted low-price store, were greeted with the violence of a system of power known as white supremacy. That power system directed a young man to find a place where he could execute the enemies of the system, outsiders defined by having a Hispanic heritage. Mexicans, Salvadorans, Hondurans, Guatemalans, Latinx people of any label, whether US citizens or recent immigrants, became targeted as killable flesh. The white supremacist cry of, "You will not replace us" echos from Charlottesville to El Paso. White ownership of the land, white privilege to determine who is acceptable and who is outcast, white power over life and death--this is his mantra and destiny.

In Dayton, after midnight, patriarchal systems directing anger and hatred toward women drove a young man to act upon his fantasies of killing the women he knew and grew up among. Even his own sister died at his hands. Misogyny or misanthropy, a fascination with killing drove him to identify women, and perhaps others, as targets deserving to die, if for no other reason than his lust for power through spilling blood, a privilege of white men in a culture addicted to violence.

Around midnight this weekend, Jesus reminds us that his heart, his soul, his deepest being, is overwhelmed with sorrow, even unto death. Jesus tells us to share this sorrow for the poor and the outcast, the darker skinned, the outsider, the women, the people who have been designated killable flesh. He reminds us that when we have done this to the least of his brothers and sisters, he has died with them. Jesus and the poor, the outcast, the women, the person of color, are executed on the public streets again, bodies displayed in public view as a reminder of how the power of this world operates.

If we are followers of Jesus, if we would be like this sorrowing Lord, we must become men and women of sorrow on a day like today. We cannot set it aside as if this way of the world is inevitable.

We must refuse to believe that this is the only path power can take. There is a power rooted in love. There is power that comes by building relationships across the barriers that divide us. There is power in a vision of justice that includes every brother and sister, every person among us.

We sorrow, and we become defiant. We will not stand by and let white supremacy be the truth of our communities.

There is a truth of beloved community, and we will live in it. Stay with me here. Stay with me here and keep watch with me. Stay with me here. Live in this vision, in this justice, in this world of love, this world as it should be.

Defiant Imagination, Part 3: Other Songs of When They See Us

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Broadway) — Sat, 06 Jul 2019 09:17:00 +0000

Having written a lengthy analysis of the song "Moon River" and its pivotal significance as part of the soundtrack of When They See Us, the remainder of my comments on the songs and soundtrack will take more of the form of vignettes, or glimpses into the artistic synergy of song and film in conveying a powerful story of injustice, defiance, and solidarity in the stories of Raymond Santana, 14; Kevin Richardson, 14; Antron McCray, 15; Yusef Salaam, 15; Korey Wise, 16; and their families. It's not so much full of academic language and theory. Much of this is an attempt to reflect on the story of the Central Park 5, the Exonerated 5, while becoming acquainted with music that has not been on my playlist. The general sense of a prophetic or defiant imagination has been crucial to my own work, yet I have not taken much opportunity to hear the way such imagination permeates and interacts with popular culture. What follows are some forays into that sort of reflection.

* * * * *

Another song like "Moon River," displaying a similar kind of defiance as seen in the Louis Armstrong example, is "Hope," by Pete Josef. Different from most songs that are part of the soundtrack, this is a verbatim musical setting of a beloved poem by Emily Dickenson. One of the U.S.'s most popular poets, Dickenson wrote usually short poems of only a few lines.

Colour by Pete Josef

Dickenson's brief "Hope Is the Thing with Feathers," is a poetic reflection on the power of hope in the image of a songbird. It "perches in the soul," implying that it resides at great depth within a person's thoughts and feelings. In any time and place there remains a steady voice, singing "without words" and not stopping. Even strong storms cannot stop the bird's voice from coming through, giving strength to the soul, burning and warming like a fire. No matter how cold, no matter how far and foreign a place, hope holds forth with a vigorous, yet undemanding presence.

This song plays over the scene when Yusuf returns home from prison, as viewers peer into his inner drive to make a life although still feeling out of place among his family and friends. A steady voice of song within Yusuf is not silent, but defiantly rises up in him to achieve what none would expect of him. The scene then turns to the family of Kevin visiting the prison. Kevin is feeling lost there. His sister proceeds to talk to him about identifying "something to look forward to." It is a strategy of hope that gains strength from his inner power, bolstered by the truth that no matter how far away they are from him, he is never alone. What she sees deep in him "perches in the soul," and from that place will give him the strength to endure. The song reveals the young men's tenacity in the face of forces working to crush them. Though they are young and tender, like the delicate image of a songbird, they persist in their vision of a world that is not what others would claim it to be.

* * * * *

In the earlier post, I also identified a kind of defiance in the story of Ruby Bridges--readiness to place one's body over against the oppressive forces that would seek to destroy a people. It is a mode of living in an alternate narrative and reality, already before it is fully visible, that provides courage to take steps to change things. Mos Def's song "Umi Says" passes on the wisdom of generations, received by son from mother, to "shine your light on the world." Life offers no promises or guarantees. The song plays briefly in the film, as if from the car radio when Kevin is ridingwith his sister Angie. He is struggling with all that he has missed in life and with the many barriers he still faces after release from prison.

She says, with the wisdom of "Umi," that he has what it takes to rise in his life.

You got time. A lot's changed, but you know what ain't changed. You. That was my biggest prayer for you--that you'd stay safe, and you'd stay your sweet self. I know you've seen things, maybe had to do things, defend yourself, survive, whatever might have happened. But in the end you have the same heart. You gotta carry that with you outta here, okay?

With that strength of identity, she believes he can overcome. His life can matter for something greater. She can see in his eyes and hear in his voice that he longs to redeem the lost time, the damaged life, even the park where he was beaten and falsely accused. Mos Def's lyrics speak of the struggle and emotion, the desire to give up, to shrink back. Yet Umi keeps pressing him to know that his life has to count for more than just surviving with me and mine. He needs to be in the fight for freedom. He needs to be part of building a united front in the work of liberation. There is a path to take, and only when we place our full selves, our emotions, our hopes, our dreams, and our bodies on the line will we begin to see the change that we are becoming.

* * * * *

Another song that feeds into the Ruby Bridges kind of defiance is by Andreya Triana, "Song for a Friend." This song plays over a series of scenes with parents and family talking on the phone to their children in prison. Next the film shows how the families worked hard to be able to visit the young men while they were locked away. The song lyrics bring attention to the aspect of Ruby's story of spending a year as the only pupil in her class, facing so much hatred and attack for taking a stand. Yet she did not feel alone. She knew that her parents and their larger circle of friends were with her in the struggle. Her body was on the line each day, and yet their bodies were in line with her to embrace and uphold her. The very body of Jesus stood with her as she prayed for the forgiveness of her persecutors, using his own words toward those who had condemned him.

In the same way, Ray's father and abuela put their bodies through the regular phone calls, the work to support him, the travel, the security searches, and in every way possible demonstrated their presence to him. He did not have to doubt that his bodily struggle found solidarity in them, and their embrace in the visiting room gave flesh and blood to the defiance of solidarity. Abuela reaches to touch Ray's arm under the voice of Antron's mother saying to her own son, "I'm walking through this with you."

Antron expresses regret that his mother has to work so hard to come see him, but she says she would come every day if allowed. "You're not too much trouble," she says. Digging deeper, she gets him to tell about what's troubling him. It's a dream that feels like a nightmare. It is so real he isn't sure whether he is awake or sleeping. He hears the sound of steps drawing closer. Each night, it seems they get even nearer. His mother soaks in that story, then flips the script on him. She tells him to keep on listening, because those steps are her feet getting closer every day to picking him up and taking him home.

Antron says, "I feel like everybody in the world hate me, Ma." But she replies that she loves him "enough to make up for everybody. All I do all day is love you." She goes through a litany of ways in which she will always be with him, describing the interconnection between his body and hers in the struggle of fear, pain, and joy as his life progresses.

The song's lyrics repeatedly focus on the love expressed through bodily presence: resting one's head on a shoulder, being held close, being brought into the arms of love, and having someone by one's side. These are given as evidence of never being alone, of support when it seems hard to breathe or to move, and of having a faithful friend to the very end. The family support of these young men is not merely an abstraction, but a defiance demonstrated through bodily presence.

* * * * *

The first post in this series on the defiant imagination brought together my experience of viewing When They See Us with scholarly work of Robert M. Franklin on the life and thought of Malcolm X. Malcolm's defiance, his refusal to be who the world had tried to make him to be, becomes a vocal type of defiance, a public challenge in word and agenda. Malcolm brought critical insight into the structures and systems of white supremacy and the cultural accommodation to racism. He demanded that things change, and if not by transformation of the whole society, then at least by construction of alternate patterns and structures that would insure justice for those who have suffered long under oppression.

The opening songs of the first episode demonstrate a kind of confidence and brash self-acknowledgement that could represent the mindset of these young men. In the post-Civil Rights Movement era, recognition that many things had changed for the better, normalization of some levels of integration in housing, employment, education, and public facilities might provide a level of encouragement about the future of race relations. Yet the genius of white supremacy as an ideology is that it continues to remake itself in new forms. The end of the 1980s marks a dramatic shift toward a new encoding of racism which centers around rewriting the criminal codes to increase lengths of sentences, multiply criminal charges, and expand incarceration of minorities exponentially. The 1989 case of these five young men takes on an iconic role in shaping the demonization of young black men as "superpredators" who must be locked away from the rest of society.

Opening scenes include the songs "I Got It Made," by Special Ed, and "Microphone Fiend," by Erik B. and Rakim. Both celebrate the giftedness and freedom of young men expressing their power and striving for success in the world. A kind of defiant attitude is built into the tone of these pieces, and it gains intensity when the young men join the large crowd that goes into the park on the night that the violent rape occurred. "Fight the Power," by Rage Against the Machine, redirects the gifts and freedom of black youth toward continuing the struggle for structural change. The point of rhyming should be to strengthen a sharp mind and embolden a brave heart. Intellectual and emotional growth feed into analytical capacity to understand social structures and systems and remake them for justice, not merely letting the powerful recreate their domination systems while young people enjoy life without cares. This tone of defiance is interrupted by the scenes of criminal violence that lead to massive police action in rounding up anyone "fitting the description," including the young men who were initially charged and browbeaten to be witnesses against one another for crimes none of them saw, much less participated in.

The overwhelming power of the domination system becomes apparent when its technologies of repression get applied to the young men who have not skills or understanding to defend themselves against police rush to judgment, imagery of monstrous black youth, forced confessions, prosecutorial misconduct, and fearmongering public media. The defiance of the song remains relevant, but the persistent power of oppression is no small opponent to defeat.

* * * * *

"Love and Hate," by Michael Kiwanuka plays in the second episode as the trial is beginning. It begins playing over interviews with community leaders who are challenging law enforcement, the court system, and the media for failing to listen to the truth, failing to investigate and uncover the flaws in the case, and failing to see the young men as human beings. It continues and builds as the young men, their families, and their lawyers make their way into the courtroom.

The song's lyrics are not uniformly defiant. They also contain cries for help: "I need something; give me something wonderful." At moments they express doubt and anticipate setbacks: "Now I feel some days of trouble." The defiance of this message recognizes that it is not a simple fight. It is a long fight, and there will still be casualties along the way. Yet there is no concession, no giving in. There is resolve to continue the struggle and achieve without surrender.

How much more are we supposed to tolerate?
Can't you see there's more to me than my mistakes?
Sometimes I get this feeling makes me hesitate...

I believe
She won't take me somewhere I'm not supposed to be.
You can't steal the things that god has given me!
No more pain and no more shame and misery--

You can't take me down!
You can't break me down!
You can't take me down!

* * * * *

The lyrics of "U Don't Know," by Jay-Z, describe the conflicting narratives of black youth caught up in gangs, drug trade, and crime, versus the creative capacity of those young people to make another kind of life through intelligence, art, business, and hard work. The defiant narrative acknowledges that at times the less desirable path of high risk and potential showdowns with police may seem like the only option a young black person may have. Whatever elements of character that went into the ability to succeed in music and entrepreneurial life also contributed to survival and advancement outside the law. Jay-Z celebrates his emergence as a powerful economic force having done the work necessary to go above and beyond all expectations. In contrast, this song plays near the end of the third episode, over the visual depiction of Ray's turning to selling drugs as his only solution to being out on the streets without opportunities for more legitimate employment.

"Who We Be" by DMX again reflects this contrast of life possibilities, emphasizing the inability of the normative gaze to look upon the lives of young black men with any clear sense of their humanity. Describing the harsh conditions, the stereotypes, the compromised choices that affect poor urban young people, the lyrics intermix the human struggles, the aspirations, and the possibilities of faith. With detailed references to the experience of arrest, the courts, remote imprisonment, solitary confinement, and mental fragility, this song plays over the story of Korey as he strives to keep himself together, hundreds of miles away from his family, targeted by other inmates so that his only refuge is in solitary confinement. Having been taken under wing by a sympathetic prison guard, he begins to hope for something better, but faces a parole board intent on forcing another false confession out of him in order to consider releasing him from jail. Korey continues to languish in prison, holding himself together with visions of his family and friends, of his past experiences and choices, thought of as someone other than who he really is both inside and outside the prison.

After the movie, after "Moon River" and the images of the actual five men, the credits begin as still shots from scenes from the four-part movie flash in the background. "Picture Me Rollin'," by Nipsey Hussle plays with its promise to "make it home." Acknowledging the ever-present threat of racial profiling, false accusation, unwarranted arrest, and further consequences of a broken criminal justice system, the song still urges the listener to believe that rather than stopped, beaten, and arrested, the protagonist is still in the car and rolling forward to get home. It may still seem that life is offering odds like "a dice game," but the singer's hope in God's care and drive to press forward, betting against those odds.

In all these songs, the defiance to stand up against an unjust world appears, at the same time as they recognize the struggle will be long and hard. Just as we viewers of this film and listeners to the music must recognize, the path to overcome white supremacy continues as an uphill battle. Frustration is rampant, and patience wears thin. Many will not tolerate such a wait. Others remain in denial that there is even a battle to fight. And those in the midst of the struggle must with the late Nipsey, be

Tryna to stay focused, kinda like Moses,
Like somebody chose us. This weight on my shoulders--
I feel these emotions, but still I keep going.

Defiant Imagination, Part 2: Frank Ocean's "Moon River" and Seeing Possible Worlds

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Broadway) — Fri, 28 Jun 2019 20:55:00 +0000

As the final episode of When They See Us was coming to a close a song began to play that grabbed my attention. It was a new arrangement and performance of an old standard. It had been foreshadowed earlier in the episode by a recurring appearance of an unknown prison inmate ("Singing Inmate") who took every opportunity to sing "Moon River" as loudly as he could. In those scenes, he was singing it with the powerful intonations of a golden-throated crooner.

I should include a comment on the type of writing I am doing. I do not intend in offering my interpretation of a song's lyrics and music to be telling you what I think is in the mind of the composer. I am not even claiming to know why the song was included as part of the movie soundtrack. I am writing about possible meanings of the lyrics and musical structure, intertwined with the scenes of the film, and filtered through the interpretive context of my own viewing. I'm not saying that it is arbitrarily subjective, but I am saying that interpretation of texts and films is multivalent. The song's performer and the soundtrack composer may have different perspectives. Yet I am analyzing musical lines, harmonic relationships, and actual words and sentences which do guide the interpretation. So, don't take me as saying that I am offering the authoritative meaning of this song or soundtrack. I am offering a reasonable and reasoned set of insights into a powerful creative composition of music, lyric, and film. Now back to the song discussion.

Lena Horne, Barbara Streisand, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mathis, Pat Boone, and especially Andy Williams had made this song part of their performance repertoire. Some artists like Louis Armstrong, Aretha Franklin, and Eric Clapton with Beck, gave it their own twists. "Moon River" is one of those songs that was pervasive in popular entertainment throughout my childhood, but I did not really learn the song or know much about it. Vague memories of watching the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's suggest that I must have once known that Aubrey Hepburn sang it in the movie. I mainly remembered the song as a standard sung by Andy Williams who was on television all the time in those days. Beyond the opening line, I couldn't have told you the lyrics.

I think I listened carefully to the song for the first time after hearing the Frank Ocean version during the epilogue of the final episode of When They See Us. This new cover of "Moon River" played as images of the actors faded into the actual exonerated men, with text overlays describing the current life situation of each of them. Looking upon the bodies and faces of these boys who became men while wrongly imprisoned presses the viewer's consciousness into recounting specific events and relationships portrayed in the four-episode film, linking the visual narrative to flesh and blood. In the context of these men's experiences of interrupted youth, injustice, and eventual exoneration to face a life so different from their plans, the song's lyrics opened up a wide space for imagination.

The song's lyrical images portray looking across a river toward what may be on the other side. Getting across a mile-wide river is a daunting challenge, at the end of which one cannot be sure what she or he will find. Then, the image shifts to traveling on the river, representing moving toward dreams of one's future. The dreams are accompanied by heartbreak and the narrator's uncertainty about what's around the next bend. As poetic imagery often does, the song starts mixing metaphors: the words speak of chasing the end of the rainbow as equivalent to flowing with the river's direction around bend after bend. The narrator is pursuing what he or she longs for, not fully knowing what that is.

Thus the river is portrayed first as a barrier between the protagonist and the future. Is it even possible to get across to the other side? What will the other side bring? Second, the river is a path upon which to journey. The journey finds a sojourner facing an uncertain future, hoping, longing for what could be, but without assurance of what actually may appear. And finally, the river is also the companion. The narrator describes "two drifters off to see the world" who are "chasing after the same...rainbow's end." The caring companions, the fellow-travelers, equally facing the unknown, sharing and bearing their hope and burden together--this may be the deepest message of the song. If I step out into this river, it will bear me along toward its destination. We will travel the same direction and meet the same obstacles and vistas, whatever they may be.

Ocean adapted the lyrics to his own version of the song. It's a "crazy world" that they will see, not just "such a lot of" world. Things won't always make sense how they turn out, but even the nonsensical is something we may find and see and experience. With reference to the end of the rainbow, Ocean adds the phrase "chasing after" to give an even stronger sense of desire and longing. Believing that there is something good to find, the protagonist passionately chases a dream yet not clearly formed.

He doesn't use the word "huckleberry," but says simply "my friend." He omits there a reference in part to Mark Twain's famous character, for any number of reasons that could include the often racist language of that story from another era.

A final major lyrical change is the addition of more concrete lyrical descriptions of the formation process of one's life. "What I see, who I become" echoes behind the lines about traveling on the river journey. Ocean is making explicit that by joining this river journey, his life is taking a particular form through the experiences and growth specific to the river's path. He says "Life's just around the bend." It's not only the figment of imagination, the rainbow's end, that is around the bend. With or without the rainbow's end, the protagonist's life will emerge from the contingent circumstances, the unanticipated relationships, and the mystery of the world encountered on the journey. This practical language presses the viewer's mind toward the unexpected world unfolding for the exonerated men, filled with challenges and also possibilities.

The performance itself brings intellectual and emotional challenges to the listener. The surprising opening stanza sung by a child's voice drills into the emotion of how the tragedy of this story explodes into the lives of children who went to the park one afternoon. It's not an untrained voice, but neither is it a smoothly polished voice. Quickly, another voice joins with harmony for a phrase--but the harmony turns out to be another melodic line in a different key, a beautiful dissonance of open harmonics. Soon a kind of improvisational polyphony emerges as the mode in which the song progresses. Going from solo line, to rich harmonies, to echoed motifs and improvised riffs, the performance partly deconstructs the traditional crooning ballad.

At times staggered entrances to melodic lines, fractions of beats apart, give a sense of fragmentation, a center that cannot hold, a whole that is invisible and out of reach. These stuttering entrances and rhythms especially appear in relation to the lyrics about the uncertainty of the river's direction and destination, through heartbreak and uncertainty. This performance itself touches a deep consciousness of the injustice and unreasonable path the young men's lives have taken.

Yet the repeated motifs, the sense of a hopeful if uncertain destiny, are powerful themes and echoes throughout. The polyphonic structures feed toward longer homophonic phrases of multiple layered harmonies. Ultimately the richest, most intense harmonies and elaborate ornamentational riffs occur on the lyrics about chasing what is around the bend. These unproven hopes, the deeply held conviction that even in a world that has been snatched away, where hopes are crushed, there is yet something worth finding up ahead. It is a liberative theme, a recognition that the world as it is is not the world as it should be. That better world, even if only partial and fragmented, still calls us forward.

This particular song drew me into recognizing how much a role the soundtrack had played for interpreting the film. So I went back to review the soundtrack, making note of other songs that had projected an interpretation of the story. In the process, I realized the way that the defiant imagination was at work in the music and the story. "Moon River," like "What a Wonderful World," challenges the realities of a world dictated by white supremacy and white vision. The river, always a potentially dangerous realm of currents, darkness, and hidden dangers, also represents the flow of life, the structures of how land and sea flow one into the other, the constancy of change and possibility of the new. Ocean's interpretation recognizes both meanings, yet casts its lot with the someday, the dream, the chasing after what may and must be there for us. Rivers have been a fruitful image to narrate the experiences of African Americans resisting oppression in the U.S.

Mavis Staples sang about lynched black bodies floating in the Mississippi River, that harsh and hateful world in which no black person is safe. The song of lament was itself an act of defiance for putting into words and music the truth about life and death under a system of racist oppression. Dissonant tones emphasized the incomprehensibility of such hate. The lament ends with a call to action to "stop them from going in the river."

Other traditional songs such as "Roll, Jordan, Roll" and "Deep River" recognized the danger of a great river's treacherous current and deep waters. Yet they also saw also great promise in the power of a river that can carry one from harsh circumstances to beauty and joy, even overwhelm an army of enemies. They sang of a river deep and wide that marked the passageway toward relief from suffering and fulfillment in a land of peace, a true home, a welcome table, a banquet at which they were honored guests. As we know, all such songs point not only to an afterlife, but also to a promise of goodness toward which the defiant person can strive in this lifetime. Not only eschatological Jordan, but the Ohio River or the Detroit River as markers of emancipatory power, are part of such songs.

One of my favorite songs and another river song, Kate Campbell's "Lanterns on the Levee" has much in common with this version of "Moon River." The coming together of two people, by Kate described as the falling rain which enters the river's flow, is again a central message. Hardships, falls, failures, disappointments, heartbreaks, can be isolating. They can feel as if one's very life is dissipating, dissolving. But joined with the strength of the river's strength, that life takes on new possibilities.

You can fall like the rain
And I will be a river, winding forever,
Strong and true.
I'll carry you away to the peaceful waters...

Perhaps Campbell's lyrics possess a different degree of optimism about what may be around the bend, that it will be peaceful. Yet the offer of shelter recognizes more storms will come, even from beyond the horizon. The path is winding, and goes on and on toward new horizons. What it will bring is unknown, but whatever comes will be better through solidarity among those on the journey.

"Moon River" reflects a kind of defiance which looks beyond the so-called realism of the world and sees a truth much deeper. In a recent conversation with local artist and community leader Pierce Freelon, we discussed something he had said about "creating black spaces without asking permission." This is part of the defiance I see in this work of art. Recognizing that the young men who were falsely accused and wrongly incarcerated found themselves at the mercy of a world which saw them as evil, the film and song also help open one's consciousness of building possible worlds that differ from the world that powerful people seek to impose on the rest of us.

A world made for everyone cannot ultimately be hoarded and controlled by a few. In the midst of the horrors of a world with its designs on breaking, throwing away, and killing young black men, there is yet a remainder of truth, beauty, and goodness which one can glimpse and place one's hope on, just around the bend. Look around at all those on the journey with you. Chase the dream with all you've got.

Defiant Imaginations, Part 1: Thoughts on Malcolm, Ruby, and Louis

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Broadway) — Tue, 18 Jun 2019 16:43:00 +0000

Absorbing and responding to the Ava DuVernay film event, When They See Us, will take some time and more than one post here. As I thought through what I might want to write, I found myself thinking back over some previous learning that seems to be relevant to what I have seen in this film. So this first post goes back over a series of insights initially spurred by a textbook I used in the Shaw University undergraduate course, Foundations of Knowledge and Ethics. It was an introduction offered to first-year students on the European and African American traditions of philosophical and religious ethics. One of the thematic claims of the book has become an important part of my understanding of how persons and communities must respond to systems of injustice, and it continues to stir my moral imagination as years go by.

Robert Franklin's book Liberating Visions examines the lives and words of four important African American leaders who offer powerful moral visions for humanity. He assigns each one a thematic adjective for the kind of life a person should live: Booker T. Washington, the adaptive person; W. E. B. DuBois, the strenuous person; Martin Luther King, Jr., the integrative person; and Malcolm X, the defiant person. Analyzing their views in light of character ethics, Franklin helps the reader see a social vision of the virtuous life, human fulfillment, and the good society through their eyes. All are powerful social insights worth examining, but Franklin's interpretation of Malcolm X is the one that the music of When They See Us has brought to the forefront of my thinking.

In theological studies, the term "prophetic imagination" has become a popular term. Walter Brueggemann writes in The Prophetic Imagination that the tradition of prophetic ministry from Moses to Jeremiah to Jesus engages God's people in dismantling oppression and reconstructing a world built on justice in loving communities. J. Deotis Roberts plays on the popular Protestant and Baptist theme of the "priesthood of all believers" in his ecclesiological book The Prophethood of Black Believers to emphasize how the black churches have contributed to a richer understanding of the task of the church than mere comfort and religious observance, extending into challenging injustice and working for the common good. This prophetic calling finds a particular expression in Franklin's use of "defiant" to describe the imagination. Defiance is a crucial element and a helpful descriptor of certain ways that the prophetic calling may find expression and embodiment.

Over twenty years ago, I was invited to participate in a conference on moral education sponsored by Shaw's Program in Ethics and Values and Duke's Kenan Institute for Ethics. I had anticipated following a keynote address by Robert Coles--no small task. I was doing some research into his work in preparation, and it led me to reflect further on Franklin's interpretation of Malcolm. Eventually I presented my paper under the title "Political Realism and the Defiant Imagination."

Realism is that school of thought in politics and theology which tends to fall back on the balance of powers mode of reasoning. Keeping all the existing powers in a condition of balance or detente--not at one another's throats, but also not stirring much change toward better justice--is considered the best one can do in the real world. Hence, realism offers little beyond incremental change for those who suffer under the crushing weight of oppression. The very idea that someone might challenge the existing powers is considered both ludicrous and dangerous by the realist. As Franklin realized, Malcolm ultimately did not let his imagination be captured by political realism.

Malcolm had been a budding, intelligent, and hopeful child, doing well in school until his early adolescent years. Despite his giftedness, one of the teachers he had respected and trusted most advised him that he should not have ambitions to be a lawyer, to take up a profession of intellect and prestige. He should be realistic and aim to take up a trade, a solid way to make money that would not require him to transgress into the realms of power and status in which he would not be welcome.

The story of Malcolm's life which follows that period shows his dissolution from the prior ambition to achieve into a life that accommodates itself to the world's worst expectations of him. The white world, the world of powerful people, would expect Malcolm not to amount to much. They would look at him and see something dangerous, something damaged, something likely to be trouble, and not someone. They would not see him. They would see a phantasm, a stereotype, an inevitability. To some extent, one can look at his life and conclude that Malcolm walked down a path that fulfilled what the world saw in him. They remade him in their image of his destiny.

Franklin recognizes, however, that Malcolm does not ultimately remain what society had expected him to be. After being imprisoned for breaking and entering and larceny, Malcolm's original intellectual curiosity and drive began to resurface, largely because of the nurturing friendship of members of the Nation of Islam. Malcolm reports that he began to copy the dictionary, line by line, page by page, to improve his reading and facility of the English language. He began to read extensively in history, philosophy, and political thought. He was instructed in the teachings of the Nation of Islam and trained in their discipline of a life in submission to Allah. He saw that to accomplish greater things, he had to set aside impulsiveness and raging emotion. He learned that the limits that had been placed on his life were artificial and externally imposed. He learned to defy the expectations of society and aim for something greater and more in tune with his true nature.

Malcolm's defiance drove him to gain the education he had missed before. He became a powerful speaker and capable leader. He applied his practical knowledge to become a strategic thinker and incisive analyst of the political scene. And when he was confronted with the inadequacy of the orthodoxies that he had previously accepted, he pursued with relentless critical effort the truth of historic Islam. Malcolm represented a defiance courageous enough to challenge the existing power relations, to say what must be said, and to be persistent in the face of powerful forces aligned against him. His radical critique conceded nothing in his effort to dismantle the dominant cultural systems which oppressed African Americans.

Remembering this account of Malcolm's life and his emergence as a leading intellectual of his time, I found myself drawn to Robert Coles's account of the remarkable young Ruby Bridges as another example of defiant imagination. At age 6, her parents guided her to be one of the first four children to integrate the New Orleans public school system. She was the only black student enrolling in her particular elementary school. The white parents took their children out of the school. Only one teacher agreed to teach in a school with a black child. So Ruby's teacher taught the class with only one student.

Federal Marshalls escorted Ruby to and from school because of the rowdy, violent protests that surrounded the school and the streets leading up to it. Ruby was not particularly scared by the crowds. She said they looked and sounded like Mardi Gras parties, with shouting and throwing things. So she bravely walked in and out of the school each day. Eventually, some white parents brought their children back to the school and the protests subsided. Still, Ruby remained alone in her classroom. In the next school year, the actual integrated classrooms began to come about in New Orleans.

Robert Coles became very involved with Ruby and her family, offering psychological care as much as was needed. He learned a great deal in the process. One of the central stories that he tells concerns an observation by her classroom teacher. As Ruby was approaching the school, the teacher observed the little girl stopping, turning to face the yelling crowd, and saying something to them. When Ruby got to class, the teacher asked about what she had seen. Ruby explained that she had not been talking to the people, but to God. Coles asked later for a fuller explanation. Ruby told him that every day she stopped, usually before getting to the school, and prayed to God for the people. That day she had forgotten until she was at the school steps. Cole was shocked that her feelings toward this hateful crowd were leading to her have concern for them and pray for them. She went on to explain that the prayer she said every day was to ask God to forgive them because they did not know what they were doing.

Her family and church had already instilled in Ruby a way of living in the world that was shocking to Coles and to many others. They had joined a long procession of courageous defiers unwilling to let conditions of injustice stand. They defied the barriers placed against the education she and other black children deserved, putting bodies in action to challenge the social order.

Moreover, her family and community was already embedded in an alternative moral narrative. She had understood the loving response of Jesus toward those who had done him wrong, and in defiance of the expectation that she should be afraid or should return hatred for hatred, she was seeking the good of those who wanted to do her harm. She hoped against hope that her opponents could be changed, and she and her community imagined a better world could come about in which enemies become allies, even friends. As an adult, Ruby Bridges still affirms that we must go against the grain of the world if we want to see change come for the better.

I became aware of a third example of defiant imagination during the period of Everly's illness. A friend had given her a recording of "What a Wonderful World," made famous by Louis Armstrong. Everly's first reaction was irritation. She has never been a person who wanted to paint a rosy picture when things were not rosy. No romanticizing and no pretending--she liked to simply say what she saw, what she felt. So she could see no reason to play "What a Wonderful World" when she felt awful and the prognosis was not promising. In what world could one call it wonderful to know that a person is dying of cancer at the peak of her life? I understood her point.

It occurred to me that I had never given that song much thought. I also wondered why someone might think it an appropriate recording for a friend who was fighting through cancer and chemotherapy. But I knew that the friend was also not one to sugar-coat life's struggles or try to positive think oneself out of real problems. I bought a Louis Armstrong album and took some time to listen to him sing the song. I read a little about its themes and its popularity. I began to understand that this kind of song represents a particular kind of defiance when sung by people who have been dealt every injustice and disadvantage by those with privilege and power.

There is a stance to take to the world when it treats you as if you are inferior, outcast, and unworthy, that defies those treatments. It is a way of knowing the good, the true, and the beautiful that disavows the knowledge projected by the powerful. Refusing to accept the world as it is offered, the defiant imagination of the oppressed recognizes that the good things in the world also belong to them. They know the truth of the world, that it is not what the lies of the powerful would assert to be true. They know that the beauty of the world, perhaps always mixed with ugliness, yet remains beauty. In defiance, Armstrong can sing about the particular sights of natural beauty that he passes, the kindness of heart and soul experienced in community, and the hope of a better life as the struggle for liberation presses from one generation to the next. Living in a world overshadowed by injustice, he can recognize that world as false, as the great lie. In contrast, the truth remains that it is a wonderful world.

This is not the same as positive thinking. It is a way of thumbing the nose at the oppressor. It is a stone-faced challenge to the world's claim on one's life. It's the laughter of one who knows that the joke is not on her. It's not pollyannish blindness, but clear sight which sees both the wrong and the right. It's not pretending, but a kind of honesty that knows tragedy as well as beauty.

I've been motivated to develop this discussion of the defiant imagination after having watched the powerful miniseries, When They See Us. The title itself focuses on vision. Presuppositions about the nature of the world and the people in it operate as filters on what human beings see. The term "normative gaze" identifies a biased perspective shared by those who hold power in society and culture--their way of seeing things defines reality because it is assumed to be the normative way to see.

Yet the words and actions of those who are not in power can challenge the assumed truth. Seeing beyond the current busyness, they may glimpse a truth not polluted or distorted by the interests of the oppressor. Taken as part of a declaration, the film title names the way that white people see black people, one which automatically puts black people in jeopardy. Taken as part of an interrogatory, the title asks whether the black young men have been truly seen at all. In this case, the young men are waiting to be seen for who they really are, not for what the fantasies of white culture imagine them to be. A defiant imagination gives its holder the possibility of challenging and overcoming the normative gaze of the oppressor.

The film project itself is an exercise of defiant imagination. It challenges the dominant narrative, the way that the young men and their families were "seen" by the newspaper reporters, the police, the prosecutors, and by many of their neighbors. In the next posting, I will discuss how various songs in the soundtrack of When They See Us help to feed a defiant imagination.

Loneliness and the Mystery of Friendship--Walking with the God of Pentecost

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Broadway) — Mon, 10 Jun 2019 00:46:00 +0000

A year ago, I was taking a couple of days for exploring historical sites about the conflicts between the European settlers and the Dakota in Minnesota after an academic conference in St. Paul. While in St. Paul, I had been with some long-time friends as well as some brand new acquaintances as part of our regional group of Baptist professors who take a weekend a year to hang out with our Catholic colleagues, talk about theology, Bible, history, etc., as well as worship and party together.

As I mentioned in a recent blog post, this time of year brings out more intense emotions for me because of various memories from my life spent with Everly, including the last weeks of her life. Last year was no different. I found myself deeply appreciative of the time spent with my old and new colleagues. We worked on our academic topics together, and we also learned about one another's lives, whether as graduate students or teaching faculty. A group of us were presenting a panel dealing with various baptist statements on sexuality which had been published in the past couple of years. In the midst of getting ready for the panel, news kept breaking about Paige Patterson's history of sexist attitudes and sermons, as well as his overt attempts to repress reports of rape and sexual harassment in his role as seminary president. The main point of mentioning all this is that we were keenly engaged with one another, talking about matters of significance for the church, the academy, and the lives of our students and ourselves.

As I drove up the Minnesota highways, I found myself thinking back on time with various people during the weekend. I had been deeply moved and surprised by a new friendship that sprung up at the meeting. I marveled at the thoughtfulness and attention shown to me by people with whom I had not previously grown a history of exchanged kindnesses. I found myself overwhelmed by the grace of unexpected friendships during our days together.

The other side of that warmth and gratitude as I drove alone was the realization that we had all gone our separate ways, and it would be unlikely that many, if any, of those people and I would spend time together until the next May rolled around. So there was a weight of sadness as well. I found myself pressing deeply into my experiences of friendship, my capacity to make friends and sustain friendships. One of the side effects of being a student through so many degree programs is that I have developed very deep and close friendships while working with fellow students toward a degree, only to fulfill those academic years by having all of us relocate and leave one another behind. I find that I can hold on to friendships with long breaks between contacts, but that I am not so good at keeping them steadily growing by communicating regularly while living far apart.

This inconsistent communication is a flaw in my practice of friendship. I am too easily affected by the habits of "out of sight, out of mind." But I think there is another key factor in how I maintain friendships that has also affected this lack of communication with people who are in remote places. While I have often had a circle of friends with whom to enjoy talking and hanging out, I am most likely to have one or two very close friends at a time, not five or ten or twenty. That leaves me most likely to be in a close relationship with friends who are close by, to whom I have face-to-face access, and whose lives are present and connected enough to my own that we are able to maintain a deep awareness of what is happening with each other.

For over thirty-five years, from our late teens until her death, Everly was the primary friend to whom I turned and with whom I shared my life. Depending on where we lived at the time, there would always be one, or maybe two, other close friends. I am an introverting type of person who can find a great deal of satisfaction entertaining my own thoughts. It is part of what helps me be a good researcher, to gain mastery of subjects, write about them, and recall extensively from stores of knowledge to use in teaching. Hours of focused study, thinking, or writing are not nearly as taxing of my energy and vitality as an hour or so spent in a large social gathering, especially if it involves trying to converse with people whom I have not previously met and who share little in common with my areas of expertise and knowledge. When mingling in a crowd, telling someone that I am a theologian or an ethicist is a pretty sure-fire conversation ender. Struggling to find common ground for conversation can quickly wear me out.

By the way, Everly was pretty much the opposite. She gained energy from social occasions. She was likely to find her way into being the life of the party. She maintained many more close friendships than I seem capable of doing. I admire all these things about her, and marvel at how her way of moving in the world was so different from mine. I often miss one of her greatest talents. Everly could "read" the crowd. Now while I may be able to get a sense of a room full of people's mood or bias, she could also quickly discern the demeanor and body language of most everyone present. Most of these signals and signs go over my head or bounce off my forehead. I often miss the tone and tenor of what is going on between people in social gatherings, including how people are reacting to me.

Because I was driving alone, I turned on some music. I often do some of my important thinking through the poetic insights of songwriters. On this day, I was listening to Carrie Newcomer and the Indigo Girls, both of whom have helped me think through issues over the years. I took note of a particular song (with a strange title) by Newcomer that day, "Cedar Rapids 10 AM." The song's refrain is an invitation to continue in friendship. The singer is needing some time to think, and has determined to do so by hiking up to a promontory to rest, look at the sky, and mull over what is on her mind. She wants her friend to come join her.

Will you come with me to the ridge top?
Lay all your burdens bare, right there.

It's an invitation to honesty and struggling to get through to the truth of things. The lyrics continue to speak of the value of deep conversations between friends.

Take away all the white noise;
It getting hard to hear.
Souls stretched as thin as tissue paper
Edged with cuts and tears....

You've always been a cup of coffee;
You've always been the cream.
You've always believed that I was better
Than I could ever dream....

So much for all the chips we've earned.
So much for all the things we've learned.
So far it is still you and me.

Dealing with the erosion of a life by the daily disrespect, frustration, and longing for something more--all that can wear someone down. That image of being stretched, with cut and torn places scattered across a tissue-thin surface, is something I can identify with. It's a picture of wearing away one's substance until it seems little is left, and even that remnant could dissolve so easily, with just a shred of dignity and energy left. In some moments, even one's length of experience makes little difference for understanding, like round after round of poker, gaining chips whose exchange value you don't care about, or knowledge that makes no difference in the current situation. Sometimes, it is only the presence of a faithful friend that can hold one together.

Last May, having seen a a valued time with friends come to an end, and sulking a bit over the state of my own life, I was feeling that, unlike the song's character, I didn't have anyone available to hike up to the ridge top and work through whatever could be on our minds. I was having a bout of self-pity, and I knew it. But knowing that didn't make me feel any better about my situation. For almost five years, I had not had Everly, my "go-to" friend. And having returned to live in Durham, I kept seeing other close friends move away, making it harder to keep that kind of presence I need when things get hard.

I started to realize that one issue for me was that in having had Everly faithfully available as my friend for such a long part of my life, I had come to take the availability of friendship for granted. It's not that keeping a marriage friendship functioning well isn't it's own kind of hard work. But having grown into mostly good habits of relating with one another, I hadn't needed to put out much effort to cultivate other friendships. With Everly gone, and later some of the other friends no longer nearby, I had come upon a new challenge to make my life work well. The kind of friendships I needed were not just going to walk up to me day after day. I was going to have to figure out how to work at being a better friend so that I could have friends.

I realized at that point that there were a number of people in Durham who had already been generous in their friendship toward me. There were friends whom we had known since arriving in North Carolina in 1986, with whom our family had been through many important events in our lives. They had not pulled back from their hospitality and availability to me. I simply had not been taking the opportunity to spend time with them and to make sure I was a friend to them as well. Another small group of friends who had invited me on several occasions to join them for conversations, dinner, or an outing, had not put up any barriers to my seeing them more often than I have been. As I stated above, I was becoming aware that there were people ready to be good friends with me if I would put in more effort rather than simply waiting around to see what would happen spontaneously. And in the year since that time, these good people and I have shared our lives and hearts in what is a pleasant relief from the pattern I had fallen into. It's what your momma or grandma always told you--don't take good things for granted. That was one of the insights that was dawning on me last May.

But there was another very important thing I was realizing about friendship on those highways. During my drive across the prairies of Minnesota, I spent some time reflecting on the mystery of becoming friends. It is commonplace in contemporary popular wisdom to assume that friendship is chosen. "You can pick your friends." I'm not saying it's a completely empty aphorism. When a person has "run with the wrong crowd," there may be the possibility of walking away from that set of friends, but it may not be easy in all cases. People often try to pick their friends by picking a neighborhood to live in, a school to attend, or a club to join. These decisions do have some impact, but whether the type of friendship that allows a person to find support, honest communication, and love will come about is not so easy to plan.

There is a mystery to friendship that can't be explained by choosing who will and won't be our friends. The Indigo Girls song, "Mystery," reflects on this hard to explain part of becoming close to another person. It puzzles over whether friendship happens by fate or choice. It asks whether the unplanned and unexpected coming and going of a friendship means that it never was real. It's likely many readers have wondered about the same kinds of questions. The person one is sure will become his best friend is just a passing acquaintance. The person she hardly even noticed grew to be the truest friend. Two people who might seem to be different, even opposite, in so many ways find themselves becoming friends: "My heart the red sun. / Your heart the moon clouded."

It's common in the popular theology of the kinds of churches that I have always been part of to think of our associations, friendships, and loves to be arranged by God's plan. I've written about my understanding of the will of God in at least four previous posts, but it seems to me that such a commonly discussed topic deserves attention again and again. I'm not inclined to think of God as a master chess player, moving all of us pieces around a board to meet some grand plan. I did not say that I do not believe God has plans for us, which I know to be that we ought to become more like the image of divine love revealed in Jesus Christ, living in community with those who gathered to him and found bounty and healing even without a permanent home and a truckload of possessions.

God's will for me and for you is beloved community, and we are the agents to share in the plan and the construction of a world that bears marks of God's Reign. Our efforts are partial, local, frail and temporary, yet they are real products of the goodness, beauty, and love in which God has made us to live. Nor do I think of God as a scriptwriter and puppeteer. There is not a single predetermined path for all of history. God works in history with infinite creativity, capacity to repair and heal, and patience with the failures, shortcomings, and outright evil projects that humans get caught up in. The calling is persistent and repeated whenever we can hear it, to turn our efforts toward the good of one another, and in loving and just ways to remake the communities in which we live. God is in the midst of the living and unfolding story.

In either image, whether the chess master or scriptwriter, God is more remote from us than the God revealed in Jesus Christ and coming in the power of Spirit on Pentecost. In Jesus, the Word became flesh and moved in the neighborhood. Jesus associated with everyday people, not the boardrooms and ruling halls of the elite. He couch surfed his way around Galilee and Judea, walked confidently through the "bad neighborhoods" of Samaria, fell in with the rough crowd and got run out of Gadara, and he built a movement of the masses that made him dangerous in the eyes of the rulers. The Spirit came to the people and gifted them to share good news in the language of all who were present on Pentecost. There was not a booming voice from the clouds, but the many voices in many languages of people who had learned who God is by following Jesus.

I am inclined to think of God's working out God's will in ways that accord with these manifestations of God's presence. Rather than moving a chess piece near me to become my friend, or moving me around to make a certain person be my friend, I am inclined to think of God as a caring companion, present with us, not scripting or manipulating us as a puppets. As we live our lives, people come our way, or we come upon people in our pilgrim journey. We will not become fast friends with everyone we meet. But as our companion, our guide, the one who is shaping us to be more what we are made to be, God will be at work to help us discern and appreciate the allies, friends, and beloved companions who can be part of the beauty that God intends our lives to be. It may sometimes seem like choosing, and other times an unexpected mystery.

Thomas Aquinas echoes the words of Jesus from the gospel of John chapter 15 when he says we can grow to be friends of God (Summa Theologia, Second Part of Second Part, Question 23). With God as a friend, an ever-present companion, our prayer without ceasing opens our hearts and minds to hear the gentle prodding of God. Maybe at times it is not a gentle prodding, but a strong push to move, a wake up call to see what is right in front of us, or opening our ears to hear the cry that requires our response. In this way, God leads us into opportunities for friendship, by being the one who cares enough to get us going in the right direction, to speak up to greet someone, and to above all to listen to people.

If I think about some of my own experiences (and I'm not going to give a long inventory), there is much that is unexpected and unchosen in the process of our becoming friends. One very close friend was a graduate school colleague of mine, but everything about our demography other than being theology graduate students worked against our becoming close friends. However, when we each had a three-year-old daughter taking a Saturday morning dance class, dads with coffee and time on their hands struck up a friendship and found they were able to talk honestly about the most difficult things they were dealing with at work, home, and church. An unanticipated intersection of daddy responsibilities created the groundwork for a long-lasting friendship.

In another case, an acquaintance came to offer prayer for me one Sunday during worship, and the conversation that followed led to recognizing a deep commonality in our longing to deepen our loving relationships with our children. If an observer judged by our different ages and background, one probably would not lay odds on a budding friendship coming from what could have been merely the formalities of performing a religious duty. If this post were a study of all my friendships, I could easily describe other cases that could be even more unexpected friendships.

Friendship isn't strictly a choice. It emerges out of contingent occurrences. It comes as a gift more than as a choice. Friendships grow as a kind of grace. That was another lesson I was beginning to learn last May. I can't predict where friendship may arise and grow. Half a year earlier had met an academic colleague from another school almost by chance as we were participating in the same conference. It was a break in the programming, so we sat down and became acquainted, learning a few things of interest about one another. I enjoyed the conversation, but I didn't expect much to come of it.

By May, we had met several more times. I was surprised that someone would make that much effort to get to know me, not being in the same town, the same academic discipline, or having very similar networks or background. By then it was already clear to me that grace was at work to allow our friendship to blossom. As I indicated in the first part of this post, I was struggling both with needing a friend, and with needing to be a better friend. And here without any plan or effort on my part, a friend had walked into my life. It's reasonable to say that I was puzzling over the same kinds of questions Emily Saliers was in the lyrics of "Mystery."

Why do you spend this time with me?
May be an equal mystery....

Psychologists and other social scientists, philosophers and theologians--we all can bring some general insights into understanding friendships: characteristics of good friendships, the likelihood of friendships to last, the needs friendships bring, the goods friendships help to produce, the virtues that support friendship and vices that undermine it, examples of good and bad friendships. When all is said and done, a great deal comes down to the simple acceptance of who shows up in one's life, the contingent events that get our attention, the opportunities we take to show concern for someone, the willingness to be honest and vulnerable, and the interconnection that grows from having a history with one another that has made us better people.

I think people can reasonably put in the effort, even choose, to become the kinds of persons ready to be friends with others. Yet there is a remainder in the narrative of friendship that is housed in mystery. Perhaps you met at that time that your soul was "stretched as thin as tissue paper," with so many cuts and torn places you did not know how you could make it much farther without someone to share the burdens. It could be that sitting to share a cup of coffee, maybe adding some cream to soften the bitterness, led to that mysterious realization that your friend can see good and power in you that you have not been able to find--"You've always believed that I was better than I could ever dream."

I'll close out this far too verbose post with perhaps the most powerful lines of the Indigo Girls' song that say a great deal to me about entering the grace and gift of friendship when loneliness seems to be the only possibility.

Maybe that's all that we need--
Is to meet in the middle of impossibility.
We're standing at opposite poles,
Equal partners in a mystery.

The Language of Grief and Loss, and Living in the Afterloss

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Broadway) — Tue, 28 May 2019 18:42:00 +0000

I learned a new word from an old friend: "the afterloss." It's what he calls the new stage of life we enter after a loss, an era of grief and change. I'll say more about it later in this post. I've been doing some grief work lately--it's that time of year for me between my wedding anniversary and the anniversary of Everly's death. In the process I've been thinking about some of the language we use to describe our loss and grieving, and maybe stretching and extending it to help me understand my own situation at this time.

The imagery of a "broken heart" is powerful to describe some of the struggle of dealing with loss through death or broken relationships. The heaviness in one’s body, the dark cloud invading one’s thinking, and the erratic welling up of tears all give the sense of something broken. Difficulty thinking about what comes next and the inability to focus on plans or complex tasks are all features of grieving that imply brokenness in my experience.

Of course, figurative language of this sort has its limits. Literal breaking usually applies to solid, rigid items or to machines or processing mechanisms of some sort. While the image of breaking does fit well enough with what loss and grief are like, it also seems that mixing the metaphors is common and helpful.

Grief as a "wound" is another image. This language makes a more direct connection to the organic, fleshy nature of our humanity and its bodily experience of grief. In this case, rather than breaking, the image of ripping flesh, or a deep cut into our bodies speaks vividly about the pain and trauma of loss and grief. A loved one’s death, or events or conversation which change or end a beloved relationship, can feel traumatic as if tearing open a wound in one’s body. In the same imagery, we often think of the healing process as stitching a wound and forming scars on our hearts.

I want to riff on what may be another aspect of this image of a wound. Beyond the initial ripping or cutting, there is often also a slow, subsequent, repeated tearing that extends our woundedness.

Very common for people who suffer loss is the experience of turning to speak to the loved one who is not there anymore. Or it may be the thought that constantly pops up, “I need to talk to her about this,” followed by the remembrance that it will not be possible.

The constant little tearing may occur when the grieving person remembers plans already made. There may have been a trip planned, tickets for a concert, dinner plans, a party, a hike, or some other outing. But these will not happen.

Longer term plans also rip the wound a little more. For me, Everly’s untimely death meant she would not be present for our children’s future graduations, and even more painful, their potential marriages or birth of children. In all losses, people lose not only concrete plans, but also imagined futures. These are dreams of a joyful future which have not always even been expressed. Perhaps buried in one's hopes are dreams of times spent in travel, in couple time not available during the hectic middle years of life, or seasons with family or friends who have been out of reach in the midst of one’s work life.

My friend Benjamin Allen, whose website and Facebook sites both are about grief and healing in the afterloss, insists above all that we not try to think of grief as a finite process. To be in grief, especially but not only after a death, is to enter a life era that he calls “afterloss.” In this era, we learn and adapt to a new stage of relationship in which who or what we have lost is still present to us and in us, but in new ways. At least this is how I’ve interpreted what he is saying. I walked with him for a short time through the horrific tragedy of loss from illness that eventually took the lives of his wife and two children. I was very young still--in my mid twenties. It was difficult for me to comprehend the depth of his pain. I remember times that I said awkward things to him out of the pat answers I had overheard while growing up, dumb cliches that it took me many more years to unlearn.

This stage of living in grief while also healing brings many complications. It's the era in which those smaller, later ripping events revive and repeat grief. My greatest loss, the death of Everly, means that all of my remaining years include her presence in making me who I am and in shaping my dreams. Her absence and losing her affect my work and my relationships, and in a way the pain of her loss is mixed with all the other losses, small or large, that follow.

The painful failure I went through in my mid-thirties as I saw a church breaking apart around me and myself impotent to make a difference also lives with me. In that time, I lost the naïveté that told me I could be a leader whom people would enthusiastically follow because of my "brilliance," my skill in speech and writing, and my sincerity in presenting my vision. Naïveté both overstated my talent and understated the struggle that we have in our communities when we try to see truth together in the midst of our divisions. That loss makes me less sanguine about leading change, less confident in my gifts, and rightly less messianic in my self-estimation.

The variety of losses one endures are intertwined. Thus each little tear of the heart intersects the ones that preceded it. All my memories of leadership failure are linked with the ways that Everly held me up when I was stumbling and helped me see when I was blind.

Part of the afterloss, for instance in my era of widowhood, is recognizing what is lost and stays lost. I do not have the same yokefellow that Everly was to hold me up when I stumble. I don’t mean that there is no one. Many friends have been present to keep me from staying on the ground when I fall. My adult children have had to learn that their daddy needs them in ways they previously did not have to face.

Besides help when I stumble, it is also clear how deep the loss of Everly's discerning eyes and insights is for me. I am constantly reminded how I miss those gifts, and that I do not have a clear way to replace them.

In the almost six years since I have been without her, I have faced numerous difficult life decisions. I usually feel that I am walking blind. I do my best to call on people who know me and care for me and believe in me for guidance and help. They do help. And I habitually work through comparisons of options to try to weigh what is best. But I have yet to press forward into such important decisions without finding myself surprised, even disappointed or shocked, perhaps misled by my self-focus or by my rosy-glasses vision. I have convinced myself that I have a glimpse of what may come next, only to find out I am blind to what probably should have been obvious. These new losses are among the continuing tears at the wounds of the heart. At this point in my life, at my low points, it sometimes seems the best description is that I have become an old fool.

Now let me qualify that. I'm just sharing a feeling I have had, but not the general stance toward the world in which I live. Most of the time I feel highly competent and able to offer a great deal to my family, my friends, and the world. So I’m not saying that I don’t ever believe in myself. I’m not asking for people to call me up to remind me how much of a blessing I have been to them. I fully believe that it is true that my life blesses others and is fulfilling for me; therefore, I press on toward the high calling, to take hold of that for which I was taken hold of. So no need to get worried about Mikey today.

However, in the afterloss, I would say it’s pretty much expected that low times will come. I reckon that's true even for people who have never endured a great loss, but in a different way. And it seems to me that in the struggle to restore some equilibrium, to find some new path, and to fill in some of the holes in one’s life, the era of grieving can often seem to be repeating what already happened. New losses overlay the old ones. To revert to the wound metaphor, old scars reopen, and pain returns to the very place where it was most intense.

I’ve had almost six years of widowhood. Throughout my life, I’ve known many women and men whose widow years have meant they stayed alone until they died. My dear grandma lived 29 years after the death of my granddaddy. She moved around to stay with family members, mainly her two daughters and her sister. That meant she lived in our home part of each year the entire time that I was growing up. I was a kid and never gave much thought to what her loneliness might have been like. Now I wonder more. I was her darling, and we often sat and talked while she rocked in her rocking chair.

She found a way to share her life with others that gave her a level of satisfaction that I never really questioned. Partly, it seems that her generational outlook of being a mother who cared for a household found some fulfillment in still using those gifts and that calling toward her children and grandchildren even after her beloved husband had died too young. She cooked and cleaned and cared for us, and she also spent her time reading, traveling, and doing what she wanted to in her "retirement." I don't recall her talking about wondering what comes next. Now I wonder what she would have said had I asked those kinds of questions.

In my years of a widow's grief, I find myself regularly wondering and questioning what comes next. That’s what got me started writing again last week, as a beloved colleague and I were discussing her own search for direction in the next season in her life. Every once in a while I think I may have uncovered a treasure what will fill some of the space that grief and loss have opened up. I think that maybe I have discovered a salve that will help scars continue to heal. I think I may be looking down a path that could calm my restlessness and make me feel more at home. So far, it’s mostly still more stumbling, a glimpse of beauty that remains just out of reach. The beauty is real. The treasure is priceless. The path was a possibility. Yet I had expectations that were too great for what could happen.

I’m probably describing what the current cultural memes call first world problems. I do remind myself that a steady job, caring friends and colleagues, healthy and happy children, opportunities to study and write—all of these are graces far and above what one person should expect. Knowing and affirming that truth of grace abundant does not, however, take away the longing that is part of what living in grief and loss carries with it.

Some might say that the longing itself is what I should set aside. I'm not sure I can agree, nor that I think it is possible. I do recognize the danger of lustful cravings, and I don't think that is what I am describing here. I believe, and hope I am right, that what I'm calling longing is an embedded passion within humanity to be in relationship, to love one another, to find fulfillment in the beauty and richness of creation, and to rest in the divine presence. It is the notion that we have been made with purpose and meaning that calls out to us and presses us forward.

At the same time that I embrace the longing as part of what urges me on toward being what I am made to be, I also acknowledge and affirm the Apostle Paul's claim that he has learned to be content in whatever circumstances he finds himself. I am moderately good at living that way, but maybe not as good as Grandma was. Somewhere in between longing and contentment--that has to be where I strive to live. I don't want to settle for less than the good that awaits me, nor to be grasping after what I do not need.

In her novel Lila, Marilynne Robinson narrates the inner thoughts of the title character as she tries to reconcile her fears with the possibility of two people caring for one another, with these words, "It felt very good to have him walking beside her--good like rest and quiet, like something you could live without, but you need it anyway; that you had to learn how to miss, and then you'd never stop missing it." That's a good description of the slow and partial healing that accompanies the ongoing tearing of our hearts in the afterloss. To close out this ramble of more words than I intended, I thank you for your time spent reflecting with me. Let’s all of us keep walking forward together, thankful for every companion who is willing to join us on the journey, learning not to miss the goodness that their lives bring to us.

Hermeneutics, Imagination, Grief, and Change

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Broadway) — Mon, 20 May 2019 17:56:00 +0000

I was late to Sunday School yesterday. I had gotten up plenty early, and I was about to finish getting dressed for church. Then I looked at some photos from six years ago, when our five Broadways went on a family cruise together. I read some words I wrote in 2014 about how I was not looking forward to the next two months of memories. In those moments a shadow descended on me, my mind started racing, tears welled up, my body shook, and I was suddenly caught up in the grief of Everly's absence again.

Let me quickly finish this part of the story. I did some thinking, some reading, some crying, and then I debated what to do next. One impulse when sad is to stay alone and deal with it without having to explain oneself to anyone else. Another is to turn to people who care for you. I decided on the latter, since I expected to see the loving eyes of some of my best friends in Sunday School when I arrived. Just last Sunday, another member of the class was sharing with us about her intermittent and surprising intrusions of grief over the loss of her mother. I knew that going to my people was better, so I went to be in the company of wounded healers, even if I was 15 minutes late. It was the right choice, and I got the loving care we hope anyone would receive.

You won't be surprised to know that with me there is a longer story to tell. So we've had the summary of events, and now the more detailed analysis.

On Saturday morning, I was dressing to go out to one of the big festivals Durham throws each year. I put on a shirt, one of my usual guayaberas, and stepped away from the closet only to realize that the date was May 18. For those who used to read my blog when I was writing more often, you may remember that I call every 18th of the month an "Everly Day," because she died on July 18, 2013. It's one of my ways of honoring the blessing of her life with me for 30+ years. Most months on the 18th I take some time for remembering. And when I remember while getting dressed, I almost always wear a purple shirt for Everly Day. So I changed shirts and got a purple guayabera before heading out.

Another thing I usually do on the 18th, is count the passage of time. We are approaching six years since her death on that July 18th. Being in a math family, I seldom settle for just one way of counting. This month was five years and ten months, and it was also 70 months. Now for those of you who, like me, have lived your lives immersed in the texts and symbols of the Bible, it is probably no surprise to you where my mind immediately jumped. No matter how much sophisticated theoretical work I do on biblical hermeneutics, that still does not keep me from imagining relationships of numbers and symbols and language that is not directly part of what Dr. McClendon would call "the plain sense" of scripture. Seventy months made me think of seventy years, the rounded-off figure in scripture to represent the length of the exile. Seventy, a multiple of seven but ten times over, conveys a message of completion as well as of long duration. Above all, the seventy year mark in this instance represents an end to a period of suffering, despair, and seemingly endless waiting.

I recognize that seventy years is not the same as seventy months. I recognize that my 70 months is not somehow predicted or conjured in the biblical text. But what did happen in the aftermath of noticing the similarity of number still seems to me to be worthy of the scriptural imagination. From that recognition, I was propelled into a reflection on the passage of time in my life by analogy to the longer passage of time in the life of Israel. What did the 70 years mean for God's people so many centuries ago? Were there ways that their recorded experience might shed light on my situation, 70 months after the devastating loss of my beloved?

The numerical similarity had occurred to me on Saturday, but with the coming of a wave of grief on Sunday morning, I turned back to that thought and opened my Bible to the Prophet Isaiah, starting in the 40th chapter, and began to read about that prophet's theological reflections on the end of the exile, the end of the 70 years of waiting. I read quickly through four or five chapters, not stopping very long at any text, and letting it wash over me. Then I realized that if I were going to make it to Sunday School, I had better finish getting dressed and get in the car to head over to the church.

The verses were very familiar. The prophet's words of comfort offer a message from the infinite and unchanging God that resonates in the Bible reader's ears. The first of the Servant Songs describes the humility and compassion of the people that God is calling to serve in the world. When I reached the 43rd chapter, I was brought to a text I read with Everly often during her suffering toward death. It speaks of God's presence in the most dangerous and fearful situations. It proclaims God's concern for humanity in creation, a precious relationship, in which God has known and given us our names even before we have known ourselves. And of course, as I have written before, John Claypool's reflections on the the end of chapter 40 spoke with power into my life during days of most intense grief years ago. God will hold us up through the most difficult times, so that we can walk and not faint, taking one more step in the strength of knowing that God will never leave us to suffer alone.

And what I had already begun to think on Saturday when I first connected the number seventy between my life and the scriptural allusion, also was there.

Sing to the Lord a new song!

I will turn the darkness before them into light,
the rough places into level ground.
These are the things I will do,
and I will not forsake them.

Do not remember the former things,
or consider the things of old.
I am about to do a new thing;
now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness
and rivers in the desert.

From this time forward I will make you hear new things,
hidden things that you have not known.
They are created now, not long ago;
before today you have never heard of them,
so that you could not say, "I already knew them."

Again, to be clear, I am not advocating a type of interpretation which personalizes the prophetic oracles as if they are not linked to the history of Israel and the coming of the Messiah, revealing the meaning of history and the nature of the One in whom history resides and finds its meaning and purpose. These verses are not about me. The exile is not a convenient turn of events meant to make me feel better or even to rethink my life. On the other hand, the pattern of divine work and character that the prophet speaks of has ongoing relevance for persons and communities who seek to turn to God for guidance and insight on the meaning and purpose of their personal and collective lives, even in our day.

Thus, the coinciding of the number 70 in the biblical story and my personal story becomes a seed of potentiality as I reflect on this season of my life in the aftermath of my greatest grief. Has a time of pilgrimage through wilderness reached a point of fullness? Are there signs in my work, my ministry, my family life, my friendships, my study, and all aspects of my existence that point to the possibility of something new? Should there be some things that I set aside in these days? Should there be readiness to take a decisive turn toward something new and unexpected, something not even created before now? What is the new song that I should sing to the Lord? What darkness will be lifted, and where will light begin to shine? I can't say that I know answers, but these questions continue to fill in the gaps of restlessness, and sometimes discontent, that arise in the life I'm now living.

This month of May marks seven years since Everly emerged from near death caused by her first dose of chemotherapy. She began to articulate to us the new vision she had of the life ahead of her. Seventy months have passed since her death. Soon that anniversary of six years will come. None of these are magic numbers. There are no rules for grief and its duration, no time limits that can be set and enforced. We have no capacity to know what the future brings, nor to be sure what choices we must make in each moment. Yet this imaginitive foray into the grand narrative of scripture as a way to recognize the continuing work of God will, I believe, bear fruit for my journey in this world. May God go with me and with you in each step, that we may walk and not faint.

Do You Dream and Weep Sometimes About the Way that Things Should Be?

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Broadway) — Sat, 18 May 2019 00:09:00 +0000

A friend of mine is spending much of the summer rethinking and discerning what is most important and what is possible to make the most of the next season of life. Looking up people who can talk about our lives and who will have our best interest at heart can help us to catch a vision of what our lives can be. So often we feel closed in by our past decisions, kind of like a train on a track or a wagon in the trail ruts. Composer Ken Medema shines a helpful light on this struggle in the lyrics of his song, "A Place for Dreaming," and the title of this post is the first of several excerpts from this song that I will quote.

Is there a place for dreaming in the corner of your mind?

Richard Rohr comments in Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, about the danger that as people get older they will fall into “cognitive rigidity and love of their own status and privilege.” It means we find it harder to consider a change that can make all the difference for us and for others. Too much is at stake and too many constraints close our minds and block our vision.

Is there a place for dreaming...
In a world where dreams are broken, and dreamers hard to find?

I remember a few years ago telling another friend about a situation on my life that I thought would probably never change in the direction I had hoped, even though I had spent almost 15 years trying to influence that change. Then last year a door opened. An opportunity arose for me to share a vision. I’m still shocked and challenged to imagine what it might mean for me and for the communities I am in.

In the almost six years since Everly died, I have found myself circling back to these same questions over and over. Now that I will not have the life that I had expected for so long, what should my life count for in the remaining years? Today Shaw University recognized me for 25 years of service. I am halfway through the 26th year already now at age 61. I have worked under eight Presidents and at least nine Vice-Presidents for Academic Affairs. In my six years of undergraduate teaching, I had two department chairs. In my 19-1/2 years in the Divinity School I have worked with four Deans.

I’ve seen the good and the not-so-good. I’ve fought for pay raises and felt across-the-board pay cuts. I’ve been “let go” a couple of times, only to be asked to come back a few weeks later. I helped rewrite a faculty handbook to provide support and protection to faculty employees, only to watch a series of new administrators remove all those protections and back away from habits of commitment to long-term, but all untenured, faculty. I revised the constitution of the Faculty Senate and helped to bring it back into existence, seeing it initially flourish and grow in strength. Then I watched leaders become frantic in their confrontations until they forced the kinds of conflict that can only end with faculty dismissals, draining away the organization's power and the morale of the community. I've dealt with dominating administrators as well as empowering leaders. I've seen Presidents and Vice-Presidents battle to keep faculty and employees on the payroll, and others seemingly callous to laying off people with one day's notice. These are bits and pieces of working at this plantation.

There are different goods and not-so-goods of working at the Duke plantation down the road. I've usually preferred the Shaw plantation to the Duke plantation in my evaluation. I've worked through personal achievement and personal tragedy, and I've found this community to be one that would hold me up when I felt I would fall, and encourage me when I was able to soar.

Do you dream of another country where there is no push and shove?
Where the rich don't rule, and the poor are fed, and the only law is love?
Where a neighbor is a neighbor, and there is trust and loyalty?

One of the questions I have been asked often during my time at Shaw, by students, by colleagues from other schools, and by friends and associates wherever I go (including last year in Hong Kong), is this one: "Why have you stayed at Shaw for so long?" Sometimes it comes as, "Why did you decide to teach at Shaw?" To the latter formulation, I think that many readers can agree that we don't necessarily "decide" where we will get a job. This job walked up to me when I was trying to find work.

My good friend Jim Kirkley had answered an ad for an ethics professor at Shaw University during the summer after I had finished my dissertation. He was hired to help design and lead a new and innovative ethics program, and in order to fulfill the university president's ambitious curriculum initiative, he recognized that Shaw would need more faculty trained in ethics. By God's grace, Jim saw me as a promising candidate, and that fall he urged me to apply immediately.

I had made a prior decision that meant Kirkley's invitation was crucial for my employment future. Rooted in my undergraduate years, I had accepted the view that men had undue privilege in society. I had determined that I did not want to be the kind of man or husband who assumed my life and career were inherently more important than any woman's, and particularly that they did not take precedent over the life and career of whomever might become my wife.

So when I finished my PhD during a time when Everly's career was on a rapid rise, we decided I should try to stay put in central North Carolina so that she could continue her career path. I wrote to every university with a religion department within driving distance of Durham and explained my situation, offering my availability. I taught at four schools during that first year. Kirkley's influence helped determine that Shaw would be one of those four. I had not particularly pursued Shaw. I was white, living a white life, and barely knew that Shaw existed; nor did I understand much about why it should exist.

The Department Chair at Shaw interviewed me as classes were beginning in January, and I started teaching as an adjunct immediately. There are far many more stories to tell, but one has to do with my first day in class. An adult student beginning his undergraduate education asked me a question concerning the syllabus. "Why do our readings begin with Socrates and focus on European philosophers of ethics?" I explained that I had been given a set of books and a syllabus to teach from.

He was starting what became a slow and difficult process of awakening me to the breadth and depth of white supremacist culture in education and in my socialization. He woke me up enough that day that I told him I thought he had a good point. I promised to do my research and, as I was able, I would bring to class additional readings from African and African American sources that would be relevant to our subject matter. From that point I started another phase of my education, something that public schools, Baylor, Golden Gate Baptist, and Duke had not taught me.

Do you dream and weep sometimes about the way that things should be?

I'm not going to drag this long story out. The main point I want to make is that coming to Shaw made me a better person. By responding to the student in my class that day, I was becoming a better scholar. By learning what I was learning in black studies sources and among black students and colleagues and as a member of a black church, I was being changed. Yes, I went through periods of thinking that I had become quite "woke" only to discover all over again just how parochial my thinking, embedded in whiteness, remained. Ultimately, I came to realize that it would only be when I could know and feel that my brothers and sisters at church and at work and in the classroom were truly my people, not "those" people, but my people, that I would begin to approach the change that must come for me and for the world.

I didn't become black. I'm not the great white hero, the great white hope, or the bearer of the white man's burden. But my people are the ones whom God has sent my way, regardless of families of origin or cultures of separation. It's a theological argument that Willie Jennings has helped so many of us see: all of us Gentiles, whether European or African, Anglo-Saxon or Zulu, have been invited in Jesus Christ to love and be loved by a God who first of all was not ours. We are the grafted in, yet fully received as friends and as joint-heirs.

When I was a child, I used to daydream a lot,
But they told me that it would not last.
I wouldn't have time for such a waste of my mind
When my life started moving fast.
Now that I'm grown, I find that life with no dreams
Is a hell that I simply can't bear.
If it's all right I'd like to open my mind
And see if my dreams are still there.

The contextual possibility of learning that sort of theological anthropology and soteriology of invitation into the Jewish specificity of the God of Jesus Christ is why I have stayed at Shaw. The socialization necessary to try to become that kind of grafted-in person is why I have needed to be at Shaw. It would be nearly impossible to have done so in very many places. And for that reason, I hold the deep conviction of the Alma Mater, "Long may thy works be proud, undimmed thy fame." I've learned to sing the words of James Weldon Johnson, standing between people of darker skin than mine, understanding the truth about us and our ancestors, who in different ways "have come over a way that with tears has been watered....treading a path through the blood of the slaughtered." It is my colleagues' and my students' history, and it is also my history, although our forebears lived through it in different roles, with different power, and perceiving it from very different worlds.

This is a truth that teaching at Shaw has helped me to see. Teaching theology, filtered through my heritage and my hermeneutical strivings to make sense of it in black church settings, is something I learned to do by looking into the eyes and faces of my students, listening to their responses, and contemplating what we are together learning. That is why I have stayed at Shaw. And staying at Shaw has made me to be who I am. I can't predict how much longer I will be teaching at Shaw, as my retirement age approaches. Like my friend mentioned at the beginning of this post, I am wondering what the next part of my life should be about. Maybe a change is coming, or maybe I will remain here in assurance that the path I have been on is the one that will continue to lead me home. But I can be sure that I will never be away from Shaw wherever I go, for this community has made all the difference in who I am, and they are in me.

Come dreaming with me, dreaming with me, admission is free.

In Honor of Stella Goldston and Grady "E.P." Goldston

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Broadway) — Mon, 24 Sep 2018 15:38:00 +0000

At Shaw University Divinity School, for the entire time I have been on faculty (almost 19 years), there has been one glue that has held all things together. That is our administrative assistant/registrar/student counselor/information center/receptionist/faculty support staff Stella Goldston. Before Shaw Divinity became only the third ATS accredited theological school in North Carolina, following only Duke Divinity and Southeastern Theological Seminary, Stella was already carrying a load of duties to support the faculty and students in their education. Since that time, we have seen five deans come and go. Stella has learned how to work with each one to accomplish his goals and keep the program steadily moving.

Last Wednesday, September 19, 2018, Stella's husband "E.P." died after they had shared 50 years of marriage.

Just over five years ago when Everly died and I became a widow, I'm sure that for some moment I felt I was the only person who has endured such a devastating loss. Part of the awakening of my humanity that I underwent during that period of Everly's illness and dying involved becoming deeply aware of the struggles that my students and colleagues, my fellow church members and friends, and people all around me were also enduring. Previously such things had seemed so distant, so irrelevant, to the life I was living. It is a sad thing to realize about oneself, having already reached one's mid-fifties in age. Let's be satisfied to say that I have grown somewhat beyond that now.

A result is that the stories of others' lives, whether fictional stories of lives in books and media or lives of the flesh and blood people around me, take me to a place of memory and empathy. I've been struggling with my schedule this week, preparing to leave for Hong Kong tomorrow, and having so many details to tie up. Unable to make the trip to Sanford for the funeral, I found myself suddenly overwhelmed by the thought of Stella Goldston's loss.

I had met "E.P." briefly on occasions when he had driven Stella to work from their remote home near Pittsboro, NC. His health had been declining in recent years, and we had feared for his life at times before. Yet he continued to be blessed with more days, and Stella showed great devotion to support him and care for him in the ups and downs of his physical condition. She has had to take more days away from the office in recent months, and the entire ordeal of their lives as they passed the end of their seventh decade has been a struggle. Yet Stella remains an encourager of the faculty and students. She offers her assistance quickly and without reservation. She lifts our spirits and keeps us together. She is a committed servant leader in our community.

Therefore today, in honor of Stella and of her marriage, and in memory of her beloved husband "E.P.", I will repeat the words I overheard that swept me into the moment of empathy and memory. Hearing them helped me realize my debt of gratitude for Stella's life and my care for the depth of loss she now faces. Perhaps with a bit of self-centeredness, I also confess that these words reminded me of how much loss I feel that Everly is not able to share the joy of this trip to Hong Kong with me. Thank God for the Psalms.

From Psalm 22:14-15

I am poured out like water,
and all my bones are out of joint;
my heart is like wax;
it is melted within my breast;
my mouth is dried up like a potsherd,
and my tongue sticks to my jaws;
you lay me in the dust of death.

Staying still in the devastation of this moment is a way of recognizing and honoring the value of a person's life and of a loving, caring relationship. And so we sit in the condition of being poured out, out of joint, melted, and dried up. Grateful--yet overwhelmed by the loss.

May God, the Source of All Goodness, bless Stella and her family in this time of grief and loss. May the Eternal Son receive "E.P." in loving embrace and joyful celebration of a life well lived and a wife well loved. May the Holy Spirit of God surround, accompany, fill, uphold, and lead Stella Goldston in the coming season of her life. And may we, the ones with whom "E.P." shared his beloved Stella, be to her a shield and staff through her time of grief. Amen.

**************
For those who would like to show support for Stella Goldston in this time of grief and loss through concrete and monetary support, let me offer the following opportunity.
https://www.gofundme.com/stella-goldston-fund

Thoughts Before David's Wedding--Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Broadway) — Mon, 13 Aug 2018 22:21:00 +0000

As almost all families do, we became convinced quickly that our David was brilliant and far advanced beyond his age. Certainly two ways he was gifted in the first year were growth and sleep. He was a hungry baby and grew accordingly. From eight and three-quarters pounds (all three of our babies were born within two ounces of one another's weights) to over thirty pounds at age one, he was a fast grower. Maybe all of the eating and growing played a role in how well he slept. Two beginner parents couldn't be more thankful than to have a baby who slept mostly on schedule and over fourteen hours a day.

The more mobile David became, the more we realized his capacity to focus in on one thing and stay at it. The first "research and study" commitment we discovered involved small balls, those baby's interlocking beads, and buckets. David would take apart the "necklace" of plastic beads and place them one-by-one into a bucket or pitcher until he filled it up or ran out of beads and balls. Then he would find another bucket, and carefully remove each item from the first bucket to place it into the second bucket. There were, of course, times for dumping the bucket, followed by placing all items back into the bucket. As he got able, he would put the beads back together in a string, then take them apart and place them in a bucket. Day after day, little David pursued this vocation. What he was learning from it probably goes far beyond what we might imagine. Taking a riff from the old Monty Python jokes about British bureaucracy, we used to say that baby David worked for the "Ministry of Taking Things Out of Things and Putting Them Into Other Things."

Duplo blocks provided a new variation on this crucial research task. If I stacked fifteen or twenty or more colorful Duplo square blocks in a tall tower, he would rush to claim it from me and painstakingly remove each block from the tower, either placing it in a bucket or placing it on a flat Duplo base piece. It would get tedious, but I could think back and come up with many more examples.

Along with the balls and blocks, David also was obsessed with books. I was a graduate student at Duke when he was an infant, and I shared a big part of the daily child care while Everly went to work to make a living for us. When he was awake, and we weren't busy with playtime, he would often sit on the bed and look at books. With a full load of classes, I was almost always holding a book. One of our rooms was packed full of bookshelves. Then Everly would get home from teaching school in the evening, and after dinner she would be working with papers and books. David got the impression early that human beings must mostly read books, so he dove in and started reading. At night we would have to read every book in sight, and repeat some if necessary. Years later, we carried a milk crate to the Durham County Library to check out enough books, sometimes with twenty or forty on one subject, to keep the boy busy.

That intense research and study drive with focus on a single subject continued for many years. He knew all about birds, about geography, about Mayan and Aztec civilizations, about dinosaurs, about Bible stories, about folk tales, and so many more topics which he would press into until he had exhausted the resources available at The Regulator Bookshop, Sandy Creek Books, the public library, the Gothic Bookshop, and any other sources we could find. He also turned his focus to book series, and would read every volume of the Boxcar Children, Ramona, Fat Chance Claude, Berenstain Bears, The Magic School Bus, Roald Dahl, and on and on.

The curiosity to learn in depth about a subject and the ability to focus through to understand the breadth of the subject describes to me one of the amazing gifts that David came into the world to display. It's never gone away. Focus and discipline get harder as we get older and face more complicated tasks, but no one can seriously doubt that David is gifted in this way. In recent years, his orchids and cacti, which expanded to his community garden plot and his prize-winning Dahlias, his rocks and crystals, his knowledge of how to care for dogs--all of these show us again and again what an impressive capacity for useful knowledge he has. Even his editing and research-oriented employment has let this gift become manifest in the workplaces where he has thrived in Ann Arbor.

And ultimately, this sometimes quiet and shy boy, became a fascinating conversationalist. It's a joy just to get him started sharing all that he has learned and thought about.

Thoughts Before David's Wedding--Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Broadway) — Mon, 13 Aug 2018 03:10:00 +0000

In a couple of weeks, my oldest child, David, will get married.  He is 32, and we have all come a long way since that first day he joined us out in the air and under the stars on a night in 1986.  Everly had gone to work like other days, planning to take leave soon.  It was still at least a couple of weeks from the "due date," but David got ready to be born.  She called, and I hurried to Nimitz High School where she was teaching so we could go to the Irving Community Hospital.  It was a long afternoon and evening of waiting.  The doctor was watching the Texas Rangers baseball game and joking that we had to name the baby for whoever was at bat when he was born, and the doctor was pulling for Oddibe McDowell.

All did not go as planned, and the medical staff decided to do an emergency C-Section.  That meant I was not allowed into the room for the procedure.  I was panicked, worried about the dangers of general anesthesia.  But that process moves quickly, and soon I was brought into the operating room and shown this little, red, squinting, frowning boy and allowed to hold him briefly.  Once Everly woke up again, all was well, and we started a long journey together in our sixth year of marriage.  Within a couple of months, we were moving to Durham, where all kinds of wonderful things unfolded for all of us.

A while later, I somewhat reluctantly told Everly, that the moment I looked on that little baby, who came from our love and the heritage of our families, changed my self-understanding and my life more than any other moment in my life.  Joy flooded and overwhelmed the room as I gazed upon little David.  I explained that it was not a replacement or advancement over having met her.  It was not more significant than knowing her, but at the same time it was more intense and systemically life-changing than anything else.  I should add that David's birth was not more beautiful and love-filled than Naomi's reluctant and delayed journey into the world or Lydia's scheduled and efficient planned C-Section birth.  The love just grows.  But I was an experienced Dad by the time Naomi and Lydia arrived.  David was a tsunami of grace that washed over us and our little home in Grand Prairie, Texas, and we continue to reside in that grace as he embarks on his own venture in making a family. 

Waiting for the Revealing of the Children of God

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Broadway) — Mon, 21 May 2018 01:57:00 +0000

Romans 8:19-27

19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; 20 for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; 23 and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.

24 For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

26 Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. 27 And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

From this text today, I want to reflect on the phrase, “Waiting for the revealing of the children of God.”

Back in April, it was not my day to give words of tribute to our pastor, teacher, and friend, Dr. Turner, on the occasion of his retirement from teaching at Duke Divinity School. But as I begin, I want to offer thanks that are relevant to this sermon today. I could make a very long list, but I will limit to three words of thanks.

There are many things that I have to thank William C. Turner for. I have met pastors of Black Baptist congregations before whose first reaction to me was to be suspicious of what kind of angle this white man is playing. I don’t blame them. They have good reason to be suspicious. And I wouldn’t be surprised if at least part of Rev. Turner’s reaction to me when I showed up at Mt. Level was to wonder just what I might be up to. But whatever his range of thoughts may have been, his public and official reaction to me was never anything but care and welcome.

Some of you may think I still have a ways to go on this next matter, but I have to thank him for teaching me how to preach. I was at best a mediocre preacher in my experience up to the time I came to Mt. Level. I found in our conversations that Dr. Turner and I had similar ideas about what a sermon should accomplish and how it should be structured. But I had never had such a week-by-week training school of how to make the most of the divine opportunity of standing behind this sacred desk. While I still have much to learn, my colleagues at Shaw tell me I have become a decent preacher over the years. You all have had to endure my training, periodically sitting while I inflict my schooling in this craft. And you all have been very good to help me understand when I am doing better, or maybe not so much better.

But by no means least of all, I have Dr. Turner to thank for helping me to grow into a robust and rich understanding of the work of the Holy Spirit. I explain to my students in theology class that I come from a kind of Baptists whose doctrine of the Trinity is weak, almost replacing the Holy Spirit with the Bible. Dr. Turner’s writings on the tradition of the holiness churches and their relationship to the invisible institution of the black church before white people would allow free public worship by enslaved Christians—these have awakened me to a lively and powerful understanding of the Spirit’s work in the church. His insights and guidance helped me not to ignore the way other theologians pointed me toward the Spirit’s work.

So today on the festival of Pentecost, the high holy day of the Spirit and the church, I cannot but stand before you to offer praise to God the Spirit who comes to us, pursues us, convicts us, calls us, fills us, and drives us onward toward God’s purpose for us. We gather today to worship God who is Spirit, and we must worship in spirit and in truth. We cannot come trampling the courts of our God who sees deeper into our hearts than we can see ourselves. We cannot gather with pretense of self-righteousness before the convicting Spirit of God. We cannot fast, cannot pray loud, wordy prayers, cannot try to impress others with our vocal expertise, cannot wear fashionable displays, cannot boast of our righteousness, and expect to please God who is Spirit. We worship in truth. We come and offer our righteousness as filthy rags before the Holy Spirit of God. We humble ourselves to pray with pleading for the Spirit to fill us and guide us. We gather in this sanctuary made sacred not by our feet, but by the Spirit who sets us on our feet every gifted day that we awaken into the world God has made.

“Come, Spirit! Come!” is our worship cry. “Send the power!” is our plea to the God of heaven and earth. Like the disappointed and confused, yet hopeful followers of Jesus in the first century, we bring ourselves together into one place, and behind closed doors we await the Spirit promised to us by Jesus. We long to be nothing less than the very body of Christ, Christ’s presence on this piece of ground, a glimpse of the glory of God enlivened by the unction of the Spirit. The church, the household of faith, gathers in the Spirit’s power to be the church, to be God’s people, the beloved community living as God created us to be, in fellowship with one another through our shared life in the Spirit.

This is the festival we celebrate today, and it is good and right to seek to know how the Spirit works and leads us on a day like today. The apostles found themselves surprised to know the way that the Holy Spirit would work among them. Empowered by the Spirit’s movement, they served God in ways that they had not imagined. The Jews gathered in Jerusalem for the festival also encountered the surprising work of the Spirit, hearing the preaching in their own languages from dozens of lands and locales in the known world. Pentecost reminds us that no matter how much we thought we knew about God, God will still surprise us in the work of the Spirit.

The texts for today include the story of the first Pentecost Sunday in the history of the church. We have already acknowledged that story from Acts and will have it in mind throughout our worship. However, I am focusing on the epistle for today. It speaks to the kind of experience that the earliest church gathered in Jerusalem had faced as they waited for the coming of the Spirit with power. Even though the first Pentecost of the church had happened during the first half of the third decade from the birth of Christ, what we might call the “30s,” Paul is writing more than two decades later about a similar pattern of experience in relation to the Spirit. Yes, the Spirit had come at Pentecost with power. Yet the Christians in Rome found themselves also waiting to see what the Spirit might be about to do.

This entire eighth chapter of Romans is a study of the work of the Spirit in the life of the church. We cannot let ourselves try to create our own way of living, to be guided by our own desires apart from God’s transforming Spirit. On our own, we will try to earn our place with God. We will think God owes us something. We will try to game the system and get over on God and one another. But the Spirit lifts us out of this self-centered, selfish way. The Spirit sets us free from sin and death. We who are united to Christ and one another share in the Spirit. The Spirit who enlivened the executed Jesus now gives life to our mortal bodies and to the corporate body of which we are limbs and organs. As a people, we learn to listen for the Spirit’s voice. The voice of the Spirit has not been isolated in any one of us, but each of us has the Spirit working to guide and shape our lives together as God’s people. No one has a corner on the Spirit’s leadership.

Thus, we all listen for the Spirit’s voice in one another. We listen to the still, small voice of God calling for us from our inmost hearts. We pray. We study. We praise. We listen. And often, we must wait. Paul tells the Romans that in their time, during the fifth decade after Jesus’ birth, creation waits with eager longing. Creation…that’s a big word, a big idea. It’s kind of like a popular word from our era, the “universe.” Creation means everything that exists that is not God, but which comes from God. It is stars and planets, atoms and subatomic particles. Creation is plants and animals, rocks and rivers. Creation is food and drink, atmosphere and soil. Creation is humanity in community, neighborhood and countryside.

So if our era of living is anything like the era of Paul the Apostle’s living, then we might conclude that also in our time, creation is waiting. The land on which our sanctuary rests is waiting; the trees that line our parking areas, the grass in the cemetery, and the stones carved with our ancestors’ names are waiting. The timbers that were carted down from Granville County wait with eager longing. The congregations worshiping across the street and down the road, the neighbors busy in their yards or homes, those sleeping in on a Sunday morning are all waiting. The residents of Mill Grove who continue generations of family in this part of town as well as the immigrants from Mexico who found this neighborhood attractive and affordable wait with eager longing. The workers at the Circle K, at the Bojangles, at the Waffle House, and at the Advance Auto Parts are waiting. The worn out gravel roads, the boarded windows, the wrecked cars all in rows long to be set free from decay. The poles that support power lines or t.v. and internet cables, the yellow stripes that divide lanes where we drive, even the deep pit where gravel is quarried wait for the revealing. The new families who found a place to raise their kids off Hebron Road wait. The hardworking folk who walk down our streets to reach the bus stop so they can go to work are eager. The dogs and squirrels and cats and foxes and birds who live all around us—all creation is waiting with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God.

Are there any children of God in Mill Grove? How will they be made evident? What would make anyone believe that there are children of God here? God made this world, this vast creation, with the purpose of building love and justice for all people, for all of God’s creatures. In all our efforts and failures, we have not managed to live up to what God wants for us and our neighbors in this world. Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church recounts our admirable history of serving God through more than a century and a half, and yet we read Paul’s words to the Romans and understand that creation is groaning in labor pains.

There are labor pains in our neighborhood as flood waters rise through the sewer system into our sanctuary. We wait for clean up of a mess and for proper repairs of a drainage system unready to handle the rains of the recent storm.

There are labor pains as teachers in our state, in West Virginia, Arizona, Oklahoma, Colorado, and across the land, stand up together to tell the legislature and state school board that enough is enough. Students need textbooks. Schools need buildings repaired. Teachers need to be able to afford a place to live and food for their tables. How long will politicians prefer to pay more for housing prisoners than for teaching children?

There are labor pains in Santa Fe, Texas, near the home of your own daughter Lydia Broadway who found herself driving by ambulance after ambulance on Friday morning a children with gunshot wounds were being driven to the hospital down the street from her home. All creation groans, waiting for the revealing. Where are the children of God? Where are the people who live as Jesus led them to live? Where are those who love God and neighbor? Where are they who bind up the wounded they find on the side of the road? Where will they be revealed.

Paul says that even we groan. We wait as a woman in labor. The urgency can be overwhelming. The possibility of what may come lies beyond a struggle that we fear we may not be ready to face. We long for our adoption into the family of God. We know that Jesus has come to us, that we have followed him, that he has saved us, yet we find ourselves longing for the fulfillment of all that it means. We feel in our bodies the need for the fullness of God, of the Spirit’s presence and power, of the transformation from one degree of glory to another.

All creation waits, longs, groans, for the Spirit to set us free. Free to be what God made us to be. Free to live as God calls us to live. Free to share our lives with abandon, with relentless affection, with humble service toward one another. Come, Spirit! Rule in our hearts today!

For many of us, the calling of Vision 150 has become a sign of the Spirit’s presence. [Vision 150 is a plan to enlarge our church’s ministry in our community, including replacing a no longer structurally sound building with a new facility that will support more community ministries.] We have grown into the vision, perhaps initially skeptical or doubtful, waiting for the Spirit to take hold of us. We have seen signs of the Spirit moving in new ministries and in concern for the use of the land beneath us. We have talked about the need to know our neighbors. We have recognized that this corner of our town has needs that we may, perhaps, be strategically situated to be able to help meet.

And still we wait. We wait to see an adequate down-payment toward building a facility. We wait for the future breaking of ground and the passing of a treasured but weary landmark as it is replaced with functional spaces for ministry. We wait with all creation to see what will be revealed.

On the other hand, if we claim to be the followers of Jesus, if we have given our lives to our Lord, if we have the Spirit living in us, then part of what this letter to the Romans is saying to us is that we are the ones creation is waiting for. We are the children of God, or at least we are called to be them. God has touched us, laid a hand on us, filled us with the Spirit, and we are the ones to be revealed as the children of God.

All around us, creation is waiting to see if we will step into our calling. Will we be friends with the people who live on Denfield, Monk, Ryan, Bobs, Todd, Teel, Weeping Willow, Rainmaker, West, Sun Dried, Felicia, Summer Storm, Justice, Shay, Graymont, Melanie, Geranium, Miller, Cozart, Swanns Mill, Genlee, Magnolia Pointe, Fanning, Lillington, and more and more and more? Will we learn from them what kind of community they long to be part of? Will we make partnerships with neighbors to see Mill Grove flourish as more than just the houses near a fast food smorgasbord? Will we reach beyond to Old Farm, Argonne Hills, Danube, and Dearborn, where many of our Mt. Level family live? Will we be among the voices advocating for a just and equitable plan for improving or rebuilding Oxford Manor? Creation all around us is waiting to see what will be revealed in us.

And creation waits because it is not clear what is coming. Too many churches have closed themselves to their communities. They live far away, drive to their building, dress in their fancy clothes, get entertained, make networking connections, and leave, hoping never to have to talk to anyone who might be walking near their church building. Many churches have revealed themselves to be the latest version of a social club or an entertainment center, but not to be the children of God who are following Jesus toward God’s purpose of beloved community. Too many churches are satisfied to share a couple of hours of the week together, but want to be left alone to make their own friends and plan their own activities without concern for the people who live across the street or down the block from where they gather to worship God in the Spirit.

What will be revealed on this piece of land? Will it be the revealing of the children of God, the ones who love the people they meet on the street, who are willing to make new friends for the sake of the one who they have promised to follow? Will it be the children of this world who are mostly concerned with keeping up with the Washingtons or the Johnsons and watching their favorite shows and hiding inside their houses to avoid associating with the people they don’t even care to know? What will be revealed? All creation is waiting, eagerly anticipating, groaning for redemption and liberation.

We don’t see it yet, but we hope. We hope, and we wait with patience. And in our waiting, we already start to live the way that shows what kind of world we want. As the teachers of nonviolence have taught us, the path to the goal must take on the character of the goal. If we want to live in a loving world, then the path to get to it is to start loving right here as we walk toward it. If we want to live in a world with justice, then we need to hunger and thirst for justice as we seek to bring it into being. If we want to live in a peaceful world, a world of shalom, then we have to become peaceable people making peace with one another as we walk toward our goal. The means must be as pure as the end. The road to beloved community is to start building a community of love. The path to a friendly neighborhood is to start making friends with our neighbors. We live in the hope of what we are being called to be, but do not yet see.

The Spirit drives us to be the church that Jesus called us into. The Spirit gives us strength to make new relationships. The Spirit gives us power to change the character of our neighborhood. The Spirit calls us to make our home to be the foretaste of the Kingdom of God, the Reign of God in this world. In our weakness, the Spirit helps us. Even when we don’t know what to do first, the Spirit is way ahead of us, praying in us and with us for the fullness of God’s purpose to be revealed in us.

All creation waits, and the Spirit is drawing us forward. The Spirit is ready to make us into the very people God wants us to be. The Spirit works within and around us to make things happen that we are not sure can happen. The Spirit is transforming us to be the revelation of the children of God in Durham, on Hebron Road, on this soil and among these trees, on the streets and in the homes. Will we heed the Spirit? Will we walk in the Spirit? Will we let the Spirit reveal to us and to our neighbors that we can be what God has called us to be?

What a day that first Pentecost of the church was! Peter went far beyond his own learning to proclaim a new word. He recognized that the prophets had expected a day when a great transformation would begin. Whatever the barriers and limits that people had put on themselves, blaming it all on God’s will and God’s plan, the word coming from Peter and the apostles on that day said that God would be shaking things up. The young and old would all be blessed to see what God can do. The men and the women would all proclaim the world of God with power. On that day, Jerusalem changed dramatically, and the change had implications for dozens of cities and regions and language groups for miles in all directions. It was not a day for narrow vision or limited possibilities. The Spirit was doing the kind of work that would free creation from its bondage to decay. The labor pains were ending with the reward of transformation. The Spirit was bearing fruit that would expand and continue for millennia into the future.

Can we join that movement here in our neighborhood? Will we join the gospel band? Spirit, guide us!

Lord grant us the capacity to listen to your Spirit, to wait for the guidance we need, and to step out in public to reveal that as for Mt. Level and our house, we will serve the Lord. We will be the children of God revealed as the loving koinonia, the communion of sharing our lives and our goods and our gifts with one another for the good of all creation. Lord, send your Spirit to fill us. Spirit, change us. Spirit drive us forward. Come, Spirit! Amen, and amen!

***********

Benediction:

Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of the faithful and enkindle in them the fire of Your love.

Send forth Your Spirit; renew the face of the earth.

O God,

Who instructed the hearts of the faithful by the light of the Holy Spirit,

grant us in the same Spirit to be truly wise,

and ever to rejoice in Your consolation.

Through Christ, our Lord. Amen.

-->

If You Are Coming for Me...

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Broadway) — Sat, 02 Dec 2017 19:28:00 +0000

This is a sermon first preached at Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church on October 29, 2017.

Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18
19:1 The LORD spoke to Moses, saying:
19:2 Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.
19:15 You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor.
19:16 You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor: I am the LORD.
19:17 You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself.
19:18 You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.

Matthew 22:34-46
22:34 When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together,
22:35 and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him.
22:36 "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?"
22:37 He said to him, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.'
22:38 This is the greatest and first commandment.
22:39 And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'
22:40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."
22:41 Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them this question:
22:42 "What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?" They said to him, "The son of David." 22:43 He said to them, "How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord, saying,
22:44 'The Lord said to my Lord, "Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet"'? 22:45 If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?"
22:46 No one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.

Recently Congresswoman Maxine Waters found herself under attack in public because of her strong stands taken against white supremacists and her criticisms of the President. She has gained quite a reputation for her outspokenness, and as a matter of both personal defiance and of encouragement to young women to speak their minds, she has been famously quoted as saying, “If you come for me, then I’m coming for you.” They’re a version of what we might call “fighting words.”

It’s been a long time since I could classify myself as a person who knows all the latest slang and popular phrases. By the time I figure them out, my kids are happy to tell me that I’m so far behind that “nobody says that any more.” So I don’t know if Maxine and I are out of fashion to use the phrase, “If you are coming for me…” to state a challenge to potential critics and enemies. I have a colleague in another city at a university not to be named who can be expected fairly often to offer up challenges to people who would dare to question or challenge her. I think she is the one I first learned the phrase from because she used it quite often. I’ve noticed several other younger academics inclined to take offense at people they think are looking for trouble, and they have started their responses with this phrase, “If you are coming for me….”

When I was looking at this familiar passage in Matthew 22, it struck me that Jesus was surrounded by challengers and enemies who were scheming and making plans about how they were coming for him. The beginning of chapter 22 continues a sequence of similar scenes. A day before, Jesus had thrown the whole city into an uproar, taking over the temple, chasing away moneygrubbers and cheats who were exploiting the poor by jacking up prices on supplies for worshipers hoping to offer sacrifices.

It was probably a fine-tuned system of outsourcing public business to private contractors. The highest bidders got to set up their tables and animal pens in the temple for a fee, and maybe an extra kickback to the officials to secure their favored position as a preferred vendor. Jesus messed up the furniture, scolded the vendors, chased away the animals, and then would not let anyone walk through the temple. Both the priestly leaders and the Roman occupiers held emergency meetings to consider what kind of response they should make. The may have met all night to get ready to come for Jesus when the morning broke.

At the beginning of the day, when Jesus showed himself in town again, the leaders of the temple were coming for him. They asked him why he thought he had authority to act the way he had been acting. Jesus was a shrewd political operator. He knew that the crowds were on his side, so on this next day after the big confrontation in the temple, he made use of that. This time he turned the metaphorical tables on these priests by asking them to weigh in with their opinions about John the Baptist. They were trapped. John was a popular figure and now a martyr. The crowds would not take kindly to the priests trashing one of their heroes. Jesus outmaneuvered them, and they went away frustrated and angrier.

For the rest of that day, groups kept caucusing, trying to come up with a way that they could come for Jesus and show him up. They were sure they could outwit him. They knew he had to be just a backwoods bumpkin who they could eventually humiliate and get the people to turn on him. Sure of themselves, each group would come with a question or puzzle, only to be caught up by Jesus and have to walk away. It almost became a contest between various cliques and factions to see who could get to Jesus first. After the chief priests and elders failed, the Pharisees gave it a shot. When they couldn’t trick Jesus, the Sadducees gave their best try and failed as well. So at the beginning of our reading today, we learn that after the Sadducees failed, the Pharisees got up their nerve again and came with the question about the greatest commandment. Jesus’ answer was so good, they had nothing to say in reply.

I guess they thought he might say the law was of no value or something similarly rebellious. Instead, he went to the deep meaning of the law, quoting two of the most beloved teachings of the Torah which were revered by the rabbis. They had come for him over and over, and to no avail. So when they had nothing left to argue about, Jesus came for them. He posed them a puzzle from the Psalms, a hermeneutical conundrum about the Messiah as the Son of David, but also as the one whom David himself called Lord. They were mad as hornets at the trap Jesus set for them, and again refused to answer his questions because they feared the crowd’s reaction if they condemned Jesus publicly, even though that’s what they wanted to do.

It’s as if Jesus had said to them, “If you are coming for me, then you had better be ready to face the truth.” “If you are coming for me, then you had better realize who it is you are dealing with.” “If you are coming for me, know that I am calling all God’s children together.” Jesus was fine with their challenging questions, but they weren’t ready for the kind of answers he brought.

What made Jerusalem such a center for turmoil and political controversy? Why was the temple such a focal point for conflict when Jesus came to town? Probably any of us who have read and studied the gospels have raised these questions from time to time. We recognize that Jesus had enemies. We may be puzzled as to why anyone would not like Jesus, whom we have boxed into an image of sweetness and meekness. But if that’s as far as our thinking has gotten us, then we need to dig deeper and ponder further.

While the world of Jesus was in many details very different from ours, there are also many ways in which we need to look at his world as similar to ours. We don’t have a Caesar or occupying Roman legions. We don’t have the same kind of Ruling Council of Priests, Scribes, and Elders, the Sanhedrin, or partisan groups called Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians, and Zealots. On the other hand, we do have Presidents and Governors and Mayors. We have Capitol Police and State Police and Sheriff’s Deputies and ICE Detention Officers. We have a City Council and County Commissioners and a General Assembly and a Congress. We do have Democrats and Republicans, a Tea Party and Anarchists and the Alt-Right. We have the Chamber of Commerce, Bank of America, Walmart, AIG, Amazon, and GlaxoSmithKline.

In our world, as in Jesus’ world, the people who are claiming the most power are scheming together to make sure that anyone else who might want power will have trouble getting hold of it. They look for wedge issues, and they make up ways to divide communities against one another. The Sanhedrin was trying to drive a wedge between Jesus and the crowds of people who had come to the Passover Festival. They were hoping their provocative questions would break down the popular consensus around Jesus and get people arguing with one another. As Jeanne DeCelles has written (New Heaven, New Earth),

Jesus did not get into trouble with the powers of his day simply by challenging the individual behaviors of his hearers. His downfall came from challenging the very systems of his society. He challenged the cornerstones. Just as the values of Madison Avenue, Wall Street, and the Pentagon conflict with the gospel, so too with Jesus and the institutions of his time: he was in conflict with the power structures of his own day, religious and civil alike.

Yes, on the day after Jesus cleared the temple, they came for him. They were set on bringing him down by dividing the crowds against him. On this day, they would not succeed. But they would keep trying.

Ironically, the Roman Empire’s agents were using the same strategy against the Jewish leaders that the Sanhedrin was using against Jesus and his followers. They played favorites and offered benefits to some and not to others. Some Jewish leaders were called Herodians because they had signed up to play along with the Roman appointed kings in the family of Herod. Others, the Sadducees and Pharisees, had originated when the previous empire’s Greek rulers worked to divide Jews against one another before the Maccabean uprising. Now the Romans played Sadducees and Pharisees against each other, and here they were taking turns at Jesus. All the while, they were maneuvering for power against one another. And the Zealots were lurking on the margins, looking for the chance to stir up turmoil in hopes that it might lead to a revolution to overthrow Rome.

This strategy of empire to divide God’s children against one another is a perennial and highly successful means of keeping the rest of us down. Rev. Dr. Barber regularly instructs whoever will take time to listen that the strategy of the powerful and wealthy has always been to convince poor whites that no matter how bad their lives are, at least they aren’t black. Now they also try to divide blacks against Latinos, white men against minorities and women, and any potential crack in the social fabric they can capitalize on.

Barber calls on us to remember how the fusion politics that brought black and white farmers and business owners and families together to stand up for their common interests and the common good managed to overthrow the plantation politics that concentrated wealth and power in the hands of a few families. The last thing the empire wants the rest of us to do is to figure out that we could work together to make things better for all of us.

Some of you were here at Mt Level last Thursday night. If you arrived near 7 pm, you may have had to park far away. The sanctuary was full to overflowing with people from many different parts of Durham. There were Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Pentecostals, Holiness, and some who claim no denomination. There were Unitarians and Reform Jews. There were members of non-profits organized for the environment, for helping students, for supporting the unemployed, for promoting affordable housing, and for building community solidarity. There were African Americans, Latinos, pale-skinned folk, and Asian Americans. There were students from Duke and Carolina, from Central and Shaw. There were people from different neighborhoods, different professions, and different socio-economic classes.

We had every reason imaginable to divide against one another, create rivalries, look down on one another, and try to get an advantage over one another. But in this case, we did not do that. Not only the current member organizations, but a dozen more churches and community groups who hope to become members crowded into this hall. They came together, WE came together, because we realized that it is not our differences but our ability to build trusting relationships for mutual benefit that make us strong.

Moneyed interests and political powers of another sort may wish to tear us down by trying to divide us. They might try to make the Durham Committee or the People’s Alliance shun us or treat us as rivals. They might try to get the DCIA or the Ministerial Alliance to see our clergy leaders as a threat. They might encourage a new group like Durham for All to see Durham CAN as a giant to be knocked down and defeated. Durham CAN could act superior and ignore other potential partners in the struggle. But that’s not what happened here on Thursday.

On Thursday, when they came for us, we stood together to fight for better housing for all, for better wages for all, for a first and a second chance for all. The full parking lot and the full house of people on Thursday night is a glimpse of what it means to live up to the great commandment to love one another. It is love in action that stands up for those who struggle even when they don’t look or talk the way we do. It is, as our own pastor, Dr. William C. Turner, Jr., told the gathered masses, “the measure of who cares.” Which of the people in our community will bear the mark of those who care?

Of course, just because Durham CAN had over 600 people uniting around an agenda on housing and jobs does not mean we have arrived at heaven on earth. Maybe there is a small glimpse of what could be, but the powers of this world have many tricks and traps to continue to break apart what is strong and healthy and flourishing.

Even after a success, we can easily fall back into the trap of letting ourselves be divided and then trying to protect our little bit of turf from others. This is the nature of sin. Sin is the decay and even destruction of the good that God has accomplished in our lives and in our communities. Sin is turning away from the path of hope that we set out on. Sin is rejecting the best possibilities that God and our neighbors have to offer us. And it does not only happen in our cities and suburbs and countryside. It happens in our churches.

Jesus reminded the Pharisees and the crowds in the streets on that day that what God wants for us can be stated in a few crucial sentences. These two commandments represent the revelation in the Torah of the very purpose and meaning of creation and human existence. Late in the night when we can’t sleep, we may find ourselves asking why are we even here? What is the meaning of life? Well, Jesus answered those questions on this day in Jerusalem.

He told all who would listen that the God who is Love spoke the world into existence as an expression and fulfillment of the love that flows in eternity from each person of the Trinity, mutually and reciprocally, perfectly and unendingly. God made the world out of love and for love. We are here in the world to love. We are made to love God and to love one another. Love your neighbor as yourself.

Wayne Gordon says that when he was a young coach and school teacher, leading Bible studies with high school youth, those kids grew very serious about their devotion to God. One day, they brought an insight to him that powerfully changed his reading of this text.

They called his attention to the commandment to love your neighbor. They said, “If the individual Christian is supposed to love our neighbors, wouldn’t it be true that a church full of Christians is supposed to love our neighborhood?” Their deep insight helped him to recognize the call of God to start a church and make a long-term commitment to transforming a run-down, poor neighborhood into a place fitted to God’s purpose of abundant living and beloved community.

But few churches in our day share that kind of vision. We lock our buildings against the neighborhood and flee away to distant places to live. Church people don’t know their neighbors, and when they do know them, they don’t like them or want them inside their church buildings. The original families in a church grow suspicious of newcomers, and new members resent the people who try to hold on to power and position.

Churches start to function as subsidiaries to social power. They occupy socio-economic strata in the social order, so that executives and managers go to this congregation, professionals and academics go to the other congregation, laborers and factory workers here, schoolteachers and public employees there, and the unemployed or homeless don’t feel welcome at any church.

Erika Edwards, a professor at UNC-Charlotte, spoke to the Shaw Divinity School Women’s Conference about the heritage of scientific racism. In earlier eras, biologists, medical doctors, anthropologists, and various other scientists sought to prove what everyone already had decided was true—that white Europeans were superior to people of darker skin from other parts of the world. Very few scientists would be willing to make those kinds of claims in public in our time, but the residual effect of that era continues to operate in the thinking and structures of our culture and our churches. Edwards talked about ways in which ranking—from darkest to lightest skin—functions to classify people’s beauty and intelligence even today. Dividing and conquering even within communities of color prevents the kind of loving cooperation that would lead to the uplift of all.

Ruby Sales talked to us at the same conference about the way that generations are being divided against one another in the current political climate. On the one hand, she said young people do not know the history of the struggle and the costs paid by those who have gone before them. All they can see is that too many seem satisfied to have gotten a small piece of the pie, to have climbed up a few steps of the ladder, and no longer have a vision of change for the better.

On the other hand, older folks have become accustomed to their strategies of respectability politics to the point that the patterns of respectability have replaced the ideals of freedom, hope, and community. Wearing braids, getting tattoos, sagging pants, or short skirts are interpreted as evidence that young people have no dreams or care too little about themselves. They may blame the young people for the lack of knowledge of their history and of the costs paid for every advance, when it was the responsibility of their generation to pass down the story.

All over this country, young people are outside of the churches believing that those of us inside have become too elitist, too self-congratulatory, too closed minded, and too uncaring about the world around us. All over this country, people inside churches are wondering where the young people are, decrying how kids are so messed up these days, angry at the social forces they blame for undermining the lives and faith of our children. We have become divided against one another, and we are being conquered.

So even within our churches, we let the empire seduce us, divide us, turn us into parties and sects and cliques. But Jesus would have none of it. He turned the argument back around to the heart of the gospel. God has loved us. God made us for love. Love God with all that you are. Love one another. Love others by wanting for them everything good you would want for yourself.

Jesus was quoting from the Old Testament. Loving God who made us and loves us was the Shema, the core confession of the entire tradition of the Jews. Today’s text from Leviticus names many ways of thinking about what it means to love our neighbors. We must not harbor any hate. We must be willing to speak up and correct those who are bullying or cheating or doing harm to themselves and others. We can’t hold grudges or be happy at other people’s misfortune. We mustn’t be opportunists and getting advantage or money from what has hurt someone else.

Leviticus says that in graphic terms: you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor: I am the Lord. We must deal justly and judge others with justice. We can’t be respecters of persons. We must aim to do no less than to display the love of God, the character of God, in the way that we live.

How is it that we can resist sin and the powers, thrones, dominions, and authorities of this world in order to live according to God’s purpose and calling to love our neighbor? At its most basic level it involves a surrender of our willfulness and our selfishness to God. What is best for us and what we ought to do may not always be what we first wish for and want to do. Our vision is limited, but God in Jesus Christ has revealed to us the way that we should go.

Jesus has called us to be peacemakers, to hunger for justice, to be pure in heart, meek, and humble. Jesus has shown us the way to lead by becoming a servant, to give of ourselves so that there will be no need among us. And he summed it all up by reminding us to love God with all that we are and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Turning away from our limited self-interest, toward the richness of God’s interest in the flourishing of all our communities, all our neighborhoods—this is the path away from enslavement to sin and domination by empire and the powers of this world that have refused to bow the knee to Jesus.

Have you come to worship today with a searching heart? Have you found yourself jealous of the good others have and bearing grudges every time someone else found success? Are you worried that you will lose out because someone else who is struggling might get some of what you want? Have you wondered if God even cares for you or is on your side?

Have you ever come to know that Jesus came into the world to show us that God is for us? And if God is for us, who can stand against us? How many ways might we keep on dividing ourselves from one another when what God wants for us is to live in loving community? The Holy Spirit is active and present to call you today to unite yourself to God, to follow Jesus down a path of love and servanthood. If you have never given your life to God by following Jesus, there is no reason to continue to delay. Be joined to Jesus so that you live in him and he lives in you.

Have you let your church become your social club where you want to pick and choose the kinds of people who are allowed to join? Has church become a place of status where we can look down on the people who don’t measure up, feeling smug that we are the ones God likes? Has church become an in-group busily defining how many others we can put into the out-group?

If the Holy Spirit has quickened in you a desire to become holy as God is holy, to be set apart by the generosity of your love rather than by the uppity angle of your forehead, then renew your vow to God to be an apostle of love in your neighborhood, in your family, and in your church. God is stirring in Mt Level, and wherever people have ears to hear, to raise up leaders and to raise up a new generation.

If we are not ready to respond and ready to listen, we will continue to quench that work of the Spirit. Will we someday look back on Thursday night, October 26, 2017, as the last day in the history of our church that we saw a full house? Lord help us to be ready to open our hearts and our doors to whomever you send to us, that we might shine as a beacon of love and fulfill our calling to be beloved community in this corner of Durham. Let us not divide ourselves, but unite ourselves to those who are brokenhearted, alone, and struggling, even if they are different from us in so many ways.

If you are in search of a church home, we pray that the Holy Spirit will speak to you about where your life should be united to the work of Christ in our city. If the Spirit is prodding you today to say that Mt. Level is the community of God’s people where you should be, then we welcome you to join with us in the service of God that we have also been called to do. The doors of the church are open.

Whosoever will, may come into the loving community of neighbors who are gathered today to love one another. If you are coming for me, let me be the first to acknowledge that God is calling us into community. Let us be reconciled to one another, and take on the ministry of reconciliation in this world so full of those whom God loves.

The Importance of Remembering: A Sermon for Ordination to Ministry

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Broadway) — Tue, 29 Aug 2017 21:35:00 +0000

This sermon was preached on August 27, 2017, at First Baptist Church, Raleigh, NC (Wilmington Street) as part of the ordination service for Rev. Belinda Wisdom and Rev. Chris Whitaker.

Exodus 1:8-22

1:8 Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.

1:9 He said to his people, "Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we.

1:10 Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and, in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land."

1:11 Therefore they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor. They built supply cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh.

1:12 But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites.

1:13 The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites,

1:14 and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor. They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them.

1:15 The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah,

1:16 "When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live."

1:17 But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live.

1:18 So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, "Why have you done this, and allowed the boys to live?"

1:19 The midwives said to Pharaoh, "Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them."

1:20 So God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and became very strong.

1:21 And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families.

1:22 Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, "Every boy that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every girl live."

Romans 12:1-8

12:1 I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

12:2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God--what is good and acceptable and perfect.

12:3 For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.

12:4 For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function,

12:5 so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.

12:6 We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith;

12:7 ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching;

12:8 the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.

The Importance of Remembering

The story of the Hebrew midwives is familiar. Their names are less familiar, but the writers of the Torah made sure to include them so that we could know them: Shiphrah and Puah. They are crucial to the history of God’s salvation of Israel, and through Israel, the world. Let’s say their names: Shiphrah and Puah.

They were important members of the community because they played an important role at a crucial moment in everyone’s life. They weren’t like the bakers or fishers to whom people might go every day for bread or fish to eat. You didn’t stop by once a week to get any needed supplies. No one depended on them to lead periodic religious ceremonies, either weekly or monthly. Children didn’t go to them on school days to practice their reading or math. But Shiphrah and Puah were important.

When the time came to need the services of Shiphrah and Puah, a family would hate to have to do without them. Probably someone in any family had some experience with helping a woman through childbirth; however, Shiphrah and Puah were the communal stewards of the wisdom of generations. Moreover, they had seen it all. They knew well that every baby did not come into the world in the same way and at the same pace. They knew that women’s bodies and emotional strength were different. They had learned ways to encourage and calm and comfort mothers dealing with the pain and anxiety of giving birth. They could recognize when a baby was under stress or in danger. When it came time for Shiphrah and Puah to do their job, people would be foolish to ignore their gifts and skill.

That’s why the King of Egypt strategically chose them to carry out his diabolical plan. He was jealous of the prosperity of the Hebrew people. He was fearful they might rise up in rebellion. He was concerned about the loyalty to one another and their commitment to justice. Over the years, he and his predecessors had found the Hebrews to be useful as cheap immigrant labor. He knew that the Pharaohs had not always treated the Hebrew workers fairly. He needed a plan to make sure they would continue to be unable or unwilling to stir up a revolution.

Sadly, the King of Egypt did not understand his own formative history. He did not know how his ancestors had benefited greatly from the unexpected appearance of this sheep-herding clan from the northeast. He must not have been told the stories of the visions and dreams that the slave boy named Joseph had interpreted for the Pharaoh. Someone had not bothered to clarify that Joseph of the Hebrews had been vice-regent of the entire kingdom, supervising an era of great prosperity and power for Egypt among the nations who were their neighbors. So the Bible tells us that this Pharaoh did not know Joseph.

Not knowing Joseph meant that he was willing to use and abuse the descendants of Joseph for his own greed and ambition. Not knowing Joseph means he was not thinking about how “all life is interrelated.” He had not reflected on the fact that “We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny.” He apparently did not realize that “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” (MLK, Jr.) Those, of course, are words from Dr. King. Ken Medema has another way to say it pertaining to our being created by God: we are “bound together and finely woven with love.” But Pharaoh did not seem to know that.

He thought that he could get his way by dividing society into warring groups. If he could make the immigrants seem dangerous in the eyes of others, then he could try to leverage that fear and hate to get some things that he wanted. If he could single out a group who look and talk and eat and pray differently, then he could get others to flock to his agenda and follow him down any path.

I don’t know who Pharaoh’s advisers were. I suspect some had big investments in the construction industry. Some were in the extraction business, cutting and transporting stones for monumental construction projects. Other advisers probably had trained security teams for managing work projects. And he kept his generals close to try to make himself seem more patriotic. He had to know people who knew how to get financing for big projects. Above all, he loved building big towers to show off his power. His advisers knew how to manipulate their king to make him feel good about himself while deciding to do things that they wanted him to do.

To build his construction projects—cities, towers, roads, monuments—he needed a ready, inexpensive work force, so he was working the Hebrews as forced labor, drafted into “public service.” He made their working conditions worse and worse, without adequate compensation. They had to go home from a hard day of building cities and monuments and work more just to get food on the table. The King of Egypt had enough insight to realize he might not be able to keep these people down forever, so he huddled with his most devious advisors to come up with a plan. He was ready to compose and promulgate another Pharaoh-dential executive order. The one about making bricks without straw had been very unpopular. His advisers suggested that he work a back channel this time. They had an idea of where the weak spot was among his opposition.

He called Shiphrah and Puah to a meeting. He had nice chariot go by and pick them up. They were brought into the plush palace of the king for a face-to-face meeting. Anyone might be impressed and honored by such an opportunity. He was counting on the “wow” factor to win them over. He tried talking with them like they were buddies and allies. He explained to them what he wanted them to do.

Shiphrah and Puah were certainly overwhelmed by being in the palace. They may not have been reacting the way the Pharaoh wanted, but they were intimidated. They knew the cost of opposing the people in power. So they played along. He gave them some parting gifts and sent them back home to do his bidding.

Shiphrah and Puah are the predecessors of some more famous Hebrews who came along many centuries later. Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah were three Hebrew young men who were told by a great king to do something they knew they should not do. We know them by the names that king called them—Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. They had another friend named Daniel, whom the king liked to call Belteshazzar. But just as these young men understood that they could not meet the expectations of the king if they were to meet the expectations of God, so did Shiphrah and Puah.

The Pharaoh had asked the midwives to do something unspeakable. He wanted them to kill babies when they were born. Worried that the Hebrew boys would grow up to be “bad hombres,” Pharaoh wanted them killed before they had a chance to breathe the fresh air of the world God had made them to live in and love in. Pharaoh wanted to end their hopes and possibilities before they could ever get started. He had figured out that a secret deal with the midwives would solve his problems. But the problem with this Pharaoh, this most powerful ruler of his era, was that he had fallen into forgetfulness.

One of the great sins of power is forgetfulness. Now stop before you jump to conclusions. I’m not saying that when we sometimes forget the things we meant to do that it’s sin. I’m not saying that as we get older and names and words slip out of reach in the middle of a conversation that we are sinning. That’s not what I mean by forgetfulness today. The forgetfulness I am talking about has to do with the way violence and power work in society. Often when people scheme and cheat and push and shove to get what they want, they turn around and talk about how they earned it through virtue and character. This kind of forgetfulness retells the history to make the people with power the heroes. It retells the story to sanitize out the oppression and violence. The textbooks don’t call forced laborers slaves, but immigrant employees. They call forced segregation school choice. They call slaves happy members of the extended family. Forgetfulness becomes self-congratulation that erases the memory of violent, murderous schemes to gain and maintain control.

If everything had worked out the way Pharaoh was planning, he would have had little problem forgetting the conniving violence he employed to weaken the Hebrews. A cover story about disease or genetic defects would have been invented to rationalize so many infant deaths. All who knew the truth would be paid off or eliminated. Pharaoh was playing a dangerous game, but the stakes were high and the potential rewards were great. Pharaoh was willing to do what it takes to achieve his objectives and make Egypt great again.

Shiphrah and Puah returned to their homes and their work with a new resolve. They would have to redouble their efforts to save the lives of the Hebrew children. They could not be careless. If they openly disregarded the Pharaoh’s authority and flaunted their disobedience in order to look heroic, Pharaoh would find other agents to carry out his plan. And who knows what would happen to them for their rebellion? So Shiphrah and Puah had to have a workable plan. They had to get their story straight. Lives were at stake.

They realized that the very forgetfulness that was Pharaoh’s modus operandi could work in their favor. The King of Egypt did not know Joseph. He had forgotten the common history of the Egyptian Kingdom and the Hebrew immigrants. He had replaced it with a narrative rooted in the logic of difference. The logic of difference says that if you and I are different in a few ways, then perhaps we should conclude that we are different in every way. We might even be complete opposites. If my skin is light and yours is dark, then the logic of difference says that whatever I think is good about me must be the opposite about you. If I am good looking, you must not be. If I am hard-working, you must be lazy. The logic of difference is insidious and demonic. It hides the obvious truth we could see if we would just look at one another and get to know one another. It replaces our opportunity to know one another with the assumption of inscrutability, of unknowability. It is a reasoning process that has shaped the invention of the races in the modern world. We use it all the time in how we think about men and women, too. The logic of difference is an intentional kind of forgetfulness.

So when the Pharaoh had time to realize that there were still lots of new little Hebrew boys running around in the ‘hood, he sent his chariot out to get Shiphrah and Puah to bring them before a board of inquiry. He asked them why they would go against the specific instructions he gave them. They played on his prejudice. They leveraged his ignorance. They offered a story about how Hebrew women were different from Egyptian women. Of course, he knew that had to be true. He believed in the logic of difference with all his heart. So they set him up. They said that when they got called to help with a birth, these Hebrew women with short labor and fast childbirth would already be finished. The baby would be born, and their chance to secretly kill the baby boys was past. They didn’t say whether they had still managed to kill a few of the boys—they let him think maybe they had, or at least they were trying. Wow! Pharoah thought. This plan was harder than I thought! So it seems he sent them away with instructions to work harder and move faster to carry out their plan. Shiphrah and Puah survived another brush with the empire, and Hebrew parents and children were a little safer for a little longer.

It is a powerful story. It sets up the story of Moses’ birth. The desire to keep baby boys alive made it very difficult for Hebrew families in this time. Eventually, Pharaoh made it a patriotic duty for Egyptians to kill Hebrew baby boys. That led to the unique turn of events of Moses’ floating in the river and adoption into the household of the Pharaoh. How many other little boys did not survive the murderous plot against them? “Rachel, weeping for her children” was a cultural memory that flowed down through the centuries, all the way to the Exile.

This contrast of forgetfulness and remembering strikes me as a crucial message for today. We gather here in a commissioning service for those who have answered the calling of God to minister among God’s people and in the homes and streets and halls of power where we find the people God loves. What will be our modus operandi as we do this work? Will we surrender to forgetfulness and leave behind the people who brought us this far? Will we use our commission to lord over others and to use them to serve our greed and lust for power? Will we forget who Joseph was, or will we remember?

This story points to at least three ways in which remembering is crucial to taking up the mantle of servant leadership. First, we can see that Shiphrah and Puah remembered who they were. Second, we can recognize that they remembered who called them. And third, they remembered why they had been called.

The story of Shiphrah and Puah leaves one important detail uncertain. Were these midwives from the tribes of the Hebrews, or were they Egyptians who worked among the Hebrews? Some have argued that Pharaoh would have had little reason to trust them to do this horrible task if they were Hebrews. He would have selected Egyptians with whom he might hope to share a common prejudice against the immigrant Hebrews. That seems possible. Many, however, have argued that the midwives were part of the Hebrew community which was where they did their work. Various rabbis have supported this view down through the centuries. The wording in the text is ambiguous, but I think it doesn’t make a big difference for our purposes. In either case, whether Egyptian or Hebrew, these women remembered better who they were than did the Pharaoh.

These women had worked and built relationships among the Hebrew immigrants for long enough that they had become well-known, even respected in their work. When Pharaoh wanted to scheme with some midwives, these were the ones well-known enough to get the invitation to his palace. Even though he did not remember Joseph, apparently Shiphrah and Puah did.

Now the text does not mention that they knew Joseph. But they did clearly know the people of Joseph. They knew the goodness of family life, the love of friendship, the joy of new beginnings, the struggle of poverty, the pain of grief and loss. They knew flesh and blood human beings, created by God, made for love, given gifts and strength for work, striving to make the most of their situation. They knew the stories of cousins and aunts and uncles, of parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. They remembered the history of where they had come from, whether as Hebrew immigrants or as Egyptians who had cast their lot in friendship with the Hebrews sojourning in their homeland. They knew the people of Joseph. They remembered the many ways his character and virtue had been taught, shared, and passed down through generations of Hebrew children. They remembered the welcome of the Hebrews into Egypt and the gratitude and service the Hebrews offered in return. They remembered that they stood on the shoulders of giants. They remembered who they were.

In taking up Christian ministry, can you remember who you are? Not many among you were noble, not many wise, not many powerful. But each one has been given grace gifts by the Holy Spirit. Each earthen vessel is capable of having the power and wisdom of God poured into it for God’s use. God didn’t have to use you, but God has called you. The church didn’t have to notice you, but the church has acknowledged your potential and called you to a task. The Spirit didn’t have to fill you, but you have known the unction that only comes from God. Do you remember who you are?

In small towns and in some neighborhoods, it was traditional to get to know someone by asking, “Who is your momma? Who is your daddy? Are you so-and-so’s boy? Are you what’s-her-name’s girl?” It is about figuring out who you are by remembering who you come from. Are you from Joseph’s people? If you weren’t born to them, have you been grafted into their family? Do you remember what kind of people Joseph taught them to be? Are we going to see Joseph when we see how you live? Are you going to be the Jesus we see in the world? If you want to be God’s servant and a minister, then remember who you are.

We can also see that Shiphrah and Puah remembered who called them. Part way through the story, we might start thinking that the midwives who got called to the Pharaoh’s palace would become the Pharaoh’s agents. We might think they would be answering the call of their king and becoming his servants. But the story turned out differently. He was accustomed to being able to impress people or throw his weight around and get them to do his bidding. He was used to being the boss and hiring and firing according to his whims. So he seemed surprised when what he asked Shiphrah and Puah to do did not happen. When he called them back, he was probably looking forward to getting to say, “You’re fired!”

The story took a different turn. Not only did the Pharaoh stay oblivious to what was happening in the birthing rooms of the Hebrews, the One who really called these midwives took care of them. Shiphrah and Puah knew who they worked for. They knew who had called them out as leaders. We don’t know how many midwives served the Hebrew women, but it probably was more than two. So Shiphrah and Puah are representative figures. Maybe they were the leaders and organizers of the midwives. Whatever their role, they had a clear understanding who it was they worked for. So when the Pharaoh stepped in to try to be their new supervisor, they were polite and immediately disobeyed. They served the one who had put them to their task, not the one who wanted to use them to do his dirty work. And the story tells us that God stood by them, protected them, and blessed them mightily for remembering that it was God who called them.

Will you remember who you work for? One of the first things that usually happens in a church when a new minister comes along is that everyone tries to get a piece of her or of him. Folks want to have coffee or go out for lunch. They come by the office or call on the phone. The conversations may start very general and encouraging, but many of them end up playing an angle. People have grudges against other church members, or they have been upset ever since some group or program got eliminated. They have visited a church and seen something they like, or they are never satisfied with the way the Bible is taught. So they start recruiting the new minister to be on their side, to join their cause, or even to do their dirty work. They plant seeds of suspicion or communicate veiled ultimatums.

Who do you work for? Of course, Shiphrah and Puah worked for the families they served at times of childbirth, and you work for the people God is sending your way. But don’t get that mixed up. You work for them because you work for God. Your work for them is to do the work of God, not to join in schemes for power or influence, for greed or status. You are not their stepping stone, but they are not your stepping stone either. God is the one who has called, us, and we are pressing on toward the high calling of Christ Jesus. God took hold of you, and now you are striving to take hold of that for which you were taken hold of by God. You have to lay aside the weights. You have to shun the temptations to sin that so easily get your imagination. You have to leave some things behind so you can reach out for the fresh gifts of God’s Spirit. Remember who called you. Remember who you work for. In all your ways, acknowledge God, and God will direct your paths. If you want to be God’s servant and a minister, then remember who called you.

Let me highlight a third way of remembering that we can see in the story of Shiphrah and Puah—they remembered why they had been called. They were midwives. That was their job. It was their calling. They knew they served God’s people. They knew that it was God who called them. And they also remembered what is was they had been called to do. They remembered why they had been called. Their job was helping families bring healthy children into the world. They had to learn the traditions, learn from experience, develop the science through observation, be alert and rested for the job, give their best every time, and find the joy and fulfillment that comes from a job well done, a life lived in faithfulness.

Now and then a birth might not go as hoped. There might be complications and injury to the mother. There might be problems that keep a child from being born strong, or alive. Shiphrah and Puah had to be ready for these times as well. They were called to do their best to help a family bring a baby into the world, and they also were called to support and care for families who struggled with the vicissitudes of life that can come with childbirth. They had a mission. They were servants of God and servants of their fellow human beings. They were called with a purpose, and they could not let that purpose slip away from their vision.

Too often, a change in role can cause a change in how a person relates to others. We all have seen it. It can happen in even the most minor of situations. Sometimes, in a church committee, people have worked together for many years, sharing, speaking up, listening, and carrying their loads as equals, as children of God seeking to do what they are called to do. Then one of the group who has not been the chair of the committee before becomes the chair. Suddenly, the new chair acts like a different person. Because of a title, she or he starts behaving as if the other committee members should only do the listening part, not the thinking and talking and deciding parts. It starts becoming a one-way relationship of boss and underling rather than equal partners. And all that can happen when there isn’t even any program money to decide how to use. Rising into an office can confuse some people so they forget what they were called to do.

Pharaoh thought he could get Shiphrah and Puah to forget that they were called to help life flourish and get them to become murderers and life-destroyers. He thought that their promotion to being in his inner circle would change their view of their work. Thank God that he was mistaken. They could not see any way to accept his orders to kill the baby boys. They were strategic in finding a plan to make sure they could prevent that from happening under their watch. They knew their calling, their purpose, and they kept their eyes on the prize.

You are called to be a servant. Minister is the translation of the Greek word diakonia, which is also translated as servant. You are not overlord. You may oversee some programming, some budget, some mission tasks, but oversight is not the same as being the boss of me, the boss of him, or the boss of her. God has called you to serve. By now you may know some specific ways in which God wants you to serve. So if you are called to preach, do so with truth and conviction. If you are called to teach, study to show yourself approved. If you are called to evangelize, make your life good news to those God sends your way. If you are called to hospitality, then receive God’s children with joy and generosity. If you are called to pray, then make yourself a vessel of God’s work as you are transformed to do his will.

The lectionary epistle text for today reminds me of my own calling to ministry. It seems centuries ago that I was 18, but at that tender age I accepted God’s call to minister. I had no idea where it would lead, and could not have predicted I would ever be in a position to stand before you here today. But in those early days of my calling, I often returned to this epistle text from Romans 12.

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, [I beseech you] by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect. For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.

At 18 I was a mixed up mess of overconfidence and fear. I had been told by everyone that I was smart and gifted, and I often believed the hype. But some of the time I knew it was just hype. I knew I was just a scared kid trying to make it in a bigger world. I was trying to listen to God and trying to be somebody. I didn’t want to disappoint my family, and I wanted my friends to like me. And no small part of me was trying to impress the girls I couldn’t get my eyes off of. If that’s not a description of an earthen vessel, I don’t know what is. So when I read Romans 12, it reminded me I had some changing to do. I needed to grow up from my immaturity. I needed to put aside the wants and ways of the world that I had learned growing up, and I needed to take on the wants and ways of God. I needed to follow the way of Jesus, which this verse describes as presenting oneself onto the altar as a living sacrifice to God. It’s a complicated metaphor. I was relieved that it said I could be a living sacrifice, even if I also realized in the back of my mind that when Jesus lived that way it had cost him his life.

This giving up of my self-made image, my self of my own construction, was the crucial step to learning God’s will for me. I longed to hear God’s call, and this epistle text told me that by giving myself, I could find my way to discern the will of God, and that it would be good. It would be excellent. That’s what I wanted. To achieve as high as I could, but within the scope of what God wanted me to do. I couldn’t think too highly of myself, but had to put myself on God’s altar to be remade, to be transformed, to become God’s servant to do God’s will. If I would walk that path, God promised to make the most of me for a particular task in my time and my place.

Do you remember why you have been called? Too many lose sight of it when they get dollar signs, TV ratings, and big buildings on their minds. Others just want to go their own way and can’t figure out how not to try to be the one who is large and in charge, even if it means only with a tiny flock of longsuffering church people. God has a good purpose for you. It means putting yourself aside and letting God replace your ambition and greed with God’s own purpose and grace. If you want to serve God and be a minister, then remember why you were called.

I rejoiced when I saw that this story of Shiphrah and Puah was the lectionary text for this Sunday. For any of you who heard it preached this morning, I pray that the Holy Spirit has brought you an additional gift from the richness of the Holy Scriptures as you heard it again. But there is one more thing I want to point out about the importance of remembering as we close.

There are many times when the Bible lets us down concerning God’s love for and calling of women to lead and work for the Kingdom of God. Written in times when women had little status in society, too often the texts omit and forget their names. In the story of the great flood, we never learn the names of the very important characters who are the wives of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Even in the stories of Jesus, a Samaritan woman from Sychar who comes to get water at the well, a Syro-Phoenecian woman who gives Jesus the opportunity to expand the grace of God to Gentiles, a woman who gives all she has to God, a woman who touches his garment in faith, a woman he forgives when the crowd wants to stone her—so many who are central to communicating his gospel life go unnamed. But this story is not one of those.

We know the names of Shiphrah and Puah. The Books of Moses tell us their names. The Torah, God’s gift of love to the people of Israel, names them. But did you notice, there was a so-called famous character in this story. He is called the King of Egypt. He is called by the Egyptian imperial title, Pharaoh. But we don’t know his name. Scholars argue about which of the known rulers of the Egyptian empires this character might be. They compare the dynasties and their writings, and some theories seem sort of right, and sort of wrong, to fit the Bible story.

We don’t remember this Pharaoh’s name. The Bible doesn’t remember this Pharaoh’s name. The Books of Moses do not remember this Pharaoh’s name, although surely Moses, who lived in the household of Pharaoh knew who this king was. But we do remember the names of a couple of midwives who worked among an outcast immigrant people. We know these women who were instruments of God’s work.

We know these ministers, even though we don’t know the Pharoah. He already demonstrated that he had a bad memory. He forgot what he did not want to know, and he did not know Joseph. But Shiphrah and Puah knew Joseph. They remembered who they were. They remembered who called them. And they remembered why they were called. Go forth today in the spirit of Shiphrah and Puah and serve God with the same faithfulness they demonstrated so many centuries ago. Speak their names. Remember. Amen

On Jordan's Stormy Banks--Reposting

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Broadway) — Mon, 17 Apr 2017 05:18:00 +0000

I have been looking at the CaringBridge site recently again because of an injury to a little girl whose parents I know and admire. She was struck by a car and severely injured, but she continues to make progress. As is usually the case on CaringBridge, we don't know how things will turn out or how quickly they will change. The long journal of my colleague and friend Dwight Peterson reminds us that we do a poor job of predicting how a person's life will endure. The chance to keep up with one another and share presence keeps people coming back and praying for one another. I know my love and hope for Amelia is growing with each story and picture that appears.

While in CaringBridge, I looked back at the website I set up for Everly when she was ill. I continued to write there well into 2015, almost two years after she died. I took a moment to read the last journal entry, written in reflection on both her death and her father's death. With the attention I've been giving to thinking about the presence of death in our lives, it seemed to me that this entry spoke into the struggle of living and dying, displayed in many ways around us and in the lectionary texts of the last weeks of Lent. Therefore, I'm reposting for any who might wish to continue on that road of reflection with me.

Journal entry by Mikael Broadway — 3/16/2015

When I was still a pre-teen, I'm not sure when, but I think in Portland, Texas, around 1969 or so, I remember not the time but the experience of hearing the hymn "On Jordan's Stormy Banks I Stand and Cast a Wishful Eye." I think it was the boisterous melody and rhythm that caught my attention, along with the lyrics which I could easily understand. I also remember some kind of visual of a storm over a body of water, dark and menacing. There were no music videos in those days, so I must have been looking at some sort of children's hymnal with illustrations. Maybe I was at a children's choir rehearsal or "Intermediate Training Union" (you Baptists may remember that terminology). I remember deciding to learn that song, and I still have an echo of that memory each time I hear or sing it today.

Recently, reading from Henri Nouwen's In Memoriam, I was reminded of that hymn again. The short book begins by telling of the warm reunion with his mother when she was terminally ill, and the blessing and joy of being together. He was reminded of the many ways in which her faith and faithfulness had anchored him and held their family together. But after their initial time of gathering, he describes a dramatic change that happened in his mother. She became less able to communicate. She had moments of obvious struggle. She seemed no longer at peace, but often disturbed, fearful. She seemed to him to be in a fight against whatever evil, temptations, and doubts that she had suffered during her life. He interpreted these days as a final battle as she prepared for the end of her life, a storm through which she was having to pass.

Part of what Nouwen was realizing was that his mother, who had often been for him a tower of strength, was a human being, a woman, who had her own struggles. She was not just the one who helped the other family members with their struggles. And he saw this working itself out in her last days of life. His reflections, of course, put my mind into searching through Everly's days of dealing with cancer and its deadly outcome.

I thought through her last days. From March to July 2013, there were many ups and downs with treatment and constant pain. She was committed to do all that she could to keep living with us, and for the most part she pressed through whatever came, asking for help that she needed from us. There were times when she became discouraged by the pain, but we kept seeking answers and trying to find a way to getting better. Our family trip in May was for her a great triumph and celebration.

There was only a short time remaining, but none of us knew that. We kept looking at houses in Austin, hiring inspectors, thinking about how to fit all five of us in a house together, and even negotiating a contract. At the same time, the cancer was doing its own work. When our house-buying plan collided with the tumors' deadly growth, the time was nigh. The doctors diagnosed the situation, and we learned there were no more medical solutions available. We made the transition to hospice, and Everly lived less than one more week.

During that week, she did not have the same kind of struggle that Nouwen saw in his mother. She was very vocal with her fear initially that she would be deserting us when we need her. But her trusted friends shouldered their priestly role in granting her absolution, reassuring her that she had done all that she could do and all that God would expect of her. They told her they would make sure her children never went hungry or had no place to lay their heads. And she received this grace and began to rest.

If she had the kind of struggle about which Nouwen writes, it was during her first month after the diagnosis in 2012. Already very sick, and considered potentially beyond help from medical intervention, she entered the hospital and received her first dose of chemotherapy. Anyone who was following her story through this illness remembers that the first treatment almost killed her. In that intial crisis, she fell deeper and deeper into a stupor. Her body became weak. She could not eat and had to be fed through a tube. She slept constantly, and emerged to waking dreams and hallucinations.

She sometimes awoke with fearful concern about some matter from work or from our family life, needing to give one of us instructions on what we needed to take care of, urgently. Sometimes these troubled conversations dealt with some relationship or other matter about which she believed she had done wrong and things needed to be set right. I know I was not the only bedside companion who served as her minister in that time of trouble. Perhaps, during that time, it was the stormy Jordan she saw before her, and she felt her need to face the dangers head on and get herself ready for that crossing.

She came out of that initial sojourn in the wilderness with a new outlook on her life. She took on the disciplines needed to regain her strength and to resist deterioration. She talked of the peace she had made with her career and her previous years of hard work toward a powerful mission. She considered what she wanted her remaining years to count for. And through many ups and downs, she made them count as much as possible toward the goals of taking care of her family and reminding us of the beautiful life we had shared and would keep on sharing.

I don't mean that her 15 months, minus that first month-plus of hospitalization, were constant sunshine. Everly certainly had fears and worries. She was a worrier, but not to despair. And she did not handle pain well. Many of you have heard her say honestly, "I'm a wimp." She did not like to get stuck for an intravenous tube. She did not like any treatment that made her burn, or get chills, or get poked or prodded. But that part of her life was not so different from before we had to face cancer. Of course, every time we had to get a new CT Scan and reevaluate her progress, there was anxiety. When the news was not as good as we hoped, there was disappointment and concern.

I'm not trying to sugar coat things, but I think it is accurate to say that Everly did not face that kind of struggle against her potential dying as a constant overwhelming problem after the beginning. She was not resigned to die, but she was not terrified by it either. When she looked back at her experience of making it through those terrible days in 2012, she would tell us stories and share insights as one who had been through a great ordeal. She spoke as one who knew something beyond what most anyone had known, having approached the brink of death, looked into it, turned back from it, and rededicated herself to a life worth living. I think you will forgive me if at times I sound like I'm writing hagiography, but what I want to say is that she had faced something, had passed through the valley of the shadow of death, and she did not need to repeat those experiences and lessons again. She already had learned that even there, God is with her.

So as I look at her last days in July 2013, I don't see intense dread. She became upset sometimes as she dealt with losing control over her body, growing too weak, too tired, too foggy-brained to act independently. But these were flashes and passing moments. It was difficult to speak, but she would suddenly enter a conversation with perception, instructions, and even jokes. It was hard to swallow well, and she would cough as one who felt she would choke, then rest again. Mostly, she was at peace with her children and all of us who cared for her around her.

I think we saw more of this struggle, that Nouwen described, toward the end in the prolonged illness of Everly's father, Herbie. His struggle was longer and painful in a different way. He observed himself slipping into dementia and losing the strength from his athletic body. He was exhausted but could not sleep peacefully. The waking dreams were deep struggles for him. I am not talking about his character or trying to say Everly did better. I am merely describing a difference in the progression of mind and body. Herbie's illness incited his brain in different ways than Everly's, stirring partial memories and robbing him of awareness of the loving people around him. He feared being left alone and called out for Marie, his wife, at all hours. He found himself running a race or fighting an enemy when he was simply in bed with family standing by. He had fought so many battles, solved so many complex problems, trained his body and worked hard for so many years. As that slipped away from him, he continued to fight and run.

What Nouwen learned, and what we learned from Everly and Herbie, is that our loved ones struggle. Even when they have hidden it from us so well, they have had their struggles throughout their lives. Some of those struggles come back to them as they take account of their lives and look ahead to what may remain. Herbie was grateful for such a rich life, for the devotion and love of his marriage, for three talented and intelligent children, and for so many friends and young people with whom he had shared that life. He hated to see that go, and the progress of his disease elicited his will to fight. But some joys persisted through it all: especially loving to be with Marie and eating ice cream. Everly's illness took a different path. But with both of them, we could honor their struggles and rejoice with their joys.

Herbie had been very clear about his approaching death while he was still able to communicate, before the strokes took his clear speech away. He had had a good life, and he was ready to die. It hurt him deeply that Everly's life would be cut short, while he might live on after having already had a full life. Like any parent, he would rather have taken her place so that she could live on. Long before he died, he had "cast a wishful eye to Canaan's fair and happy land." And as we numbered Everly's last days, she also faced with a willing heart that she was "bound for the Promised Land."

I think that in writing about this, both Nouwen and I are striving to be honest, to tell the truth. Dying often is not, as many of us hope and imagine, an easy slipping away. It is not only having family together and saying good-bye. It is also a struggle to let go of the only good that we have known and to face the ways that we did not live in every way as we had aspired. I can't think of any more appropriate way of handling our grief over Everly than being honest about our living and being honest about our dying.

We get so focused on our own experience of our loved one's death, and that is to be expected. What Nouwen did, and what I have tried to do here, is also to collect and put together the clues we have of what our loved one went through. We can't say we know it with certainty, especially those periods when they were not able to speak to us about it. But we can take what they did say, and what their convictions have been, to see through a glass darkly, until that time that we see face to face in "one eternal day where God the Son forever reigns and scatters night away."

No chilling winds or poisonous breath
Can reach that healthful shore.
Sickness and sorrow, pain and death,
Are felt and feared no more.

Death Behind Us, Death Before Us

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Broadway) — Fri, 14 Apr 2017 22:10:00 +0000

This sermon for the Lenten season was first preached at Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church on April 2, 2017. It seems highly relevant for Good Friday or Holy Saturday.

Ezekiel 37:1-14
    1 The hand of the LORD came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the LORD and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. 2 He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. 3 He said to me, "Mortal, can these bones live?"
    I answered, "O Lord GOD, you know."
    4 Then he said to me, "Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD. 5 Thus says the Lord GOD to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. 6 I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the LORD."
    7 So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. 8 I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them.
    9 Then he said to me, "Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord GOD: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live."
    10 I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.
    11 Then he said to me, "Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, 'Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.' 12 Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord GOD: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. 13 And you shall know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. 14 I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the LORD, have spoken and will act," says the LORD.

John 11:1-45
     1 Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. 2 Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill.
    3 So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, "Lord, he whom you love is ill."
    4 But when Jesus heard it, he said, "This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God's glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it." 5 Accordingly, though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, 6 after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.
    7 Then after this he said to the disciples, "Let us go to Judea again."
    8 The disciples said to him, "Rabbi, the Jews were just now trying to stone you, and are you going there again?"
    9 Jesus answered, "Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Those who walk during the day do not stumble, because they see the light of this world. 10 But those who walk at night stumble, because the light is not in them." 11 After saying this, he told them, "Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to awaken him."
    12 The disciples said to him, "Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will be all right."
    13 Jesus, however, had been speaking about his death, but they thought that he was referring merely to sleep. 14 Then Jesus told them plainly, "Lazarus is dead. 15 For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him."
    16 Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, "Let us also go, that we may die with him."
    17 When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days.
    18 Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some two miles away, 19 and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother.
    20 When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home. 21 Martha said to Jesus, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. 22 But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him."
    23 Jesus said to her, "Your brother will rise again."
    24 Martha said to him, "I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day."
    25 Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, 26 and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?"
    27 She said to him, "Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world."
    28 When she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary, and told her privately, "The Teacher is here and is calling for you."
29 And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him.
    30 Now Jesus had not yet come to the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. 31 The Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary get up quickly and go out. They followed her because they thought that she was going to the tomb to weep there. 32 When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died."
    33 When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. 34 He said, "Where have you laid him?" They said to him, "Lord, come and see."
    35 Jesus began to weep.
    36 So the Jews said, "See how he loved him!"
    37 But some of them said, "Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?"
    38 Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. 39 Jesus said, "Take away the stone."
    Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, "Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days."
    40 Jesus said to her, "Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?"
    41 So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, "Father, I thank you for having heard me. 42 I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me."
    43 When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out!"
    44 The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, "Unbind him, and let him go."
    45 Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him.

    We already heard the reading from the prophet Ezekiel. I’ve had a special affinity for Ezekiel, for his many acted out prophecies and for the pathos of his life as a prophet who was rejected among his people. Ezekiel’s visions, another sermon for another day, make a crucial theological turning point, along with the other great prophets of his era–Jeremiah and the Exilic Isaiah. They reshape the vision of a people under God who are not dependent on an earthly army or king, or even on a land of their own. They elevate the doctrine of the Hebrew God to One who is not limited to land or ethnicity, but rules in all places and among all peoples.
    This passage in the 37th chapter, one of the most famous ones from Ezekiel, is a text I have preached more than once. I want to highlight the first verse before I read from the gospel text. If you want to turn to the 11th chapter of John’s gospel, I will start there in the first verse. But first, let me repeat the first verse of Ezekiel 37. “The hand of the LORD came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the LORD and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones.”
    Now if you will join me in the Gospel reading from John, chapter 11. The lectionary selects verses 1-45, telling a familiar story of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. I will narrow the focus to the first 16 verses. John 11:1-16....
    And look again with me at that final verse, 16. “Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, ‘Let us also go, that we may die with him.’”
    Join me today as we consider these two passages on the theme, “Death with us; death behind us; death before us.” Death behind us. Death before us.
    The first thing to strike me about these lectionary readings for the Fifth Sunday of Lent was the pervasive presence of death. The prophet Ezekiel was carried away by the power of the Spirit and set down in a place of death. It was some kind of historic battlefield scene, but one in which the traditional practice of burying the dead must have been too overwhelming. Instead, a field of dried, bleached bones lay scattered before the prophet. As so many other times in his prophetic ministry, Ezekiel found himself overwhelmed. Here he stood, surrounded by the signs of death of so many who had lived before his time. He was immersed in the memory, or perhaps it was the forgotten memory, of so much death behind him, so much death that loomed heavy behind him.
    Then we look at the Gospel text and find another very familiar story in which Jesus initially feels no pressure to check on his friend, only to find out soon that Lazarus had died. I was struck by more death. With his disciples, he has to face going to the home of his dead friend. Moreover, his disciples are concerned that to take this journey could also mean the death of Jesus and even their own deaths. In the midst of their work of ministry, they are looking down a road toward death. Death looms before them.
    My mind quickly jumped to a famous Irish prayer associated with St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland. One of the most remembered sections of the prayer repeats one affirmation after another about the presence of Christ:

Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ where I lie, Christ where I sit, Christ where I arise...

But my mind replaced the affirmation of Christ with the recognition of the presence of death.

Death with us, death before us, death behind us,
Death in us, death beneath us, death above us,
Death on our right, death on our left,
Death where we lie, death where we sit, death where we arise...

I admit it’s not a pleasant set of thoughts. We live in an age of denial. We like to call our denial positive thinking. We think we can mentally hide from the realities of life. So faced with the pervasive presence of death, we are most often inclined to say to ourselves or to one another, “Why don’t we change the subject? Let’s talk about something happier.”
    I’m not criticizing that strategy. Sometimes that’s the best way to cope with some of the hard truths of our existence. But we should not confuse coping through occasional denial with opening our hearts to the truth about what people face every day in our world. We, as Ezekiel and as Jesus, live in a world where death surrounds us.
    Many of us have in recent months had to entertain the possibility of death’s presenting itself in our families as national leaders threatened to eliminate health insurance for millions of us. What kind of logic, or should I call it greed, drives people to believe it’s acceptable to cause the deaths of many thousands of fellow citizens by taking away access to health care? What does it mean to call health care a responsibility and not a privilege, when at least half of workers make such low wages they could never take the responsibility to purchase health care on their own? Death with us, death in us, death where we lie down.
    I’ve heard people say that when I preach they know to expect a social justice sermon, a sermon about ministry in our community. I don’t mind that reputation. I hope that along with that reputation I can also have a holistic faith and ministry that touches all kinds of needs and hopes of God’s people. But I don’t apologize for always seeking to look beyond our inward well-being toward the well-being of the world God loves.
    Yet today I want to say that while there are obviously social justice implications for this message, it is also an attempt to delve into the depths of what it means to live and love, to lose and die, and to be God’s creatures, to be human in this marvelous and mysterious world God has made.
    In day-to-day living, we don’t always have time or energy to think about the mysteries and marvels. We stay busy putting one foot in front of the other. We count on the continuity of having the people around us present today and tomorrow and next month and next year. Jesus probably felt the same way about his friends in Bethany. When he got word that Lazarus was sick, maybe he did not initially take it very seriously. Everybody gets sick now and then. I had a head cold this week. Some of you may have had a rougher time with the flu recently. We think of getting sick as something to endure, with the assumption that “this, too, shall pass.”
    A couple of days later, Jesus decided it was time to go to Bethany. Had another person come to give him a message? We don’t know that, but we soon find out that he had somehow come to know that Lazarus had died. Maybe he had a vision or an intuition. Moreover, John does not give us much insight into his mood or feelings at this point. Later we learn how sad he was about Lazarus’s death. At this point we only know that he has made up his mind to go to Bethany.
    His disciples are pretty upset about this plan. They have been doing their work farther north, and across the Jordan, outside of the jurisdiction of the Jerusalem authorities. The reason is that Jesus has not always been respectful and diplomatic in his dealings with the Sadducees, the Pharisees, the Herodians, and the Roman authorities. During his last visit to Jerusalem, of which Bethany is a near suburb, a mob had actually picked up stones to kill him. Jesus and his buddies slipped away before the stoning could happen, and they had stayed far away ever since.
    Now Jesus is facing the death of his beloved friend Lazarus down the road, near Jerusalem. The disciples are thinking about that angry mob with the rocks. We know from the other three gospels that Jesus has warned his disciples that when he goes to Jerusalem, the rulers there are going to kill him. Their strategy has been to keep their distance. They are not sure Jesus is thinking straight. He insists on going, so Thomas gives a plainspoken response–“I guess we can all go die together.”
    Under the rule of empire, the residents of Palestine were acquainted with death. They had the experience of harsh treatment by the Roman overlords and the Herodian interloper kings. They could not get out of their minds the image of their friend John who had been beheaded because he would not mince his words. And they had seen the way crowds can shift to mobs in a moment when the conversation turns an unpopular way. They weren’t ready to die, and they were not convinced they or Jesus needed to die. If Jesus would just get organized for battle like a real Messiah was supposed to do, they could gather enough fighters to sweep into Jerusalem and take out all the enemies of the people. But Jesus showed no interest in being a Messiah under those conditions. So maybe they were doomed to die together.
    The slogan Black Lives Matter is a response to the pervasiveness of death in times and places where it just should not happen. The former president stood in the role of every person when he confessed that in the killing of Trayvon Martin it was clear that the boy could have been the son of any black parent, including himself. The blood of Trayvon, of Michael, of Sandra, of Freddie, of Rekia, of Jonathan, of José, of Uniece, and of so many more cries out from the ground. How many deaths until young people’s lives matter? How many killings until accountability becomes a reality? Death on our right side, death on our left side, death where we rise up, death where we sit down.
    The rest of the story from John 11 is very familiar. Jesus goes on to meet Martha and Mary. He weeps over the death of his friend. And God performs a powerful sign through the Incarnate Son to demonstrate that there is nothing out of the reach of God’s power. The story of Lazarus’s coming forth from the grave is a powerful moment in the gospel account of Jesus’ life. It foreshadows something even greater to come when Jesus comes out of his grave. In and of itself, this event does not abolish death. Lazarus went on to die at a later time, as did his sisters and everyone else gathered in Bethany that day. And so we still find ourselves living in the midst of death, as did Jesus and his disciples and friends in this story.
    I stumbled upon a book of poetry by Audre Lorde this week as I was preparing for this sermon. The title of the book is Our Dead Behind Us.   I decided I needed to understand what she meant by that title, so I got a copy of the book and started reading the poems. I was not too surprised to find that title phrase in the first poem, one called “Sisters in Arms.” It is a poetic narration of two women who find themselves in a crisis. Both live as expatriates from different societies–one from the USA and one from South Africa. The South African woman gets news that in a horrific and violent series of repressive acts, her fifteen-year-old daughter in South Africa has been murdered by the police forces. In the same sequence of events, elementary school children have also been massacred for protesting against injustice and apartheid–six-year-olds, nine-year-olds, even a three-week-old infant.
    The mother heads to South Africa to bury her daughter and join in the struggle. The other woman remains behind, and in her pain and anger is working in her garden. Let me quote a few lines from the poem,

my hand comes down like a brown vise over the marigolds
reckless through despair
we were two black women touching our flame
and we left our dead behind us

The power and pain of death, even in their sympathy and care for one another, was breaking them down and breaking them apart. Their lives kept going on, and their dead were left behind them. This experience is not far away from many people throughout this world in which we live and die. Death before us, death behind us. We don’t escape it if we live in this world.
    God has made us finite beings. We are born, we live, we die. Even Jesus’ coming into the world has as a crucial part of it his full sharing of our existence, all the way to the point of death, and more specifically an undignified death.
    By the time most of us reach middle age, we have become far more acquainted with death than we wish. Grandparents and parents whose love filled and shaped our lives leave us in this world without their presence. Too many of us lose loved ones far too early for their time. The mystery and grief of their absence weighs heavy on us. We sometimes are tempted to join with the writer of Ecclesiastes and wonder if all of life is in vain.
    I do feel some trepidation in taking you down this difficult road of thinking about death today, but I can’t help but testify to the light the Spirit has shed on these texts. From Ezekiel to Lazarus, even when we walk with Jesus, we walk amidst death in a dying world. Part of what we must recognize in Thomas’s remark from John 11:16 is that if we are going to be faithful to Jesus, we may even have to challenge death. The way of Jesus, we see now in hindsight, is a way of the cross. It is a road to execution. It is a pilgrimage of standing strong for God and God’s justice even in the face of those who would kill us for doing so.
    Many of us have grappled in recent months with the likelihood that struggling for justice may become harder in our time. It may not be adequate to call the congressional representative or write a letter in support of some legislation. It may not be adequate to have celebratory marches in which we are happy to be together in the cause of justice, then stop off at our favorite restaurant on the way home. It may be that we will have to face down harsher opponents in our time. We may begin to catch on that when our young people are beaten and shot in the streets, we cannot keep telling ourselves that it was because they were not acting respectably enough. In some circles and places, the forces of evil are gathering their strength. They are already lashing out at Muslims and refugees and transgendered persons. They are looking for ways to cut away the safety net for the poor, for the elderly, for school children, and for children of immigrants.
    Protecting the vulnerable may become costly for us in ways that it has not been. Standing up against official injustice, against warmongering, against government sanctioned discrimination, against unfair voting practices–these may become as dangerous as it was for children in Birmingham, for citizens walking on a bridge in Selma, and for Dr. King organizing with sanitation workers in Memphis.
    I’m not predicting these things will happen to you or to me. I am simply reminding myself and all of us that when we take up the calling to follow Jesus, a cross may be near in our path. If any of you would follow me, you must deny yourself, take up your cross daily, and follow me. Anyone who would save his or her own life will lose it, but all who would lose their life for Jesus’ sake will find it.
    There is a deep logic of death and resurrection in the very nature of the church. Our sacramental practice of baptism articulates that logic. We ought not to be unfamiliar with death, but we ought to be able to see it differently than the world does.
    For part of the reason that Jesus was ready to head to Bethany was that he had become convinced by his faith in God that death was not final. He had come to realize that even if he were captured and executed as an enemy of the state, that God still had a purpose for him beyond that moment of death. Moreover, his dying as an act of defiance and protest to the injustice of the empire would be far greater than the regime’s acting against one person. He had come to realize that the death he would endure was one which would encompass the deaths of all of us. In his role as the Second Adam, he would be recapitulating, reconstituting, rebooting humanity into a new creation. This is what he tried to explain to Martha later in Bethany--he himself is the resurrection in which we also share.
    Paul wrote about this logic of death and resurrection often. In Jesus we all die, and in his resurrection we all are raised. In his death, our past inadequate way of living passes away. In his resurrection a whole new life already has begun in us. He, who is our Savior, is our new life. As Paul wrote in Galatians, I am crucified with Christ, yet nevertheless I live. But it is not I who live, but Christ lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live in faithfulness to the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. He reminds us in Romans that we die and are buried with Christ in our baptism. We rise from the waters of baptism into a new life.
    So there is another sense in which we might say without despair, and perhaps even with rejoicing, that death is behind us. Although Ezekiel looked at the bones and saw death in its brutality in the history of that valley of bones, his eyes were opened to see that those parched and desiccated bones can live when God raises them to new life. Jesus, on the road to Bethany, can face the likely wrath of the powerful in Jerusalem because he has fixed his eyes on the joy that is before him. He is willing to despise the shame of the cross, of the jeering crowd, and of the mocking crown on his brow. He can endure the cross for the sake of the new creation. He can endure death because he will bring us all through it with him. Oh, Death, where is your sting? Oh, grave, where is your victory? In bringing all of us together into his death, Jesus puts our deaths behind us.
    Now some of you may rightly want to complain that it’s not quite right, Rev. Broadway, for you to lay on all this thick death conversation and then try to turn it around to be happy in the last minute or two of the sermon. Let me say that I also hope I know better than that. It ought not to be a rule that we have to leave church feeling giddy and happy all the time. Sometimes we may have to leave with some burdens to bear. So I’m not going to try to dress up death in a pretty outfit so you can forget about what these texts teach us.
    What I do want to say is that in our baptism, we are united to Jesus in his death. We undergo the death of our sinful ways. The death of our rebelliousness and rejection of God is accomplished. The old short-sighted and egocentric self dies in order to be joined to the new self, the true human self, the Second and True Adam, Jesus. Our new humanity is constituted by being joined to him. We live in Christ. Christ lives in us. We are made new. This is great and wonderful news. But that is not the same as saying that we no longer have to face the troubles of the world.
    I think there is something to be learned here from Jesus’ baptism. The gospel accounts tell us of the remarkable experience of his baptism in which all three persons of the Triune God are made manifest together as the Son is baptized. It is a crucial moment of Jesus’ life and ministry, and yet he comes up out of the water only to face some of the greatest trials he ever had to face. He goes alone, driven by the Spirit, into a deserted wilderness, and great temptations befall him. He struggles with his mission and Messiahship. How should his life count in the world? What kind of Messiah should he be? It was not easy for him, and it will not be easy for us. Yet still, because of his example in baptism, and because of the way he embodied that baptism through faithful life, death, burial, and resurrection, we have become united to God through him.
    Would you go on living on your own, alienated from God, if you knew that you could have your life joined to God for every moment and every day? Would you seek to have the courage to face whatever troubles and trials come, knowing that in all of them, Christ is living in you and you in him? That is what God is offering to each of us today. If you have not yet answered the call to unite your life to Jesus, to follow in his way, and to enter with him into baptism that demonstrates our passage from death into life, then there is no better time than today for you to follow Jesus. Follow him through this vale of tears, through the pervasiveness of death, with hope that God is at work even now to transform this world we live in to become the Kingdom of God, the beloved community, a land where peace and justice reign in the lives of women and men. Follow Jesus today. Pass from death to life in him.
    There may be some present today who are struggling with loss and grief. You have lost a friend, a family member, a spouse, a parent, or some other loved one to death. You know you are supposed to acknowledge that such a death is a mere passing on to another dimension of life, an entry into the presence of God even more fully than we know on this earth. Still, it does not take away the emptiness and hurt you feel on this side of that transition. Perhaps you need to turn toward God and ask for comfort and healing as you continue on the road of life that remains for you, before and until the joyful reunion you long for beyond the grave. If you need to come and cry out for God’s Spirit to fill and heal you, then now is the time to come. Don’t be embarrassed for having grief. It means you are human and that you know what it means to love and be loved. God is a healing God.
    If you live in Durham, but you are not currently united with a congregation, take a moment now to call on the Holy Spirit for guidance. It may be that God has brought you here today because you should be united to this local body of Christ’s followers as we fight against the pervasive power of death and shine the light of life in the world. If you feel the calling to join with us in the ministry that God has called us to in this city and this neighborhood, why not go ahead and join with us today. Amen.
**********
An addendum: a few words from Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

Whoever enters discipleship enters Jesus’ death, and puts his or her own life into death; this has been so from the beginning. The cross is not the horrible end of a pious, happy life, but stands rather at the beginning of community with Jesus Christ.

Thy Will Be Done

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Broadway) — Thu, 13 Apr 2017 22:47:00 +0000

A topic I try to cover every semester in theology class is the theology of prayer. I first introduced this topic to illustrate the theological category of a "practice" which has become more and more prominent in theological reflection in recent decades. Taking such a familiar concept as prayer gave me the opportunity to investigate the goal or purpose of the practice, the proper means of practicing prayer, the various forms of prayer that make up the general practice, the "rules of the game" that define what is and is not prayer, the virtues required by and strengthened by practicing prayer, the relation of prayer to a more general practice of worship, and the corruptions of prayer in contemporary practice. I've written about aspects of this conversation at various times in this blog.

Last week in Systematic Theology class, I started down that road in our unit on ecclesiology. Having gone over various ways of outlining the doctrine of the church, I had ended with McClendon and Yoder as examples of theologians who had turned to practices of a shared life in community as the crucial ways of elaborating on the nature of the church. I took the low-hanging fruit, prayer, and began to illustrate how to understand it as an example of a practice.

As usual, the students were fairly quickly drawn into the reimagining of this subject in which they had long been immersed and about which they had often reflected. As usual, I began to take critical shots at common popular assumptions and problematic teachings about prayer. We addressed the idea of prayer as a consumer activity, of "shopping" with God. We looked at the ways we have been told that if we do or say or think or feel the right things, then prayer will work out how we want. I stressed that prayer is not about getting God to change and do what we want, but that it is an opportunity for God to change us and align us with the divine purpose. Students were offering helpful supplements to my prepared remarks, and all in all the discussion seemed to me very successful as a teaching and learning activity.

Then the conversation turned deep and personal. One experienced pastor began to describe pastoral experiences in which a young person had endured a terminal illness. Another spoke of her sister's illness and partial recovery. I tried to draw upon my own experience of losing Everly to cancer even as we prayed for God's deliverance. Finally one told of the sudden death of his young son. We ran up against the limits of prayer as an input-output machine. Prayer can never be reduced to doing our duty so that God will do God's "duty" to give us what we hope for.

One obvious protest brings up the story of Lazarus or Jairus's daughter or Peter and John in the temple with the lame man, or any number of other divine interventions for healing and life. If they prayed and God delivered, why can't we? The unsatisfying answer is that Peter and John and Jesus did not heal every lame person, raise every dead child, or open every grave. These mighty works were a sign of God the Creator who is able to do all things in the world God has created. They were not a sign of the reversal of every pattern and system in creation so that none will ever die or be sick in this world, if we just pray hard enough or in the right way, with the right words.

The asked but unanswerable question remained: If God acted in those events, why not in my crisis? The question has many shades of meaning. One is the question of whether I have failed God in some way and therefore did not merit God's favor. Jesus challenged that kind of thinking by the synagogue leaders as wrongheaded. We do not need to be trying to figure out how to blame people who get sick or face disabilities. We need to be compassionate toward them. Another shade of this question is whether God has abandoned us. But God cannot and will not abandon God's creation. God stands by us even in the most difficult and most evil of circumstances. God can, but mostly does not, intervene in the events and actions of human life. How many years was Jesus living in the world? Yet we know only a few days and weeks of his life. These highlights, which emphasize his teaching, his confrontations, and his mighty works, might be assumed to be representative of every day of his life. Or they may more likely be great and memorable times surrounded by and interspersed among many normal days more like our own experiences. It's not an answer to the question, but a way of trying to think through the problem.

When I am most faithful to my professed method of theological reflection, I link my arguments back to Jesus. In this case, words from Jesus about prayer become highly relevant, as well as examples of his prayers. There are many of these stories and teachings in the gospel, and I will not take them all up in this blog post. We discussed quite a few in class. For instance, Jesus' "High Priestly Prayer" of John 17 helps us to identify the purpose of prayer--union or communion with God. Jesus' parables about prayer teach the proper virtues of communion with God (the Pharisee and the Publican) and the trust in God's loving purposes for us (the Importunate Widow and the children's requests for bread or an egg). Jesus' model prayer in Matthew 6 deserves extensive analysis for its contributions to an understanding of prayer, but let it suffice here to say that at it's core is the prayerful person's aligning herself or himself with the purpose and will of God: "thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth." It is this sentiment that inspired the name of this blog.

So last week I tried to make sense of this aspect of Jesus' praying: praying for God's will to be done. It is not only in the model prayer. Jesus did not forget his own advice when he found himself in a crisis. Praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, not long before he would be arrested, tortured, and executed, Jesus poured out his heart in prayer. He asked if the expected sequence of events could be avoided. He asked if there could be another way. And he followed his cries with the prayer, "not my will, but Thine be done." He prayed that he would align his will with the purpose and will of God. As my friend J. Kameron Carter showed me, it was the prayer his mother taught him. When we first encounter the young Mary in Luke's gospel, she responds to the pronouncement and promise of God's messenger Gabriel by saying, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” The mother who was willing to align her life with God's purpose taught her son to pray in this same manner. When he was old, he did not depart from it.

Even here, we run into dangers interpreting Jesus' prayer. The core prayer is clear--praying for communion with God and the capacity to join oneself to God's purpose in the world. But what is it that Jesus wants to avoid? What other options are available to him? What is it that he ultimately agrees to be the will of God?

Too often, we operate primarily from our position of hindsight. We overlay the conversation of this prayer with layer upon layer of traditioned interpretation. We import the revivalist's personal salvation preaching, the early modern construction of spheres of power through the nation-state, the medieval divinely predestined feudal order, and so many potential distortions of race, capital, religion, and violence. We assume that when Jesus is asking to avoid the abandonment and torture and execution that he is facing, it is God's will that Jesus be abandoned, tortured, and executed. We leave aside the actualities of a concrete life and let our minds wander among eternal verities and metaphysical principles. We accept that dangerous theological dictum that Jesus came to die, as if the life he lived was not itself the purpose and will of God. We turn Jesus in the garden into a mere cypher for an internal conflict within God. We pretend that one part of God does not want to die, but the other part of God wants him to die. But this is the wrong interpretation.

What were Jesus' options? He could continue to follow the path of proclaiming and embodying the Kingdom of God. This is what had gotten him in trouble. This is what had aroused the powerful to make plans to destroy him. This is what had stirred the crowds to follow him and put their hope in him. This is what had motivated the disciples to be part of his movement. He had challenged the social order, the economic disparities, the political structures. They had pushed back and threatened and plotted to end his movement. Now, at this moment of truth, what should he do?

If it be possible...this phrase represents the question of how to proceed and be faithful. For Jesus to stand up for the people, to continue his mission, and to do so stubbornly now is going to mean he will be arrested, tried, tortured, and executed as an enemy of the state. Another option would be to retreat again to the countryside and wait to continue the battle another day. He has done this more than once in the past, if we can piece together a history from the four gospels. But for several weeks at least he has been convinced that the time for retreating is over. He has told his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem for a final confrontation, and that it is going to cost him his life. Would retreating once more be a way of extending his influence and building his movement? Or would it be a way of undermining the work he had built up thus far? Would it be a cowardly retreat, or a strategic plan for a long-term struggle?

A different option would be to walk away from it all. Jesus could concede defeat. He could say, "Sorry, I didn't mean it." He could settle back down to carpentry or join his buddies in the fishing business. He could be that guy everyone has heard of--"remember who he used to be?" He could give up on the calling he had previously accepted and renounce his critique of injustice. He could promise to leave the Sadducees and Pharisees and Herodians alone. He could even hold a joint press conference to say they had worked out their differences and that he is now in full support of their leadership. Jesus would not have to deal with arrest and execution. He could walk away.

Jesus also could reverse his previous position on violence. He could embrace the popular notion of a Messiah as a conquering king. Although he had spent his career rejecting and denying that was his way, even at the end telling his followers that he did not come to lord over anyone, but to lead as a servant, Jesus could conclude that it was not working and not worth the cost. He could get his followers to gather their weapons. He could stir the crowd which loved to follow him and hoped he would lead them into battle. He could become that Messiah and fight to the bitter end. Who knows if he could reach the same success as Joshua or as Judas Maccabeus? This is what all his people seem to want him to do. If it be possible...

Then again, he might hope that the people who were his enemies, the ones who were at that very time preparing to arrest him to fulfill the plot they had made, would suddenly change their minds. Could it be that he would not face their wrath, but they would embrace him? Certainly that was a possibility in some universe. But it was unlikely. And the only way he could find out about that was to go confront them again.

This is the choice Jesus grappled with that night in the Garden. Should he continue faithfully on the path that he had discerned as the calling of God--to confront injustice, face down the powerful, proclaim a counter-politics and a contrast society, no matter where that might lead or what it might cost him? Or should he renounce his calling, give up on the struggle, concede the defeat, walk away, turn on his people? He wasn't choosing whether to accept God's plan for his death. He was choosing whether to accept God's plan for his life. Would he be faithful to the end, even if it meant his enemies would execute him? This is not the same as saying God planned for him to die. This is saying that God planned for him to struggle against evil without taking up the ways of evil and violence, even if it meant his love for his friends meant he would lay down his life. God's will is to love. In Jesus' case, to continue to love to the end meant he died the death of a political enemy.

In a similar way, I think it is possible to reflect on the challenges we face without depending on a predestinarian view of God's will and feeling that we must concede to the chess-game god's next move. I mentioned earlier the hard questions that we ask but cannot answer. Just as Job wondered why such terrible things happened, the whirlwind only offered the disappointing answer that there are many things we will not know. When Everly was sick with cancer, we could not know how the illness would respond to medicine and treatment. We went through ups and downs, through many pains and struggles, in an effort to see how she might live out her life as anticipated. At 53, too young for a person to die, she had been stricken. She faced the difficulty of giving up her career at its peak of success. She wondered what she could do to build up her children who as young adults still had much to learn from her. She knew that leaving us behind in the world would mean a harder financial existence and an emptiness in our homes from her absence.

My own struggles were similar. How could I support her through her trials? How could I live without a partner through whom God had always led and guided me? What kind of life should I have, since so much of the life I had been living was tied up in her career and person? What both of us had to face was the necessity of living the life we had been called to live in a new set of circumstances. To the extent that we had heard and responded to God's calling in our lives, then that calling was not changed in this new crisis. However, it was a new context in which to live it. Everly came to realize that the time she had available could be best used to build up the people in her life--her children, her family, her friends, her colleagues, and me. She headed straight into the life ahead of her, following the calling she already knew was upon her.

Knowing the "why" of tragic events often escapes us. Thus, my theology professor from seminary, William Hendricks, offered a response formed not in certainty, but in wisdom. He urged us as ministry trainees to learn to convert the question. We must push past the unanswerable "why?" to the practical "what now?" What now, O God, would you have me do? In the new circumstance I face, how do I remain faithful? If this is what my life has come to, then how can I be the person you have called me to be?

Jesus prayed that prayer in the Garden. He was up against an unfolding sequence of events that would not go well for him. Like any sane human being, he did not want to go through the things that now were about to come to pass. Is there another way? Can I do something else? What are the options? God, help me know what to do. He concluded that the God who had called him and the Spirit who had annointed him to preach good news to poor people, to set at liberty the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor--this same God who had willed this life for him would carry him through whatever evils and trials he must face to carry out that mission. God wills for us to take up the mission of Jesus. May I be always able to pray with him, "not my will, but Thine be done."

When Words Fail

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Broadway) — Tue, 28 Feb 2017 19:17:00 +0000

This sermon was first preached at Shaw University Divinity School Chapel Service on February 18, 2017

1 Corinthians 3:1-23

I think that most of you would understand what I mean if I said, “It’s been one of those weeks.” You can probably identify with having that feeling at some point in the recent past. In the midst of living life, sometimes we prepare our best work, we pray our most beautiful and confident prayers, we express ourselves in conversation as clearly as we can, but nothing turns out as we expected. We are hurt, people don’t understand, friends are angry, God is distant. I’m not good at hiding it. Students see me walk into class and ask if I’m okay. Co-workers pull me aside to ask what’s wrong. It was one of those weeks.

I have made a career out of using words: reading, speaking, and writing. I read news, commentary, essays, and books a large part of every day of my life. I listen to preachers in church; I listen to radio news in the car. I write short, clever comments on what is happening in the world. I write longer reflections on social issues and the church. I do my thinking with my fingertips on a keyboard. I must have written tens of thousands of words as I have struggled to live with the illness and death of my beloved wife. Sometimes what I write is simple and straightforward. Sometimes it is complex argumentation.

There are plenty of times when I can’t seem to get started. Occasionally I begin, only to find myself headed down a road to nowhere, making me have to start over. On some subjects, I have stored away many long and complicated sentences and paragraphs in the recesses of my memory, ready for me to pull them out on a moment’s notice to clarify a question or drive home a point.

There is joy in crafting words. Constructing a strong first sentence or a challenging final sentence in an argument can satisfy a thirsty soul. Framing a vivid metaphor or a lyrical turn of phrase can give life to a project. Employing the rhetorical skills passed down by a lively intellectual tradition of preaching can lift an entire room of spirits together, or stir them to anger, or challenge them to action.

I’m not the greatest wordsmith by any means. Too many of my sentences meander toward obscurity. Too often I make an argumentative leap that leaves out important intermediary steps, forcing the listener or reader to wonder why I suddenly changed the subject without clear warning. We all can look beyond our own achievements toward the oratorical craft of another preacher we admire for her or his depth of understanding, precision of vocabulary, and skill of delivery. We find ourselves returning to certain writers whose ability to articulate and inspire on the printed page or on the pixilated screen leaves us wanting more.

So for me, and perhaps for many of you, life unfolds in a proliferation of words. It’s more than words, but it still is a flood of words. A few weeks ago, I sat down in a hotel room in New Orleans where I was attending the Society of Christian Ethics. I had been reading books and essays, contemplating an essay on the topic of reparations in theological education. Over a period of a couple of days, broken up by conference events, meals, and a small amount of sleep, I wrote over thirty-two pages on the topic, and still felt I had not quite covered all that I should say. I’m not really trying to brag here. It’s simply an illustration of how my writing often gets done. I was only able to do that because of habits coming from so many years of devotion to and immersion in speaking and writing. It’s far from clear yet whether all those words will make much of a difference in the world.

I doubt that my three kids believe it, but there was a time in my life when I was known as a person of few words. My wife, who could outtalk me any day, used to laugh at me for the way I had something to say about almost any subject, even those I knew little or nothing about. She would tease me about being a “know-it-all.” That’s probably not so hard for my colleagues to believe. While I slip into the quiet mode still some of the time, mostly nowadays I produce and spout and swim in a sea of words. I have come to trust in the power of words, especially when combined with the power of communities organized for strategic action.

A little over a year ago, our community organizing group, Durham CAN, was struggling to see words turned to action on affordable housing in Durham. The City Council, leaders of the County Commissioners, and of course the Durham Housing Authority all were on record supporting affordable housing. It’s hard not to think that more affordable housing is a good idea. But liking the idea and making change happen are different things. We applied the power of words by creating and conducting a Downtown Durham Subsidy Tour.

We held a public teaching session about the millions of dollars in subsidies that had gone into various commercially profitable projects. These were tax incentives and public-private partnerships amounting to tens of millions of dollars from which private developers and businesses would benefit greatly at taxpayers’ expense. A tiny fraction of those subsidy amounts would be enough to get Durham moving toward more affordable housing. So we took citizens all over downtown and hung up signs on various buildings, detailing the subsidies that went to private developers and businesses. Those spoken and written words made a difference. Television and newspaper reporters’ words made a difference. Targeted, strategic words made a difference, and progress quickly got underway on three different projects for affordable housing.

A public event like that or a powerful sermon or a groundbreaking book can demonstrate to us the power and importance of words for human society. The Apostle Paul was clearly a man of words. He was a speechmaker, a preacher, and a teacher who could adapt his style to the particular audience he was addressing. In the opening three chapters of 1 Corinthians he discusses this aspect of his ministry extensively. He reminds his readers of the good times they have had in the past teaching and learning about the gospel of Jesus Christ. He points out how people started out not knowing much, and that God is able to use foolish people to shame the wise. He insists that the wisdom of the world may, in fact, not be worth much at times.

He is setting them up. All these words, all the things he calls to their remembrance, suddenly are challenged in this third chapter. He says he wishes he could use some of his big words with them, but he says he has to use words more suited to infants than to adults. Apparently they are stuck in the age of eating baby food. They may have picked up some fancy words to use, but they have missed the point of what they have learned. They might know how to pronounce propitiation or concupiscence, but they haven’t let their training transform them adequately toward God’s purpose for them. They are dividing into camps and sects, picking and choosing among their teachers to create factions. Some want to claim Apollos, some Cephas, and some Paul. He gets no satisfaction that some claim to side with him because he wants them to recognize that all the teachers are contributing to the one unified message and calling God has for them.

We’ve seen it happen. Someone says, “Reverend Smith never would have done things that way.” One whispers, “Deacon Johnson never tried anything like that.” Another complains, “Sister Jones always knew the right thing to do.” Soon it breaks out into conflict in the committee and board meetings. Then small groups form in the parking lot to continue the criticisms and complaints. Church conferences heat up with angry words. People begin to impugn one another’s integrity and doubt the truth of one another’s words.

We take up sides. We resist leaders trying to make a difference. We shut out innovative ideas. Churches too often work against our own best interests and our best opportunities for ministry.

Paul argues in our text today that all the teachers the Corinthians have had were building on a single foundation. That foundation is Jesus Christ. All the teaching and preaching had pointed back to this reference point—the ways and words of Jesus Christ are the basis for all that the Corinthians or any other churches must build. Yet for all the words that Paul has loved sharing and has depended on to accomplish his work of building up the church, it seems that little growth in grace and discipleship have occurred. Words have failed. The people in the church have not remembered what they learned, nor have they remembered who they are.

Paul doesn’t give up. He starts again to build his case with persuasive words. Now he tells them that they are a temple. The second-person pronoun in these verses is a plural. It’s hard to tell in English. We use the same second-person pronoun for singular or plural. “Y-o-u” can mean one person, and the same word “y-o-u” can mean a group of people. In the South, we know how to translate it differently than the English Bible usually does. Paul, in this case is saying “Y’all.” Y’all are a temple. This is not the same way he uses “temple” elsewhere to refer to a human body. In our text today, the temple is the community of faith envisioned as forming a structure together. It’s similar to Peter’s image of a building made of living stones. But the Corinthian church people have broken up the building. It’s cracked, and there are big gaps, broken down walls, and fallen roof timbers. For all the teaching, they have failed to become united as God’s building, the family of faith, the body of Christ.

Paul quotes from Job to remind them that just because a person can make a lofty and wordy speech does not mean one has displayed true wisdom. They may be twisting their words to manipulate a situation, to try to prove themselves superior, to try to put someone else down. God knows the difference, and Paul says he can tell the difference, too. Words are failing the Corinthian Christians because they are willing to use them as weapons. They are abusing the power of words to benefit their particular faction or camp, and the temple they are supposed to be building is falling into ruin.

Words fail us when we use them against one another. Words as weapons tear down. They deny the purpose of human living: to love one another. Words that shade the truth in order to try to win are failing words. Words that construct alternative facts for the purpose of verbal battle succeed only in crushing truth beneath our feet. Words fail in politics and in church when they become our sledgehammers and crowbars to destroy what God wants us to build up. We may end up like so much of the world around us by choosing up sides and despising anyone who disagrees. Paul was a couple of millennia too early, but I’m sure if he had been writing today, the people he was criticizing would be calling one another Nazis, fascists, and communists. He tells them not to boast about human leaders—if they are good leaders, then what each of them gives you is good for all of you.

I’ll have to leave this 1 Corinthians text to talk about other times that words fail. Here, Paul spoke to the misuse of words to divide, mislead, and destroy. But sometimes words fail for other reasons. For instance, sometimes words fail because they choke in our throats and drown in our tears. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve had words fail me in this way. Sometimes a hurt is so intense, the mind seems lost in a fog. Words spoken seem pointless. Things I’ve been able to say before no longer make sense. I was so sure I understood a situation, but now to have even thought those thoughts seems utterly stupid. Or I had thought I knew the direction my life would go, only to find out it will be impossible for those things to ever happen. In these moments words fail us. We try and fumble about to describe what we are going through, but with little success.

In those moments of pain and struggle, words can fail another way, too. For those of us reacting to someone else’s pain, we may become like Job’s so-called friends and start tossing words about in harmful ways. If I approach someone going through the hellish pain of losing a loved one, and I offer platitudes about their loved one being in a better place, or say it’s all going to be all right, or claim everything happens for a reason, my words are likely to become instruments of greater pain. The compulsion to provide a solution to other people’s pain is really about my own discomfort. If I can sum up the problem with shallow theological-sounding clichés, I may assume my job is done. I’ve figured it out for them, and now they will be fine. What’s needed in times of pain, grief, and loss is fewer words, more presence, and humble service. Don’t make words fail by forcing your pile of happy, crappy, empty theological banalities on someone in deep pain. They are struggling to put words to their situation, and they don’t need useless and hurtful words to fill that void.

When words fail us in the depth of pain, we can be thankful that we are not left alone. In his letter to the Romans, Paul describes the situation when our hurt and longing may be too deep for words. In that crisis, God has not abandoned us, even if words have. Paul says the Spirit cries out for us when we cannot handle it ourselves. We may not know what the meaning of our situation is. We may feel only loss and emptiness, loneliness that looks to be endless. But God is present in the midst of our struggle. Remember this is the same God incarnate who saw his friends sleep when he needed their prayers, saw them run away when he was arrested, and ultimately cried out in the anguish of abandonment when hanging by nails from a wooden implement of state-sponsored torture. In the depth of suffering, God knows the wordless void, enters it with us, and initiates the crying out and healing that will restore us.

Here in 1 Corinthians 3, Paul reminds us that when words fail, whether it is through our arrogance and divisiveness or through our hurt and emptiness, we still have a place to stand. There is one foundation. That is the foundation of Jesus Christ. He is the firm foundation. He has come for us and never deserted us. We belong to him, as siblings, as joint-heirs, and members of one body, as living stones in a temple not made by hands. To belong to Christ is to have our lives surrounded by and embedded in God. You belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.

To know Christ is to walk in his way. In word and deed, we take up his path. He calls us to follow him. He says to choose the narrow way that leads to life. He reminds us that it is not merely following a road he walked, but that he himself is the road, the gate, the life we must live. He is the Word, the logos, the dabar, the essence of both God and humanity, in whom we live and move and have our being. So words may fail, but the Word of God, our Savior, the True Human and exemplar for our lives, will never fail. Thanks be to God.

Listening with Patience and Letting Music Do Its Work

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Broadway) — Thu, 19 Jan 2017 05:07:00 +0000

I've not put much stock in the theory of art as purely the artist's expression of an inward state. Art, no matter how personal, remains a public act with communal significance. Not to belabor the point, but why use a canvas? Why this paint or that clay? Why this instrument and this tempo? There are numerous potential reasons why an artist struggles to get work into public view. Even the desire to have one's art recognized is something more than just wanting personal validation. It is better understood as a form of communication, of connecting with others.

Thus, when I claim in the title that music has work to do, it is a work of communication. Music's communication may operate at many levels. These ramblings about art and music arise out of spending an evening listening to Branford Marsalis and Joey Calderazzo play saxophone and piano as a jazz duet. Interviewed about their collaboration, Marsalis argues that the jazz duet is not merely a mini-quartet or a truncated ensemble. It is itself a distinct kind of performance able to display its own communicative style of close collaboration, sensitivity, and balance. Marsalis says, "The object is not to play in the same way that you play in other situations. You have to change the conversation as well as the setting. Once you know the form, you can just react to each other."

Their further reflections on their engagement with the music as a duo help the reader, and listener, to understand there is a kind of work going on with musicians that is at least part of what I mean when I say that music is doing work. It is the musicians, of course, who drive and make the music live. This is why at a jazz concert, one learns it is appropriate to give applause when one musician in the ensemble completes a "solo" or highlighted portion of a longer musical composition. People don't do that during a harpsichord concerto at the end of the harpsichord section, but in a jazz performance, when the pianist has carried the lead for some time and then recedes back into the balanced ensemble playing, clapping is appropriate and expected. Jazz audiences, in a less formal relationship with the performers than in classical performances, immediately recognize and acknowledge the virtuosity and the effort it takes by communicating their appreciation. At classical concerts, the audience struggles to demonstrate patience when moved by the musicians' art and waits until the end of a lengthy composition.

To take an aside, I did not grow up in a family which schooled me in the appreciation of jazz or classical music. My introductions to these was slow, through the music education programs of public school and college. Our music came more from folk traditions, church hymnals, and popular gospel and secular radio. If my mom used the word "jazzy" to describe music, it was not a compliment. Beyond that home training, in high school I sang and listened to music of various eras of Western culture, from Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Neo-Classical, and Modern eras. We learned the discipline of remaining silent until an entire piece was finished before offering applause. In college, my exposure grew through public performances of chamber music, orchestras, string and woodwind quartets, and occasional jazz. But learning about jazz really came later from listening to the public radio station in Dallas during my two years working there. Even now, I have attended few live jazz performances, and when I do I appreciate the chance to go with a friend from whom I can learn, by observing, the skills of listening and appreciating what I see and hear.

The work of music is partly understood as the work of the musicians, but there is in music as in all art a surplus of work that is greater than the particular agents of its production and performance. Scientific study confirms many anecdotal links between music and the brain, affecting emotion, reasoning, creativity, exercise, memory, and personality. I won't try to report on all these scientific studies. A quick internet search will uncover popular and scientific resources about the complex relationship between music and the brain and body. Play around with the search terms and you may, like me, find yourself reading all kinds of research and commentary rather than this blog post. Rather than be comprehensive or even particularly scientific, I will comment briefly on a few aspects of the work music does for human flourishing.

Perhaps most obvious to many people is the emotional and formational link one retains to the music one listens to during formative periods and significant moments. Music marketers have developed business models around stratifying the various niches in which people become attached to musical styles and artists during adolescence and early adulthood. Music of the 60s, of the 70s, of the 80s, etc., become the organizational structure for attracting a certain type of listener to whom advertisers can target messages to match the demographics. This business use of music taps into something many of us have known personally--that tunes, rhythms, instruments, and songs of a certain era propel us into memories or emotional states relevant to deeply formative parts of our history. Certain beats and tunes stir the confusion and rebellion of teens frustrated by the struggle between independence and parental authority. Songs and lyrical hooks may evoke early attempts to understand feelings of attraction, infatuation, and one's bodily awakening as a sexual being. Longings, hopes, and decisions about life direction may have close ties to a personal "musical score." The work of music clearly includes an interplay with crucial emotional and formational eras and mileposts in one's personal narrative.

The mention of a musical score points to another aspect of music's work. Music taps deep structures of the brain to arouse emotion: anxiety and fear, sadness, anger, attraction, happiness, excitement and more. While not all people respond to the same music with the same emotion, there are widely accepted patterns of "happy" and "sad" music, shaped by harmonies, rhythm, tempo, volume, timbre, and other complex aspects of music. I tend to be skeptical of overgeneralizations about happy and sad music, but scientific study tends to support links between emotional perceptions of music and emotional reactions to other sensory perceptions. Listening to a "happy" or "sad" musical clip will likely influence a person's perception about facial expressions as more happy or sad. Some theorize an ancient link between music and the sound of active human living as influencing this reaction in the brain. Even without needing the hard science, the use of sound tracks to shape the mood of a movie is a widely tested and effective sign of the work music does. Many people regularly choose music to play at home or in their headphones at work or out in public with an idea of influencing a mood toward happiness, energy, melancholic remembrance, or meditation. Music works in our brains and bodies to reinforce or redirect our moods, even without our conscious planning.

Finally, there are many directions of research on the relation of music to strengthening reasoning ability, to helping focus mental activity, and to opening up creativity in thought. I am particularly interested in the work of music to spark creativity and reflection. "Brain science," a term of growing popularity, is apparently something different from psychology or physiology or philosophy. I take it to be a specialization related to each of those fields, using newly available knowledge to offer insights that could be valuable to all of those older disciplines. Brain science offers explanations rooted in the activity or reduction of activity in various parts of the brain under certain circumstances. One such explanation says that just the right volume and type of music can create enough disturbance in brain activity that a person's most routine reasoning and memory patterns become interrupted, requiring the brain to work a little harder, to work around interrupted routines, and seek creative solutions to problems. I don't really know how to evaluate how credible that explanation may be. Yet, it offers one kind of reasonable explanation, rooted in basic brain function and in growing knowledge about the complex process of memory and reasoning. Regardless of how accurate the theory may be, the actual work of music to stir creativity has wide anecdotal support.

To wrap up my ruminations on letting music do its work, I will go back to my seat in Baldwin Auditorium, listening to the jazz duet. Not really a novice any longer, but far from a connoisseur, I listened with eagerness to the various ways the two musicians intertwined their roles, sometimes stepping back or forward as accompanist and lead, and other times mingling two lines into one. I was listening with a friend with much longer experience of attending live jazz performances, so at times my learning included watching her responses to the music to help me understand what might be going on in the room. In a fancy auditorium at an academic institution, I gathered that the crowd was somewhat stiffer, with less bodily movement of the head, legs, and feet, than one might see in a different venue. There were times when it seemed I ought to be standing and moving my body, but not on this night. Different styles and melodies took my thinking in different directions--sometimes into issues of work and intellect, and other times into relationships, social life, and politics.

There is an interesting relationship between the listener's thoughts and feelings about a piece of music and her or his desire to know a "back story" of how a piece came to be written, or when it emerged during the life of the composer. This is not essential, and in fact may function to limit the creative reverie that music may incite. Yet, it also can be part of the complexity of how music works. In one case, Joey Calderazzo told a story about a piece before he played it. He does not always tell it, but the performance fell on an important anniversary relevant to this particular composition in which he was engaging his thoughts and feelings about a dear friend who was struggling with cancer. He mentioned being on tour, performing in many different places, yet looking regularly at the postings about his friend on the CaringBridge website, where people dealing with terminal illness (usually cancer) and their loved ones can provide regular updates about the progress, or regress, of their health as they deal with various treatments, symptoms, improvements, and setbacks.

Some of you readers know that I spent about a year and a half writing on CaringBridge during Everly's illness and after her death. So the mention of CaringBridge immediately set my thoughts and feelings on a trajectory. As the duo began to play the piece, named "Hope," I was already on track for a tour of memories. A few years ago, I may not have been able to listen to the music because of the intensity of grief. I'm not completely sure how to describe this particular moment which is the primary reason I am writing about the music. The music went to work. I was listening and being drawn along by the melody and rhythm.

At the same time my imagination took me to the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. I saw the waiting rooms in various clinics. I recalled the hospital rooms where we waited for and through treatments. I saw the pharmacy, the doctor's examination rooms, the hallways, the pre-op and recovery rooms. And there were so many waiting rooms. I remembered Everly's moments of impatience during the tedious waiting for CT scans, having to drink barium shakes to get ready. There were times when she was anxious and needed me in sight. There were procedures that lasted hours and left me wandering the halls. Sometimes I even taught my classes through video and audio conferencing in the lobby of the hospital. Mostly, it was a chain of memories of the two of us doing our work to live a little longer and share time with our kids, our families, and one another.

I did shed some tears, but the interaction between the music and my thoughts and feelings was more complicated than a mere trigger for sadness. I'm not sure sadness accurately describes the emotions that accompanied the work this music was doing. It was an opening to creative possibilities. It was not only a memory of loss, but also a memory of effort, of unified struggle, and of hope for what might still await us. I'm inclined to think that what was going on between me and the music is partly described as creative thinking. It was not merely a catalog of memories, nor a sinking into a blue mood. It was also a process engendering the love, the hope, and the good that went on between us, and even among us in relation to the medical staff, as we lived that struggle toward what we did not yet know would come to pass. I'm not trying to make this sound like a mystical vision, because it wasn't. Yet I found myself in that evening in a concert hall in a kind of creative simultaneity with the remembered time in Houston, when the future was not known and the possibilities awaited. Thus, there was a mixture of grief and hope, tied together in the beauty of having lived alongside Everly during those events, as well as in her presence in memory now amidst all that my life can and may yet be.

I don't want to overdramatize or idealize a song at a concert. I'm trying to describe through self-report and reflection what I think appears as a possibility in the way music works and can work in many occasions. I did not take a flight of ecstasy. It was not one of the highlight events of my life. Still, it was a moment of power, a glimpse of glory, a flash of soaring that opens the eye to possibilities that may not seem obvious in most of the mundane hours of work and routine. I think that the right kind of listening, with patience, can let music do some amazing work.

Shepherds, Why This Jubilee?

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Broadway) — Sun, 25 Dec 2016 06:48:00 +0000

The Christmas season sweeps over people with wave after wave of emotion, a wide range of feelings that reflect the memories of family time, of fears, hopes, dreams, and disappointments. I'm one of those people.

I don't remember much mixture of emotions when I was a child. I think when I was a younger adult, part of the mix of emotions was being tired from finishing papers and projects in school. There was the excitement of giving and receiving presents, and the inevitable disappointment that the long-anticipated presents were not going to actually make life perfect or even very different. Eventually, the joy was in seeing the happiness of our own children, mixed with the nagging sense that we had sold our souls to the consumer gospel and had accumulated way too much junk. Now as I look around at the boxes still unpacked from my move to NC from Texas, I still know that it is true.

So this Christmas Eve has been no surprise. I've had the satisfaction that my adult children and I have agreed to cut back on the orgy of consumption and share time together without the pressure of last-minute shopping or checking off lists from the the tit-for-tat gift mandate. For that reason, we are able to enjoy being together better, taking care of preparing meals and reveling in them together. I hung out part of the day with brother-in-law Jim and Dad. Most everyone relaxed and napped a while. Jim played some Andy Griffith episodes to make us laugh. Then our old man trio went to Black Mountain Presbyterian Church for Christmas Eve liturgy.

Even while waiting and listening to the preparatory organ music, I was drawn to a beautiful hymn and prayer printed in the order of worship:

Jesus is our childhood's patter; day by day, like us he grew;
He was little, weak, and helpless, tears and smiles like us he knew...

God of the commonplace,
we confess that we have bee seduced by human wealth and power.
We do not expect to meet you in haggard faces,
cold barns, or lonely watches.
We are slow to receive your word when it comes from improbable places.
God of all creation, intrude on us this night.
Let the clamor of angels and the hurried steps of shepherds
echo in our hearts, until we, too,
spill with good news of great joy.

That waiting, that anticipation, those moments shared so many times with my beloved Everly and Hugh Delle, began to overwhelm me. Sitting between my dad and a woman who sweetly greeted me when I joined her on the pew, my face clouded and tears flowed. A knot seemed to swell in my chest, a tension formed of deep longing for what is out of reach. In our first Christmas without Mom and now the fourth without Everly, I don't really think this kind of feeling is going to ever go away, until a day comes when I don't even know myself any longer.

When I looked ahead and saw the lyric line, "Shepherds, why this jubilee? Why your joyous strains?", it struck me as a summation of my thoughts and feelings in the moment.

My longing and discomfort in this season in inextricably tied to not having Everly and Hugh Delle in the room with me, but it spreads from there to many other things. There is a great sorrow weighing on me because of the discouraging events and social uproar of this moment in time. It is a time when people of my generation may have hoped we would see taking shape in our world some element of redeeming change, of movement toward overcoming the racialized structure of the world, of seeing an end to the centuries of Eurochristianist-Muslim hatred, of dividing and despising people for bodily differences. But if we are honest with ourselves, we have to recognize that much of what we hoped might be changed has remained a molten magma under the surface of false civility. Granted permission and encouraged to set aside pretense of politeness, the fabric of social existence seems to be dissolving around us.

I'm not generally inclined to believe all is lost, but there are times when it is hard to see the hope. A quarter century ago the long and deadly Lebanese Civil War which had divided a previously peaceful country into camps ruled by warlords, came to a tenuous peace, only to be followed a few years later by an outburst of violence among Rwandans that seared every conscience. Bolstered by social theory that questioned the inevitability of human unity and highlighted the depth of disagreement as far beyond the conventions and capacities of rational agreement, I wondered if Lebanon and Rwanda might be the future toward which modernity is inexorably plunging. Next came our family's heartbroken departure from a church in which too many members were asking, "What would be wrong with being an all-white church?" It was not a future I hoped for my children. But I'm drifting that way again with Syria, deportation, Muslim registries, gun and weapon extravaganza, police killing, racial profiling....

Searching for paths toward another future, I continued to study and converse and experiment toward a new way of ecclesial practice in community that would form in the world a counterpolitics of beloved community. In time, that led me into relationships with radicals and innovators--people who, unlike me, were not writing a story in academic language, but remaking neighborhoods and cities and race relations in their corners of the world. Most of my direct work has been in community organizing, and I've supplemented that with relationships among those who are doing Christian Community Development, who are forming intentional new monastic communities, and who are crying out a prophetic word toward moving Forward Together at Moral Monday rallies. I still can stir passion to teach and preach that these springs in the desert are the real path toward good news for the poor and despised of the world. I tell myself this is the new wave of Christian renewal. But if that's true, it's so slow. What I've had to accept for a long time, that this world is not on an upward path of progress, remains a painful lesson to learn again and again.

At Christmas time, when all my children who live in three different states have come together, and I sit in church without their mom or grandma still in the world, it becomes painfully, desperately, dismally slow. How have I and my generation of church people failed in our imaginations, in our strivings, in our comfort with this world, to live a gospel radical enough to be a sign of hope in this world? When my friend Chanequa Walker-Barnes asks whether those attacking "Black Lives Matter" can understand the "sheer horror of people objecting to the statement that our lives are valuable?", it drives home the disillusionment with the times. When the NC legislature, elected through illegal voting districts and voter suppressive laws, insists that the heritage of allowing harm to people because of their body differences is too close to their hearts to repeal, it dissipates hope. When people insisting on being known as Christians vote and cheer for the very things that Christians ought to oppose, it begins to clarify the world in which we live. In an era when churches' primary de facto liturgical expression has become "where are the young people?", I'm feeling a bit lost on how to offer an answer of why young people should give a damn about the church.

Sitting in a church full of white people tonight, I was deeply moved by the liturgy, but it was not lost on me how the message of turning away from fear toward hope seems as out of reach as ever in that context and so many more. The pastor's remark, mid-meditation, that the church has been guilty of peddling fear in order to turn around and offer hope, hits very close to the core of the problem. Churches of all sorts, having aligned with the tide of culture, are playing the same games. Promote fear, then offer yourself as the solution--sell your product, line your pockets, seek your own interest. I'm pretty sure that's the church my kids and their generation see. I know it has been sold to me many times, and I've willingly bought it. But I hoped I knew better. My friend Deborah Boston and I talk often about the difficulty of believing churches can or want to make the changes they need to make in order to be the gospel here and now. The chilling truth is how much that is true of my own way of being in and of the church.

The beauty of tonight's liturgy, to me, was in its recognition that this advent's waiting was not just pretend. The harshness, horrors, terrors, and struggles of the world are real. When false evangelicalism has told me, "You should not be living under the circumstances. Rise above them!", it was so much bourgeois claptrap. The circumstances are crushing and destroying the very people we claim God loves and wants us to love. Aloof discipleship that looks for a fantasized solution outside of human suffering does not fit with the story of this night. There have been too many times in this almost 59 years of living that I've been willing to let a spiritualized gospel replace the true gospel that took form in a shit-floored shed where a naked baby clung tenuously to life, surrounded by just his homeless, refugee parents and various domestic animals. As Steve Harmon reminded me tonight, the memory of that stable opens up a great mystery--it wasn't a gala party with dressed-up people, a sterile hospital full of highly skilled technicians, or even the comfort of home with family and neighbors helping and praying. The animals in the stable, not the self-important humans hoping for a photo op, were the first witnesses of Jesus in the world.

O magnum mysterium,
et admirabile sacramentum,
ut animalia viderent Dominum natum,
jacentem in praesepio!
O great mystery,
and wonderful sacrament,
that animals should see the new-born Lord,
lying in a manger!

By the next day, Joseph must have had to go out and hustle up some water, some bread, and whatever other food he could buy or beg. Mary must have been exhausted as she relinquished from her very body's strength to carry, give birth, and feed the infant Jesus

Beata Virgo, cujus viscera
meruerunt portare
Dominum Jesum Christum.
Alleluia!
How blessed is [Mary] the virgin whose tender flesh
was deemed worthy to bear
our Savior, Jesus Christ.
Alleluia!

I started out talking about mixed emotions across a wide range. Mostly here I've been dwelling on the sadness of this Christmas Eve. I don't mean by digging deeper into the sorrow that I'm now fixed in one frame of mind and heart. Yet it seems that I should at least feel the wave of sadness all the way through in this "get over it," "move on, already," "accentuate the positive" age. It's a world in which commercial interests aim to stir up happiness through encouraging mass consumption of trinkets and gadgets. In the morning, Momma won't be getting me up to have breakfast. Everly won't be organizing us to look in stockings and unwrap packages. Trinkets, gadgets, and positivity won't change that. And the epidemic of indifference, greed, and hate that has swept our world will still be convulsing all around us. It's not suddenly easy being born or giving birth.

With all the promise of joy that angels announced to the farm workers on the hillside, those marginalized workers still had their hard work to do. Mary and Joseph, holding on to that tiny baby, still had to find a way to make a living, a place to live, and food to eat. "Shepherds, why this jubilee?" Can such a lowly, outcast moment two millenia ago make a difference now? Looking at the churches of this land, it seems unlikely. But it still seems there is enough good news in the holistic gospel that's worth fighting for. As my friend Matt Jantzen said this week, "I'm angry, and I can't stand to just wait around while things get worse, and not try to do something about it." I hear you, Matt. I can see only glimpses of the path in the dark of this midnight. Y'all who still hunger and thirst for justice gotta help me see where that hungry baby is calling for me to bring some milk, a blanket, and an arm and chest to rest on.

This Season Without Mom

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Broadway) — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 23:33:00 +0000

I am back in the swing of the end of the academic semester, in between the family gatherings of Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. It was our first family gathering since Mom's funeral on February 20. It's no surprise that grief is unpredictable, and this season has certainly been that way.

I traveled to San Antonio for the annual circus of academic religious and textual studies known as the AAR/SBL Annual Meeting, to which are attached dozens of other related groups focused around faith traditions, studies of a particular scholar's work, topical interests, schools, publishers, and most any kind of individuation of religious studies one might imagine. I attended Mennonite and Baptist professors' gatherings as well as a research institute focused on trends in talking about God. I went to a workshop on teaching, a panel on a new book, and an alumni gathering. I hung out with friends, did lots of walking, and considered doing many more things than I had time to do.

Dad met me in San Antonio on Monday after visiting with his sister Mary McCombs, who also lives there. My time was so short in town, I was not able to arrange to see friends living in San Antonio, to my disappointment. Dad and I rested one night at his house in Salado, empty of its familiar central presence of Hugh Delle. We left on Tuesday morning to make the two-day drive to Black Mountain. Lydia's new job kept her at work through Wednesday and required her to check in and work on Friday, so she was not able to make the NC trip this year. She went to be with Everly's family, Marie, Ruth, John, and Kenny, in Austin. Michael and David would make the drive down from Ann Arbor on Thursday. Jerene's chaplaincy job had her working at the hospital on Thanksgiving Day, so we all were converging to have our big meal on Friday.

The first long day's drive brought us into Tuscaloosa, AL, pretty late in the evening. It was a day of plenty of conversations. Without Hugh Delle, no one led us in a singalong. No one insisted we play any road games together. We just kept pressing forward to get the miles behind us. The second shorter day included more conversations about how we were making it in these days without Mom around. Dad is doing his best to reactivate some professional work and relationships. While Mom's health was declining, he had little time between their medical appointments and her need for his support at home. His focus around her care was a development that came gradually and without any regrets. Of course, it was sad for him and all of us to see her growing weaker and needing more assistance to get through the days. Now that she is free from those troubles, Dad has had some time to readjust and think about what he should do with his life. I'm very impressed with the initiatives he is taking to do good in the world and become more active again. We also discussed what I might hope to do in the coming years. Thankful not to face much traffic, we arrived to clouds of smoke in the mountains of NC as the sun was setting.

For at least six or seven years, holiday gatherings have shifted from Mom's frenzied work to make everything happen to Mike and Jerene sharing in the cooking. It used to be that Everly and Jim would take responsibility for the clean-up, and of course that Everly had us all organized in advance to enjoy our time together. Now, without Everly and Hugh Delle, it was a more sedate group. The majority has shifted toward the quieter personalities: Jim, W.D., Mike, David, Michael, and Naomi. When I am one of the most gregarious people in a group, then you know it's a pretty calm gathering.

Being a little brother seems to never get out of one's system. So even at 58 and 61, I constantly find ways to pester or tease my big sister when the family is together. Sometimes, I have to admit, I've gotten too carried away. Moreover, with Hugh Delle in the house, it seems like I would feel even more permission to pick at Jerene and wait for Mom's reprimand. I say this because one of the ways I felt Mom's absence this Thanksgiving was in a need to police myself and try harder to get along. It struck me as somehow backward--it seems like I should have felt that way in Mom's presence out of respect for her. Family dynamics are confusing and somehow not very transparent to us who are in the midst of them.

We talked about Mom, and of course Everly, throughout our time together. There was not any clear moment of focus on Mom's absence. Maybe it was most like being a collection of beads with no connecting thread. Mom was a thread that held us together. Now we were trying to figure out how to be together without her. Nobody had any fights that I observed. We all did the kinds of things we usually do, with less of the steering, coordinating, planning talk that Mom would bring.

Just now it came to mind how whenever we would sit down to eat, within a few minutes Hugh Delle would turn the conversation by asking, "What should we have for dinner?", or lunch, or breakfast, or whatever the next meal would be. Nobody was really pressing those kinds of questions. With some effort, we agreed at one point to watch a movie together. We shared meals. Some went on walks while others napped. The younger generation went out to meet friends. The old fogeys sat around and talked, read, or watched TV. Dad and I watched a very disappointing Baylor football game.

There were some poignant moments, but mostly these were private to each person. Having been through such intense grief from Everly's death and absence, I wondered if that was going to repeat itself. But grief is unpredictable, and it was much lower key for these days. We made it through. We loved each other. We reenacted our family traditions.

And now we are back to work. For those of us in academic life, it's the high pressure time of wrapping up a semester. Naomi will finish her dual masters degrees in social work and public health. I will grade another batch of student work. And all of us will think ahead about regathering for Christmas, with Lydia joining us. It is also Advent, a season of waiting through trials. We all have our trials. Dad is shouldering his with courage. He was raised well, and he learned through many years of marriage, pastoring, and organizational leadership. He's doing all he can to make the world he touches better for the many souls God loves. And so, we wait.