Learning to See and Learning to Listen

This dialogue sermon was first preached at Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church, Durham, NC, on March 1, 2015.

Matthew 16:1-26

The Pharisees and Sadducees came, and to test Jesus they asked him to show them a sign from heaven. He answered them, “When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red. ’ And in the morning, ‘It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening. ’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times. An evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah.” Then he left them and went away.

 When the disciples reached the other side, they had forgotten to bring any bread. Jesus said to them, “Watch out, and beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” They said to one another, “It is because we have brought no bread.” And becoming aware of it, Jesus said, “You of little faith, why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not perceive? Do you not remember the five loaves for the five thousand, and how many baskets you gathered? Or the seven loaves for the four thousand, and how many baskets you gathered? How could you fail to perceive that I was not speaking about bread? Beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees!” Then they understood that he had not told them to beware of the yeast of bread, but of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees.

 Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.

 From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

 Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?

Today we are going to try an experiment in dialogue.  Those of us who have studied about preaching have been taught that good preaching is not a one-sided lecture.  Good preaching is a dialogue between the pulpit and the pew.  In the tradition of black churches, we practice that dialogue in part through a kind of call and response.  When the congregation appreciates the preaching, they speak back to the preacher.  When the preacher gets a response, it affects how the sermon continues to unfold.  A quiet congregation may be giving a message as well.  Nowadays, when I go to a white congregation to preach, it’s a bit of a struggle for me.  I’ve grown used to having you help me out.  So today I am going to ask you for some help, but in a different way than usual. 

I’m going to ask you to have a conversation with others who are around you in the pews, considering a set of questions relevant to the sermon.  These questions relate to our life as a congregation on mission in this community.  They also relate to our church’s alliance with other congregations and community groups in Durham, through the community organizing group Durham CAN.  Mt. Level has been a part of Durham CAN from its very beginning, almost 20 years ago.  We want to continue strong relationships with our friends across the city and county.  We have accomplished many important things in the past, from improving after-school care opportunities for young people, to getting sidewalks and streetlights fixed, to promoting a living wage for workers, to helping arrange a means for poor people to get access to specialized medical care, to getting the schools and the local governments to hire bilingual staff and interpreters, to pressuring the city and police to respond and change their ways of relating to minorities in the community, and so many other ways.

There is not a head honcho of Durham CAN who decides what we will work on next.  There is not a backroom board that sets the agenda.  In organizing of this kind, the agenda rises from the people.  It happens in listening sessions.  Today, we want to listen to one another, to have a listening dialogue in this sermon.  Over the next month or so, at least a couple thousand people in member organizations across our city, including many congregations, will gather to discuss what is on our hearts and minds, each in their own ways.  At Mt. Level, we are having this discussion as part of this morning’s sermon during our 7:55 am service.  Don’t think you came to the wrong place and have ended up at the PTA meeting.  No, this is still church, and I am bringing a sermon, but you will also have a part of the sermon.  So let’s press on with it.

Not everyone gets caught up in the latest fad story on the news or on the internet, but I would not be surprised to find that at least some of you have heard about people arguing over the color of a dress in the past few days.  Is it white and gold, or is it blue and black?  Physicists, computer programmers, psychologists, and all kinds of people have given expert opinions about “the dress.”  I am not sure why it is such a big deal, but I bring it up because it illustrates an aspect of what this sermon is about.  Although we all may be in the same space and time together here and now, that does not mean that all of us see and hear the same thing at the same time.  What you and I may see as we look around us may be very different.  That’s in part because of the way that we look at things.

Sometimes we call this having a different perspective on things.  From my point of view, and from your point of view, the world may look different.  Sometimes we call this our vision of reality.  And part of what Jesus, his friends, and his opponents are dealing with in this chapter from Matthew is that they see the world differently.

There is more than just how they see at stake in this chapter.  Also, when someone is speaking, they are not always hearing the same thing.  I can bet many of you have been in a conversation in which one person thought she said one thing, but the other person heard something very different.  Listening to one another is often harder than we think.  Husbands and wives, parents and children, long time friends—even people who are close to one another often struggle to agree on what is being communicated between them.  

You said this. 

No, I said that. 

No way! I distinctly heard this. 

Well, you distinctly heard wrong, because that is not what I said.  

If you’ve never been in one of those conversations, I would be very surprised.

So today I want to consider the proposition that we all need to learn to see and learn to listen.  A good example of this difficulty happened just a week ago on national television.  On a program called “This Week,” hosted by George Stephanopoulas, two authors were pitted against each other concerning the way to overcome the wrongs of racial injustice which go back across centuries through slavery, Jim Crow, and discrimination in housing, employment, and society in general.  Ta-Nehisi Coates argued for actual financial solutions to previous financial damages.  Shelby Steele said that government efforts to help black people had only hurt them.  These two well-known intellectuals saw a different world and heard very different things being said.  They agreed on the wrongs of slavery.  They disagreed on what has happened since that time in the lives of blacks in the United States.  They saw different histories unfolding.  They did not hear the same message when they listened to the cries of the black community.  Something like that went on in our text from Matthew’s gospel as well.

Let’s walk through this complicated series of events.  They happen across different geographical settings as Jesus and his followers travel and carry on conversations on a whole range of matters.  I think there is a lot to observe here about how we see and how we listen.

It begins with an argument between some of the community leaders and Jesus.  The Pharisees and Sadducees come with a chip on their shoulders.  They don’t like Jesus.  They are the ones who know “what’s what.”  They don’t approve of Jesus’ talking to so many people and having so much influence.  They don’t think he has the right credentials.  They see an opportunist and imposter.  They come at him demanding to see a sign from heaven.

Jesus turns it all back on them.  He points out that they know how to interpret the weather and plenty of other things around them, but they can’t see the signs of the times.  They are supposed to be the spiritual leaders who know what’s what.  But they can’t see what everyone else seems to see.  Crowds of people are following Jesus around, listening to every word he has to say and watching every movement he makes.  These crowds are convinced that something great is happening in the world and that Jesus is at the heart of it all.  They believe that God is doing something momentous through Jesus.  But the Pharisees and Sadducees can’t see it.  They are so fixed on what they already see as the way of God, that is the way that they like to do things, the way that keeps them in the dominant class of society, that they can’t see something new happening. 

Jesus says, repeating something he said earlier recorded in chapter 12 of Matthew, that the sign they get is the sign of Jonah.  Now of course, there is an allegorical meaning here related to Jonah’s being dead to the world in the belly of a fish, then sort of resurrected when the fish spit him out, a story that parallels the coming death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus.  But the meaning of the sign for this moment is more focused on the ability to see and hear what God is doing in the world. 

Jonah himself could not believe that God would do something new in Ninevah.  Yet when the Ninevites heard the word of God, they received it with repentance, thanks, and joy.  God was doing something new in Ninevah, and the prophet who should have known about it did not see it coming at all.  In the same way, the people all around the countryside and in the towns and cities can see that God is doing something great, but the religious leaders don’t see it at all.  The crowds listen and hear the possibilities, but the leaders hear only interference with their plans and their power.

Which are we?  Are we able to see a world of possibilities in which God is working for our good?  Do we hear the words of life and respond in faith?  Or do we see only the same old same old, day after day, nothing changing, so we are just settled in to wait out this life until its over?  Do we shut out the sounds of fresh beginnings because we have become comfortable where we are?

This same kind of drama keeps playing out in various ways throughout this chapter.  When Jesus, upset about his encounter with the Pharisees and Sadducees, makes comment in figurative language to the disciples, they completely miss the point.  All they can think about is that they forgot to buy some lunch.  So when Jesus mentions “yeast,” they think he is talking about bread for lunch. 

This makes Jesus even more frustrated.  They seem not to have been listening to him at all.  He starts telling them some stories to remind them of all that has been happening.  He reminds them of days when many thousands were fed from only a few bits of food, and all the many baskets of leftovers that were collected.  The twelve baskets of leftovers, like the twelve tribes that make up the whole of the nation of Israel, and the seven baskets of leftovers, like the seven days of creation and Sabbath, represent completeness and abundance.  The work that God has been doing is the ushering in of a new age, the age of God’s reign, the Kingdom age.  It is breaking into the world right before their eyes.  Don’t they remember?  Yet the Pharisees and Sadducees “yeast” was their teaching which supported the status quo, the existing power relations, the economic disparities and injustices of their world.  Jesus said to look out for those who only can continue to prop up the world as it is and cannot hope for and see a world as it should be.

What are we seeing as we go about our lives?  Are we seeing a world that cannot change?  Is it a world of injustice that will always be bad or even keep getting worse?  Or is it a world in which Jesus has put thrones, dominions, powers, principalities, and authorities under his feet?  Can the way that power and economic life is arranged be turned upside down?  Can God bring down the mighty and lift up the lowly?  Are we able to hear what Jesus is telling us, or are we just trying to get our lunch and forget about making a difference?

In the next part of the story, we read that they arrive at their destination of Caesarea Philippi, a place bearing the names of the current and previous empires that have dominated Judea, the Roman Caesar and the Greek Emperor Phillip.  In this place, Jesus decides to have a listening session of his own.  He has a set of questions for the disciples to discuss.  The first one asks them what they have heard and what they know.  “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?”  They had a range of answers.  At least two important findings emerge from this conversation.

The first important finding is that many people think that Jesus may be John the Baptist.  That is a dangerous political idea.  What has happened to John the Baptist, who was once the same kind of popular traveling preacher that Jesus is now?  John has been arrested, imprisoned, and executed by beheading—that’s what happened to him.  So if powerful people believe that somehow John the Baptist, or someone just like him, is still out there, they may be soon on their way to arrest, imprison, and execute Jesus, too.  What else did the first question bring out?  They say that people compare Jesus to the great prophets.  They recognized that he is bringing the same kinds of preaching today that the prophets did of old.  They believe Jesus is calling Israel back to faithfulness to God.  They see him as challenging injustice and demanding a change in the way the powerful and wealthy treat the poor, the widows, the orphans, and the immigrants.  So the disciples report that Jesus’ message rooted in the prophets of old is getting through.  People recognize that he is bringing God’s word and the possibility of a new age.

Then the second question asks for the disciples’ own judgments, their own heartfelt answers.  “Who do you say that I am?”  We don’t know what all of them said, but I suspect this was a long and interesting conversation.  Different disciples must have shed different light on how they had come to understand who Jesus was.  We only get the report of Peter’s answer in the gospel text.  Peter gives a great answer for which Jesus commends him.  Peter has expressed, perhaps in summary of what all the group had to say, that Jesus is the Messiah.  To say in his day that Jesus is the Son of God was not the same as we use that term in the post-resurrection, post-Pentecost era of the church.  Peter’s saying he was the Son of God was pretty much the same as saying he was the Messiah.  For the Jewish monotheistic faith, Son of God did not mean that Jesus was a divine being.  That would be blasphemy to them.  Son of God in the Old Testament generally means something like calling someone a messenger directly from God.  An angel, for instance, might be called the Son of God for delivering a vital word directly from heaven to earth.  So Peter says in two different ways that we believe God sent you and that what you bring to us comes from the very heart of God.  Jesus was so happy to hear that answer.  He was not, to his disciples, just a magic show, a gravy train, a crackpot orator, a charismatic figure.  To them, he was from God and doing God’s work.

It was a high point, followed by a very low point in the career of Jesus.  Because they acknowledge this valuable understanding of who he is and in doing so express their willingness to follow him further into his mission from God, Jesus starts having a strategy session with the disciples.  He begins to talk to them about what he needs to do.  In the tradition of the prophets, he needs to speak the truth to power.  He needs to confront the powerful and the oppressors, to challenge them for their injustices, and to press for them to change their ways.  Because he has already heard his enemies talk about wanting to get rid of him, and because of what has happened to John the Baptist, he realizes that what he needs to do next will be risky.  In fact, he does not believe he will survive it.  He is, in fact, expecting that he will help get the movement started, but that when he gets arrested and executed, his followers will have to continue the work.  God will vindicate their sacrifice, and he is confident that even if he dies, God will raise him up again.

Hearing this, but not really listening, Peter jumps in and contradicts Jesus.  Wait a minute, Jesus.  Let’s not rush into anything.  There are other possibilities.  Like you reminded us, there were lots of baskets of food left over before.  You can afford to wait awhile.  Maybe we don’t need to go to Jerusalem just now.  Let things calm down a bit.  Take another lap around Galilee.  Let’s build up the base of support a little more.  Don’t go inviting disaster when things are going so well.  You don’t have to say everything you know to people who don’t want to hear it.  There’s lots of work to do besides confronting the powerful.  Go heal someone else’s mother-in-law.  That went over well before.

Jesus was crestfallen.  He was so disappointed.  And apparently he was troubled.  He knew what Peter was saying.  Those thoughts had probably passed through his own mind.  Maybe he didn’t have to face down the people in power.  Maybe he could just keep things straight in his own backyard, his own household.  This is what we call temptation, and Jesus was tempted just as we are.  It’s like the first temptation he experienced in the wilderness, linked to his conversation about the baskets of leftover food. 

That’s why he responds to Peter’s words with the command, “Get behind me, Satan!”  He’s not calling Peter Satan.  He’s calling out the tempter.  He’s saying like the song, “Get out of my way!  Get out of my way!”  Get out of my way, Satan.  I’ve got a job to do.  So he tells his disciples not to be a stumbling block.  They need to understand the mission.  They need to do the power analysis.  If God’s mission is to be fulfilled, then the fight has to be taken to those who are in the way of God’s work.  They need to believe that change is needed and that it is possible.  They need to listen to what they are saying to one another and listen to what Jesus is saying to them.

Do we really believe that God has a better way for our world?  Can we let the joy of knowing God, the hope of God’s will being done on earth, the love of one another to stir our passion to take on the challenges of our time?  Is the Messiah God has sent to us the one who leads us into a more livable, loving, just world?  That’s what the first invitation is today. 

I want you to get a partner, just two or three of you together at the most, and talk about the questions on the half sheet of paper that you received from the ushers.  Open yourselves up and be willing to have this holy conversation.  What has made you proud to be part of this church?  What pressures are bearing down on you and your family?  On what matters should our church take a stand?  As you carry on this blessed conversation, talk about what really matters to you.  You are in the presence of God and of brothers and sisters in the family of God.  When you get to the last question, jot down in a few words what each of you would believe to be priorities to continue the work of God that Jesus was starting and that we are continuing even today.  We want to collect your notes on that last question especially to begin this process of listening to one another, right here in our congregation and all across Durham.  So start now to talk with one another.  I’ll be doing the same thing right here in the room with you.  After a few minutes, we will come back together to finish this sermon.  Don’t be timid.  Start right away.

[Conversations began all over the sanctuary using the following listening guide.

Mount Level Listening Sessions:

Contributing to a Common Agenda for

Durham CAN

Tell a story about one time when you were most proud to be part of Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church.

What are the greatest pressures that you and your family are having to face at this time?  Can you give an example of how this has affected you?

If there was one issue that Mount Level should stand up for and strive to make a difference in now, what would that be?  Why is that such an important issue for us to take on?

After giving a reminder and a few minutes to complete the conversations, we returned to the more traditional part of the sermon.]

All right.  I hope that most of you were able to talk through the three steps of this conversation.  If you are still jotting down what you heard from listening to one another, finish that up.

Jesus went on to explain to his disciples how important the work they were about to do would be.  He said, in anticipation of his confrontation in Jerusalem, that following him would be like taking up a cross.  That means being willing to be mistreated and suffer because you stood up for the weak, the oppressed, the poor, and the outcast.  He said if we are not willing to do that, it is as if we are throwing our own lives away.  Clinging to our own comfort and selfishness rather than giving of ourselves for brothers and sisters means that we lose the true meaning of life, the true joy of fellowship, the true communion with God.  But if we can put aside our self-centeredness and count the lives of others as of infinite value to God, then we can find what God has made us for, what God has made us to be.  What is the profit of winning a pointless, worthless life?  Nothing is worth throwing away what God wants for us just to get a moment of comfort.  Nothing is worth a life without knowing God. 

Have you met the Lord Jesus?  Have you seen the world Jesus offers to us?  Have you heard his call to loving community and mutual service?  Today is the day to follow Jesus with your life.  If you have never taken the step to join Jesus on the road to victory over sin, oppression, and death, there is not better time than now to join yourself to him. 

Are you in Durham and not united to a congregation?  We at Mt Level want to be a people who follow our Lord wherever he may lead.  If the Spirit is telling you that this is the place, that these are the people, that this is the mission to which you should join your life, come and become part of this congregation.  Follow Jesus with us.  Help us become what God would have us to be, as we offer to you our friendship and fellowship along the way. 

Who Then Is This, That Even the Wind and Sea Obey Him?

Yesterday morning, through the night, and today the winds have been blowing.  Thursday's drive to High Point found my little car pushed around by the winds across the North Carolina Piedmont.  It's a windy season, and this week will bring much more of it.

This morning, my beloved and faithful friend, Rev. Ralph Burton, stepped into the sacred desk at Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church to testify of the ways of a faithful God in the lives of the patriarchs and matriarchs of Israel, drawing on the text from Hebrews 11.  Among the many names and stories told there, I am always drawn to the mention of Abraham, who "set out, not knowing where he was going."  A few verses later, the writer offers a summary of the first part of the chapter.

All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland.

There are so many ways that these words work on my consciousness of a life I am trying to live.  Probably most immediate to me is that these words constituted a critical text for reflection and analysis brought to the predominantly white congregation where Everly, I, and our children were seeking to serve God twenty years ago.  The speaker was Rev. Nancy Sehested, who came to us in a crucial time of division, when it was not clear where the church would go next.  I probably should write more about that moment in my faith development, but not today.  Let it stand for now that I am strangely saying that something from twenty years ago is the most immediate response I have to these words.  The past is not in the past. 

But these verses also speak to Everly's dying, and the events and moments she did not live to see.  They speak to the way she and I lived toward a vision of a better world in which children learn the math they need, in which justice flows into so many aspects of living, in which our children and other people's children have opportunities to live well and contribute to others' living well.  They also speak to my situation of trying to reshape a vision of how to live my life without her.

Burton and I call each other "brother" by intention.  I commented once from the pulpit that I was trying to get used to being called "Reverend" at Mt. Level, since in my growing up, Dad refused to be called by such a title.  He does not like the idea of the pastor's being treated as elevated in status or holiness.  He sees himself as one more sinner saved by grace.  To him, a pastor is "one among equals" called out to a specific task, but not a higher rank.  In response to those comments, Burton has always greeted me with a smile and a hearty "Brother Broadway."

Our backgrounds probably could not be much different in some ways, but similar in others.  Today he spoke of his ancestors brought to North Carolina from West Africa to work on a plantation not so far from where our church is located today.  He remembers being a dirt farmer growing up, with tobacco for a cash crop and a garden plot to feed the family.  He said that life clearly required they live in the way of Hebrews 11's testimony, "by faith."  My parents' families are one generation (on Dad's side) and two generations (on Mom's side) removed from dirt farming and sharecropping.  But although I am familiar with modern agriculture from growing up around it in Texas and hearing family stories, I don't have any significant experience of it.

As a second generation college graduate, the path of professional careers and salaries was paved for me.  Although we were not a wealthy family, we were well-established in the middle-class niche which includes home ownership, food on the table, cars to get around, and the comforts of contemporary life.  Mom and Dad remember the Great Depression and the struggle to get out of it, but their kids receive all of that second hand.  Burton told about the foreparents who founded Mt. Level in Granville County back in the days of the Emancipation, and their move down into Durham County when the federal government set up military camps on the land of their families.  I did not hear him complaining about the life he received from this heritage.  He told a story of God's faithfulness, of thankfulness for the blessing of God's bounty.

As Bro. Burton preached and testified, so much was on my mind today.  For several weeks, a good bit of my focus has been on promoting participation in the Historic Thousands on Jones Street, the Moral March of the Forward Together movement.  I had preached, written liturgy, and even learned how to use Twitter (old dog, new tricks) in order to try to get the message out, especially to Shaw University Divinity School students and alumni.  Finally the day of the march came yesterday.  I started early and stayed in the middle of it most of the day.  Even after the march and speeches were over, I roped my friend Rev. Dr. Rodney Sadler of Union Theological Seminary into coming to my afternoon Christian Ethics class to talk with my students about his ongoing work in building relationships among clergy and leaders in Charlotte, NC, including deep theological reflection on the meaning and calling of this approach to ministry for justice and the common good.

It was a long and tiring day, and as I sat in my house after dark, thinking back over it, I could not help noticing the wind whistling all through the neighborhood trees and houses.  The wind has been blowing for several days, and I think we will get quite a bit more as this week goes on.  On Saturday morning, I put on a cap with "Shaw University Divinity School" on the front, to make sure I was bearing witness appropriately to the church's concern for justice and provision for the poor.  But my big mop of hair doesn't hold a hat on very well.  When we got on the Fayetteville Street corridor near the NC State Capitol, it started blowing hard, like a wind tunnel.  One of my colleagues told me that if I put my hair in a ponytail, I could tuck that through the sizing gap in the back of the cap and hold my hat on.  It worked.  If it hadn't, I might not have gotten home with the cap.

The wind was strong, but the speakers were not just blowing wind.  They had important things to say.  And Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, did not disappoint.  He talked about a society whose hearts have grown cold, stony, and perhaps have even died.  He analyzed the problem with policies that refuse to provide health care, reverse the progress on voting rights, punish the unemployed, belittle teachers, care nothing for education, throw away a generation, make pariahs of immigrants, and generally despise the people who live in the land.  He said it's not a Republican or Democrat problem (or as I would put it, not a Republicrat or Demican problem), but a problem of our hearts.  We need to have our hearts revived to care for our sisters and brothers.  We need to have our hearts oriented toward the good we can build together rather than just shutting out the ones who we think are not worth our love.  With references to defibrillators and such, he reshaped for our edification the February 14 tropes of hearts and love.

Along with so much good, I was finishing up several weeks of teaching about Christian virtue and moral formation.  Class included discussion of James Wm McClendon's chapters on Jonathan and Sarah Edwards and the nature of Christian love (Ethics chapters 4 and 5).  I reviewed again the role of the Holy Spirit and perseverance in the habituation into virtue and the formation of character.  Growing in grace, acquiring virtue as Christ justifies (makes righteous) the people of God, includes many hard lessons, partial steps, and milestones along the way.  Students brought great insight to the conversation, letting me leave class with a good feeling of success. 

Recognizing that growth in virtue requires practice and is not immediate, it seems important for me to make note of another part of the day.  It comes in the context of my effort to rise into the full capacities of a faculty member after some years of diminished focus and hampered motivation.  The story is bigger and more complicated than Everly's sickness and death, but of course those events are at the center of it.  As I've written repeatedly, who I am and what I will do, now that Everly is not beside me in the same way, is the great challenge for me in these days.  I'm teaching the same courses I have taught for many years, working with many of the same people, attending the same church, and in process of seeing myself remade, re-formed for the tasks God has for me.

I have always believed that avoiding the vicissitudes of office politics, the comparisons and jealousies, the gossip and scheming, is the best policy.  Yet the belief and the actual living do not always match up.  So here I'm confessing that I'm not a saint.  Those who know me best now will appropriately "rofl."  Though sometimes reputed to be a man of few words, I have in the years of being a professor drifted toward having no unspoken thought.  Although I was not nearly a match for Everly in this characteristic, she of the gift of thinking out loud, I have no poverty of words.  One place that this can get me off track is in the kind of office chatter that may drift over into analyzing co-workers.  I have to confess that I am sometimes guilty of that bad office practice of talking critically about my colleagues.  Having said that, I hope I have not made all my colleagues who might read this start to be suspicious of me.  I don't think I do this all the time, and I hope and pray that my self-estimate is true that I see the good in my co-workers and look forward to working with them.  Even so, I don't always live up to my best self. 

This became clear on Saturday morning when a friend came to me with obvious hurt in face and voice.  Somehow, this person had gotten the impression of my disapproval and criticism, and it was not unwarranted.  Of course, I wanted the confrontation to go away, but when it did not, I took up the difficult strategy of trying to be honest without being hurtful.  The conversation lasted long enough to be quite uncomfortable.  It eventually closed with a measure of resolution through confession, apology, expression of confidence, and promise of doing better.  Having brought this episode to temporary closure, I put my focus back into the work of the day:  marching and teaching class.

Those kinds of conversations do not go away easily for me.  They nag at me for many reasons.  As indicated just above, part of the problem is that I know that I have not acted in the way that I clearly believe that I should.  I've been drawn into relishing the conflict and criticism as if I am not talking about flesh and blood people with real feelings and lives to live.  Rather than sympathy, I have been willing to see fault and failure.  Why don't I, don't we, live up to the level of what I, what we, know that is the right way to live?  This troubles me.  I know I could and should be better.  Second, it bothers me because I frankly do not like to be in conflict with people with whom I will need to continue a relationship.  It leaves me unsteady and uncomfortable.  I want to get it worked out.  This characteristic may be why Everly and I were able to keep our two strong personalities in good relationship for so long.  She also hated to let conflict stew.  McClendon (chapter 3 this time) says that among the "basic moral equipment" of humanity is the capacity for shame, blame, and guilt, and I guess these have been developed in the two of us so that we don't like to leave them active to unsettle everything else we are trying to do.  Finally, I was confronted with the failure to bring my profession and my action into coherence.  To make an impression by saying and doing one thing among the crowd, but in private say and do something very different, is a primary example of moral failure. 

There I sat, by my front window, listening to the sound of the wind blowing, a 57-year-old man unsettled by the deficiency of my moral formation.  Grace still has much more work to do.  It led me to think about how far I have to go.  Once very active leading in local and statewide community organizing, now I have difficulty reviving those old skills and habits.  I still have a pretty strong capacity to talk about it, but setting up one-on-ones and getting to meetings has not been easy to keep myself doing.  Each time I can't get myself organized to go to a meeting or see someone with whom I should have set up an appointment, I see how far I still have to go.  And it brings back the question of whether I will be able to do it.

I've been reading, as I can muster the courage, books in which people have grappled with their experiences of loss and grief.  The first book I read and have written about before was John Claypool's Tracks of a Fellow Struggler.  I cannot recommend any book more highly, and it was a great blessing.  I'm not sure I remember all the books that I have looked at, but poems by Denise Levertov have opened doors to my memories and processes of change.  Jean Vanier's Seeing Beyond Depression offered sympathetic and practical thoughts about the journey of sadness and loss.  This week I picked up Henri Nouwen's In Memoriam, written soon after the death of his mother.  Only a few words into it I had to close it.  He wrote about the moments after she died, with the family in the room, they prayed, "Lord, lead her now to your house and give us the courage to continue our lives, grateful for all she has given us."  A few sentences later, he wrote, "I want to express how during those days her love, her care, her faith, and her courage became more visible to me than ever before, and how I came to know in a new way what it meant to be her son.  But it is so difficult and painful."

I had to close the book and set it down.  For several days I walked by it with trepidation.  This remains my challenge: to have the courage to continue my life, grateful for all she has given me.  I have picked it up again and made it through a few more pages.  It is going to do me some good. 

These moments over recent days, put together, have drawn me into deeper recognition of the struggle that we all find ourselves in.  I hope this kind of writing is not merely my crying out for sympathy--poor, poor Mike.  I don't really want that, even if it seems attractive now and then.  What I want is to be at my destination without having to traverse the road.  Today's hymn, Lift Every Voice and Sing, reminded us of the stony road trod by the descendents of kidnapped Africans forced into slavery.  It offers up the prayer, "Keep us forever in the path...lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee; lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee."  Bro. Burton and I have not walked the same kind of stony road.  I don't need to overcomplicate the path that I must pursue.  Doors are open for me.  People respect and love me.  For me, the struggle seems more to be whether I can muster the strength and faith and focus to rise to the work awaiting me.

The cold winds reminded me of an old gospel song that says to "hide behind the mountain, where the chilly winds don't blow."  It goes on to say, "Jesus is the mountain."  Jesus will protect us in the storm as he did with the disciples out on the lake.  When it gets really cold, as it will in the coming days, I will be tempted just to hide from the wind.  Of course, if I am following Jesus down the road, that "mountain" Jesus can be the windbreak that makes my journey less difficult.

But I stumbled on another song today that speaks to this situation powerfully.  "Lean Into the Wind" is a song from the Carmelite Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Los Angeles.  Steeped in scripture and prayer and ministry, this community of servants have composed a number of deeply insightful songs with lyrics highly relevant to understanding moral formation in the presence of the God who loves and knows us.  Some parts of the song convey a dialogue in which the Lord asks, and sometimes, answers questions about our readiness to follow the Way of Jesus.

Are you here for consolations?
Mere pleasures and devotions
flowing only with the motions, in the shallows you stay?
Or are you here to love me?
Your heart undividing,
relax the grasp of all that you clasp
be rich in me. 

My beloved you will see
I’ll fulfill these plans to be,
embrace in faith there’s no other way,
go deep with me.

And the refrain offers a back and forth of question and answer.  The first and third questions, answered by the human interlocutors, offer promises of devotion to the calling.  The Lord answers the second question with words of encouragement and strength.

Why are you here?  (You know my Lord I love you.)
What do you fear?  (In peace accept the fight.)
Will you just stay there, or lean into the wind? (I will lean into the wind.)

Maybe this will end up in a sermon soon.  But what I am learning about grief, about vocation, about friendship, and about ministry, is that one has to lean into the wind, embrace the struggle, press on through the waves, step past the shallows and into the deep waters.  In those places, we will learn the breadth and depth and height of God's grace and the fellowship of walking yoked with Jesus.

I believe I might try to lean into the wind.

Waiting for Something and Not Writing About It

Over the past two months I have sketched out many blog posts.  I have put down some notes about things I'd like to write.  I've even started writing what I thought would be one post, but later decided I needed to divide into about four different posts.  That one was really convoluted and complicated (I know, that's my style sometimes).  I thought of many things while driving to Texas and back at the end of October and beginning of November.  I have done a good bit of thinking about the current public outcry about the treatment of blacks by police and society, and wondered how much I should say and how much I should listen.  And I've been busy with teaching, reading papers, grading, and completing reports at work.

But I have come to see this week that one big barrier to writing here on this blog has been a kind of fearfulness about what is happening in my life.  It started to hit me when I read one of Denise Levertov's poems over a month ago.  So I've decided this is where I need to start.

The poem that I keep coming back to is called "Terror."

Face down; odor
of dusty carpet.  The grip
of anguished stillness.

Then your naked voice, your
head knocking the wall, sideways,
the beating of trapped thoughts against iron.

If I remember, how is it
my face shows
barely a line?  Am I
a monster, to sing
in the wind on this sunny hill

and not taste the dust always,
and not hear
that rending, that retching?
How did morning come, and the days
that followed, and quiet nights?

I bought the book of poems, having read lines from her in a post from The Plough, the publishing ministry of the Bruderhof communities.   Specifically, it was The Daily Dig, a daily email with a reflective quotation and a simple bit of photographic art that comes to me each day.  I looked for further information on the poet, and found that she had written poems about her own process of grief, so I rounded up copies of some of her books from used booksellers.  I've just finished reading the first one, which has the title of one of the poems about which I have posted before, With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads.  The poetic imagination and profound grief work have not disappointed.

About halfway through the book, I came to this poem.  The title put me off, and at first I could not see the link between the title and the poem.  But as the words rested on me for a while, I started to recognize that potential for terror.  The crux is in the first sentence of the third stanza:  "If I remember, how is it my face shows barely a line?"

The poem flows from an experience of utter desolation, face down in a carpet, engulfed in anguish.  The particularities of what is heard, what is smelled and tasted, the reaction of feeling the rending and retching, are not very specific.  But they portray the totality of the pain that the narrator has in memory.  It's not so far away.  The sensory remainder is conjurable.

But it is also not immediate.  The poem ends describing morning and the passing of days and quiet nights.  It expresses shock or dismay at singing out in the wide world.  And thus the "terror" at stake is the narrator's wondering if her ability to live on after such wrenching grief means that she has lost her humanity.  "Am I a monster?"  That is the terrorizing question.  It is stated in the extreme.  Maybe others might find ourselves asking more urbane questions such as, "Have I gotten off track?", or the common adolescent query, "Is something wrong with me?"  Still the heart of the question is the same.

The poet understands that going through something so terrible tears one apart, and the intense grief and pain are the human responses to the loss, the injury.  And so much of what I have written in the past two years has been in the midst of that intense pain.  I've reached out for solace, for understanding, for companions, for salve.  I've dug deep into the history of living a life with Everly.  I've marveled at her complex and expansive goodness.  I've imbibed the faith and faithfulness of my formation as a follower of Jesus, a child of God, a participant in the life of the Spirit.  And the smell of those hard days stayed ever present in my nostrils, the sounds, the images ever in mind.

I turned to everyone who would lend an ear and a kind word, trying to think of how I could go on.  I made pilgrimage to places where Everly and I had gone, to people whom Everly and I had known together.  I thought about what she and I had cared for and how we hoped to live our lives in the world.  I remembered the ways it had gone right and the ways it had not.  I sought to care for our children as she would do, always knowing I could offer my best, and at the same time never be what she was for them.  And I tried to discern what my life should be on the path that continues forward from her death and her absence.

As you know, I concluded that I should continue to teach at Shaw where I have now completed twenty-one years.  To do so, I determined it would be best to relocate back to North Carolina.  Because so much of our lives and view of the world have been shaped by Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church, I bought a house just down the road from there.  In August, I moved to Durham and started setting up household, with the added blessing of having Naomi with me while she is attending graduate school down the road.  And having gotten back to being in town and on campus every week, rather than just a few weeks each semester as during the Texas sojourn, I started trying to become a more complete member of the faculty and participant in the work of the Divinity School.

Those efforts met with many successes, and some struggles.  I began to see emerging some of the characteristics that I remembered in myself from earlier days, and I believe they are also characteristics that Everly admired in me.  My life was taking new shape, and I was finding myself investing in my work and academic life in ways that I have not for many years.  A number of close friends and colleagues invested the time in me to engage my thinking and encourage my efforts, awakening a confidence I did not remember feeling for some time.

And thus, I arrived by increments to the place and time Levertov's poem describes.  Everly is on my mind daily.  I speak of her whenever I get an opportunity.  I have pictures of her in all the places I go.  But no longer does each day bring wrenching sobs.  I don't mean they never happen, but they are not so frequent as they were.  I am more likely to think and speak of her in pleasant memory and timely insight, without it always shifting into sharp pangs of grief.  So when this poem sank in, I thought to myself that I was somewhere along a path of change that put me in the midst of one of the grief tropes--that of the person who is noticing the change of intensity or even wondering if he "will forget her face" as the time passes.

I tend to resist almost any sort of classification system for human personality and behavior, including the so-called "stages of grief."  Yet there is little denying that over time the human mind and emotions can find a path of adaptation to the new circumstances of loss.  As I have mentioned before, fellow widower David Forbes calls it "renorming."  I'm adapting to the new normal.  And the new normal now includes my trying to make something of my life without Everly walking with me.  I've written this many times now, yet it can be a troubling thought.  Am I being unfaithful to her love and her importance if I am no longer so intensively feeling the pain?  This is the question the poem asks so harshly, "Am I a monster?"  It is the question asked in the Psalm of terror, "How can we sing the songs of Zion in a foreign land?"

And so the poet faces the very same dilemma.  How can I sing?  And I think even further, how can I sing out in the world where people can see me?  I remember many times in the past year, and it still happens, when I seek to sing in church or I play music that I love, tears begin to flow and the words get choked up in my throat.  But sometimes I can sing.  And I might even feel like cutting loose a tune in front of people now and then.  Yet it contradicts a way of being that had become my standard.  It had become my characteristic way for some time to be the grieving widower, the pitiful, sad man.  Somewhere along the way, I have become less comfortable in those clothes.  I notice myself carrying on work and participating in groups without bringing all things back to my loss of Everly.  I wonder how this is possible, knowing how rough it has been during this season of life.  I find myself telling people, as I get to know them, about Everly's death without getting choked up.  I wonder if that makes me seem cold, even though my inward gaze still sees the time of weeping as present.

Once in a while, not every day and not even every week, I may find myself overwhelmed.  It may be at home, in the office, on a drive, or just about anywhere.  I've borrowed a term from Kate Campbell for those times:  "fade to blue."  It's from one of her songs, and it describes well the sort of drift into a sorrowful place that seems to have to happen now and then.  But those times have become rarer, if not less intense when they do come.

So this week I realized that my frustration over not having written for this blog in so long had somewhat to do with this poem.  Upon first reading it, I thought that it would make an excellent jumping off point for describing part of my journey of grief.  But perhaps subconsciously that nagging question was pressing in the other direction.  I was not sure I wanted to put a public face on how things have changed.  Is something wrong, that I don't feel the same pain the same way?  I don't believe that to be true.  It is not wrong.  It is next.  It is different.  It is walking another step.  It is living.

The change came from a whole lot of intentional work, of striving to keep on living, of discerning the particulars of a life I hope will be well lived.  Yet with all the effort, it also "snuck up" on me, as we say in these parts.  It came as something waited for without waiting.  It makes sense, but it was not itself the goal.  The goal was to live an honorable life that holds on to all that I have received from knowing Everly.  One outcome was to begin to find meaning and purpose in that life that offers its own rewards, even without her to share it.  I don't call it moving on.  Thank you to bob and mj patterson-watt for teaching me that we don't "move on."  That implies leaving Everly behind to go do something else.  So all of you friends of those who are grieving, there is another cliché to drop from your vocabulary.

If it's not moving on, and it's not monstrous, what is it?  You won't surprised if I say that it is a form of grace.  It is grace to live on in the face of unbearable loss.  It is the superabundant possibility of the grace in which we stand, wherein waiting (suffering) produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope.  It is an unexpected life, partly undesired, yet bursting with grandeur, with "the dearest freshness deep down things."  Therefore, it may be moving, but without the connotation of being finished with something past.  It is a continuation of walking with a changed presence of my beloved.  And as I let myself think of what might come of the life we have thus far shared, I'll agree with the Indigo Girls, "When you're learning to face the path at your pace, every choice is worth your while." 

Out of this comes my Advent meditation.  Waiting for the little child who will lead--God the baby entering our world, and now each year waiting again.  In this season, I wait to see what this new life will be.  I wait to write, partly because I fear what it might mean.  Yet as Everly would assure me, I don't need to fear.  Her message, like that of the angel on that blessed night, "Don't be afraid, for there is good news of great joy."  Don't postpone it.

What Are We Imagining We Will Find When We Seek the Will of God?

Any professor knows that when students are doing their job, they press us to articulate things that we have not said clearly before.  If we have not said them clearly, it probably also means we have not understood them clearly.  Moreover, what these classroom discussions will often do is require us to pull together things we have said on various discrete topics in order to discern new insights and construct new frames for reflection.  This week in class, my students and I have been talking about how we discern the will of God for our lives.

I have thought of this past year, the year since Everly's death, as my year of discernment.  Although I am fifty-six years old with grown children, I have had to reboot my future.  I've written about this before.  Having lost access to the future with Everly that I was expecting, all the roads ahead seemed strange and uncharted.  I'm struggling for the right word here.  My dean talks about "renorming" of his life, having lost the "normal" he knew when his wife passed away.  That get's at a big part of it.

It's not exactly like going back to the beginning, not a Da Capo al Fine.  I don't have to repeat all the misdirections, achievements, and learning of youth.  In that way it's more like continuing with a great absence and all the confusion and uncertainty that brings (which, realistically, is actually a different set of confusions and uncertainties than the ones that Everly and I shared).  It's continuing, but things don't feel the same, don't taste the same, don't smell the same.  It's like walking on a path on a hillside, with everything tilted, with challenges for the footholds.

My having recently moved to a different house, one that has been gutted, rebuilt, and remodeled, puts me into a kind of spacial, structural model for what is happening.  It is a kind of rebuilding after a storm.  Parts of the structure are missing.  As things get into place, I have to figure out how to reorganize.  What used to take my time does not any more, but new things beg for my attention that I could previously ignore.  I'm not doing a very good job of maintaining a single metaphor here, so I guess I'm back to my earlier point of struggling for the right word.

So in the year of discernment, I was asking a question that in common church-speak could be called "seeking the will of God."  Now that things have changed, what should I be doing?  Now that I'm not Everly's cheerleading director, where should my energy go?  I talked with people I see often.  I mulled things over with family.  I made efforts to visit with people I see less often.  I pulled everyone who gave me some time into my conversation about what kind of life I should have.

Part of it, the part that swam in a deep pool of grief, was about recovering.  I'm not saying grief is something you get over.   I'm saying that making a life required time and reflection and learning and growth that acknowledges that for me everything is changed.  It means trying to remember those strengths that made Everly my chief admirer, an honest and plainspoken admirer, but an admirer no less.  It means trying to resurface from the deep pool breathing big gulps of a life that I have always believed God is offering to me as a gift.  It means believing again in the reasons I have been driven to be somebody and make a difference in my world.

As it has turned out so far, I continue to teach in the same esteemed seminary where I have taught for two decades.  It made sense to relocate back to that vicinity.  I had to grapple with my learning about John Perkins and his teaching about "relocation" to live among people with whom one ministers.  Puzzling about where that relocation should be, I looked at several different neighborhoods where I have relationships with church people who care about their communities.  I had to overlay those neighborhoods with the available housing, to find a place I could live and be healthy, provide space for my scattered family, and, of course, that I could afford.  Affordability and livability do not always align.  So I have ended up living near the church where I have served as a minister for the past seventeen years, Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church.

What will come of all this discernment and seeking?  That is something to wait and see.  Saturday I led devotional for people who had come to Mt. Level for Community Day.  We had health personnel for blood pressure checks, information about chronic conditions, community programs for children's safety, and even flu shots available.  There was a cookout fired up in the parking lot.  People who needed it got food to take home and help make ends meet.  Throughout the day, our ministers led short devotional services for the people who were there.

I talked about the times we are motivated to seek out God's guidance as seasons in our lives change.  From the seasons of the year, to seasons of school and work, to seasonal change from major life events, people may be motivated to inquire after God concerning their futures.   In those short comments, I tried out a couple of analogies.  First, we sometimes go asking for the wrong kind of guidance.  We are looking for the GPS god.  We want an exact destination, every road and turn preselected, a voice telling us what's about to come next, and no more having to think about it.  Anyone who got bad directions from a GPS device knows that's not even a good way to think about using one of those things.  But I am convinced that it also misunderstands the way that a life unfolds in relation to God.

Maybe that imagined map of God's will holds on from an age when Christians more widely believed in theological determinism and predestination.  In popular Christian talk and thinking, it remains a commonly expressed idea that God's control of the world means that every step our our lives is planned and coming to fruition moment by moment.  Most would not spin from their comments about specific events a full-blown theory of predestination, but would instead offer assertions in defense of human free will or even radical freedom and autonomy.  So in that way, it does seem more like a holdover, a convention in religious speech passed on through generations, even as worldviews and theological constructions have changed in ways that would contradict it.  The continuing presence of this kind of thinking is a partial explanation of why people would go to God looking for a GPS answer.

Before mentioning the alternative that I offered in the Saturday devotional, let me interrupt with the conversations I had with my students over the past week.  A big part of the Introduction to Theology course at Shaw Divinity School pertains to theological hermeneutics.  Along with the hermeneutical study that students get in Bible classes and in preaching classes, we spend some time on theological aspects of hermeneutics to help students understand that there are critical theological judgments and ecclesiological practices that shape faithful reading of the scriptures.  As I conclude this part of the course, I spend a large part of a class meeting in theological autobiography.  I tell the story of my upbringing as a white Southern Baptist, a Texan, a minister-in-training, a theologian, a church leader, a white person learning to make black friends, and a member of a black Baptist church.

Having told this story, with illustrations about Bible interpretation at relevant points, and especially to discuss my journey into reading the Bible with people whose lives have not been the same as mine and whose faith sensibilities have been shaped in a very different social and cultural context, students had more questions.  Learning to read the Bible in a black church and teaching black ministers has burst open dividing walls, pushed away opaque glass to allow me to see what my isolation in white privilege did not let me see.  I try to tell this story truthfully without letting it be a form of heroic tale of the honorable white man bearing his burden.  Telling it over and over, with the conversations that ensue, keeps helping me to understand my own pilgrimage better.

This time, a student asked me how I understood what had happened to me in relation to the will of God.  Since the most recent chapter of my life includes the death of my wife, that was the first thing that came to my mind.  I explained that I do not believe it is God's will that people die of cancer, and that there was much more good that Everly could have done in this world had she not been taken from us by this disease.  Thus, I don't think it is God's will that she and I had only thirty-three years of marriage, or that my children will progress through their adult lives without having their mother to encourage and direct them.  Some people may feel the need to believe that "it was her time."  I would say this time or another could have been her time.  Such things are not set in stone nor predetermined.  But whatever time her death came, whether she lived or died, she lived or died unto the Lord.

Everly's dying was a great loss to our family and to many other people in this world.  But I also told my students that I don't think that her untimely death means an end to all good possibilities for us.  It's not a failure of God's love and providence, but a tragic circumstance in which God's love and providence remain and surround our lives.  By implication, I am saying that I don't imagine a divine being flipping switches, waving a scepter, or pushing buttons to make every event around me happen.  God is active and present, but not necessarily in those kinds of ways.

The great challenge for me, mentioned above, has been rethinking what kind of life God has for me even though for almost four decades it was and would be a life lived with Everly.  The year of discernment was partly a year of looking at who I have been with and without Everly.  It was remembering what has mattered to me about living with her and wondering what that looks like if she is not by my side.  I wondered if, after this devastating loss, I would be able to invigorate, even resuscitate, some of my passion for making a difference in the world.  As our pastor, Dr. William C. Turner, Jr, said in her eulogy, she has finished her part of the race and has handed me the baton to keep on running.  In her view of me and my own self-understanding, God has not cast me aside and is not finished with me yet.

So as the will of God unfolds for me, I don't think of it as a single road to a single destination.  That brings me to Christian Ethics class a few days before that hermeneutics discussion.  We examined the Christian understandings of love and marriage and the contrast between those theologically shaped ideas and the popular thinking that permeates our culture.  One of the popular ideas is a fatalism of romantic love.  It is widespread popular thought that there is a single perfect mate for each person.  These two people of shared destiny must find one another and make their fate come into fruition.  It's a highly problematic way of thinking that has little room for grace, for redemption, and for growth.

To "fall" in love implies a complete lack of control.  But that is to conflate a biologically driven instinct toward pairing and mating with a virtue of love.  Attraction and infatuation are not the same as love.  Love is an orientation toward the good of the other, not a giddy feeling in the stomach and a fog in the brain.  Rather than the fatalistic falling in love, a Christian understanding of love and marriage should be about "growing in love."  The contemporary moment in which we live, a blip on the longer history of human flourishing, is all about self-chosen mates based on love as fate based on a self-perceived and self-reported giddiness.

I'm not arguing against people making their own judgments about whom they will marry, but I am arguing for a different kind of discernment process based on a sober evaluation of how deep a friendship is possible with the other person and whether we are pursuing goals that will take us in the same direction, or in Christian language, whether we are sharing a calling we can live out together.  For that reason, as a young man I came to imagine different ways of describing the will of God as comparable to maps of two different states of the U.S.

Having spent a summer in Washington, mainly around Wenatchee and Spokane, I had learned that the prominent geographical feature of the Cascade Mountains makes getting from one side of the state to the other a bigger challenge than I had experienced growing up in Texas.  There are very few roads that cross the Cascades because of the difficulty of traversing such high peaks and their steep slopes.  A few mountain passes allow hikers, skiers, or drivers to safely travel.  In winter, the choices for driving become more limited.  So if I am in Wenatchee and want to get to Seattle, I can either go this way, or that way, and there are not many other options.

The fatalistic view of finding a mate, when imported into Christian thinking, is operating in an imagined world not unlike the road map of the State of Washington.  To break it down, if I am in Wenatchee and if God's will is for me to get to Seattle, then I have to get the exact road right, or I have no hope of fulfilling God's plan for my life.  If I have only one perfect mate out there in the world, and I can't keep myself on the path toward God's perfect will, I will forever miss God's plan for my marriage.  When I put this in such stark terms, I wonder how such thinking would ever pass careful theological muster.  Yet the anxiety of believing in only one path and the risk of missing a turn because of a mistake, a sinful choice, or ignorance, makes out God to be a kind of heartless dictator of sorts.

Once when I was about to drive from one small town in Texas to another, I got out a road map of Texas.  Because of legislation in the 1940s to support secondary roads in farming and ranching areas, there are thousands of roads that crisscross every county in Texas.  A road map of Texas is a jumble of roads forming triangles and quadrilaterals of varied sizes and turned all directions.  Getting from point A to point B in Texas often has dozens of possible routes.  There are longer and shorter routes.  There are straight, curved, and zigzagged routes.  There are scenic routes and efficient routes.  When I ask a computer map system how to get somewhere in Texas, if it suggests three routes, it usually tells me they will all take about the same amount of time.  Getting around in Texas leaves lots of room for missing a turn or for changing your mind.

It struck me that seeking the will of God was more like this map.  (I confess my birth and upbringing in Texas does make me biased toward believing it could be God's country, but I think that is irrelevant to this analogy.)  If God has a direction for me to go, it is not necessarily dependent on an exact route.  If God has a destination at which I should arrive, there may be many possibilities and ways by which I could get there.  God is not so much trying to harness me onto a single set of ruts on a road that runs through the only mountain pass as God is calling me to be a certain sort of person whose impact in the world is a certain sort of impact.  There are all kinds of flexibility about how that will play out.  I don't have to be in a panic about accidentally missing a road sign or misunderstanding an instruction.  God is making the journey with me, and we will work it out as we go.

A week later, in Christian Ethics class again a student followed up on our conversation about the will of God.  That gave me opportunity to elaborate further on the idea that our calling is first of all to a relation to God and one another.  Jesus called the disciples to "Follow me."  He sent them out to go to every village and town, stay a while, accomplish some things, then go on to another place.  What mattered was the people they met and what they did as they carried out their mission.  The calling of God, following Jesus, and living in the Spirit has its roots in the life of the Trinity and the pouring out of the divine love and goodness in creation.  The divine life of mutual love, submission, and sharing is the pattern sewn into the fabric of creation.  Humanity's destiny is to love one another, seek the good of one another, and share the bounty of creation with one another.

The will of God for all humanity is a life lived in justice, kindness, and humility.  This is what the Prophet Micah proclaimed about the essentials of the divine will.  Do justice.  Love kindness.  Walk humbly with God.  To generalize, the will of God for humanity, for me, for us, is a life of virtue.  Living in the Spirit means loving, being joyful, making peace, being patient, showing kindness, living gently, doing good, remaining faithful, and having self-control.  Following Jesus entails poverty of spirit, meekness, mourning, mercy, peacemaking, purity of heart, hunger for justice, and endurance even in hardship.

So I explained to the students that while they should seek God's guidance on major life events and choices, such as whether to become the pastor of a specific church, those moments which seem so critical have to be seen within the bigger picture of God's calling.  Being at this church or that church will certainly have an impact on the pastor's life, the pastor's family's lives, and the lives of the people in the church.  Yet if a pastor is at church A or church B or church C may not be the most important aspect of knowing the will of God.  Is this pastor living in the beatitude that comes with being a follower of Jesus?  Do this pastor's life and this church's life bear the fruit of the Spirit?  Where there is injustice, are this pastor and church seeking justice?  Where people struggle, do the pastor and the church and bring kindness in word and deed?  Are this pastor and church walking with God and in humility?  The calling is first of all to be a certain kind of people, a peculiar people, a people whose living bears in it the image of Christ.

Finally, I can get to the second part of what I shared at the devotional.  Rather than a GPS version of the will of God, I suggested that it is a Jazz Band God whom we serve.  I will claim no originality for making this claim.  Writers such as Cornel West and Barry Harvey have preceded me in using musical metaphors to help describe the shape and possibilities of human living in this world where God is calling us together.  What I said in this case was that a jazz band does not have every note and beat predetermined.  It is not without any sort of plan or purpose, but it always remains open for improvisation.  It may start in one direction, then regroup and change its direction.  The key is that they listen and make the musical journey together.  Our God made us to walk this journey with one another, and even with God.  Walk humbly.  Walk faithfully.  Jesus said to take my yoke.  Let Jesus share the burden and be a partner in the tasks.  The Spirit will guide us into all truth.

God may have specific destinations and specific stretches of road for any of us along the way.  We can trust that if God has such specific plans for us, God will make them known if we are walking in the Spirit as we ought, if we are living a life of virtue, if we are following our Lord.  But there is no need for constant anxiety about whether in each step we are getting it right.  There is so much from scripture that is clear about what sort of persons God has called us to be.  If we keep that in the forefront of our living together as God's people, we will always be on the path to do the will of God.  For that will is that all creation live in love, doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with God.  What else does the Lord require?

Having been pulled into these conversations by students who themselves are pursuing God's purpose for their lives with great enthusiasm, I was able to lay out in close proximity several decades of my reflections on what it means to pursue God's will in life.  It has been a fruitful time of reflection for me.  I hope some of it can help others make a little sense as well.  At least it may be an opportunity for me to gain insight from you and clarify some matters about which I need to learn more.

Jeremiah 29:11-14 

¹¹For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. ¹²Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. ¹³When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, ¹⁴I will let you find me, says the Lord.

Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church Sesquicentennial

Our church in Durham is celebrating its Sesquicentennial this Sunday.  Between the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War, former slaves, some at least from the Stagville Plantation, organized a congregation in the boundary area of Durham County and Granville County.  When in 1933 their land was appropriated to build a military base, Camp Butner, these families moved south into Durham County, taking their congregation and their church building with them.

Some settled in the Mill Grove community, north of the main city but still in the central part of the county where the Eno River flows past Roxboro Road and Old Oxford Highway.  Many continued sharecropping and farming.  Some developed commerce in trades such as home construction and furniture making and repair.  Ultimately descendents of these settlers struggled for education and advancement, scattered to all parts of the county and beyond, and they have influenced this region in many ways.  I'm proud to be adopted into their family.  Here is a write-up from the local paper.

MOUNT LEVEL MISSIONARY BAPTIST CHURCH TURNS 150
April 30, 2014
Dawn Baumgartner Vaughn