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

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.

A World Fit for Naomi

This is the second reflection/sermon on the horrible violence that continues in our world, preached last Sunday after a week in which police killings of black men rocked Baton Rouge and Minnesota followed by a mass killing targeting white police officers in Dallas.  Some preachers may try to deal with such events by simply continuing to preach on topics already scheduled, ignoring current events.  That seems all wrong to me.  Biblically and theologically, it is a season that calls for lament.  Lament is an honest crying out to God for an accounting and for divine action and presence in the midst of all that is going wrong in the world. 

These deaths, though remote from Durham, still can be personal to each of us in a variety of ways.  We may know someone who has suffered in the same way.  We may know someone who is in the same kind of work.  Or we may have found ourselves in a similar situation such that "there go I, but by the grace of God."  One of my connections on this day was my daughter's birthday; thus, the title represents my struggle with hopes and fears for her life, the lives of my other children, and the lives of so many more who must face dangers and aggressive evil in the world.

As I have done several times recently, I draw on multiple texts from the Revised Common Lectionary to piece together a narrative and argument.  I suspect that this time that the centrifugal force of my anger and hurt have led me to be more "all over the place" than I usually let myself be.  If at times it seems that I am digging down in my knapsack for everything that makes me mad, grant the patience that it also may be an opportunity to speak to as wide as possible a range of different hurts and fears in the congregation.  In retrospect, I have never had so many mothers and women come to offer their thanks and appreciation for a sermon when it ended as this past Sunday.  May that be a learning opportunity for me about how I flesh out an argument when I preach.

Amos 7:7-9, 12-13

7:7 This is what he showed me: the Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb line, with a plumb line in his hand.

7:8 And the LORD said to me, "Amos, what do you see?" And I said, "A plumb line." Then the Lord said, "See, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel; I will never again pass them by;

7:9 the high places of Isaac shall be made desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste, and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword."

…

7:12 And Amaziah said to Amos, "O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah, earn your bread there, and prophesy there;

7:13 but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king's sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom."

Colossians 1:9-14

1:9 For this reason, since the day we heard it, we have not ceased praying for you and asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of God's will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding,

1:10 so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God.

1:11 May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully

1:12 giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light.

1:13 He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son,

1:14 in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

Psalm 82

82:1 God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment:

82:2 "How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? Selah

82:3 Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute.

82:4 Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked."

82:5 They have neither knowledge nor understanding, they walk around in darkness; all the foundations of the earth are shaken.

82:6 I say, "You are gods, children of the Most High, all of you;

82:7 nevertheless, you shall die like mortals, and fall like any prince."

82:8 Rise up, O God, judge the earth; for all the nations belong to you!

…that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God.  May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power.

 

A World Fit for Naomi

to Bear Fruit in Every Good Work

         I was eager when asked to preach on July 10, a special day in our house.  Naomi was born down the road at Duke Hospital on July 10, 1989.  A couple of things immediately went through my mind, perhaps not in this order.  First, I thought it would be an opportunity to reflect on Naomi, and so many other Mt Level children, as a gift of God to us.  Second, I thought it would give me a chance to tell an embarrassing story about her.  Well, I would not really want to embarrass her too bad.

         Naomi came into the world full of energy and joy.  Many of y’all know her for her grace in worshipful dance, but you may not know that she started practicing her dancing almost as soon as she could walk.  There was a time when she would take a bite of food, climb out of her chair and dance a loop from room to room in the house, then climb back up to continue her meal.  She also was a very creative child in making up words to suit her understanding of the world.  One of those words was the name she called me for a while.  We don’t really know why she combined the words Mommy and Daddy to come up with “Momdy.”  But for a while, when she was 2 yrs old, I was Momdy.  Well I could go on and on, but telling stories on Naomi is not my main purpose today.

         Many of you could easily start in telling fun and funny stories about family memories.  Even when life is hard, families and children can show resilience in finding ways to be joyful together.  We can thank God for making us able to be resilient and to see that life need not be judged by its worst moments.  It’s not always easy to see that.  In the deepest periods of my grief over Everly’s illness and death, you all stood by me.  You saw me step into this pulpit and struggle to speak, even weep at times.  I felt like I had become the crying preacher.  And I’m not sure that today is going to change that pattern. 

Today is a day of sorrow, a day for worship through lament.

         “How can we sing the songs of Zion in a strange land?” the Psalmist cried having lost home, family, and everything else she or he loved.

         “How long, O Lord?” the prophets asked, watching the injustices of the world.

         It’s been a week for calling out to God.   In Baton Rouge, a man was already pinned to the ground and still shot.  In St. Paul, a man cooperating with the officer who stopped him was still shot.  Alton Sterling and Philando Castile—two people’s lives were taken from them, from their families and communities.  As people began to rise in the liturgy of protest across the nation, another mass shooting took place in Dallas, targeting police officers.  Five died:  Lorne Ahrens, Brent Thompson, Michael Smith, Michael Krol, and Patrick Zamarippa.  How many lives must be lost to the evils of racial fear and hatred, God?  How long can this go on?

Every name points to a family, to moms and dads, to sons and daughters, to brothers and sisters.  Bullets have destroyed relationships, traumatized loved ones.  Our hearts break when we hear a boy crying for his daddy, when we hear a little girl trying to comfort her mother.  And it’s only human that we start thinking about our own loved ones.  What kind of world is this for our children and grandchildren?  What kind of world is this for the young people who live on our blocks and in our neighborhoods?  Is this a world fit for Naomi?  I know it’s not the world I want for her.

The reading from the Prophet Amos reminds us that too often the world has not lived up to God’s standards for justice.  He tells about a vision in which he sees the Lord holding a construction tool.  The tool is a plumbline.  It’s a simple tool that relies on the force of gravity, and it has been used at least back into the days of ancient Egypt.  The plumbline, sometimes called a plumb bob, combines a weight and a cord or string to measure whether a beam or other element of a building project is vertical, whether it is perpendicular to the ground.  This is similar in its function to a tool many of us may have used or seen, a level.  A level usually is used to judge whether a beam is horizontally level, and it actually also operates through the force of gravity.  When a builder hangs a plumbline, gravity causes it to hang straight toward the gravitational center of the earth.  The string forms a straight vertical line that can be used to measure whether a wall is being squared up properly to build a strong and stable structure.  If the structure is out of line with the plumbline, then it needs to be corrected.

So when Amos sees this vision of the Lord using a plumbline, it is a vision in which God is taking a measure of whether Israel is lined up the way it should be.  God is checking to see whether the structures of Israel have gotten out of whack.  Has Israel become crooked?  Are Israel’s public officials, rulers, and other powerful people out of line, bent, and twisted?  God is not going to ignore a misaligned society, according to Amos.  The rulers and religious institutions are in for an inspection, and being found to be crooked and out of whack, they will have to be set right.  Some boards and masonry may have to be knocked down so they can be rebuilt the right way.  Some people in charge will have to be replaced.

If we were to read the whole book of Amos, we would find that a wealthy class has conspired with the rulers and the priests to let greed win out over justice.  The poor are suffering.  They are becoming slaves in service of an oppressive ruling class.  The systems of political and economic justice that God had given to Israel have been ignored and discarded.  Israel has gotten out of whack, and the priests and prophets who should be upholding the law and looking out for the people are themselves in on the corrupt system.  Amaziah, high priest of Bethel, is angry with Amos for criticizing the temple and the king.  He challenges Amos for daring to speak against the house of worship and against the king.  He says that Amos should not say such things in the king’s sanctuary.

Does Amaziah not understand what he is saying?  Isn’t the house of worship dedicated to God?  Isn’t it God’s house?  Yet Amaziah says it belongs to the king.  He calls it a temple of the kingdom.  Help us, Lord, if we have become the king’s sanctuary and a temple of the kingdom.  Help us if we have become the governor’s sanctuary and the temple of the General Assembly. 

Are we unwilling to speak the truth in our churches because we dare not offend the powerful?  Do we believe our preachers have crossed the line if they criticize the mayor, the manager, the governor, the legislators, the board chair, the police chief, or the sheriff?  Have we gathered here to worship the social structures and the status quo as if whatever is happening in political and economic life is the will of God? 

Lord, give us the courage and hard-headedness of Amos!  He told Amaziah that he was neither a prophet (by which he probably meant a well-trained messenger from God, perhaps from the priesthood like Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and others) nor was he the son of a prophet (by which he probably  meant a disciple or trainee working under a prophet).  He was a farmworker who did not let his particular job nor his lack of training  keep him from doing what God sent him to do.  Let us be ready, whether we are trained prophets or not, to speak the truth God gives us to the powers that oppress and abuse people.  The plumbline does not lie.  Social forces have warped the world we are in and gotten it all out of line.  It’s not producing and protecting justice.  God is expecting us, like Amos, to stand up for justice.

Psalm 82 creates a dramatic portrayal of God’s judgment upon the bent and crooked systems and structures of our world.  It describes an imaginary divine council, as if there were a pantheon of gods who came together to argue and negotiate the fate of the world.  It was not uncommon to believe such a thing possible in the ancient world, with the common assumption that every group of people, every tribe or nation, had its own patron god.  Some of the Bible’s stories imply that the various gods battle against one another for territory and for devotion.  According to this Psalm, a council of divinities has gathered, and in walks the God of Israel.  When God walks in, the politics of the meeting change. 

It says God claimed the seat of judgment.  That would seem to be the highest place.  This telling of the story quickly makes it seem that those who would pretend to be gods are being put in their place.  Having taken the seat of judgment, God speaks to principalities and powers gathered there.

How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? Selah

Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute.

Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.

This Psalm helps us to understand what is out of line from Amos’s vision of the plumbline.

         First, it says they are judging unjustly.  The decisions made by powerful people are showing partiality.  The wicked thrive because the legal system is twisted to help the powerful.  Bribes and influence peddling are distorting the fair distribution of goods among the people.  Abuses and oppression slip through the courts, and no one is held accountable for clearly unjust acts.  The Psalmist calls out all who are abusing the system to benefit some and harm most.  With Amos and the Psalmist, we must stand up against an unjust legal system.  Whether the abuses happen in the North Carolina General Assembly, in the US Congress, in the police department, in the district court, in the banks, in the boardrooms, in the jailhouse, in the fast food chain, in the immigrant detention center, in the housing authority, in the big box stores, or in the social services department—the time has come to change the way things are being done.

         Second, the Psalmist names our duty as “giving justice.”  People deserve better than they are getting.  There is a right response to human dignity and a right response to wrongdoing.  The right response is justice.  When justice is denied, society starts to crumble.  The efforts of the powerful and wealthy to benefit themselves without care for others will eventually destroy the system which is benefiting them.  An unjust social order destroys itself from within, but the tragedy is how many people are harmed and even killed by injustice while the corrupted system remains in place.  The antidote to this road to destruction is to restore a system of justice for all.  With Amos and the Psalmist, we have to fight back against unjust laws and unjust conduct of the legal system.  Those who do wrong should face consequences and have opportunities to repent and change their ways.  Those who have been abused should be restored to their just and joyful state of living. We have to take to the streets and to the halls of decision-making to be faithful to God.  Seeking revenge is no form of justice, but a continuing corruption and expansion of injustice. 

         Having said to give justice, the Psalmist restates this charge with additional demands.  The Psalm has God telling the others gathered in the council to “maintain the right” of the ones who are being abused.  Giving justice is not only setting things right that have already gone wrong.  It is also promoting a system in which justice is the standard operating procedure.  It is making sure people have what is rightly theirs before they become destitute.  Extending the availability of health care to tens of millions more people is an attempt to maintain the right.  Yet if the laws are flawed and create opportunities for powerful corporations and their executives to overcharge for drugs and medical procedures, there is still much more to be done.  If the system continues to shut out millions of people, to allow medical bankruptcy to be the most common form of bankruptcy, and to use medical care as an ideological tool for party politics rather than a cause of justice, there is still much more for us to do.  God’s gift of health to creation should not go to the highest bidder nor be denied to those whose jobs pay less than a living wage.

         Part of our duty, according to the Psalmist, is to rescue and deliver the poor and needy from the hands of the wicked.  Whether it is the abuse of usury through payday loans charging 300% to 700% interest, or the speculative real estate deals that put renters out of affordable housing to redevelop neighborhoods for gentrification, or the high risk financial transactions that led to a worldwide economic crash that put hard-working people out of jobs and homes, we must be about the work of rescue and deliverance.  We can’t sit idly by and watch governments that bail out supersized banks, that allow the very people who destroyed the economy to continue getting richer rather than go to jail, and that leave unemployed people without health care, without homes, and without hope for a job that pays a living wage.  We have to open our hands, our buildings, our pantries, and our wallets to those who have been put out, cast aside, nickeled and dimed, and kicked to the curb.  The work to rescue those harmed by the injustices of the world is part of the work of giving justice.

Third and finally, we should note that the Psalmist is naming the ones who are being abused and should be given justice.  The list includes the weak, the orphan, the lowly, the destitute, the needy.  Just to make sure, the Psalmist mentions the weak twice.  The point is that some have access to the halls of power and others do not.  The ones who have had to depend on a just social order to protect them are now being abused.  Their weakness is not a lack of ability or strength, but it is a lack of connections, of access, and of anyone to call on for help.  They are not in the noble families.  They don’t have money to grease the palms of those who might help them.  They lack many basic necessities.  They are deprived of what any person must have to thrive and flourish.  Symbolic of this kind of weakness is the orphan.  Lacking parents, the protection of orphans falls to other family members or community members, and orphans find themselves subject to the whims and indifference of society.  The plumbline shows that the treatment of these people fails the test of verticality—the way they are treated is not upright.  With Amos and the Psalmist, we must take the side of those who are being oppressed and work together for justice.

This imaginary council of gods has failed to measure up to God’s standards for justice.  So God reminds them of their true nature.  While they imagine themselves to be gods, they are not.  They are mortal.  Their end will come.  Like every human institution and government, they will fall.  Then the Psalmist concludes the Psalm by praising God and proclaiming the truth about who God is.  “Rise up, O God, and judge the earth; for all the nations belong to you!”  It’s not a council of equals, a group of gods in competition.  It’s a room full of pretenders who must now face the only true God.  The Psalmist calls for God to rise and judge the powers and principalities, the thrones and dominions, the rulers and authorities, the pretenders and posers and wannabes.

As I pointed out earlier, often the Bible presents the idea that the various nations may have their gods in competition with the God of Israel.  We tend not to think quite that same way about the nations and the gods, although perhaps we are not as far from that world as we think.  But it is definitely true that if we examine the ways that we act, it seems like we expect to find rescue and salvation in the world.  There are clearly many gods in our imagination.  These pretenders, these false gods, find their social embodiment among the governmental, corporate, patriarchal, and intellectual structures and systems of our world.  We look to these powers for salvation, although we seldom use that language.  We keep the salvation language locked up in church, but we live as if we still need many more saviors outside the halls of worship.

Who in our day are the gods gathered in council?  What are the names of the gods offering us salvation from the challenges of our lives?  What powers are we calling on to get a leg up and prove ourselves better than others?  The Psalmist reminds us that no matter what idols and false gods the world is calling on for salvation, only one God is the true judge and savior of the world.

Only a week ago, across this city and the nation people elevated an idol in their churches by pledging allegiance, not to the God of Jesus Christ, but to the flag.  Many sang songs of war and battle to demonstrate their hope for salvation rooted in the nation and its military might.  The idea of America has become a doctrine of salvation.  It is a belief that by spreading the power and influence of this country, the world will be saved.  Statements of faith about “the greatest country in the world” accompany a theological understanding of America as God’s chosen nation.  These unbiblical and heretical ideas penetrate into institutions that pose as churches, but instead act as the king’s sanctuary, the temple of the kingdom.  Amaziahs all over this country seek to silence the prophets and protect the status quo of power that has its origins in genocide of the native peoples and enslavement of Africans.  God is judging the idols of nationalism and calling us to justice.

Another god of our time is whiteness.  Pale skin functions as a sign of chosenness, a sign of destiny, a sign of superiority in our world.  Darker skin remains a sign to many of condemnation, of evil, and of danger.  Thus some like Dylan Roof rest their faith in protecting the white race by seeking to kill the descendents of Africans, even as they gather in church.  Others with less overt in their racist ideas continue to act out this same worship by labeling children like Trayvon, and Tamir, and Michael, as a menace, as a threat, as a monster.  The fiction of race has had deadly consequences for half a millennium, and it remains a powerful doctrine of salvation expressed in the aphorism, “If you’re white, you’re right.”  The differential treatment of people of color in the legal system and through mass incarceration has given rise to the phrase, “the new Jim Crow.”  One way or another, the legal system seems committed to salvation through destruction and degredation of dark-skinned people.  God is judging the idols of whiteness and racism and calling us to justice.

Another false god of our day is the gun.  The NRA has steadily repeated its religious mantra of salvation that the only way to stop bad people with guns is to have more guns in the hands of good people.  The gun is the means of salvation.  Arm everyone with all sorts of powerful weapons, and this idol tells us we will be safer and more able to defeat evil.  What else is a gun but an instrument of violence?  Some might demand that I do homage to hunting and the long heritage of providing meat for the table.  I can acknowledge that without being turned away from the truth that people who are buying and gathering guns are doing so out of fear that they will have to try to protect themselves from marauding enemies, either from beyond our borders or already within our borders.  Guns are being offered as a way to be saved from immigrants, criminals, and jihadists.  They tell us that guns don’t kill people; people kill people.  But guns make it so much faster and easier for people to kill people.  I would have to reply that guns don’t save people; love saves people.  God is judging the idols of guns and gun violence and calling us to justice.
         Another false god of our time is the border wall.  Some would claim that America can be saved, and all of us with it, if we could just keep out all the foreign people trying to undermine our prosperity and society.  The reasons given are differences of language, differences of culture, differences of religion, and scarcity of the goods that everyone needs.  If we can keep out the outsiders, we’ll be saved.  The God of Jesus Christ has invited all outsiders to come and be part of God’s peoples—all of us who are Gentiles are welcome.  Keeping people out is not God’s way.  God is judging the idols of xenophobia (fear of outsiders) and racial and religious hatred, and calling us to justice.

The Psalmist says the gods were gathered in council, so there must have been many of them present.  Who else was there?  There is the god of money that promises us if we can get enough, we will have everything that we need.  Of course, we always need just a little more.  It is a false doctrine of salvation.  There is the god of superficial, chauvinist Christianity that twists the faith of a peaceable, non-violent Jesus into a call for holy war against Islam.  Yet we are called to love our enemies.  It is a false doctrine of salvation.  There is the god of virility and sexual conquest that promotes male sexual domination to prove one’s power in the world.  Elevating oneself by harming others is ultimately destructive of oneself.  Patriarchal power over women is a false doctrine of salvation.  There is the false god of fortified bathrooms.  Fearing what they do not understand about the variety of sexuality in creation, people grasp at harmful solutions to complicated issues requiring understanding and reconciliation.  Hate Bill 2 is a false doctrine of salvation.  There is the false god of consumption that says we can be somebody if we wear the right labels on our clothes, drive the right vehicles, eat the right foods, join the right clubs, and in every way stay abreast of the trends.  But this neverending consumption in fact consumes us until we disappear into our possessions.  Consumption is a false doctrine of salvation.  There is a false god of respectability.  It tells us that if we just go along to get along, if we keep showing ourselves to be respectful and respectable, we will be saved from the dangers of the abuse of power.  Respectability discourages protest.  It tells the young people to go home and stop talking about “Black Lives Matter.”  It looks for fault in the ones who have been abused, as a way to prove to ourselves that it can’t happen to us.  But this week and the past two years are sure reminders that respectability is a false doctrine of salvation.

         The gods gathered in council are not saviors.  They are idols, bent on using and abusing us for our own destruction.  They distract us from the trust in God that we ought to have by urging us to trust in idols, in salvation by other means.  They discourage us from standing up for the truth of God’s salvation because we are too busy trying to earn a false salvation that promises everything but delivers death.  Guns, money, nationalism, whiteness, and every other false god only draw us away from the one true God who is demanding that we live justly, love mercy, and walk in God’s way.

         The Psalmist’s description of God’s judgment and victory among the false gods of this world is a foreshadowing of the victory of Jesus over the powers and authorities.  Our text from Colossians today speaks about how the people in that church and in that city have grown in their faith and in following the ways of Jesus to the point that they are bearing much fruit for God.  Their love and their faithfulness to Jesus’ ways have become well known.  Since we know Jesus and we know what the Psalmist has written here, we can infer that their bearing of fruit must also include a flourishing of justice in their community.

         Beyond the first chapter of Colossians, Paul goes on to write about the victory of Christ over evil.  He says that the thrones, dominions, rulers, authorities, and powers are subject to Christ because they are part of the creation that Christ himself accomplished.  Moreover, through his cross and resurrection he has disarmed them and made a public example of them.  He has judged them and now rules over them.  God’s purpose for the structures and institutions of human life is that they contribute to our flourishing, that they serve the good of humanity and all creation, that they give justice to all God’s children.  So just as the Psalmist says, now Paul repeats that we must be about the work of giving justice and maintaining the right, rescuing and delivering the unjustly treated.

         Joining Paul in his prayer for the Colossians, I also pray for our world to be this kind of world.  Although many who seek their own benefit and ignore the good of others are at work to twist this world away from justice, the work of Christ among the Colossians reminds us of the hope for transformation of a corrupted world into a community of love and mutual service.  That is the world that I pray and I work to send my children into.  It is the world that we as God’s people long for.  It is a world in which Naomi can bear fruit in every good work.  Through our prayers and devotion to the God of Jesus Christ, the seeds of that fruit and that good work are planted in her heart and in the hearts of Mt. Level’s children.  Yet we have seen horrifying reminders this week of the continuing struggle against evil, against the false gods and idols of our day, and against the forces that would turn us and our children away from our calling.

         Thus, we continue to join with Paul in his prayer for the Colossians that they will be made strong with all the strength that comes from God’s glorious power.  We will need strength to face the evil at work in our world.  We will need strength to break through the intense misunderstandings and divisions that keep people at odds over race, class, guns, money, and power.  We will need strength to get out of bed day after day to take up the cross of Jesus and live for justice in an unjust world.  We will need strength to love when it seems hate is winning the day.

         Our hope rests in the power of the God of Jesus Christ, who has, as Paul tells the Colossians, “rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”  As he has rescued us, now we are sent into an unjust world to continue his work.  Jesus has redeemed us.  Jesus has forgiven us.  That is the world into which we may enter:  the loving fellowship of Jesus, a world of redemption, a world of forgiveness.  That is a world fit for our children to respond to the calling to give justice.

 

Yoder, Race, and Liberation

In conversation with a friend studying theology in Scotland, Scott Prather (see his recent article, "The Body and Human Identity in Postmodernism and Orthodoxy," in American Theological Inquiry), I was thinking about how late-twentieth century theological movements. We share an interest in Yoder's theology and in the renewal of churches overwhelmed by the culture of race, capital, and empire. I put together a few thoughts that address some of the intellectual and ecclesial agenda I am in the midst of in these days.

One thing that has changed about my theological work since leaving graduate school is that I do not tend to look at flawed approaches as reasons to disavow others' theological writing. So although I can find things to disagree with in much Latin American liberation theology, whether it be elements of modern politics too intermingled with ecclesiology, or aspects of RCC doctrines that I find problematic, or sociological models that repristinate the policing of religion to the margin, I just set those parts aside and mine the stuff that represents what I would classify as faithful theological reflection. It would not sell in a dissertation, but I'm not working on that agenda any more.

So when I read the liberation theologians, I figure that what they set out to do is not so different from what I am setting out to do. Where they help me, I use them. And they are way more useful to me than so many evangelicals who can't see past the end of their statements on inerrancy or satisfaction, or the mainstream protestants who are convinced that the nut of the gospel is the equivalent of the nut of American democracy.

Yoder has the resources for a theology of race which he never adequately developed, nor did he demonstrate a full understanding of the implications of race for his dialogue with black theologies and ecclesiologies. That is, by making his concept of Constantinianism absorb so many diverse failures of the church, Yoder did not name adequately what whiteness is and what it does to the churches. Ultimately theologians like influenced by Yoder must dredge the wells of white theology to see how the construction of whiteness has poisoned generations.

I have been thinking about the commonalities of Yoder and the black theologians and other liberation theologians for some time. Having spent some time reading liberation theologies this year, I still find the commonality compelling in the basic backbone:

• a living, breathing, human Jesus;
  
• the political nature of the messiah;
  
• Jesus representing an oppressed, poor, minority;
  
• the minority position/option for the poor;
  
• the critique of Constantinianism/Capitalism/National Security state;
  
• the making of a new, called-out community;
  
• the pneumatological driving force of the church linked with a bottom-up ecclesiology;
  
• the critique of ecclesial political establishments;
  
• the turn to the marginalized;
  
• the theological engagement with practices;
  
• the value and critique of tradition;
  
• perpetual reform/evangelization of the church;
  

and on and on.

Carter's RACE 6: The Triumphal March of White Bodies and Purified Reason

Carter sets out to demonstrate that Kant’s critical work is not merely an ahistorical project to purify reason by purging the clouds of prejudice and bad thinking that have mostly clouded human reason. He argues that it has a powerful driving teleology of the emergence and growth of the Enlightenment as the universal destiny of humanity. In making this case, he shows that the teleology is inextricably tied to a theory of human races which finds its center and purpose in the unfolding of the exemplary and ultimately perfectible white race.

The teleology is driven on the one hand by the seeds of human nature. The development of humanity in this way is rooted in the seeds of human nature which give rise to the various capacities of the human species, although this natural driving force does not by itself tend toward the full development of humanity toward its destiny. Thus he must identify another driving force for teleology which is not confined by the materiality of human existence and sensory perception. This other teleological factor must unfold in human reason.

Human reason’s emergence as Enlightenment has occurred in the white race of Europe. The white race, transcending the limitations of races, constitutes the nature and destiny of the human race which remains to be perfected. These other races will ultimately be stamped out by their own limitations, through a kind of “inner rotting or decay” (92). They are too embedded in the materiality of humanity and its passions, and they lack full capacity for educability. They will never reach full self-governance, but the white race is exempted from this failing.

This second driving force of a purified rationality is what Kant worked in his Critiques to identify. The Enlightened human race must now embark on its world-historical task of extending its autonomy and freedom throughout the globe. Apparently, this process will accompany the process by which the other races are stamped out.

This destiny of the spread of Enlightenment (whiteness) must now face its challenges. The great challenge is that humanity would become sidetracked or stunted in its advance toward perfection. As Kant’s theory of race describes this process, certain developments of human nature are partial and lack balance. Having become imbalanced, these “wayward reproductions” cannot be brought back into balance. Such alien humanity must not become intermixed with the Enlightened, balanced portion of the race. Miscegenation becomes the great fear, whether in the periphery of the lands where Europe is only beginning to exercise dominance, or in the heart of Europe itself. If alien races contaminate the humanity that is destined to emerge, then the rise of Enlightenment (whiteness) may be hindered.

Frankly, Kant is getting creepy here. The party line in looking at European philosophers in relation to European history has been to show how Hegel believed in the inevitable advance and rise of an Enlightened race through the dialectical struggles of history, building a foundation for race theory in the concepts of thesis and antithesis and the inevitable overcoming of such contradictions. Then the close of the Enlightenment with Nietzsche provided the theory of the Übermensch who through the sheer force of his will to power reshapes the world in his image. These philosophers, therefore, get assigned indirect blame for the rise of German National Socialism and of Hitler.

Often, Kant gets offered as the antidote to that stream of German philosophy because his theory of a common human nature exhibited in reason supports doctrines of universal human rights. A few dissenting voices have raised the claim that Kant’s theory of the rational human leaves many gaps through which certain humans might be considered less than fully human. Human rights only apply to those who are defined as human. The debates in the Bush administration’s efforts to apply different rules of war and justice to some persons, deemed not to deserve the same rights as other persons, illustrates the ways that such theories of human rights can be shown to have loopholes.

What Carter has shown in this analysis of Kant is that what some might call loopholes turn out to be the engine driving the argument. Some animals are more equal than others. Some races, even recognizing that their development is part of the essential potentiality of the human species, remain imbalanced and deficient, and must ultimately pass off the scene if the true humanity is to emerge. That sounds plenty useful to a theory of the rise of the Aryan race.

Carter's RACE 5: Immanuel Kant and the Racialized Teleology of Enlightenment

After defending the dissertation and moving on to teach, I was so relieved not to be reading only what could be digested for nourishing some part of my project. I immediately started reading in one of my key areas of interest that had mostly lain dormant while in doctoral studies: Mesoamerican history and the arrival of Europeans in the Americas. Through my seminary years I had come to believe that something of grave importance for the church had happened during that time and that it was poorly understood. I believed that something had gone terribly wrong, and that it was somehow tied to contingencies rather than necessity. Something had happened in the history of European engagement with the civilizations they were newly encountering that could have gone otherwise. As it turned out, it was disastrous for many of the world’s peoples and for the church. I was eager to restart this line of thinking through new research.

About seven months later, I started teaching my first undergraduate ethics course at Shaw University. On the first day of class, a student asked me questions about the textbook choices and course design that made me realize something that I had bypassed during doctoral studies. As an adjunct, I was teaching from syllabi prepared by others, and it presented a fairly standard approach to European philosophical ethics. Although my fellow students and I had applied a good deal of intellectual concern to matters of racial division in the church, I was amazed at how little effort I or my teachers had put into actually reading and studying literature examining such matters. So my next crash course was in African and African American approaches to ethics.

Looking back it became apparent that when I wrote in my dissertation about the ways that accommodation to modernity had handicapped and even perverted the churches of the West, I did not grasp the interrelationship of modern nation-states and racialized thinking. Among all the fruit of studying John Milbank, I was not pushed by him toward a construal of modernity as a racialized world. I can see now where I might have grasped some insight had I been looking. However, the critical turn in Milbank’s argument never really embraces the construction of whiteness. Milbank’s identification of the “liberal Protestant metanarrative” offers possibilities for reflection on the racialized nature of the modern world, but frankly I was focused on the rise of modern nation-states and did not give enough attention to the rise of modern economics nor the racial implications of the nation-state. Carter’s work offers a way to probe this direction and gain a new insight into what I have studied.

Several years after I finished my dissertation, the work of Luis Rivera in A Violent Evangelism helped me to begin to understand this gap in my education and thinking.

The key here, as I made note of in the previous post, is that Carter has examined critical but lesser known writings of key figures. This time, it is Immanuel Kant. Kant, ever positionized as anti-teleological, is far more complex than most of us learn in school. His attention to teleology can’t be ignored in Toward Perpetual Peace, yet to my reading this work was either an anomaly or a late-career change of perspective which contradicted earlier views. But Carter has shown the critical teleological elements of Kant’s entire project, evident in his fascination with Enlightenment and what it means for the future of humanity as the seeds of human potential unfold in the rise and triumph of the white Europeans in the world.

This connection to race might be ignored by many readers as “throwaway comments” scattered in his writings. This is in fact the favorite hermeneutic of twentieth-century philosophy and political science, which carves out the sections of enlightenment writings that speak to theological arguments or racial conceptions. Most of us are aware of Kant’s derogatory remarks about the impossibility of a black man making good sense when he talks. The commonly repeated racist quotation becomes an emblem of the racist heritage of modernity, but most of us go on teaching Kant as if this belief about race is not central to his philosophical project. Carter has argued that certain essays and reflections from the heart of Kant’s career clearly develop the significance of race within the philosophical, political, metaphysical project of Kant’s career. Race, and particularly the white race which is a race transcending race, is a critical driving force in the teleological unfolding of human destiny.

The contrast of black and white races is a critical element of Kant’s thought. The black race represents a kind of dead end of one possible trajectory of human development. Having reached a certain point of development, perhaps a nadir, the black race would be most difficult to turn and move toward the higher directions of the human race displayed and potential in whiteness. The “darker races,” in having developed certain seeds or potentialities inherent in humanity, have become enclosed within the trajectories of their particularity, “they suffer under the entropy of their own particularity: they can’t get over themselves.” Thus believing that race is a natural and inherent and permanent feature of humanity, he singles out one race, a kind of super race, as the one destined to fulfill human destiny. As for the others, “their racial existence is an impediment to their human existence, where ‘human’ here stands for the universal.” Only one race can stand for the universally human (89).

Having been led to this place, it now seems obvious that the racializing project is inherent in the modern project, not merely a detachable extra appendage unrelated to and unnecessary to the body politic and the body of knowledge. It remains a driving force behind so-called globalization and the neocolonial vision of multinational corporations and nation-states.

Carter's RACE 2: The Racialized Jew

With apologies once again to Dr. Carter if I have misunderstood his argument, I am attempting to articulate some of what I am learning and thinking about as I read his new book.

In his critique of Cornel West and analysis of Michel Foucault (in Race: A Theological Account), J. Kameron Carter raises a matter of particular concern for professional theologians. There is a tendency in the profession of theology to be overly confident of the power of language. Thus, the critique of modernity, and if Carter is right, the critique of racialized understandings and structuring of bodies (politic), can emphasize the discursive structures of racial reasoning without adequate attention to the nondiscursive structuring, the production and reproduction of racialized bodies (politic), the “dynamics of relationships of force” (48).

This problem, it would seem to me, shines a light on the difficulty for white theologians to identify the effects of whiteness on theological theory and practice. Thus we find ongoing attempts at therapy through language to eliminate racism and racialized thinking. The most naïve form would attempt to create terminology to substitute for racialized language in a kind of idealistic method of changing the reality by changing its name. While this has some therapeutic value, it cannot in and of itself uproot and dismantle the power relations and structures of production which are the inherent logic and grammar of a racialized theopolitics. Next, Carter will interrogate Foucault’s concept of biopower and biopolitics as a more material analysis than West offered.

West, it would seem, probes the emergence of a discourse of biblical interpretation and other intellectual productions which deployed elements of the new scientific vision, Cartesian philosophy of mastery, and the normative gaze of classical aesthetics. The discursive structures “circumscribe how people of African descent come to be situated in the modern imagination” (49). The shortcoming of West’s excellent work, according to Carter, is that it can provide explanation for the conditions of the possibility of the emergence of white supremacy, but it does not explain why white supremacy was the actual result. He implies a level of contingency, which he then fails to name; thus, a hint of inevitability or necessity hangs in the air. Foucault goes on to recognize the moment of anxiety over the racialized Jew in modern Europe which elicits a pseudotheological articulation of a notion of the white nation around which an entire hierarchical construction of race comes into being. The biopolitics of the nation appears in the dialectical relationship of decentralized individualism with centralized administration and surveillance, such that the people themselves police nationhood in their own racialized, individualized, modernized, pseudotheologized bodies.