Seven Years Between Haircuts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kephalé, the English Word "Head," and a Tradition of Misreading the Bible

Recently I posted a short sermon I gave for part of a Men's Day observance in a Baptist Church.  I have long had mixed feelings about Men's Day.  It is not one of those days that fits into the centuries-old church calendar that observes days for the saints and an annual cycle of seasons that brings attention to the anticipation, the birth, the life, the passion, the resurrection, and the reign of Jesus Christ.  It is, however, part of another liturgical calendar that evolved over decades to address certain aspects of church life.  There is a Women's Day, and there is a Men's Day, and in some churches these are big annual events.

These days have significance in a number of ways.  Women's Day has its origin in a 1906 proposal by Nannie Helen Burroughs, who suggested a day when women in National Baptist Churches could lead in educating and motivating the churches for Foreign Missions.  It's purpose then includes promotion of missionary work, fund-raising for missions, and elevation of women to the opportunity to lead, speak out, and exercise gifts in the church.  It was of a piece with the rise of Women's Clubs organized for community betterment, including the kind of work done by Ida B. Wells-Barnett in the anti-lynching campaign and the founding of black educational and social institutions.

Men's Day does not have the same specific historical origins, but seems to have grown up in many ways as a complementary observance to address the need for men to take up their part in the work of the church, to serve, to teach, and to lead.  It is not uncommon for it to include a theme around the "missing" men in the life of the churches that seem often to be populated primarily by women.  So Women's Day is on one hand an effort to elevate the place of women in institutions that display a tradition of patriarchy, and Men's Day is on the other hand an effort to draw in and encourage more male discipleship.

Having grown up Baptist, whether among white or black Baptists, I have worshiped and served in institutions steeped in patriarchal tradition.  In my early adult years, I realized the failure of such churches to listen to the message of Pentecost and the momentum of the New Testament writings toward full equality of men and women in families, in church leadership, and in relation to God.  And still today, that tradition weighs heavy in the churches with which I associate. 

I'm not saying there has been no change.  I commune now in a church which has women in all levels of leadership, including ordained ministers and deacons, as well as various offices and roles of influence.  It is not surprising at all to have a woman preach, pray, or lead worship in any way.  Even so, the rhetoric of hierarchy and male leadership still crops up at times, and it remains assumed by many in the community of faith.  Moreover, our church is on the more progressive end of a continuum; we have not had a woman as senior pastor, but women's calling and capacity for leadership is not a question.  On the other hand, many churches with which we cooperate and associate, probably a very large majority of them, continue to exclude women from official recognition in church leadership, such as preaching, serving as a deacon, or receiving ordination.

So I always approach Men's Day and Women's Day with a level of trepidation, knowing how they easily become a platform to recite and reinstate patriarchal structures as if they are the absolute command of God for human flourishing.  The assumed primacy of the male in family, church, and society remains a powerful idea.  I am always thankful, as I was on the night that I preached about the sin of seeking to control the world and the people in it, when the observance does not morph into a rally for boosting the patriarchy.

There is an important agenda in black churches when it comes to encouraging men to rise into their gifts and callings.  The events around the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Travon Martin, to name only a few, symbolize the difficulties black men face in trying to make their way in U.S. society.  The deeply imbedded prejudices and fears which assume to know that black men are up to no good stand in the way of education, jobs, economic stability, and empowerment.  We ought to be encouraging black men to defy the social pressures and assumptions that would try to keep them marginalized.  That's why I believe in the agenda of Men's Day.

Womanist thought seeks to expand our notions of gender politics and community responsibility to avoid pitting some people against others.  As Marcia Riggs has demonstrated, the heritage of the Black Women's Clubs is not elevation of women at men's expense, not elevation of the middle class at the poor's expense.  It's core was the motto, "Lifting As We Climb."  Womanism shares that spirit of believing that the it is not possible for some in the community to achieve what is good for them if they do so by holding down or putting down others.  It must be a general community uplift, a devotion to the common good.  To use biblical language, it is a commitment to having "no one in need among us."

Men's and women's achievement and advancement go hand in hand.  In this way, the church seeks to fulfill the message of the Apostle Paul to the Galatians, when he told them that their baptism gave them a new birth into a new world and a new life.  They were changed beings, no longer defined by the biases of culture from which they had come.  It was a new culture of equality:

As many of you who have been dipped in the dye of Christ have also gotten dressed up in Christ.  There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, not male and female, but all are one in Christ Jesus (my translation).

Those so-called natural divisions which would divide us are not any longer relevant.  There is a new kind of freedom for living according to the gifts that the Holy Spirit gives freely to whomever the Holy Spirit wills.

The pentecostal faith of the church acknowledges that the first bearers of the gospel of the resurrected Lord were women who went to his tomb on Sunday and discovered he was risen.  Mary Magdalene, one of his companions in life was the one who first met him in the resurrection.  Jesus' followers remembered how he did not care about the disreputable behavior of talking with a divorced and cohabitating Samaritan woman, outcast by her community.  They remembered that he praised Mary of Bethany for her devotion to learning that traditionally was a role assigned to men only.  And Peter preached from the Prophet Joel's words which said that both men and women would prophesy, that is they would preach and deliver a word of God.  Remnants of the early church in the New Testament writings indicate the leadership of women like Lydia, Phoebe, and Chloe.

Not all New Testament texts are so easily wrenched from patriarchal thinking.  Among the ones that is commonly used to justify patriarchy is 1 Corinthians 11.  It contains a formulaic set of parallel statements that seem at first to be a claim on behalf of hierarchy in patriarchal form.  That is because of the word "head" in English, translated from the Greek kephalé.

In English, the "head" man is the one in charge.  We have "Department Heads" and "head linesmen" and most prominently, "heads of state."  In English history, the beheading of Charles I was a public symbol of removing the monarchical authority from over the people.  So the English word "head" connotes hierarchy and authority.  There is a concept of "headship" in English that tampers with our cultural biases when we read verse 3.

But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the husband is the head of his wife, and God is the head of Christ (NRSV).

Greek is not the same.  Certainly Greek culture has its own symbols of hierarchy and a heritage of patriarchy.  Yet the language does not rely on the image of the head to portray hierarchy and authority.  There are many meanings, both literal and figurative, for the word kephalé.  It can mean the anatomical head on a human or other animal.  It can mean a part of a plant that in certain ways is similar to the head on an animal.  It can mean the top piece, or crowning piece of something (not to be confused with the English crown as a symbol of rulership).  It can often mean the headwaters of a stream, and by analogy the source of something. 

Lexicons of ancient Greek language give many possible meanings for the word kephalé, but there seem to be no instances which indicate that Greeks used it to mean the boss, the ruler, the one in charge.  I am thankful for the summary of various sources assembled by Laurie Fasullo of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, as she made the case that it is inappropriate to insert "headship" as authority into a reading of Pauline texts and other New Testament texts.  I will not try to duplicate all of her interesting and excellent work. 

If 1 Corinthians 11:3 should not be read to indicate that there is a grand hierarchy in which women or wives are ontologically subordinate and men in authority, then how should we read it.  Fasullo and others convincingly argue that talking about heads here is best understood as emphasizing the unity of the two elements being named.  Christ is clearly not eternally and ontologically subordinate to God.  So some other relationship is being indicated here.  If Paul is speaking in his rabbinic voice, then he may be pointing us back to the Genesis story of the woman's creation from a rib of the man, and thus saying that the man is the source of the woman, and thereby we see that they are made of one substance and inseparably linked.  In the same way, humanity is linked to Christ, who is the true human, the Second and True Adam, and thus the source of the man.  Christ, the beloved, is eternally begotten of the lover, the Father, and is inseparably linked and coequal, fully God.  To say head here is to use the word in its sense of being the source and therefore the same.

Wayne Grudem is the primary scholar in defense of the notion of "head" as "headship."  Scholars who disagree with him have offered a pretty strong critique of the arguments he published in the 1980s.  So in 2001 he published an updated argument to take on various newer scholarly works with which he disagreed.  He attempted to import the popular U.S. evangelical notion of hierarchy equivocally called equality through a conception of "complementarity."  Complementarity is the evangelical/fundamentalist word for equality of status combined with differentiation of roles, with those superordinate and subordinate roles ontologically and essentially mapped onto gender.

Grudem accused his opponents of claiming their sources make arguments that are not actually present, or what one would call an "argument from silence."  Lacking any direct claim, they claim too much for his interpretation.  Yet he does the same, claiming that the misreading by Catherine Kroeger of Chrysostom's comments on 1 Corinthians 11:3 failed to recognize that Grudem's position was required to make sense of them.  Yet Grudem ends up contradicting Chrysostom, not agreeing with him.  He claims the subordination of Jesus Christ as an essential status, taken on voluntarily, and yet by implication from eternity to eternity.  This is exactly what Chrysostom is battling, so it makes no sense that he would have agreed with Grudem's subordinationist theology of the Trinity, even though Grudem believes that it is obvious and entailed in his words.

It seems, therefore, that the traditionalist view, bolstered by its champion Grudem, continues to rely on this equivocal use of the term equality to deny the very coequality of the persons of the Trinity as as way to justify an eternal inequality called equality in the subordination of women to men.

Did Jesus subordinate himself, take the form of a servant, and become like us?  Yes.  And Jesus has been highly exalted.  The subordination of one person of the Trinity to another is shared among all three persons.  This is the nature of the perfect communication of all things between the persons, coeternally existing in coequality, supreme communicability, complete consubstantiality, perfect configurability, and unsurpassable mutual intimacy. 

Can women reasonably respond to Christian faith through similar voluntary subordination?  Could a marriage reasonably allow one person to exercise most or all leadership?  Yes to both of these.  Many blessed unions have appeared in cultural conditions of patriarchy.  Yet the Letter to the Corinthians cannot be used to demand that this is the inherent ontology of God's creation of humanity.  Thus, a marriage can also reasonably allow partners to find their path of mutual submission (Ephesians 5:21) and offer themselves to one another as servants, bucking the cultural expectations so that both live into the image of Christ.  Nothing in this text says a man should claim his right to be in charge. 

What that means is that contrary to their claim to read the plain sense of the text, using a grammatico-historical method of interpretation to find the one meaning of the text, evangelicals are using an allegorical method of interpretation.  This is exactly what I heard recently.  Taking the English use of the word "head" in its symbolism as authority and ruler, the interpreter began to discuss the various features of the head and their significance for leading and being in charge.  In similar manner, the other parts of the body which are not the head were held up in contrast (feet, tail, etc.) to indicate what a person in charge was not supposed to be.  It is an abuse of allegory to do what allegory often does--reinforce cultural assumptions. 

A colleague of mine, Curtis Freeman, has written a scholarly article on 1 Corinthians 11:3, criticizing Grudem's readings of the theologians of the early centuries of the church.  I look forward to reading that when it is published soon, and I will plan to share a link to it or summary of it when it becomes available.

Ecclesia Houston--What Would Dad Think?

I worshiped at Ecclesia on Taft St. in Houston today.  It has some of the expected features of emergent-type congregations: 

• a repurposed building, 
• a coffee shop and coffee drinking in the service, 
• people worshiping in casual clothes, 
• a worship band and large-screens for lyrics and video, 
• a slight techie feel combined with functional furnishings, 
• a sense that the setting is an impermanent stop on a longer journey, 
• an ambivalent relationship with popular culture, 
• one foot in the ancient Christian tradition, 
• a fair share of small beards and goatees, and 
• conversational worship leadership and preaching.

My dad (Rev. Dr. W. D. Broadway), aged 80 and a Texas Baptist preacher for over 60 years, would call this type of church a "Rock Church."  I'm sure that is language harking back to my teen years when a youth movement of evangelical Jesus Freaks and Catholic folk masses were challenging the fixed norms of worship practice across many denominations.  Dad still uses the term to refer to most "praise and worship" style worship services with a worship band, especially those that sing unfamiliar songs with indeterminate melodies, led by CCM wannabe soloists that seem to be imagining they are performing to ticket-purchasing fans rather than leading congregational singing (I agree that he is right to be disgusted by that kind of deformed church service).  But the latter does not describe the worship at Ecclesia.  Dad would probably have found this kind of Rock Church worshipful.

The first thing I noticed was that the worship band and read-along screens were leading the congregation in singing traditional hymns.  It was not just one hymn thrown in as a token for the old fogeys.  Both of the first two songs were hymns folks would recognize from baptist or other protestant hymnals, if not beyond.  Later, they introduced more contemporary songs, of a different type of lyrical and musical style.  What I noticed, however, was that plenty of people were singing along.  It was not a soloist blasting us out.  I suspect the songs were familiar to regular attenders.  Moreover, there was some theological depth to these songs rather than merely repeating statements of personal feeling ad infinitum.  So I suspect Dad would think that part of the service was acceptable.

The conversational preaching probably would have gotten Dad's blessing as well.  Chris Seay, the pastor, indicated that he was continuing a series of reflections on heaven in this sermon.  His opening discussion revealed that people in the congregation are perhaps wary of what heaven might be.  One of the great comments he made pertained to his 8-year-old son's reticence about growing up, since he loves playing with Lego's so much, but his dad is so busy with so many other things.  By comparison, adults who love what they are doing and people they share their lives with may not be so eager to change it for the unknown joys of heaven.

He focused a good deal around Jesus' words from Matthew 25, "Well done, good and faithful servant."  However, the text analyzed more carefully came from Hebrews 11:32-12:2.  His concern was to emphasize that heaven as a state of existence and a state of affairs is not some kind of narrowly religious place and activity, as much contemporary Christianity might portray it to be, but a place and activity of joyously sharing in the justice and mercy of God that Jesus proclaimed as the Reign of God.

To illustrate his argument, he showed a video clip relating to The Advent Conspiracy and their work to fund clean water for the people of Mt. Barclay, Liberia.  Many of the people, especially children, had been dying of water-borne diseases, gathering their water from a stream.  Clean water from wells turned around the health conditions of the community.  The ministers and others from Mt. Barclay who reflected on the work of God in their community included one who said that the clean water had brought heaven down to earth for them.  You would not be surprised, considering the name of this blog, that I agreed with Bro. Seay that those words will preach.

Finally, I should remark that although it is clearly a young adult dominated congregation, they are not merely detached and carefree.  I could go into a number of ways in which they show signs of taking their place in the struggles of human existence, but I will focus on only one thing here.  This sermon followed a day in which one of the young women of the congregation had been buried.  Without telling us a lot of details, it was clear that she had been facing a life-threatening disease and that her expected time to continue fighting the condition had been cut dramatically short. 

Under these conditions, Bro. Seay offered a hopeful reflection on heaven, in which those who have gone before us are watching and pulling for us in the struggles we face.  Heaven is not the same as our lives here, nor is it a locus of complete wish fulfillment.  It will take some adjusting to the differences, he said, but it will be better than we can imagine.  That is a pretty good riff on the biblical language, as I see it.  Dad knows good preaching when he hears it, and I think he would be passing on some things he heard if he had been there today.  Thanks to Curtis Freeman for telling me about these folks.