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.

Thy Will Be Done

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Missiology of "Out-Messaging" ISIS

I recently finished an essay on the notion of "light" in Christian missiology, including analysis of how in the modern age it became a cipher for spreading Western civilization.  One part of my research focused on John Winthrop's sermon about being "a city on a hill" because "the eyes of everyone" were watching.  In light of the "mission" of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Winthrop's use of that text takes on a subordinate relationship to commercial development and acquisition of land to expand the influence of England. 

Well, today I was listening to foreign policy writers discussing the frustration over the continuing appeal and growth of ISIS in Syria and Iraq.  As they bemoaned the ineffectiveness of efforts to stop the growth of this military and ideological organization, one of them kept taking it back to the PR or propaganda campaign that some believe is needed to "out-message" ISIS's own outreach.  Describing the failure of "State Department twitter" to curb ISIS, he said, "there's no sense of turning any kind of 'beacon on the hill' or  'shining city' kind of message to give any kind of alternative options to the disenfranchised and the humiliated and the oppressed populations who have somehow made this decision that I'm going to become a person who is on the other side of the cage from that Jordanian pilot and light him on fire."

I wish I had had that quotation when I was writing.  It is about the best example of using that Matthew 5 text to describe promoting Western civilization that I have heard.  Without any direct attempt to be theological, this theological resource was pulled from the knapsack to promote a soteriology of civilization.

Men Claiming Divine Right to Enslave and Rape Women

It's not something new, but it's back in the headlines this week.  With no effort to hide it, the quasi-governmental structures of ISIS have developed rules and institutions to govern and bless sexual slavery of women, better known as rape.  Moreover, they claim that they do so on the basis of the findings of a specific research assignment given to scholars who delved into the traditions of their faith.  Having just noted (in a previous post) Octavia Butler's narration of sex trafficking and rape in a future post-apocalyptic world (not in any way implicating Islam or the Quran in her account), it struck me that her book was again highly relevant for my continued reflection.  To quote from the beginning of the NY Times article

In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.

He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her.

When it was over, he knelt to pray again, bookending the rape with acts of religious devotion.

This morning I heard a commentator on the radio say, with reference to sex-slavery and other recent stories about ISIS that this is a new kind of entity in history, one we have not dealt with before.  I think that exaggeration was part of an argument to display a contrast between Al Quaeda and ISIS, but it is clearly not true that there have not been other groups who justified ethnic cleansing, rape, slavery, sex-trafficking, and genocide, either in the name of religious beliefs or of political power.

The Times article offers a fairly extensive analysis of the orchestrated and highly organized process by which thousands of Yazidi women and girls in particular have been kidnapped, documented, advertised, displayed, and sold as sex-slaves.  We are rightly appalled.  It tells about very young men who have bought these women and girls as well as bought into the ideology that justifies their rape.  From the outside, it is not hard to offer the criticism that very young, lonely warriors are susceptible the ideological framing of rape as pious duty.  They have given their all to a divine cause which includes establishing a righteous patriarchy.  They are ready to go to their deaths, and this heroic self-understanding can become justification for acts one might not otherwise believe right.

It is very easy for people in our culture to see this as a terror originating in Islam.  Certainly Islam does not escape all critique for justifying slavery or oppression of women.  On the other hand, neither do Christianity or Judaism.  The perspective of any of these faiths toward slavery has not been purely abolitionist, and perhaps for the majority of their histories they at times endorsed and certainly tolerated slavery and men's control over women's bodies and sex.

There is a long (thousands of years) history of writing about men claiming the right to force sex upon women.  Scholars argue about whether such ideas ever existed as codified law or were widely practiced.  Priests or kings seem at times to have claimed the right to first sexual relations with women who would marry, although actually exercising that right would be hard to organize.  It may have been practiced less often than used as a threat to demand a tax or tribute to the ruler.  In ancient Roman times, this was called in Latin the ius primae noctis, or the right to the first night.  The medieval term from from French was droit du seigneur, or right of the Lord.  Scholars of European history have claimed they find no evidence that such a practice was prominent in medieval society.  Yet it certainly shows up among the demands presented in late medieval and reformation era peasant revolts. 

For instance, in a document known as "To the Assembly of the Common Peasantry" (May 1525), the anonymous author cites the abuse of the New Testament to provide theological justification for the oppressive practices of the nobility, including sexual abuse of women (Michael Baylor, The Radical Reformation).

Do not let yourselves be led astray and blinded to any degree because every day the authorities endlessly repeat what the Apostle Peter says in I Peter 2:  "You should be submissive to your lords, even if they are rogues," etc. ... St Peter's view means something very different; for according to their interpretation, we would have to deliver our pious wives and children to them, so that they could satisfy their lust with them (109).

Various peasant uprisings cited this lordly claim to sexual rights as one cause of their revolt.  The existence of this tradition, even if not widely practiced, demonstrates a cultural assumption about the availability of women for sex at the will of men. 

More present for the experience of people in the USA is the recent history of enslaved African Americans.  I need not repeat the theological justification for slavery that emerged in the churches of the US and other European-influenced cultures.  One element of this domination system was the slave-holder's claim over the sexual lives of slaves, especially female slaves.  Extensive testimony from former slaves documents this history, such as the National Humanities Center document "On Slaveholders' Sexual Abuse of Slaves,"

A Washington Post article, "A Tender Spot in Master Slave Relations," reviews some of the literature on the subject of the rape of slave women.  Citing one book by Adele Logan Alexander, Ambiguous Lives: Free Women of Color in Rural Georgia, 1789-1879, the article turns to a comment made by Julian Bond, claiming that the book's stories of slave women bearing mixed race children was also his own family history.

Bond said: "I often talk about that history. My great-grandmother was a slave. She had been given to a woman as a wedding present, and when the bride became pregnant, the bride's husband, my great-grandmother's owner and master, exercised his right to take his wife's slave as his mistress. He was a Presbyterian minister. Two children came from that union, James Bond and Henry Bond, and James Bond was my grandfather."

A minister claiming the right to his slave's body gives iconic representation to the abuse of theology to support the sexual will of men in power.

I pray that the despicable practices revealed about ISIS will end, and that good people will continue working to bring them to an end.  They are one part of the horror of modern slavery and sex trafficking including other regional quasi-governmental groups such as The Lord's Resistance Army in East Africa or systematic sex-trafficking along the Interstate Highway System in the United States.  It's a recurrent political dynamic of human societies, and one that any follower of Jesus must refuse to accept.  All human beings are created in the image of God, not only males.  Moreover, in Christ the divisions we would create to build systems of domination are rejected.  "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28).  I recognize that interpreting that verse would be another long essay.  For now, let it stand as a Christian rejection of domination systems, including patriarchal and classist claims for domination over women's sexual lives.

Organizing and Liturgy

At the end of the Durham CAN Delegates' Assembly last night, I gave closing remarks about how we move forward.  The overarching theme was linking liturgy, as the work of the people, to the continuing organizing to be done on policing, jobs, and housing.  Here are those remarks.

Hello.  I am Mike Broadway, Associate Minister at Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church and part of the Clergy and Strategy teams of Durham CAN.

It has been some time since we have gathered in this kind of assembly to testify, to plan, and to make promises to one another about making our city and county more of what it ought to be, more filled with opportunity and a good life for all of its residents.  It has been 231 days, to be exact.  For me, it has been even longer.  After four and a half years sojourning in Central Texas, through many changes for me and for Durham, I’m blessed to be among you again as part of this great work of building power together. 

Many preachers have stood before you today, and maybe it seemed like a liturgical assembly at times.  While we preachers are only a small part of the leadership of Durham CAN, it is fitting that we think of this gathering as a liturgy.  The word liturgy means “the work of the people.”  It comes from an ancient Greek term that describes the duties that people in a city have toward one another.  Those with talent, with property, with power, with resources have responsibility to contribute toward making life in the community better for everyone.  Liturgy, not merely the words and actions we do in our houses of worship, is the work we are called to do for the good of one another, for the common good.  It is learning to use the power that God gives us.  It is not confined to a worship service; it expands into public service.  We are all liturgists—we are public servants.

This duty of public service also has deep roots in the story of God’s calling out a people.  Abraham and Sarah of old were told that God would bless them and their descendents.  Those blessings, however, would not be for clutching tightly and hoarding.  They would be blessed so that they could be a blessing to others.  Have you been blessed with a position of influence?  With ability to negotiate?  With connections and power?  With a job?  With a home?  With friendships?  Do you have energy to work?  Do you have a deep resistance to injustice?  In all these cases, you are blessed.  And remember, like Sarah and Abraham, you have those blessings so that you can become a blessing to others.

Today we have testified and poured out our hopes for our neighborhoods, for jobs, for housing, for living wages, for young people’s opportunities to learn and work—these are the liturgical prayers of the people.  In our conversations, we have made progress and promises with one another today.  That’s how we build our power.  We have agreed that the time when we could ignore unjust practices of profiling in policing will come to an end in our city, and we will work together to see that day.  We have taken a first step toward concrete progress, should I say frame, brick and mortar progress, on abundant affordable housing.  We have made plans to strengthen relationships across the community to make sure that our out-of-work neighbors have opportunities both now and in the future to train for, apply for, and to work in good, living-wage jobs.  These promises are just the beginning.  They are the confessions and creeds of the liturgy.  Having recited them, another powerful work of the people begins now.

Take the hand of the people on each side of you.  We made promises and agreements.  We are in this work together.  Turn to your neighbor and say, “I’ve been blessed.”  That’s right.  We’ve all been blessed, and we all have blessings to share.  Now turn to your neighbor again and say, “We have the power.  It’s time to do the work.” 

With thankful hearts for the seeds of justice planted in us, for the blessings we have received, for the Spirit’s powerful work among us, for the visions and opportunities ahead of us, let’s all go forth from this place and do the work of the people.  Thank you all, and good night.

Bluebonnets for Easter

I've posted some pictures on Facebook from Good Friday and Holy Saturday, and I've made a series of comments about them which I am collecting here.  In the past, I have written about wildflowers and bluebonnets and their significance for Everly, our years together, and for our family (here and here, for instance).  We have been blessed with an abundance flowers at Everly's grave this year, and I wanted to share these pictures and reflections with those of you who have followed our story.

In winter 2013, we planted bluebonnets and paintbrush wildflowers on Everly Estes Broadway's gravesite in Salado. With pretty good rainfall, the plants emerged in the spring, but there were only a few scattered, small blooms. So we hoped for another year of root growth to bring us a better bouquet this year. Today Lydia made her way to Salado at the end of Holy Week, and we got a big surprise.

As the day waned on Good Friday, she found and sent us pictures of abundant bluebonnets all over the Broadway grave plot, and only on that part of the cemetery. A little foreshadowing of Easter on Good Friday for us who love Everly. 

Bluebonnets all over, with a few scattered paintbrush and behind the bench, several red Drummond's phlox visible in the corner of one photo. Everly will be loving these flowers. I always loved to bring her flowers.

 STEM moment: Everly will be loving to see a few atoms (possibly) of her carbon remains revitalized in this palate of color. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Dust to soil, soil to bluebonnets.

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W.D. (my dad) and Lydia have gone back to sit with Everly and place an Easter lily by her gravestone today on Holy Saturday. Last year on Easter the four of us took lilies to Everly's grave before sunrise. Later in the day we took pictures with bluebonnets as we had on our last Easter with Everly. This year we are scattered around in three states. Thank you sweet Lydia for these pictures.

Beyond my comprehension, in the complex relation of time and eternity, the mystery of Holy Saturday is a day of communion of our Lord with the dead. WD and Lydia stay there by this grave at the borderlands of this mystery, and we remember that this tomb and the Lord's tomb and so many more tombs cannot hold prisoner those who have been laid to rest.  

But on this day, Christ and those united to him (the church against whom even the gates of Hades may not prevail) participate in the liberation of "All of these [who] 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. If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, God has prepared a city for them."

"There is a communion of the saints," as Rev Turner declared in Everly's eulogy, and like so many flowers clustered around WD's and Lydia's feet, there is a great cloud of witnesses, sitting vigil on this day, with all creation groaning in labor pains, awaiting redemption of our bodies. We hope for what we do not see and wait with patience. The Spirit helps us in our weakness and intercedes with sighs too deep for words. The Spirit intercedes for the saints according to God's good will and purpose for us. In this blessed, sweet communion, we await the mystery of resurrection, in hope.

Jordan's Stormy Banks

(I am reposting this from Everly Broadway's CaringBridge site.)

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

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

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

I thought through her last days.  From March to July 2013, there were many ups and downs with treatment and constant pain.  She was committed to do all that she could to keep living with us, and for the most part she pressed through whatever came, asking for help that she needed from us.  There were times when she became discouraged by the pain, but we kept seeking answers and trying to find a way to getting better.  Our family trip in May was for her a great triumph and celebration.  There was only a short time remaining, but none of us knew that.  We kept looking at houses in Austin, hiring inspectors, thinking about how to fit all five of us in a house together, and even negotiating a contract.  At the same time, the cancer was doing its own work.  When our house-buying plan collided with the tumors' deadly growth, the time was nigh.  The doctors diagnosed the situation, and we learned there were no more medical solutions available.  We made the transition to hospice, and Everly lived less than one more week.

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

If she had the kind of struggle about which Nouwen writes, it was during her first month after the diagnosis in 2012.  Already very sick, and considered potentially beyond help from medical intervention, she entered the hospital and received her first dose of chemotherapy.  Anyone who was following her story through this illness remembers that the first treatment almost killed her.  In that first crisis, she fell deeper and deeper into a stupor.  Her body became weak.  She could not eat and had to be fed through a tube.  She slept constantly, and emerged to waking dreams and hallucinations.  She sometimes awoke with fearful concern about some matter from work or from our family life, needing to give one of us instructions on what we needed to take care of, urgently.  Sometimes these troubled conversations dealt with some relationship or other matter about which she believed she had done wrong and things needed to be set right.  I know I was not the only bedside companion who served as her minister in that time of trouble.  Perhaps, during that time, it was the stormy Jordan she saw before her, and she felt her need to face the dangers head on and get herself ready for that crossing.

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

I don't mean that her 15 months, minus that first month-plus of hospitalization, were constant sunshine.  Everly certainly had fears and worries.  She was a worrier, but not to despair.  And she did not handle pain well.  Many of you have heard her say honestly, "I'm a wimp."  She did not like to get stuck for an intravenous tube.  She did not like any treatment that made her burn, or get chills, or get poked or prodded.  But that part of her life was not so different from before we had to face cancer.  Of course, every time we had to get a new CT Scan and reevaluate her progress, there was anxiety.  When the news was not as good as we hoped, there was disappointment and concern.  I'm not trying to sugar coat things, but I think it is accurate to say that Everly did not face that kind of struggle against her potential dying as a constant overwhelming problem after the beginning.  She was not resigned to die, but she was not terrified by it either.  When she looked back at her experience of making it through those terrible days in 2012, she would tell us stories and share insights as one who had been through a great ordeal.  She spoke as one who knew something beyond what most anyone had known, having approached the brink of death, looked into it, turned back from it, and rededicated herself to a life worth living.  I think you will forgive me if at times I sound like I'm writing hagiography, but what I want to say is that she had faced something, had passed through the valley of the shadow of death, and she did not need to repeat those experiences and lessons again.  She already had learned that even there, God is with her.

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

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

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

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

I think that in writing about this, both Nouwen and I are striving to be honest, to tell the truth.  Dying often is not, as many of us hope and imagine, an easy slipping away.  It is not only having family together and saying good-bye.  It is also a struggle to let go of the only good that we have known and to face the ways that we did not live in every way as we had aspired.  I can't think of any more appropriate way of handling our grief over Everly than being honest about our living and being honest about our dying.  We get so focused on our own experience of our loved one's death, and that is to be expected.  What Nouwen did, and what I have tried to do here, is also to collect and put together the clues we have of what our loved one went through.  We can't say we know it with certainty, especially those periods when they were not able to speak to us about it.  But we can take what they did say, and what their convictions have been, to see through a glass darkly, until that time that we see face to face in "one eternal day where God the Son forever reigns and scatters night away."

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

Church Shorthand Terms

One thing I learned from teaching first through fourth graders in Sunday School is that many of the favorite words and phrases people like to say at church are shorthand for complicated concepts that may be quite difficult to explain.  These symbolic, metaphorical, or abstract terms often make little sense to children whose literal and concrete interpretation of language leads to misunderstandings or confusion.

This hit me most clearly in the month of each year when the curriculum turned toward an evangelistic emphasis, tailored toward the developmental stage of the children.  In the two year curriculum cycle, it is no surprise that Southern Baptists, with their conversionist tradition and evangelical leanings, made sure to include evangelistic teaching.  Because of the high level of educational expertise available in the Sunday School Board staff in those days of the 1980s, the literature for teaching was adapted to the developmental stages of the age cohorts being taught.  It was not designed for high pressure evangelizing.  It was supposed to lay a groundwork for children growing in their faith so that they can do what my dad often spoke of, "make a step toward Christ."  Such an approach reveals that Southern Baptist curriculum design included acknowledgement of both the "crisis" model of conversion and the developmental model of "growing into faith in Christ."

Using either model, our theological tradition expected Christian converts to be able to articulate some kind of experience of conversion.  Describing such an experience should employ certain preferred terms:  "accepting Christ as Savior," "asking Jesus into my heart," "getting saved," "giving my life to Jesus," "making a decision for Christ," "following Jesus," "professing faith in Christ," "confessing my faith," "getting converted," and "having a relationship with Christ." 

A few terms often heard but less preferred are "walking down the aisle,""loving Jesus," "getting baptized."  Baptists liked to talk about walking the aisle, but as a synecdoche it offers the concrete mind of children an inexact and incomplete description of what is valued in soteriological language.  Baptists like to talk about loving Jesus, but it is too general to satisfy their specific soteriological understanding.  While Baptists practice believer's baptism, they also carry on a centuries-old argument about the nature of baptism and Baptist rejection of sacramentalism (a heritage worth inquiring into at another time).  Thus, this synecdoche as a description of conversion challenges the particular identity Baptists want to mark out for themselves.

In all my efforts to explain soteriology to children, I found that many of these shorthand terms I was most in the habit of using did not provide much clarity of understanding on their terms.   I'll not discuss the issues with all of the terms and phrases listed above.  Let it suffice to say that some fail to communicate because of their abstraction:  accepting Christ, making a decision, professing faith, confessing, having a relationship, and getting converted.   Other terms, in their metaphorical specificity, caused difficulty with specific concrete images they call forth:  asking Jesus in your heart, giving my life, and getting saved.  Children who were familiar with the term "getting saved" might think of being in danger from drowning, from a mean person or monster, from a fire, from a storm, or some other danger.  Linked with discussion of Hell, it might draw the focus of the child to fear of fire and pain and away from the love of God in Christ. 

I concluded from many efforts at explanation that the best choice of terms was "following Jesus." First, it was a term with strong biblical precedent in the very words of Jesus.  Second, the concept of following has roots in the narrative not only concretely, but also thematically.  The stories of following are illustrative of what people even today are being asked to do when we respond in faith.  Biblical examples of following convey the image of conversion in that people leave things behind, change what they are doing, and begin new ways of life.  Third, the idea of following as similar to imitating or learning from someone is not complicated to grasp.  Disciples and discipleship are prominent biblical and theological ideas that help to elaborate what following Jesus means. 

Wayne Gordon, pastor of Lawndale Community Church, arrived at a similar conclusion about the preferability of inviting people to follow Jesus when making an evangelistic appeal.  He said that the widely recognized invitation to "get saved" carried with it so many accumulated layers of cultural distortions that he found it as much a barrier as an appeal for people hearing the message.  Moreover, the call to follow Jesus is much better at conveying the ongoing, lifelong process of salvation that constitutes the Christian calling.

I started out writing this post because of a conversation I had with students over the weekend.  This week in class, a discussion led to citing the importance of contextualizing certain virtue language in the framework of "a relationship with God."  It caused me to wonder what that specific phrase means.  Much rhetorical energy has gone into preaching a distinction between religion and relationship.  It is one of many examples of arguments based on stipulative definitions.  Religion and relationship are assigned specific meanings which by their stipulations make one preferable, even though these are not the only ways the terms are used.  Thus, there may be other ways to employ the term religion usefully and favorably, if it were not narrowly defined to be problematic.  Thus, relationship has a generally favorable connotation for popular theological conversation.

Current speech patterns employ the phrase "in a relationship" to replace what might previously have been described as "having a boyfriend/girlfriend" or "going steady," to name a few possibilities.  Such use of the term favors the implication of emotional involvement.  To speak in this context of a relationship with God can imply an emotional interdependence or general good feelings between a person and God.  While relationship with God does not exclude loving feelings or mutual recognition and appreciation, it is important to avoid having such terminology captured by popular speech patterns.  Theological understandings of love must not be truncated to mean mere emotional mushiness.

A broader context for the phrase "relationship with God" should reach toward doctrines of creation, anthropology, and Christology.  Stanley Grenz used the title "The Relational God" for an entire chapter of his extensive systematic text, Theology for the Community of God.  There he develops a framework in which to understand God as the source of human existence who in distinction from creation brings persons into existence with whom personal relation is possible.  Personal relationship recognizes the distinction between Creator and creation as well as the capacity for mutual knowing and interaction.  It is a way of situating humanity within the dynamic ordering of divine love that brings about creation and its possibilities.  Christologically, to be united to Christ, who is God incarnate taking humanity into Godself, is to be joined intimately with God through the eternal loving interchange among the Trinity.  In this way, being in relationship with God means that we are communing with God through having our nature renewed through the atoning life of the True Adam.

To be in relationship with God is to know that our beginning and end and the fullness of our existence are infused by grace which is the condition of possibility of our existence and the means of our present sustenance and future hope as beings.  To be in relationship with God is to have received this grace and embraced God's good purposes for humanity.  This much richer understanding of relationship helps to situate the popular emotional conception.  Moreover, when linked to conversation about friendship with God, terminology used by Jesus and much later by Thomas Aquinas, the relationality of God and the significance of "having a relationship with God" can become fruitful theological reflection.

Pre-teen children may well be able to understand many aspects of this discussion of what a relationship with God could be, although probably not in the overly cumbersome language I have used.  But the struggle to articulate a fuller meaning does illustrate my point that church conversation using shorthand terms often leaves plenty of misunderstanding and confusion that deserves further study and reflection.

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.