Author: Sara Palmer

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One New Book for the Preacher

o. Benjamin Sparks

Richmond, Virginia

TaNehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015), 152 pages.

I had a friend who was a church secretary for over foity years. She retired in 1983 and kept the congregation under her watchful eye until she died hve years ago. She told me a story about when she was a gill growing up in Red Springs, Noith Caiolina. A young black woman had come to live with her family, staying in a spare loom. The gill had nowhere to go, and they took her in. She cleaned and washed and helped out for several months, becoming paif of the family—until one night after midnight a loud knocking came at the door. When they opened it, there stood members of the local Ku Klux Klan, all bedecked in their lobes and hoods. They had come for the young woman—and to save himself and his family, there was nothing that her father could do but hand her over. They never heard from her again. My friend told me this story to explain why her father stopped attending church. He had recognized the voice of one of the men whose face was shiOuded by a hood; he was the Clerk of Session of the Presbyterian Church. I ׳c׳dá Between the World andMe because I had previously read a June 201Τ essay by Coates in The Atlantic called “The Case for Reparations.” (It remains available online.) Both the book and the aificle are required reading for Christian preachers (but especially white American preachers) in the weeks leading up to the 2016 elections and in the waning months of President Obama’s second term as our hrst African American president. I cannot guess your reactions to either book or aificle, but in fairness (trigger warning’?) I begin with my own. I am surprised at their impact upon my heaif and mind since they captured my attention. Each holds me enthralled. To read them is to be humbled, surely, but also to be unexpectedly energized. I have been retired for nine years. I wish I were foityhve with the responsibility of a pulpit and a Church School classiOom—and with the wisdom of accumulated years, a wisdom tempered and sobered by the re-emergence of public racism not heard in this country since my childhood and youth. My reaction has also been inhuenced by serving a congregation in the capital of the Confederacy for twenty-hve years, a church which had its beginnings eighteen years before the outbreak of the Civil War. The hrst pastor of Richmond, Virginia’s Second Presbyterian Church, Moses Drury Hoge, organized the church in 18Τ3 and died while still pastor in 1899. I have been marinated in the stories, customs, and recollections of glories—and of wounds that have never healed. Neither aiticle nor book induced guilt, but rather in more ways than I can describe in this limited space, each produced a profound experience of God’s grace and piOvidence, for me personally, yes, but also for the ragtag, predominantly white, mainline denominations that are embedded into the warp and woof of our fractured republic. Has America ever been other than fractured’? The texts were revelatory. They awakened in me more realistic (and even penitent) understandings of my past

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life and ministry, reminding me of forgotten encounters that will become evident as this aiticle unfolds. The readings help me understand what we glibly call “white privilege,” a limp, distorting euphemism that dares to account for the destruction and evil we (and our ancestors) have perpetrated on Africans, hrst of all—and then upon African Americans . My eyes are opened to how I personally (and we white people collectively) have essentially become who we are thiOugh the suffering of our black brothers and sisters in this land and people of color beyond these shores. This involves, surely, the entire racial myth upon which Western civilization has been built, at least since the beginnings of the European enslavement of Africans and codihed into law in Virginia in the seventeenth century. Such legal violence also existed in Massachusetts where it was equally harsh. The “ruling poobahs” of Boston were required to declare that Phyllis Wheatley (the hrst published African American poet, 1753-84) was human before her poetry was allowed in print. Only human beings were permitted to publish, and by law, Wheatley was not human.’ The suffering and destruction that our brothers and sisters have endured is not only about our wealth, as many recent books have documented.? That suffering undergirds the ways in which we continue to interpret reality: our faith, theology, culture, philosophy, science, and history. It has been and will long continue to be the foundation of our existence as a nation. Between the World and Me is an extended letter to Coates’s son Samori. It is pait memoir and pait instruction, an autobiographical sharing of wisdom about what it means to be (and to grow up) black in America. The letter is hltered thiOugh the lens of personal experience, family, and Coates’s own history: as a child of the ghetto, as a student at Howard University, as a husband and father. The climax of the book is the account of a college friend’s murder by an African American policeman who was never held accountable. His friend was an upper class privileged black student, the son of a physician. The last twenty pages or so of the book is the account of an extended conversation with the student’s mother. Dr. Jones. Coates’s writing is poetic, with phrases and expressions worth savoring and mulling over for their aptness and beauty. This single sentence summarizes the black experience in the (so called) New Woild, in which Coates describes the duration and meaning of slavery: “They transhgured our bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold. ” Presbyterian (and much institutional Christian) wealth was made by cotton and tobacco and the buying and selling of slaves. Many institutions, sacred and secular, still derive their economic sustenance from these enterprises. Coates sees much, if not most, of white America as built upon the continued destruction of black bodies. He writes that he had to learn (from his father, painftrlly) how to protect his own body from violation. He realizes that it could be taken from him by a whim, by a miscalculation, as was the life of his friend at Howard. The police had mistakenly tagged this capable, high achieving student as a drug dealer, which was why a policeman followed him into his middle class neighborhood and hnally shot and killed him. This destruction continues into the present and is manifest now by pohce shootings. ‘111ا ::; ا :؛;:; ؛ﻻ :!؛ اا that provoked tte ،letter” ١١Samori was

was acquitted. He saw that Samori was weeping. Even though Coates is a self declared atheist who has no use for the notion that

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the suffering of black Americans is redemptive, his writing sometimes betrays his own immersion in black Christianity. The suffering of his people is what hnally allows him to see that he is not special because he is black and helps him understand that this suffering is pait of all humanity’s suffering of which he himself is a pait. The foundation of our so called democracy is based upon an aitihcial dehnition of race. “I saw,” he writes, “that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to US [as black Americans or black people] but the actual injury done to US by ρνογΛν uaVvyW o ١١YVciuAg us, intent on believing that what they have named US matters more than anything we could ever actually do. (Italics are mine.) In Amei’ica, the injury is not being born with darker skin . . . but in everything that happens after.” His point is most poignantly illustrated by President Barak and Michelle Obama. My reading of Coates draws out of me recollections, as iron hlings are drawn to a magnet. I remember an insight I gained as an interim pastor in Nashville. In November , 2009,1 attended a several day long symposium commemorating (at the same time) the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Beilin Wall and the 50th Anniversary of the Nashville piotests for equal accommodations. As I listened to pastors from East Germany speaking about their experiences on the same stage with pioneering pastors of the Civil Rights movement, I began to realize that I, too, grew up in a police state (in Alabama and in Georgia). Not for me, of course, but for African Americans. They had no law enforcement or police to piotect them from whatever mischief whites might connive to do against them: whether lying about their conduct, outright theft of their possessions, verbal and physical abuse, or lynching. No more piOtection than East German Christians could expect from police in their Communist state. Coates reminds US in this book that African Americans in many places are barely more safe today. Coates writes to Samori after listening at lengthto Dr. Jones, the mother of the slain Howard student, speak about the death of her own son: “Don’t pin your struggle on their (white Americans) conversion.” That word of advice is passed on to Samori. Might this not be where the church of Jesus Christ may legitimately stake a claim’? Between the World and Me tells not a new story, but the old, old story of the Western and American experience. Between the World and Me offers preachers and congregations, in the words of Leonard Pitts, “the courage to confront the history that made US.”. If courage is not what we need, then the words and the compelling narratives ofour complicity inandprofitfromslaveryffromJimCrowandsegregation, from private prisons, and from the continuing, if sporadic, war on African Americans in our cities and towns) give US preachers the warrant we need to bring Holy Scripture to bear upon our ongoing, and recently re-articulated, American dilemma. We could begin with an extended meditation on DeuteiOnomy 15:12 – 15, which Coates uses as a superscription before his aiticle in The Atlantic (June 2014):

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shah let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shah not let him go away empty: thou shah furnish him liberally out of thy flock ….And thou shah remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today. (KJV)

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In addition to Deuteronomy, there are the teachings in Leviticus regarding wealth and poveity, the remarkable story of Naboth’s vineyard in I Kings, and the writings of the prophets. There is a veritable goldmine of narratives from Luke andActs: the story of Zacchaeus is a model text, and do not forget the hapless Ananias and Sapphira. There is the parable in Luke of the rich man and Lazarus, which concludes with Jesus’ most chilling words in any of the four gospels: “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, then neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead” (16:31). For those readers who have access to the Reformed documents, there are many confessions, especially the contemporary ones, which issue strong calls to social justice. But equally helpful perhaps, and more surprising, are the ancient ones, like The Westminster Shorter Catechism, as well as John Calvin’s exposition of the Ten Commandments. Catholic Social Teaching as well as encyclicals cover these matters as far back as the 19th Century (Rerum Novarum, 1891). Finally, all of our homiletical excursions into such delicate and difficult matters in white pulpits need to be undertaken with genuine humility and not a hint of arrogance or of that spurious “enlightenment” which so easily assumes a position of superiority when we stand “six feet above contradiction.” The word of God convicts, of course, but the word of God convicts preacher and hearer together, and never more so than after reading Between the World and Me. Without genuine humility how will we be credible’? Thereforelbelievetheoverridingtextforsuchpreaching (orinaseriesofsermons) will be best taken from St. Paul in 1 St Corinthians 1 : “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong ….”As Paul begins, he writes, “Consider your call.” We white denominations need to consider our call. Is it now a call to repentance’? All along the ages we helped forge this country out of a wilderness, land that we stole mostly with violence from other nations. And we helped to build, with prayer and fasting and word and sacrament, the economy of our nation—Noith and South—on chattel slavery. By the standards of the gospel, that makes US weak and foolish indeed. But out of such foolishness, weakness, and depravity, God has biOught grace upon grace: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, the Grimke sisters of Charleston, South CaiOlina, Rosa Parks, Andrew Goodman (martyred in Mississippi in 1964), Maitin Luther King, Jr., and countless African American congregations who believed that God’s promises were true. And those promises were true, are true even now, and by their witness and the witness of God’s word, ever will be. God has all along this toilsome way called also as witnesses unnamed and unremembered ones who have followed and carried the CIOSS—and have given an eternal witness. There has rarely been a more appropriate time for such preaching.

We speak now against the day when our Southern people who will resist to the last these inevitable changes in social relations, will, when they have been forced to accept what they at one time might have accepted with dignity and good will, will say: “Why didn’t someone tell US this before’? Tell us this in time’?” William Faulkner, in response to Southern white reaction to the 1954 Supreme Couit decision to integrate schools.

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Notes t. Told by Dr. Katie Canon at a gathering at Union Presbyterian Seminary in 2٥٥1. 2. Among others, Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth ofOther Suns (New York: Random House, 2٥1 ;)٥MichelleAlexander , The New Jim Crow( ׳NewT’ork: The New Press, 2٥1 ;)٥Edward Baptist, The HalfHas Never Been Told, Slavey and the Making olAmerican Capitalism NewYort Basic Books, 24د؛ ١ . 3. The young African American shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2٥14. 4. Leonard Pitts, “Courage to Confront Our History,” The Richmond Times Dispatch, June 1, 2٥16.

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One New Book for the Preacher

Liz Goodman

Monterey United Church of Christ, Monterey, Massachusetts

IwD. C:،YÉ1,eV ة١It Spooks: Living In Response to an Unheard Call (L’،1١wdCt,١ SC: Shehei’50 Publishing Collective), 2015.

Now that I live back in a small town, I hnd what I miss most about city living is public transportation. Riding Boston’s “T” always made for good people watching and better still, eavesdiopping. Even when I couldn’t catch the larger context of what was being talked about, even when I couldn’t understand the language, it was often compelling, enlightening. That was my experience in reading It Spooks: Living in Response to an Unheard Call. I was eavesdropping on a conversation that was strange, sometimes amusing (if unintentionally so), and ultimately enlightening. It Spooks is, as described on the cover, “a book of visual, poetic and written responses to a paper by John D. Caputo,” who is a philosopher of religion. Recently retired, he spent most of his career at Syracuse university, a deconstructionist a la Jacques Dmrida. AssiujIi, ؛e^ak^s apartiehgion with pleasm e and a sense of urg;ncy.

our best interests, a God that should not be taken as having existence but being of insistence. Actually, to sum up his theology, he would likely say (has indeed said), “God doesn’t exist; God insists.” But the real beneht to be found in It Spooks comes less of his contribution than of the larger conversation it calls foith of the aitists and writers who contributed to this book—a book of various typefaces and graphic tricks, of prints of paintings and ait installations, of song lyrics, letters, essays, and poems. Thiity-hve such people responded, most of them young, white, straight, American, and emerging from evangelical and oithodox PiOtestantism, more than a few once homeschooled and then further educated at Christian colleges and now hnding themselves amidst a world that calls much of that upbringing into question. With no editors mentioned, the piOvenance of the book feels mysterious, but this is doubtless pait of the book’s mission (if a book can be said to have a mission). To deny some central authoritative voice, to dodge the demand that there be a source to decide what’s legitimate, this project means to work outside all authoritative and authorizing frames, to chase down the tnith that is always outpacing US and that, were we ever to catch it, would be evidence against itself as true. The effoit, overall, hits its mark, if unevenly. Some contributors are more “qualibed ” for the task than others, which I say knowing to hold in question the whole notion of “qualihcations”—professors, priests, a stay-at-home mom, a “monkette,” among others, are all called on here. Some are more capable of meeting its high intellectual and aitistic demands, which I also note knowing that this is pait of the point. For more than a few, the effoit is great indeed, involves passionate struggle to come to terms with the self, paiticulaily as it apparently falls shoit of some oithodox ideal—the saved soul, the pure, the good. The young women seem most to feel crashed under this ideal.

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For 11;1)0ا؛1؟ ١’؛1ا1’؛11إا ١)؛ إدا ,10٢ﻻ Garbers, who writes,;AltrrghIdidn’tfe^anyone

and family, I filled journals documenting obsession and tortured attraction…And of those journals, which are from “when I knew everything about the life of faith,” she writes, “They are wrought with self-hatred as I narrate my inability to embody the call to whichI believe 1’m responding….” Anotheryoungwoman, Carrie Borchardt, presents pages thatactuallylooktohave been photocopied from her journal. In one entry, she writes, “When I cannot name the It which bids me back and back again, I feel powerless, unidentified, unnamed. But when I try to box it in with any parameters, I find it bears no weight to me….I reflect on… how for years I stifled my doubts with reverence and how life itself had to strip me of my pride of sureness before I dared ask the Other who It was and what Its shadowy motives are….” But not all entries are so confessional. Indeed, most aren’t. Tad DeLay, in the entry he entitled “Oithodoxy’s Anxiety and Ideas that Fail,” brings a cooler head to the task and evoked in me less sympathy but a dose of appreciation. He claims his chapter is “a piotest against ideas that fail,” and he begins with Caputo’s (elsewhere) challenge, that “the stronger and louder you shout your confessional faith… the more insecure you piOve yourself to be.” More pointedly still to the likes of US preachers, DeLay writes, “If your theology preaches easily, there is always the chance that you are underestimating your hearer’s capacity to hear.” Brian McLaren, whose chapter comes later on, would take it further. As to the question of whether Caputo’s “spooky, haunted message [will] preach in a typical local church,” he claims, “It won’t.” And yet, he writes, “It is exactly what needs to be preached for a growing number of people in a growing number of churches.” It’s with this suspicion that I recommend It Spooks as one new book for the preacher. If you’re like me, then you’re at home in the mainline church, and you’re comfoitable with our liberal oithodoxy, our theology of the CIOSS, our redeemer who loves to save and saves to love, and our concept of sin as social and structural more than as personal failing. So it might be worthwhile to hear these other voices, younger voices who came of age as Christians when the religious right was dominant and fomenting anxieties that I, as a member of both Generation X and the United Church of Christ, can barely relate to. Not so for many Millennials, I regret to learn. What once-church-goers there are among that generation may largely have dropped church in order simply to survive, in order to cope with the world as it actually is. I feel very sorry for the countless people who are trying to fit into an ideology whose strictures are too strict, are cutting off the breath of life. The loss of that is a loss of self, which I think some of the contributions reveal: a couple of writers, searching for themselves in the aftermath of an ideological upbringing, could hardly find anything beyond themselves. There is, I hate to say, a bit of naval-gazing in It Spooks. But it all called to my mind the tradition of foot binding in China. When small feet were an aesthetic ideal, many gills were subjected to having their feet bound, which stunted growth. Past a ceitain point in their development, you could unbind the foot, but it would never grow in. Those gills would never walk light. They would ceilainty never ran free. Is this the case when the human imagination is bound’? Is this the case when faith is constilcted at precisely the time when it’s meant to glow’?

Journal for Preachers

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If so, then orthodox PiOtestantism is guilty of something far worse than irritating self-righteousness. Yet there is an opportunity here, because another thing all the contributors to It Spooks have in common is an apparent desire to be taken seriously, which is something that should delight US preachers. If we hnd any such people in our pews on any given Sunday morning, we need not dumb down the gospel. Indeed, we must not simplify the message in an assumption that most people aren’t listening anyway and those who are can’t handle the raw, strange, wild God that the Bible as a whole testihes to and that history unfolding reveals and chases after. No, instead, we can be frrll-throated in whatever of God has haunted US all week. If it has kept US awake at night, it will surely keep congregants awake on Sunday morning, might even propel them, hopeftrl, curious, into the week ahead.

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One New Book for the Preacher

Frederick w. Schmidt Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Evanston, Illinois

NÜMclÉá, Divine Teaching: An Introduction to Christian Theology (Oxford’. Blackwell Publishing, 2008)

In a Doctor of Ministry class last year, I gave my students a pretty stiff bit of reading to do in systematic theology. One preacher, who held a Masters of Divinity from a prestigious divinity school, observed, “You know this was tough sledding. In fact, I have never been asked to do any reading of this kind.” I showed some surprise (most of which, I admit, was feigned) and said, “Surely you’ve read something like this before.” “No,” she answered, “my systematics class wasn’t all that systematic. We were intioducedto a variety of hermeneutical approaches including black, feminist, and liberation theology-but we weren’t exposed to the larger systematic task.” That pattern, I have discovered, is increasingly common perhaps not everywhere, but in many places. Systematic theology is no longer a conversation about the great, over-arching themes of the theological enterprise, including soteriology, eschatology, ecclesiology, and similar categories. Instead, what we emphasize and often focus on are what I would call discrete, if not competing communities of discourse. It’s little wonder, then, that many clergy, when given the opportunity to read works that point them in the direction of the larger theological task, experience it as a rare, if not completely novel undertaking. I would not want to suggest for a moment that the hermeneutical works to which seminarians are exposed are either lacking in importance or without signihcance in correcting the imbalance that has marked the way we read Scripture. But when the two tasks are so closely identihed with one another that hermeneutics substitutes for systematic theology, clergy are often left in the dark about the larger theological task. As a result, they are also deprived of a roadmap that would help them to navigate the evolution of Christian theology across cultures. It is little wonder, too, that preaching in today’s pulpit often lacks any explicit theological content or that less and less solid catechetical work is done anywhere in the church. Enter the gift that is Mark Macintosh’s Divine Teaching: An Introduction to Christian Theology. Although it is not new (Blackwell published Diving Teaching in 2008), it is likely to be new to the vast majority of preachers who have been at their task for a while. The beauty of this book is that it invites the reader to re-engage the task of theology from an ancient, but now novel vantage point, urging the reader to consider God to be the hrst and best teacher of theology. As such, it challenges the reader to consider systematic theology not as an esoteric enterprise ht for specialists, but as the language we use to describe our journey into God. This approach has the advantage of re-introducing the reader to the passion that also suggests ways the theologj of the church a1’iseSf1Om,؛onnects with, and frames

the spiritual journey, giving the reader some sense of the vital connection between the theological task and the life of faith.

Pentecost 2016

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Unlike some scholars, Macintosh does not try to stipulate in too close a detail what the reader must believe. Wisely, he notes that the theological enterprise requires a pirate’s instincts, commandeering language and analogy to sail into the transcendence and otherness of God that escapes a mere moital’s grasp. But by exploring soteriology, the Trinity, incarnation, creation, revelation, sacrament, and the ecclesial life, Macintosh piOvides the reader with a sense of the directions in which one might move. How what Macintosh offers here might shape the work his readers do in the pulpit will vary, of course. But an engagement with his approach to theology offers rich results. What Macintosh says, for example, about the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the theologian, is true of the Spirit’s work in Pentecost as well:

When you see these characteristics (faith, hope, and love) showing up in anybody… ,what you have going on is not just a little of the divine way of life impressing itself within the life of a human being. More than that you have someone whose life has begun to paitake of Christ’s way of being in the world; what you have is someone whose way of thinking, and acting, and desiring is being inspired by the same Spirit who led Jesus towards the truth of himself and his relationship with one he called Abba.

If a preacher is looking for reading that will rekindle a passion for engagement with the story of Pentecost, what better way to begin than by pulling apait this one paragraph in a way that is accessible to a congregation’? To help people understand that Pentecost is not just “the church’s bilthday,” but the initiation of ajourney into the triune God under the leadership of the Holy Spirit and to see that journey as a piocess of transformation is far more than I have often heard offered. To see the church as that place where ajourney into the same truth and relationship that Jesus enjoyed with the Abba, is also to offer a far more robust ecclesiology than the vast majority of Christians possess. It would take some careful work to unpack Macintosh’s rich, compact paragraphs into an accessible homily. But it is hard to underestimate the value of intiOducing congregations to the “the faith once delivered” – paiticulaily in a day and an age in which churches do so little to acquaint their members with the content of that faith. If you are looking for a companion in that task, you will hnd Mark Macintosh is a valuable guide.

Journa l for Preachers