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  • Thomas Wolfe was no theologian

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    Thomas Wolfe Was no Theologian*

    Scripture: Luke 15:11-24

    P. C.Enniss, Jr.

    Trinity Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, Georgia

    I confess to a certain existential interest in the subject of the sermon this morning, for this is one of those days when the sermon is for me .(I trust every sermon is for me.) But more especially today, the sermon arises out of the preacher’s own personal situation and personal need to hear again the reassuring word of God. It all stems from two Sundays ago. The sermon was over, and during the singing of the last hymn, my eyes were casually scanning the Congregation rather unconsciously. Among you, in their customary places, were Janie and our two sons, David and Steven, both of whom were to leave within the next week for college. In that moment, the instant surge of awareness that both boys were leaving home, that they would not be there the next time we assembled in that place, and the accompanying fear, the dreaded fear, that Thomas Wolfe is right, “You can never go home again.” You know Thomas Wolfe’s quote which has become a sentimental cliche to describe the truth about human experience, “You can’t go home again.” Surely that was true for Wolfe. Once he left his home in western North Carolina to wander all over the world, he never returned to the North Carolina mountains again except in his imagination. The cliche became the title of his last novel and indeed the epitaph of his life. “You can’t go home again,” Wolfe wrote. “You can’t go back to your familyback to your childhood—back to romantic love—back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame— back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing’s sake—back home to the ivory tower—back home to places in the country away from all the strife and conflict of the world—back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for—back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you— back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time—back home to the escapes of time and memory.” And Wolfe is right. We wish he weren’t, but Wolfe is right. Second love is never the same as first love, the second child is never the same as the first child, the second birth never so pointed as the first. Or with faith, the second, longer and more profound look into the verities of the faith (though infinitely more satisfying ultimately) can never recapture the inner exhilaration ofthat first moment when the reality of God dawned. And of course what is true for us privately is true for us collectively. History repeats itself to be sure, but never in identical chapters. The world will never be again tomorrow what it was yesterday, despite all of our yearnings for the good old days. We can never return to life as it was before the atomic bomb or before the pill or the airplane or the computer. Life will never be the same again. Wolfe is right…but thank God Thomas Wolfe is no theologian. Long before Thomas Wolfe wrote about his own wonderings and wanderings, another told a tale—not nearly so elaborate nor pretentious a story, but a story that twenty centuries later still penetrates to the very heart of every human being who hears it. It is,of course, the story you heard retold for the thousandth time a few moments ago—Jesus’ enduring epic of the young man who asked for his inheritance early,

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    quickly converted it into cash and ran away, as far as his money would take him, squandered it in the far country, his entire inheritance in what the writer called “riotous living.” Only when his money ran out and his friends ran out, and there was no place else for him to run, he “came to his senses,” so the story goes, and he said to himself, “I will arise and go to my father, and he arose and came to his father, but while he was yet at a distance, his father saw him and had compassion and ran and embraced him and kissed him. It was Jesus’s way of saying, “You can go home again.” Thomas Wolfe said you can’t, and in one sense he is right, because Wolfe was writing out of the human experience, of the human condition, human emotions and human yearnings . That is what makes Wolfe the novelist he is—his capacity to take those common human emotions (like homesickness) and translate that into a story that any one of us can read and declare, “That is me. I know that one. I too have tried to go back and found I cannot.” But thank God Thomas Wolfe is no theologian. Wolfe is writing of men and women, their homesickness and their despair. Jesus’ story is about God, about God who waits and watches like a father with arms widespread…and always a bottle of champagne stuck away in the basement just in case the child comes home when the stores are closed. Thomas Wolfe says, “You can’t go home again.” Jesus says, “You can come home again…any time.” The stories, however, are not contradictory. Wolfe simply writes of what he feels, what everyone feels, the human ache for home, the place where we belong. Consequently, it comes as no surprise that the theme of so many Southern stories (Gone With the Wind, McCullough’s Member of the Wedding, Willie Morris’s North Toward Home, Warren’s A Place To Come To, and of course, Alex Haley’s Roots), the pervading theme of these Southern writers, is home, a place, that Spot one can point to and know “I belong.” Paul Tournier takes the title of one of his books, A Place For You, from an interview he had with a young patient. The problem appeared to be the young man’s inability to settle down, to focus on anything. He tested brilliantly, but he couldn’t stick with anything. Nothing held his interest, and so he had spent his first adult years just wandering. In therapy, he related how he had tried the church, but without ever finding “his place” there. He tried for a while to identify with an existentialist group of intellectuals, and that was not satisfying. At one point he turned to militant communism, at another to a street gang. Everywhere he turned, the experience was the same…always the feeling he did not belong. On rare occasions, he told the therapist, in some small smoky bar, he had felt himself “in.” But the feeling was only a fleeting impression. Then in a sort of self-diagnosis, he said, “Basically I think I am always looking for a place… for some place to be.” It is the ultimate ache, isn’t it? — the need to belong and the fear that we don’t, or if we ever did, the dreaded fear that we can never regain the feeling again. Robert Penn Warren appropriates this personal fear into sociological prophecy in his novel about Jed Tewksbury, a contemporary uprooted and alienated prodigal who wanders from job to job, from wife to wife, from broken dream to broken dream. At one point Jed has a conversation with his friend, Stephen, in which Jed speaks nostalgically of his home town in Alabama: “I told him how, hating the South, I had fled it, and ever afterwards blamed my solitude on that fact. I had fled, but had found nowhere to flee to.” Stephen listened intently, then in turn said, “As for me, I have no country that I recognize as my own, and I am trying to learn to be happy in that condition.” Then

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    he began to speak of the countryless world to come. “We are merely feeling the first pangs of modernity — the death of the self which has become placeless. We are to become enormously efficient and emotionless mechanisms that will know how to breed even more efficient and emotionless mechanisms,” he predicts. We hope the prophecy is wrong, even though the evidence leaves us unconvinced. At least Warren has identified for us the problem, the human need for a place (an emotional place where one feels at home, where regardless of one’s geography or one’s history, one feels secure and comfortable and at home.) So it is crucial that periodically we preach on the prodigal son. Like the Easter story and the Christmas story, it bears repeating, for the story of the prodigal is the gospel in capsule. It is all there: our rebellion and God’s grace, our rebellion and God’s welcome. Is anyone so dense as not to identify with the story? You do know, don’t you, that the story was never told only for the debaucherers, drunkards, and whoremongers. The story is, for any who has ever wandered even afew feet from home and wondered about the kind of welcome that would await should they ever try to go home again. The story is for anyone who has ever wasted his substance (time, energy, intellect, money) in pursuit of private profit and is now having second thoughts about such waste. The story is for anyone, any institution, church, or nation which has set its course in one direction and wants now to change but wonders if that is possible. The story is for anyone who has ever breathed the air of the far country (which is only another name for that place where one feels separation from God). To be sure, the far country may be a land of riotous living and drunken debauchery, but it may also be the land of emotional apathy, the land of intellectual atrophy (a mind once open and curious which is now drawn closed). It may also be the land of supreme comfort and luxury where our successes so isolate us from the world that God (who is always found with the dispossessed) is rarely seen. The far country may be a place of genuine doubt …or on the other hand, the far country may even appear to be a very religious place, all the appearance of piety and personal orthodoxy, but oblivious to the weightier matters of the law… justice, mercy, and faith. The far country is any place (any moment) where the experience is separation from God. Well, we are all wanderers, are we not? I dare say there is not one of us here (even the more saintly among us) who has not tasted the fruit of the far country, for to be human is to know separation. Paul Tillich says, “Existence is separation.” In fact, Tillich says separation is a better word than sin to describe our condition, and he is probably right. For to admit we are sinners doesn’t really carry much of an emotional load, now does it? Most of us can own up to that rather easily, if not glibly, but to confess we are separated from ourselves (“The good that I would, I do not; the evil I would not, that I do.”) or separated from one another (Friends who used to mean much to one another now hardly speak any more.) or separation from God. (“I don’t go to church much any more…I find it difficult to pray any more…I really don’t know what I believe any more.) Separation is a more descriptive word. Tillich is profoundly right when he says, “Before sin is an act, it is an estate,” a condition. It is that ache inside which is but a symptom of our separation, our estrangement from something to which we know we belong. In Steinbeck’s East of Eden, one of the characters confesses to this universal condition when he says, “We all live East of Eden.” (We have all been expelled from the garden, destined to an eternal homesickness.) And so it is for our sakes Jesus tells

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    the story, not to tell us anything we do not already know about ourselves, that we are sinners, separated and homesick. We know that. No, the story is to tell us something about God. It is the confirmation that we can go home again. That no far country is too far, no wanderer unwelcome. Theologically, it is the story of God ‘ s grace, for remember, in the story the father owed the lad nothing more. The inheritance had been paid, the books closed, justice done. The boy had no more claim. That is just the power of the story, because the prodigal had absolutely nothing coming to him. He deserved nothing, was due nothing, expected nothing. And just at that moment, the lights went on, the music began to play, and the father shouted, “Welcome home.” But of course that is the character of God’s grace. It always comes when one least deserves it and least expects it. Listen to the way Paul Tillich writes of this unpredictable quality of grace:

    It does not happen if we try to force it upon ourselves…just as it shall not happen so long as we think in our self-complacency, that we have no need of it. Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and reluctance. It strikes us when we walk through the valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual because we have violated another life—a life which we loved—or from which we were estranged. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed for perfection of life does not appear—when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades—when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying, “You are accepted.” You are acceptedaccepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now, perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now, perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything and do not perform anything and do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted. If that happens to us, we experience grace.

    Well, I want to close now with a very old and well-worn preacher story. I suppose it has been told in every pulpit across the land for the past fifty years, but I tell it again not because it says anything new, but because it says something very old and very necessary. The version I remember has it that a Methodist minister was on the way to attend a conference. He was on the train, riding in the coach with only a few other passengers on board. But there was a boy who looked to be in his late teens who attracted the attention of the few passengers. The boy was fidgety and restless. He would sit in one seat for a while, then move down the car to another. The minister watched the boy for a long while and then moved over to the seat beside him saying, “What’s troubling you, Son? Worried about something? Maybe I can help. I’m a minister …and if you feel like telling me, I’ll be glad to listen.” The boy seemed glad. “Sure,” he said. “I don’t mind telling you. Do you know the little town named Springvale ?” (The minister said he had heard of it.) “Well, it’s the next stop,” said the boy. “We’ll be there in about fifteen minutes. That’s my home; I used to live there. My

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    father and mother still live there, just a mile on this side of town. Three years ago, I had a quarrel with my father. I said, “You’ll never see me again.” I ran away from home. Three years I’ve been gone. Sometimes I wrote my mother, but of course she could not write me back. I wrote her last week and told her I would be on this train passing through. I told her I would like to come home just once. I asked her if it would be all right for me to stop, to hang something white outside the house so that I would know it was all right with Dad. I knew she would do it, but I had to know how Dad felt.” The boy looked out the window. Then he said to the minister, “Look, Sir. My house is just around the bend on the other side of the hill. Will you look for me? See if there’s something white. I can’t look if there isn’t something white. Will you look for me?” The train lurched a bit as it made the slow curve, but the minister kept his eye on the round of the hill. Then forgetting all of his clerical dignity, he shouted out, “Look, Son, look!” There stood a little farmhouse under the trees, but you could hardly see the house for white. It seems that the father and mother had taken every bed sheet, bedspread, table cloth, pillow case, even handkerchief, and hung them out on the clothesline, the fence, and the trees. The entire hillside was white. The story has it that the boy looked and was so excited that he was off the train almost before it stopped at the station. And the last the minister saw, he was running as fast as he could up the hill toward the house with the white sheets flapping in the wind. Now I tell that story because it is true. Oh, I question that it ever happened. Nonetheless, it is true (like the story of the Prodigal Son is true). It is a story about ourselves. We are all prodigals in our own way. But that is not why the story is so important. We know that. Thomas Wolfe is right, of course. No, the story is important because of what it says about God, who always waits with arms widespread with a welcome on his lips. And if we know that too, well, it bears repeating. But praise God, Thomas Wolfe was no theologian. We can come home again.

  • Forgiveness: grace, not work

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    Forgiveness: Grace, not Work

    Pamela Cooper-White

    Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia

    On the popular web site “WikiHow” (an online cousin of Wikipedia that publishes brief “how-to’s” on virtually everything from washing a dog to running for political office), an article recently appeared entitled “How to Forgive.” It begins,

    One of the hardest, thorniest and most difficult things we humans are ever called upon to do is to respond to evil with kindness, and to forgive the unforgivable. We love to read stories about people who’ve responded to hatred with love, but when that very thing is demanded of us personally, our default seems to be anger, angst, depression, righteousness, hatred, etc. Yet study after study shows that one of the keys to longevity and good health is to develop a habit of gratitude and let go of past hurts. Want to live a long, happy life? Forgive the unforgivable. It really is the kindest thing you can do for yourself.1

    The tone of this essay is one of self-help, even self-improvement, like a Nike sneaker commercial: “Just do it!” (And you’ll feel better when you do.) And yet, there is good reason to believe that this popular emotional view of forgiveness is not only unhelpful, but also it is poor psychology, and from a Christian point of view, poor theology as well. This assertion may seem quite surprising, since forgiveness is a central theme in Christian scripture and tradition, and there is a strong strand of Christian thought that seems to advocate forgiveness as a hallmark of Christian piety. From the Lord’s Prayer, which (in various English translations) includes “forgive us our debts/trespasses/sins as we forgive our debtors/those who trespass/sin against us,” to the story of Jesus insisting that the disciple forgive “not seven times, but seventy times seven,” (Matt. 18:18-19) emotional forgiveness is often understood even as a command of Jesus himself. The runaway Christian bestseller, The Shack, offers a good example of how forgiveness is viewed as central to spiritual life and even personal healing. The protagonist, Mack, is mysteriously summoned to a secluded shack where years before his youngest daughter Missy was murdered. The Trinity, in the form of a “large beaming African-American woman,” a “Middle Eastern” man “dressed like a laborer ,” and a strangely translucent, “small, distinctively Asian woman” who collects tears in a crystal bottle, meet Mack at the site.2 They spend time with him, giving him lessons and helping him to grieve. In a culminating lesson, Papa takes Mack to a clearing and teaches him about forgiveness:

    [Papa says,] “You already know what I want, don’t you?” “I’m afraid I do,” Mack mumbled, feeling emotions rising as they seeped out of a locked room in his heart. “Son, you need to speak it, to name it.” Now there was no holding back as hot tears poured down his face and

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    between sobs Mack began to confess. “Papa,” he cried, “how can I ever forgive that son of a bitch who killed my Missy. If he were here today, I don’t know what I would do. I know it isn’t right, but I want him to hurt like he hurt me.. .if I can’t get justice, I still want revenge.” Papa simply let the torrent rush out of Mack, waiting for the wave to pass. “Mack, for you to forgive this man is for you to release him to me and allow me to redeem him.” “Redeem him?” Again Mack felt the fire of anger and hurt, “I don’t want you to redeem him! I want you to hurt him, to punish him, to put him in hell…” His voice trailed off. Papa waited patiently for the emotions to ease. “I’m stuck, Papa. I just can’t forget what he did, can I?” Mack implored. “Forgiveness is not about forgetting, Mack. It is about letting go of another person’s throat.” (224)

    The dialogue continues, as Papa clarifies that Mack’s forgiveness does not mean that “everything is okay,” nor does he have to have a relationship with his daughter’s killer, nor does he have to forget what he did (225-6). Forgiveness does not excuse the man’s crime (226). But Papa makes it clear that it is Mack’s spiritual task, for his own wellbeing, to forgive the man:

    “I don’t think I can do this,” Mack answered softly. “I want you to. Forgiveness is first for you, the forgiver,” answered Papa, “to release you from something that will eat you alive, that will destroy your joy and your ability to love fully and openly. Do you think this man cares about the pain and torment you have gone through? Don’t you want to cut that off? And in doing so, you’ll release him from a burden that he carries whether he knows it or not—acknowledges it or not. When you choose to forgive another, you love him well.” “I do not love him.” “Not today, you don’t. But I do, Mack, not for what he’s become, but for the broken child that has been twisted by his pain. I want to help you take on that nature that finds more power in love and forgiveness than hate.” (225)

    After further dialogue, Mack is finally convinced and asks how to go about this task of forgiveness. Papa replies, “Just say it out loud. There is power in what my children declare.” And Mack does so, at first in a whisper, and then “with increasing conviction” (227). He tells him he is a joy, that he may have to declare this forgiveness “a hundred times the first day and the second day,” but that eventually his forgiveness will be complete, and God’s love “will burn from [the murderer’s] life every vestige of corruption.” Mack groans, but “in his heart he knew that it was the truth” (227). What is wrong with this picture, from a pastoral and theological perspective? Many faithful Christians, including many theologians, would say that it is both psychologically and theologically sound.3 The theme of forgiveness as a cardinal virtue (however seemingly unattainable) is rampant in popular culture. Images of Amish girls, walking to the schoolhouse where their classmates were gunned down in Nickel

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    Mines, Pennsylvania, and accounts of their community ‘ s prayers for forgiveness of the gunman, held a strong fascination for weeks in the public media. People were riveted by media portrayals of the Amish as “Christ-like.”4 However, such portrayals even of the Amish, for whom forgiveness is a central spiritual discipline, neglected the more subtle and complex emotional nuances of Amish practice.5

    Forgiveness Is not a Work The portrayal of forgiveness in The Shack is less flat-footed than the “Wiki-How” article cited above. Author William Young incorporates the understandings that forgiveness does not erase or excuse wrongdoing and that forgiveness is a process, not a one-time action. The primary problem with all such emotional depictions of forgiveness , however, is that they define forgiveness as a human activity—in theological terms, as a work. Forgiveness becomes something we do, like exercise or healthy eating, in order to live a better life. In numerous popular accounts, forgiveness is increasingly being touted as a form of corrosion-prevention: “Unforgiveness is NOT normal or acceptable. It is a dysfunction, a sin. Like corrosive acid, it eats away at the soul and body of the possessor.”6 In this way, the public interest in forgiveness in North America begins to be one more tool in the distinctively self-absorbed U.S. culture of self-actualization and the pursuit of happiness. Such depictions of forgiveness are perhaps not coincidental, coming at a time when self-improvement is a trademark of the good life, and advertisements for the good life have become all the more shrill in the aftermath of September 11, the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the current economic crisis. Notably , the primary motivation expressed in these calls for forgiveness is to release inner bitterness, pain, and anger in order to heal from one’s wounds and feel better. From another popular website, About.com’s page on depression, we read:

    Forgiveness. It’s such a hard thing to do, but it can be so liberating to the soul. What makes it difficult for most of us to do is the way we define it. We think of forgiveness as meaning that we should say all is forgotten and things will go back to what they were. This Biblical definition of forgiveness is very hard for most of us to swallow. How can you forget the unforgettable? How can you forgive the unforgivable? To enjoy the benefits of forgiveness, however, we needn’t go that far. All that’s really required is that we make the decision to move forward, to let go of the old hurts. We don’t have to condone what’s been done. What’s wrong is still wrong. We don’t have to invite the person back into our lives or even be friendly with them. What we do have to do is allow ourselves to release all the negative emotions associated with that person. As long as we hold onto the pain, we are choosing to allow that person’s past actions to continue to hurt us. We can also choose to stop letting them hurt us. That’s a definition of forgiveness that’s more doable for those of us who are less than saintly.7

    The article continues with “an exercise you can do right now to let go of pain and regain your life”—in other words, salvation. How are such calls for forgiving one’s way to healing and salvation likely to be heard by actual victims of violence, betrayal, and injustice? Any demand to forgive

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    may be understood by the wounded individual as an impossible burden that adds insult—or guilt—to injury. Such advice all too often tends to heap new feelings of guilt and inadequacy on a person who makes an effort to forgive, using such guidelines, and feels that he or she has failed. The most healing word we can offer a survivor of abuse or injury —from a Christian perspective—is this: th&tforgiveness is not a human work. The author of the About.com quotation has in fact misread and too quickly dismissed the Bible. A closer examination of biblical writings about forgiveness can help us to come to a better understanding of forgiveness—one that does not force forgiveness on the survivors of injury and violence.8

    What the Bible Really Says The word most often used in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ teachings on forgiveness is the verb aphimi, which means “I send away, or let off,” in the sense of forgiving a loan. This is the word for forgiveness used, for example, in Matt. 18:2135 and in the Lord’s Prayer (in both Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels). In Matt. 6:12, the verse literally means “release us from our debts (opheilmata) as we also have released those who are indebted to us (our debtors—opheiltai). We no longer hold them in obligation to us. This is also the sense of the most commandment-like passage about forgiveness in the Gospels, Mark 11:25 : “Release whatever you may have down on someone, in order that your father in heaven may release your trespasses.” There is nothing inherently emotional or psychological about this sense of the word. It is simply a cancelling of a balance due. Furthermore, in Mark 11:25, Jesus is more likely arguing against taking revenge than he is arguing for feeling forgiving. The Gospels and the Epistles both advocate turning away from active vengeance (e.g., Matt. 5:38; Rom. 12:17-21). However, refraining from personal retribution does not equate to feeling emotionally warm toward someone who has done us harm. An examination of the parallel text of the Lord’s Prayer in Luke further suggests that the emphasis in this passage is on the quality of God’s forgiveness, and not on our effort to forgive. In Luke’s version, the forgiveness of sins rather than debts is made explicit: “forgive us our sins” (hamartia)—literally, when we have missed the mark. But in Luke 11:4, God and human beings do not do exactly the same thing! The parallelism in the verse is not “as we forgive the sins of others,” but again, as in Matthew, as we forgive our debtors (those who owe us—opheilonti). The Lucan version is not, in fact, a parallelism as in most English translations, but an analogy. In other words, we pray for God to release us from our wrongdoings in the manner in which we humans release our debtors. This is not the same thing as saying that we should forgive sinners as God forgives, and it is certainly not a legal contract by which God will only forgive us if we first forgive others. It is God in these texts who forgives sins, not human beings. In this sense, The Shack almost gets it right—Papa tells Mack that Missy had already forgiven her murderer. Mack asks, “How could she?” Papa replies, “Because of my presence in her. That’s the only way true forgiveness is ever possible.”9 The problem, of course, is that it is still framed as something the person him- or herself finally does, although s/he does it by God’s help. This sense of the Greek carries forward the understanding of forgiveness found in the Hebrew Bible. The word kaphar, to cover, is used by the ancient Hebrew writers to describe how God “blots out” sins. This word is never used in relation to human

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    beings. It is only God who forgives in such a way. Note also that the English translation, “blots,” implies an erasure, whereas a “covering” literally suggests a healing-over, but does not preclude a scar of remembrance.10

    Forgiveness as a Gift of Grace The word for forgiveness found more often in the Epistles, charizomai, (e.g., 2 Cor. 2:7,10; 12:13; Eph. 4:31-32; Col. 2:13; 3:13) literally means to be gracious. Paul often exhorts the members of his churches to show forbearance, compassion, and kindness toward one another, and to “forgive each other as the Lord has forgiven you” (Col. 3:13; also echoed in Eph. 4:31-32). But this verb charizomai is too often misunderstood, again, as an effort on the part of the person. To be gracious is to be graced. It is a charisma, a gift of the Holy Spirit. It enables a person to let go of the person who wounded him/her, and perhaps, in time, to be less preoccupied with both the perpetrator and the wound. Moreover, as New Testament scholar Krister Stendahl pointed out, the modern church’s emphasis on sin and forgiveness is not a correct interpretation of Paul.11 From a post-Freudian perspective, we tend to psychologize biblical texts in ways that were unknown in the ancient world. Therefore, to assign a modern emotional understanding to the texts about forgiveness is anachronistic and probably says more about our preoccupation with guilt and anxiety than the Bible actually says about God, Christ, or the early Christian community. As I have written previously,12 at certain times, for some people, when pain has been worked through and justice has in some sense been achieved, this gift simply descends. There may be a sense of anger, inner conflict, doubt, fear, or hatred being lifted away. The experience of violation is not erased or forgotten, and anger and fear may still be present in very appropriate ways. But the experience no longer has power over the person in the same way as it did before. If aphimi is the word for release, then in this charism of forgiveness from God, it is we who are released—not by our own doing, but by God’s action in us and for us. At times, this may come as a sense of realization or discovery after the fact.13 There is a new lightness, a new ability to move on emotionally, a “peace that passes all understanding.” In another popular novel, The Kite Runner, the protagonist Amir discovers that without any conscious effort or intention on his part, he had finally experienced forgiveness toward his father Baba for secretly preferring his illegitimate half-brother:

    Your father was a man torn between two halves, Rahim Khan had said in his letter. I had been the entitled half, the society-approved, legitimate half, the unwitting embodiment of Baba’s guilt. I looked at Hassan, showing those two missing front teeth, sunlight slanting on his face. Baba’s other half. The unentitled, unprivileged half. The half who had inherited what had been pure and noble in Baba. The half that, maybe in the most secret recesses of his heart, Baba had thought of as his true son. I slipped the picture back where I found it. Then I realized something: That last thought had brought no sting with it….I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.14 There is no English word that adequately expresses this sense of forgiveness as

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    something we receive rather than something we do. Rather than the transitive verb “to forgive him/her,” which implies active effort, we need a word like “to be forgiven of him/her,” which would convey the sense of having been released from pain and bitterness. This grace does not (and perhaps need not) come to everyone. It is not a matter of magic that we can invoke or a prize we can earn. There are no “should’s” in any of this, nor should we hold this in front of survivors of violence as a goal at the end of an emotional or therapeutic process. Perhaps the best pastoral counsel we can give to someone who may be feeling pressure (either internal or external) to forgive an offender is this: Sometimes people may have a feeling of having forgiven another person as a letting go and moving on, but do not blame yourself if you are not “there” in your own emotional life. Forgiveness is a gift of grace, and it may be given to you in God’s own good time. In the meantime, don’t worry, and don’t be preoccupied with something that is God’s job to do, not yours.

    Reconciliation as Communal A related set of words in the New Testament, translated as “reconciliation” (apokatallasso, katallasso, and diallattomai), literally means “thoroughgoing change” or “transformation.” I have argued in my writings on the church’s response to victims and survivors of violence that this term represents a turn from insistence upon individual survivors forgiving their perpetrators toward an emphasis on communal reconciliation. The root words for “reconciliation” are revealing—katallasso comes from allasso, to exchange, which in turn comes from the root word alios, meaning other.15 Violence is, at its heart, always a result of an objectification, an “othering”— turning a “Thou” into an “It.”16 And such objectification can always be found operating not only at the level of individual relationships, but in the wider context of social injustice and unequal power, which serves in turn to undergird, goad, and/or reinforce individual acts of harm and violation. Re-conciliation is therefore a corporate transformation—a turning toward those who have been “othered,” a restoring of the concilium, the whole society.17 Again, as in Paul ‘ s second letter to the Corinthians (2 Cor. 5:18-19), reconciliation is God’s work through Christ, and we are the ambassadors or messengers ofthat reconciliation. This reconciliation, or transformation, is not about individuals “making nice,” or even about individuals’ coming back into personal relationships at all. Rather, it is the promised unity and peace between whole groups of people, represented in Paul as Jews and Greeks, slaves and free, male and female (Gal. 3:28; cf., the “reconciliation” between circumcised and uncircumcised peoples brought about in Christ, Eph. 2:1416 ), and between humanity and God (Rom. 5:10, Col. 1:19-23). Its sign would not be the oppressed forgiving their oppressors, but rather the hearts of the oppressors recognizing the full dignity and humanity of those who had objectified, and entering into true repentance, true metanoia.

    Conclusion All theology, but especially pastoral theology which is concerned with care for suffering, must begin with human beings, and in particular, the pain and brokenness of the human condition. Pastoral theology takes human suffering as its starting place—in Jürgen Moltmann’s words, “the open wound of life in this world.”18 From the perspective of those who have been victimized, whether the injury has been

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    emotional, physical, or sexual, classic and popular definitions of forgiveness as a spiritual work do not facilitate the healing that well-meaning Christians intend. Furthermore, when we urge someone else to forgive, we may be unconsciously wishing simply to avoid staying with them in their suffering and anger. As the Rev. Marie Fortune, longtime advocate for survivors of sexual and domestic violence, has put it, “We ask others to forgive and forget, and what we really mean is that we want them to forgive so we can forget.”19 When we shift our perspective in doing theology from one of power and privilege to the perspective of the “sinned-against,”20 we are challenged to re-think simplistic notions of forgiveness as a work. If forgiveness is God’s job to do, and a gift of grace that we may receive but not forcefully achieve by our own effort, we no longer need to push forgiveness onto others or ourselves ! We may or may not ever feel as though we have forgiven those who have harmed us, but we can stop punishing ourselves and others for legitimate negative feelings of hurt, anger, humiliation, and grief. As we allow our feelings to flow through us, without self-recrimination or judgment, we may find that we have new freedom, because we are no longer using our energy to suppress emotions that we thought were un-Christian. In fact, the so-called “negative” emotions of hurt and anger can be channeled into acts of compassion for others who have been wounded and collaborative actions with other Christians for constructive social change. Finally, as we re-shift our attention away from forgiveness as the central theme of our theology, we can be freed to engage in prophetic witness to the already-not yet reconciliation that God is calling forth from all creation and an end to violence in all its forms.

    Notes

    1 http://www.wikihow.com/Forgive. 2 William P. Young, The Shack (Newbury Park, CA: Windblown Media, 2007). The romanticization of racial stereotypes in this image is also highly problematic. See my review of The Shack in The Journal of Pastoral Theology, forthcoming. 3 For example, see Eugene Peterson’s book endorsement: “This book has the potential to do for our generation what John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress did for his. It’s that good!” The Shack, front cover. 4 E.g., “Amish Forgiveness Is Christ-like,” MSNBC, available online at http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=qjJt3wKXdRc. Reporter Ann Curry stated on Oct. 4,2006, that “the Amish here are quick to forgive, burying their anger even before they bury their children, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/ 15134030/ 5 Dr. Steven Holt, a scholar of Amish life, states, “The Amish are quite aware that forgiveness is — the emotional side of forgiveness is aprocess. It’s a difficult process. It’s something that certainly wasn’tover in five or 10 days after the shooting. PBS Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, “Perspectives: Amish Forgiveness,” Sept. 21,2007, available online at http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/weekl 103/ perspectives .html. 6 Junior DeSouza, “Forgiveness,” available online at http://www.openheaven.com/forums/ forum_posts .asp?PN= 1 &TID=9616 7 Nancy Schimelpfening, “The Healing Power of Forgiveness,” July 25,2008, available online at http:/ /depression.about.com/od/copingskills/a/forgiveness.htm. 8 The following section summarizes a more detailed exegesis of forgiveness in the Bible in Pamela Cooper-White, “Conclusion: The Call to Reconciliation,” The Cry of Tamar: Violence against Women and the Church’s Response (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), pp. 253-62. 9 Young, The Shack, 226. 10 contra Miroslav Volf, who has proposed an eschatological vision of a restoration of the world in which even the memory of evil is erased and forgotten, in Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), p. 136; see also Volf, The

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    End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), and Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006). My view is more like pastoral theologian James Emerson’s on this point, The Dynamics of Forgiveness (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1964). 11 Krister Stendahl, Paul among Jews and Gentiles (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976), 85,95, also cited in John Patton, Is Human Forgiveness Possible? A Pastoral Care Perspective (Nashville: Abingdon, 1985), 89,127-30; and lectures at Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, MA, 1982. 12 Cooper-White, The Cry of Tamar, pp. 260-61. 13 Cf., Patton, “The Discovery of Human Forgiveness,” in Is Human Forgiveness Possible? pp. 117-45. This is the corollary to the discovery that one has been forgiven, described in Emerson as “realized forgiveness” in Dynamics of Forgiveness, 131-32. 14 Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner (New York: Riverhead Books/Penguin, 2003), p. 359. 15 John W. de Gruchy uses this etymology in Reconciliation: Restoring Justice (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002). While de Gruchy draws different conclusions, based on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he also emphasizes communal reconciliation. 16 Martin Buber, / and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Free Press, 1971). 17 Cooper-White, Cry of Tamar,p. 262. This has resonance with Emerson’s emphasis on the community context of forgiveness in Dynamics of Forgiveness, p. 180. For further discussion of relationality and power, particularly power-in-community, see also pp. 28-42. 18 Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), p. 49. 19 Video “Broken Vows: Religious Perspectives on Domestic Violence,” Seattle: Faith Trust Institute, available through http://www.faithtrustinstitute.org/index.php?p=Broken_Vows&s=l 12. 20 Andrew Sung Park and Susan Nelson, eds., The Other Side of Sin: Woundednessfrom the Perspective of the Sinned-Against (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001); see also Park, From Hurt to Healing: A Theology of the Wounded (Nashville: Abingdon, 2004).

  • Elisha as the original Pentecost guy: ten theses

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    Elisha as the Original Pentecost Guy: Ten Theses

    Walter Brueggemann

    Cincinnati, Ohio

    The Elisha narrative in 2 Kings 2-9,13 constitutes a quite distinct literary corpus in the Book of Kings .* In terms of content and placement, it is a corpus of literature that suggests great intentionality on the part of the traditionists in celebrating this odd character right in the midst of jaded royal power. 1. Elisha is the original “Pentecost guy” who anticipates the rush of the spirit upon Jesus and who models the conduct of the apostolic community in the Book of Acts. Indeed, Elisha may be the first “apostle,” the one sent. He is infused by the spirit of God who will lead and guide him into courageous transformative acts in a society that had no reason to expect such transformations. Elisha’s narrative introduction as a carrier of the spirit is accomplished in three parts. First, he is presented as a disciple of Elijah in 1 Kings 19:19-21. At the very outset he has Elijah’s mantle thrown over him, a symbol (or totem) of power and authority. He is reluctant to leave his old life with family and work, but Elijah tersely permits him to get his life in order. And then he “follows,” enlisting in a dangerous enterprise out beyond all previous connections. Second, in the scene concerning Elijah’s “ascent,” Elisha is in deep grief over the loss of Elijah and prays “for a double portion of your spirit” (2 Kgs 2:9-12). It is telling that his bid is not for the spirit of God, but for the spirit of Elijah. He is profoundly aware of continuity (apostolic succession?) and presents himself as heir to Elijah’s power and authority. Third, after the “departure” of Elijah, Elisha recovers the mantle of power and authority and dramatically “parts the waters” of the Jordan River (2 Kgs 2:13-14). The reader is invited to relate the Jordan waters to the waters of the exodus, as has already been done in Joshua 4:23; it is as though Elisha is prepared to lead a new exodus, this one to depart the hopeless royal enterprise of Israel. He will replicate the work of Moses. His companions are able to discern, from this dramatic act, that “the spirit of Elijah rests on Elisha.” In three quick paragraphs Elisha is identified as the carrier of the transformative spirit of Elijah. He—with this undomesticated power—is on the loose. He is, moreover , on the loose in the regime of Ahab and Jezebel who had compromised Yahwism, who had no appreciation for Torah mandates, and who practiced an oppressive politics and an exploitative economics. The narrative walks us into a situation where the spirit of emancipator transformation is at deep odds with the order of the day. 2. The emancipatory intent of the Elisha narrative is to witness to the transformative power of God that is loosed in the world through this human agent. The narrative—not unlike the Synoptic accounts of Jesus—offers an inventory of transformative actions that leave witnesses “amazed,” awed by the inescapable awareness that the force of the spirit is back in play against the closed settlements of society: Elisha transforms polluted water into “wholesome water” (2:19-21). Elisha rescues a poor widow and her son from rapacious creditors by an act of neighborly abundance (4:1-4).

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    Elisha gives a son to the Shunammite woman and then raises him from the dead (4-36). Elisha transforms poisonous food into edible food (4:38-41). Elisha feeds 100 people from a small food supply (4:42-44). Elisha heals a Syrian general of leprosy (5:1-27; see Luke 4:27). Elisha recovers an axe head from a swamp by causing iron to float (6:1-7). Elisha transforms a Syrian military threat into a great feast of peacemaking (6:823 ). Elisha eases a famine in Israel by the work of the wind (6:24-7:20; note 6:6). Elisha causes a widow to receive back her forfeited property (8:l-6).2 Elisha anoints a new Israelite king, thus initiating a dramatic social revolution in Israel (9:1-16). The list of transformative deeds is breathtaking when it is recited in sum. Remarkably , Israel’s narrative exhibits no curiosity about these extraordinary events, nor does it offer any explanation. It is content to tell! The narrative permits the reader to discern, from episode to episode, that something beyond conventional human management is underway in this collection of “miracles.”3 3. The deconstructive intention of the Elisha narrative is to expose monarchs in Israel as impotent and irrelevant to the promissory history of God. The Elisha narratives do not happen in a vacuum, but are situated in a larger body of texts entitled “Kings.” The presumptive subject of the narrative of “Kings” concerns the kings who rule in Samaria and Jerusalem. The Elisha narrative, moreover, is framed in 2 Kings 1:17-18 by a report of the death of Ahaziah (son of Ahab) and the ascent to the throne of Jehoram (another son of Ahab). At the conclusion of the narrative of Elisha, it is framed by a report of the ignoble death of Jezebel (2 Kgs 9:30-37). It is reported that after dinner Jehu, the one dispatched by Elisha to eliminate that dynasty, found nothing left of the rejected queen except “the skull and the feet and the palms of her hands” (v. 36), a residue of failure that signaled, says the narrative, that “This is the word of the Lord.” The royal figures in chapters 1 and 9 serve to frame the Elisha narrative, but neither Jehoram nor Jezebel figures significantly in the action that is reported. Inside the narrative, moreover, kings play only a small role and are regularly reduced to irrelevance. • In the narrative of Naaman, the Syrian general, the Israelite king responds in dismay and anger to the request for healing, for he is shown to have no healing capacity. Indeed, he himself recognizes as much: “When the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his clothes and said, ‘Am I God, to give death or life, that this man sends word to me to cure a man of his leprosy? Just look and see how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me’” (2 Kgs 5:7). The narrative must run on quickly to Elisha. • In the narrative concerning the war with Syria, the king in Samaria is presented as “perturbed” at the outset, seeking to arrest Elisha (2 Kgs 6:11-12). Absent from the crucial action of the narrative, the king reappears at the end, wanting permission to kill his Syrian adversary (6:21). He is rebuked by the prophet who reminds the king that this is his show, and the king has no role to play. • In the narrative of famine, the desperate woman pleads with the king to provide food: “Help, my Lord king” (6:26). But the king, yet again, abdicates responsibility and confesses that he has no capacity to make a difference: In 2 Kgs 6:27, “he said, ‘No! Let the Lord help you. How can I help you? From the threshing floor or from the

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    wine press?’” As in 5:7-8, so in 6:31 the narrative must promptly refocus on Elisha, the real agent in this account. • In the narrative of the woman who had forfeited her property, the king is conferring with Elisha’s aide and seems to act in response to the woman according to social passions of Elisha (8:4-6). In this case the king does act on his own, but the context suggests that even in this royal act, the horizon of the prophet is operative. The king is peculiarly interested in the “great things” of Elisha that critically break open a closed society. • In the culminating event of revolution, the prophet has the capacity to anoint new kings and create new political possibilities before which incumbent kings are powerless (9:4-10). • The cumulative effect of the narrative is to portray kings in Samaria as feeble office holders who have no power to govern in generative ways. They cannot heal (5:7); they cannot make peace (6:22); they cannot produce food (6:27). They cannot contribute any dimension of well-being to common life, not heath care, not foreign policy, not sustenance. They cannot do anything that kings are supposed to do. The intent of the narrative is to deconstruct and expose them as empty ciphers in the processes of social power that merit neither loyalty nor obedience. The Pentecost guy does not wait on them, but simply disregards them. He is not intimidated by them and offers no allegiance to their empty forms; he has other wonders to enact that make common life possible, wonders over which the kings have no say. 4. When one considers the wonders wrought by Elisha on the one hand and the impotence of the kings on the other hand, it is clear that the narrative enacts and exhibits a profound tension between office holders and wind carriers. That same tension has been at the heart of Israel’s faith since the wind blew back the waters in Egypt at the behest of Moses, an act that exhibited the impotence of Pharaoh, the quintessential office holder. It is possible to trace that great and durable tension and the great contest between formal power and effective power through Scripture; in the season of Pentecost it is possible to see the effective transformative power that is credited to the force of God. So it is with Amos and Amaziah (Amos 7:10-17), with Isaiah and Ahaz (Isa 7:1-12), with Jeremiah and Zedekiah (Jer 37:17; 38:14-28). And so it is, most dramatically, in the confrontation between Jesus and Pilate. Pilate is exposed as an empty, helpless cipher who administers all the emblems of power but is in fact powerless (John 18:33-19:16). Jesus, by contrast, has none of the credentials or emblems of power, but effectiveness in transformative activity. Given that interaction of formal power and effective power, it is no wonder that the apostles, in the Book of Acts, are dangerously on the loose in the empire, turning the world upside down. The Book of Acts is commonly seen as a book that exhibits “the spirit in the church” and as the drama of Easter preaching. What is not noticed most often is that the Spirit and Easter preaching bring the apostles before the authorities who regularly summon the wind-carriers into court. The Book of Acts is a replica of the Elisha narrative. Both attest that the tension in the midst of formal power is a place where all of the Pentecost folk dwell. 5. “Office holders” characteristically seek to retard and resist transformative authority and action. In the Elisha narrative, the king has taken Elisha to be an enemy precisely because Elisha has unloosed transformative energy and authority in his realm: “And he said, ‘So may God do to me, and more, if the head of Elisha son of

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    Shaphat stays on his shoulders today’” (2 Kgs 6:31). The king imagines that if he can eliminate the wind-carrier, the wind will go away. In this regard Elisha is viewed in the same way that Father Ahab viewed Elijah before Elisha, as “troubler” (1 Kgs 18:17), and as “enemy” (1 Kgs 21:20). Pentecost characters are always an inconvenience and most often a threat to establishment arrangements. And certainly Elisha in his work of healing, peace, and food called into question the power arrangements that privileged some in Samaria over against others. It was, of course, the same with Jesus. Mark reports, already in chapter 2, that healing and forgiveness are reckoned by the authorities to be “blasphemous” (Mark 2:7), and already in 3:6, a healing provoked lethal opposition: “The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him” (Mark 3:6). The tension between the privileged that guard the settlement and the underprivileged who want access is neatly voiced by Luke: “Every day he was teaching in the temple. The chief priests, the scribes, and the leaders of the people kept looking for a way to kill him; but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were spellbound by what they heard” (Luke 19:47-48). The same contest continues in the United States now; the Senate consists mostly in billionaires whose work is primarily to channel tax money to preferred lobbyists; only very occasionally can such an establishment body bring itself to care for the common good. Mutatis mutandis, what passes for “orthodoxy” in the church as established certitude is a device for maintaining power, whether about who is excommunicated or who is eligible for ordination or any such decision. “Truth” characteristically takes on a strange alliance with power. The office holders in the Elisha narrative are a powerful embodiment of self-protection and exhibit an unwillingness to run any risks beyond their own protection. 6. Conversely, wind-carriers characteristically shun office-holding and maintain a distance as “outsider” that gives freedom and energy. One could not imagine Elisha as a candidate for kingship in Samaria. Nor would one have thought that Jesus might run for governor in Galilee. There are important exceptions to this rule. Thus many of us have regarded Franklin Roosevelt as a wind-carrier for the poor and the powerless; and John XXIII was a wind-carrier who shocked and scared the office holders in the Curia when he arrived at the Papacy. And Desmond Tutu, after long risky witness, became a bishop. In all of these cases, however, the occupants of the office did not suffer from amnesia. The presidency did not cause Roosevelt to forget the poor. Papal authority did not cause John to turn away from pastoral realism for the sake of pomp. And Tutu as archbishop was not seduced by Anglican punctiliousness away from the critical issues of his society. These exceptions are important. But they are exceptions. In the Elisha narrative, in any case, the prophet is portrayed as utterly unimpressed by formal authority, unburdened by official responsibility, acting out of a kind of freedom and energy and courage to which “office” could add nothing. Beyond that, his imagination remained uncurbed and unfiltered, so that he could imagine the poor made safe, the dead given life, the hungry given food, the sick healed. He knew in profound ways that the ways things are are not the ways they need to be. Pentecost, in ancient Israel or wherever, concerns the force of newness that is undeterred by present power arrangements. That is why established church traditions, with precious legacies and huge endowments, tend not to specialize in Pentecost.

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    7. The labels “office holder” and “wind carrier” pertain more to a mindset and an act of imagination than they do to visible, organized reality. The social reality of being “in office” or not is important, but I do not think that being “in office” or out of office is crucial. What counts is one’s self-perception and one’s readiness or lack of readiness to live one’s life in a responsive way. Thus in or out of office, one can imagine a safe self that stays close to settled power arrangements and official forms of management and control. Or one can, in or out of office, refuse to be restrained by excessive burden or excessive privilege, and be able to run risks out beyond the treasured contours of any social arrangement. We do not have access to the way in which Elisha “imagined himself,” and perhaps he did not permit himself the luxury of self-reflection, not being a modern person. But we can entertain the prospect that Elisha—or Elijah before him—might have been more “contained” in royal Israel by privilege and deference and entitlement. But one cannot, from the narrative, imagine that he would have been restrained or self-centered in his energy and courage for newness. Thus I suspect that Pentecost is the invitation to reimagine ourselves—since “imagination” is close to the work of the spirit—not as products of power arrangements, but as heirs of life-giving wind that refuses to be controlled. 8. The core work of Pentecost is to embrace the wind and to yield the controls of “office.” We may watch Elisha in the early vignettes of his life, “embracing” and “yielding.” In 1 Kings 19:19-21 where he is first on the scene, he holds back from Elijah for the sake of his “mother and father.” Interestingly Elijah does not press the point, but gives him room for unfinished business. But Elisha does not hold back from Elijah very long; he moves immediately to an act of outrageous newness; he kills the “means of production” of his family for the sake of “following.” And in 2 Kings 2:12, as he asks for Elijah’s spirit, he cries out in some fear and desperation: “Elisha kept watching and crying out, ‘Father, father! The chariots of Israel and its horsemen! ‘ But when he could no longer see him, he grasped his own clothes and tore them in two pieces” (2 Kgs 2:12). One can see in both cases that he is processing his new role, his new vocation, and his new identity. We have no evidence that Elisha ever wanted to “go back.” Our own sense of self, nonetheless, will indicate that this Pentecost process of embracing and yielding is a demanding one. The matter pertains to us personally in the ways we are always re-deciding our identity and our vocation. It is possible to imagine the self as an essential “given” and therefore fated from our nurture and environment. Or it is possible to think in terms of an emergent self upon whom the wind continues to blow. The move from essential self to emergent self is evoked in (a) the liturgical process of confession and pardon and invitation to lead “a new and righteous life,” and (b) in psychotherapy in which the assumption is that a new self can be nurtured and chosen and embraced. As the matter of embracing and yielding pertains to persons, so it may also pertain to corporate bodies. Jim Wallis now is proposing that the church in the United States may faithfully accept its identity not as institution but as movement.4 The pair of terms, institution and movement, makes a nice parallel to “king and prophet” in our narrative. The king embodies all of the closure and settlement of institution, and the prophet represents in the narrative all the risks and possibilities of movement. Pentecost is the lively possibility of our becoming wind-carriers when we have spent much of our energy to secure “tenure” in our “office.”

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    9. A Pentecostal decision about “office holding ” and “wind carrying, ” embracing and yielding, pertains to biblical interpretation as it pertains to every faithful practice in the church. John O’Banion, in his magisterial review of Western literature, contrasts two types of literature under the rubric of “list” and “narrative.”5 By “list”— under which he includes Plato and Descartes—O’Banion means literature that is comprehensive and organized to bring control. By “narrative” he means indeterminate openness to newness. His categories lead him to speak of the “demise” of narration in a way that is reminiscent of Hans Frei, only O’Banion works in larger scope concerning all Western literature.6 His categories also remind me of Lévinas’s defining categories of “totality” (by which he means an all comprehensive, totalizing, totalitarian offer) and “infinity” (by which he means openness beyond control).7 The reason I cite O’Banion—along with Frei and Lévinas—is that the categories pertain to how a spirit-powered church might read Scripture. Too much, I believe, we read Scripture according to “historical criticism” that is designed to accommodate the text to our reasonableness. But our interpretation of Scripture that is post-critical and open to the compulsion of the spirit might indeed generate new missional energy. I suggest it is worth a long pondering about how to read Scripture as wind-carriers and not as office holders. 10. Preachers are caught, given Pentecost, in a deep bind precisely because preachers—like tenured seminary teachers—are “office holders?’ That is, they are accountable for budgets, programs, and membership lists, and these responsibilities cause one to be cautious, prudent, and restrained. But every preacher knows, as she faces the text, about the intrusion of the spirit who summons to say the unsayable and to hope the unhopeable that violate everything that is acceptable in “the office.” There is no way out of this dilemma, but there is gain in naming the Catch-22 that is at the center of the Pentecost crisis. I finish with three ponderings about the Elisha narrative and all the Pentecost guys and gals summoned to be wind-carriers. First, the narrative about the death of Elisha may give us pause (2 Kgs 13:20-21). As the narrative works, Elisha’s last public act— the initiation of a political coup—happens in chapter 9; he disappears from the narrative until his death report in chapter 13. There it is reported that by accident a dead man was thrown into the grave of Elisha: “As soon as the man touched the bones of Elisha, he came to life and stood on his feet” (2 Kgs 13:21). Contact with the dead prophet, we are told, caused new life for the man. The prophet is radioactive, loaded with the gift of life. It might matter that preachers should know—rather than being managers or therapists or moralists—that their very bones, infused by the spirit—are radioactive, recruited for the transmission of life. Preachers might claim more for the wind that powers them! Second, as I pondered Elisha, I kept being drawn back to the Book of Acts. Preachers at Pentecost are more or less stuck with the Book of Acts and the all-toofamiliar story of “tongues of fire.” But what if the Book of Acts—set in the empire of Rome—is simply a replay of the ancient narrative of king and prophet, of office holder and wind carrier? Pentecost, in such purview, turns out to be not about a great charismatic event (though it is that), but a surge of power for life that leaves us always unsettled and on the move. In a society where “our kind of church” exists, we tilt always to the side of the settled. But if Pentecost follows Easter and the gift of new life, then Pentecost is about public power and public history and public peace and public

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    healing and public food. It means to wrest the public out of the hands of the office holders. Third, after Elisha and the Books of Acts, Pentecost is a special time to consider how the people of God position themselves in a society of fear and violence. It should be clear that the office holders—right and left—have not a clue about how to reorder and renew our common life. Just like the ancient kings, they are bewildered at what they face. What a time for talk and walk that knows that the wind is blowing out beyond our preconceived formulations and settlements. Pentecost preaching is not for magic tricks. It is for the slow, steady obedience to what we cannot grasp. This work enacted by the spirit concerns: the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, life everlasting. All of that is well beyond the ken of office holders!

    Notes

    1 On this body of texts, see Walter Brueggemann, Testimony to Otherwise: The Witness of Elijah and Elisha (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2001). 2 In this narrative text it is the king, and not the prophet, who acts. The narrative reports, however, that the king has been much interested in “the great things” of Elisha, that is, the wonders he has performed. It is reasonable, I suggest, to think that the narrative exhibits the king as instructed and empowered by the wonders of Elisha to enact precisely such a wonder in his own sphere of power, namely, the recovery of the property of the widow that is in the right of the king. If this connection is credible, then the king acts in this way only because of the empowering report of Elisha. 3 It is conventional in critical scholarship to identify these Elisha narratives as “legends,” a label that serves to dismiss them because they do not conform to conventional reason. A post-critical reading of them, however, suggests not that they are second rate, but that they open a newness not available to conventional categories. A reflection on such a dismissive use of the label of “legend” lets us observe the way that conventional criticism serves conventional management of social power. 4 Jim Wallis, The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America (New York: HarperOne, 2008). 5 John D. O’Banion, Reorienting Rhetoric: The Dialectic of List and Story (University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992). 6 Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). 7 Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).

  • Pentecost in India: what does the birthday of the church mean for ‘churchless Christians’?

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    Page 23

    Pentecost in India: What Does the Birthday

    of the Church Mean for uChurchless Christians”?

    Martha L. Moore-Keish

    Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia

    “Peter said to them, ‘Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.’.. .So those who welcomed his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added.” [Acts 2:38,41]

    Pentecost as celebration and problem When I was growing up, our children’s choir at church learned a Pentecost anthem that proclaimed “Pentecost is happy birthday, happy birthday to the church.” We sang it with great gusto, celebrating the day when the church was born. All of us had grown up in the church: nurtured by Sunday school teachers and adoptive grandparents, going to Bible school in the summers, playing together in the courtyard after worship each week, relishing the covered dish dinners with their brilliant Jello salads and the cheeseburger casseroles that my mother never made. We were perfectly at home in the cool whitewashed sanctuary with its frosted glass and pale green carpet. Of course Pentecost was a reason to celebrate! It marked the beginning of this family that loved us so much. “Happy birthday,” we sang, “many happy returns to the church.” For us, and for long generations of Christians before us, to be Christian means to belong to the church. These are synonymous. Children born into a Christian family learn the stories and songs of the faith in the context of church and eventually come to confess their own faith within that community. People who come to faith as adults are baptized and enter a church at that point. Whether children or adults, “Christians” understand themselves to be part of a larger organized community, the church. The image of the church as body of Christ underscores the intimate, even interchangeable, relationship between following Christ and being part of the community that shares that discipleship. And so Pentecost has been joyful celebration of the community of Christ. In some areas of the world, however, this straightforward connection of Christianity and church membership is more complicated. I encountered such a situation in south India during my sabbatical in the summer of 2008, when I began to learn about a population in that country that has been labeled “churchless Christians.” How do we celebrate the church and the birthday of the church, even as we acknowledge that some people follow Jesus as the Christ without belonging to a church? What does Pentecost mean for disciples of Christ who live out their faith beyond the bounds of the visible church? In this article, after a brief synopsis of the history of Christianity in India, I will explore the main reasons that some followers of Jesus in India choose to remain unbaptized and outside the bounds of the institutional church. I will then offer some theological concepts that are helping me to think about the church in less sharply defined ways, so that church is not a matter of who is “in” and who is “out,” but who God might be calling in new and unexpected ways. Finally, I will conclude with some

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    reflections on what North American Christians might learn from the situation of “churchless Christians” in India.

    A view of the churches in India Christian churches have thrived in India since at least the third century. Though the claim is historically unverifiable, Syrian Christians in Kerala trace their origins to the apostle Thomas, who is said to have arrived in India in 52 CE. and been martyred near Madras (now Chennai) in about 72 CE. There is certainly historical evidence of a Christian community by the late third century, with connections to the churches in East Syria.1 Migrations of Christians from Syria or Persia in the fourth and ninth centuries solidified the connection between churches in southwest India and the churches in East Syria. India still has vital churches in this Syrian tradition, centered in the state of Kerala on the southwest coast. All of the various Syrian Christian churches in India bear an important witness for North American Christians, embodying ancient liturgical traditions separate from either Rome or Constantinople, and echoing the earliest Semitic origins of Christianity, now rooted in the soil of south India. At the end of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese established trading routes with India and in the early sixteeenth-century introduced a new form of Christianity to the sub-continent: Roman Catholicism. Initially the Roman Catholics were friendly to the Syrian Christians they found, embracing them as “our brethren” in common faith. Soon, however, the differences between the two forms of Christianity began to chafe, and the Western Christians tried to reform what they regarded as aberrations in Syrian practice, including differences with regard to sacramental practice, clerical celibacy, and acknowledgement of papal authority. This culminated in 1599 at the Synod of Diamper, a meeting in which the Syrian Christians were required to confess their faith according to Western formulation and pledge allegiance to the pope. Though it appeared to be a dramatic shift, this mass conversion did not settle the matter. Half a century later, in 1653, the majority of Syrians rebelled against the Portuguese and their Catholic form of Christianity, returning to the tradition that they had held for centuries before. Though few Syrian Christians remained loyal to Rome, the Catholic Church grew among other populations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to become the largest single Christian communion in India, now numbering about 17.3 million people. Beginning in 1706 with a German Lutheran mission in Tranquebar, Protestant missionaries traveled to India, establishing churches as well as schools and hospitals, and attracting new converts to Christianity. Anglicans, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, and many other denominations have worked to build church communities, sometimes baptizing entire villages at once into the Christian faith. In 1947, four churches in south India (Anglican, Congregationalist, Presbyterian, and Methodist) joined together to form the Church of South India. In 1970, several churches in the north (Anglican, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Methodist, Baptist, Brethren, and Disciples) joined to form the Church of North India. Together, these two denominations have about 2.3 million members, the largest Protestant communions in the country. Other existing Protestant churches include Lutherans, independent Presbyterian and Reformed denominations, and many evangelical, free, and Pentecostal churches.

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    As this complex history shows, India has had vital Christian churches for centuries. In its Syrian, Roman, and variously Protestant expressions, Indian Chris­ tianity has simply assumed (with Christians around the world) that one who follows Christ should be baptized and join the visible church. Though the majority of Christians in India continue to practice their faith within the bounds of church community, the twentieth century saw the emergence of a new phenomenon: “churchless Christians” who affirm faith in Jesus without being bap­ tized. These followers of Christ challenge the usual linkage of Christian faith with baptism and entrance into the church. On the birthday of the church, we need to hear the concerns of this hidden group, asking what those of us who dwell within the church’s gates might learn from those followers of Christ who remain outside.

    “Churchless Christians” in India Why do some people who profess faith in Jesus decide not to be baptized? The particular history of Christianity in India has produced cultural, economic, and social/ familial forces that lead some Jesus-bhaktas (devotees of Jesus) to refuse baptism. These three sets of issues are difficult to disentangle, but for the sake of clarity I will discuss them separately. In any given situation, one or more of these may be at work in the decision not to seek baptism and church membership.

    Culture, First of all, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, baptism into the Christian church usually meant renunciation of Indian culture and embrace of Western culture. In both Catholic and Protestant churches, converts to Christianity often had to give up Indian clothing, diet (especially giving up vegetarianism and learning to eat meat), and other traditional customs. Β aptism thus came to signify a cultural boundary as well as a religious one. More ardent Hindu nationalists today continue to view baptism and church membership this way, arguing that Christians are not truly Indian. Christian artist Jyoti Sahi laments the traditional equation of baptism and rejection of Indian culture, saying, “Hindus… have only questioned Baptism when it has seemed to be a mere formality, a social ritual which separates a person from the communion of his [sic] mother-culture, resulting in rootless individuals.” 2 Sahi and others clearly

    affirm that entering the Christian church through baptism should not mean exiting the rich history of Indian culture. For the past few decades, many churches have been trying hard to keep baptism from functioning as such a cultural boundary, so that to be baptized Christian does not mean to cease being Indian. For instance, liturgical reforms since the 1970s have tried to draw on various traditional Indian cultural elements to reverse the unfortunate teaching of an earlier age, that to be Christian meant to embrace Western culture. One pioneering Catholic liturgical center in the 1970s introduced an “Indian eucharist” in which the priest, upon entering the sanctuary, was greeted with flowers, incense, and oil lamps, and the liturgical chants were in Sanskrit or a local Indian language rather than Latin. However, despite such efforts, many still perceive Christianity as a foreign implant on Indian soil. The situation is complicated by the fact that, especially for less privileged castes, it has actually been an advantage to renounce Indian culture and embrace the culture of Western missionaries. Adopting Western dress, language, and customs marked a visible rejection of the traditional caste system which is so oppressive to those at the

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    bottom of its hierarchy. This helps to explain why many Christians sharply criticized the liturgical reforms that drew on brahmanical (priestly, upper-caste) practices in an effort to incorporate Indian culture into Christian liturgy. For Dalit (formerly “outcaste “) Christians, these particular customs do not proclaim the liberating message of the gospel, but perpetuate the very oppression that Jesus came to abolish. In the face of these cultural debates, some Christians choose to avoid baptism and remain outside the bounds of the organized church in order to affirm their Indian identity and culture. As Lutheran pastor and scholar Herbert Hoefer reports, quoting one non-baptized Christian woman, “the Hindu community thinks less of us if we are baptized, for they say that we have left our Indian traditions.”3

    Economy. After independence, in an effort to improve the conditions of the lowest socio-economic groups in society, the Indian government instituted a system of “reservations,” or benefits, for members of “scheduled castes” and “scheduled tribes.” Similar to U.S. affirmative action programs, the Indian government gives special consideration to underprivileged castes and tribes for benefits such as entrance into schools and government jobs. This was a noble effort to improve the economic conditions of those who had long been oppressed. However, the Indian government has also instituted a law that makes it impossible to be both Christian and a participant in the caste system. The presidential order of 1950 reads: “no person professing a religion other than Hinduism shall be deemed to be a member of Scheduled Caste.” This was amended twice, to include Buddhists and Sikhs, but Christians are still excluded from this provision. As scholar Paul Chirakarodu puts it, “Dalit Christians, when they cease to be Hindu, automatically become ineligible for concessions or aid. The Scheduled Caste persons who embraced other religions other than Hinduism, Sikkism [sic] and Buddhism are denied every right.”4 There is deep irony here: in baptism, Christians claim to be freed from the constraints that culture places on our identity, and yet this means that in India they now face severe economic and political disadvantages. Indian writer Arun Shourie highlights this irony in a sharp critique of Christian leaders:

    The church… having proclaimed for two centuries that untouchability was a curse peculiar to Hinduism, has been in the forefront in demanding that benefits given to scheduled castes and scheduled tribes must be made available to Christian scheduled castes and Christian scheduled tribes also! Not one missionary organization has protested that by extending castebased Reservations to Christians (and Muslims) the Supreme Court has put the axe to a basic tenet of Christianity (and Islam)!5

    Because around 80 percent of Indian Christians come from Dalit background, which often means marginal economic status, this denial of benefits can be a real obstacle to baptism and church membership. In his extensive study of non-baptized believing Christians (NBBCs), Hoefer encountered several cases in which people delayed or avoided baptism because of these economic costs. For instance, “a college student said that he has been in the Christian faith for some time, but he has decided not to take baptism until he secures a government job. He will lose the government reservation for his caste if he is bap-

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    tized.”6 In other cases, laborers fear loss of employment if they convert and receive baptism. One man, who indicated that he expected to receive baptism soon, is still concerned “that the landlords will take him last for work the moment he converts.” Another Christian “rents from a landlord, and he has been threatened with eviction.”7 In various ways, public conversion to Christianity and reception of baptism can bring about real economic hardship.

    Family. Another factor that keeps some Indian believers from baptism is the influence of family. In some cases, those who come to Christian faith avoid baptism in order to keep peace with non-Christian relatives (such as Christians married to nonChristian spouses). Women in particular may worship Jesus in private, but not seek baptism if their husbands are Hindu. Closely related to the concern about family peace is the concern about rejection of the family gods. Women traditionally have primary responsibility for puja (worship) in the home, and if a wife ceases to worship the family ‘ s chosen gods, this could have serious consequences. “If they take baptism and cease to carry out the family rituals, every family difficulty and calamity thereafter will be attributed to the women’s failing to serve the family god.”8 Even if the woman herself does not believe in the power of the family god, her rejection ofthat deity may cause the rest of the family to blame her if anything goes wrong in the future. In other cases, family concerns are tied to broader social and economic issues. This is particularly true for young people who need their families to arrange their marriages. For instance, in one village a local Lutheran pastor “knows of several high caste youth who have studied in the local Christian schools and come to faith in Christ. However, they keep their faith a secret from the families because it would mean being sent out of the house and thus the loss of all social and economic security in life. They ask who would then arrange a marriage for them.”9 Here we see cultural, economic, and family issues converging: caste identity is culturally determined, and it traditionally determines both what kind of work one can do and whom one may marry. Though the situation is changing somewhat with India’s increasing urbanization and economic expansion, Christians who step outside of this cultural framework still risk not only social rejection, but economic deprivation and alienation from family.

    What does the birthday of the church mean for “churchless Christians”? For those of us who have grown up and been nurtured by the institutional church, who have appreciated the boundaries of the church as a supportive (even if flawed) structure, it is hard to understand the perspective of those for whom the walls of the church form a forbidding barrier, shutting out family, culture, livelihood. It is crucial, of course, not to overlook the diversity of voices among “churchless Christians,” who have varied reasons for not coming to baptism. It is also crucial not to Romanticize them, as if they are simply victims of a sinister plot that prevents them from coming to baptism and public profession of Christian faith. Even so, their narratives suggest that many of these people are hungry for the life of Jesus, for the forgiveness and healing promised in his resurrection—precisely the things that some people experience within the church. But baptism (and the organized church it implies) has come for many in India to signify death, not life. What might this situation teach us in North America about the church? How might we attend to the concerns of churchless

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    Christians even as we celebrate the birth of the church at Pentecost? From listening to the stories of Indian believers outside the church, I have heard two repeated and apparently contradictory themes. On the one hand, these nonbaptized believers call our attention to the serious commitment that is implied in baptism. On the other hand, they help us to see that Christian faith can be lived out in profound ways without baptism and outside the formal bounds of the church. First, commitment to Christian faith marks a real change in life: behavior, economic status, family, identity. There is substantial risk involved in this transition. For many North American Christians, by contrast, being baptized and joining the church is anything but risky; indeed, even in this day, joining a church in some parts of the country can bring social prestige and even economic success. We need the reminder that in India, as in many other parts of the world, making public profession of faith is a demanding step that can signify renunciation of culture, economic status, and family ties. At least some of those who decline baptism do so precisely because they recognize its cost. In this way, the attitude of non-baptized believers may actually deepen our appreciation of baptism and the significance of Christian discipleship that it signifies. But second, the stories of non-baptized believers in India also reveal that a great deal of Christian commitment can be lived out beyond the bounds of the institutional church. In varying ways, these “churchless Christians” read scripture, pray in the name of Jesus, avoid practices that contradict their faith, perform works of mercy, and even attend worship services. Many of the values they articulate and the practices they embody are identical with those of baptized Christians nearby. So on the one hand, their hesitation to accept baptism highlights the significance of church membership; on the other hand, their already committed lives often raise questions about the significance of baptism and official membership in the organized church. It seems that the witness of non-baptized Christians is calling us at once to be more serious and less serious about belonging to the church. How are we to respond to this conflicting message? If we return to the biblical narrative of the birth of the church, it does not offer any straightforward guidance. In his Pentecost sermon in Acts 2:14-36, Peter convicted his listeners of their sin, proclaimed Jesus’ resurrection, and called for repentance in response to God’s grace, accompanied by baptism. Baptism was intended to signify repentance and faith, and those who were baptized naturally gathered together in communities of common conviction and practice. If a person acknowledges sin, affirms Jesus’ resurrection, and is in a continual process of repentance, and if that person even attends worship and is in some conversation with other believers, but for good reasons cannot receive the outward sign of baptism, is that person less Christian than a baptized person who knows nothing of sincere repentance in response to God’s grace? The church has offered two sorts of avenues for responding to this question, one more typically Catholic and the other more Protestant (and particularly Reformed). Both provide ways for considering people to be members of Christ’s church without participating in the visible institutional church. The more Catholic response focuses on the internal sanctification of believers, which may be present even without water baptism, while the more Protestant response focuses on the “invisible church” known only to God. In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas cited Augustine on the possibility of

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    “invisible sanctification without visible sacraments.” While he was thinking primarily of catechumens who die before they are able to receive baptism, Thomas clearly indicates that someone “can obtain salvation without being actually baptized, on account of his desire for Baptism, which desire is the outcome of faith that worketh by charity, whereby God, whose power is not tied to visible sacraments, sanctifies man inwardly.”10 The contemporary Catholic catechism echoes this teaching: “For catechumens who die before their Baptism, their explicit desire to receive it, together with repentance for their sins, and charity, assures them the salvation that they were not able to receive through the sacrament.”11 This has come to be called “baptism by desire.” Though non-baptized believers in India are not the same as catechumens preparing for baptism, this approach holds promise as a way to honor the genuine faith of “churchless Christians” while still affirming the value of the church and its baptism. In a similar vein, some Catholic theologians are suggesting that an Indian ecclesiology needs to focus on the internal dimension of Christian life rather than focusing only on the external, institutional expression. Felix Wilfred, for instance, portrays the church as “the community of all those who are interiorly transformed and enlightened.” He focuses on one early interpretation of baptism as “enlightenment,” photismos. As Wilfred says, “The baptism of Jesus was not a simple external event or ritual. It was also a deep inner experience through which Jesus became intensely aware of his own inner self and his union with the mystery of the Father and the Spirit. It was as well an experience of realization of his relationship to the world and society. … To belong to the community of the disciples, it is important to follow Jesus, the guru, in his inner spiritual journey ,”12 Wilfred goes on to connect this interior sense of church with the community, so this is not simply a private individual interiority. This emphasis on the internal transformation of those who belong to the Christian community can make room for those who are not baptized and yet clearly have been changed, “enlightened” by their encounter with Christ’s gospel. The richness of Wilfred’s proposal, like the concept of “baptism by desire,” lies in the fact that he simultaneously values the symbol of baptism and describes the baptized life in a way that need not be restricted to those who have received that symbol. The Reformed Protestant movement offers another avenue for addressing apparently faithful people who live outside the visible church. Again appealing to Augustine , Calvin and other sixteenth-century reformers developed the distinction between the “visible church,” which is the institutional expression, and the “invisible church,” which consists of the elect who are known only to God. As Calvin says, “Sometimes by the term ‘church’ it [i.e., scripture] means that which is actually in God’s presence, into which no persons are received but those who are children of God by grace of adoption and true members of Christ by sanctification of the Holy Spirit. Then, indeed, the church includes not only the saints presently living on earth but all the elect from the beginning of the world.”13 Though this distinction has certain problems, it does helpfully disrupt the notion that all God’s chosen ones are within the bounds of the church (and conversely, that all those within the bounds of the church are God’s chosen ones !). With regard to non-baptized Christians in India, the concept of the “invisible church” may helpfully stretch our ecclesiology so that these “churchless Christians” might actually belong to Christ’s church in a way that is visible only to God. To be sure, Calvin himself did not use the concept of invisible church to press for inclusion of the non-baptized; nevertheless, the category is useful for disrupting any easy

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    equation of institutional church with actual followers of Jesus. These two proposals represent different conceptions of the church and its members, one focusing more on sanctification and the other focusing more on divine freedom. For now, however, I am more interested in what they have in common than in how they diverge. Both offer ways to think about so-called “churchless Christians” as actually belonging to Christ’s church in a broader sense, while still valuing the visible ecclesial body. In this way both “baptism by desire” and affirmation of the “invisible church” offer avenues for being simultaneously more serious and less serious about belonging to the church.

    A challenge for North American Christians The situation of “churchless Christians” in India offers a fresh challenge to those of us in North American churches. As I hear the stories of people in south India who cannot choose baptism without serious cultural, economic, or familial cost, I have come to appreciate more deeply the meaning of my own baptism. Rather than assuming baptism as a birthright, I have come to hear with new seriousness the language of Paul in Romans 6:3: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” Baptism is truly costly for these “churchless Christians,” something that American Christians do not often confront. In addition, I returned from India pondering anew a question that faces many of our own churches in this country: how do we respond to non-baptized people who occupy the edges of—or who dwell in the midst of—our congregations? How do we regard their participation in the body of Christ, especially when it comes to the Lord’s Supper? To be sure, the cultural and economic situation in the United States is vastly different from that in south India. Yet attending to the factors that keep people from baptism in that culture has made me newly curious about why some people in this culture follow Jesus without choosing baptism. Have we constructed boundaries that keep people away from the richness of community life, or have we kept ourselves from the richness of their company because of our comfort within the bounds of the visible church? Have I adhered too readily to the church’s tradition regarding baptism because baptism has cost me little and because the church’s walls have always provided me room to thrive? These questions will continue to haunt me in the years ahead. What then of Pentecost? Can we still celebrate the birthday of the church with a clear conscience? I think we can, giving thanks for the ways in which the church has truly been a “means of grace” for many Christians. But we do this with more integrity when we stand in solidarity with those followers of Christ who cannot publicly profess their faith, for whom the visible church is not a welcoming and hospitable place. When we drop the red balloons or blow out the candles on the church birthday cake this year, let us give thanks not only for the church we see around us, but simultaneously give thanks for those “secret friends” of Jesus who worship alone, yearning for the day when we may all join together across lines of caste and culture, breaking bread and singing praises to God without fear.

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    Notes

    1 C.B. Firth, An Introduction to Indian Church History, rev. ed. (ISPCK, 2001), 20. 2 Jyoti Sahi, “An Artist’s Response to the Question of an Indian Church.” Vidyajyoti (January 1986): 5354 . 3. Herbert Hoefer, Churchless Christianity (Gurukul Lutheran Theological College and Research Institute, 1991; reprinted by William Carey Library, 2002), 23. 4 Paul Chirakarodu, “Dalit Christians: A Case of Social Plight” in Christian Identity and Cultural Nationalism: Challenges and Opportunities (BTESSC/SATHRI, 2006), 31,35. 5 Arun Shourie, Missionaries in India: Continuities, Changes, Dilemmas (South Asia Books, 1998), 5152 , quoted in”The Nature and Practice of Sacraments (Baptism and Eucharist) in the Church: Present-Day Challenges—A Missiological Perspective” by P.T. George, in Masihi Sevak XXXII, vol. 3 (December 2007): 69-70. 6 Hoefer, 21. 7 Ibid., 37-38. 8 Ibid., 13. 9 Ibid., 38. 10 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica. First complete American ed. (New York: Benziger Bros., 1947), Pt. III.. Art. 1, Question 68, p. 2399. 11.Ê Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2d ed. (Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), #1259. 12. Felix Wilfred, On the Banks of the Ganges: Doing Contextual Theology (Delhi: ISPCK, 2002), 210211 . 13 Calvin, Institutes, IV.l.7, p. 1021.

  • Walking humbly

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

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    Walking Humbly*

    Micah 6:8

    Jin S.Kim

    Church of All Nations, Minneapolis, Minnesota

    Hola, bom dia, jambo, bwana-asifiwe, male-magua, konnichi-wa, and of course, an-young-haseyo! These are some of the greetings you will hear on any given Sunday at Church of All Nations. I want to thank God and our wonderful Presbyterian family for giving me the honor of preaching at this august assembly for the second time in four years. I have been asked to preach particularly on the theme of walking humbly with our God from Micah 6:8.

    God has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

    The Birth of a Multicultural Church One of the reasons I was asked to preach is to share with you the amazing things that have been happening at Church of All Nations in Minneapolis, the congregation I am so privileged to lead. In January of 2004 a group of mostly second generation Christians of a Korean immigrant church in the Twin Cities was blessed by our “mother church” to launch a multicultural community called Church of All Nations. We were chartered with great fanfare, but no one knew if a hundred mostly young Korean-Americans could actually become a Church of All Nations; many thought the name was a bit premature, if not presumptuous. Today, we have an adult membership and worship attendance of about 250. We are currently 32% Asian, 37% white, 20% black, and 10% Latino, with over 20 nations represented in our membership. Our pastoral and teaching staff includes people who hail from Korea, Kenya, Sudan, Brazil, Japan and the US (both Euro- and African American). Our session also reflects the major racial ethnic groups of our congregation . We are one of a handful of congregations in the US with no ethnic majority and sizable groups of the four major racial categories of white, black, Asian and Latino. But we actually have even more denominational diversity than ethnic diversity, and draw as many Catholics, Episcopalians and Lutherans as we do Pentecostals, Baptists and Evangelical Free. Our highly visible commitment to ecumenical unity may be one reason why most of our new members have no Presbyterian background. We seem to draw equal numbers of “evangelicals” and “progressives,” Republicans and Democrats, traditionalists and dreamers, and a lot of what I call “posts” – those who see themselves as postmodern , post-ideological, post-denominational, post-foundationalist, post-missional and post-emergent – we’re even post-trendy.

    *This sermon was preached at the 218th General Assembly of the PCUSA. June 24,2008, San Jose, California.

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    From the beginning, the crafting and nurturing of our congregational identity was seen as paramount. Our central mission is to do the ministry of reconciliation, and it is happening in all kinds of wonderful ways here. For instance, in January of 2006 we moved from our “mother church” to a declining white PCUS A congregation founded in 1884 called the Shiloh Bethany Presbyterian Church in an urban suburb called Columbia Heights. Seven months later Shiloh Bethany had a congregational dissolution, and all of their members became members of Church of All Nations, handing us the keys and the title to the building. Incidentally, 1884 is the year that PCUSA missionaries first arrived on the shores of my home country, Korea. So we came full circle, historically speaking. Not one Shiloh Bethany member left after the merger – praise God ! One of the key reasons for this union was the growing recognition of the need to be a new kind of church for an increasingly multicultural population in Columbia Heights and the entire Twin Cities area. Church of All Nations fit that need very well. Exactly a year later in August of 2007 an independent Pentecostal Brazilian congregation which also had a multicultural vision asked if they might merge with us. We became 10% Latino overnight! As the co-pastors of the Seara Brazilian Ministry have testified, it was love at first sight. And I can tell you, a full year into this journey, we are still on our honeymoon. We have wonderful friendship, collegiality and mutual respect among our six international pastors, and a culture of inclusion and investment with our many full-time interns. Our diverse staff tries to model for our congregation a way of walking humbly with each other and modeling for the church the ministry of reconciliation. We witness many signs of growth in our midst, but the most important thing is that people are filled with joy, hope and genuine love for each other across all kinds of lines, crossing barriers erected by church and society, history and culture. For decades now, Shiloh Bethany members have prayed that their sanctuary would be full again, and that the building would be restored to its original condition. Who knew that God would answer the prayers of this typical, declining white church through a young, multicultural church? Who knew that a church chartered just two years before would own a sizable building overlooking a beautiful lake? Many of us who began this journey assumed that we would be dealing with much more conflict as many cultures and worldviews add to the complexity of congregational dynamics. What we have discovered, to our delight, is the exact opposite. The very decision to join a church in which one chooses to be a minority seems to draw the kind of people who are willing to “lay down their sword” of power and privilege, and to walk humbly with God. The Korean American founders had to set the example first. Today, we all seem to be caught up in a virtuous cycle of lifting up and valuing other individuals and cultures, to “consider others better than oneself.” The culture of public confession, corporate repentance, joyful celebration and vulnerable relationality that we have cultivated at Church of All Nations is key to understanding the dynamism and eschatological hope evident in our life together. We live in the time between the “already” and “not yet.” Our church also sees itself between Pentecost in Acts 2 and the coming kingdom in Revelation 7, when all nations , tribes and tongues will glorify God together in one voice. We feel called to be an ecumenical church that embodies the major spiritual roots of the early church – to

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    be simultaneously Rational, Sacramental and Pentecostal. We are also convinced that only intentional movement away from rigid denominationalism toward visible unity will lead the global church to recover its identity as one, holy, catholic and apostolic. We are a high-risk, low-anxiety church where anything is possible, including the possibility of failure. The only poverty we contest for ourselves is the poverty of imagination. We feel so blessed with God’s abundance and grace. With humans, this is impossible. Thanks be to God who makes all things possible!

    A Brief History of Race in America Now let me share a bit about the theological, historical and sociological reflecting that goes on at Church of All Nations on a daily basis, especially regarding race in America. From the ruckus over Barack Obama’ s former pastor Jeremiah Wright, it’s clear to me that we still don’t know how to engage this topic in either church or state. After all, racism remains the mega-idolatry in the meta-narrative of American history. Race is the third rail that will electrocute anyone who touches it. I am grieved over this episode, as I believe that Dr. Wright will be remembered as one of the great prophets of his generation. Do we need reminding that it was the African American church that kept the prophetic tradition alive in America? The Black Church has been the only consistent, alternative voice to the dominant narrative generated by empire. As a Korean American, I speak as a historical newcomer to this debate. When I was growing up in 1970s South Carolina, we didn’t even have a category for Asians or Hispanics – there were so few of us in the Deep South back then. I had no ethnic group to belong to, except when I went home to a mother, a father, a brother and sister who looked like me. Thanks be to God that I also had the Korean immigrant church on Sundays to look forward to the Korean Community Presbyterian Church of Columbia , S.C., where my pastor was the Rev. Sun Bai Kim, my lifelong mentor. The immigrant church served as a spiritual and cultural oasis for people like my parents. But one of the painful things that we have to grapple with is the larger social context within which the white church, black church and immigrant churches find themselves today. White Presbyterian missionaries from the US came to Korea in 1884 and made the outrageous claim that “the God who made us is the same God who made you.” In other words, they taught us that a sovereign God made all of humanity and all of creation. A century later a lot of us growing up in America realized that that is not quite the case. Your doctrine might teach the sovereignty of God and a shared humanity, but your churches sure don’t embody it. You opened up your Bibles to us, but made it crystal clear that your churches are not open to blacks, Asians and Latinos. It’s painfully obvious that India is not the only country with a rigid caste system. From the birth of this republic, our founding fathers enshrined into the constitution the notion that blacks would be counted as three-fifths of a person. Only since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 have African Americans as a whole been legally enfranchised and able to vote. Is this country not founded on the unstated principle that whites should be on top, middle-colored people in the middle, and blacks at the bottom ? Have we not determined as a society that only whites are fully human, middlecolored people almost-human, and blacks and American Indians sub-human? Now I want to ask, on the fortieth anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination: How did we get into this mess? Clearly, nations have tried to dominate other nations from the beginning – that’s nothing new. What’s new was that when “in 1492, Columbus

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    sailed the ocean blue…” to the so-called New World (new to the Europeans), he sailed as a Christian. Attila the Hun was not a Christian; Genghis Kahn was not a Christian; Alexander the Great was not a Christian; the Egyptian Pharaohs were not Christians. When the Egyptians warred against the Hebrews and prevailed, that meant that the Egyptian gods were stronger than the Hebrew god. So you’re supposed to go to war to prove that your tribal god is mightier than your enemy’s tribal god. So how then do Christian nations behave in the same brutal way that non-Christian nations have behaved since the beginning of time? How do we justify oppression, slavery, the theft of land, theft of labor, genocide, rape and exploitation of every kind done unto non-European peoples? How do these Christians break every one of the Ten Commandments, violate the Beatitudes, and defy every teaching of Jesus in perpetrating a global holocaust onto non-white peoples around the world? How do Christian nations do that? It’s really simple. Invent racism. European nations had to invent the notion that darker skinned people are not fully human so that they could justify this unrelenting global war of terror. Well into the 19th Century American intellectuals, politicians and religious leaders debated whether black people had souls. White people needed to buy into the myth of the inferiority of others by saying to themselves: “We know that God made all of humanity, but if we can just convince ourselves that dark skinned people aren’t really human, we can do whatever we want.” Or, “Certainly, these African heathens cannot be as civilized as we are! Can they really be considered fully human like us?” It’s clear that racism is a philosophical construct, one invented by Christian nations to absolve themselves of the atrocities of empire, to do what every powerhungry nation has done to another, and still call themselves Christian. It’s one of the biggest self-deceptions ever invented in human history. And that self-deception continues to undergird American life. Do we realize that when an ethnic group tries to wipe out another ethnic group in Asia, it is called genocide, but when white settlers wipe out over 10 million Native Americans over a period of 250 years, so that only a couple of hundred thousand are left today, we call it Manifest Destiny? When whites brutally oppressed blacks in South Africa, that was called apartheid, but when whites in America did the same thing, we called it Jim Crow. When people from the Middle East set off bombs among civilians, we call it terrorism, but when white supremacists bombed black businesses, homes and churches all over this country during the Civil Rights era, it was called “unfortunate.” Is not 400 years of unrelenting oppression against Native and Black Americans a form of “state-sponsored terrorism”? We Americans don’t alter our history; we simply euphemize and euthanize it. This penchant for the whitewashing of history is one reason why all Christians should reflect seriously on South Africa’s Belhar Confession, a foundational document in our self-understanding at Church of All Nations. There is a powerful myth at work in America – the myth of the white man as the good guy, the righteous sheriff who comes to clean up the town, the cowboy protecting the pioneers from the “naked savages,” the homesteader who pulls himself up by his bootstraps – forget about the fact that he pulled himself up on top of land that was stripped from someone else and labor that was stolen from someone else. There is no affirmative action program more grandiose than the one invented for white people in America. How often have we heard about the bootstraps? Give me all that stolen land

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    and stolen labor and see if I don’t have stretch marks from all that pulling. It’s not that there is a deliberate attempt to distort history. It’s that there is such a powerful need in America to maintain a parallel myth of the white man as the hero that it overwhelms actual history and prevents white people from speaking honestly about the past, and therefore taking responsibility for the present. Most damning of all is that white Christians are just as prone to drinking this imperial Kool-Aid as anyone else, and so become incapable of offering genuine confession and repentance. Another obstacle is that the grip that radical individualism has on the Western mind prevents white people from confessing corporately about structural sin and injustice. How many times have we ethnic minorities heard, “My great-grandparents immigrated after the Civil War.” Or, “I’m not a racist-1 have one black friend.” Or, “We’ve always lived in Minnesota and so never owned slaves.” To which my response is, “So we Minnesotans never wore cotton or smoked tobacco?” (Incidentally, I support the continued use of the term “ethnic minority.” Just when we are approaching an era when that term will be used for white people for the first time in American history, we want to change the rules?) How do we boldly and explicitly confess our past so that our memories can be healed? How do we penitently confess that we are still complicit in the structures of injustice that still fund our so-called commonwealth? What does it mean for us to walk humbly with our God and with one another in this time and place, and model a constructive way forward as a beloved community?

    From Martin King to Rodney King Remember the Rodney King incident and the riots that ensued in Los Angeles in 1992? We had 400 years of white racism against blacks, and when black people exploded in anger at the white police brutality finally caught on videotape for all the world to see, it ended up being blacks and Koreans fighting it out in South Central L.A. How did this happen? Koreans started coming to this country in the late 1960s, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. How did Korean immigrants get caught up in the middle of the racial fear and hatred between blacks and whites that goes back to the time when Europeans first stepped foot on this continent in the early 1600s? However, I am not at all suggesting that we Korean people are not culpable in this great American tragedy. Like all immigrants before us, we used the same strategy to “get ahead.” In the mid 1800s, millions of Irish were escaping the great potato famine ravaging their land. American nativists considered them European refuse dirtying up America, literally. They were greeted by angry mobs who shouted, “Go back to Ireland!” and “They’re here to steal our jobs!” Sound familiar? But the Irish immigrants ‘ response was essentially: “We know we’re starving, diseased, uneducated ‘European scum,’ as you say, but at least we’re not black.” After the second generation lost their Irish brogue, they were accepted as “white” and became part of the great American melting pot. Of course, we are well aware that this melting pot only worked for European immigrants and had always intentionally excluded darker skinned Americans. A few decades later after the Irish, the Italians started coming. They were a little darker, a little hairier, but they made the same case: “Hey, we know we’re not as white as the Anglo-Saxons here. And we know we’re from southern Europe and Catholic and not as ‘American, baseball and apple pie’ as you people who have been here before

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    us. We’re not even as ‘white’ as the Irish, but at least we’re not black.” And so in America, Italians got to be white people. In America, even Jews got to be white people over time. Where else in the world could the Jewish people have gained that kind of social acceptance?—what a country! This is no small feat considering the historic bias against new immigrants from the earliest days of our republic. Benjamin Franklin, one of our most illustrious founding fathers, said about the Germans, “Why should the Palatine boors be suffered to swarm into our settlements and, by herding together, establish their language and manners to the exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us, instead of our Anglifying them?” He claimed that the non-English immigrants were not “purely white,” and that the Germans, Russians, and Swedes were of a “swarthy complexion.” However many generations it took, Germans, Swedes, Norwegians, Irish, Italians and Jews all got to be part of melting pot whiteness in America because there was a common target of hatred called blackness. Now what do we do with the middlecolored people, like Latinos and Asians? With racist laws forbidding interracial marriage , third generation Asian Americans looked just as Asian as the first generation. We could lose the accent, but we couldn’t lose our non-European looks. For instance, my Korean wife was born in Montgomery, Alabama, and our children are third generation Korean Americans, but they look just as Korean as their grandparents who came from Korea in 1975. Now here’s the clincher. Even though we Koreans can’t get rid of our Asian-ness enough to enter fully into whiteness in this country, “At least we’re not black.” So here’s the deal we middle-colored people made with the white power structure of this nation: “Let us enter into your elite educational institutions, let us work in your corporations, let us live in your neighborhoods. We know you flee when black people move into your neighborhoods, but hey, slow down. We’re Asians; we’re not black. No, we ‘re not as white as the Europeans, but at least we ‘re not black.” And so we Asian immigrants used the same strategy as every immigrant group before us, stepping on the backs of black people to enter into white privilege. As Asian people who have been offered the crumbs of white privilege in exchange for silence and invisibility, we’ve traded in our birthright of dignity for a bowl of pottage. We have failed to understand that in our day and time, that bowl of pottage is the petty crumbs of empire. We have chosen the path of least resistance rather than the straight and narrow path of solidarity with the poor, the marginalized and the rejected of society. O Lord, how now do we recover our humanity and our prophetic imagination? I think it’s really tragic that the Rodney King incident incited such violence between the African American community and the Korean immigrant community.. .but I understand. The 1970s, ’80s, and early ’90s was the time when many Korean immigrants got their start in low-cost, urban neighborhoods. Now if you go to South Central L.A., hardly any Korean-owned businesses are there as newer immigrants have taken over. You see what I’m saying? Korean immigrants have been here long enough now not to need to be in the poorest neighborhoods. “Well, we’re movin’ on up, to the east side, to a deluxe apartment in the sky….” Y’all ain’t talkin’ ! From a Korean perspective , it was tragic that the Rodney King incident exploded just in that brief moment of immigration history when Koreans owned businesses in South Central L.A. The

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    dream of Martin King seemed to turn into the nightmare of Rodney King. On the other hand, it’s not just a historical accident. It’s a historical pattern that my people were a part of. That it happened to us might be tragic, but that this sort of ethnic conflict occurred at all in the 1990s is indicative of how hidden the structures of racism are on a day-to-day basis. Is this how a new immigrant group becomes “American”? And what does that say about whether we are Christian or not? Are we genuinely Christian when we ourselves participate in this historic pattern of injustice in this country? So I want to conclude by walking humbly with God and with you, my fellow Presbyterian sisters and brothers. On behalf of all Korean immigrants in this country, I apologize to you, my African American sisters and brothers, and ask your forgiveness . On behalf of all Korean immigrants, I also apologize to our Native American sisters and brothers for benefitting from the land that was stolen from you. And on behalf of all Korean Americans, I apologize to my white American sisters and brothers, for when we as Asians gladly exploit the “model minority” myth for our own advantage, we are complicit in perpetuating racial divisions and the dehumanization of us all. I humbly ask all of you: Please forgive me and my people, by the grace of God. And may that same grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion and fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with you all, now and forever. Amen.

  • The resurrection two-step

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    The Resurrection Two-Step

    David Bartlett and George Stroup

    Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia

    George: David, is the Christian understanding of resurrection as exclusively anthropocentric as it sometime appears? Does Christian hope include more than just hope for human beings? Is it also hope for the non-human world as well? Hope for all of God’s creation? Traditionally Christians have understood the basis of their hope to be Jesus Christ’s resurrection. It is, to use Paul’s metaphor, the first fruit of the promise of the resurrection of the dead. But is it only dead humans that will be raised? What about my dog Snoopy who died recently? Should I have hope for him as well? Γ m not sure I want to go to heaven if it is just another faculty meeting. That sounds to me more like hell than heaven. Much of the Christian tradition seems to imply the resurrection is only about human beings. The Apostles’ Creed, for example, affirms “the resurrection of the body,” and The Nicene Creed “the resurrection of the dead.” When the Westminster Confession of Faith (a document dear to both Reformed and Baptists) discusses resurrection in its penultimate chapter, it describes human bodies that die and “see corruption” but on “the last day” are reunited with their souls which neither die nor sleep, but “immediately return to God who gave them.” Most theologians and biblical scholars recognize that this body/soul dualism and the affirmation of the soul’s immortality has more to do with Plato than with the Bible, but even if we revise Westminster’s understanding of human beings, resurrection still seems to refer exclusively to human beings. Everything else is dust to dust and ashes to ashes. Perhaps an exception is the last line of the Nicene Creed which affirms not only “the resurrection of the dead,” but also “the life of the world to come.” But is that life more than just human life? Is “the world to come,” the new heaven and the new earth in Isaiah 66:22 ff. and Revelation 21:1? It is interesting that when Paul discusses resurrection and Christian hope in I Corinthians 15, he makes extensive use of non-human metaphors. In verses 35-41 he uses images of “a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain,” the bodies of animals, birds, and fish, and the sun, the moon, and the stars. How literally should we read Paul? Was he using these examples only to illustrate the glorified, incorruptible human body that will be raised, or was he suggesting that it is not just human beings that will be raised and transformed, but the whole of God’s creation? David: As I understand it, the promise of New Creation guarantees against both facul­ ty and session meetings, though choir practice continues indefinitely. It is the consum­ mation for which every minister of music I know devoutly longs. No sermons, just song. To say at the outset what I’ll probably say again, my reading of Paul is that he is trying to imagine what is barely imaginable in order to persuade the Corinthians of resurrection hope for themselves. In 1 Corinthians 15, I’m inclined to think that he’s using all these analogies as analogies without making any claim about God’s promise for the non-human creation, though by the time he is through, he has largely recapitu-

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    lated all the steps of creation in Genesis 1 and used that story as a kind of parable for our final hope. (And some commentators think that his words about heavenly bodies respond to what some of the Corinthians might have believed, that our immortal selves are made of star-like stuff, and in death we quite literally return to the heavens.) What I think Paul is trying to do is to apply his own experience of the risen Christ to the Corinthians’ own hope and to assure them that as Jesus was Jesus, but not simply the Galilean Jesus with a brighter robe, so the resurrected Corinthians will be themselves—Stephanas and Chloe and so on, but not just the same Stephanas and Chloe. Their resurrected bodies will be driven by God’s spirit and not by their own heart and lungs. In Romans 8, however, there is no question that all creation is caught up in hope— not just for the redemption of the children of God, but for the redemption of the cosmos. What that means for Snoopy or any of our beloved pets is far beyond my ken. Also beyond my ken is what the hope for the redemption of the cosmos means when we look at the stars with much greater accuracy than the writer of Psalm 8 or St. Paul could imagine* We are very small people on a very small planet in a modest sized galaxy, way off in a corner of the known universe. If God is God, God’s intentions must have something to do with everything God has created—not just us. In our hope for New Heaven and New Earth, New Heaven will still be very big and new earth pretty small. George: That’s very helpful. Ever since I first studied these texts as a student at Yale Divinity School, I have been confused about what Christian hope entails and what it does not. David: What was it that confused you? George: I thought we were supposed to hope for a New Haven and a New Earth. David: (silence). George: Well, seriously, it does not sound to me as though you think Paul was much of a systematic theologian. (I suppose there are worse things one could say about another person, but none come readily to mind.) I gather you think Paul’s use of nature metaphors in I Corinthians 15:35-41 does not mean that Paul thought the promise of “the resurrection of the dead” referred to the whole of creation, but only to human beings. In Romans 8:18-25, however, it sounds like Paul has in mind not just the redemption of human beings, but the whole of creation, including puppy dogs. When Paul writes that creation “waits with eager longing” (8:19) and is “groaning in labor pains” (8:22), he seems to reverse what he did in I Corinthians 15:35-41. In the latter text he uses examples from nature to describe Christian hope in the resurrection of the dead, but in Romans 8 he uses examples from human experience to describe God’s redemption of the whole of creation. If Paul were a decent systematic theologian, he would remind the Corinthians that it is not just for this life only that we have hoped (I Cor. 15:19); it is also not just for our own species. After all, there is ample evidence in his letter that the Corinthians had considerable difficulty living together in community. Perhaps it would have helped them to realize that community extends beyond human relationships to include the whole of God’s creation. David: Perhaps Paul thought it was more important to be a faithful Christian than a systematic theologian. George: Perhaps, although that is difficult for me to understand. But regardless of what Paul thought, you make the interesting observation that by the time he has

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    finished his argument in I Corinthians 15, he has “largely recapitulated all the steps of creation in Genesis 1 and used that story as a kind of parable for our final hope.” Could you say a little more about that? David: The clearest clue that Paul has Genesis in mind comes in 1 Corinthians 15:45 where Paul quotes Genesis 2:7 (in the Septuagint): “The first man, Adam, became a living soul.” Then Paul draws the contrast between Adam who merely lives and Christ who not only lives, he gives life. And we live our lives between the first Adam (because we are dust) and the second Adam (because we bear Christ’s image). What I wonder is whether in the preceding paragraph Paul also has the Genesis story in mind—now not Genesis 2, but Genesis 1. We have a list of the different kinds of bodies—seeds that become plants, but also human beings, animals, birds, fish (reversing the order of creation in Gen. 1 ) and then completing the reversal and recapitulation , the bodies of the sun, moon and stars. I think this may actually help your thesis—that when Paul talks about the final hope, he looks not just to humans, but to the whole host of created things to draw his analogies. There’s probably an article in there somewhere, but I realize that this one isn’t it. George: I wonder why Paul’s imagination was drawn to the creation story in order to describe Christ’s resurrection and the nature of Christian hope. Paul seems to insist that there is continuity in Christ’s resurrection between the Jesus who dies on the cross and the Jesus God raises from the dead. In an important sense it is the same person. But he also seems to think there is discontinuity as well. It is the same “body” or soma that is raised—the risen Christ is the crucified Christ— but it also is not the same. “It was sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body” (v. 44) and the perishable body that died is raised imperishable. (I cannot remember whether it was Paul or Handel who wrote that.) Without denying the continuity between the one who was crucified and the one who is raised, it sounds like Paul thinks there is something unprecedented and completely new that happens in Jesus’ resurrection , and in order to describe this novum, this “new creation,” perhaps he is drawn to the creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2. To what extent do you think there is a parallel between God’s act of creation in Genesis and God’s act of “new creation” in Romans 8 and I Corinthians 15? And if there is a parallel, would it not be strange for Paul to limit “new creation” to what God did after lunch on the sixth day (Genesis 1:24-31)? After all, in the NRSV translation of II Corinthians 5:17, Paul writes that “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation.” Interestingly, this translation of the text does not say that only those in Christ are a new creation, although presumably that is intended as well, but that “there is a new creation.” And apparently this new creation is not simply one in which human beings are reconciled to one another, but one in which God is “reconciling the world to himself.” I know you New Testament people have serious reservations about whether Paul wrote Colossians, but if he didn’t, he should have, and, interestingly, in the Christ hymn in 1:15 ff. the Christ who is described in I Corinthians 15 as the “first fruits” (vv. 20,23) is described as “the first born of all creation” (v. 15), suggesting that God’s act of reconciliation is by no means limited to human beings. It is through the crucified and resurrected Christ that God “was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven (v. 20), and “all things” seems to cast a very large net, including not only things that occupy space, but time as well. “He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together….He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead,

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    so that he might come to have first place in everything” (vv. 17-18). If we read these texts in relation to one another (as systematic theologians are wont to do), Christ’s resurrection is the first fruits not only of the resurrection of the dead, but the first fruits of God’s new heaven and new earth, which seems to include the whole of creation. David: Whether or not Paul wrote Colossians, I think you’re right that the claim that Christ is the “firstborn of all creation” picks up on the motif that really is there in Paul, that God in Christ is making a new creation, not only new human creatures. So I want to affirm with you that God’s business is bigger than what God has done, is doing, and intends to do with humans. Having said that, I confess to being entirely agnostic about the details of what that means for particular non-human creatures. To be confessional, I have presided over many burials for humans and a few burials for pets. In the former case I always talk about “the sure and certain hope of resurrection from the dead through Jesus Christ our Lord,” and in the latter case, I never do. When I think of the communion of saints, I never think of the communion of saints and their cats and dogs. Does this mean that at some deep level I am a specie-ist, a person who wants to privilege the human species as racists want to privilege a particular race? Maybe. Looking at it another way, does the hope for a new creation mean the hope for the resurrection of every created thing? My friends in biology tell me that by far the largest species of created things are the beetles. Or do we have a kind of rough estimate of where some kind of genuine intelligence begins—with dogs, cats, and I am told, especially pigs. Are these the animals with “souls,” who therefore can be included in God’s eschatological promise? I end up in far deeper waters than I can navigate. I think we see through a glass very dimly, that when we see face to face, what we will see is the face of God. I pray that we will also see the faces of the people we have loved and lost awhile. I have no idea whether Christian hope extends to the pets of the faithful, too. I do think that for Paul, as for Christians, there are two great interlinked miracles— creation and resurrection— and that we cannot really understand the one without the other. When Paul wants to name God, he brings the two miracles together. (The God in whom Abraham believed) “gives life to the dead and brings into existence the things that do not exist.” (Rom. 4:17). Because of the promise of this God, says Paul, Abraham “hopes against hope.” So do we, I think, without always being able to draw a very clear picture of what we hope for. George: I especially like Romans 4:17 because it seems to provide some basis for the Christian claim that God creates ex nihilo. As you know, many of our Old Testament colleagues howl and tear their hair when theologians try to use Genesis 1 as a basis for the Christian claim that God creates out of nothing—ex nihilo. Paul’s claim that God “gives life to the dead and brings into existence the things that do not exist” will do just fine as a warrant for the claim that God creates ex nihilo. That might suggest that the basis for the Christian claim that God creates ex nihilo is first and foremost Christ’s resurrection and that we should understand Genesis 1:1 -2 in light of Easter. We usually think of nihilo as pertaining to God’s “first” act of creation, but this parallel might suggest it pertains primarily to God’s “last” act of creation—God’s new creation in Jesus’ resurrection and the promise of the same at “the last day” and “the resurrection of the dead”—and it is that giving life to the dead that is basis for our understanding of God’s original bringing into existence “the things that do not exist.” Our Old

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    Testament colleagues will love that one. That raises two additional questions. First, how should we understand death? In the preceding paragraph I suggested that death might be understood as a nihilo or a non-existence. But Paul’s favorite metaphor for death seems to be “sleep.” It is difficult to know precisely what he means by death as sleep, just as it is difficult to know precisely what he means by seeing “face to face” (I Cor. 13:12 ). However, Paul does seem to distinguish between death as “sleep” and death as being no more or “perishing,” and that may suggest that somehow death is not a nihilo. In I Cor. 15:1619 Paul argues that if there is no resurrection of the dead at the last day, then Christ has not been raised and “those who have died [or fallen asleep] in Christ have perished.” But is it only human beings who having lived and died then sleep? Or is there some sense in which all the things that once were but now no longer are also “sleep”? Romans 8:19-23 does seem to affirm that not only dead people, but all of creation, perhaps including “all things” that no longer exist, “waits with eager longing” to be “set free from its bondage to decay.” I suppose one might argue that one significant difference for Paul has to do with what is baptized and what is not. Romans 6:1-11 affirms hope for those who in baptism have been “united with him [Christ] in a death like his” and “will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” Paul does not seem to allow for the baptism of “all things.” Is there a difference between human death and the “death” of non-human creatures, species, stars, suns, moons, galaxies, and dogs? That does, however, raise the question of Christian hope. In its most important sense Christian hope is hope in God, but for Paul isn’t it more than that? It is not just hope for “this life only” (I Cor. 15:19), but hope for “the end,” when Christ will come and hand over “the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power, including death” and the dead will be raised (I Cor. 15:2427 ). Paul’s hope seems to spread out over a large canvas, and I am left wondering how large it is. Does it include hope for the redemption of all of creation? And if so, what does that mean for daily Christian existence? Is Christian hope truly Christian if it is hope only for us and our kind? Is it only for the human world that Christians pray that God’s redeeming will “be done on earth as it is in heaven”? David: In deference to my advanced age, I get the last word for this version of our ongoing discussion. So let me respond to each of your queries briefly. I very much like the suggestion that Christians understand creation in the light of resurrection and not always the other way around. On my most Christocentric days I think we should understand everything in the light of Christ crucified and risen, and there is certainly precedent in John 1 and in Colossians for seeing creation as Christ-shaped—so why not resurrection shaped as well? On the issue of whether resurrection from the dead is really like creation ex nihilo because Paul says that those who are dead are asleep, I remain uncertain. The use of “sleeping” as a euphemism for death by no means originates with Paul, and it may not carry any particular descriptive weight. What Paul does say explicitly is that death is an enemy to be overcome (I Corinthians 15:26,54-57). He may also sometimes imply that death is simply a sign of finitude (as sleep is a sign of physical limits), but he does not ride that one nearly as hard as he rides the claim that Christ’s resurrection and ours are a victory over the real enemy—death. As with so much of 1 Corinthians 15,1 think this claim is based on his reading of Genesis 2 where, counter to many Old Testament

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    interpreters, he believes that the certainty of death is indeed a consequence of disobedience, sin. I am still agnostic on the question of the way in which resurrection might include the non-human creation, but I note with some appreciation your suggestion (also made by Paul Fiddes in his book The Promised End)1 that the resurrection promise is for the Body of Christ—that is the baptized—both communally and individually. I have prayerfully buried some pets, but (fortunately) never baptized one. As it happens my other project for this week is to write a guide for preachers on I John 3:2 where the writer says, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is that we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” I like that because it is modest about what we know and (to coin a phrase) audacious about what we hope. Happy Easter.

    Note

    1 Paul Fiddes, The Promised End (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).

  • In the mean time

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    Page 14

    In the Mean Time*

    Isaiah 65:17-25; 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13; Luke 21:5-19

    Barbara Brown Taylor

    Piedmont College, Demorest, Georgia

    If that was more scripture than you are accustomed to hearing on Sunday morning, you have to remember that I’m from the South, where more people read the Bible than the newspaper. Even those who read both sometimes put more faith in the Bible than the news. They read the headlines for signs of the times. They want to be ready when the last day comes. So I asked for the full dose today—Isaiah’s vision of the new creation, where “the wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox,” and Luke’s vision of the end times, when “nation will rise against nation” in the midst of great earthquakes, famines and plagues. With visions like those kept alive by a holy book, you can’t really blame the biblically literate for wondering if the end time has begun. Whatever was going on in Isaiah’s day, his promises still sound so promising that he could be saying them almost anywhere in the world today. He could be walking through a hospital in Nairobi. (“No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime.”) He could be standing in a refugee camp in Gaza. (“They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.”) Luke could be picking up shrapnel still hot from the latest roadside bomb in Iraq (“Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.”) He could be standing in the smoke of the west coast fires, watching the hills burn though the night like a field of fallen stars. (“There will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.”) Of course people have believed they were living in the end times for thousands of years now—when Vesuvius blew, when Rome fell, when the Great War began, then the next one, when the Twin Towers crumpled, when the tsunami struck, when Katrina hit, when the drought came. Some have even tried to hasten the end by various means, including the drinking of poison, the arming of militias, and the funding of religious groups committed to forcing the apocalyptic timetable they read in scripture. Even if those things are as foreign to you as a tent revival, you still have to decide how to live in a world where frightening things happen as regularly as your heart beats. Oil hits $100 a barrel. The government of Pakistan fails. The makings of a dirty bomb are found in an apartment in Brooklyn. Like most of you, I am pretty well insulated from the more ordinary catastrophes of human life on earth. Kids don’t shoot each other with illegal handguns where I live. If I need an operation, my insurance will cover most of it. When I run out of food, I go buy some more. I do not take any of these privileges for granted, but I know there are things they cannot shield me from. How do you drink your second cup of coffee while scientists log record-breaking heat waves? How do you get in your twenty minutes on the tread-

    * This sermon was preached on November 17,2007 at The Memorial Church, Harvard University.

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    mill while the US and Russia line up on Iran? Especially if you are a person of faith— how do you live between the visions of Luke and Isaiah without turning away from a world that seems bent on its own destruction? How do you live in the mean time without losing heart? As urgent as these questions are, there is nothing new about them. Christians have been asking them for as long as they have expected Jesus to return, which they started doing even before he had died. When nation rose against nation, he told them they should not be afraid. When they received word of natural disaster, of food shortage, and galloping sickness unto death, they should raise their heads so they did not miss “the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory” (Luke 21.27). When they saw these things taking place, he told them they would know their redemption was drawing near. “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away” (Luke 21:32-33). That was comforting, for a while. But by the time Paul started writing letters to the earliest churches some twenty years later, people wanted to know what had happened to Jesus. The terrible stuff was right on schedule. Pilate had been relieved of duty for killing too many people. The emperor Claudius had expelled all Jews from Rome. The hostile divorce between church and synagogue was well underway, along with a Jewish revolt against Rome that would fail spectacularly. And yet as hard as the faithful searched the clouds, the sky stayed empty for them. They were dying for some sign of a savior. They were dying with no sign of a savior, and they were losing heart. Paul had a lot to say to them, but almost none of it was as strange as what he wrote to the Thessalonians (in a passage I might never have found if it had not been paired with the other two for this Sunday). “Keep away from believers who are living in idleness,” he wrote them. “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat. For we hear that some of you are living in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work. Now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living. Brothers and sisters, do not be weary in doing what is right.” Now that is truly odd. The world is falling apart, Jesus is AWOL, the Thessalonians are losing heart, and Paul responds by commanding them to get out and earn a living. No more idle lunches at the soup kitchen. No more sitting around each other’s kitchen tables reading the Bible and getting into everyone else’s business. If you don’t work, you don’t eat! Paul doesn’t eat anyone’s bread without paying for it, he says, and neither should you. So wherever you are going for Thanksgiving dinner, be sure to take your checkbooks. The suggested donation for Christians is $35 per person. What can this possibly mean? Was Martha right after all, breaking a sweat in the kitchen while her sister Mary sat idly at Jesus’ feet? Were the disciples wrong to leave their fishing nets in order to follow an unemployed carpenter’s son from Galilee? Should everyone at the feeding of the five thousand have put money in the breadbaskets before they took anything out? I don’t think Paul was thinking about any of that. I think he was thinking about the church in Thessalonica, where some people were giving up on the world. Their faithful expectations had come to nothing. They had been watching the clouds so long that their necks hurt. They were so convinced of the futility of their actions, so alienated from their government, so at odds with their pagan neighbors, so disap-

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    pointed in God that the most faithful thing many of them could think of to do was to resign from life and focus their attention on the end. So what if the cupboard goes bare? There is usually a neighbor willing to send a plate of leftovers. So what if drought makes drinking water cost as much as gas? There is nothing to be done. So what if the local economy fails, the schools can’t afford books, the banks take back people’s houses, and all the doctors move away? This is the way of the world, and the world is doomed. If Paul got exercised about attitudes like these, it was because he knew what idleness can do to a human soul, not to mention a whole church. It isn’t just a matter of lying around on the couch watching reruns of Grey’s Anatomy while moss grows in the toilet bowl or staying home on election day because nothing’s going to change anyway. Idleness is a matter of surrendering interest in this world. It is a matter of divesting from the things that make this world go—business, government, neighborhoods , schools—and counting on God or other people to pick up the slack. Idleness is a failure of purpose, a failure of nerve. It is a grave misunderstanding of the God who means to redeem this world, not abandon it. When Paul saw it going on in Thessalonica, he kicked a word I cannot say in church. He told people to get up off their *bleeps* and get back to work. He pointed to his own hard work as an example to be imitated. He commanded them “in the Lord Jesus Christ” to do their work quietly and earn their own livings. He told them not to be weary in doing what is right. These verses have been put to wretched use by those opposed to social welfare, just as other verses from Paul have been used to oppose emancipation for slaves and women and to keep gay and lesbian people in the balcony at church. Paul comes in so handy on issues like these that plenty of people have written him off as an outdated apostle, too bound to his own time to help us much in ours. Does anyone here, for instance, really have a serious problem with idleness? I doubt it. This church includes some of the busiest, most involved people I know—which means that at least some of you have come to the wisdom that busyness is as soul-deadening as idleness. Done hard enough, busyness can be just another way of dealing with despair. When God doesn’t come, work harder. When the world wobbles on its axis, clean all your closets right down to the baseboards. When you are convinced there is nothing you can do to change the weather, the White House, or the war, go shopping. CreateanotheryouonSecondlife.com/. Shrink the circle of your concern to your own welfare. There are all kinds of ways to divest from the world. I don’t know what Paul might say in his first letter to the Cambridgians. He might have to live here a little while or at least hear some reports from Timothy or Silas before he decided what we needed to hear before we could really hear the gospel, but I do not think that our spiritual condition would be unknown to him. He too lived in the mean time. He lived with high expectations of God, of himself, and of the world that crashed on a regular basis. He was under no illusion that he had control over anything. Neither idle nor busy-busy-busy, he chose something more like engagement—walking 10,000 miles during the last decade of his life—all the while believing that the Christ would return any second. Paul was no stranger to despair; yet he never checked out. “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat. For we hear that some of you are living in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work. Now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living.

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    Brothers and sisters, do not be weary in doing what is right.” It is a very odd Christian teaching, but there it is. Paul was apparently convinced that God meant to redeem this world, not to abandon it, and that the best way for God’s people to remember that was to stay invested in the messy, unspiritual, and often futile activities of ordinary human life on earth, such as earning a living, dealing with less than perfect jobs, managing money, and making out grocery lists. Investment in the world is not optional. When the Christ finally appears in the clouds, better he should catch us vacuuming up the cat hair or rubbing our eyes at the computer than lying in unmade beds reading books on spirituality while the bills go unpaid and the weeds take over the yard—or (Paul might have added if he had spent some time with us) being mere busy bodies, multi-tasking our ways into oblivion while this world God so loves suffers the consequences of our self-absorption. “Do not be weary in doing what is right,” he says, without telling us what right is. I guess he trusts we can figure that out, at least if we stay engaged with the world and each other. For thousands of years now, that is how God’s people have survived the mean time without losing heart. And lo! Here we still are, with today’s fresh chance to do what is right.

  • Down by the river

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    Down by the River

    Genesis 32:22-32

    Thomas G. Long

    Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

    We should have known, shouldn’t we, that it would have come to this. We should have known that we would find old Jacob out there, down by the river bank, fighting as usual. We should have known that we would find Jacob in the darkness, sweating, wrestling, and brawling as always. It was in his nature, in his DNA. Sometimes you can tell from the very beginning how a person will develop, what character will emerge. Years ago when I was pastor of a church in Atlanta, I had in my congregation a family who had a troubled teenage daughter. She was having a hard time growing up. She is now, I’m happy to report, a grown woman and doing quite well. But in those days she was struggling, always in trouble. She was in trouble at home, in trouble with teachers at school, occasionally in trouble with the police. After one of her scrapes with the law — it wasn’t her first and it wouldn’t be her last — her mother said to me in the midst of the turmoil, “I knew it would turn out this way. She was different from the other children from the day she was born. I knew when she was an infant that she was going to demand a lot of attention, that she was always going to be trouble.” Well, so it was with Jacob. One could see trouble coming from the day he was born. As a matter of fact, he was trouble even before he was born. In his mother’s womb, the child that was to be Jacob was already brawling, fighting, and wrestling with his twin brother. You may remember that his mother Rebekah was not even sure she was going to be able to become pregnant. For a long time she thought she was infertile. She and her husband Isaac prayed desperately that she would become pregnant. Well, as they say, be careful what you pray for, because the result of Rebekah’s prayer was that she ended up carrying twins, and one of them was a wrestler. Rebekah knew he was trouble even from the beginning. In fact he wrestled so vigorously with his twin brother and created such distress for Rebekah that she cried out in lament to God, “If this is what it means to be pregnant, I don’t want it. As a matter of fact, if this is what it means to be pregnant, I’m not even sure I want to live.” To put it mildly, Jacob was what we would today call a “problem pregnancy,” but Rebekah pushed her way through it, and finally the two boys were born. The first boy was born with a red complexion and hairy. They took one look at him and named him Esau. There is a little bit of a play on words here in the Hebrew, but his name means something like “red stuff.” The second born came out of the womb wrestling and fighting. In fact, he took hold of his brother Esau’s foot and was trying to pull him back into the womb, to wrestle him back so that he could be born first, instead of Esau. His parents took one look at that act of aggression, ambition, and competition, and they named him Jacob, which means “the heel grabber,” “the barroom brawler,” the “wrestler,” the “fighter.” P. T. Barnum once famously said that there is a sucker born every minute. Well Jacob already knew that. In fact there was a sucker born just the minute before he was,

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    his twin brother Esau, and Jacob spent most of his childhood mastering the art of conning his slightly older brother. “Take a card, Esau, any card.” By the time that they were young men, Jacob had managed to weasel his brother’s inheritance, to deceive their father Isaac, and to wrestle away from his brother the blessing rightfully due him because he was the oldest. Jacob was a con artist extraordinaire. Soon he moved from trifling with his family of origin and onto richer territory. He pretended to be a naïve innocent to his future father in-law Laban and wound up at the end of the day with not only two of his daughters, but also with Laban’s best livestock and most of his money. By the time we catch up with him in our story, Jacob is on the lam running barely a step ahead of his creditors and his enemies. In worship we sometimes have prayers that begin, “O God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Do we really have any idea what we are saying, invoking Jacob’s name over our prayers? This guy is a con artist, a flimflam man. He can steal the bullet out of your gun before you can shoot him. His whole life embodies what Woody Allen said to defend himself when he decided to have an affair with Mia Farrow’s adopted teenage daughter: “The heart wants what it wants.” And when it wants what it wants, it wrestles life and anything that gets in the way to the ground in order to get it. We should have known it would have come to this: old Jacob wrestling and fighting beside the river. It is in his DNA. It is in his nature. Do we really know what we are saying when we pray to the god of Jacob? As a matter of fact, in the deepest part of our hearts, I think we do know what we are saying when he pray in Jacob’s name, because we recognize our own stories in his. Jacob is not just the man Jacob; he is Israel, the people of God. And he is not just Israel; he is all of us, all human beings. In our hearts, human beings are wrestlers and brawlers and fighters. That is essentially what God told Rebecca when she complained about her pregnancy. God said that it was not just two babies that were struggling in Rebekah’s womb. It was the divided human condition struggling there. It was not just two babies; it was two nations. It was Israel and Edom, hunters and gatherers, farmers and ranchers, red states and blue states, old light and new light, liberals and conservatives. It’s “Momma always liked you better.” “Yeah,but you were the apple of Daddy’s eye.” It is the human struggle at war, and Jacob epitomizes it. And all of us are Jacob because our hearts want what they want, and we will wrestle life to the ground to get it. As biblical scholar Terry Fretheim once said of this story, “Well, there is Jacob. Take him or leave him, and the astonishing thing about this story is that God takes him.” What God does is take Jacob the con man and transform him into Jacob the human being. Jacob believes that he can seize what he wants by the dint of his own strength. We see him, swaggering toward the promised land, boasting of his own strength, his fists gnarled, ready to brawl his way forward. In fact, the only thing standing between him and the promised land is the river Jabok and a mysterious stranger. And this makes all the difference. One day, after chapel at the seminary where I was teaching, I was walking across campus, and one of my students hailed me, “Dr. Long, I need a word with you.” I said, “I’m going to get a cup of coffee; do you want to join me?” And she did. When we got our coffee, she said, “Here is what I want to talk to you about. My supervising field education pastor is making me preach next Sunday.” Preaching professor that I am, I said, “Good.”

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    “No, it is not good. He is making me preach the lectionary.” Again, I said, “Good.” She said, “It is not good. Have you read the lectionary passages for next week? They are about judgment. I don’t believe in judgment. I believe in love. I believe in mercy. I believe in kindness. It took me three years of therapy to get over judgment. I am not going to preach judgment.” We talked about that for a while, to no avail, and then she changed the subject. She wanted to tell me about her family. She and her husband were having a problem. It was their youngest son, the last to be at home. He was in trouble. He was giving them trouble. She said, “We don’t even know his whereabouts most of the time. For example , last night my husband and I were having supper. We didn’t know where my son was. We think he’s involved with drugs; we just don’t know where he is or what we’re up against. All of a sudden, in the middle of supper, the door swings open and there he is. I said, ‘Would you like some supper?’ He looked like he was going to spit, stalked down the hall to his room, and slammed the door. My husband got up and turned on ESPN. That is what he does always in this situation. It is the way he always responds. But something got into me,” she said. “I got up from the table and walked trembling down the hall. I am afraid of my own son, physically afraid of my own son. When I got to his room, I pushed open the door, and I said to him, ‘Now you listen to me. I love you so much I am not going to put up with this anymore.’” I said to her, “I think you just preached a wonderful sermon on judgment.” That is what judgment is. It is not God punishing us; it is God setting things right. It is God saying to us, “I love you so much I am not going to put up with this anymore.” The great theologian Karl Barth once said, “Do not fear the wrath of God; fear the love of God, for the love of God will strip away everything that stands between you and God.” There by the river Jabok, the love of God ambushed proud Jacob. We don’t know everything that happened there, but we do know what came out of it at the end. Jacob, the old street brawler, the old wrestler, got up changed and walked away with a limp. He got up transformed; he got up with a new name; he got up with a blessing to carry with him into the promised land. I had my own little brush with the law recently. After filling up my car with gas, I had to drive across four lanes of traffic to get into the left-hand turn lane. I darted across the lanes, but suddenly the light changed to red, the traffic stopped, and I found myself with the nose of my car in one lane and the tail of my car in another. I looked in the rearview mirror and there were police lights behind me. The policeman got out and said, “Do you know what you did wrong?” “No, I don’t,” I answered. He said, “You are impeding the flow of traffic.” When you are a young man you get a ticket for speeding in a convertible. When you are my age, you get one for being in the way, impeding the flow of traffic. He wrote out the ticket and said to my question of what have I done wrong, “You have violated section 62.130 of the Georgia code.” “What is that?” I asked. “Look it up in the library,” he said, thrusting my citation through the window. I am a Jacob-style wrestler. I was not going to take this sitting down. I went to the library, I looked it up, I read the language of the code, and I came to a firm conclusion: I did not impede the flow of traffic. Technically speaking, I was not impeding the flow

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    of traffic, not according to the exact language of the law. So I went to the law school library, and I did a Lexus Nexus on this section of the law. I got case law, I got background, I got definitions, and by the time my trial date came around, I had a file folder two inches thick that proved that I was innocent. On the day of my trial, the judge called my name. “Would you please approach the bench.” I picked up my file folder, flexing my Jacobean muscles, and walked up to the bench. The judge said, “The officer who arrested you is no longer employed by the county. There is no one here to bear witness against you. You are free to go.” Something in me wanted to say, “You can’t dismiss my case like this ! I have a file folder that says I’m innocent!” Suddenly I realized, Jacob that I am, I’d rather be right than free. I’d rather win the fight than be blessed by grace. So down at the river Jabok, the mysterious stranger wrestles me and you to the ground. Who was the stranger? Was it divine? Was it human? Was it Jacob wrestling himself? Was it Esau? Was it Isaac? Old victims of his deceit returned in his imagination for revenge? Was it God? Was it all of the above? We don’t know. All we do know is that when Jacob got through with the experience, he recognized that God was somewhere in it. “I have seen God face to face and I have lived and I have ablessing.” So look, if you are trying to find God. Don’t just look in the Bethels, the shrines, and the sanctuaries. Look in the Jaboks, too. Don’t just look in the mountain top experiences; look in the struggles as well. I think it is very important that the Christian life does not begin at Bethel. The Christian life does not begin with a magnificent anthem or an inspiring sermon or a moving worship service or fantastic buildings with stained glass. The Christian life begins with baptism, where God says to all of us, “OK Wrestler, I’ll meet you down at the river.” All we know is when we walk through the waters, we’ve got a limp, a new name, and a blessing. I went to the grocery store the other day. I hate to grocery shop. It is one of my least favorite things to do. Causing me to be even more irritated was the fact that I ran into some people that were actually enjoying their grocery shopping. It was a mother and her young son, and they had learned how to make a game out of this. What they did was, she had a list and she would read the next item off the list, aluminum foil,paper towels. He knew exactly which brand she wanted. He would run around the store till he found it and came back bearing it like a trophy. She would applaud, smile, give him the next item off the list, and off he would go. You know how it is in the grocery store; you are going to meet people several times if you meet them once. About the fourth aisle over it dawned on me: the little boy was mentally disabled. She caught me staring at them. “I was just admiring your relationship with your son,” I said. “Yes” she said. “He is a blessing from God.” I don’t know how many river Jaboks she has been through. All I know is she is on the other side of the water, standing in the promised land with a blessing from God.

  • Lent: a time to intensify our living into Christ

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    Lent: A Time to Intensify Our Living into Christ

    Elizabeth McGregor Simmons Davidson College Presbyterian Church, Davidson, North Carolina

    The fall of 2008 flung Americans onto an economic roller coaster ride like none other in recent memory. A seven-day plummet in the Dow, a one-day meteoric leap, a dizzying series of dips and rises had American Christians hanging onto their pews for dear life, clinging for some sense of spiritual stability as the raucous midway din of presidential campaign rhetoric assailed their eardrums. It is impossible for this author to peer into a homiletic crystal ball to discern the precise contexts in which sermons of Lent 2009 will be preached. However, at the writing of this article, prognostications are that the new President and Vice President, whoever they may turn out to be, will have inherited a full plate of economic challenges, a war, and perhaps even additional monumental troubles beside which these former crises pale. In the congregations to which readers of this journal preach, it is entirely possible that jobs will have been lost, retirees’ savings and seminary endowments eroded, and church budgets cut. With anxiety abounding all around and not least in the hearts of us preachers, we are left with no choice but to throw ourselves facedown before the throne of our merciful God, pleading that we will be given the faith and courage to proclaim Good News which 1. keeps the big picture of God’s love for all in full view. A photograph on the front page of the metro section of a local newspaper etched onto the mind’s eyes of readers the searing image of 156 people who queued up on a weekday morning between 4:30 a.m. and 8 a.m. outside a community crisis assistance agency, waiting for the doors to swing open on the possibility of a utility bill paid or a sack of groceries proffered. Whatever Good News a preacher preaches from these Lenten texts must ring as true in the food pantry line as it does in the suburban Bible study group. Perhaps one blessing of an economic downturn is that it offers us the possibility of clearing our vision so that those we have formerly labeled “other” now become fellow passengers in the same boat, as together we are buffeted about by troubled economic waters, our hearts and lives shaken open to receive anew the transforming power of the God whom we know in Jesus Christ. 2. provides gracious sanctuary for worried, wearied souls. A few days after Congress passed its economic rescue plan, a banker approached his pastor and confided, “The hour I spend in worship has never been more important to me. The Word that I hear carries me through the turmoil of my week. Especially now, I need to be reminded of a constantly loving God who will never abandon me.” The struggles of our congre-gants are real, and in this reality, pastors are challenged to listen to them and to the Spirit deeply and prayerfully in order that our sermons might bear a nonanxious witness, conveying the peace of Jesus Christ which passes all understanding. 3. is a faithful prophetic Word. My colleague Kathy Beach-Verhey bravely prayed recently, “Lord God, this financial crisis highlights our love of and dependence on money, and as people of faith, this helps us to call into question our values and priorities… .Loosen our bonds to our money and our material possessions we pray,

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    Lord God, at the same time that we pray for you to calm our anxious hearts and minds.” The desires of our pastors’ hearts to embrace the hurts of our congregants ought not make us hesitant to speak of their and our complicity in the injustice which the God of the widow and the orphan confronts.

    Lent is a time to take the time to let the power of our faith story take hold of us, a time to let the events get up and walk around in us a time to intensify our living into Christ… }

    Lent I-Mark 1:9-15 It was a barren place. The rocks were bare and jagged. Hills of sand dotted the landscape. It was the wilderness. And it was into the wilderness that the Spirit of God hurled Jesus. Hmmm…. Isn’t the Spirit of God supposed to lead people into lush, sunlit, happy places? Ask any parent what she desires for her children, and she is apt to respond, “Ah, I want them to be happy.” Surely God, the perfect Parent, would want the same for Jesus. But apparently not. The Spirit of God may have descended upon Jesus at his baptism, giving him a divine A+, but now the same Spirit gives him a swift hard kick into a place where problems loom large and people feel utterly alone. In Matthew and Luke Jesus is “led” by the Holy Spirit, which conjures up a picture of a dewy-eyed child trustingly placing his hand into the hand of a buxom, grandmotherly Holy Spirit or a trust walk at a youth group meeting. In contrast, Mark writes that the Spirit “drove” Jesus into the wilderness , which brings to mind not a white dove gently fluttering over Jesus’ head, but a huge black raven flapping its wings with tornado-like fury, dive-bombing Jesus and snatching him up in its needle-sharp beak by the tag of his robe and dropping him with a thud into the middle of the desert and a flght-to-the-death battle with the very forces of evil. Mark paints a picture of the wilderness place where people who are serious about living the Christian faith are of necessity driven. Then he concludes this little narrative by painting a picture of community in verse 13: “Wild animals were [Jesus’] companions , and angels took care of him.” (The Message) It is a tiny glimpse of God’s cosmic community, if you will : the animals, the angels, and a human being, Jesus, who represents all human beings, all a part of each other, keeping each other faithful in the midst of the wilderness.

    Lent II-Mark 1:21-28 Note how the gospel writer describes Jesus’ body language. The scene progresses in this way: Jesus teaches. It’s sobering stuff about suffering and rejection and dying, so Peter reacts, wagging a long, bony finger of rebuke under Jesus’ nose. What happens next is interesting. Mark writes, “But turning and looking at the disciples, Jesus rebuked Peter.” In other words, Jesus swivels around toward the disciples, which may be the gospel writer’s way of s wiveling around toward the church

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    and extending an arm in order to sweep all who are the church into the scene in order to make sure that when Jesus gets to the part about denying oneself and picking up the cross and following, Christians of every age are to know that these words are intended for their ears as well as for those who heard or read them in the first century. What has often happened, however, is that as Jesus’ words have made the journey from the church’s ears to Christians’ mouths and from Christians’ mouths out into the world, they have been spoken in some twisted ways with devastating results. How many times has a woman who is struggling with whether to stay in or leave a situation of spousal abuse been heard to say, “My pastor told me that this is my cross to bear,” or “I know that I am supposed to deny myself for the sake of my kids if I am a good Christian, but I don’t know how much longer I can take it”? Whenever Scripture is used, or rather, misused, to keep people in slavery or to manipulate someone into living in any way that is less than whole, we may be assured that “the Son of Man will be ashamed” (v. 38) of those who make the claim that they are his body. Mark 8: 31-38 calls us away from such shame, however. The passage draws us into being the true and faithful Body of Christ, a body which is willing to lay down our very lives for the sake of others. There is a lot of suffering in the world. And sometimes our hearts break from the weight of our own suffering or the suffering of ones who are near and dear to us. For Christians who seek to follow the vocation of Christ which he elucidates in Mark 8, however, our own suffering is placed within a larger context, a context which is much vaster than simply “us.” We are not the only ones in pain, and indeed, when one considers the people who are hungry in the world and compare the lack in their diets to the amount of food that most American Christians have in our pantries and refrigerators and at church potluck dinners, then, at the very least, we are granted some sense of proportion regarding our own suffering. But Jesus gives us much more than a sense of proportion. He gives us a calling, a vocation which he himself empowers in us, in which the breaking of our own hearts becomes a cross-shaped bridge which connects into the suffering and, ultimately, the healing of others.

    Untili-John 2:13-22 People call the story, “The Cleansing of the Temple.” If we didn’t know better, we might conjure up an entirely different scenario involving Windex, Comet, or Pledge upon hearing the title. This story is no quaint domestic scene, however. Here we don’t find Jesus engaged in a flurry of light housekeeping activity, but in a mad rampage around the Temple courtyard. In his hands is not a dust cloth, but a whip of cords. He isn’t shoving dust bunnies out from under the bookcase, but shoving moneychangers away from their desks. When he has finished with his task of cleansing, the fresh clean scent of lemon oil can’t be detected anywhere. The cattle are loose, the doves are squawking, and the people are upset. The people are mad, but they aren’t as mad as Jesus. Jesus is very mad, because the people who are in charge of the Temple have been way too concerned about mere housekeeping. Shaken by the political turmoil of being under Roman rule, the keepers of the Jewish tradition were into survival. They were holding onto their institutions for dear life, contenting themselves with housekeeping matters like changing Roman

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    coins into shekels and making sure that there was a good selection of sheep and doves for the worshippers. Into this scene, Jesus thrusts himself. Turning over tables. Upsetting the conventional ways of doing things. Attacking what they understand religion to be. Doing everything he can to move them from a superficial to a deeper, truer understanding of what it means to be rightly related to God. How is Jesus tearing into your life, confronting you with the robust heartiness of his truth? How is he pulling the rug out from under the communion table of your church and sending the table of your denomination toppling out of the chancel in his anger at how much time is spent on mere housekeeping? How is Jesus turning over the tables of your and your congregation’s survival mentality with amazing newness and power?

    Lent IV-John 3:14-21 This passage contains that most-often-taught-in-Sunday School, most-frequentlyplacarded -at-sporting-events Bible verse, “For God so loved the world….” Most Christians can quote John 3:16 at the drop of a hat. That’s good, for the verse and the story of which it is a part speak eloquently of God’s love for the cosmos. The Gospel according to John got written down back in the day when Christianity was just getting formed in an organized religion sense. Many for whom it was written still mostly thought of themselves as Jews, but they were Jews who had either stomped out of or gotten kicked out of the traditional synagogue because they believed in Jesus, and they were hurting from the nasty things that the people in the synagogue across the street were saying about them…how they were the kind of people whose kids you couldn’t let your kids play with because, you never know, they believed all kinds of weird things, and if you didn’t keep a close eye on them, they might just up and serve your kids ham sandwiches when they came inside for a snack or something terrible like that. It hurts to have people feel that way about you, so to hear that they weren’t condemned by God like they were condemned by their neighbors, but in fact were loved by God beyond their imagining was a very heartening thing. It was heartening for those first-century folk to hear, and it’s been heartening for Christians to hear ever since. That’s the upside of the story. The downside of the story is that when people say nasty things about you, sometimes what you do out of the hurt and anger that you feel is retaliate by saying nasty things right back about them. There is something of this going on in the Nicodemus story. Readers are told that Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night, and that tiny fact—that this respected leader of the Pharisees could no more walk up and ring Jesus’ doorbell in broad daylight than the Pope could casually drop in at a Planned Parenthood board meeting for a friendly chat over lunch—is a clue that while Nicodemus hadn’t journeyed very far in a physical sense to meet with Jesus, he was, nevertheless, miles outside of his religious comfort zone. This detail about Nicodemus coming to meet Jesus in the dark is also a little retaliatory dig on the part of the narrator. Nicodemus may be a great Jewish leader, but he is “in the dark” (wink, wink) and so, by virtue of association, is everybody else in the evil-deed-doing synagogue across the street. At the same time that Christians are being heartened by the assurance that God loves the whole cosmos beyond their greatest imagining and Jesus is the supreme

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    expression of this love, it’s important that they be reminded by their preachers where the condemnatory language about people who don’t believe in Jesus comes from, so that the story isn’t tipped over and the downside becomes the upside2

    Lent V-John 12:20-33 “Sir, we would see Jesus.” These words were inscribed on a small brass plate mounted on the seminary chapel pulpit at the precise spot where they would catch the eye of every student, every professor, every visiting lecturer who stood there to preach. “Sir???! ! !” sputtered the women students to one another and to any sympathetic and long-suffering male classmates who would listen. It is a bit amusing for one of those students, now mellowed into middle age, to think back to the 1970’s and how uncomfortable that brass plaque made her. And yet honesty would force her to admit that when nudged by a writing assignment to come face to face with John 12’s “Sir, we would see Jesus,” she is still uncomfortable, although for a different reason altogether. On a plaque on a pulpit, as an admonition to a preacher, the words seem to be implying, “The gospel is simple. Just proclaim it in its purity and simplicity, and people will see Jesus.” However, the gospel is never simple. How do people see Jesus when the news which pounces onto the screen when one logs onto the internet, morning coffee in hand, roars war and economic turmoil? How do people see Jesus while standing at a graveside as the minister intones, “Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” into the emptiness of their grief? The gospel of Jesus Christ is rarely, if ever, simple, and thus, it is reassuring to read John 12:20-33 on the Fifth Sunday in Lent. Belief in Jesus did not seem simple in that long-ago day either. Some Greeks approach the disciples, the ones who know Jesus best, and the visitors say, “Sir, we would like to see Jesus.” And you never saw such scurrying around. Do the disciples know who Jesus is or don’t they? Are they too embarrassed or unsure or shy to point the way to Jesus with clarity and eloquence? It would seem so. And there is a voice from heaven. Is it thunder? Or is it an angel? Some of those who were there said one thing. Others who were there said another. Were they really doing their best to hear God’s voice, but simply couldn’t quite make it out? It would seem so. And then there is Jesus himself. Even in John’s Gospel, where Jesus is more omniscient than he is in the other gospels, Jesus himself owns up to a troubled soul. Is he doubtful? Is he afraid? Yes, it would seem so. And yet, he goes forward to the hour of his own death. And moving forward, he adds an incredibly gracious word for all who doubt, for all who are afraid, for all who find it difficult to believe: “I, when I am lifted up, will draw all peoples to myself.” Shortly after Joanna Adams became pastor at North Decatur Presbyterian Church, a long-time member and elder, sixty-five years old, first killed his thirty-one year old son and then shot and killed himself. The son had been diagnosed with schizophrenia eight years earlier, had ceased taking his medication, and had become more and more violent. The father had become deeply concerned that his son would hurt someone else. In the sermon which Joanna Adams preached at the memorial service for the two of them, she said, “The Reformed theologian Karl Barth said that people come to

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    church on the Sabbath with only one question in their minds: Is it true?…When we come to church on a Monday afternoon for a memorial service of two people who died untimely deaths, the question is even more compelling. Is it true? Can God be trusted on a day like today?” After forthrightly winding through all the painful questions which such tragedy spawns, Joanna Adams said, “We are not dealing today with a God who comes around only when things are rosy and the birds are singing. There is a cross up there ! The God we know in Jesus Christ knows about suffering. The God we know in Jesus Christ gets to the valley of death, gets to loss, to doubt, before we get there, so that He is ready to catch us when we stumble blindly in, so that He can guide us through the dark…. It is true that God can be trusted.”3 It is true that Christ draws all people to himself. Whether one finds it easy or difficult to believe, whether the thought of death rarely crosses one’s mind or whether one is staring death in the face, Christ is drawing all to himself. Thanks be to God.

    Notes

    1. Ann Weems, Kneeling in Jerusalem (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1992), 20. 2.1 am indebted to Ronald J. Allen and Clark M. Williamson, Preaching the Gospels Without Blaming the Jews: A Lectionary Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004), 29-30, for raising this caution. 3. Joanna Adams, “The Only Question,” in A Chorus of Witnesses, ed. Thomas G. Long and Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1994), 267-270.

  • Preaching on forgiveness

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    Preaching on Forgiveness

    John Patton

    Atlanta, Georgia

    In thinking about preaching on forgiveness there are many issues to take into account. This article is designed to touch on a number of them. Although I make use of a number of psychological sources in this article, I am convinced that the most important way to interpret forgiveness is theological. The Lord’s Prayer reminds us that human forgiveness and God’s forgiveness are inseparable. Thus it is important for the preacher to deal with forgiveness theologically and not get side-tracked onto views that are simply psychological or behavioral. Some years ago I wrote about forgiveness. At the time the book was written I was doing a great deal of counseling with individuals, couples and families who were troubled with family relationships. I found that many of those with whom I worked made explicit use of forgiveness as an interpretive concept for their experience but insisted that they could never forgive the one who had so deeply hurt them. They were unable to respond either to the threats they had heard about what might happen to them if they did not forgive or to the affirmations of how “good for them” forgiveness was. There were others who claimed that they had forgiven the offender, but their forgiveness seemed so easily accomplished that I had difficulty believing them. On a number of occasions I found myself thinking, “I’m sure that I believe in God’s forgiveness, but I sometimes wonder if human forgiveness is really possible.” Popular wisdom—what everyone knows or assumes—seems to tell us that forgiveness is a good thing, something a person ought to be able to do and that doing it will be good for them. Some of the popular literature about it is more “preachy” than most preaching. Forgiveness is often proclaimed quite dogmatically as thinking and doing the right thing. When a person learns how to “think right,” according to one author, it contributes to proper rest, diet, exercise and other health habits. One author even insists that there is an immutable mental and spiritual law that when there is a health problem, there is a forgiveness problem; therefore, you must forgive if you want to be permanently healed. “There is nothing unpleasant or embarrassing about the act of forgiveness,” says another self-help “preacher” of forgiveness. “In most instances, you need make no outer contact with those involved in your forgiveness act, unless the occasion arises that demands it. The only requirement is that you willingly speak words of forgiveness, and let those words do their cleansing work.” “If you have a problem, you have something to forgive. If you experience pain, you have a need to forgive. If you find yourself in unpleasant circumstances, you have a need to forgive. If you find yourself in debt, you have a need to forgive. Where there is suffering, unhappiness, lack, confusion or misery of any sort, there is a need to forgive.” That is a pretty extreme statement, but it illustrates how strong convictions about forgiveness can be. In the years since my book was written, the psychologists seem to have “discovered ” forgiveness, and there has been a tremendous amount of psychological literature on the topic. Much of it is interesting to read, and it is written by authors who seem almost as enthusiastic about what forgiveness can do as the self-help writers I mentioned earlier.

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    One of the major contributors to the psychological research on forgiveness is the Templeton Foundation. Unlike most other fimds-granting agencies that support scientific research under a presumption that such research will be objective, the Templeton Foundation has sometimes challenged social scientists to design research that would demonstrate the usefulness of forgiveness, a challenge reminiscent of drug companies who do research on the effectiveness of their own products. I question that as an appropriate strategy for research,but the major psychological disagreement I have with what I have read of the Templeton material is based on my conviction that healing grows out of relationship rather than any particular act that is supposed to be good for you. Another thing I have noticed in the psychological literature—although again I must say that I have read only a small portion of it—is that much of it ignores the powerful dynamic of shame and its influence on forgiveness. What has been most powerful in the experience of persons I observed struggling with forgiveness is the shame that these persons experienced as a result of the abuse and injustices they had suffered. Shame was not a word that they used to describe what they had experienced. Shame is something that is difficult to acknowledge. What these persons did acknowledge , however, was the fact that they did not feel that they were the same persons they were before the injustice or injury took place. Perhaps the person they were before the injury could have forgiven those who had hurt them, but the person they were afterward was estranged from his or her former identity and, thus, in no position to forgive. In considering the impact of shame on forgiveness, it is important to note that the shame experienced by persons I worked with in pastoral counseling resulted not only from the personal injury they had experienced, but also from the shame they had incorporated from what they understood their religious tradition to be saying to them. One striking example of this comes from a commentary on the New Testament Gospel of Matthew that is still used for personal religious devotion and study by members of the major Protestant denominations. In his discussion of the Lord’s Prayer, the author states:

    Jesus says in the plainest possible language that if we forgive others, God will forgive us; but if we refuse to forgive others, God will refuse to forgive us If we say, “I will never forget what so-and-so did to me,” and then go and take this petition on our lips, we are quite deliberately asking God not to forgive us No one is fit to pray the Lord’s prayer so long as the unforgiving spirit holds sway within his heart.1

    Most of my counselees would not have been, in the judgment of this biblical scholar, “fit to pray the Lord’s prayer,” but, in fact, they did pray it. They believed that forgiveness was important, but they were caught both in the shame of what had happened to them and confirmed in it by what they understood their religious tradition was telling them they must do. They were unable to respond either to the threats they had heard about what might happen to them if they did not forgive or to the affirmations of how “good for them” forgiveness was. I certainly make no claim to be the kind of New Testament scholar that William Barclay has been, but I believe that in making God’s forgiveness of us conditional on our forgiveness of others, he is wrong. To be sure, God’s forgiveness and ours are

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    linked together, but God’s forgiving us as we forgive others does not have to be related in a conditional way. The phrase about “forgiving as we are forgiven” appears in the context of a prayer describing the believer’s relationship to a God who is understood as a loving and forgiving parent. In relation to such a God, the believer is surprisingly empowered to be forgiving. Human forgiveness, understood in this theological way, is not primarily something to be done to improve our health or salvation, but an illustration of a quality of life when it is lived in relation to God and one’s fellow human beings. Rather, we are enabled to forgive as we are empowered by God’s forgiveness of us. This is an issue that is important to consider in thinking about what and how to preach about forgiveness. The assurance given in Matthew 6:33, that seeking first God’s Kingdom and the kind of life associated with it will put all other issues in proper perspective, seems to me to put Jesus’ teaching on human forgiveness in the proper relationship to his total message. The announcement of the Kingdom is at the forefront of all that Jesus taught, just as the petition “thy kingdom come” appears before the petition about forgiveness in the Lord’s Prayer. The familiar phrase “the Kingdom of God is in the midst of you” is most expressive of Jesus’ teaching. The kingdom, as it is experienced now, is in the midst of ordinary people, those who hear and see that God’s rule is in fact a part of their lives. The Spirit’s activity is going on even now in the midst of the ordinary events of life, and finally, God’s blessings will be provided in an unpredictable, unexplainable way to just those persons we might have turned away from his banquet. The images of the kingdom as among us and symbolized by the table provide an important context for considering Jesus’ specific teaching about human forgiveness. “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” should be taken seriously, but not separately. The message about human forgiveness in the Lord’s Prayer is not found by extracting from its context the one petition in the prayer that seems to tell us what to do, but in seeing that petition, like the others, as essentially an affirmation of God’s relationship to us and a call for our continued relationship with each other. I make no claim that this is the only way to understand the teaching about forgiveness in the New Testament, but I am convinced that what I have said is not inconsistent with the main thrust of that teaching. A life of faith in the God to whom the Lord’s Prayer is addressed can be described theologically as a continual discovery and rediscovery of grace. We do not have to forgive , but sometimes we discover the capacity to forgive in ourselves. Human beings worship God to celebrate that fact. Our forgiveness is not a condition of God’s forgiveness, but something enabled by God’s relationship to our human lives. My theory about how human forgiveness sometimes takes place grew out of this theological understanding of forgiveness and from what I observed in the process of pastoral counseling. Most obvious was that fact that it took time, a different amount for different persons and circumstances, but what seemed to be there in all cases was a gradual broadening of the parishioner or patient’s focus of concern. No longer was their agenda narrowly focused on the injury they had experienced and the one who had injured them. The frame of their life picture was enlarged, and we dealt with a number of different concerns in their lives. The injury was still there in the picture, but it was placed in relation to other things. Life was going on in spite of it.

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    Forgiveness, or something like it, seemed to occur in my counselees when they were able to see the people who had injured them as something more than just those who had hurt them. They had healed enough from their injury and shame to look beyond their injury and think about their life beyond it. I became convinced that forgiving was not primarily a behavior, something done or not done, but a process discovered retrospectively after it had already begun to take place within the context of renewed relationships. The theological thesis about this was presented in my book in the following way:

    Human forgiveness is not doing something but discovering something —that I am more like those who have hurt me than different from them. I am able to forgive when I discover that I am in no position to forgive. Although the experience of God’s forgiveness may involve confession of, and the sense of being forgiven for specific sins, at its heart it is the recognition of my reception into the community of sinners — those affirmed by God as his children.2

    There is more in that thesis than can be explored in this article, but it is a theological way of saying that forgiveness is most likely to be discovered not in trying to forgive or in being instructed about the process of forgiveness, but in the larger process of overcoming ones hurt and rediscovering who one is beyond the experience of injury and brokenness. The person who stays focused upon whether or not he or she can forgive is not likely to do so. There are some other things that should be considered about preaching on forgiveness. Because of the circumstances of my clinical practice and my own choice, I had not dealt at all with the physical violence or sexual abuse perpetrated by strangers or by family members. Moreover, much of the literature on such abuse makes it clear how the demands for forgiveness by those who have been so victimized can itself be abusive. An illustration of this comes from Karen Olio, a psychotherapist in an article that is a response to the statement in a children’s book that insists that the abused child must forgive the father who abused her. Olio argues instead that such insistence on forgiveness “contributes to the re-victimization of survivors, who for so long were forced to conform to an external version of reality, by insisting the path to wholeness and freedom can only be found by adopting one particular way of thinking and feeling toward the abuser.”3 She challenges this “one way” forgiveness by noting its presumption that the victim’s judgment must be suspended. She argues the contrary that, in fact, judgments offer a significant contribution to the healing process for survivors of sexual abuse. She comments that the “defense mechanisms, denial and dissociation, which are developed to cope with the emotionally overwhelming and physically over-stimulating abuse experiences, render survivors particularly susceptible to the suggestion that forgiveness is a necessary step toward resolution of the abuse trauma.” It is “no doubt crucial for resolution of the trauma that survivors be able to view the abuser as a human being, and that they not depersonalize him or her in the same manner that they themselves were depersonalized.” But, she insists, compassion and forgiveness “are optional.” Olio denies the argument of the recovery movement and

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    12-step programs that taking responsibility for forgiveness is an important part of an abused person’s empowerment. Instead, she argues that survivors, “who already must struggle with the feelings of self-blame caused by the abuse,” should not have to take on the further blame of not being able to forgive. In another treatment of human forgiveness after abuse, Sidney and Suzanne Simon argue (as I did in Is Human Forgiveness Possible?) that forgiveness is a discovery.4 It is the by-product of an ongoing healing process. Failure to forgive is not a failure of will. Instead, people are unable to forgive because wounds have not yet healed. Forgiveness is not something done (i.e., a behavior). It is something that happens as a sign of positive self-esteem, when the victim is no longer building his or her identity around something that happened in the past. The injury is not all of who one is, but rather a part of life that has at least started to move out of the center of the frame. A fascinating example of how uncritical assumptions about the value of forgiveness can be a problem comes from an article that I have used for many years in discussions of forgiveness. A Texas pastor, Richard P. Lord, wrote about his experience in being called upon to deal with the situation of a woman whose sons were killed and who herself was shot and left for dead by an unknown group of men who broke into her house. One of the men later wrote her from prison saying that he had “found Christ” and asked her to forgive him. She asked her pastor, “Am I obligated as a Christian to forgive in this situation? Just what does the church mean by ‘forgiveness’? He did not say, ‘I’m sorry… just forgive me.”5 In the pastor’s answer to the question, he identifies two problems in forgiving: forgiveness as forgetting and forgiveness as excusing. With respect to forgetting, he comments, “When we forgive someone, it usually implies that we will try to act as though nothing has happened. Can we do this without showing massive disrespect for the victim of violence when those close to him or her are deeply concerned that their loved one not be forgotten?” With respect to excusing, he asks the question, “If an abuser has a religious experience after the abuse has taken place, does this mean that ‘now we should act as though a crime wasn’t committed?’” And, in reflecting on his proclamation in worship, “Your sins are forgiven,” Pastor Lord imagines a battered wife thinking, “Who gave you the right to forgive the one who beats me?” As a consequence of this reflection, he argues that forgiveness cannot be “a commodity that can be handed out” by the church or anyone else, and he concludes that pastors and other well-intentioned Christians “have no right to insist that the victim establish a relationship with his or her victimizer to effect a reconciliation .” Pastor Lord’s answer to his parishioner was based on an understanding of repentance as involving three conditions: remorse, restitution and regeneration. None of the three was evidenced in the prisoner who said he had “found Christ.” Thus, the pastor concluded that to “offer forgiveness when these conditions are not met is not gracious. It is sacreligious.” His answer to the victim was, “No.” She did not have to forgive. Almost more striking than the original article were the negative responses that it stirred up among The Christian Century’s readers.6 One example that is typical of others said, “How can I be a Christian and refuse to forgive? … If you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive you. I cannot call myself a Christian and refuse to forgive others or hope to have my sins forgiven.”

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    The issues that arise with forgiveness after abuse and violence are important in reminding preachers and other well-meaning Christians that expecting or demanding forgiveness from someone can itself be abusive. Their work has also emphasized that forgiveness, if it takes place, should be a part of a broader healing process, not an isolated event. Theologically most helpful in my more recent understanding of forgiveness is Gregory Jones’ view of forgiveness as embodied within Christian living. Forgiveness should not be understood apart from that larger concept. In describing the kind of life of which forgiveness is a part, he uses the image of learning a craft. Just as Aristotle emphasized the importance of learning a “craft” for learning how to live, Jones argues that there is a craft of forgiveness which Christians are called upon to learn from one another.”7 The craft of forgiveness involves the ongoing and ever-deepening process of learning to live in communion with God, with one another, and with the whole of creation. As one who has been learning how to play music again after a recess of 35 or so years, I find Jones’ image of learning a craft to be a powerful one. I practice on my piano or saxophone so that later I can play the music almost without thinking. When my craft is learned well enough, I can feel where a note is to be played with my hand without a conscious decision about it. Through practice I become less awkward, and music becomes a part of me. The craft becomes a part of the person one is, not just what one does. The religious life as the Christian tradition describes it is an ongoing communal activity of learning to live into the forgiveness that characterizes our relation to God. My way of saying this has been that it is a discovery in the process of living in spite of the brokenness that I, or another, have created or have been responsible for. Although much of my concern over the years has been with human forgiveness, human and divine forgiveness cannot be separated theologically. I am committed to the view that we forgive as we are forgiven. God is a part of any forgiveness we give or receive. Understanding forgiveness as a part of the Christian life reminds us that forgiving is not something that we have the power to do or are righteous in doing. Rather, it is a description of the nature of our now and to come kingdom relationship to God and to each other. Like God’s kingdom, forgiveness is something that is discovered to be “in the midst of us,” as a part of our “neighbor-hood” with each other. Again, the New Testament image that most powerfully expresses it is the messianic banquet, where strange dinner companions sit side by side at a common table. Their differences are obvious, but seated at the same table, they are able to see how much they are like each other. If one believes that forgiveness is an authentic and central element in Jesus’ teaching about the Christian life, it would seem to follow that preaching and pastoral care should involve the guidance of persons in how they should forgive. The understanding of human forgiveness as something discovered rather than something done, however, suggests that direct guidance in forgiving is, in effect, turning that forgiveness, theologically, into a work or achievement, and psychologically, into a behavioral technique of reducing the pain of self injury. The implication of forgiveness understood as discovery rather than act is that preaching and pastoral care are not so much helping persons with forgiveness as with the pain ôf being themselves. They are concerned to help persons break through the

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    isolation of shame and rejection, thus freeing them from their need to view themselves as victims. It is from the position of being an ordinary, responsible human being that the discovery of forgivingness in oneself becomes possible. Like those who have studied the creative process have found, we are more likely to discover something when we are not trying to prove anything. The function of church and ministry is not to supervise acts of forgiveness, but to provide relationships in which genuine humanity, including the possibility that I am forgiving, can be discovered. Human forgiveness is something more likely to be discovered when the pastor is not trying to help someone do it. When I can recognize what is like me, ie., neighbor-hood, in another, I have either forgiven that person or discovered that forgiveness as something done is not the main point anyway.

    Some of the books that have been helpful to me in my continuing study of the process of forgiveness are: Helping People Forgive by David W. Augsburger (Louisville, Ky: Westminster/John Knox, 1996) Embodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis by L. Gregory Jones, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William Β. Eerdmans, 1996) The Ministry of Reconciliation: Spirituality and Strategies, by Robert J. Schreiter, (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books., 1998) An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics by Donald W Shriver Jr. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1995) Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Re­ conciliation by Miroslav Volf (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996).

    Notes

    1 William Barclay, The Gospel of Matthew 1 (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1959), 223-24. 2 John Patton, Is Human Forgiveness Possible? A Pastoral Care Perspective (Lima, Ohio: Academic Renewal Press, 2003), 16. 3 Karen Olio, “Recovery From Sexual Abuse: Is Forgiveness Mandatory?” Voices 28 (1992): 73-74, 1992. 4 Sidney and Suzanne Simon, Forgiveness: How to Make Peace with Your Past and Get On with Your Life (New York: Warner Books 1990). 5 Richard P. Lord, “Do I Have to Forgive? Personal Perspective,” The Christian Century 108 (October 9,1991): 902-903. 6 “Readers’ Response,” The Christian Century, 108 (November 20-27,1991): 1126. 7 L. Gregory Jones, Embodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 1996), xii.