David W. Swanson's Blog

Back in August, a friend gave me a copy of Percival Everett’s recently published novel, James, in which the author retells Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the vantage point of the enslaved Jim. Early in the book, as James is beginning his unlikely attempt to reunite his family, he and Huck stumble onto a robbers’ trove which includes, to the James’ great delight, a small stack of books. Huck doesn’t suspect his companion’s literacy, so James has to be discreet about why he wants to bring the books along. Later, as Huck sleeps, James considers his treasure.

I pulled my sack of books closer, reached in and touched one. I let my hand linger there, a flirtation of sorts. The small thick book I’d wrapped my fingers around was the novel. I had never read a novel, though I understood the concept of fiction. It wasn’t so unlike religion, or history, for that matter. I pulled the book from the sack. I checked to see if Huck was still sleeping soundly and then I opened it. The smell of the pages was glorious.

I read most of James while perched on a limestone breakwater overlooking Lake Michigan, a short bike ride from our apartment. I must have dipped my nose into it’s pages at this point, searching for a whiff of that comforting smell. The friend who gave me the book knew, even if I didn’t, that I needed this book. More than that, I needed a friend who knew I needed the book.

I read a lot this summer, most of it outdoors. For sheer amount of reading hours, our back porch, newly equipped with a solid Amish-made rocking chair, retains its perennial pride of place. Surrounded by hanging flower baskets, hummingbird feeders, and neighbors coming and going from the apartment building next door, there’s hardly a better place to spend a quiet morning or, illuminated by strings of lights draped from the porch rafters, a muggy Midwest evening.

Everett’s genius isn’t limited to his unexpected retelling of Mark Twain’s well-known novel, though that alone might motivate you to pick up the book. The way he ushers the reader into James’ interior life – filled as it is with sarcasm, anxiety, and resolve; in other words, with humanity – is what had me quickly flipping the three-hundred pages. Traveling with a Black companion who can pass as white, James reflects, “Without someone white to claim me as property, there was no justification for my presence, perhaps for my existence.” The path to the beach at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore

The same sort of creative genius is displayed by Tiya Miles in Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People, my favorite book of the year. I also read this one from my quiet lakeside outpost, though in this case the reading was interspersed with unfocused gazing at the horizon while considering one of Miles’ many insights.

If James displays a novelist adept at history, Night Flyer reveals an historian whose prose reads like well-crafted fiction. “Despite the toil she did there,” writes Miles about Tubman’s affinity with the natural world, “she felt an emotional affinity with natural things and may have experienced outdoor time as a balm with healing qualities.”

The work in nature may have eased the toll of Aramita’s [Tubman’s given name] disability, too. She was a sensitive person, attuned to her surroundings and appreciative of nature’s flourishes. The greenish-brown tint to the waterlogged land may have calmed her; the rustling sounds of the living forest may have soothed her; the pinesap-sharp scent in the air may have energized her; the fastidious habits of busy birds may have charmed her.

It’s a revisionist history that is pursued in this exploration of Tubman, a woman whose mythology has often obscured her personhood. Long understood as a solitary and heroic figure, Miles wants us to imagine the most famous of all the conductors of the Underground Rail among her like-hearted contemporaries. Aramita, claims the author, “acted out of a logic that made sense to her and would have made sense to other members of her Black female faith culture.” Miles effectively situates Tubman within this Black faith-rooted, freedom-seeking community by drawing from narratives written by her contemporaries and making impressive use of Womanist theologians and scholars.

By the time I was reading Night Flyer, my own book was just a couple of months away from publication. Given the ways I probe the intersection of race and the environment in Plundered, I was especially interested in how Miles explores two of the themes central to Tubman’s worldview, “spirituality (her belief in God, heaven, and unseen powers) and ecology (her belief in the integrity and import of relationships among all natural beings).” Luminous pragmatism is the evocative term Miles coins to describe this convergence.

Night Flyer is an objectively excellent book, though it struck two personally important notes for me. Before the Chicago weather warmed up enough for my extended streaks of outdoor reading, I’d slowly become aware of a deep fatigue. Try as I might, I couldn’t shake a pervasive sense of emotional depletion. While initially resisting the language of burnout, eventually I had to admit that this was precisely what I was experiencing. That phrase, luminous pragmatism, became one of the few handholds I could imagine in that depleted state and, with so much else being unclear, I knew that I needed to spend as much time outdoors as possible in the weeks to come.

The other thing Mile’s retold history did for me was to point out the absurdity of heroic isolation. Reading about Tubman’s sustaining relationships began rekindling my imagination for a vocation that is purposefully interdependent with others. Despite the countless obvious differences between my own privileged location and the fraught circumstances that Tubman constantly traversed, her nurture of community spoke to the tender places of my exhaustion. Toward the end of her life, writes Miles, Aramita “invested in an aboveground social network rooted in Black-owned land that function as communal space. Other holy women like her had thrived in community once their travels slowed, establishing informal circles of support and formal institutions while feeling that they did the Lord’s work.” Yes and amen. My boys joined me at the secret summer spot a couple of times

Poet Christian Wiman’s must recent collection of essays, poems, and criticism, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, was another of my outdoor companions this summer. “It requires no great prophetic power,” he observes, “to recognize that we as a species, as a communal soul, have withered, and that as a direct consequence the world around us is dying. The despair is too much to turn one’s attention to, so most of us turn away.” Our church, having recognized my burnout, graciously insisted that I take extra time off in August and September. The thing about unplanned time off is that it’s really hard to turn away from the withered places, whether they be the large-scale stuff Wiman imagines in this essay or the closer, more intimate landscapes of grief. Much of those couple of months was spent simply acknowledging – again and again and again – the depletion I’d been too busy to notice.

Despite its subtitle, Zero isn’t a despairing book. It’s almost as if Wiman, whose rare cancer diagnosis and subsequent excruciating treatments have acquainted him with despair, can’t help but veer into wonder and grace, as in the final sentence of entry twenty-one, “The earth is beautiful beyond all change.”

On many muggy August afternoons I’d strap a folding chair to my bike and slowly ride out to the lake. Tucked between two busy beaches, I found a hidden and quiet limestone perch shaded by a thin line of trees from which I could let my eyes wander over the blue horizon. On most days I’d jump into the water once or twice, trying not to splash too noticeably so as to avoid one of the teenage lifeguards having to walk over with their sheepish reprimand. I’d float and paddle, ducking my head under the water to hear the quiet, before clambering awkwardly up the rocks to my chair, towel, and backpack full of books. And yeah, the earth is beautiful beyond all change, even from a perspective withered by emotional fatigue.

Some days, Wiman testifies, “although we cannot pray – because we are too busy, or because we are in too much pain, or simply because the words will not come – a prayer utters itself.” I didn’t much try to pray this summer but, provoked by slow walks through Jackson Park or long rests alongside the lake, prayers were uttered. Having spent a wonderful few days with my family at the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in Michigan earlier in the summer, I returned to camp by myself in September. Each evening I carried that same folding chair out to the mostly deserted beach and watched the dimming sky slowly light up with constellations, planets, and the occasional meteor or satellite. Frankly, I’m not sure how a person couldn’t pray under such circumstances.

Should you ever find yourself burned out, I recommend expanses of stars and great big vistas. Mine was the lake, though I imagine mountains or plains, forests or fields would do just as well. Also, the Psalms. About praying the Psalms, Kathleen Norris notices how they “defeat our tendency to try to be holy without being human first.” The Cloister Walk came with me to Michigan as did Eugene Peterson’s Answering God, a book about praying the Psalms to which I’ve returned regularly. Agreeing with Norris, Peterson insists that prayer as modeled by the Psalms is a deeply human endeavor, which is to say that it accounts for our persistent need of salvation. “Human beings are in trouble most of the time… Prayer is the language of the people who are in trouble and know it.” I knew it and it was and though 2025 will be full of its own trouble, I’m glad to step into it with a heart that is being revived.

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I read a few other books this year, a handful which were gifts from friends who’d heard about my burnout. I’m generally wary of receiving books as gifts as there are only so many reading minutes available each day and my to-read stack already defies those limits. But, maybe because these generous book-givers knew better than I what I needed, these books became steadying companions, small codices of grace.

Photo credit: mali maeder.

I’m glad for you, the readers of this little newsletter to be some of the first to learn the title of my forthcoming book. After a bit of brainstorming back-and-forth with my publisher, InterVarsity Press, and input from friends and family, here’s where we landed: Plundered: The Tangled Roots of Racial and Environmental Injustice. If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to share some of the assumptions behind the title.

Plunder is a theme that runs through the book, particular in my description of the force which animates both environmental and racial injustice. For a couple of reasons, this is something that felt very important as I was writing. First, it’s been my experience that most people who care deeply about confronting systemic racism don’t see its connection to environmental destruction, and vice versa. If they intuit a connection, it remains vague: both are expressions of injustice. But, as I do my best to show in the book, the connection is precise and deep. I go as far as to say that addressing either racial or environmental injustice without addressing the other guarantees that our efforts will never address the root cause behind both.

I hasten to add that this truth has been articulated by others, long before me. In an article written in 2000, theologian James Cone claimed,

The logic that led to slavery and segregation in the Americas, colonization and Apartheid in Africa, and the rule of white supremacy throughout the world is the same one that leads to the exploitation of animals and the ravaging of nature. It is a mechanistic and instrumental logic that defines everything and everybody in terms of their contribution to the development and defense of white world supremacy. People who fight against white racism but fail to connect it to the degradation of the earth are anti-ecological — whether they know it or not. People who struggle against environmental degradation but do not incorporate in it a disciplined and sustained fight against white supremacy are racists — whether they acknowledge it or not. The fight for justice cannot be segregated but must be integrated with the fight for life in all its forms.

Second, without diagnosing plunder as the shared origin behind both of these planetary injustices, we will miss the opportunity to subvert both simultaneously. We will always be bouncing back and forth between the two, toggling between strategies and tactics. What I hope will become clear in the book is that there is a way for communities to live together which undercuts the destructive power of racism and environmental degradation at the same time. We don’t have to choose.

The subtitle elaborates on the inherent connection between the two forms of injustice. And the image of roots points toward the vision for holistic justice which I hope will capture readers’ imaginations. I won’t say more about that vision for now but, while the book necessarily digs into the intertwined character of racial and environmental injustice, I spend as much time articulating a way of life that is beautiful, good, and genuinely attractive. (You’ll have to decide whether I was successful!) I want this book to not only analyze what we’re up against but to make accessible the kind of life whose goodness is evident both by its attractiveness and the blessing it offers to our wounded world.

One last thing that is worth mentioning: There is a lot of Jesus in this book. This wasn’t intentional. Rather, I found that in both my analysis and vision for comprehensive justice, again and again Jesus was the entryway. To say it differently, take Jesus away and the story and logic in Plundered totally falls apart. I’m hopeful that those readers who aren’t Christian will find a vision for Jesus and what he makes possible that is worth grappling with. And for Christians, I hope the book will wake us up to the indescribable treasures we have been given in our Lord’s life, death, and resurrection. Truly, Jesus changes everything.

Plundered is scheduled for an October 8 publication date. I got to see some potential covers this weekend and I’ll share the final choice here once we’ve made that decision.

How helpful is it to publicly oppose the MAGA-Trump movement in 2024? I’ve been wondering about this and am struggling to come up with an answer I feel much conviction about.

It feels like a lot of people, for a variety of reasons, believe it is necessary to take a vocal stand against the former president and the values and assumptions he represents. The foreboding knowledge of the upcoming election provides more than enough motivation to point out the threat the coming days represent.

I remember feeling these things strongly. During the summer of 2016, I wrote the following.

Christian resistance is what the moment requires. It’s necessary to say that this is a non-partisan resistance because our imaginations have been so diluted that we think only of our vote as a signal of support or opposition. But there are other ways. We might submit our vote to a person who has been the target of the candidate’s hate. We might devote our attention to local candidates whose decisions will impact classrooms and housing. We might, as some of are, begin to think about what resistance will look like after this election. There will be reasons to resist if the candidate is elected- he’s made no mystery of how his policies will ostracize and divide. And if he’s not, there will be a reinvigorated contingency of citizens who have been deputized in their bigotry. This too will require our Christian resistance.

I believe these words as much now, seven years later, as I did then. But I feel little impulse to write something similar today. Why?

In part it’s because many, many people, including some white Christians, have found their voices since Trump’s election. Back in 2016, it could feel like shouting into the (white) void to point out was was so painfully obvious, that a bully was riding a tide of white resentment to the most powerful office in the world. Now, though, such voices are fairly common.

I’m hesitant to join my voice with these others in part because it can sometimes feel like voicing opposition is less about attempting to change someone’s mind than about demonstrating my righteousness to those who are already convinced. And that’s another reason I’m slower to say publicly the obvious things about the destructiveness of the former president’s rhetoric and policies: I’m not sure how effective it is.

Certainly there are still good reasons to say the true things loudly. Bearing witness to justice is necessary, especially during times when deception and double-speak run rampant. But we should be careful not to mistake necessary prophetic moments with the quieter, longer work of inviting friends and neighbors away from easily manipulated fear.

Here’s where I’m landing on the question of publicly opposing the Trump movement in the months ahead. Yes, there will be times when it’s important to speak up. Christians in particular have the responsibility to tell the truth no matter the situation. But what will matter more, a lot more in these siloed circumstances, is how we are are actually, materially advancing compassion, mercy, and justice in the communities where we have influence. And this will often involve more quiet listening than public talking, more humble compassion than swaggering conviction, more in-the-trenches organizing than cheap sniping.

How about you? How do you plan on using your influence in the tumultuous days ahead?

A lightly edited version of a talk I gave at a conference at Progressive Baptist Church here in Chicago.

On a November Sunday in 1898, the Rev. Francis J. Grimke stood before his congregation at the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington D. C. Rev. Grimke had been born into slavery in South Carolina, the son of a white enslaver and an enslaved mother of African descent. How he traveled from bondage on a plantation to self-emancipating himself to studying in freedmen’s schools to attending Princeton Seminary to leading one of the capitol’s most well-known Black congregations is a fascinating story for another day.

As Grimke made his way to the pulpit that autumn day, the Civil War had been over for 30 years. More pressing for Grimke and his church was the fact that the federal government’s southern reconstruction efforts had been halted a mere 12 years after the war’s end and the grotesque impacts of that cowardly decision were everywhere to be seen, particularly in the white supremacist terror which manifested in lynching. Over four thousand of these deadly acts of white power have been documented from Reconstruction through 1950.

On this Sunday, standing before his people, Grimke was thinking about countless white people who enabled and oftentimes led the mobocracy terrorizing Black people. He was also thinking about their pastors.

Another discouraging circumstance is to be found in the fact that the pulpits of the land are silent on these great wrongs. The ministers fear to offend those to whom they minister. We hear a great deal from their pulpits about suppressing the liquor traffic, about gambling, about Sabbath desecration, and about the suffering Armenians, and about polygamy in Utah when that question was up, and the Louisiana lottery. They are eloquent in their appeals to wipe out these great wrongs, but when it comes to Southern brutality, to the killing of Negroes and despoiling them of their civil and political rights, they are, to borrow an expression from Isaiah, ‘dumb dogs that cannot bark.’

The question I have been assigned to consider is this, “Where has the white church been?” Rev. Grimke reminds us that ours is not the first generation to grapple with the failure of most white Christians to join our sisters and brothers in the quest for justice. The Rev. Dr. King exposed this failure from a Birmingham jail in 1963. “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.” Writing about the scourge of lynching in 1892, Ida B. Wells wrote that white Christians “heard of this awful affair and read of its details and neither press nor pulpit gave the matter more than a passing comment.” Years earlier, reflecting on the nation’s slaveholding economy, Well’s mentor and friend Frederick Douglass stared white Christianity’s hypocrisy in the face.  

I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity… I am filled with unutterable loathing when I contemplate the religious pomp and show, together with the horrible inconsistencies, which everywhere surround me. We have men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members.

Where was the white church when the first kidnapped and enslaved Africans arrived on these shores 400 years ago? Where was the white church when the early colonists elevated pseudo-scientific racial theories over Christian baptism in order to justify perpetual bondage? Where was the white church when the dehumanization of Indigenous people and people of African descent was codified in our founding documents? Indeed, I could use the remainder of my time simply posing this question to one instance of our history after another. With few exceptions, the answer to this perennially relevant question is this: Not only was the white church present at each moment of racial injustice, but the white church has also been one of the primary enablers of that same racial injustice. In fact, it is impossible to honestly account for our legacy of systemic racism and white supremacy without also accounting for the ungodly complicity of the white church.

With the balance of my time, I want to consider the role of the white church in the struggle for justice through four propositions with help from the Apostle Paul in Romans 12. 1) There is a racialized pattern to American society; 2) White American Christians have largely conformed to this pattern; 3) White Christianity’s conforming complicity was not inevitable; and 4) Given our conformity, white Christians must be discipled to resist the racialized pattern in order to pursue true solidarity. To conclude I will suggest a final proposition.

There is a racialized pattern to American society.

In Romans 12:1-2, Paul wrote, “I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, on the basis of God’s mercy, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable act of worship. Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.”

The language reflects a particular place and time when certain cultural norms appear natural, neutral, and normal. Paul tells the church that they are not to conform to the age or, in another translation, the pattern of this world.

One of the patterns in this country is how the logic of race has infected our society, creating a racialized society. Sociologists define a racialized society as one “wherein race matters profoundly for differences in life experiences, life opportunities, and social relationships.”(Michael Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided by Faith) We can predict the likelihood of death during childbirth,life expectancy, proximity to violence, proximity to pollution, and access to generational wealth all through the lens of our racialized society.

There is a racialized pattern to American society. Our nation cannot be understood only through a racialized lens, but any understanding of this nation which doesn’t account for the racialized spirit of the age grossly misunderstands life in this particular place.

White American Christians have largely conformed to this pattern.

Rev. Grimke lamented the silence from white pulpits. Rev. Dr. King decried the same. While traveling in the UK to rally support for the anti-lynching movement, Ida B. Wells was asked by a journalist what the internationally renowned American evangelist Dwight L. Moody had done to support the cause. Wells wrote, “I answered – nothing. That Mr. Moody had never said a word against lynching in any of his trips to the South, or in the North either, so far as was known.”

From this nation’s origins to today, Christians of color and Black Christians particularly, have pointed out white Christianity’s tendency to conform to patterns of racial supremacy and domination.Earlier this month, Rev. Dr. Charlie Dates wrote an op-ed directed to white Christians which said, in part, “We are not your rhetorical whipping boy, trotted out for another session of mockery that serves your political ends. We are not your minstrel show, played on repeat on your news channels as a way to reinforce tropes about the inherent dangerousness of Black people. We see what you are doing and name it for what it is: racism.”

This deadly, persistent acquiescence to the racialized status quo led many Christians of color to assume that white Christians were not actually followers of the Jesus found in Scripture. In his introduction to one of Ida B. Wells’ investigations into lynching, Frederick Douglass wrote,

If American conscience were only half alive, if the American church and clergy were only half christianized, if American moral sensibility were not hardened by persistent infliction of outrage and crime against colored people, a scream of horror, shame and indignation would rise to Heaven wherever your pamphlet shall be read.

How else to explain the racial exclusion common in white churches? The white politicians who claimed allegiance to Jesus while advocating policies of segregation and disenfranchisement? The spectacle lynchings advertised and timed to commence after white pastors finished their benedictions? Even today, white Christians are more prone to racialized nationalism, less open to immigrants and refugees, more fearful of racial/ethnic diversity, and more likely to believe that white people face discrimination.White American Christians have largely conformed to the racialized pattern of our society.

White Christianity’s conforming complicity was not inevitable.

The ubiquity of the racial hierarchy and the totality of the white Church’s complicity could lead us to believe that White Christianity’s compromised witness was a foregone conclusion. But there was no predetermined script which forced white Christians to betray our faith, dehumanize our sisters and brothers, and profane the name of our Lord who commanded us to love one another.

Sarah Grimke and her sister Angelina were born into a slave-holding family on a plantation in South Carolina at the turn of the 19th century.When she was 26, Sarah traveled to Philadelphia where she met some Quakers and became acquainted with abolition through their theological lens. She brought her new biblical convictions home to Charleston where her younger sister soon adopted her anti-slavery position.

Despite their place within a patriarchal, enslaving society, the Grimke sisters began writing and speaking against slavery. When they discovered that Francis J. Grimke – the eventual Rev. Grimke who we heard from earlier – was their half-brother, they arranged for him to come north and covered his educational expenses.

In 1836 Sarah wrote an open letter entitled “An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States.” In it she wrote about the enslaving economy.

Nay, we not only sustain this temple of Moloch; but with impious lips consecrate it to the Most High God; and call upon Jehovah himself to sanctify our sins by the presence of his Shekinah.  She went on to say, If ever there was a time when the Church of Christ was called upon to make an aggressive movement on the kingdom of darkness, this is the time.

The courageous and costly witness of the Grimke sisters remind us that white Christian complicity with the racialized spirit of the age was not and is not inevitable.This is important because until those of us who are white confess our agency within this sinful society, we will never be able to embrace the gift of repentance.

In her letter to the clergy, Sarah wrote about this gift. “Jehovah is calling to us as he did to Job out of the whirlwind, and every blast bears on its wings the sound, Repent! Repent!”

The pattern of this world is powerful; the spirit of the age works to make us believe that the status quo is immovable, that we cannot cut across the grooves and channels chiseled into social life by generations of hierarchy and oppression. It’s a lie. Conforming complicity with sin is never inevitable. The patterns of this world are trouble, but take heart, Jesus has overcome even the troubling patterns of this world!

Given our conformity, white Christians must be discipled to resist the racialized pattern in order to pursue solidarity with the Body of Christ.

The good news is that white Christians do not have to conform to the wicked patterns of this racialized society. The bad news is that generations of white churches have abandoned their members to the deforming patterns of this age. We have abdicated our responsibility to disciple white Christians away from racism.

If this is right, then the way forward is discipleship. To do this, we must reimagine our liturgies to disciple white people into solidarity with the Body of Christ. No one-time sermon series or book study can do this work. This is about life-long discipleship. We must ask whether people are finding more in common with their diverse sisters and brothers than they are with those who share their race but not their faith.

Take the liturgical practice of Holy Communion as an example. In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul admonishes the Corinthian church because “there are divisions among you.” These divisions fell along the socioeconomic patterns of Greco-Roman life: the poor came to Holy Communion hungry while the wealthy came tipsy. In other words, they brought the societal status quo to church with them. They left the spirit of the age undisturbed.

As a result of their conformity, Paul says, “it is not the Lord’s Supper you eat.” Their tacit acceptance of the status quo so thoroughly corrupted their worship that the elements could no longer be said to be the Eucharist.

Paul goes on to say, given the Corinthians’ tendency to slip into the sinful patterns of their society, that each member of the church ought to examine themselves before eating the bread and drinking the cup. Paul’s exhortation is to consider how we have succumbed to the ungodly norms of our society which have fooled us into accepting the unacceptable.

The similarities between the patterns of Paul’s day and our own are clear.Can we bring the racialized patterns of segregation, domination, and exploitation with us to worship and still pretend it’s the Lord’s Supper in which we participate? What might it look like for white Christians to be given the space in worship to examine our hearts before coming to the table? To allow the Spirit to reveal where we’ve left the patterns which abuse our sisters and brothers uninterrupted?

When I suggest that the way to enlist white Christians in the ministry of justice and righteousness is through discipleship, this is what I mean. God has given our churches the gifts needed to spiritually form us to follow Jesus as we become more like Jesus to do the good work Jesus would have us do.

For those of us who serve and lead in white ministries, our task is to reimagine our discipleship practices so that they are forming people into deeper and deeper solidarity with all of God’s people.

The re-discipling journey for white Christians will not happen overnight. This is generational work, as we give ourselves to the redemptive journey of repentance, repair, and reconciliation. Oh, may God raise up more of his white followers who will hear the call to disciple white Christians, who will see the opportunities for holistic discipleship in white communities, who will refuse to be bound by the ancient lines of hostility and division, who believe that the gospel of our Lord Jesus has a life changing word to speak to those bound to the old status quo.

The justice of God is not dependent on white Christians.

Years ago, I was riding in a car with my friend, Pastor Daniel Hill of River City Church here in Chicago. Daniel told me that he sometimes imagines the redemptive movement of God in the world as a powerful river. Rather than joining the flow of righteousness and justice, white Christians have too often acted like a tree that has fallen across the river, collecting debris, and slowing the flow. Our job, he said, is not to try to save the white Church from itself; only God can do this. But we can shift that log. We can clear some of the debris. We can, with God’s help, unstick some of what has stopped-up the flow of divine righteousness.   

But while I hope, pray, and work for the redemption of the white Church, I never want to forget that the justice of God has advanced in this country not because of the cooperation of white Christians but in spite our resistance.

So, as I close, may I offer this reminder. While the white ecclesial complex has long had the financial prowess, institutional power, and cultural privilege to make itself the center of any conversation about justice and righteousness, God is not waiting on white Christians to get our act together in order to advance his will on earth. The shalom of God will not be frustrated by the racial hostility which is so often disguised within so-called racial reconciliation programs. The God who simply is justice and righteousness is not stymied by the white conservative’s overt intransigence nor by the white progressive’s covert sabotage.

Yes, we hope and pray and work for the reconciled witness of the whole church. We will not stop pleading earnestly with our white sisters and brothers – of whom I am one – to renounce the spirit of this age for solidarity with the whole Body of Christ. But neither will we forget the testimony of those who’ve faithfully labored before us.

We might remember Moses and Aaron appealing to Pharoah to renounce his oppressive ways. But the righteous God was not hindered by Pharoah’s hard-heartedness. We might remember Elijah’s warning to Ahab and Jezebel to renounce their allegiance to the bloodthirsty Baal. But the consuming fire of God was not hindered by Ahab and Jezebel’s stunning idolatry. We might remember the impressive empires – Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and Greece – and their totalizing claims to rule the world through the terror of their militaries and their weapons and their spectacular size. But the steadfast love of the God who loves orphans, widows, and foreigners would not be hindered by the pompous claims of emperors and their fleeting empires.

And we might also remember that dreadful puppet of a king, Herod the Great, and the terrifying might of Rome which propped him up. If ever there was a moment when it seemed as though the justice of God had met its match, this was it. God, it seemed, had grown silent. Generational land was lost to the empire’s tyrannical taxation. The temple was desecrated; exiles were scattered. The terror of crucifixion crowded the Jewish imagination.

And into this tense and terrible situation was born Mary and Joseph’s son. And while the kingdom he announced was open to anyone willing to repent their way into it, he did not privilege the powerful men who demanded his attention. He stayed away from respectable citadels and reputable synagogues. He couldn’t be bothered with the petty debates of distinguished clergy and illustrious scholars. Time and again he announced to anyone who would listen that heaven was breaking through the margins, interrupting old patterns, disturbing long-accepted status quos.

Joining the ranks of the falsely arrested and the unjustly sentenced, Mary’s firstborn refused to appeal to king or governor. After all, the kingdom of heaven did not need the permission or credibility lent by any earthly authority for its advancement. Hanging on Calvary, he accepted the totality of our un-righteousness, the entirety of this world’s injustice, the crushing finality of sin. The justice and righteousness of God would be eternally established not by appealing to this world’s powers and princes but by defeating the “principalities and powers, the rulers of the darkness of this world, the spiritual wickedness in high places.”

And when Jesus got up that first Resurrection Sunday, he did more than nudge the logjam of injustice; he did more than clear a bit of the debrief of wickedness. When Jesus got up, the glory of the Lord filled the earth, as waters cover the sea. When Jesus got up, justice ran down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Marcus Briggs-Cloud is a linguist and the co-director of Ekvn-Yefolecv, “an Indigenous ecovillage community in Weogufka, Alabama comprised of Maskoke persons who have returned to their ancestral homelands to practice linguistic, cultural, and ecological sustainability.” Years ago he resolved to revitalize the language of his people before it completely died out. The Maskoke people depend on communal ceremonies which renew their relationship to the world, ceremonies which depend on the specific vocabulary embedded in their language. As Briggs-Clouds notes, “No language means no ceremony; no ceremony means Maskoke People will perish.” You can understand why saving a language projected to disappear by 2040 felt so urgent.

But in his attempt to save Maskoke language, Briggs-Cloud ran into a problem. Surrounded by the norms and assumptions of Western culture, Maskoke people continually had to reach for English words to describe concepts and situations that had no precedent in their own culture. And by importing English words to adequately describe the impact of Western culutre, Briggs-Cloud and his people “would find our Indigenous ontological worldview, that is inextricably tied to the natural world, flipped upside-down.” The linguist was faced with a dilemma: admit the inevitable demise of his people’s language and culture or embark down a more radical path. He chose the latter.

The result of Briggs-Cloud’s refusal to surrender his language and culture is Ekvn-Yefolecv. In addition to being a haven for the Maskoke language, the ecovillage is a model of sustainability, environmentally friendly farming practices, and decolonized curriculum for their children. The members of Ekvn-Yefolecv understand that they are not “exempt from globalization or climate crisis” but this community is allowing their language and culture to flourish. Their commitments, radical from a certain vantage point, were the common sense steps necessary to ensure their survival.

I’ve thought a lot about the Ekvn-Yefolecv community since first reading about it. One of Briggs-Cloud’s important insights is that culture requires a distinct language and that this language must be rooted in a particular community. What are the implications for those of us who are seeking God’s shalom in our own particular communities? I’ve thought of three.

First, what sort of language is required to articulate a vision of God’s justice in places so thoroughly shaped by injustice? The tendency, in my experience, is to search the contemporary lexicon for words which approximate the values of shalom, harmony, and righteousness which we read about in Scripture. Steeped in the competition and consumption instigated by consumer capitalism, the language we use is often compromised from the beginning. Our attempts to co-opt mechanical and technical metaphors to describe the values of a kingdom that advances by grace and gift fall woefully short. In fact, rather than serving as the entry to a new world, our default language ensures that God’s shalom will not disrupt our violent and exploitative status quo.

Second, if our contemporary dialect fails to form cultures of shalom, we’ll need to choose the slow process of developing vocabularies which do. We have seen, all too regularly these days, the sad results of church communities built on the assumptions of the dominant culture. Celebrity, spectacle, and homogeneity cannot sustain a hilltop city amidst so many creeping shadows. We’ll need to undertake the multi-generational responsibility of learning a culture sustaining way of talking. We might begin, simply enough, with prioritizing the biological and ecological speech so common in Scripture. These words, and the assumptions behind them, remind us that God alone can accomplish his purposes. They are not ours to commodify or manipulate. A language rooted in the imagination of Scripture will align us with the Creator as well as with the rest of creation. We’ll begin to understand our distinct place – our counterculture – as a people of salt and light.

Finally, the cyclical nature of language and culture reveals the urgency of strongly defined community. While one of the characteristics of Christian community is radical hospitality to the stranger, we offer that welcome from our own culturally out-of-step location. Knowing that shalom requires a distinct language and culture – a way of describing and seeing the world which allows us to participate in God’s righteousness and justice – we’ll resist the suggestions whispered by marketers and bankers to make ourselves relevant. Instead, we’ll nurture communities where our language and culture can thrive. How we do this, as people called to love the world without expecting to be loved by it, is a persistent question faced by Christians and we only need to answer it for our own particular time and place. What’s important is that our communities are forming people whose language and culture nurture shalom amid circumstances which typically don’t.

I hope the Ekvn-Yefolecv ecovillage thrives for many generations. I hope many of our churches will find our own ways to follow their example.

(Photo: Members of the Ekvn-Yefolecv ecovillage.)

A sermon about living gently with Creation.

25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27 And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? 28 And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, 29 yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. 30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31 Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ 32 For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33 But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

34 “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today. (Mt. 6:25-34)

Here’s something I believe is true about every single one of us: our experience of peace increases when we spend time in creation. I’ve mentioned this before, but most Tuesdays, my weekly day off, you’ll find me walking slowly through Jackson Park for 2-3 hours. I cross Cornell Drive and walk behind the MSI, before coming to the Bobolink Meadow. And as I approach the meadow, I can feel my body relaxing; my breathing slows down and I start noticing the sights, sounds, and smells of the forest and the grassland. The worries I’ve been carrying start to shrink.

The crowds listening to Jesus in the Galilean countryside had worries of their own. An occupied people, they lived under the constant threat of violence and coercion. The empire had taxed many of them into poverty. Spiritually, they wondered whether God would ever come to rescue them. Observing the wildflowers dotting the hills and the birds flying above their heads, Jesus told the crowd not to worry because they held an honored place within creation.

Now, I realize that not all of you share my enthusiasm for nature walks through Jackson Park. Every time I mention birdwatching, I catch a few of you rolling your eyes. But I stand by my belief: our experience of peace increases when we spend time in creation. You see creation includes more than the beaches of Lake Michigan, the paths through Washington Park, or the trails at the Indiana National Lakeshore. We are each a part of creation. It may not be a quiet walk through a Forest Preserve that brings you peace; maybe it is a meal prepared with fresh ingredients with close friends. Maybe it’s turning off all the screens in your home for a family game night. Maybe it’s spending Saturday mornings at the community garden, weeding, planting, and harvesting. God’s created world comes in many forms.

During this Easter season, we’re going to consider some of the implications of God’s new creation which was inaugurated by Jesus’ resurrection. This morning we’ll look at what happens as we live in harmony with God’s creation, the creation which has been renewed in Christ. So, here’s the big idea: Experiencing God’s peace includes living peaceably with God’s creation. I’m using the word peaceably today, instead of peacefully because peaceful can sound passive whereas peaceable assumes an active participation. Living peaceably with creation requires our action, as we’ll see.

As he encouraged the crowd, Jesus twice told them to carefully consider different aspects of God’s creation. First, he said, “Look at the birds of the air…” The word for look could be translated, “gaze at in the face.” Second, he invited the crowd to, “consider the lilies of the field…” The word for consider could be translated as, “examine.” In other words, Jesus is not telling those anxious men and women to take a quick peek at creation or to occasionally and quickly remember their place within God’s creation. Instead, we should hear Jesus inviting us to meditate deeply on God’s creation, to live harmoniously with God’s creation. Experiencing God’s peace means living peaceably with God’s creation.

How do we do this? How do we live peaceably with creation in ways that lead to more peace in our lives? In this passage we see three forms of meditation which help us live peaceably with creation. We live peaceably with creation by meditating on creation, by meditating on our interdependence with creation, and by meditating on our creator.

We experience God’s peace when we live peaceably with creation by meditating on creation. The idea of meditating on creation might conjure images of some beautiful place on a screensaver, or one of those generic inspirational posters at your office, or someone’s Instagram photos from their vacation. But Jesus directs the crowd not to a generic illustration of creation but actual birds and flowers. They are invited to gaze at and examine specific examples of the local creation. 

There are proven benefits to this kind of creation medication. Researchers have found that twenty minutes in nature can improve concentration and reduce the need for ADHD/ADD medication in some children. Time in nature improves cognitive function and memory. We are more likely to exercise regularly if our exercise takes place in nature. Thirty minutes in nature improves heart health, circulation, and lowers cholesterol. Just five minutes in nature improves mood and self-esteem while regular exposure to creation can reduce anxiety and depression.

The crowd was familiar with this sort of proximity to nature in ways that many of us are not. About this harmony with creation, Pope Francis writes that in God’s loving plan, “every creature has its own value and significance… and can only be understood as a gift from the outstretched hand of the Father of all, and as a reality illuminated by the love which calls us together into universal communion.”

Our contemporary society can hide from us our connection with this universal communion. For example, try to identify the origins of everything on your plate at lunch today. What plants are represented? Do you know what they look like in the field? And where did each item come from? For most of us, our separation from creation is so thorough, this will be an impossible assignment.

But despite this separation, it is still possible to meditate on God’s creation. A member of our church recently told me about her experience helping with a community garden. She told me it was the process of gardening that was so powerful for her. The way the seed started so small, submerged in the dirt; how it looked so much better once it began growing; how it went through pain and struggle but still became what God intended. She specifically mentioned how planting garlic taught her about God’s timing: garlic gets planted in the fall and overwinters in the hard, frozen soil before finally sprouting in the springtime.

So, even though we may have forgotten our place withing God’s universal communion, we can still choose to remember by meditating on creation. But to do this, we need to see creation and to see creation we need to name it. Choose to learn the name of one tree, flower, or bird this week. See how learning the name of just one aspect of nature can help you begin seeing – and loving – more of God’s creation.

We experience God’s peace when we live peaceably with creation by meditating on our interdependence with creation. Jesus and the crowd understood their connection with the land. Jesus’ parables were full of examples of this connection; wildlife, farming, baking, and other natural examples fill these stories. While we are prone to forget our dependence on nature, Jesus and the crowd understood where their food, water, and shelter came from. In fact, interdependence was built into the Jewish law.

“You shall not see your neighbor’s donkey or ox fallen on the road and ignore it; you shall help to lift it up… 6 If you come on a bird’s nest, in any tree or on the ground, with fledglings or eggs, with the mother sitting on the fledglings or on the eggs, you shall not take the mother with the young. 7 Let the mother go, taking only the young for yourself, in order that it may go well with you and you may live long.” (Dt. 24:4, 6-7)

The Catholic Catechism puts it like this. “God wills the interdependence of creatures… Creatures exist only in dependence on each other, to complete each other, in the service of each other.” The many environmental crises we face tempt us to look away from this basic fact of life, but Jesus invites us to meditate on our interdependence. He invites the worried crowd to look around. “…they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.”

The worries we share with that Galilean crowd can be a form of pride. We are prone to living as though we are capable of fully caring for ourselves. With such a starting point, we can never possess enough and worry is inevitable. Marketers, of course, have figured out how to capitalize on this prideful worry; they convince us that we need the latest thing, a thing which is destined to join so many others of our needs in a landfill. Our prideful worry harms God’s creation.

But when we meditate on our interdependence, we remember that we cannot fully provide for ourselves. This simple fact engenders humility; we too are dependent on the rains, crops, seasons, and other people. Toward the end of the book of Job, God asks Job, “Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place? (38:12) Have you entered the storehouses of the snow, or have you seen the storehouses of the hail?” To this, Job can only humbly reply, “See, I am of small account; what shall I answer you? I lay my hand on my mouth.” (40:4)

As we meditate on our interdependence, we are experience humility and humility leads to peace. No longer do we have to have more. Our starting point has shifted from scarcity to abundance.

One of the few places we regularly recognize our interdependence with creation is before a meal, when we bow in prayerful thanksgiving. What if we were to begin applying this practice more broadly? We might pause thankfully before a glass of clean drinking water. Or after we fill our car with gas. Or when it begins to rain. These small acts of thanksgiving can help us meditate more regularly on our interdependence with creation.

We experience God’s peace when we live peaceably with creation by meditating on our creator. What is your image of God? Many of us imagine God as our lord, savior, redeemer, provider, defender, judge, etc. Jesus is also the creator whose death and resurrection has inaugurated new creation. “The earth is the Lord’s,” writes the psalmist, “and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it.” (Ps. 24:1)

The fact that everything that has been created belongs to the creator can bring us peace. You belong to the Creator. So does your family, your bank account, and so on. But this knowledge brings responsibility as well. The West Virginian mountaintop that is being blown away for the coal that powers our homes belongs to the Creator. So do the clearcut forests which provide our paper products and the Lake Michigan waters polluted by the refineries providing the gas for our cars.

Does the fact that Jesus is Creator matter to us? I’m not sure, to be honest. If Jesus were our divine Lord and Savior but not the Creator, would anything really change about how we live our faith? If not, we have to admit how far we moved from God’s desire for us. God’s role as creator was deeply important to his people in the Old Testament. To take one example, the law dictated that the “land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants.” (Lev. 25:23) The understanding that God was Creator impacted everything, right down to their economy and understanding of private property.

God is the Creator and Jesus reveals a Creator who cares lovingly for his creation. According to Jesus, our “heavenly Father feeds” the birds and “clothes the grass of the field.” We can be prone to a deistic view of God; we view creation as a one-time act and so we toil and scheme under our own strength until, exhausted, we plead for God to intervene. But Jesus says that God feeds and clothes his creatin. Presumably the birds and the flowers are not asking to be fed and clothed. God proactively cares for his creation.

This is why meditating on our Creator is so powerful. When we do, we are pulled from the endless treadmill of our own self-sufficiency. The Creator feeds you. He clothes, shelters, defends, finds, heals, protects, answers, relieves, fills, hears, leads, surrounds, vindicates, guides, restores, hides, prospers, watches over, delivers, and blesses you! The Creator does not stand at a distance from his creation, watching as we try to care for ourselves No, whatever God’s creatures need, God the Creator will provide.

“Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’  For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.”

This week, when you pray, pray to Creator. Following the lead of our Indigenous friends who often address God in this way, choose to imagine God first as the Creator this week. Notice how this changes your posture toward the rest of God’s creation.

Our contemporary society has convinced us that we can experience peace without living peaceably with God’s creation. But friends, there can be no true harmony with God as long as we are living out-of-tune with God’s creation. The great news is that God’s creation is all around us! You’re sitting next to God’s creation. When you walk out of this building, you’ll be surrounded by God’s creation. Despite our best efforts to pave over the prairies and restrict wildlife to zoos and mitigate friendships to social media, God’s creation is still all around us.

Jesus invites us to slow down, to pause our worries, and to meditate on creation, on our interdependence with creation, and on our Creator who cares for each of our needs. Choose to live peaceably with creation this week, and welcome more of the Creator’s peace into your life.

(Photo credit: Vlad Chețan.)

In Marilynne Robinson’s novel, Gilead, an elderly clergyman writes to his much younger son, “This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.” I was reminded of these two short sentences yesterday, on Earth Day. As mentioned in a recent newsletter, I’ve been rereading Pope Francis’ encyclical letter, Laudato Si’ over the past few months. One of the themes he returns to is how our contemporary lifestyle, particularly for those of us in the industrialized West, detaches us from the rhythm of creation. “Human beings and material objects,” writes Francis, “no longer extend a friendly hand to one another; the relationship has become confrontational.” This antagonist stance, aided by what the pope calls our “technocratic paradigm” distances us from nature; it works against our attentiveness.

When we think about attending to creation, we are likely to first consider the plants and animals with whom we share our communities. Driving through Chicago congestion this week, I was startled to watch a squirrel treat an electrical line as a convenient overpass. Last year I watched a coyote explore the park across the street from our church office. Depending on where you live, your experiences with nature might be a bit more… natural.

Of course, we are a part of nature too. We belong, in Francis’ words, to the “universal communion” through which we “are linked by unseen bonds and together form a kind of universal family.” If there is only one Creator, than we must take our place among the rest of God’s creatures. And the same forces which work against us seeing the plants and animals around us also warp how we see one another. What Francis writes about the manipulative power of the technocratic paradigm is true for how it is applied against human and non-human creation. He writes that this “paradigm exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object.”

It is the desire for control over nature which keeps us from actually seeing nature and receiving it as a gift from God. How many plants which are native to your community can you identify? What are the migratory patterns of the birds and insects around your home? Does how you think about weather patterns include the impact on local agriculture, the water table, and how many mosquitos will be buzzing around your cookout this summer? Our inability to see nature and our place in it stems from a formation within a society which has been hell-bent on controlling creation for hundreds of years.

What we cannot see, we cannot name. And what we cannot name, we cannot love. So our engagement with nature is reduced to consumption and exploitation.

Because human beings are inter-related with the rest of God’s creation, we might expect this malignant neglect to extend to one another. Theologian Delores S. Williams writes that there is a “relationship between the defilement of earth’s body, and the devilment of black women’s bodies.” The extractive ends of the technocratic paradigm are applied to lands and bodies and it is certain bodies – racialized as commodities in a manner similar to how some places are reduced to resources – which are made most vulnerable. It’s not that we face “two separate crises,” notes Francis, “one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental. Strategies for a solution demand an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature.”

I write a lot about racial justice as an essential part of discipleship to Jesus. In fact, it’s likely why you subscribe to these occasional newsletters! But for some time I’ve believed that we can’t really imagine a way beyond white supremacy without understanding our interdependence with the rest of God’s creation, human and non-human alike. Pope Francis is right: what is required in these days of racial and environmental crises is an integrated approach. I’m going to be spending more time learning and writing about that sort of integrated vision and I hope you’ll stick around for the conversation.

(Photo credit: Pixabay.)

Is watching, scrolling, and sharing the best we can do in response to yet another televised war?

I want the act of watching a war unfold on the other side of the world to feel stranger than it does. It should feel stranger than it does. But I was thirteen when the first Gulf War was beamed into our home, a graduate student when our president sent troops into Afghanistan. I drove to Radio Shack to pick up an antenna so I could watch the beginning of the second invasion of Iraq, an event that, in my memory, seemed more like the beginning of a race than the bloodletting it eventually was.

Televised and streaming war is normal now. Some of these conflicts get better ratings than others; the horrors in Ukraine have captivated us in a way that Syria or Yemen or Ethiopia never quite managed.

There was a story on our local public radio station this week about some high rises in Chicago which are being illuminated in the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag. It’s a way of standing in solidarity, according to a couple of the building managers who were interviewed for the report. They didn’t sound all that convinced that their lit-up support makes much of a difference.

What else is there to do with another war on? Today’s headlines tell me that Russia took more ground while my social media feeds recycle the head-shaking stories of the feisty Ukrainian resistance. It’s all so far away and, compared with my scrolling and scanning and skimming, changing some light bulbs on a skyscraper seems positively productive. Illuminated solidarity.

I’m taking a seminary class about creation theology this semester and this week our small group discussed the inherently limited nature of being human. We are interdependent with the rest of creation in a manner that contemporary life, at least in my part of the world, thoroughly obscures. The naturalist and author Aldo Leopold wrote that civilization “has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relation with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim.” I wonder, is that forgetfulness partly to blame for the helplessness I feel in the face of another broadcasted war?

In Laudato Si, Pope Francis quotes the Catholic Catechism on the human dependency with our fellow creatures. “God wills the interdependence of creatures,” he writes. “The sun and the moon, the cedar and the little flower, the eagle and the sparrow: the spectacle of their countless diversities and inequalities tells us that no creature is self-sufficient. Creatures exist only in dependence on each other, to complete each other, in the service of each other.” There is no being human without relying completely on the biota and abiota for our very survival.

The clutter, gadgets, and middlemen which Leopold warns us about are defined by Francis as the “technocratic paradigm” through which we’ve come to view the world. “The specialization which belongs to technology makes it difficult to see the larger picture. The fragmentation of knowledge proves helpful for concrete applications, and yet it often leads to a loss of appreciation for the whole, for the relationships between things, and for the broader horizon, which then becomes irrelevant.” We feel that we are related to those women and men dodging missiles so many miles away but the dominant paradigm keeps us from intuiting the nature of our relationship. We feel that there must be some sort of reciprocity but it’s hard to say just what it is. Our formation has us assuming technological solutions to the suffering inflicted upon our creaturely kin.

In the days immediately preceding the Second Gulf War, Wendell Berry wrote that a “nation’s charity must come from the heart and imagination of its people. It requires us ultimately to see the world as a community of all the creatures which, to be possessed by any one, must be shared by all.” Such a perspective renounces the technocratic paradigm with its utilitarian and segregating impulses. Instead, we choose to see ourselves as cooperative participants, giving to and receiving from the earthly home we share with every other creature.

This is not an invitation to trade one abstraction for another. Leopold writes that “there is value in any experience that reminds us of our dependency on the soil-plant-animal-man food chain, and of the fundamental organization of the biota.” These experiences can only be found within the very close confines of the places we inhabit. Those seeking to live within the limits of our place will, as Berry writes, show “concern for the health and longevity of its soils, forests, and watersheds, its natural and its human communities, its domestic economy, and the natural systems on which that economy inescapably depends.” Are our places healthy? Do we know how to find out?

In 1964 Fannie Lou Hamer, along with eleven other activists, spent three weeks in Guinea. As the field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Hamer joined the other delegates and traveled to West Africa at the invitation of the newly independent nation’s president, Ahmed Sékou Touré. In her new biography about Hamer, Keisha N. Blain writes that President Touré “hoped to provide an opportunity for young Guineans to meet with American civil rights leaders to exchange ideas and strengthen ties between both groups.” Hamer’s path to leadership in the Civil Rights Movement differed from many of her contemporaries, beginning in the severe poverty and racial oppression of Sunflower County, Mississippi. After years of sharecropping on a white man’s plantation, Hamer threw herself into the struggle for voting rights after being fired and shot at after attempting to vote. She now found herself far from Mississippi’s cotton fields, being consulted by high-ranking delegates and forging international partnerships.

Later that year, after returning from their trip, Hamer made a speech in Harlem on behalf of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. In it, she linked what she had experienced in post-colonial West Africa and a lifetime in Jim Crow America. “For three hundred years, we’ve given them time. And I’ve been tired so long, so I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Blain writes that, “for Hamer, drawing the links between the experiences of Black people in the United States and those in Africa was not simply a matter of grappling with American foreign policy. The deep connection and relationship between African Americans and Africa guided her recognition.”

In these interconnected relationships, Hamer represents a vision of compassion for our global neighbors which is unencumbered by the technocratic paradigm. Far from shielding her from the struggles on the other side of the world, Hamer’s roots in and commitments to her flesh-and-blood neighbors in Mississippi allowed her to see the interrelated whole.

How might we shake lose of the fragmented malaise of technocracy which has us adding wars and rumors of war to the rest of our media queue? Which has us assuming that sharing and liking are the closest to solidarity we can get? Perhaps we might begin by plunging our hands into the nearest bit of soil we can find, feeling for the reverberations of this created world of which we are but a small part. Any fruitful response to the old predictable destruction will not come from some technological miracle. It will reveal itself to those who can see the whole, who understand we belong to the whole and can imagine that wholeness in the stories and suffering of our kin.

Neighborly love cannot be mitigated through our technology, no matter what the technocratic saviors from Silicon Valley and Washington DC believe. Love is always an embodied sacrifice. It makes particular demands on limited and interdependent creatures such as ourselves, namely that we care for the diverse places and people closest to us. Only then, from the creative confines of our creatureliness, can we love our faraway neighbors.

A sermon about the truth which abides, even in our cynical age.

To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. 32 Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:31-32)

“What is truth?” retorted Pilate. With this he went out again to the Jews gathered there and said, “I find no basis for a charge against him. (John 18:38)

Does anyone else feel like truth has gone out of style in our public discourse recently? Previously, it seemed that pundits, partisans, and other powerful people were at least interested in a veneer of truth. But over the past few years, the slide toward power-grabbing relativism has been dizzying. Sometimes the betrayal of the truth seems aimed at something big, like undermining our electoral process. And other times the motivation seems downright vindictive. I’m thinking of a story that some of you will remember.

It took place at last summer’s Olympic games when gymnast Simone Biles decided to withdraw from the competition. Biles came to the games as one of the all-time greats having won four gold medals in 2016. She had also been public about her occasional experiences with depression along with the fact that she had been one of the survivors of the sexual abuse perpetuated by the USA Gymnastics team doctor.

When Biles, who is Black, decided to withdraw, saying that she felt uncertain attempting her routines and that she needed to prioritize her wellbeing and safety, many athletes, especially African American athletes, spoke out in support of her. They described their own difficult athletic experiences and the struggle to push themselves beyond the limits of safety. We also heard many Black women speak up, praising Biles for prioritizing her mental and physical health; they acknowledged that if she didn’t, no one else would do it for her.

But then, seemingly from another universe, the pundits began speaking up. Mostly white men, these voices characterized Biles’ decision very differently. One called her a “selfish sociopath” and a “shame to the country.” Another wrote that “Biles seemed to revel in taking care of her ‘mental health,’ whatever that means.” Yet another took to social media to mock Biles’ decision, ending with, “What a joke.”

These cynical responses represent more than a difference in perspective or experience. Instead, they were a refusal to take Simone Biles at her word. Rather than believing the experienced athlete and the chorus of others who corroborated her experience, these pundits chose to obscure the truth for their own cynical agendas.

We live in a world where we don’t simply have different perspectives, but where one group of people is comfortable telling another group that their experiences aren’t true. It can seem as though more and more people are not invested in learning the truth, especially if it messes with their own narratives about reality. The cynicism that drips from Pilate’s words as he responds to Jesus fits our own cultural mood all too well: “What is truth?” But as we see from a passage earlier in John’s gospel, Jesus taught his would-be followers that truth could be known by holding to his teaching.

I am convinced that it is the unity of Jesus’ followers across cultural lines of division which bears witness to the truth of the gospel. The tension between cynicism and truth is not abstract. When Christians are not equally invested in the truth, when we content ourselves with the mistruths, mischaracterizations, and outright lies which support our partisan opinions, we are abdicating our call to represent our Savior, the One who is the way, the truth, and the life. But none of this is inevitable and here is the good news I want to lift up this morning: Cynicism must surrender to the truth in the presence of the Body of Christ.

Cynicism surrenders to the truth in the presence of the Body of Christ. In other words, how we serve and worship together testifies to a truth which cannot be obscured. And in these days of suspicion, when truth seems hard to pin down, this in extraordinary. So, what is it about the Body of Christ which forces cynicism, lies, and deceit to surrender? First, the Body of Christ is built on the truth. Second, the Body of Christ exists for reconciliation. Third, the Body of Christ testifies to freedom.

Cynicism must surrender to truth because the Body of Christ is built on truth.

How do we know the truth? According to Jesus, it’s by holding to his teachings. More literally, it’s by remaining in the word. More than knowledge about Jesus, this is an invitation to abide with Jesus, the one through whom, according to John “all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” No wonder that abiding with Jesus leads to the truth.

But we all know how sin obscures our interest in abiding with Jesus. Rather than running to the truth found in the Son of God, sin orients us toward deceit. We each have a propensity to lie, to believe lies, and to expect to be lied to. Is it any wonder that cynicism has become our vernacular?

So, we need to remember that Jesus established his church is similarly deceitful days. Pilate wasn’t the only one despairing of knowing the truth. And it’s into this cynical world that Jesus comes claiming not only to know truth to have access to the truth but to be the truth. He does not hoard truth. He does not cloak it in mystery as will the Gnostics. Unlike ideological operatives of our day, Jesus doesn’t force anyone to join the right party to access the truth; it is available to Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, and Zealots. It is available to Republicans, Democrats, progressives, and conservatives. You simply need to abide with Jesus.

This is the incredible claim made by Body of Christ across time and place. It is the claim we make today: truth is available and it is found in Jesus. Turn to him and abide with him! Do not put it off. Do not wait until you have figured everything out. Until you are less busy. Abide with the Truth today.

Cynicism must surrender to truth because the Body of Christ exists for reconciliation.

Members of the Body of Christ are drawn toward one another by the truth of the gospel.Often this is where our churches have left it. where we leave it. The problem is that when we begin articulating the massive scope of what Jesus accomplished on the cross, those who’ve been formed by a reductionist gospel get nervous. We are told to stick to the gospel. And in our own American context, this small gospel hasresulted in segregated/complicit church.

Writing from a prison cell in Birmingham in 1963, Dr. King reflected on this dynamic. “In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: ‘Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.’”

If we will listen to the testimonies from brothers and sisters from earlier generations they will remind us of the dangers of reducing the gospel to the proclamation of the truth of the gospel without the corollary demonstration of Jesus’ reconciling and righteous power.

You see, the Body of Christ exists not only because we are drawn to the truth in Jesus, but because of what Jesus has accomplished between us. In John 17:20-21, Jesus prays for us.“My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.” And as the church grew beyond the confines of Jerusalem, the Christians applied Jesus’ prayer for oneness to each line of cultural separation they encountered. They applied the message and mandate of reconciliation that Paul proclaimed in 2 Corinthians to the social hierarchies of their day between Jews and Greeks, rich and poor, women and men, the enslave and the free, representatives of the empire those who’d experienced the worst of the empire.

They became, as Dr. King would say, maladjusted to the sinful assumptions which privileged some at expense of others. Reconciliation became central to identity. It was worth fighting for. It made them distinct from the surrounding culture.

Cynicism thrives in segregated silos. But when we are rooted within the diverse Body of Christ, we have more access to the truth because we can no longer reduce the truth to our own narrow experience. Now the Jew must consider what circumcision means to the Gentile. Philemon is confronted by the impossibility of continuing to enslave Onesimus. Greco-Roman Christians must give up their participation in ritual meals with food sacrificed to idols. The wealthy can no longer ignore the poor as they both come to the Lord’s table together.In reconciled community – one-ness across cultural lines of segregation and hierarchy – the truth of the gospel becomes ever more accessible and live-able.

What choices will you make to participate in reconciliation? In a society built on hierarchies and segregation, reconciliation will not happen to you. We must resist the status quo.

Cynicism must surrender to truth because the Body of Christ testifies to freedom.

Notice how what Jesus says. “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”And what kind of freedom is this? It is certainly spiritual Abiding in Jesus leads to freedom from sin, death, devil! And this freedom always manifests visibly.

In Luke 4:18-19 Jesus says that the Spirit of the Lord is one him to proclaim good news to the poor, freedom for the prisoners, recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.And then he begins healing the sick, restoring the outcast, raising the dead, denouncing the corrupt, and refusing the way of violence. When Jesus proclaims a truth-inspired-freedom, it is a holistic freedom!

This gospel of freedom inspired enslaved people of African descent to plot, plan, and pursue their emancipation despite enormous risk. This gospel of freedom animated the prophetic imagination of saints like Fannie Lou Hamer, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, and John Lewis to organize and agitate and mobilize for liberation. This gospel of freedom has breathed Holy Spirit life into countless women and men who’ve been hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair;  persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.

May I speak to those of you this morning who find yourselves worn out and exhausted? Perhaps you’re asking yourself, how many times must I display the wounds I’ve received at the hands of this racialized society? How many times must I try to convince you that the racism I’ve experienced is real? How many times will my experiences and the experiences of my people be diminished, downplayed, or denied?

Can I invite you to direct your allegiance and affections to Jesus once again? Not as a distraction from injustice; not as an escape from the pain you bear. No, turn your face to Jesus as the one who is truth; as the one who will never lie to you; as the one who has kept the saints who’ve gone before you, and not just kept but who has parted seas and provided mana, who has brought down rulers from their thrones and lifted up the humble, who has brought low the enslaver, the segregator, the disenfranchiser, the mass incarcerator

Hear again the words of that old spiritual: Give me Jesus, give me Jesus. You may have all this world, give me Jesus. You can have this world of cynicism and deception; oppression and injustice. Give me Jesus: give me the truth, give me the Word who was there at the beginning and who will see me through to the end, give me the only one who can guarantee my freedom from evil in all of its manifestation. Give me Jesus.

This is the Jesus to whom we, the Body of Christ are called to testify with our lips and lives. When a world accustomed to Pilate’s despair encounters a community of Jesus’ followers, they ought to be shocked and intrigued. Who are these people who testify to this comprehensive freedom? Who are these women and men who can imagine a world of shalom and salvation? Who are these free people living as though the righteous will of God in heaven is actually present here on earth? Who are these diverse people who don’t seem to belong together and why do they love each other? Who are these people who willingly lay down their power and steward their privilege for their neighbor’s good? Who are these ordinary women and men who lay down their lives for the truth, for freedom?

Cynicism surrenders to the truth in the presence of the Body of Christ. The built-on-truth Body of Christ. The exists-for-reconciliation Body of Christ. The testifying-to-freedom Body of Christ. Sisters and brothers, you are the Body of Christ, and we need you take your place. Do not believe the lie that our cynical status quo is inevitable. In Christ, the truth has come. We have been reconciled. So let us give our lives to proclaiming our Lord’s freedom, to that joyful announcement which cleanses sinful hearts and shatters sinful chains: Those the Son has set free are free indeed!

(Photo credit: Johannes Plenio.)

A reflection for our church’s brief, online Watchnight Service.

Imagine a gathering of enslaved women and men, collecting in secret on any given December 31st. New Year’s Day was often when enslavers settled their accounts; should they find themselves in debt, it was likely they would sell some of those they had bought and abused

What do the conversations of those gathered sound like? What do the songs feel like? What do the prayers look like?

Imagine now a similar gathering on New Year’s Eve, 1862. Three and a half months earlier President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and word had reached this community that the new law would go into effect at midnight

What do those conversations sound like? What do those songs feel like? What do those prayers look like?

A Watchnight service is a sacred occasion, though not because we find it in Scripture or practiced by the early church. No, this service is holy because those who first gathered to mark the passage of one year to the next – first under the most extreme duress and then in anticipation of liberation – they sanctified it with their worship, praise, and prayer; with their songs, tears, and shouts; with their theologizing, organizing, and self-emancipating; they made holy this service of watching and waiting, of remembering and anticipating, of praise and petition by their refusal to renounce Habakkuk’s promise: “For the revelation awaits an appointed time; it speaks of the end and will not prove false. Though it linger, wait for it; it will certainly come and will not delay.” (2:3)

Coming precisely one week after Christmas, on this night we turn our attention again to the Word made flesh. In him there is no separation of the spiritual from the physical, the spirit from the body, spiritual freedom from holistic liberation.

Many of the women, men, and children who gathered in hush harbors to speak and sing the truth away from the enslaver’s deception and violence, these saints held seamlessly together the God who saved soul and flesh, who restored sin-tattered spirits and bodies burdened by white supremacy, whose salvation could not be withheld by plunderers or exploiters.

2022 has been another long year. But let us not make the mistake of thinking ourselves unique in this regard. 1862 was a long year. Every year, as we await the revelation of our Savior, is a long year.

We come tonight with our burdens, laments, and petitions. They are each of them valid. Our Lord has heard and will hear our cries. He sees the desires of your heart, the ones you’re barely able to utter to yourself.

But tonight is a place for praise as well. You are still here. We are still here. There is breath in your lungs, blood pumping through your body, synapses firing with feeling and emotion. You have been kept this year. You have not spun apart. There has been manna enough to eat, water-turned-wine enough to drink. Your God has been a strong tower and a fortress surrounding your vulnerabilities.

So we gather tonight in a spirit of praise, alongside the saints who’ve gone before us. We gather in that most Christian of way: the night of sorrow has been transformed into the daybreak of redemption. What had been a practiced grief has become the site of good tidings of the greatest possible joy. Our mourning has been traded for a dance, our sackcloth for garments of joy.