Listening to the Prophetic Feminine Other

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Their music (Nina Simone, Mary J. Blige, and Lisa Gerrard) captures something I’ve been spending alot of time with: the blues.  Not the genre itself but the sensibility.  The sensibility that says we can possess a sense of the tragic nature of our existence while simaltaneously holding on to hopeful vision and living with a tearful smile.  These artist, at this moment, capture for me this sensibility.  Reading bell Hooks doesn’t help either. Her insightful reading of the text of the world has been a challenge and has also been a place of repentance and conversion for me. 

Excerpt from her book Feminism is For Everybody: Passionate Politics:                        

Since our society continues to be primarily a “Christian” culture masses of people continue to believe that god has ordained that women be subordinate to men in the domestic household. Even though masses of women have entered the work forces, even though many families are headed by women who are the sole breadwinners, the vision of domestic life which continues to dominate the nation’s imagination is one in which the logic of male domination is intact, whether men are present in the home or not. The wrong minded vision of feminist movement which implied it was anti-male carried with it the wrong minded assumption that all female space would necessarily be an environment where patriarchy and sexist thinking would be absent. Many women, even those involved in feminist politics, chose to believe this as well.

 

  The more I listen to the prophetic feminine ‘other’ the more I recognize my need to repent from my lack of historical empathy towards real lives of women.  Take Hilary Clinton for example.  I was talking to my mom about the democratic primary race.  She gave me a perspective I did not consider before.  I was criticizing Senator Clinton for some of the comments she’s made over the past month or so regarding Senator Obama and his former pastor Jeremiah Wright. My mom said, “Hilary is bitter.  She was told that she may have been the only hope for the Dems getting the White House in 08′.  So, what did she do? She began to position herself politically by first running and winning the Senate seat in the state of New York.  And she did exactly what the Dems wanted. She got into position.  Then what happened next?  Obama happened.”  I am not a Clinton supporter and I still remain disappointed in the way she’s handled the so-called media-created controversy surrounding Rev. Wright.  But I never considered this interpretation of her ‘bitterness’ and ‘defensive’ posture.  

Anyways…I am sure that wasn’t a helpful rant but had to get that out there.  However, these musings bring me to a moment of confession: I do not truly and faithfully listen to the voices of women.  I have many sexist habits that God and my neighbors need to help me with.  When I quote and recite authors they are mostly men.  When I think of great leaders in history my default position is toward the masculine.  I cut their voices off in my soul.  I do not let their thoughts and pain enter into the internal orchestra of my mind.  My sexist habits die hard.    Who will deliver me from this sexist body of death?

So…I’m listening to these beautiful women now.  Their music captures both the beauty and tragedy of the world.  Themes of sacrifice, love, tragedy, redemption, hope, peace, sacredness, beauty, goodness, truth, purpose, and justice pervade.  God is profoundly here.  May I be here as well.

Bald Blogger practices Pentecost

My soul brother Phil Sinitiere has started a series of posts that will be covering a recent interivew he had with author Jonthan Wilson-Hartgrove.  Jonathan’s latest book, which I’m currently reading, is Free to Be Bound: Church Beyond the Color Line. 

I hope to give my thoughts on his book soon.  Right now I’m reading mad books.  Right now I’m captured by Tony Jones’ latest book The New Christians. 

 

I plan on blogging on this soon.  Plug: he has a section on me in his book.   I plan on musing each ‘dispatch’ of the book over the next several days.  I have been intending on posting something sooner but wanted to give his book more blog time.  This is probably one of the best books I’ve read on the emerging church movement.  Tony gives us several ‘dispatches’ on the ECM that are really basic characteristics.  Stay tune…

Wonder why the preacher said “God-damn America”?

Sean Bell (May 18, 1983–November 25, 2006)

@ Kanuga

*Historical note: this is my first blog post from my new laptop.  I now see how folks can keep up in the blogosphere. 

Anyways I’m here at the Kanuga Conference Center for the “Practicing Peace: Creative Responses to Violence”.  I’ve sojourned here with my good friends Steve and Becky Knight.  The conference speakers will be Helen Prejean, Jim Carroll, Walter Wink, June Wink, Mpho Tutu, and Bishop Charles Jenkins.  The conference is being hosted by The Institute For Servant Leadership.  Sister Helen Prejean is about to speak in  few minutes…

More later.  Busy week.

Easter Prayer

 

Christus resurrexit! (Christ is risen!)

Vere resurrexit. (He is risen indeed.)

God of mercy and justice.  May this day be a day we remember that a Grace-ed New World has come upon us.

Amen.

Good Friday Meditation

IC XC: Jesus Christ, Ghetto’s Rose

Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete? Proving nature’s law is wrong it learned to walk with out having feet. Funny it seems, but by keeping it’s dreams, it learned to breathe fresh air. Long live the rose that grew from concrete when no one else ever cared. - The Rose that grew from concrete, a poem by Tupac Shakur …we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength. - Paul, a 1st-century revolutionary Christian preacher Today we stand at the foot of the cross.  It is Good Friday.  Christians the world over will be remembering, reflecting on, and creatively imagining the significance of Jesus’ crucifixion.  Many Christians that inhabit different traditions of the faith will be emphasizing one of many of the images and/or symbols used to give meaning to the cross of Jesus Christ.  The cross, for many, means substitution, sacrifice, ransom, moral example, and conqueror (or victor).  Today’s brief meditation will be through the image of Christ as Victor over Sin and Death…or to bring it to the street: Jesus, Ghetto’s Rose. Tupac Shakur’s poem quote above captures the essence of this image: Christus Victor.  Pac’s poem paints for us life in the ghetto.  But it is a hopeful picture.  He paints a picture of a resilient rose that is able to break through the concrete.  The concrete represents ghetto-ization.  The long history of marginalization, joblessness, structural inequities, violence, racial self-hatred, black nihilism and despair.  It is a world not too far from the world of Jesus.  A world of Roman Imperial oppression and its tragic consequences that left many out in the cold where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.  Jesus hailed from Galilee.  Essentially he comes from the hood or ghetto.  His ministry is done primarily within this context, the margins of Roman Imperial power seated in Jerusalem.  Jesus’ proclamation of the coming kingdom of God would be an alternative to the Roman Imperial order.  It would be this order or false kingdom that would crucify Jesus. Just as life is often smothered and strangled to death in the ghetto. True Life was crucified by Sin and Death by way of the Roman Imperial death grip.  But as Tupac and the Gospel story remind us there is One who was victorious over the concrete of Sin and Death…Ghetto’s Rose, Jesus from Nazareth. Amen.

Thoughts on Obama and Wright

 

The blogosphere is buzzing about the relationship between Democratic Presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama and pastor Jeremiah Wright.  The questions are numerous.  The main issue among some Christian bloggers has been Obama’s proximity to Wright’s version of Afro-centric Christian theology and it possibly hurting his bid for the White House.

My question: why should Wright’s version of Afro-centric Christian theology hurt Obama? why is this an issue?  

Is it because the label “afro-centric” is a qualifier? and thus far Obama (contra his political opponents) has distanced himself from the race issue.  Given our current political and racial climate in the United States I would to.

But what’s wrong with afro-centric? Especially when much of Christian theology for the past 500 year or so has been ”euro-centric”.  Of course we haven’t called it “euro-centric” Christian theology.  We’ve just called it “Christian”.  Kind of like “person” meant “white person” for many centuries. Or like “rational”, “pure”, “normal”, “clean”, “articulate”, etc. meant “white”.

Of course those who are uncomfortable with the qualifier afro-centric Christian theology or black theology would do well to understand the historical and social reasons why black folks use these qualifiers.  They only reveal their racial privilege by their ignorance of why black folks have had to do theology in this light.  

Here’s a truth about afro-centric theology that often goes missing in these discussions: it is a theology that seeks to re-affirm black humanity and resist the congenital effects of white Supremacist Christian culture.   It is an attempt to cure black folks  (and hopefully other folks) of racial self-hatred and ’apocalypse’ the pervasive genetic defect of white supremacy in North American Christianity.

Note: it is a strange irony that a theology that seeks to affirm black folk’s being made in the image of God and that seeks to resist the long history of white supremacy in North American Christianity would be considered ‘racist’.  Its the strangest of historical ironies. 

What unconscous habits would lead one to make such a charge?

My suggestion to folks uncomfortable with the qualifier “afro-centric”: read indigenous black church history.

Start here:

The Black Church in the African American Experience (Paperback)
by C. Eric Lincoln (Author), Lawrence H. Mamiya (Author)

And for something a little more palatable if you don’t like black Christian radicals:

 

Africentric Christianity: A Theological Appraisal for Ministry
by J. Deotis Roberts (Author)

I’d start here rather than rely on Sean Hannity for theological references.

 Initial thoughts…. 

Insurgency of Peace ‘occupies’ the Queen’s City (Charlotte, NC) this Friday

This week Brian Mclaren comes to my neck of the woods (Charlotte, NC) with the Everything Must Change tour.  We are expecting a good turn out.  Brian will be doing an interview with the local NPR station.  He has done an interview with the local paper here in Charlotte.  I’ve been re-reading his latest book, Everything Must Change.

   

I’m sure its causing a stir in some church circles.  A great read for anyone whose tired of status-quo Christianity with the after-life gospel and is hungry for a this-life gospel.

*shameless plug.  I get to lead a discussion on diversity and Pentecost.

Jesus and the Disambiguated

“Jesus’ message focused on the urgency of a radical change in the inner attitude of his people. He recognized fully that … no external force, however great and overwhelming, can at long last destroy a people if it does not first win the victory of the spirit against them.” - Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited.

I love to collect hifalutin’ words.  A word I stumbled upon earlier this year and continues to haunt me I found on wikipedia: disambiguation.

In computational linguistics, word sense disambiguation(WSD) is the problem of determining in which sense a word having a number of distinct senses is used in a given sentence. For example, consider the word bass, two distinct senses of which are:

1. a type of fish
2. tones of low frequency

and the sentences:

1. I went fishing for some sea bass
2. The bass part of the song is very moving

To a human it is obvious the first sentence is using the word bass in sense 1 above, and in the second sentence it is being used in sense 2. But although this seems obvious to a human, developing algorithms to replicate this human ability is a difficult task.

I know…a bit technical .  I took a couple of double takes at this short definition to get a layman’s understanding (and I’m still trying to wrap my mind around it).  To bring this word down to a street level it appears that this word means, in a basic sense, clarity.  Dis-ambiguation is a way for a system to bring clarity to a word…to give us the proper meaning and sense of a word.  It is the removal of ambiguity, the fuzziness, the cloud that often hangs around a word with multiple meanings. 

In an exercise of postmodern playfulness I want to use this word, dis-ambiguation, in the sense of being given clarity.

In a gospel-sense, dis-ambiguation, would be a prophetic function.  The prophetic, as I understand it, is about giving clarity to God’s people in order for them to be faithful to God’s covenant of shalom.  It is the removal of ambiguity of the many narratives and powers that shape our lives.  If my playfulness with the word dis-ambiguation is close to something like clarity in the sense of the prophetic then Jesus would be the ultimate dis-ambiguator. 

Jesus, the Great Dis-ambiguator, would give a message, share words, perform practices, instill prophetic habits, and give cadence to the lives of those around him in a way that would give clarity of sight:

Luke 4:17-21: “And the book of the prophet Isaiah was handed to Him (Jesus). And He opened the book, and found the place where it was written, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, Because He anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, To set free those who are downtrodden, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.’

Jesus was a prophet.  And like all good prophets he gave people clarity about the place of their lives within the larger picture of God’s world. Jesus showed ‘what was the case’ and ‘what was hoped for’.  Jesus was good at giving clarity or removing ambiguity.  The ambiguity of the present and the hoped for future.  In short, he was the Great Dis-ambiguator.

So…in Jesus’ redemptive wake are those attached to him, the dis-ambiguated.  The dis-ambiguated are those, for whom Howard Thurman would say, that are emboldened and empowered to fight against the ’spirit of the time’ or zeitgeist.

To be dis-ambiguated by the gospel is to be gifted with clarity to see how we have been routed by the militancy of ’sin’, both systemically and personally.  

My use of “Jesus and the disambiguated” simply echoes Howard Thurman’s “Jesus and the disinherited”.  Thurman, echoing the work of (pre)post-colonialist thinker Franz Fanon’s work (e.g. Wretched of the Earth) on the effects of oppression on the oppressor/oppressed, helped lay the foundation for liberation theology in our North American context. 

As an African-american, Thurman, gave us insight into the first century Palestinian, Jesus from Nazareth as a liberator.  Thurman’s location as being tied to an oppressed community aided him in having a hermenuetical solidarity with the Jesus community in Roman-occupied Israel.  Like most of scripture and the African-american religious tradition, faith tends to be interpreted from the margins…from the bottom-up.

Bringing Fanon and Thurman into our postmodern context, where we are being made more aware of ‘all’ of ‘our’ complicity with anti-human stories and powers, we learn that disambiguation is not just about those in the margins. 

The disambiguated can be everyone.  ”All” of us are occupied territory of some sort.  ”All” of us are like Legion the demoniac Jesus encounters in the gospel story.  “We” are all Legion for ‘many’ things plague us and oppress us.

The dis-ambiguated is not limited to those at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder.  We are  all oppressor and oppressed.  Jesus disambiguates us with the message of salvation…the proclamation of God’s redemptive order, the kingdom of God. 

Emerging Profession: Resisting Maintenance of the Spectacle (3)

Under the weather for the past few days.  Thanks to everyone who commented on this topic.

How’s the spectacle maintained? and what difference does it make.  Since this whole thing is a conversation, not a dissertation, my thoughts will be fluid.  In other words, no footnotes.

The spectacle of the CEO-pastor is maintained by constant deference to American Business culture and the legality of non-profit corporations.  

We are inundated with conferences on ’steps’ and ‘principles’ of leadership and management.  The culture of North American churches is steeped in the language of corporatism.  This is the air we breath.  My contention is not that we live in this world.  I am more concerned with the spectacle of the CEO-pastor as a possible un-just social relation that simply mirrors the social, political, economic inequities in our society. Where pastors hide under the ‘legality’ or ‘law’ of the CEO.  As we learn from the deconstructionist ‘law’ oftentimes hides deeper structural injustices.  Or as the apostle Paul once taught us: not the letter of the law but the spirit of the law.  The law, it seems, oftentimes follows behind justice.  I see the temptation of being swallowed up by narratives of competition, success, and acquisition that are counter the fruits of the Spirit.  I am reminded some years ago when two large popular churches based in Atlanta had students in competition for ’souls’ on their respective campuses.  They saw themselves as part of competing camps or corporations striving to get the best part of the ’soul’ market.  Episodes like this are just an expression of the larger issue being discussed.      

So…while many pastors point us to the legality of their positions as CEO-pastors there is a greater issue involved than the legality of their positions.   The social, political, and economic relation of their positions to their churches and their larger communities.

I do not believe it is enough to point to the ‘legality’ of your ‘right’ to claim yourself a CEO.  You must do the hard work of deconstruction and repentance.  The hard work to see if your embracing of leadership philosophies from American Business culture are anti-thetical to the upside down kingdom of God. 

Is your CEO-leadership style in harmony with the covenantal demands of God’s justice-making convenant?  Solidarity with the oppressed, mercy, justice, love, shalom, vulnerability, reconciliation, charity, grace, etc.. 

Or do you maintain the spectacle of the CEO by hiding behind a mountain of leadership books, conferences, and Constitutional laws?