Emergent and the issue of Race
My man Charlie Wear over at Next-Wave offered an interesting observation about a report by Van S of missionthink who attended the recent Emergent convention in Nashville. Charlie asked the question, “Emergent, mostly white males?“
Great question Charlie. I have participated in the discussion. And have thought about why Emergent is mostly white…for now. And I should say that Emergent US and UK are mostly white. I am not sure about the Emergent conversation that is taking place in other parts of the globe. The most obvious one is that the conversation started in white evangelical churches. So there is the historical fact that the conversation was started by white evangelicals that were concerned about particular issues relating to the church’s mission in the world of our time. So I don’t buy into the conspiracy theory that those really involved in Emergent…those that initiated the conversation were purposely trying to keep the “others” out of it. I think that would be a more charitable rendering of the pervasiveness of whiteness of the Emergent conversation to suggest that the conversation just simply started this way.
Secondly, another reason why Emergent is mostly white has to do with the history of race and Christianity in America. I have said this before in another thread and am looking forward to the response but it is this: the reason why there is a white church and a black church is because of racist white Christians. White Christian racism created the dichotomy between black and white churches. As a matter of fact there is no such social designation named “white” or “black” church prior to the peculiar way race played out here in America. White racism created the black church. The black church was a reaction to white idolatry of race. There would have not been a black church had many of our white Christian brothers and sisters had not been blinded by the false belief in white superiority. And this historical matter has continued to play itself out in American Christianity. The white/black church distinction was created because Christians violated the unity that is to be embodied in the Eucharist. The reason why Emergent is mostly white is because Christians failed to embody the Eucharist. We simply failed to be the body of Christ. And I cannot see any serious discussion of race in the Emergent conversation without calling for a serious discussion as to how and why our Christian forefathers and foremothers broke the Eucharist by idolizing their whiteness. I can’t see how we can deal with the race issue without dealing with the specifics of how this whole thing came about. It very much needs to be a part of the catechism of the Emergent conversation. Assuming of course Emergent wants to deal seriously with embodying a “deep ecclesiology”. We’ll see.
Merton On My Mind
I told myself I was going to take a break from reading. I tend to read myself into despair. There is definitely some truth to the biblical injunction that much reading is weariness to the soul. I know that sounds bad but I’m being honest here. I read very little fiction which I heard is not good as well (not reading fiction that is). I have been thinking about picking up a good novel. Any suggestions?
I did run across a refreshing voice the other day, Thomas Merton. Where has this cat been all my life? There is something about this gentlemen’s writing that stirs me up. I have been reading Luke-Acts along with some of Merton’s writings. I picked up a book edited by Robert Inchausti, author of Subersive Orthodoxy, that is a collection of quotes and passages from Merton’s various writings.
Here is something that got my day going. It came at an opportune time after a conversation I had with some of my co-workers, who happen to be Christian, about the notion of worldliness. There were a varying range of ideas about “worldliness”. From going to the strip club to drinking beer, to cussin to all the other “worldly” things Christians are infamous for prognosticating on . In reading Merton this morning I stumbled upon a notion of worldliness that, to me, really captures what the biblical narrative is getting at when it uses the word “world” or “wordly”:
I think the question of “turning to the world” is in fact a question of being patient with the unprepossessing surface of it, in order to break through to the deep goodness that is underneath. But to my way of thinking, “the world” is precisely the dehumanized surface. What is under the surface, and often stifled and destroyed, is more than “the world”: it is the spirit and likeness of God in men. Much of the ambiguity in talk about the world-especially mine-is that everyone tends to be quite selective about the elements he admits into his concept of “the world.” My particular concept focuses on the sham, the unreality, the alienation, the forced systematization of life, and not on the human reality that is alienated and suppressed. This has to be made clear. (p.27-28)
What did I get from Merton here? What stuck to my soul? It was the notion that the “world” is a sham, an unreality that is foisted upon us all. A sham we accept and are willing to sacrifice our souls and children for at the drop of a hat. A sham. A sham life of serving only my interests and not that of others, sham dreams of being the most important, sham aspirations of climbing over others to get to the top, sham relationships based upon utility. When someone now tells me that Jesus saves me from the “world” the gospel has more of a real meaning now. The world ceases to be a nebulous concept. The world ceases to be something that receives arbitrary moral judgments.
The world is a sham. It is the sham. It is the world-as-it-is-presented. A world that blurs the soul and makes it difficult to distinguish between the “flesh” and the “spirit”. That part of me that is attached to the old age and the other part of me, the spirit, that is captured by a new age inaugurated by Christ on the cross and in his resurrection.
Merton has helped me go one step further in imagining salvation as something real and not an a-historical proposition I have to eject my mind in order to desperately hold on to. He is helping me read the prophets, Jesus, and the apostles aright. Salvation has a concrete reality to it. May God’s grace keep me and save me on the journey of my soul!
Thanks For Your Prayers
I want to thank everyone who has been praying for my mother-in-law, Regina. My wife called me last night to tell me she is beginning to re-gain sensation on her right side. If you recall she had a stroke a couple of weeks ago. And while hospitalized the doctors discovered she was in the terminal stages of cancer. My wife took her for a spin in her wheelchair around the nursing facility she is at now. My wife started singing, under her breath, Third Days’ song “Your Love Oh Lord”. She began to cry. She told my wife that was her favorite song. I can’t really capture the power of this moment because my wife and her mom have had somewhat of a distant relationship over the years (not just geographical). Regina began to tell my wife how grateful she was for all that God had given her and thankful she was that there were people around the country praying for her that don’t know her. My wife said she was really blessed to hear that there are people all over the country praying for her. Thank you for your prayers.
Singing A New Song
There is a balm in Gilead
To make the wounded whole;
There is a balm in Gilead
To heal the sin sick soul.
Some times I feel discouraged,
And think my works in vain,
But then the Holy Spirit
Revives my soul again.
Refrain
If you cant preach like Peter,
If you cant pray like Paul,
Just tell the love of Jesus,
And say He died for all.
What these two songs have helped me realize is how I can imagine the Christian life as singing a new song. Not only singing a new song but a performance of a song in a world seriously out of tune. Stanley Hauerwas helps us try to use our imaginations in seeing the Christian life as a faithful performance:
“The church is therefore called to perform the good news of God’s redeeming love in Christ. That is its vocation. What it means to be a good performer of the gospel, then is not simply a matter of finding the right words – although it is clearly that- but it is also a matter of finding the right key in which to sing our song, the right meter and cadence in which to say our poem, the right register in which to play our piece. All performances of God’s called people, in other words, are repeat performances, at once emulating the one true performance of God in Christ but also an extension and variation- an improvisation, if you will- of that singularly defining performance. The elements of continuity and discontinuity, sameness and difference, old and new, make assessing the faithfulness of Christian performance an ongoing task.” (Performing the Faith, p. 103)
What a way to imagine living this life. I find many parallels in playing a song and living this new life. I once was a saxophonist. Both the soprano and the alto. One of the parallels I see in playing these particular musical instruments and my tutelage under the Peasant is that there were times I would give a stellar performance. But before there were stellar performances there were those horrible performances normally done during practice.
All of this of course reminds me of how finite I am. We are all like artists rough around the edges. We need practice. We need terrible performances as well as stellar performances to make us faithful performers.
As a Christian I look at my life and see all the horrible performances I have made and the very few stellar performances I have under my belt and wonder what the next piece will be five minutes from now, later today, tomorrow. Will I rise to the occasion? Will I blow the house down? Will I tear up the stage? Will I dazzle the audience with my Christian virtuosity? Well…again Hauerwas pops my bubble when he suggests that being “best” is not a theological category. What is a proper theological category for us Christians as we seek to stay in tune with the Peasant? I am suspicious that it is to be faithful performers of the gospel.
More random thoughts later…
Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith
Me and the kids broke down (actually I did) to go see Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith last night. I am a fan of the Star Wars legacy. Star Wars was the first movie I actually saw or remember as a kid. I was somewhat disappointed with the previous two movies. I still liked them. Don’t want to get into why I was disappointed except to say this last installment of the epic was probably the best out of the previous two. I have read some of the reviews. Its the typical stuff. The script was poorly written. Some of the character’s interaction with each other seemed wooden (like the romance between Anakin and Padme). Aside from the window dressing issues people may have with the movie I couldn’t help but feel like Lucas was up to something. I don’t want to spoil it for you but I was wondering if this installment of Star Wars has more of a cultural message than the previous ones. Of course they all tell a story that has various elements of our culture and history but something about this episode of Star Wars spoke to our current global situation to me. I won’t say more. But here is a line in the move that caught me and stayed with me as I was walking out of the movie theatre:
“Anakin, Siths deal in absolutes!” – Obi-Wan
Prayers for Regina
For the few people that actually stumble upon this blog I would like to request your prayers for my mother-in-law, Regina. She recently suffered a terrible stroke. While in the hospital recovering from the stroke it was discovered that she has terminal cancer. The doctors don’t expect her to live no longer than two to three months. My wife, Yashica, and my baby girl, Deborah, have flown up to the Seattle area to be at my mother-in-law’s side. We all wanted to go but monetary limitations have stepped in the way. We decided to send my baby girl with my wife since her mother has never laid eyes on her…except for pictures.
We are still holding out hope for God’s healing hand. At this point we are just leaving ourselves open for God’s mercy and grace.
My prayers have been starving for words to describe my feelings. I find myself only able to pray this:
Father, thy will be done. Have mercy on Regina. Amen
I don’t know what else to say. Pray for our family during this difficult time.
What is the prophetic?
Recently I was asked what I meant by the “prophetic”. A difficult question for me. My Christian journey began in a Charismatic church that had a particular understanding of the “prophetic”. Although it was a bitter-sweet experience I believe God used it to teach me alot of things about God. For one, God is “real” in Charismatic churches. God isn’t an abstraction. Neither is God described as the “Ground of Being” or as the conclusion to a syllogism. God is usually described as being “here” in the Charismatic church. But one of the most profound things I learned in that context was that God “speaks” to the people of God. That God has something to “say” to us. I don’t want to get into any cessationist arguments I just want bear witness to my understanding of the prophetic.
The prophetic was first introduced to me as God’s “speaking” to the people. The prophetic is God saying something through the presence of the Holy Spirit to those that bear God’s name. Of course I moved out of the Charismatic context. I still go back from time to time to remember where I came from. I still keep one foot in that particular Christian world. It don’t consider it an “upward” move for me. More like a lateral move. Stepping into another web of understanding in regards the prophetic. The web expanded as I began to study Old Testament scholars like Walter Brueggeman who offers us this definition of the prophetic as he reflects on the career of the Hebrew Prophets and ultimately Jesus Christ:
“The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.” (from The Prophetic Imagination, p. 13)
It is this understanding of the prophetic that I began to understand and appreciate more prophetic voices like Martin Luther King Jr., Diettrich Bonhoffer, Martin Luther, Sojourner Truth, John Howard Yoder, and many many other prophetic voices that presented Christ’s body with an alternative consciousness and perspective. Some of these people were pastors, preachers, liberators, theologians, and all of them were trouble-makers in their own way. Which seems to go with the terrain of being prophetic. It is easy to be labled a trouble-maker when you begin to present something out of the box…especially when you are saying that the box has been too small. The prophetic can be scary at times. It is telling those that reside comfortably in the box that we are actually in a big room. The prophetic says get out of the box.
One of the things that has captured my imagination in regards the prophetic has been the hebrew word for “prophet”. Before I get lambasted about my Hebrew let me warn you…most of my learning on these matters has been quite Gramscian. My seminary training has been mostly on my toilet. So forgive me for the roughness in which I articulate this stuff. Kittel describes the word “prophet” or the Hebrew word “nabi” as having multilayered descriptions. One of those descriptions is that of a “bubbling up”. Ecstatic speech inspired by God’s manifest presence. A prophet is one who bubbles up ecstatic speech inspired by God. It is a speaking after God after one has come near to God’s manifest presence. I know this is beginning to sound kooky. But I will conclude with where I am now with this weird thing called the “prophetic”.
The prophetic seems to me to be about being intoxicated with God’s passion and love for the world. God’s love and passion from the biblical narrative seems to be about God repairing a broken fallen world (tikkun olam). And no…I am not into Kabbalah. I just find something powerful about the vision thatGod is repairing the world. When reading the Hebrew Prophets I see individuals captured and literally possessed by God’s vision of redemption and restoration of broken individuals, people, social and political orders.
The prophetic is about being caught up and intoxicated with God’s passion and love for the world we live in.
More later.
Worship in the Spirit of Justice
Brian McLaren and CRCC will be hosting a number of gatherings in D.C. during June and July dealing with issues related to justice and peace throughout the globe. I might be going.
Hip-hop Violinists
I love it when people are innovative. Especially with music. Some people may think that the terms “emergent” “postmodern”, and “negro” seem strange together, but what about hip-hop classical music? This is hot! I got this from Urban Onramps, Rudy Carassco’s blog.
If I was ever on the creative team of an urban emergent community this would definitely be in the line up.
Precious Lord, Take My Hand
Sometimes weariness can come to this young negros soul from reading too much. For the next couple of days I will be spending time meditating on simple scripture and listening to old negro spirituals. I was reflecting on this popular African-american hymn today. This was one of Rev. Martin Luther Kings Jr.’s favorites. If you ever get a chance listen to gospel music’s godmother Mahalia Jackson’s rendition. Its heavenly.
