Sweet home Alabama!

I’ll be home in Birmingham for the next couple of days seeing about my dad. He suffered a stroke recently. He’s gotten a lot better. Thanks to all my twitter and facebook friends for your prayers.

What’s in my iHymnal?

Something close to home would be The Birmingham Sound: The Soul of Neal Hemphill Vol. 1.  I discovered this album the other day. I ran across it looking up an old childhood friend of my mom (Sandra Pigrom), Frederick Knight (aka Ratman). He is known for such songs as Ring My Bell and I’ve Been Lonely For So Long.

I was excited to find out that my mother’s hometown Bessemer, Midfield, and surrounding Birmingham area was a mecca for soul music during the 60′s and 70′s. So much so there is an expression called the ‘birmingham sound’  that goes back to gospel quartets emerging from this region during the 30′s and 40′s. Alot of them touring the United States and world giving gospel concerts and creating their own distinctive gospel sound. The soul music in this particular album is a musical child of the gospel quartet.

There is a distinctive Birmingham sound that I hear when listening to this. Some of these sounds I remember as a child listening to my parents music in the basement while sifting to piles of vinyl records or listening to my uncle P.A. (Presh Alley) in the back room of my grandmother’s house vibing on some Marvin Gaye and sipping on a fresh bottle of Thunderbird (he’s let me get a sip now and then or I’d sneak one). Ah…the good ole days.

But the sound is quite a distinctive soulful sound. You hear in the background a history of gospel, Civil Rights, blues, alive-ness, body movement, finger snapping, street sounds, soufulness, and for me personally it reminds me of weekends on the five mile creek with my cousins, adolescent girl crushes, catching brim-fish with my hands, watching family spats in the summertime, etc.. Nostalgic.

Transforming Theology enters my world

For the next couple of months I’ll be engaging one of my favorite theologians, Joerg Rieger. This will be a part of a larger project titled Transforming Theology. Follow the link to get a sense of what is taking place. From what I can tell this will be a conversation between academia and the streets.  My good friend Tripp Fuller has invited to be a  part of a consortium of theo-bloggers that will be engaging theology from their particular contexts. I look forward to engaging Brother Rieger from my place. My location is that I am an African-american engaged in various kinds of ministry in an predominantly black church context. Of course I have my feet in different worlds. One is the emergent/missional stream and the other is in the world of the black church. This should be interesting.

The text I’ll be conversating with will be Rieger’s God and the Excluded: Visions and Blind Spots in Contemporary Theology.

Lectio Divina – John 3: Wild is the Wind

You know well enough how the wind blows this way and that. You hear it rustling through the trees, but you have no idea where it comes from or where it’s headed next. That’s the way it is with everyone ‘born from above’ by the wind of God, the Spirit of God.

- Jesus

In our sacred text intimacy and ‘knowing God’ are one and the same thing. I am usually cautious when using this language to describe relations to God. Largely because words like ‘intimacy’ are wedded to our overly-sexed culture.

 

Knowing God is an intimacy that goes deeper than the intimacy involved in sexual relations. God goes into places, secret places, that no human partner can go. God is never fooled by the various masks I wear to fool people or hide from people. God’s holy kiss is both a terror and a joy. It is a joy because I am held by a love that is more than pure and that seeks my highest good. It is a terror in that it will not let me tarry long in its presence with my false self. I can be false while appearing intimate with another human. But not with God.

 

These thoughts come to me while doing lectio divina in this John 3 passage and listening to a Nina Simone song Wild is the Wind.  In John 3 Jesus describes the movement of the Spirit in our lives as the wind. In particular, the Spirit’s midwifery. We are born from above through the midwifery of the Spirit. The Spirit’s movement is like the wind.  But it is a wind that cannot be easily discerned or named. The Spirit’s movement is unleashable.

 

In Nina’s song Wild is the Windwe are brought into a rapturous recollection of a love shared by two lovers. The lover describes the love for the Beloved and the way the Beloved responds. Of course the lover’s love is wild as the wind. It is un-tame-able and un-domesticated. But while it is not easily captured it is very close. Very close.   

 

These thoughts come to me as Scripture reads me:

 

Wild is the wind…the Spirit’s dance in my life. 

Listing and twirling in hidden places

Turning over lies

Springing forth truth

Lighting my heart

Making my eye single

 

Prayer Offering:

 

My God, with Your holy kiss my life began again.

 

 

 

 

 

Elegy I

Art by Andrea Knarr

I loved. With every fabric of my being I loved. But I have the good fortune of living in a world of flux. In constant shifting. There is this continuum I live in of loss and renewal. It is a loss that seems to have gotten the best of me. Loss is a difficult reality. We hold on to things that do not want to be there. We want to place ‘the leaving ones’ in the deepest caverns of our hearts. But they do not want to stay there. How do you go on? How do you let go? They say time heals the deepest wounds. I agree to a point. Yet the pain still lingers even though it may be a faint whisper in a healing soul. In this season of elegy I’ve come to recognize the pain, wound, loss, and lost love as a true gift. Had I not possessed this gift I would not know ‘me’ or atleast the me that God gazes at every moment and in every breath I take. 

 

Love can be painful.   This is the beginning  of my own elegy.  Confession is good for the soul.

Elegy I