Writing a New Story

I’ve been thinking a lot about the conversation I had with Bianca Mabute-Louie on my podcast (published March 2). One of the things I love that she mentions early…that I’ve been clinging on to… is the idea that we must let things be imperfect.

This reminds me of something Dr. Willie Jennings talks about in his book After Whiteness, namely, three characteristics of white supremacy. According to Dr. Jennings these are: mastery, possession, and control.

These three things play out in how white supremacy deals with others and with God, among other things. For example, white supremacy has taught us that in our attempts to know God, we must master (hello, Master of Divinity) God. We must master theology in the way that one person has often been the master of another. Second, white supremacy has taught us that we can possess God (and people)—that we can be the ones to own the knowledge and essentially, the land. Lastly,  this ties into control. White supremacy has controlled who's in charge, and who or what gets to call the shots.

But the more that I learn about God or about Scripture or about theology in general the more I realize the  phrase, “I don’t know” is indeed a sacred declaration; it’s a way to name my humanness and my imperfections and the fact that I’ll never fully know (or master or possess).

I talk a lot about “decolonizing” and I think leaning into imperfection and into uncertainty is part of this process.

Most importantly, Bianca and I spoke about anti-Asian racism. While I don’t feel fully equipped to say all the things about this topic because i’m not Asian American and I want to respect the unique struggles that our Asian American siblings are facing (while recognizing my place within all of it), I do want to highlight the brilliant things that Bianca and other Asian American thinkers have said:

First of all, I want to focus on grief.

In a conversation with Kathy Khang, Jazzy Johnson on the Chasing Justice podcast, Chinese American thinker and theologian Barnabas Lin expressed that for many folks in Asian American communities, they feel like they’re being policed in how they express their anger and grief causing many of them to modulate down. Barnabas explains that there might be good cultural reasons to modulate this grief, but there are also racialized realities that speak to the reality of assimilation and how Asian Americans are “supposed” to be or how they're “supposed” to act. (check out the convo here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/anti-asian-racism-and-collective-liberation-part-1/id1511600139?i=1000509580299)

Bianca also talks about this; but she mentions that there’s space for all of our grief—particularly the grief of our Asian American siblings who have had to deal with the trauma of racism and losing so many of their elders to hate crimes.

For those of us who are not Asian American, part of our job is to allow the space needed to let their grief be what it is.

To this end, Bianca also talks about how we oftentimes fall into this sort of "oppression olympics." She made such a powerful point: that we often gaslight ourselves into thinking that our experiences aren’t as important as other peoples, but she reminds us that there’s room for all of our grief. We don’t do anyone a service by just swallowing our pain.

"When we start to bring our pain to light is when we start to get free," she says.

I love these reminders—that grief isn’t a competition, but a sacred space we can and should hold for each other.

This makes me think of Romans 12. In it Paul says, “9 Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. 10 Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves. 11 Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. 12 Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. 13 Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality."

He then goes on to say. "15 Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. 16 Live in harmony with one another.”

The Bible clearly tells us to stand in solidarity with those who grieve.

And I believe this involves listening to understand. It doesn’t mean “mourn if you agree” and it certainly doesn’t involve policing the ways mourning or grief are expressed.

“Mourn with those who mourn” doesn’t come with qualifiers.

I thought about this so much this past summer during the Black Lives Matter protests and opinions thereof. And I think about it now in regard to anti-Asian racism.

Lastly, Bianca shares about her own personal journey with restorative justice and abolition after she was the victim of a violent robbery. She shares about how she is committed to centering her and her communities collective grief while also divesting from policing and the prison industrial complex. “We can do both,” she says. Together, we must look for new ways that sustain more holistic change.

This makes me think of how important our imagination is, how necessary it is for us to envision a new world order and then live into that imagination. It won’t always be perfect and we don’t have all of the answers but we can begin to imagine and envision and seek new ways of living and being and engaging in the world that don’t perpetuate colonial and violent realities.

And so I continue to echo Bianca that we must rewrite a new story.

And I believe, this is something we can do together.

A Practical God

Hi friends! I’m not sure if you’ve listened to my conversation with Dr. Quanny Ard on The Protagonistas podcast (published February 16), but I’ve been thinking a lot about our conversation recently—particularly the idea of a “practical God.” I often talk about how in many circles of evangelicalism there’s more of an idea of God or an idea of Jesus than a fully embodied, holistic Jesus.

This reminds me of the time a pastor that I used to know (who used to--from what I think--respect me before I began talking about women or racism in the church) reached out to me, wanting to ask me questions about my faith shifts. I'll never forget one of his questions, namely, if I could “pie chart spiritual and physical freedom.” “Which one is primary?” he asked. I responded that I cannot pie chart my spirituality, my faith in Christ and especially not the way I live it out. Of course, he was frustrated by this and asked me to tell him which was more important, if I would lean one way or the other. I reminded him that I believe faith and spirituality is holistic. The reality of Jesus and the kingdom of God affects all aspects of life and this dualistic, either/or, "what's more important?", thinking is how we got into this mess in the first place…

Throughout history folks have prioritized the "spiritual" aspect of Christianity and minimized the physical aspect of it. This is dangerous! As it has led to the justification of all sorts of evils. As we know, slave masters were able to tell enslaved people that it was okay that they were enslaved, that it didn’t matter what happened to their physical bodies as long as their spiritual selves were in good shape.

Whew, I cannot reconcile this with the life of Jesus whose ministry was shaped by practical things like actually feeding the poor and physically healing people.

There’s an example I like to use, which I use in Abuelita Faith about the parable of San Lazaro or the poor man Lazarus that sits begging at the rich man’s gate. They die, and Lazaro goes to heaven while the rich man goes to hell. In the parable, the rich man then  asks Abraham (who is in the presence of Lazaro) if he can send Lazaro to hell to give the rich man a drink. This is a powerful parable! And message that deals with the consequences of overlooking the poor in life--a physical reality, right? Well, I kid you not, my first few years of seminary and oftentimes my conversations in white evangelical spaces centered around the notion of an afterlife when this parable was brought up. Time and time again I noticed that privileged folks were far more interested in constructing a theory of whether folks in heaven or hell can see each other or talk to each other--rather than actually dealing with the poor.

I remember thinking how absolutely pointless these conversations are. I think about it now when I still see folks arguing over things that have no real bearing on actual physical bodies, on hungry bodies, exploited bodies, dying bodies. And I admit, I used to love these conversations, too. it made me feel spiritual while also dislodging me from any real responsibility in the world.

And I think this speaks so well into my conversation with Dr. Quanny: about Black maternal discrimination. About the fact that Black babies are 3 1/2x more likely to die in their first year of birth and Black mammas are 4x more likely to die during pregnancy compared to non-hispanic white babies and women. As Dr. Quanny mentioned, if we are people who say we care about our neighbors and want to see God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, then we should care about these statistics because I believe God cares about these statistics. I believe God wants all folks to flourish and it's our job as Christians (who believe in an embodied God who put on flesh and walked among us) to do what we can to educate ourselves and others, to raise awareness and to advocate and offer support where and when it’s needed.

But we cannot do that if we first don’t believe in a practical God.

In my conversation with Dr. Quanny I also brought up a professor i had in seminary: Dr. Kyong Jin Lee. Dr. Lee is a brilliant Korean Hebrew scholar who grew up in Bolivia. She is a multilingual and multicultural theologian and scholar who after receiving her PhD in biblical studies decided to get a Master's in economics because she argued that Christians should be interdisciplinary. This reminded me of the countless amount of folks I knew in my evangelical days (including myself!) that just wanted to “do ministry” or work in churches, believing that formal ministry work or church work was the only important thing, but as we know, we don’t need all leaders and professionals shoved in churches.

We need Christians out in the world, taking their heart for justice and God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven to everyday spaces: in doctor’s offices and in the courtroom and in restaurants.

I believe fighting for justice and equity in these spaces is sacred and holy work.

So, anyway, all of this to say that I encourage you and us, wherever we find ourselves right now—whatever job, whatever community, whatever city or state—to hold on to a practical God and live into this God who is intimately connected to the real, the raw, the lived experiences of folks made in God’s image.

May we educate ourselves and learn and be aware about all the ways injustices affect our realities including the realities of Black mammas and Black babies so that we can be holistic (not pie charted) followers of Jesus—so that all of us as a community of image bearers can flourish and live into God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

A Letter to the Evangelical Church by Tiffany Bluhm

Dear Evangelical Church,

I’ve been meaning to catch up. To have a heart to heart. As you know, I’ve long been grateful for how you took me in. When I felt like I was lost at sea, you told me of a mysterious love that would never leave me, never forsake me. You convinced me that life with Christ would usher in the fullness of God. I believed you and you were right.

From the scriptures and those positioned to influence, I discovered this glorious life with Christ was for all people, no matter their race, no matter their class, no matter if they were man or woman. From first century writers, I learned that those on the margins were welcomed into the Kingdom of God as equals, as heirs, not as second-rate citizens. Yet, in the past few years, you’ve bolstered beliefs that harm, have remained silent when your voice was sorely needed, and harbored men who’ve done nothing to contribute to human flourishing, but instead silenced and slandered the women who spoke truth to their lies.

I’m perplexed, church. In high school you told me that my body belonged to the Lord and to my future husband, and that it was my job to ensure I didn’t cause my brothers to stumble. You told me true love waits. You told me that if I did as you said, I would be blessed. I believed every word. I followed every rule you gave. More than that, you told me you’d be there for me. You told me that my place and voice mattered. Instead, faux egalitarianism was all you offered me. Women’s voices were not necessarily voices to be heard, but voices to be stifled.

You’ll remember church, that as a twenty something, I chose to work for you. I spent my days building you up, encouraging you, and learning alongside brothers and sisters. It wasn’t perfect, but I loved it. After all, you had invited me in, and I made it my life’s work to invite others in.

Yet, when the daughters of Eve needed you most, when men in countless faith spaces abused their power at a woman’s expense, you left us high and dry, despite our thinking you would come to our defense. Despite our assumptions that you would assist in tending to our wounds. Rather than rebuke the abusers of power, you rebuked us. We were out of line. It wasn’t our place to speak up.

At the time I didn’t understand, church, why I, and women for millennia, have served as scapegoats, as collateral damage to protect men in power. As I’ve gained insight and understanding on why silencing women has become a cultural norm within your walls, I’m more convinced than ever, that to right our cultural wrongs, to uphold women as equal in the eyes of God, we must pursue our highest ideals. Ideals that believe women are not second to men. They are image bearers. Overcomers. Partners in the great work.

We have a long way to go, church, but if we listen to those we’ve silenced and stifled, admit where we’ve gotten it wrong, and partner with the Divine to bind up the brokenhearted, maybe we can be the place of peace and hope we were called to be.

Tiffany Bluhm

Advent 2020, Week Two: A Loud and Intimate Peace

AMAZING PEACE:  A Christmas Poem
by Maya Angelou

Thunder rumbles in the mountain passes
And lightning rattles the eaves of our houses.
Flood waters await us in our avenues.

Snow falls upon snow, falls upon snow to avalanche
Over unprotected villages.
The sky slips low and grey and threatening.

We question ourselves.
What have we done to so affront nature?
We worry God.
Are you there? Are you there really?
Does the covenant you made with us still hold?

Into this climate of fear and apprehension, Christmas enters,
Streaming lights of joy, ringing bells of hope
And singing carols of forgiveness high up in the bright air.
The world is encouraged to come away from rancor,
Come the way of friendship.

It is the Glad Season.
Thunder ebbs to silence and lightning sleeps quietly in the corner.
Flood waters recede into memory.
Snow becomes a yielding cushion to aid us
As we make our way to higher ground.

Hope is born again in the faces of children
It rides on the shoulders of our aged as they walk into their sunsets.
Hope spreads around the earth. Brightening all things,
Even hate which crouches breeding in dark corridors.

In our joy, we think we hear a whisper.
At first it is too soft. Then only half heard.
We listen carefully as it gathers strength.
We hear a sweetness.
The word is Peace.
It is loud now. It is louder.
Louder than the explosion of bombs.

We tremble at the sound. We are thrilled by its presence.
It is what we have hungered for.
Not just the absence of war. But, true Peace.
A harmony of spirit, a comfort of courtesies.
Security for our beloveds and their beloveds.

We clap hands and welcome the Peace of Christmas.
We beckon this good season to wait a while with us.
We, Baptist and Buddhist, Methodist and Muslim, say come.
Peace.
Come and fill us and our world with your majesty.
We, the Jew and the Jainist, the Catholic and the Confucian,
Implore you, to stay a while with us.
So we may learn by your shimmering light
How to look beyond complexion and see community.

It is Christmas time, a halting of hate time.

On this platform of peace, we can create a language
To translate ourselves to ourselves and to each other.

At this Holy Instant, we celebrate the Birth of Jesus Christ
Into the great religions of the world.
We jubilate the precious advent of trust.
We shout with glorious tongues at the coming of hope.
All the earth’s tribes loosen their voices
To celebrate the promise of Peace.

We, Angels and Mortals, Believers and Non-Believers,
Look heavenward and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at our world and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at each other, then into ourselves
And we say without shyness or apology or hesitation.

Peace, My Brother.
Peace, My Sister.
Peace, My Soul.

In her poem, Angelou says that peace is loud, “louder than the explosion of bombs.” This makes me think of the sound of collective voices yelling in unison at the top of their lungs, “no justice, no peace” as they contend for a world in which black and brown bodies aren’t plagued by the reality of injustice and inequality, carrying the wounds of their ancestors in their flesh.

Peace is loud.

Maya also says that we “We, the Jew and the Jainist, the Catholic and the Confucian, implore you, to stay a while with us. So we may learn by your shimmering light how to look beyond complexion and see community.”

I don’t think that Angelou is arguing here for a colorblindness, but a sense of belonging. I’ve been reading Willie Jennings’ latest book “After Whiteness” where he explains that whiteness (as he articulates: the ideology not the race) is upheld by mastery and possession and control. But in contrast, the way of Jesus, is a way of radical belonging. 

We see this in the Gospels and in Acts. The disciples had been trying to gain power during their time with Jesus as they continuously asked questions like “who will sit at your left and right hand with you in glory?” or “when will you return in power?”

They were so concerned about power—and they end up receiving it after Jesus dies and resurrects, but to their surprise, it’s not the power they expect.

In Acts 2, they end up receiving Holy Spirit power. And what’s beautiful is that when they receive it, everyone speaks in their native tongues in a language that is familiar to them. The power they receive is personal; it’s intimate; it’s tied to a sense of belonging.

As Jennings says, “Holy Spirit power is not power over people but power for people.”

It makes me wonder if Angelou and Jennings were on the same page, that true peace is found in our belongingness to one another the way Jesus brought peace between Jew and Gentile and brought them into the same family. This togetherness, however, was not brought about by erasing their customs. In Galatians Paul argues that Jews are to observe your Jewishness but not to make it so the Gentiles have to adhere to their customs or their convictions when it comes to things like circumcision, for example.

Toward the end of her poem Angelous says, “On this platform of peace…” (the platform in which we learn from each other) “we can create a language to translate ourselves to ourselves and to each other.”

I wonder if this is what Holy Spirit, Acts 2 power is about: translating ourselves to ourselves and each other.

True peace is in our belonging to each other, to ourselves, to God.

Advent 2020, Week One: Standing in the Tension between Hope and Hopelessness

Oh Beloveds, it’s Advent! I let out a little sigh of relief yesterday because boy, do I need this season. I’m ready for all of the devotionals and rituals and reflections on expectant hope and joy.

What gets me about this time of year is the opportunity to reflect on the reality that God inhabited the same world we do—that God breathed the same air and dressed Godself with the same flesh and the same bones. God became fragile and vulnerable and dwelt among the ordinary. I love how The Message puts it: God “moved into the neighborhood.”

In this way, God didn’t just tell us to love our neighbors. God became one.

For Jesus, becoming a neighbor meant fighting for the dignity of his fellow neighbors. It meant disrupting the status quo—not just by turning over tables, but by feasting and celebrating with those deemed not worthy. Jesus both instigated confrontation and inspired celebration.

It was raw and it was real and I wouldn’t want the God I worship to be anything less than all of those things.

Whew.

In honor of this season and my excitement for it, I decided to do a short series of videos on my reflections. The first video is on hope and it was originally recorded for the Rise community.

I know I talk about hope a lot. I’m kind of obsessed with the idea of it because it’s such a...strange thing, isn’t it? It can take on so many meanings and be used in so many ways.

I wonder if I’m consumed with the notion of hope because Scripture is dripping with its fragrance and every poet or prophet or person in the Bible speaks of it so differently. They make it their own and that gives me permission to make it my own, too. Depending on what day it is.

In this video, I reflect on Maya Angelou’s poem “A Plagued Journey” (h/t to The Loft UMC for turning my attention to Angelou’s poetry this Advent) alongside some of my thoughts on a theology of hopelessness.

A Plagued Journey

BY MAYA ANGELOU

There is no warning rattle at the door
nor heavy feet to stomp the foyer boards.
Safe in the dark prison, I know that
light slides over
the fingered work of a toothless
woman in Pakistan.
Happy prints of
an invisible time are illumined.
My mouth agape
rejects the solid air and
lungs hold. The invader takes
direction and
seeps through the plaster walls.
It is at my chamber, entering
the keyhole, pushing
through the padding of the door.
I cannot scream. A bone
of fear clogs my throat.
It is upon me. It is
sunrise, with Hope
its arrogant rider.
My mind, formerly quiescent
in its snug encasement, is strained
to look upon their rapturous visages,
to let them enter even into me.
I am forced
outside myself to
mount the light and ride joined with Hope.

Through all the bright hours
I cling to expectation, until
darkness comes to reclaim me
as its own. Hope fades, day is gone
into its irredeemable place
and I am thrown back into the familiar
bonds of disconsolation.
Gloom crawls around
lapping lasciviously
between my toes, at my ankles,
and it sucks the strands of my
hair. It forgives my heady
fling with Hope. I am
joined again into its
greedy arms.

I'm Embracing a Theology of Hopelessness and I Think You Should, Too.

This goes without saying, but this year has certainly been one for the books. While we’ve all been affected differently by all the things this year has brought, most of us, regardless of where we are, still feel the collective exhaustion. I know I do—it’s depleting, overwhelming. If you read my post when COVID first hit, you’ll know that I was avoiding silver linings earlier this year, resisting the “well, at least…” of the privileged in effort to remain tender, to learn to lament well.

It was good and necessary for me to do so then and to continue to do so now as the news cycle keep churning, as injustices continue to happen across the globe. And don’t worry, I have also intentionally sought things to be thankful for, small wins to rejoice over in this season. I think that’s important and should be part of our daily living, our spiritual disciplines and connection to the Divine and others. Like everything else on this journey of spiritual wholeness, I think there must be a balance. There are seasons of lament and seasons of joy, times of gratitude and times of sorrow, moments of struggle and moments of rest.

However, it’s still true that in uncertain and overwhelming times like these, the word “hope” continues to be thrown around in an attempt to soothe our pangs of anxiety and unease. But with November coming and thousands of people still dying, still without jobs, I’ve persisted in my wrestling with the detrimental effects of platitudes.

I’ve continued to wonder if pushing the notion of hope is any more helpful now than it was earlier this year, particularly for those of us who hold privileges that shield us from inhumane laws or the consequences thereof.

This wrestling has led me to actively and intentionally seek out a theology that seems a lot closer to the narratives of those in Scripture, and the marginalized and minoritized in our midst. How do we engage with desperate people and desperate situations? How do we develop a theology that takes seriously the lives of those who feel hopeless—those whose humanity is defined by struggle, and struggle only?

Searching for an answer to these questions has led me to embrace something that makes many privileged Christians uncomfortable. It has led me to embrace a theology of hopelessness—one that I believe is more “biblical” (whatever that means) than a theology centered on a superficial notion of hope—and I think you should embrace it, too.

In his book, Embracing Hopelessness, Miguel De La Torre argues that “hopelessness frees us to imagine creative ways to struggle for justice.”

Oftentimes, when people are hopeless, forced into desperation, they will do whatever it takes to liberate themselves from their current situation. When threats of a loss of political freedom plagued my abuelo in Cuba, desperation led him and seven others to board a small lancha in the middle of the night with hopes of arriving to the Miami shore. Hopelessness embraces the current reality and for many, it can enact courage, serving as an impulse for perseverance.

Many narratives in Scripture highlight the notion of desperation, how hopelessness leads to seemingly “questionable” acts in which the marginalized not only do courageous things, but they do so in ways that might make modern day Christians feel uneasy. This can be seen in the ways that characters in the Bible act as “tricksters” who struggle for their own liberation and the liberation of their people by essentially “messing with” the systems of power.

One such character is that of Tamar in Genesis 38 who is left without children after two of her husbands die. Her father-in-law, Judah (who was the father of her first two husbands) was supposed to, by law, marry her to his youngest son. However, seeing what happened to his first two sons, he decides to lie to Tamar and abandon her, leaving her destitute without husbands or sons to secure her future.

Due to her desperate situation, Tamar enacts her survival by dressing up as a prostitute in order to trick her father-in-law into sleeping with her. Her plan works when he impregnates her, securing her future in the family. This act of trickery leads Judah to declare that Tamar “is more righteous than I, since I wouldn’t give her to my son Shelah,” he says.

Tamar’s initial hopelessness and desperation enables her to engage in this act of trickery which not only awards her the title of “righteous,” but gains her a place in Jesus’ genealogy in Matthew 1, as her son Perez becomes the ancestor of King David and thus the ancestor of Jesus.

While narratives like these might be shocking for the dominant culture—from Esther hiding her identity from the king of Persia, to Jacob cheating his way to an inheritance—engaging in deceit in order to ensure their own liberation or the liberation of an entire people is commonplace in Scripture. In each of these instances, whether it be trickery, lying, or deceit, God blesses the outcome, proving that God is always and consistently on the side of the oppressed.

For many marginalized people across history, hopelessness has been the catalyst for change, as moments of desperation force many to use their voice and enact their own agency, particularly when the power structures at hand are designed to domesticate them and keep them silent.

Of course, my wish isn’t to romanticize hopelessness, but simply acknowledge the reality of desperation, and how our embracing hopelessness might allow us to stand in solidarity with those struggling for their, for our liberation. As De La Torre says, “We embrace hopelessness when we embrace the sufferers of the world, and in embracing them, we discover our own humanity and salvation, providing impetus to our praxis, for hopelessness is the precursor to resistance and revolution.”

On Why I Mourn My Time in New Orleans

I often mourn my time in New Orleans—the city I once called home several years ago.

I think about NOLA all the time. Its mom and pop shops. Its street performers. Its celebrations, its festivals, its joy.

I think about the way the culture lures you in and attaches itself to you, making a home within you, remaining long after you’ve gone.

I think about the smell of Cajun foods and beignets, and the chorus of accents and jazz that linger in the air.

I also think about the oppression, the racism, the generational pain.

I moved to New Orleans almost a decade after Hurricane Katrina ripped through the city, murdering and displacing thousands upon thousands of its residents. I didn’t know much about the city other than the fact that strolling through its neighborhoods felt like being transported to a new, imaginary place.

I also didn’t know much about evangelicalism and the differences within its denominations when I moved there, either. It hadn’t been too many years since I transitioned to Protestantism after being raised Latina Catholic in Miami. I moved to New Orleans to attend a Southern Baptist seminary. I wasn’t familiar with what that meant, the culture—and more importantly, the history that it entails. I didn’t know that the Southern Baptist Convention became the “Southern” Baptist because of its split with the North over slavery.

I admit, I was ignorant when I moved there. In more ways than one.

My first week of orientation while at this seminary, I sat in a session that talked about how to engage with the city. I remember feeling confused when all we talked about was how it was “wise” to stay out of the debauchery that happens on Bourbon Street, how the “demonic presence” there could affect our walks with Christ, lure us into a bar for a drink. The French Quarter was often talked about as a hellish place, one where only “sinners and drunkards” (yes, like the biblical reference) hang out. Sure, the French Quarter IS a place where folks go to drink and let loose, but when it comes to its demonic activity, I never once heard about how the French Quarter was the hub where slaves were bought and sold, where families were ripped apart, where young Black women were bartered by rich white men who’d take them home and rape them, among other things. The stronghold of this history didn’t make the French Quarter hellish or demonic, the giant margaritas and Voodoo shops did.

The first few months there I’d learn about the pagan Voodoo culture that dominated much of the city. The evil, demonic spirituality “savage” African peoples brought with them when they were forced against their will, arriving in New Orleans as chattel slaves.

New Orleans was founded by Sieur de Bienville and served as a hub for slavery in the 18th century. Many call it an “accidental city,” built mostly on swampland assumed to be incapable of holding its infrastructure. Bienville chose it because of its ready access to river and overland traffic, and it eventually became a major commercial center and port for goods passing between the Mississippi River system and the Gulf of Mexico. This made New Orleans an ideal city to trade slaves. In fact, the banning of transatlantic slave trade in the U.S. in 1808 only increased the volume of domestic slave-trade-traffic in the city.

Additionally, the sugar and cotton plantations that surrounded the city kept New Orleans at the center of this slave trade. Eve Abrams explains that, “back when cotton was king, New Orleans was its queen city.”

My last year there I lived on the beautifully historic Saint Charles street which was known as Mardi Gras’ predominant parade route. St. Charles is adorned with streetcars and decades-old beads—their faded purple, gold, and green colors tell stories as they decorate the power lines and trees. Like most mansions on St. Charles, I lived on a property that was divided up into several units—a Victorian mansion turned into small apartments, if you will. When family and friends would visit, we’d drive them up and down St. Charles, admiring the homes and how they’ve seemingly remained intact throughout the centuries.

But the nostalgia of these homes doesn’t come without its own dark histories. If you turn your gaze toward the very top of these mansions, you’ll often find a small window in an equally small triangle-shaped space, barely big enough for a person to move about. I learned early on that these small spaces were slave quarters where humans who were bought and sold were kept as property in these homes, mostly inhabited by plantation owners.

Tourism in the city thrives off of this history, with most tours aimed at bussing hundreds of white people to nearby plantations, where they listen to how slaves were tortured as they stroll through the grounds and sip their French wines. Even Mardi Gras parades highlight the dark history of the city and its celebrations, with Zulu (one of the most famous parades) thrown by an all-Black organization originally created because enslaved Africans were not allowed to participate in the pageants and parties of Mardi Gras.

The oppression and subjugation of Black people is tied to the very fabric of New Orleans, it permeates everything—even the corruption of the local government which has been tied to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

All of these details of its dark and demonic history make me mourn New Orleans, but I mostly mourn it because none of this was talked about or taken into considering during my time there, particularly within the Christian institutions and the Christian churches I was a part of that were so-called “training me for ministry.”

Now I don’t speak for all Christian people in the city, of course. But I do know that in most of the Bible studies, church sermons, and class lectures I attended, we talked primarily about the evil that engulfs the city due to the so-called pagan religions that make up so much of its culture, not the aforementioned evils that serve as its backbone.

During my last year there, I attended a church in the Bywater, which is known as a religiously plural area. We often did prayer walks around the neighborhood, praying that God would free the “demonic activity” that resides there. Across town, colleagues would stroll through Gentilly evangelizing from house to house asking that God would release the “spiritual stronghold” in its residents. Many I know—including myself—would engage in community activities in the 9th Ward, doing things like plant gardens and run summer camps for the youth, hoping this would do its part in eradicating the poverty and crime found there.

The problem wasn’t that folks weren’t engaging with the city. Many were. But I often think about the spiritual conversations that went along with these ministry efforts. While I know serving youth through community activities and prayer-walking around neighborhoods isn’t always a bad thing, I often wonder now as I look back if we were praying for and focusing on the wrong things?

My white, male pastors and professors were convinced that the stronghold in New Orleans was due to African religion, and wild parties, and they led us to pray fervently against those things. In many ways we were led to believe that if we told enough people about Jesus and effectively discipled them into our churches, then perhaps these evil things would be overcome, that perhaps poverty and crime would come to an end.

But I often wonder: why didn’t we pray enough (or even at all) against the demonic stronghold that is intergenerational trauma brought forth by slavery, segregation, redlining, voter suppression and other forms of oppression? Considering New Orleans’ dark history, why didn’t we ever seek to cast out the white demons of systemic racism that haunt and torment its people? Why didn’t we consider that enslaved Africans were evangelized to, too? If simply telling people about Jesus would eradicate the evil in New Orleans, then why was this evil only perpetuated by Christians during the Antebellum Period and beyond?

I often wonder what our ministry and missions’ efforts would look like in a “lost” city like New Orleans if whiteness wasn’t its king, if the torture of Black bodies wasn’t its foundation.

I often wonder what kind of effect door-to-door evangelism would have if it also brought with it information on voting, local government, and petitions for new laws that would protect the homeless, poor, Black men on the side of the road, whose narratives were framed as those displaced by drugs, alcohol, and even demonic possession. But what if homeless, poor, Black men are such because the city was not only built on their backs, but the system is designed to keep them from thriving? We often prayed for their spiritual deliverance, without giving thought to fighting for their physical freedom—and more than likely, white supremacy is the demon that displaced them rather than the red-horned one we gave all the credit to.

I still mourn New Orleans.

First, because I miss the city dearly. And second, because during my time there, whiteness convinced me that Blackness was the problem—that African spirituality and drunkenness, not white supremacy, kept it in its chains.

On Embroidery and...Vulnerability?

This little embroidery kit taught me a lesson on vulnerability this morning.

A few months ago I asked Twitter what their hobbies at home were because I wanted something else to do besides reading and writing. I got hundreds of great responses (that have since come in handy thanks to quarantine). The first two things I tried were puzzling and sketching. I quickly found out I was really bad at both and gave up after about a week. Unlike Taylor, I don’t tend to learn new things. Instead, I like to do one thing and do it really, really well—I like to be the kind of person that becomes an expert in their craft. I’ve never really seen this as a negative thing until, well, last night when I tried my hand at embroidery. Several Twitter folk recommended it and it looked like the perfect thing to pick up as it reminded me of my days growing up, sitting next to Abuela as she sewed everything from Halloween costumes to wedding dresses. Watching her create entire worlds with her fingers amazed me, and even as a small kid, I think it did something to me spiritually. 

Anyway, I sat on the couch last night and Youtubed “beginner embroidery.” It seemed easy enough. However, ten minutes in and I found myself exasperated trying to get the fabric in that circle thing and trying to untangle the string I was using that had already begun to knot. I looked at Taylor and said, “I don’t know why I bought this. This is annoying.” He laughed (and as an expert new-hobby-starter) looked at me and said, “just give it shot. Don’t give up yet.”

I gave it about two more minutes and then decided I’d try again tomorrow (without any intention of really trying again tomorrow).

Well, it’s tomorrow.

And after grabbing my coffee to sit outside and read before a work meeting, I stumbled upon an excerpt by Brene Brown in which she referenced Theodore Roosevelt’s Daring Greatly speech: “the credit belongs to the [person]…who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes short again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcoming.” Brene then talked about how this is the bedrock of vulnerability: understanding the necessity of victory and defeat and engaging both, being all in.

As silly as it sounds, I immediately side-eyed my beginner embroidery kit. I think it was trying to make me realize that the only reason I didn’t like it (or puzzling or sketching) is because I have to stumble passed being really bad at it for a good, long while before I can be good at it. And who wants to be bad at anything? I hate failing, but it’s less about failing and more about how hard it is for me to be vulnerable.

Vulnerability sucks and it’s painful and it makes me feel really, really uncomfortable.

WHEW.

Anyway, this is clearly not about embroidery. However, I got some stuff to sit with today—including my embroidery kit—and some spiritual lessons I need to learn as I work toward getting the string unknotted and into a pretty, little flower display. Because a lot of life and faith is about sitting in the tension and unknotting the knots in order to make beauty out of random pieces of thread—and that process? It takes a whole lot of vulnerability.

What's Causing a Revolution in Your Heart Today?

I’ve been reading Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert as per the recommendation of some friends who thought it might be helpful in my journey of writing. In it Gilbert says, “You must be willing to take risks if you want to live a creative existence.”

The most debilitating thing about taking the risk of writing a whole book is that for some godforsaken reason your mind latches on to the one voice who told you that you aren’t knowledgeable enough, or ready, or whatever-else to do the thing you’ve been called to. It really doesn’t matter that you have hundreds of voices that have told you the opposite. The voices that encourage you in your calling escape like sand, becoming anonymous in the ocean of your insecurities. But the opposing voices? They’re a resounding gong you can’t seem to silence.

Sound dramatic? Oh, it is.

But here’s the thing: Every time I sit down to write, I remember that I’m not doing this for everyone. I’m doing this for those of us who know we have a whole lot more learning to do, together. I’m taking this risk not to teach, but to invite you to join me in my process of making sense of this strange world. I can’t promise I’ll get it right or have the perfect thing to say, but just as God meets us in our messiness and imperfections, so we, too, can walk alongside each other in the process of learning—as messy and imperfect as it is. 

And hey, here’s another secret: sometimes, even, I realize that I’m not doing this for anyone at all, really. I’m doing this because as Gilbert says, “create whatever causes a revolution in your heart.” And for me, telling the truth about God, faith, life, is what causes that revolution.

So, friends, what’s causing a revolution in your heart today?

On Lamenting: Why I'm Resisting Silver Linings During COVID-19

I decided to start reading the book of Lamentations a few mornings ago. I began reading the first verse of the first chapter and after speaking those words aloud, I quickly slammed my Bible shut, looked at Taylor and muttered a slow and drawn-out, “woah…” under my breath.

“How she sits alone,
the city once crowded with people!” (Lamentations 1:1)

It’s funny, I’m usually the first person to caution people against reading the Bible this way. No, I don’t think Lamentations 1:1 is talking specifically about our current quarantined situation (obviously), but I do think God is constantly communicating things to us and this first line felt so close to home that I couldn’t help but continue to listen to what I think God has already been telling me.

I started writing this blog post when this all first began. The first few lines that I wrote down read:

“Here’s my COVID-19 post. It’s not encouraging.

I’ve been struggling.”

 The past couple of weeks were (still are)…hard. I don’t tend to be an emotional person (passionate, yes), but I found myself feeling a whole lot of emotions I hadn’t felt in a long time and all at the same time: worry, fear, exhaustion, anxiousness, discomfort, current grief, anticipatory grief, loss, and overall sadness. A lot of sadness.

I just moved to a new neighborhood in east Los Angeles, a neighborhood that I was excited to explore with all its mom-and-pop shops, and local coffee and food nooks. The first night we moved in, before any social distancing measures were put in place, Taylor and I walked to a local restaurant where I enjoyed the best cauliflower dish I’d had in a while. The next morning, I called my mom excitedly and told her I wanted to take her there for dinner when she came to visit for my graduation—assuming nothing would drastically change and all would be as usual come June.

 Less than a week later, in one of my afternoon walks, I passed by this same restaurant and noticed a sign on their door: “Thank you for 12 great years, Echo Park. We love you.”

My heart sank as the reality of this hit hard for the first time.

Every hour after that was met with news alert after news alert on my phone with updated death tolls, unemployment numbers, grim projections for the future. More personally, I received emails about events I had scheduled. One by one they were being cancelled: shows, conferences, in-person classes, church, small group, work events, a vacation Taylor and I had planned. And then there’s still the uncertainty of things (which I think at this point are certain, but I refuse to accept it until it’s “official”): a class at Emory I was scheduled to take, a writer’s retreat…my graduation.

All of these things compounded together began to feel like a heavy weight slowly pulling me under. Everything happened so fast and all at once. I felt like I was beginning to drown, mostly with sadness.

I felt, and still feel, sad for those who are dying and for those who are sick. Sad for those who feel symptoms, but don’t have access to testing or health insurance. I feel sad for those of us who struggle with anxiety and those at home with depression. I feel sad for the elderly, already marginalized and lonely, who are now asked to further isolate themselves from the public. Similarly, I’m sad for the disabled among us who are often ignored, they’ve been living this reality for so long and have to now listen to the rest of us process it for the first time. I feel sad for Asian people across the country who are suffering from racist insults fueled by those in power. I’m sad for those stuck in domestic violence and child abuse situations, as this time at home might be absolute hell. I’m sad for high school seniors who won’t get to attend prom or their senior trip. I’m sad for those losing their jobs, or having their hours or salaries reduced. I’m sad for friends whose family members have tested positive and are now living in crippling fear. I’m sad for the local shops that have been forced to shut down after 12 years of serving the community.

The first two weeks of this sadness was so overwhelming I could barely get off the couch. Well-meaning friends encouraged me to practice gratitude, go out for a walk, download workout videos, try cooking something new; but besides not having the energy to do so, something in me questioned whether I should push past the sadness…wasn’t it warranted? Why should I force myself to “feel better” when things look so grim…for the entire world? What if this is a time in which I should grieve? And not for a moment…and then go back to “normal life”—or any attempt at trying to make life feel “normal” again.

The only thing that made sense for me in that moment was to let things not make sense, to sit in the funk, not rush through the sadness. I wanted to feel it, because everything that’s happening is worth sitting in the sadness.

I write this to you today not as a glimmer of hope, or a call to find a silver lining, at least not right now. Instead, I join the chorus of people who are urging us to learn to lament. And lament well. As N.T. Wright said last week in a Time article, “Lament is what happens when people ask, “Why?” and don’t get an answer. It’s where we get to when we move beyond our self-centered worry about our sins and failings and look more broadly at the suffering of the world.”

For the most part, dominant culture is not particularly attuned to the suffering in the world—and not just the world, but also those who are less privileged in our midst. Privilege gives folks the ability to rush quickly to hope, to avoid sitting in the pain. As Walter Bruggemann says, the “haves” develop of a theology of celebration; the “have-nots” develop a theology of suffering and survival, “their notion of themselves is that of a dependent people crying out for a vision of survival and salvation.”

In his book Prophetic Lament, Soong-Chan Rah explains that the Western, American Church doesn’t know how to lament well because of its deeply rooted sense of triumphalism and exceptionalism. The privilege of those in the dominant culture is furthered by the belief that we, as a society, are an exceptional people favored by God. This goes all the way back to the Puritan and Protestant ministers and magistrates who arrived in this country and convinced their flocks of their blessed status as a redeemed people in sacred covenant with God and with the land. It’s part of how they were able to justify genocide, claiming New England as the new Jerusalem.

For centuries the American church has sung songs of victory and triumph while ignoring the cries of the marginalized. But when we do so, we fail to live in truth. We gloss over the brokenness of this world and the ways we have perpetuated that brokenness. As Rah says, “we cover up our wounds.”

But what if we decide to stop covering up our wounds? What if we awaken from our numbness and choose to feel it, all of it? What if we acknowledge the brokenness around us, in our world—and the ways we have a played a part in it?

What if we learn to lament from those who know lament intimately? What if we do this not only for ourselves, but to better love and serve our neighbor?

What if we allow ourselves to be tender and broken, to name our losses and resist the urge to jump to quick, shallow fixes? What if we not only learn to listen to the voices who have been crying out from the margins in dependence on God, but join them in their hope of seeing a more just society?

Imagine how our world could transform now and after all of this is over. 

After all, we can’t envision a new future if we don’t see and feel the suffering in our current reality.

And so during this time, I’m resisting the “well, at least…” refrain of the privileged and choosing to sit with the words of those who grieve in Scripture, including Jesus who asked God why he’d been forsaken. I’m allowing myself to remain tender and broken for a chance that the Divine might meet me here, in the muck.

I said this post wasn’t intended to be a glimmer of hope, a call to find a silver lining, but I can’t help but think that perhaps that is the silver lining—the opportunity to give ourselves the freedom to lament, to sit in the funk, to weep like Jesus wept, and not rush past Good Friday—in the hopes that we would be more like and closer to Jesus come Easter Sunday.

On Esther and the Subversive Scriptures

A lot of people hate to hear this, but the Bible is wildly subversive. I was having a conversation with someone who comes from a similar fundamentalist background recently when they wondered why they’ve never been able to point out the subversive-ness in Scripture.

“Because we weren’t trained to do so,” I admitted.

Most churches don’t train their congregants to think critically about the Bible, to read it holistically and responsibly. Instead, we’re taught to pick out verses, plaster them on coffee mugs and quote them when it’s convenient. 

But the Bible is so much more than this, offering commentary on power, and how we are to deal with and respond to it when it’s entangled with evil and injustice.

For example, the New Testament is loaded with subversive language—even from the very beginning of the gospel of Luke, with Jesus’s birth announcement. Those hearing it in the first century would have recognized how eerily similar it was to Roman rhetoric, heralding the message that Jesus is Lord and Caesar isn’t—a dangerous and disruptive claim for those making it.

Most churches also don’t do the best job about getting into the nitty-gritty of certain details, like that of the Greco-Roman household codes, which identified the relationships that were absolutely central to Pax Romana (Pax Romana is the name for the semblance of external looking “peace” during the Roman Empire—I say “external” because while it looked like there was transnational peace, those living within Rome were experiencing atrocious levels of injustice and oppression). Laws were put in place to keep society controlled under the Roman regime. The household codes gave men unilateral authority over children, wives and slaves. When reading these household codes in the NT nowadays, we understand that these authoritarian laws no longer apply to slave-master relationships, right? So why do we assume they (included in the same code, not even separate) still apply for wives?

Anyway, I digress…

Surprisingly enough, I still have several people who check in on me from my last seminary, often keeping me up to date with the goings-on (and venting about the things they don’t particularly feel comfortable talking about with their classmates and professors). I recently received a message from one such person who was sitting in chapel when the speaker made a point about Naomi, claiming that she wanted what every woman had ever wanted: a family. Now, I won’t go into detail about all the ways this general claim about “every woman” is problematic, and I’ll even say that I wouldn’t mind the speaker making this point about Naomi…if, and only if, he had also pointed out the reality that older, widowed women during this time quite literally needed family (more particularly men—sons and/or husbands of which Naomi lost both) for their survival, which is why Naomi encouraged Ruth to seduce Boaz so as to receive a chance at marriage…and ultimately, financial security. Naomi wanted a family because she didn’t want to die, and she was willing to use sex and manipulation to get to that end.

Most churches don’t teach us to read Ruth that way because it’s scandalous and doesn’t fit with our mold of how women…or really, Scripture is supposed to behave.

Another such story like this one is the story of Esther. What I love about the story of Esther is its literary artistry that unravels poignant theological, social and political messages. In fact, I read an article recently that talked about how Esther has been considered by many one of the best literary works…ever, in the world. Esther isn’t your typical story, it’s loaded with humor, satire and irony, marked by the theme of “reversal.” 

Obvious examples include what happens between Haman and Mordecai. Haman, in his hatred for Mordecai and the Jews issues a decree to not only murder God’s people, but he even builds gallows to hang Mordecai. Little did he know, however, that he would be the one killed on the gallows, and instead of the Jews being executed, it’s his allies who suffer that fate. Those who the king promotes ending up falling, and those who are lowly end up being exalted. As one student put it, “The reversal is that Mordecai rises, and Haman falls. Mordecai refuses to bow to Haman, yet Haman ends up falling to Esther's feet. Mordecai rises to power, and Haman falls in humiliation and, ultimately, death.”

Other lesser known moments of irony and humor can be found in more seemingly insignificant details, like that of King Ahaseurus. He is meant to epitomize the power and authority of the Persian empire, but in Hebrew, his name roughly translates to “King Headache.”

So many of the events in Esther are a headache for those in power, indeed.

The culmination of the book is the final feast—the feast of Purim—still celebrated by Jews today. What had initially turned out to be a period of fasting for the Jews, becomes a period of feasting: Jewish fasting contrasts the feasting of the Persians; Jewish mourning transforms into celebration.

The subversive nature of these feasts shouldn’t be lost on us as the book begins and ends with two big, yet wildly different ones. The first, extravagant Persian banquet is topped off with an edict by the king that all women should be subject to their husbands. Why? Because Queen Vashti, Ahaseurus’s initial queen, stood up for herself (and all women) when she decided not to prance herself around at the order of her drunk husband and his friends. The irony is that, not only will Esther end up disobeying him twice (by coming to him when he has forbidden it) but she will eventually manipulate and dominate him for the liberation of God’s people (so much for his edict, huh?). The final feast is a celebration of this fact. Additionally, it’s Haman’s listening to his own wife telling him to build the gallows that is ironic for him, as—like I mentioned—he’s the one that ends up hanging on them.

As the men attempt to control their wives, the women are the ones controlling them. Talk about subversive. 

As many of you know, my focus for the last several years of my seminary career has been biblical studies and it’s particularly for this reason. The Bible is a treasure chest filled priceless gemstones that remind me of God’s commitment to God’s people. The more time I spend in it, the more clearly I see how devoted God is to my, our, liberation—even willing to use “disobedient” and powerful women to achieve that end.

On Honoring Our Ancestors

Western tradition isn’t too keen on honoring the dead, or our ancestors who came before us. I remember when I first transitioned to Protestantism after being raised mostly Catholic, I would hear folks make a case that Catholics aren’t Christians because they “worship the saints”—a common yet ignorant claim of what it means to honor the faithful that came before us.

I admit, I made comments like these. I internalized the hyper-individualistic view of myself, my faith and ultimately, of salvation. I bought into the notion that following Jesus is simply a “personal” decision that I make “in my heart”—like if my following Jesus or my spiritual growth has absolutely nothing to do with the hundreds of people in my community, the countless amount of people who have influenced me or even those I, myself, have influenced. 

My perspective changed, however, after I was given the freedom to invite my culture, my upbringing and my identity as a Latina into dialogue with who I am as a person of faith. Naturally, this involved reflecting on the faith handed down to me from my abuelita, complete with the memories of me at St. Dominic Catholic Church in Miami where I was first baptized, where I first received the Eucharist, where I watched Abuela sing on the choir every Sunday. Instead of disconnecting myself from these important parts of my spirituality, I began to ask the Divine to illuminate these memories so that I may receive a more robust and integrated understanding of my faith.

And as always, God did. In fact, I was led to an overlooked passage in Scripture that energized me in my search for a faith passed down from generation to generation. Interestingly enough, it’s found in one of Paul’s letters to Timothy (vs. 1-7):

I’m grateful to God, whom I serve with a good conscience as my ancestors did. I constantly remember you in my prayers day and night.  When I remember your tears, I long to see you so that I can be filled with happiness.  I’m reminded of your authentic faith, which first lived in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice. I’m sure that this faith is also inside you.

Paul begins his letter in gratitude for a faith served in good conscience, like that of his ancestors—like that of those who came before him. He then acknowledges Timothy’s faith—a faith birthed from his abuelita and his mama. A communal faith that takes seriously the impact of not just people who came before him, but the women who formed and shaped him. 

This past week we celebrated the Feast of All Saints which overlaps with the Mexican tradition of Dia de los Muertos. The church that I attend had a beautiful altar put in place, inviting members of the congregation to honor the dead in their lives. As I stood and looked at the pictures of mothers and fathers, spouses, aunts and uncles, even children, I was reminded of the power that is the cloud of witnesses that we are surrounded by—los muertos, los santos—those whose faith has shaped, formed, and energized us for the race set out before us, as the author of Hebrews claims.

We wouldn’t be who or what we are without their perseverance in finishing strong and passing the baton over to us. May we honor and remember our abuelitas, tias y mamas in the faith as we continue this race.

Are "Good Intentions" Good Enough?

I know I’m a tad bit late, but a couple months ago I finished reading Jamie Wright’s The Very Worst Missionary a Memoir or Whatever. If you know me, you know I’m a memoir junky so when I heard from several people that this a fun and necessary read, I purchased it on Kindle and dove right in. It didn’t take long before I was hooked. For one, the book is hilarious. But more than that, it’s painful and authentic (or painfully authentic?). I’m also a fan of people who use a sort-of dark humor to deliver hard and uncomfortable truths—a reason why I’m a HUGE fan of Mary Karr (if you haven’t read Liar’s Club yet, get on it ASAP).

Anyway, the book is Jamie’s journey of first becoming a Christian and then a missionary in Costa Rica. Her story is one that resonates a lot with my own. Like Jamie, I didn’t grow up evangelical, so coming to it as an adult was…interesting, to say the least. I certainly felt out of place at first, trying really hard to fit in to the Good Church Lady mold, but falling flat on my face over and over again. I think coming to Christianity as an adult gave both of us a sort-of advantage to see things a little more objectively, to recognize more easily the parts of the system (not Jesus, of course) that were broken.

For Jamie, the particular aspect of the system that she critiques is that of “missions.” This isn’t a new conversation, by any means. Jamie points out the economic damage done to communities by free missionary labor. She exposes what goes on behind the scenes in many “well-meaning” efforts. Included in this is the emotional harm done to orphans “when a never-ending stream of smiling volunteers comes and goes from their lives.” Besides highlighting how incredibly patronizing so much of the endeavor can be, Jamie tells of her experience with locals, and how they entrusted her with the very sad reality that many of them indeed play along with what the white saviors are doing. In one part, she shares the story of locals who pretended to “get saved” so the missionaries would keep coming back and giving them free stuff. Meanwhile, the missionaries take pictures and post about how “blessed” they are to have “led people to Christ.”

That reality is heart-wrenching for me, particularly because it felt so personal. I used to be one of those well-meaning, picture-posting, I’m-so-#blessed people—not just as a participant, but as a leader, for many years.

It all hit home for me when Jamie began to recount her weekly visitations to a particularly under-resourced neighborhood in a developing country (in her case, Costa Rica) to spend time giving snacks and playing with the “poor kids”—a common thing I used to do on my mission trips. Not only does Jamie highlight the relational damage that can be done to families when foreigners provide basic things that parents cannot, but she is honest (and right) about how we refuse people their dignity when we assume they’re as ignorant as we are.

“The more time I spent in the community, the more I realized that poor people are poor and perhaps uneducated, but they’re not dumb,” she says. Jamie explains that the mothers knew the SUV she would drive up in to feed their children was worth more than their family would see in decades, “and while I do think they knew we meant well, I’m pretty sure they also knew we were utterly clueless.”

I’ve been thinking about this since I read it months ago. It creeped into my mind this morning during my prayer/reflection/meditation/reading-whatever-you-want-to-call-it-time and stole the direction of my focus. I became overwhelmed thinking about the times I believed I was doing God’s work, only to be pushing folks away at best, or hurting them at worst. I began recalling my own moments of cluelessness on mission trips with both my mega-church in Miami and the mission organization I led for every summer. Well-intentioned, I went into communities thinking I was changing people’s lives without ever considering the fact that instead, I could be harming them, robbing them or their dignity. The truth is, I didn’t know a single thing about sustainable humanitarian work or the economics of the country I was “called to serve.”

Additionally, I was clueless in assuming that my group was the first and only one to share the gospel with them, that we brought some sort of spiritual gift that their own community couldn’t provide. I was clueless to assume that I could relate to them, particularly when I had no idea what they’re lived experience is, or that my privilege (and lack of awareness of it) made it nearly impossible to communicate the message of Jesus to them in a way that wasn’t patronizing and that actually sounded like…good news.

During my prayer time, all I could muster to God was, what did you think of that? I wondered, are “good intentions” enough? God, were you pleased with me in my naiveté or frustrated with my ignorance?

A few weeks after finishing the book, I flew to Boston to visit my sister. While I was there, we spent a day in Salem, complete with a trip to the Witch Trials museum. I had learned a whole lot about the Trials on Europe’s end during a Women in Church History class, but learning about what happened on the same soil as I was standing on felt different, eerie. We took this cheesy and terribly dated tour where we sat in a dark room while lights shined over still Papier-mâché-looking humans (albeit terrifying, if you ask me) as a voiceover shared how the Witch Trials all started. Perhaps many of you know this, but it was all a bunch of Bible-thumping Puritans that began and perpetuated the craze. And by Bible-thumping Puritans I mean… Christians, very much like us. The kind of Christians who really, really loved Jesus and wanted to do right by him. These Jesus-loving-Christians accused, shamed and murdered dozens of women and a few men because they thought the devil had taken over them (as it turns out, a group of young kids—perhaps due to boredom—were faking that they had lost their minds).

God, were you pleased with their well-intentions or frustrated by their ignorance?

There was a picture going around recently on Facebook of the famous “Declaration of Independence” painting of the US founding fathers, Christians who wanted to worship freely. In this particular picture, documentary filmmaker Arlen Parsa put a red dot over the faces of every God-fearing founding father who owned slaves—and as you can imagine, nearly every single face is covered.

God, were you pleased with their well-intentions or frustrated by their ignorance?

Remember when God said it’s a narrow road?  I’ve been wondering lately if the narrow road is that space few inhabit where good intention isn’t just the baseline, lowest bar we expect from Christians. I’ve been wondering if that narrow road that Christians are called to walk on with integrity is the road where good intention doesn’t just stand on its own, but is met holistically with preparation, skill, and knowledge and education. 

Someone from that old mega-church surprised me recently by reaching out for advice after we hadn’t spoken for several years. She called to receive a hopefully simple and straight forward answer on how to engage her faith in contexts where it’s hard (like family, for example), but after nearly-three hours of going back and forth about theology, faith, life, I concluded that there really is no simple and straight-forward answer because, well, doing this thing with integrity is not straight-forward or simple. Life and faith are complicated and for some reason, evangelicalism has made us uncomfortable with that. But I think that part of being a good steward is learning to wrestle well in the tension.

Perhaps this is part of what Jesus meant when he said it would be hard and that we would have to be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves: it takes actual effort to not perpetuate ignorance and live a faithful life. It takes time, learning, and patience to wade through the gray areas, admitting that we don’t know it all or have it all together. It takes humility to admit that perhaps what we’ve been taught to believe as right and well-intentioned can actually be wrong and harmful.

 Doing God’s work requires that we be holistic followers of Christ, not one-sided or naïve, but well-rounded, astute in our pursuits. 

And that narrow road? It’s where we refuse to be lazy exegetes, Christians “the world” has every right to make fun of. Perhaps that narrow road is a call to holistic living where the Holy Spirit collides with our passions and our education, where we can confidently stand in the gray area of life as we figure out how to share the message of Jesus thoughtfully and effectively, making this world a better place together, in the midst of the mess.

Reflections on Exodus and a "Sacred Wasteland"

I’m finally taking a long-awaited Hebrew exegesis class on Exodus this quarter. For the last couple of years, I’ve found myself drawn to the pages of this book like a small creature drawn to the sweet scent of food.

As a daughter of Cuban immigrants, whose world view has been shaped by the reality of exile and displacement, I’ve found myself attracted to the theological implications of an “Exodus” and a God acquainted with those “exiting”—a people who, like my own familia, wandered, fleeing their Promised Land with the dream of one day being able to return. 

As I read the stories of the women in the first few chapters of this book, I can’t help but reflect on the women in my own life—the moms, abuelas and tias—who sacrificed and took life-altering chances to provide a better future for me and those who would come after me. The women in Exodus have energized and sustained me; women like Shiprah and Puah—the midwives who disobeyed Pharaoh’s command and did not kill the Israelite newborns. Or Jochebed, Moses’s mother, who also went against Pharaoh by placing her son in a basket on a river to save his life.

These mothers and midwives were subversive in their actions, changing the course of history. Their nonviolent acts of civil disobedience eventually leading to the liberation of an entire people—a common theme throughout Scripture.

***

Throughout my translation and study, I’ve wrestled with Hebrew nuances, like in Exodus 3:7 for example, the verb “to see” is doubled, a common action in Hebrew grammar. Because biblical Hebrew does not use punctuation, a double-verb is a sign that the word is intended to by emphasized. So, the author of Exodus 3 is trying to communicate that God really, surely saw the oppression of God’s people. It wasn’t a passing sort of “see”—it was active, one of empathy that led to action.

I’ve read from biblical scholars like Carol Meyers and Gale Yee who have challenged me to question how to deal with the oppression of the Egyptian people—why was it okay that they suffered without the same respite the Israelites received?

Throughout my reading of James Cone’s commentary, I’ve wrestled with Israel's election. Imagine if God had chosen the Egyptian slave masters as God’s chosen people instead of the Israelite slaves? An entirely different kind of God would’ve been revealed. Israel’s election (and no, I’m not reflecting on the when they were elected) is deeply connected to liberation of the oppressed from political and social bondage. If this is the case, then what does that mean for us today?

Some of the questions I’ve been asking are new—questions I hadn’t yet asked in my prior readings of Exodus, and I’ll admit that I have more questions now than I did before. But as my first Hebrew professor pointed out, coming away from a text with more questions than when you began is a good sign of engagement. And although it can be frustrating, it is wildly and beautifully liberating. 

***

I’ve also wrestled with the divine name and what role it plays in differing contexts. For example, when God’s name (traditionally translated as “I AM”) is revealed in Ex 3:14, it occurs within the context of Moses’ call to be God’s messenger of liberation to God’s enslaved people. The name itself is a verb translating to mean, “I Will Be What I Will Be,” or as Terence Fretheim translates it, “I Am Who I Will Be.” This self-given name implies that God self-identifies with faithful continuance; God is the God who was, is, and will be—through God’s ongoing active and powerful mediation within worldly affairs; and as Moses is shown, a God who is ever committed to the ongoing work of liberation—I Will Be the God Who Rescues You Now and For All Time to Come.

***

Out of all that I’ve learned so far, one seemingly insignificant detail caught my attention and I haven’t been able to move past it: a detail found in the word “Horeb.” In Exodus, Horeb is where God appears to Moses in the burning bush, where God delivers the Law and where the Israelites camp out. Horeb is called “The Mountain of God” and you know what the word “Horeb” means? It literally means “waste.” When I stumbled upon this in my translation, I felt a deep sense of awe.

Isn’t it just like God to appear in a “Wasteland”—a forgotten and neglected place; a place people have deemed desolate and worthless—and make it sacred?

This truth encompasses all that I’ve been reflecting on throughout my exegesis of this book thus far, as well as my reflections on what is happening in our country with those who have also fled their oppressive conditions. You see, when it comes to “exile,” God is where the hurting is. God appears in a place least expected, and rests God’s presence amidst an “unwanted” people. Where they are is where God is and where God is, is holy ground.

A Word of Hope: Strength for Your Journey

I recently got into the habit of asking guests I chat with on my podcast what brings them hope. It’s become a nice exercise, ending every episode on an encouraging note. Sometimes it’s especially necessary after spending nearly an hour talking about the hard and discouraging things.

Not surprisingly, many of the responses I get have something to do with children—whether it’s what they say or what they do or how they understand the world. As I tweeted the other day, “it’s as if Jesus was on to something when he said, ‘the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.’” While I don’t spend much time with young children, I have been spending a lot of time the past few years with high school students, and I can concur…their love for justice and truth and equity gives me hope. Lots of it. Similarly, their boldness in asking questions and challenging ideas that are harmful or unhelpful is also a breath of fresh air. I’m always in awe every time I leave a small group session, often reminding myself that the future of the church looks bright and everything is indeed going to be okay.

Experiencing those glimpses of hope is special…and necessary. They keep me both grounded in the present and excited about the future. They give me the energy I need to continue this work, like a strong shot of Cuban cafecito on the morning of what you know will be a long and productive day. Or, perhaps more appropriate, that sacred sip of the wine and bite of the bread on a Sunday. As those who administer the Eucharist at my church say after placing the body of Christ in my palm or inviting me to direct the chalice representing Christ’s blood to my lips, “the body and blood of Christ, strength for your journey.”

Strength for my journey, indeed.

Such powerful words that always move me.

Last night I had one of those “strength for my journey” moments on the final day of my first doctoral seminar, “Human Rights in the Old Testament” (as I mentioned in my previous post).  The last ten weeks we’ve translated and exegeted passages in Nehemiah, Exodus, Psalms and Leviticus. We’ve walked through Deuteronomy and its relationship to rights. We’ve wrestled with the difficult and often odd laws concerning women, marriage, and family. We’ve dialogued about the relationship between rights and the state, freedom of religion, what our duties are as God’s people and even property rights as it pertains to the Old Testament. At times, it’s been beautiful. Other times it’s been challenging. Most of the time, it’s frustrating, as any sort of work that involves different languages, cultures, and social understandings often is.

But last night, I experienced something a little different. For the final class, we were each to give a short presentation on what our major, final paper will be about. As each person had their time to share, I felt that familiar Sunday morning feeling swell up inside of me.

I listened to my colleagues share about their work on political and economic idolatry, the book of Exodus and the exploitation of Black bodies. I listened to presentations on dignity and Asian American women—the negative messages they’ve internalized in society and how God’s mission of liberation and flourishing dismantles and rewrites those oppressive narratives. I listened to my colleagues share about what the OT has to say about how we treat and understand undocumented peoples and those whom, I argue, are among the most marginalized in society: the disabled community.

As I listened to thesis statement after thesis statement—war cry after war cry—of this deeply personal, costly, and disruptive work—the kind of disruptive work Jesus was intimately acquainted with—I felt that Monday-morning, 7am-Bible-study-with-teenagers-feeling: the future of the church looks bright and everything is indeed going to be okay.

Brothers, What Are You Afraid Of?

This week threw me for a loop.

For starters, I had the opportunity to engage in a really great discussion in my Human Rights in the Old Testament doctoral seminar.

 We dialogued about rights and responsibility as it pertains to the Deuteronomic law, while wrestling with questions like, whose responsibility is it to make sure that human dignity is upheld?—individuals? Society as a whole? The law?

It’s a complicated question (and a great one for discussion), but one particular classmate’s thoughts sparked my curiosity. She maintained (and I hope I’m understanding her correctly) that if each person upheld their duty of being kind and having empathy toward one another, then the good of individuals, collectively, would outweigh the bad. For example, if all good (or kind or empathetic) people did their part in taking care of the poor (no matter how small the part they play), then the effects of that would prove colossal. A lot of small acts of making things right would eventually add up and solve poverty and/or homelessness.

This sounds beautiful and I can see the truth in it, but during our dialogue, we couldn’t neglect to mention the difference between ideology and reality: IF everyone did their part. The truth is, most people don’t.

But the more I thought about this, the more I wondered about the effects of the people that do do their part. What role do small acts of making things right play?

Well, we all know (or perhaps we don’t) how the Divine works. That very same day I got to experience something unlike anything I had ever experienced before.

Every Wednesday Fuller leads us in worship for chapel. This particular Wednesday, we had the beautiful opportunity to celebrate Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) heritage month.*

With that in mind, we had Korean-American author, speaker, Kathy Khang join us (check out her interview on The Protagonistas) and preach a powerful message on Jesus’ interaction with both Jairus and the bleeding woman in Mark 5. I won’t go into all the details of her sermon because you should check it out, but one important thing that Kathy pointed out was the contrast between how Jairus approached Jesus in comparison to how the unnamed woman approached Jesus in the very same passage.

Jairus—a synagogue leader—was a man with power and privilege and he didn’t neglect to approach Jesus as such, walking right up to him in a crowd and pleading for his daughter’s life boldly. Jairus was direct, perhaps even confident in his request.

The unnamed woman, on the other hand, approached Jesus in fear. She had been suffering from constant bleeding and because of this, she was seen as “unclean.” She was an outcast, and she approached Jesus as such— coming up behind him in order to go unnoticed. Instead of speaking to Jesus directly, she hoped for the slightest chance of merely touching the tip of his clothes, believing that would heal her.

What a striking difference.

As Kathy mentioned, the woman knew she was afraid. The text tells us she was trembling.

As Christian women (and particularly, as Kathy explained, her AAPI sisters), we know what it’s like to live in a world of Jairus’. We know what it’s like to approach situations with fear, feeling like we’re less-than, not good enough, perhaps unclean.

But, you see, the thing about Jairus is that despite his confidence, he also was afraid—and it was Jesus that pointed out his fear: “don’t be afraid; just keep trusting,” he told him.

Jesus’ intuition was always on point. What was Jairus afraid of? Did he not trust that Jesus was who he said he was?

Kathy reminded us that Jesus asked this question after he made Jairus wait. Initially, Jesus was on his way to help Jairus, but was stopped by this unnamed, outcast woman.

Jairus was made to wait while Jesus attended to her.

What a powerful image—a man with power and privilege standing on the sidelines while Jesus healed, liberated and uplifted a person—a woman—whom society had ignored and pushed aside.

This story suddenly felt close to home, personal.

The room sat silent and heavy.

And in that moment of silence and heaviness, Kathy turned a corner. She looked at the brothers in the room and asked them a very important question:

Brothers, what are you afraid of?

I’ve wondered this same question many times, too.

I wondered it when I was told by a pastor that I’m “unsubmissive” because I took initiative to read the Bible with young girls in my church. I wondered this question when reprimanded by a Christian man in my life— “you think you’re a man,” he told me— because I had certain opinions and concerns. I’ve wondered it when told by professors (not at Fuller) that women should learn Greek to impress their husbands or that our place of ministry is only at home. I’ve wondered this question when I’ve been interrupted, talked over or dismissed in meetings.

What are you afraid of?

You see, my intention has never been to take anyone’s place at the table. I’ve only ever asked that you make room for me to sit alongside you. 

And what gets me the most is that fact that the more time I spend at God’s table, the more I recognize how long, how expansive it truly is. Not only are there enough seats, but the food and drinks never stop flowing. God’s table is abundant.

And then what happened next in that chapel service is something that I will never forget.

Dr. Kevin Doi, an Asian man and our seminary chaplain, stood in front of the crowd and led our brothers in a prayer of confession and blessing:

”Women of the church, we confess the ways we have hurt you, the ways we have not seen you, the ways we have not heard you. We confess the ways we have ignored you, dismissed you, silenced you, and committed violence against you.

As men, we grieve what we have done to you and what the world has done to you.

Sisters, we affirm your worth, your voice, your gifts, your presence, your being--individually and collectively. We see you, we hear you, we value you. The body of Christ is woefully deficient without you. The church needs you, we need you. As men, we desire to be your partners in the ministry of God in the world.

We affirm you as seen, chosen, anointed, and beloved of God, who commends your faith. It is your faith that the body of Christ needs to be well.

Amen.”

The room overflowed with tears as we heard those words. Most of us had never heard them before.

And as the men confessed, I couldn’t help but hear Jesus’ words, “don’t be afraid; just keep trusting.”

So back to my initial question: what role do small acts of making things right play?

I can’t say I know the answer, but what I do know is that I found healing in that room that day. And what I’ve found is that healing happens in increments, and many times it happens unexpectedly.

Perhaps my classmate was right. Perhaps one person’s or a group of people’s actions or words of confession and blessing carry more weight than we imagine, sparking a hope in us that nudges us toward that healing.

 As I consider this, Anne Lamott’s words ring true in my heart, “Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.”

* I do want to emphasize the fact that the focus of this chapel time was to center the experiences of the AAPI community, particularly AAPI women. My own reflections as a non-AAPI person are in no way intended to take the focus away from celebrating my AAPI siblings and centering the experiences of my AAPI sisters.

#AAPIofFuller Campaign

Check out Centering: The Asian American Christian Podcast for more on the AAPI experience.

Gardening as Sacred Resistance?

My spouse, Taylor, was out of town this weekend, so I thought I’d take advantage of my time alone and engage in some spiritual self-care. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do so: perhaps pray, meditate, do some yoga, light some candles, read some scripture? Sure, all of the above. But something I had heard on a podcast (and read months before) by theologian Willie Jennings had been lingering in my mind.

Willie Jennings is a black theologian (who wrote this incredible must-read book called The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race). He begins The Christian Imagination by talking about his mother (which he reiterates in this podcast):

“[She] taught me to respect the dirt. Like many black women from the South, she knew the earth like she knew her own soul.”

Jennings builds his argument about the origin of race on this idea of earth and body—land and soul. You see, from the very beginning, humans have been connected to the land and to animals. If we think of the Genesis narrative—the garden—man and woman were among land and animal, commissioned to watch over the earth, to take care of it, and receive nourishment from it. The connection among God’s creation in the narrative is beautiful, divine, “very good.”

And not just creation, but the story of Israel in its entirety.

Much of Israel’s story is deeply rooted in the land: their displacement from it and their longing to be restored in it.

Jennings explains that since the beginning of time, in many different communities, when someone came across a people, they’d come across the land they were connected to. When someone met a people, they also met the animals that were a part of their family. It’s a divine sense of “creaturely entanglement.” We’ve always lived in an enmeshed world where our lives are intertwined and continuously interweaving.

But you see, what colonization did was fundamentally split people and land. Jennings argues that when this happened, when peoples were ripped from their land—their source of life and nourishment—and from their animal-kin, the wholeness of who they were was stripped from them. What was once a holistic identity that mirrored the goodness of creation, now became a distorted identity.

People were made to believe that their identity only came from their physical bodies and what it was forced to do. For the first time in human history, peoples in the colonized world would be forced to think of themselves in disorienting ways, away from land and away from animals and into races. They were forced to reduce their identities down to the activities of their bodies because the land was being taken, animals were being captured and killed at monstrous rates, and plants were being utterly destroyed.

According to Jennings, the horrors of this “diabolical” split are realized in that we no longer see land, animal and people bound together. In fact, the separation of these three led to the destruction of place-centered identities and the governing of one crucial idea: private property. “No matter how you want to think ethically, morally, theologically or spiritually about life, it will always be deeply dysfunctional and even diseased.” When land and body were split, they became property to be owned. This deep disconnect is what drives so many of our problems. “Until we understand that, we can't understand why race is so powerful. It’s powerful because it exists precisely in that disconnect.”

So, going back to my Saturday morning spiritual self-care.

The words, “from dust we came and to dust we will return” kept replaying in my head. I longed for that connection to the land that Jennings so profoundly speaks of—that divinely sanctioned connection where human, animal and land coexisted in a life-giving union.

So, I dug. I dug up dirt. I tilled soil. I watered plants. I picked up trash. I felt the earth in between my fingertips. 

I gardened as an act of worship and I gardened as an act of resistance. And while I did so, the Divine rejuvenated my weary soul.

As Jennings reminds us,  

“We are of the dirt.

The dirt is our kin.

We are creatures of the dirt, bound together.”

The Healing Power of Invited Physical Touch

I had a really, really beautiful moment at church this past Sunday.

For starters, I woke up not particularly enthusiastic about going to church. Taylor and I were out of town Friday and Saturday, so all I wanted to do on Sunday was veg out in my robe and read. Sometimes I do skip church to do that, but that morning I sort of felt that thing that told me I should fight the urge to stay home and get myself to church.

Have you ever felt that? Not necessarily about church—just about things in general? That “you should really do this” feeling not motivated by guilt, but by your spirit (perhaps the divine) nudging you to do the thing you don’t feel like doing?

And you know that feeling you feel after you push yourself to do that thing you didn’t want to do and it turns out to be exactly what you needed? Like when you’re feeling down and you know you should go for a run or get yourself to the gym and you muster every last bit of energy it takes to get dressed and get your butt out the door, and after your run or work out you feel like A MILLION BUCKS because it was EXACTLY what you needed?

That was church for me on Sunday.

And I will say, I don’t always feel that way. A lot of times church—well, worship services—can feel…forced. Not every time, but when it does feel that way it can suck the life out of me.

Anyway, yesterday had every potential to be that because it was “Healing Sunday” and we’ve all watched those videos about people praying healing over others and have felt that similar feeling of skepticism. Now granted, I know people (who know people) who have experienced miraculous healing, and I don’t ever doubt personal stories, but oftentimes they’re the exception, not the rule, right? And sure, I’ve done my share of praying healing over people, but it’s always been a very timidly asking God specifically “IF IT BE YOUR WILL” (ya know, just in case it doesn’t happen, you can easily brush it off as a “well it just wasn’t God’s plan.”)

But this “Healing Sunday” was different, mainly because I’m not physically suffering from anything that needs healing. However, when invited, I felt that same weird tug to head toward the front of the room for prayer—the same one that got me out of the house—you know, like the gentle but firm tug of a small child pulling on mom’s hand, guiding her toward the kitchen for a desired snack.

It had been a while since I invited someone to pray over me, and I think I just really, really needed it. As I walked up toward the altar and waited in line for my turn, I caught a glimpse of one of the clergy women praying for those kneeling in front of her. She wore a white robe, or vestment, beautiful dark-brown skin, and a gorgeous set of perfectly-placed braids. I watched as she placed her hand on congregant’s shoulders and foreheads in a way that looked tender yet confident. How did she manage to do that so effortlessly? Her eyes shut tight as she prayed boldly into the ears of women, men, children, and the elderly. Strangers rested their weary heads on this woman’s soft belly as tears rolled down both of their faces. The scene was so intimate and personal. How could this be possible between two strangers?

Anticipation grew as I approached my turn to kneel. She began praying over me, holding my what suddenly felt fragile head in her hands. As she prayed that I would be reminded that God delights in both my weakness and in my strength, I felt her warm hands graze over and squeeze my shoulders.

When she asked God to give me wisdom on my journey, she rubbed the part of my neck that was exposed because of my ponytail. I was gripped when she kept her hands under my ear, over the dried out, bumpy skin that often flares up because of my nickel allergy. In any other situation, I would’ve pulled away self-consciously and explained that what she’s feeling is an allergy and not contagious in any way, but she didn’t seem to care or question if my skin allergy would rub off on her. So I let her hover her hand there, feeling exposed yet unbelievably cared for. I felt like one of those lepers that Jesus reached out and touched time and time again without fear of contamination. When she finished blessing me with her words—”in Jesus’s name”—she lightly kissed the top of my head, the way I imagine Jesus did to those who came to him in desperation—a simple yet profoundly loving and reassuring gesture.

All of these details brought tears to my eyes.

Afterwards, all I could think about was the fact that we live in a time when it feels like every week we hear of a new physical or sexual abuse scandal in the church. So much so that the thought of physical touch oftentimes leaves people cringing and uncomfortable. Even writing the description of how this woman embraced me felt awkward at first.

However, after my experience with this beautiful stranger, I couldn’t stop thinking about the healing power of invited physical touch—the kind that made up so much of Jesus’s ministry. It’s easy to forget about the gift of loving physical touch when it seems like the only kind of touch we hear or talk about is the kind that humiliates, oppresses, shames and even kills. As I pondered on this polarization, I wondered if perhaps loving and invited touch can be seen as act of sacred resistance.

What if those of us who were ready, able and willing were intentional about inviting and offering loving touch more often? What if we did so as a response to the atrocities that have been going on behind closed doors for far too long? 

The purpose of this post is to offer a simple reminder: embrace a trusted person today—whether it’s the laying of hands for prayer, a simple hug, or a kiss on the forehead—use your hands as a means of sacred resistance; your body to show love in a way that seems so foreign and uncomfortable. You may realize that you needed it more than you thought.

The "Nameless" Women in Mark as the Embodiment of God's "Upside-Down" Kingdom

One of the podcasts I love listening to as it pertains to Scripture is The Bible For Normal People. I’ve said this a few times before, but it’s true, I’m a huge Bible nerd. Sure, I love talking about women and race and all sorts of (unnecessarily) controversial topics when it comes to religion, but I always make sure to do that from the lens of Scripture. Why? Well, besides it being The Bible, I think it’s a truly incredible book that has been taken hostage by so many fundamentalists and biblicists and all kinds of folks that not only offer weak and lazy exegesis, but that do so to silence and to oppress, and to you know...

So yea, I’m just passionate about knowing it—decolonizing, deconstructing, and reconstructing harmful views and ideas and theologies that have been taught without thorough care and scholarship. Of course, I don’t expect to get it right every time (and surely, I don’t), but that’s part of the reason why it’s a life-long process, one that I’ve 100% committed to.  

Ok, enough of that tangent.

Back to the podcast.

On a recent episode, the hosts interviewed New Testament scholar, Daniel Kirk about his work regarding the book of Mark. It so happens that I’m going through Mark with one of my groups of high school girls, so I’ve been obsessively combing through commentaries and such lately. Because I really enjoyed this episode, and because I’m on a Mark-trip, I thought I’d summarize it (and highlight some of my favorite things).

First off, Kirk starts by setting the tone of Mark: the theme of redefining Messiah. According to Kirk, the whole gospel is about redefining the nature of Jesus as Messiah. Scholars use the term “messianic secret” when it comes to Jesus not wanting people to know he’s the Messiah. In Mark 7, for example, we see Jesus healing folks and then telling them not to say a word to anyone. Scholars argue this is because people were waiting for a Messiah, and hearing about Jesus would give them the wrong idea of what kind of Messiah Jesus was. You see, contrary to what they were expecting, Jesus would be a suffering Messiah, a servant that would give his life.

Part of this redefining messiahship also has to do with what Kirk calls the “upside-down kingdom.” The first time Jesus’s death comes up, he says the ever-famous line, “All who want to come after me must say no to themselves, take up their cross, and follow me.” This is “upside-down” because Jesus is saying that greatness and “finding your life” really comes in giving it up, in “bearing your cross”—a true paradox to greatness.

We see another kind of “upside-down” paradox in the feeding of the 5,000. The paradox in this story is that a lot of food—enough to feed thousands—comes from what looks like nothing, a few fish and loaves. This is the same idea with the parable of the mustard seed. Here we learn that the kingdom of God comes from small, unassuming things.

As the story goes, the disciples have a hard time getting this whole “upside-down” paradox. I mean, c’mon, Jesus is constantly talking about “giving up your life” and they’re consistently arguing about who is greatest in the kingdom and who will sit at Jesus’s right and left hand! But didn’t Jesus say if you want to be great you have to be least of all? In fact, he drives this point home by immediately taking a child after he says this and continuing by explaining that if you receive a child like this, you receive him, and if you receive him, you receive the father who sent him. As Kirk says, Jesus is telling the disciples that the way to God is not an upward escalation toward heavenly power, but it’s a reorientation—a downward slope in power. You see, we might think of children as innocent and cute and when Jesus says this, we think of a Sunday school “awwww” moment, but in antiquity, children were at the bottom of the society’s patriarchal pecking order—even under women and slaves. This is critical to understanding that there is a potentially massive social upheaval that’s seeded in the Gospel—it doesn’t explode and come from above, but it’s like a small seed, and if you enact it, everything changes.

What’s happening in the person of Jesus is an inversion of social power structures—and it’s creating a community that is entrusting itself to God in cross-shaped ways by refusing to play the power games in the way that has been taught. This is demonstrated beautifully in that Jesus goes to dinner with people who aren’t normally invited to the table.

This reorientation of the people of God is peculiar and may I add, pretty darn offensive (beautiful and offensive, now there’s a paradox).

Ok, so after all of this, Kirk makes a really, really amazing point. He maintains that if you read the book of Mark with this “upside-down” power dynamics grid—which elevates those otherwise pushed to the margins—one thing that becomes clear is that the “nameless women” in the gospel come off as “ideal disciples” in a way that the Twelve never end up living up to (remember how the disciples kept fighting about who’d be the greatest?) 

As Kirk says: If you want to know the best people in this gospel other than Jesus to look to as an example for the life that we should live, you need to look to the nameless women.

So who are these “nameless women”?

1) Peter’s mother in law

Mark tells us that Peter’s mother in law was sick in bed. Jesus went to her, healed her, and immediately after, she got up and started serving them. Kirk points out that Peter’s mother in law does the very thing the disciples refuse to do, and exactly what Jesus kept calling them to as they continued calling greatness unto themselves.

2) The bleeding woman  

We learn of a woman who had been bleeding for twelve years who came to Jesus in a crowd and touched his clothes at the thought that this might heal her. After he felt someone touch him, Jesus asked “who touched my clothes?” The woman, came forward, terrified, to which Jesus replied, “your faith has healed you” (Mark 5:34).

Kirk contrasts this episode with the scene of the disciples being in the boat during the storm (a couple episodes before this) and Jesus rebuking them for being of little faith (Mark 4:40).

3) The Syrophoenician woman

Right in between the first feeding of the 5,000 where Mark says “they were completely amazed, for they had not understood about the loaves” (Mark 6:51), and the second feeding of the 4,000, we find the story of the desperate woman who asked Jesus to heal her daughter. This is by far one of Jesus’s strangest remarks to someone asking him for help. He told her that he can’t take the children’s food and feed it to the dogs, to which she responded “Lord, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” As Kirk puts it, she “mic-drops,” wins the only argument with Jesus in the whole Gospel by somehow having eyes to see that there is not only enough bread for the children at the table, but for whoever else is seeking.

When read in context of the feeding narratives, isn’t that just incredible? She understands what the disciples didn’t: all are welcome at the table and there certainly is enough food to go around.

4) The poor widow

In Mark 12 we learn of a poor widow who put in two small copper coins into the collection box for the temple treasury. Upon seeing her do this, Jesus said to his disciples, “I assure you that this poor widow has put in more than everyone who’s been putting money in the treasury. All of them are giving out of their spare change. But she from her hopeless poverty has given everything she had, even what she needed to live on.”

Jesus lets the disciples know that in giving up her whole life, she is embodying costly, life-taking discipleship, the kind of life-taking discipleship Jesus himself engages in and asks of his followers.

5) The woman who anoints Jesus

In Mark 14 we learn of a woman who pours “very expensive perfume” on Jesus’s head. Scholars argues that this gesture is one of messianic anointing, an act that seems to confess Jesus as Messiah. What’s interesting about this is that when Jesus interprets the act, he says “she anointed my body ahead of time for burial.” This is the action that Jesus says, “wherever in the whole world the gospel is proclaimed, what she’s done will be told in memory of her.”

In this action, she was able to hold together Jesus as Messiah and Jesus as someone who is about to be buried—something the disciples just didn’t get—the reorientation of what Messiah means. As Kirk says, “the whole message that Mark is trying to get across is embodied in this action.”

It’s easy for the unnamed women in Mark to be ignored because they’re on the margins, or they don’t have names, or they’re “not important” because they weren’t part of the Twelve, but if we think the disciples are more important than these women for those reasons, then, as Kirk suggests, “we’re reading Mark with the same posture that Mark is seeking to overturn.”

Christianity, Life, Racism: It's All Complicated

A friend recently came to visit and naturally, we spent a lot of time chatting about faith. This isn’t anything new as I talk about faith a lot—all the time, actually. After all, I am finishing up a degree in theology and it requires that I think and write about faith well over 40 hours a week.

It’s actually pretty mentally and emotionally exhausting, now that I think of it—which is why I so crave carbs and a glass of red wine at the end of most days.

Most of my conversations with my visiting friend about faith revolved around the things I once thought fit neatly into perfectly separated folders in the desktop of my mind. The folder for “Christianity” had several subfolders: “Christology,” “Ecclesiology,” “Soteriology,” etc. I even had a “Calvinism” folder with even still subfolders, one for each letter of TULIP.

Oh, how complicated it all was back then. Which is ironic, you’d think such a neatly compartmentalized “faith” would make life simpler, no?

Well yea, that would be true if we lived in a Black and White world. But let’s face it, we don’t. I’m sure we can all agree that most of life takes place in the mess—in the grey areas, doesn’t it?

Let’s take racism, for example. I’m sure, we can all agree that it’s wrong. But many people want to pretend that it’s “Black and White” (no pun intended). Many people I’ve spoken to (or read Facebook posts from) assume racism is simply “a heart issue.” The problem with this is that it removes all responsibility from any of us to dismantle it, because, well, “it’s simple: it’s a personal problem.” And trust me, I wish it were that simple. What perhaps is foundationally “a heart issue” has permeated into a societal, systemic issue. Racism exists in the grey area: in stereotypes, in microaggressions, in the fact that Black men get shot not only in their own homes, but even when they’re doing the right thing by protecting active shooters. Racism isn’t just about slavery. It’s more than that. It’s complicated. It’s grey.

You can apply this same idea to not only all social issues, but life in general.

How do you convince a new mother who’s just lost her infant daughter that God is good? Or a young girl who’s just been sexually assaulted by a family member and finds herself pregnant? Or a father of three who is dealing with mental illness that’s affecting his entire family?

There are no easy answers. Life is complicated. Faith is complicated.

But the more I study Scripture, the more I recognize a God who is well acquainted with the complicated—a God who we’re told created people and then regretted it (Genesis 6). A God who wanted to wipe out folks, but then had a change of heart when asked to reconsider (Numbers 14).

A God who became human and wasn’t disconnected from society, standing on the outside, telling people what to do. Instead, God stepped in the muck, broke “purity laws” by engaging with the outcast—those deemed too dirty or too broken. When people died, God wept (John 11). When they were about to be stoned (for reasons justifiable at that time), God intervened (John 8).

It’s interesting, when I read the Torah, I don’t just see a bunch of nonsensical laws that need be dismissed, but I can see a story of a God completely aware of the complicated—of the grey area. According to Deuteronomy 22, there are different punishments for men who sexually assault women in the middle of the town in front of everyone, verses men who sexually assault women out in the country where no one else is around (and yes, both instances involve the man being executed). Now, of course we understand that these laws were written thousands of years ago when culture, society and life was completely different, but the point is that they’re oddly detailed and very circumstantial because, well, life was (and still is) intricate, complex…complicated.

Maybe Scripture feels like a hot mess most of the time because it’s a story of a God choosing to get dirty and to exist in the grey, among complicated people. And I think this should not only give us hope, but should inform our Christian ethic. Perhaps it’s not about making perfect sense of Christianity, having all the answers, knowing or deciding who’s in and who’s out. Perhaps it’s about sitting with God and with others in the muck, not being afraid of the mess, and living out our faith intentionally and carefully in each unique situation.