Who we are or what we do?

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a cultural diversity class with a friend at Azusa Pacific University. As the two of us talked afterwards, she asked if I got the sense that her classmates thought of culture as the things people do rather than who people are or how they think. So which is it? Is culture what you do, who you are, or how you think about the world?
The answer is "yes." We have a tendency to divide who we are from what we do, but they are not so easily separated. We act in certain ways because we have particular beliefs, but our beliefs and thoughts are also shaped by our actions. Thinking is itself an action. We give labels to describe who we are, but those same labels define what we do. We are creative, introverted, a thinker, a musician, etc. We cannot divide who we are from the way we think or the way we act.
When it comes to culture, the being-act-thought divisions are just as misguided. Culture is what we do. I would be hard-pressed to explain any of my Irish-English-Navajo-Mexian roots without turning to the traditions that define us. I spent evenings at tribal dances as a child, so the culture of my ancestors would not be lost. My grandfather spoke Spanish, and I attended years of Spanish classes, so our language would not be lost. The same is true of the Christian tradition. Our "culture" involves worship, taking the Eucharist, being baptized, and studying Scripture. Our cultures are what we do.
At the beginning of this post, I argued that our cultures could not be divided into the being-act-thought categories, so why affirm that culture is defined by our actions? Culture cannot be defined solely by actions, but actions are important. Our actions are not autonomous. We perpetuate particular traditions because of how we think about the world, and those same actions shape who we are.
Participation in traditions forms our faith. As our churches gather for prayer, we learn to speak to and listen for God, but we also pray because we trust that God hears us and answers our prayers. We partake of the Eucharist because Christ commanded us, and we know that it is a means by which God pours his grace into our lives. As we continue to come to the table, we are formed as a community who shares a common table and lives a common life; we become a community which is unmistakably marked by the death of Christ. When our churches celebrate Passover, we are taught that the church lives in continuity with Israel, and then we begin to read the story of Israel as our own story. We obey the sabbath out of obedience, and we are formed in the rest of redemption and formed out of the ceaseless work of slavery (Deut. 5:12-14).
As Christians, we believe certain claims about God and the church and our lives are shaped by those beliefs. We are a redeemed people who knows that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead on the third day, that God is creator, sustainer, and redeemer, that the church is the body of Christ, and that Jesus will come again. But we are like Israel in the wilderness. We know who has brought us out of slavery but we are quick to return to our old masters or give our allegiance to new ones. Our participation in the daily, weekly, and yearly patterns and rituals habituate our trust and faithfulness to the God who redeems us. Without the practices, our beliefs lack the grounding and formation to be sustained, but without the beliefs and obedience, we have no purpose for our practices. Who we are shapes how we think which shapes our practices which in turn transforms who we are. Our practices, beliefs, and identity are indivisible.

Now that summer has arrived, I will try to be more consistent in my posts. I'll be working on a piece to post later this week, although annual conference may create a challenge.

Sin that Marks Our Bodies

Earlier this year, I sat down for lunch with Amey, an African-American first-year student. The goal was to hear each others' stories and to know the pain of growing up as a Black child in the South. In the process of that conversation, I mentioned that a faculty member had marginalized me in a lecture, unintentionally, and broken me once again. Amey's gift to me was her recognition that I was hurt, even though the professor did not mean to hurt me. She refused to differentiate between the pain and oppression she experienced growing up in the South and the pain and oppression I was experiencing as a Divinity student. Even now as I think back on that conversation, I am so blessed by Amey's ability to look beyond the Black-White characterization of the South. Her recognition was that oppression, marginalization, and racism are always wrong.
The problem I am trying to articulate is not that I am oppressed more than others, the problem is that oppression exists in our churches in any form. We are made in the image and likeness of God, all of us, no matter our skin color, social status, economic class, or city of origin. We reveal God to our brothers and sisters as they reveal God to us. Since we are created in God's image, we, all of us, are icons, windows through which we see God. When one person is oppressed by another, when one person is ignored, then we are guilty. We are like the teachers who were guilty because they claimed to see. We do not love our brothers and sisters when we marginalize one of them, and as John tells us, if we do not love our neighbors, we do not love God. We are not competing over oppression at the Divinity School. We are trying to faithfully tell our brothers and sisters that their inability to see us is a refusal to view us as icons of our Lord and as humans redeemed by God.
Last week I wrote that "our bodies bear the scars of the attacks against us." Our bodies are marked. We are one church, and the oppression of one of us marks all of our bodies with the scars. It is not okay to recognize the racism perpetuated against one group without recognizing the racism perpetrated against other groups. It is not okay to discuss the social construction of one race without discussing the social construction of the others. Even as we repent of slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow laws, too often we either allow or perpetrate the oppression and marginalization of others. We, the church, the redeemed of God, still perpetuate the sins of racism.
Almighty God, our creator, redeemer, and sustainer, open our eyes to our sins of not seeing your face in the brothers and sisters around us. Help us bring healing instead of pain to the broken and ignored in our midst.

Abused or Ignored?

I think that my sisters at Altared helped me understand part of my frustration tonight. We were discussing race, reconciliation, mercy, truth-telling, and our own brokenness. These women have consistently provided a place where I can speak, and where my pain and my joy can be heard. This space is refreshing in a Divinity School which tries to be faithful, but like any other institution, fails miserably at times.

Last spring, I sat through the response of one of our Black Church Studies and Theology professors to Bono's speech at the Presidential Breakfast. I remember feeling like I had never been so marginalized by a member of another ethnic minority. The tears I cried that morning were tears of sorrow and pain. Tonight as we talked before the altar, I was able to share briefly that I consistently feel marginalized at Duke, by both professors and students, and I was able to confess my own fear and reticence to speak truth and mercy to those who consciously and unconsciously perpetuate injustice.

As I walked away from those women and that altar, I realized that a portion of my pain comes from being ignored. In some cruel way, it is better to be abused than ignored. The abuse hurts, and it cuts deeply into the very fabric of your being, especially when the abuser attacks the color of your skin. When we are cut, we bleed, and there are many of us who are limping through these hallways. Our bodies bear the scars of the attacks against us, against our people, and against our identity.

But our scarred and bleeding bodies are at least acknowledged. There is a validation of personhood and of power when you are attacked. People attack you because they are threatened by the power you could wield, or they strike because they hate the person you are. Either way, there is an acknowledgment that you exist, albeit a perception that you are unworthy. There is no such validation in being ignored. When you are ignored, you are not even worth the time for someone to attack you. You possess no power to threaten the institutions and structures of society. You are worthless; instead of being the fly who nags and is swatted, you are the concrete people walk on, not tended, not cared for, not noticed.

My experience at Duke has been the latter. There is no desire to include the latino/a community in discussions of reconciliation. There is no acknowledgement that students may come from indigenous American tribes. There is no attempt to recognize my presence. Attempts to bring other ethnic groups into conversations of truth-telling and reconciliation are systematically ignored. Questions are interrupted or avoided altogether. I am neither Black nor White, so I do not matter.

This is a cry for truth, justice, peace, and mercy in Duke Divinity School. Whether you acknowledge it or not, I am a child created by God, redeemed by his blood, and empowered through the Holy Spirit. I will claim that identity for myself, and I will continue to ask you to claim it for me.

Then, I will proclaim the hope I see within these ivory walls as well. There are small groups of students, like these eighteen women before the altar, who create space to acknowledge pain and stand together as the body of Christ. In that space, I am no longer ignored but live as the member of Christ's body I am. In that space reconciliation begins, and we cry together over our sin and injustice, and we rejoice at grace which covers us all. We seek wholeness and healing and God's merciful touch. As we go from that space, may we all cry together the words carved into that altar: "I Thirst."

An Introduction

Through the wisdom of professors at Westmont College and Duke Divinity School, I have been encouraged to begin a blog which will intentionally engage theological issues. Topics may include race, reconciliation, evangelicalism, or any other topic of interest and/or importance. If these posts interest you, I welcome your presence and careful engagement with me in these discussions.

[Update: I have added additional writings from the past couple of years that are theological in nature or have theological implications. They are listed according to the order in which they were originally written.]

May the sanctifying grace of our Savior Jesus Christ cover us all.

Phil 3:4b-14 Sacrifice to Obtain the Resurrection of the Dead

The Christian Church is quite an odd gather of people. Have you ever stopped to think about what it is that we proclaim? 2000 years ago, in an obscure town in a tiny, out of the way province of the Roman Empire, a baby was born in a barn to a teenage mother. He was Jewish. A member of a religion that makes up only ¼ of 1% of the world’s population. After his birth, this baby named Jesus faded into obscurity for thirty years before reappearing at the Jordan River in Israel. He traveled around teaching crowds of people, upset almost every political and religious leader of the day, and three years after he appeared at the Jordan, he was crucified by the Roman government. 2000 years later, the church is still celebrating a failed revolutionary. We wear crosses around our necks; crosses, a sign of execution, much like wearing a golden gallows on a chain. We proclaim that we are brothers and sisters, and we eat the body and blood of Christ. Yes, the church is an odd gathering of people.

But I left something out. Did you catch it? I left out the resurrection. Isaiah proclaims that God is doing something new. Streams of water are springing up in the wilderness. The people God has chosen will proclaim His name. The Pharisee who seeks to destroy the church of God becomes God’s most powerful evangelist. And everything that we thought we understood is thrown into chaos.

Paul had his life figured out. He was the perfect Jew. His family had followed the Torah and had him circumcised when he was 8 days old. He was born of the tribe of Benjamin, an educated man who had become a Pharisee, a teacher of the Jewish law. And when this strange group of people called Christians started proclaiming that Jesus was God, Paul was sure they were committing blasphemy. He traveled around, enforcing the law and persecuting the church. A zealous Paul was stoning Christian leaders in obedience to the law.

Then Paul met Christ. This zealous Jew was caught up by the Holy Spirit and the grace of God into the life of Christ, and he cast aside everything which used to be important. Can you heart the theme reverberating through his letter? He “puts no confidence in the flesh,” whatever were gains, he now considers losses,” and he considers all his former glories as garbage. Paul is now a man whose life seems backwards. What has happened?

Christ took hold of Paul just like he had taken hold of those other crazy Christians. We live in a world tormented by the effects of the Fall. We are captive to sin and death, and our bodies are weak, frail, and decaying. We are in bondage to sin, death, and the devil. From the moment we are born, we are dying. Our time here is short, and we face diseases and wars. There is no guarantee that we will even wake up tomorrow. And lest we think that we are not in bondage to evil, look at the morning paper. Catholics kill Protestants in Ireland. The whole world, including the church, stands by as thousands are killed in Sudan. Two brothers fight over who gets to keep the house they inherited. We are in bondage to other forces.

Paul’s former life was a part of this captivity. He followed the law to try to curb the sinful nature, but the law could not deliver him from bondage. He was from Israel, the people of God, but even Israel needed to be set free from these evil forces. This is why Christ Jesus took hold of Paul. The Holy Spirit brought Paul into the life of Christ. Paul participated in the faithfulness of Christ and is righteous in Christ. He participates in Christ’s sufferings to obtain the resurrection of the dead and the defeat of the powers of sin and death. Paul has given up a lot, but life in Christ set him free.

We seek freedom as well. We want liberation from the decay and death of our bodies. We want victory over the power of sin. We know this desire every time a new request comes across the prayer chain, and every time we celebrate the life and passing of a brother or sister. We groan in anticipation of the perfecting of our bodies, and we celebrate when our brothers and sisters pass on because they have won the prize which they were seeking: the resurrection of their bodies. That liberation and victory came at a price for Paul. He participated in the sufferings of Christ and joined in his crucifixion. He received liberation, but he had to die first. After all, without death, there is no resurrection.

Today is the fifth Sunday of Lent. Next Sunday we will celebrate the entry into Jerusalem and Christ’s proclamation as King. In a week and a half, we will mourn at the foot of the cross as we witness again the crucifixion, and in two weeks, we will rejoice in the resurrection. Today, we prepare for Easter.

What might we need to die to in order to be set free? Paul set aside his status. He had authority as a teacher, even if it was only authority over a small number of Jews. Maybe for us it is the authority of being a boss at work or of being the head of our extended families. | Paul counted as loss the boundary markers of his society. Here, maybe it is being Black or being White, having an education or having none, being a confederate or being a Yankee, having money or being poor. Paul gave up his special status in the people of God. Being a Hebrew was nothing compared to being brought into the life of Christ. For us, does being Methodist compare with Christ? Does being a member of a Christian family take the place of life in Christ?

As we go to God in silent prayer now, remember that Paul gave up persecuting the church and was transformed into a powerful missionary. What you may have to give up to attain the resurrection of the dead? What new thing might God do with you as you are taken hold of by Christ?

I'm ready to give up...

...on life in the South.

I love Dr. Amy Laura Hall. I think that she is doing a wonderful job of calling us to examine the narratives that the world is giving us in order to live as faithful followers of Christ. But today she missed the point. She told us that she has heard from some of us about the Black-White dialogue in the South. She said that she is aware that life here includes more than just those who are Black or White, but that when we start arguing over who is more oppressed, then evil has won. I actually agree with that point. When we compete over our oppression, we give in to Satan and stop living into the church we are. I don't want to convince her that I'm more oppressed. I'm certainly less oppressed than many people in my classes. My problem was that after Dr. Hall told us that she knows there are Asians and latino/as in the area, she proceeded to talk about race and oppression in Black and White terms. It appeared that she was simply subsuming all non-Western European people groups into African-Americans and their oppression.

Dr. J. Kameron Carter was the guest lecturer in Ethics today. You may recognize his name from some of my other posts on race. This is the professor who told us that salvation comes from Africa. I tend to dread all of his lectures because he usually makes me cry. Today, he defined October 12, 1492 as the exact time when theology got off track and started to be a discourse of race and of culture. It was Columbus' landing in the Caribbean which allowed modernity to occur. I'm not sure I'm convinced, but even more, I'm disturbed by his narration which is, again, very American-centric. He brought all stories in the world into the story of the American South and the African-American community here.

I don't want to negate the experiences of those in the South. I know that the history of the American South is incredibly horrible. I know that American slavery was especially oppressive. And I'm not trying to initiate escapism. I know that life in Nevada, California, Oregon, Idaho, Washington, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah is not perfect. Racism certainly still exists in the West, in different forms perhaps, but it is there nonetheless. Don't think I'm avoiding these problems. I have been told by a boyfriend that his parents would never allow him to marry a Mexican woman, while I looked back at him wondering if he realized I was Mexican. I have been told by my friends' parents that they hate Hispanics, and then lived in the fear that they might see me with my dad or grandparents and forbid me from spending time with their children. I've lived in the racism of the West.

No, I'm not trying to escape racism. I'm trying to escape the concept that all minorities are African-American, that all stories are the same. If you want to write a narrative of all humans living under the curse of sin, of all humans being redeemable, of all humans living only by the grace of God, then I will get on board immediately. There are ways that we are all the same. My history is not one of them. When Carter recalls Oct. 12, 1492, I don't hear the inauguration of slavery in the South. I hear echoes of massacres and the removal of peoples from their tribal lands to reservations. I hear the story of the US government forcing the Navajo people to reduce the size of their flocks, resulting in the starvation of the people come winter. My narrative is different, and I want out. I want out of the land where my narrative has to be one of either slavery or slaveowner. I want out of the story where I am forced to fit into a preconceived notion of what it means to be a theologian or a Christian. I want out of the classes where I am told to tell a different narrative than that of the world, and then told that the new narrative is defined by Black and White. I'm ready to give up on life in the South.