Category Archives: God

grace, inspiration, loving viewpoint enemies

Proud to be an Okie

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Blog post from Kingsview & CoActually no, I’m not from Muskogee, Oklahoma, where “We don’t smoke marijuana” and “where even squares can have a ball,” as country singer Merle Haggard celebrated. Still I’m almost proud to be from there as I ponder the history of the version Merle first sang, what he came to make of it, and what became of it over the years since he first wrote the lyrics (with Roy Edward Burris) during the Vietnam War.

It’s complicated. Just before the pandemic hit and he mostly stopped live touring, for the first time I heard Kris Kristofferson, surely closer to the hippie Merle mocks in the song than to a square, in live concert. (There is a 1975 version on YouTube of Kris singing “Okie” with Cher and Rita Coolidge that seems to suggest some ironic awareness; the younger Kris throws around his mop of wild hair as he intones the lyrics about not letting “hair grow long and shaggy.”) That pre-pandemic night Kris, himself oddly enough a former soldier, sang  of the hippie-like values and addictions Merle chastised accompanied by “The Strangers,” the very band Merle founded and toured with until his 2016 death.

Memories of that night came flooding back when CBS released a special featuring Willie Nelson’s 2023 ninetieth-birthday concert. Woven through it are several appearances by a frail Kristofferson, supported tenderly by such singers as Roseanne Cash and Nora Jones. These made me grateful I’d experienced Kris live when I did and reminded me again of the “Okie” complexities.

Because they also live in me, riven by paradoxes in my roots and life trajectories, the contradictions inherent in hearing Kris sing Merle’s famous “Okie from Muscogee” did fill me with a certain rapture. The contradictions throb in me, for example,  as I remain committed to pacifism yet will never forget how moved I was by the stories of U.S. veterans I met while dean at Eastern Mennonite Seminary.

By the end of his life it seemed clear Merle, once a prisoner pardoned for burglaries by then-Governor Ronald Reagan, was singing the song within layers of complexity I could never claim fully to plumb yet which intrigued. The Okie (which he only kind of became after his family migrated from California during the Great Depression) who sounded like he was bashing anyone who smoked marijuana had battled addictions himself.

Anyone who hasn’t heard Merle sing “Amazing Grace” at St. Quentin, where he had been imprisoned, hasn’t fully experienced grace. This version is ragged, rough, and raw–throbbing with awareness of how “wretches” (an “Amazing Grace” lyric I rejected when younger, before I grew old enough to recognize myself in it) are saved.

So this is who sings about being from Muscogee. And in his singing so many layers of meaning, he reminds what richness imperfect people can offer if true to their truths rather than addicted to offering fake truths.

I and we needn’t agree with Merle on every detail to grasp that here is a real human being, someone who has traveled through vicissitudes with integrity, acknowledging and even magnifying them when called for. Here is no flattening of meaning but ever deeper exploration of it.

And so as Merle ages his songs become ever richer, their subtexts ever more resistant to simple interpretations, such that it made sense at Kris’s concert for his audience to break into applause as  “Okie from Muscogee” launched.

We were sitting, that night, in a country in which some loved “only squares can have a ball” and others loved the possibility that Merle’s song is at least partly the satire Kris may think it to be. Yet the song transcends the divisions.

The hatreds and animosities that spawned it in the 1960s as war raged have perhaps not so much healed as mutated and maybe even intensified. Interpretations and responses to “Okie” have mutated as well. Some see it as one more inspiration for continuing the cultural battles. But as I ponder Kris singing Merle’s song as his own life fades and with the band Merle’s death left behind, I find myself living at least briefly in a world in which only squares can have a ball yet with the hippies sing toward that grace still able to amaze.

—Michael A. King, publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC, blogs at Kingsview & Co, https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo

Anabaptist-Mennonite, Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, Anabaptist-Mennonite writing, Bible, biblical interpretation, Faith, God, Peace, Suffering, Teachings of Jesus, Theodicy, violence of God

The God of Joshua and Jesus, by Ted Grimsrud

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Author photoOne of the more challenging passages in the Bible is the story told in the book of Joshua. God’s chosen people enter the “promised land,” meet with opposition from the nations living there, and proceed—with God’s direction and often miraculous support—to kill or drive out the previous inhabitants. The book ends with a celebration that now the Hebrew people are in the Land, poised to live happily ever after.

Probably the most difficult aspect of the story to stomach is the explicit command that comes several times from God to the Hebrews to kill every man, woman, and child as part of the conquest. This element of the story is horrifying, even more so in light of the afterlife of the story where it has been used in later times to justify what are said to be parallel conquests—such as the conquest of Native Americans and native southern Africans. I wonder as a Christian pacifist what to do with this story. But, really, even for Christians who are not pacifists, how could any moral person want to confess belief in such a genocidal God—or accept as scripture a book that includes such a story?

Exhortation not history

I want to see if we can find meaning in the story that will help us put it in perspective and protect us from uses that find in the story support for our violence. More than defending Joshua per se, I want to defend the larger biblical story of which it is a part—an essential story for faith-based peacemakers. So, the first step for me is to recognize the type of literature, in a general sense, that Joshua is. I will call it “exhortation,” not “history.” It was an account likely written many years later than the events that inspired it may have happened. It was shaped in order to offer exhortation to its readers and hearers to seek faithfully to embody the teaching of Torah. I do not think it was meant to tell the people precisely what happened in the Joshua years.

I would characterize the Joshua story, then, as a kind of parable, a story (mostly if not totally fictional) that makes a point. To see the Joshua story as kind of a parable does not take away the troubling elements of the story—however, I think such a view changes what is at stake for we who believe in the Bible. What is at stake for us, most of all, is to try to discern the lesson the story is meant to make—not to feel bound to believe that the details are factual. Thus, for one thing, believing the Joshua story conveys important truths does not require us to accept its portrayal of God (or of the vicious character of the “conquest” of the promised land) as normative for us.

In what follows, I will not work at discerning what it is that we should make of the still present problem of why the Hebrews would have told a story with such problematic details about their tradition and their God. Such reflections are important, but they are beyond what I am able to articulate right now. Rather, I want to focus on what I understand to be the ethical, political, and theological concerns of the parable. Especially, I want to focus on the place of the Joshua story in the larger story the Bible presents us with. How does the Joshua story contribute to the Big Story that culminates in the life and teaching of the later “Joshua” (that is, Jesus)?

A political agenda

My Old Testament professor Millard Lind, in a class I took from him on based on his book, Yahweh is a Warrior: The Theology of Warfare in Ancient Israel, gave a useful framework for me to think about Joshua and other stories of divinely initiated violence. Lind focused on the understanding of politics in the Old Testament. He suggested that what was most interesting and revolutionary in ancient Israel was its attempt to create an alternative to the coercive, hierarchical politics of the empires and nations of the world, an alternative to what he called “power politics.”

We may think about the main elements of the Old Testament through this alternative politics lens: Creation and fall, the exodus and Torah (including the Ten Commandments, Torah’s spirit of empowerment, the concern for vulnerable people in the community, the sense of being over against Egypt, and the Sabbath regulations [day of rest, forgiveness of debts, anti-centralization and social stratification, and the jubilee provisions concerning land ownership]). Then we may think of Joshua, the Judges, the turn toward kingship, the prophets’ critique, and the impact of exile. Finally, we may turn to the New Testament picture of Jesus in the gospels and the apostolic witness in Paul and Revelation. All of these materials may be helpfully understood as presenting an alternative political orientation to the power politics of the nations.

Let’s focus on the Joshua story—the so-called “Conquest.” On the one hand, in this story we may see an emphasis on what Lind called “theo-politics” over against state-politics or power-politics. “Theo-politics” is a useful term for categorizing the alternative politics of the Bible. In the Joshua story, following on the heels of the exodus and Torah-revelation in the wilderness, we see a de-centering of human power structures. We also see that sustaining the Hebrews’ status in the land will be based on their faithfulness (or not) to Torah. So, in this story we have a reiteration of the countercultural politics introduced with the exodus.

On the other hand, in the Joshua story we also come face to face with overwhelming violence and its celebration. The Hebrews in the story may have been marginalized and recently liberated slaves and the “Canaanites” in the story may have mainly been kings and oppressors (see Norman Gottwald’s account in his famous book, The Tribes of Yahweh). Yet the story that was written and then retold became a story that kings and oppressors could and did use to justify their conquests during the era of Christendom—an utterly devastating story.

Reading Joshua as part of the bigger story

How do we understand the Joshua account to fit with the bigger biblical narrative? We may think in terms of something like what Walter Brueggemann has called the Bible’s “primal narrative”—the core story of God’s liberating acts that is repeatedly recounted throughout the Bible. We may read the primal narrative with what we could call a “theo-politics” lens. We start with God’s promise to Abraham and Sarah when they are first called to something new—their descendants will “bless all the families of the earth” (Genesis 12:3). This promise may be seen as the core element of the biblical story (I develop this point in my book, God’s Healing Strategy: An Introduction to the Bible’s Main Themes).

What follows in the story is the path, at times quite tortured, that God’s people take in trying to carry out the vocation implied in that promise. In the Christian Bible, this path leads ultimately to the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21–22 where the nations are healed by the leaves from the tree of life.

Abraham and Sarah’s immediate descendants face various adventures that culminate, by the end of Genesis, with them in Egypt. The settling in Egypt turns ominous in the book of Exodus. The Hebrews are enslaved. They have multiplied far beyond Abraham’s clan and have little sense of identity. They cry out, God hears, Moses arises, and they are delivered (without any generals or a king!). After their deliverance, God gives the people Torah as a gift to guide their common life as a counterculture in contrast with the ways of empire. Torah details a just and peaceable society with decentralized power and a sense of the value of each person (which involves a special focus on protecting the well-being of marginalized people in the community).

We are given the sense that to live out Torah, the people need a particular place where human flourishing may be embodied and practiced in the flesh in order to lead to the promised blessing. However, we are also given the sense that the only way to imagine such an embodiment of Torah would be in a territoried community, a geographical region with boundaries and sovereignty as a people. However, also, from the start we get the sense that this existence in a territoried community is contingent upon faithfully embodying Torah—the landedness is meant to serve the vocation, not to be an end in itself.

As it turns out, to be established in a particular land will require violence. People will be displaced, and the community will need coercive force to maintain its borders. There seems no way to have landedness (at least to the degree it requires sovereignty and boundaries) without also having violence. This seems the case even if from the story of the exodus it is clear that this necessary violence is not meant to be the monopoly of a centralized human power structure. Instead, at the beginning the necessary violence comes in the form of God’s direct intervention.

So, when Joshua leads the Hebrews into the promised land, the land of Canaan, inevitable violence takes place—on a large scale, as the story is told. The story makes it clear that this violence is God’s. At most, the human role is secondary. The on-going human leadership in the community is not based on gathered military might but on faithfulness to God’s commands.

The growing problem with territorial sovereignty

In Joshua as the people enter the land, in Judges as the people settle and establish their on-going community, and in the first part of 1 Samuel, the violence to maintain territorial sovereignty remains ad hoc and does not lead to permanent structures of power: no standing army, no collection of generals, no human king. However, the tension and sense of insecurity without such structures prove to be intolerable for Israel’s elders. These elders (and note in 1 Samuel 8 that the initial call for a king is not a popular demand from “the people” but a demand from the elite, the “elders”) make a decisive move to restructure Israel’s politics to “be like the nations.” According to the story, the main representative of God among the people, Samuel, argues vehemently against this restructuring, but he is ultimately told to accept it by God.

There is, earlier in the story, a brief account of how human kingship might work in harmony with Torah—Deuteronomy 17:14-20. This kind of king would be subordinate to Torah and would refuse to centralize military power and wealth in his and his main supporters’ hands.

As the story continues, though, it becomes clear early on that neither Samuel’s warnings nor the strictures from Deuteronomy 17 would be heeded. Kingship in Israel and Judah does indeed lead to centralized power, wealth accumulation in the hands of the few, disenfranchisement for the many, and a militarized society. The prophets make it clear that the on-going departure from Torah would have terrible consequences. And when their warnings are borne out, their words were remembered and provided a theological rationale for continued faith.

The disasters that befell Judah (destruction of kingdom and temple) did not mean God’s failure but vindicated God’s warnings. Because the long-forgotten books of the law were found during Josiah’s ill-fated kingship, the people had resources to sustain their sense of identity and the sense of the promise given to Abraham and Sarah. As a consequence of the failures and, at the same time, due to the sustenance of the core vision, the community was able to respond to the disasters with creativity and resilience. As it turned out, the loss of territory opens the possibility to revisit the initial tension between a community established with decentralized power dynamics and the need for territorial sovereignty. This time, the community was able move toward the decentralized power side of the tension instead of the territorial sovereignty side.

Beginning with Jeremiah 29 there is an embrace (or at least an explicit acknowledgement) of a vision to carry on the promise where scattered faith communities would “seek the peace of the city where they found themselves” rather than to hark back to a vision of a territorial kingdom as the necessary center for peoplehood sustenance and the vocation to bless the families of the earth. Though the story line that follows continues to be centered in the “holy land” with its rebuilt temple, it evinces little hope for re-establishing a territorial kingdom as the condition for the sustenance of the peoplehood. Though little noted in the biblical texts, the Judaism of this time continued to spread and solidified its existence as a scattered peoplehood outside of the “promised land.”

The politics of the second Joshua

When we get to the story of Jesus, we are introduced to a political vision that takes non-territoriality for granted. Jesus shares with his namesake, Joshua, a message that God saves (the meaning of the name). He brings a message about the kingdom of God and is ultimately seen to be a royal, messianic figure. But his message repudiates the coercion and centralization of power politics that a territorial kingdom requires. In that sense, he becomes a kind of anti-Joshua.

Jesus’s community embodied a politics of servanthood not domination, free forgiveness not the centralized control of access to God, and non-possessiveness not accumulated wealth. He set his notion of God’s rule over against the Pharisaic purity project, the centralized Temple, and brutal Roman hegemony. Rather than the eradication of the impure Other that we see in Joshua, with Jesus, we see him healing the impure. Rather than the sense that God intervenes violently on behalf of the promise that we see in Joshua, with Jesus we learn that God’s intervention on behalf of the promise is decidedly and necessarily nonviolent. Victory through self-giving love replaces victory through violent conquest. With Jesus, the promise does not need a state with justifiable violence that requires defending boundaries. In fact, what we learn from the second Joshua is that such a state is most likely to be hostile toward God—and in fact such a state (Rome) does execute God’s true human emissary. We must note, too, that Jesus seems to believe that this vision was present in his tradition from the start: “I came to fulfill Torah, not abolish it.”

The biblical story concludes in Revelation with New Jerusalem, established not through the sword but through the self-giving witness of the Lamb and his followers. Babylon is overthrown by this witness, and the result is the healing of the nations, even the healing of kings of the earth. Politics are utterly transformed.

The role of the Joshua story

The Joshua story is crucial. It shows that territorial sovereignty is not possible without violence. As we read the trajectory of the biblical story, we get the sense that what Joshua sets up is a kind of experiment. Will it be possible to embody Torah in concrete life through controlling a particular territory that might be administered in just and peaceable ways? Doing so could indeed serve as a means to bless all the earth’s families. That Israel could envision a blessing through territoriality is seen in the vision recorded twice, in Isaiah 2 and Micah 4: People from all the earth come to Israel to beat their swords into plowshares and learn the ways of peace.

As the story proceeds, though, we see that the very means to establish Israel in the land carried with them the seeds of failure. Indeed, the land could not be secured without violence—and once the land is secured, the dynamics of violence do not disappear. The initial tension between a decentralized theo-politics on the one hand and territorial sovereignty on the other hand came to be resolved on the side of territoriality. That is, Israel could not be sustained apart from the centralized authority of kingship and its attendant power politics.

However, as Deuteronomy 17 and 1 Samuel 8 warn, such a politics of domination cannot help but undermine Torah. Such a politics cannot help but be corrupt and violate the very conditions of existence in the promised land—as the story tells us. In the end, after the Babylonian conquest, Israel again is presented with the tension between territoriality and theo-politics. This time, in tentative ways, the tension is resolved more on the side of theo-politics. Certainly, the strand of the biblical tradition that culminates in the ministry of Jesus clearly resolves the tension in this way.

When we reread Joshua in the light of these later developments, we will recognize that the violence there is stylized and exaggerated. In exaggerating that violence, Joshua helps show the inevitability of power politics being a dead end and the impossibility of the promise being channeled through the state. Joshua itself points toward countercultural politics by helping to clear away the illusion that theo-politics ultimately could find expression in a territorial kingdom.

“Biblical politics”

The story the Bible tells, then, becomes a story pointing toward a kind of countercultural politics—decentering the state (rejecting empire and the coercive maintenance of geographical boundaries) and advocating organizing for shalom apart from the state through decentralized communities of faith that are open to all comers.

“Biblical politics” is revolutionary in its own way. But it does not underwrite a focus on directly overthrowing the state and doing without any human authority—though even more certainly the Bible strongly repudiates the kind of obeisance toward the state all too characteristic of post-Constantine Christianity. The state, it seems, can be seen most of all in the biblical story as simply existing, for better and for worse. It should not set the agenda in either a positive or negative way for peace people. Theo-politics is about peace work is all its forms, generally independent of territorial kingdoms or modern nation-states. There can be some common ground; more often there will be tension and even conflict between peace people and the nations.

The main point, though, is to work for human flourishing in local communities and global connections of resistance wherever they may be enhanced. Perhaps this will lead to a whole new global order (we may hope; the current order is doomed). More importantly, is the much more modest affirmation of such work as the only way to embrace life in healthy and sustainable ways—or at least it’s the best we can hope to do.

—Ted Grimsrud, Harrisonburg, Virginia, is Senior Professor of Peace Theology at Eastern Mennonite University and was a pastor for ten years. He has written numerous books, including God’s Healing Strategy: An Introduction to the Bible’s Main Themes, revised edition (Cascadia, 2011) and, most recently, To Follow the Lamb: A Peaceable Reading of the Book of Revelation (Cascade Books, 2022). He blogs at Thinking Pacifism, where this essay was first published.

Anabaptist-Mennonite writing, Doubt, Faith, gratitude, inspiration, love of God, Mennonite poet, Poetry

Do I Dare, a poem by Joseph Gascho

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If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. —Psalm 139:9-10

Do I dare to tell my Darwin friends
about the giant hand
that led my surgeon’s hand
for six whole hours?

Do I dare to tell my Dawkins friends
about the gentle hand
that held me
for 40 days?

Do I dare to think
it was no dream,
that gentle, giant hand,
holding me,
lovingly?

—Joseph Gascho, Hummelstown, Pennsylvania, is a retired cardiologist and emeritus professor of medicine and humanities, Penn State University College of Medicine. The Annals of Internal Medicine awarded him both poem of the year and photograph of the year. Positive Exposure 109, on museum mile in New York City, has featured his photography exhibit, “The Operating Theater.”  In addition to other books of photography and poetry (see  jgascho.com), he has written Heart and Soul: A Cardiologist’s Life in Verse (Wipf and Stock, 2023) .

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, God, Holy Spirit

A Pentecostal Theater Large Enough for This Marriage

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Kingsview & Co blog post barn imageFor a year I’ve been the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer made a main presentation on her or his tradition and the remaining writers offeredresponses. Here at Kingsview & Co I’ve been posting my contributions along with links to the larger conversation. As touched on below, this post completes my participation.

* * *

If I dare put it this way, I’m grateful to J. Terry Todd for offering, in “Following Jesus to the Altar: One Pentecostal’s Reflection,” a Pentecostalism large enough for my marriage. This marriage, of a former atheist and semi-former charismatic, has called for a large room–even, in Todd’s language, a theater. And in relation to the Pentecost-related matters Todd addresses, as much my marriage as my Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition has set the stage for my experiences and perspectives. The story:

As a teen, I attended a church camp. I had by then decided that adopting atheism was the most ambitious, dramatic way I could declare independence from traumatizing aspects of my Mennonite church community.

Intertwining with classic Anabaptist themes in my church experience were already evangelical and fundamentalist influences. Then yet another stream was added: the charismatic renewal movement. Abruptly all manner of settled ways of praying and worshiping and thinking were unraveled. It could be said that, to echo Todd’s memorable wording, a form of Pentecostalism was making its transgressive appearance.

It had taken over this church camp. So there I was, theoretically atheist. Yet underneath the atheism I was also, as Todd introduces his experience, “bearing the weight of a grief I couldn’t name.”

What happened next could be described almost word for word as Todd does:

Bearing the weight of a grief I couldn’t name, one Sunday I tarried at the altar, a classical Pentecostal phrase that involves praying mightily for a divine encounter with the Holy Spirit.  I stood, along with others, near the front of the worship space, my body enveloped by the band’s percussive rhythms and the praise team’s soaring vocals.  I, I’ve seen God do it, and I know / it’s working out for me. / It’s getting ready to happen. The entire assembly chanted the song’s refrain, again and again: It’s getting ready to happen, it’s getting ready to happen.  I wasn’t kneeling at a structure but standing, walking, rocking on my heels at the “altar,” a space that in most Pentecostal settings encompasses the center front of the church, stage left and stage right as well.

My moments of tarrying, or waiting expectantly, involved both the fervent hope for a divine encounter with the Holy Ghost, and a struggle with my willingness to surrender to the experience. And then it happened . . .

But precisely there our experiences sharply diverge. For me it most definitely did not happen. I felt crushed under the dreams of those praying over me, laying hands on me, issuing ecstatic utterances through which I grasped, though without understanding the words themselves, that they were entreating the Spirit to enter recalcitrant me.

“Just let go,” they pled. “Let your tongue go even if it makes no sense. Say nonsense words and then the Holy Spirit will come to fill them with meaning.”

So I did. And a sort of half feeling of sort of half being filled with something arrived but deep down I knew: I was doing my best to be filled with the Spirit but not managing actually to be filled by other than my own quest to be “good” for those who wanted me to be filled. Still I yielded. Eventually I eked out some nonsense words. Joy erupted. For several days I convinced myself It had happened: I had spoken in tongues; I had been baptized in the Spirit.

Only for a few days. Then as I noted no underlying transformation of my troubled self, I admitted the truth to myself: I had tried but failed to open myself. Whatever had happened had been my effort to go along with the expectations of the crowd.

Years later I was to find paths toward following Jesus and experiencing the Spirit. Part of what it took was concluding that what had befallen me back then was external coercion blending with my inner need. I had experienced true hunger but not necessarily for what I was being offered at that camp.

In mid-pilgrimage I met a woman. She was Joan, still a teenager, in her first year at Eastern Mennonite University, where we met when I was a senior. She had been raised American Baptist. She had found much to treasure in her tradition. But there were hungers not yet met in her teenage self. In her world too the charismatic movement made its transgressive appearance, undoing patterns and spiritualities that had long seemed settled. She was blessed. She still connects with friends from the days she sang in a traveling choir with her charismatic mentors and friends.

Eventually, of course, the former-but-sometimes-still-atheist and the charismatic decided that one thing amid their confusions was clear: They should marry. When they announced this oil-and-water merger to their respective friends, there was no joy in either camp. There was gnashing of teeth, rending of clothes, smearing of ashes on brows. This was a variant of Thelma and Louise rollicking their way off a cliff.

So here we are, forty-some years later. We have survived partly by becoming more like each other. What our friends couldn’t always see–nor actually could we ourselves, who realized we might have lost our minds–was that we would also, hoary though the concept is, complement each other. So I am often enough the skeptic but experience Joan as offering guard rails that keep me from, ultimately, plunging into the ditch of cynical disbelief.

And I think she would testify to the ways we mutually nurtured each other when at moments of severe distress in her circle of loved ones the charismatic word was sometimes a toxic pray harder, trust God more, get out of the Spirit’s way even if that forces you to lie to yourself about what is actually happening here. During one potentially fatal crisis, it was also not her charismatic mentors but that boring old-fashioned leader, an American Baptist pastor, who knew precisely the words of divinely inspired grace and wisdom to offer.

Within that journey we find ongoing blessings as we nurture children and grandchildren in a world turned wilder than many of us might have anticipated even a few years ago. We go to church. We engage Scripture. We do things good Christians and Mennonites do. We take seriously the Mennonite Church USA understandings of the Holy Spirit offered in the 1995 Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective article 3, which concludes that–

The Holy Spirit enables our life in Christian community, comforts us in suffering, is present with us in time of persecution, intercedes for us in our weakness, guarantees the redemption of our bodies, and assures the future redemption of creation.

But buffeted by traditions we have long experienced as sources of both strength and shadows, we have not majored in jots and tittles of Holy Spirit doctrine. Nor have we found that the somewhat middle-of-the-road MC USA take on the Spirit exhausts the wildness of the wind and the tongues of fire that blow and alight where they will.

This means I take in Todd’s report more as testimony and inspiration than as theological tome–although I appreciate and affirm the theological nuances he offers us and the many ways they resonate with Joan’s and my lived experience. I particularly am moved by Todd’s ability to show us three things:

First “is the experience of worship as a theater of divine encounter, a space of intense emotion and intimacy where God meets us at the altar.”

Second is “transgressive space”:

As a theater of divine encounter, the Pentecostal (or renewalist) altar can be a “transgressive space,” a term Gastón Espinoza has used to describe the altars at Azusa Street, the 1906 Los Angeles revivals that helped put the Pentecostal movement on the Christian map.

Third is the “freakiness” that this can catalyze and empower. Todd documents an amazing array of Christians and peoples and experiences that can all, in their frequently contradictory ways, fit in the theater. As he describes matters, “The altar where I first experienced the baptism of the Holy Ghost is a transgressive space, which is why I use the provocative language of ‘flying the freak flag’ to unabashedly embrace Pentecostal ideas and (especially?) actions that might puzzle or even repel others.”

That grips my heart. That shows me what it can look like when Christians today behave as those first book-of-Acts Christians did, seemingly drunk but with Spirit not spirit. That fills me with appreciation for ways in our half-blind and fumbling ways Joan and I, one burned by one form of Pentecostalism, one healed by another form of it, then both of us discovering mutual inspiration and healing at the nexus of salvation and shadows, have found each other. And have been found by the Holy Spirit who turned even our marriage into a wing of that theater of divine encounter.

Yes, J. Terry Todd:

That prophecy makes me dance with joy at the altar, as I await this Third Pentecost, grateful for the radically relational pneumatology that undergirds it.

Somebody shout Hallelujah, please.

* * *

This post completes my contributions to the “Following Jesus” conversation. It has been a rewarding journey. Meanwhile “Following Jesus Is a Liquid Dance,” J. Terry Todd’s engagement with his respondents (which includes comments on my post above), provides an eloquent and heartfelt wrap-up to a valuable year of mutual learning for the twelve of us involved. Let Todd have the last word:

As embodied souls we are here for a time such as this. Some of the roadblocks to the flourishing of all God’s people are novel – a climate emergency on a global scale, the possibility of nuclear destruction, along with the usual human litany of greed, war, murder, inequality, and exploitation.

How do we sing the Lord’s song in such a strange land?  Well, it’s not all dependent on our singing, thank God since I can’t carry a tune in a bucket. Maybe it’s the Spirit that plays and sings through us. Glory! In a prophetic phrase attributed to Montanus, “Behold, the human being is like a lyre, and I [the Spirit] fly over them as a pick.”

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean and participated in Harold Heie’s Respectful Conversation project within which a version of this post was first published.

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, God, inspiration, love of God, Pietism

Stirred by Tender Pietism

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For a year I’m the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer makes a main presentation on her or his tradition and the remaining writers offer responses. Here at Kingsview & Co I’m posting my contributions along with links to the larger conversation.

* * *

In his stirring rendition of “A Week in the Life of a Pietist,” Christopher Gehrz illumined for me the reality that a fair amount of what I’ve experienced as just part of my heritage is indebted to Pietism. I needed barely to  read more than that one of my favorite hymns, “Children of the Heavenly Father,” has Pietist roots to grasp this.

This intrigued me enough that I pursued Gehrz’s fuller comments on the song writer, Carolina Sandell, learned that she is his favorite hymn writer, that she engaged in bride (of Christ) mysticism, and that

Still more controversially, she inherited the Radical Pietist and Moravian interest in the divine feminine. The first draft of “Thy Holy Wings” asked God to spread “warm mother’s wings,” and a hymn inspired by the martyrdom of Swedish missionaries in Ethiopia implored God to “tenderly hover” over Christ’s witnesses on Earth, “Embracing their cares like a mother.”

Reading this took me to my childhood as an often-lost missionary kid trying to survive both the beauties and bafflements of life in Cuba and Mexico. By the time I was 12 the crosscurrents of the missionary experience and my escape into secular inspirations like science fiction had me flirting with atheism. Yet repeatedly a backdrop of hymns and gospel music playing most bedtimes on a Wollensak reel-to-reel tape recorder brought comfort amid pain.

Many a troubled night I’d listen to songs like George Beverly Shea singing “Tenderly He Watches.” Here the controversy of feminine images for God is dialed back. This is done perhaps intentionally and as Sandell herself sometimes seems to do (not least as in “Heavenly Father” children safely to God’s “bosom” are gathered). God remains in such renderings a male who watches over me not as but “like” a mother, a “mother watching o’er her babies.” Still the tenderness is explicitly and implicitly palpable, and it strikes me how often Pietist-flavored hymns leaven the sternness of traditionally patriarchal faith expressions.

When I aged into a culture-shocked teenager trying to make sense of college in the U.S. after leaving Mexico just months before, key to my surviving the tough days was lying many an evening on the couch watching the reels turn on what was now my more advanced stereo Dokorder tape recorder. I would put on the most tender hymns I knew. Shades of Sandell.

Which then takes my heart and memories back to the scores of hymns offering God’s tender care that healed my wounds way back then, bless me still today, and surrounded the bed of my dying mother-in-law Mildred. As she faded, her daughter and my wife Joan, along with our three daughters, sat by her bed singing such hymns. We accompanied the tracks playing on an old Ipod I had loaded with hundreds of hymns and gospel songs for Mildred to go to sleep to in her retirement community much as I had as a boy.

Many of the songs,  in fact, were precisely the same ones I had listened to in Cuba and Mexico, plenty of them with that Pietist flavor. I had resurrected them by buying lost vinyl records on Ebay and laboriously transferring them to the MP3s that eventually ended up on my and Mildred’s Ipods.

All of which is to say this: I certainly have long loved such hymns. But it was Gehrz who helped me more fully understand that through them I was experiencing aspects of a Pietism that did indeed help save my life.

I need to rethink some of my own personal history and my Anabaptist-Mennonite heritage in light of Gehrz. I’ve under-credited Pietism. I’ve long been reasonably aware that strands of piety did heavily influence the communities within which I was most primally shaped. I’ve been less aware that these pieties were not just floating in the Anabaptist-Mennonite air but were a gift from sources such as Sandell and the many others Gehrz identifies, including Philipp Jakob Spener, August Hermann Franck, and more.

Citing Roger Olson, Gehrz observes that “if there is no Pietist movement, we might nonetheless discover what Olson calls ‘the Pietist ethos’ in Lutheran, Wesleyan, Baptist, Anabaptist, Reformed, and other churches represented by other participants in this conversation.” Indeed.

Gehrz himself names what I might otherwise worry a tad about from within Anabaptist commitments to social ethics. This is the possibility that piety can so turn inward as to forsake the outward. I’ve heard Mennonite preachers worry, precisely, that the more Pietistic hymns can generate a me-and-God as opposed to us-and-God or God-and the-world Christianity.

Gehrz, however, makes the case that as with “Francke (1663-1727), personal conversion to Jesus Christ sparked social action.” And my own experience suggests that the tenderness that watches o’er the troubled ones of us safely in God’s bosom gathering can be a key source of returning to the world healed enough to care for it.

Thank you, Christopher, for this tender report, on behalf not only of your own tradition but our many traditions enriched by it, of a week in a Pietist’s life.

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean and is currently participating in Harold Heie’s Respectful Conversation project within which a version of this post was first published.

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, baptism, Evangelicalism, grace, Mennonite, salvation

Collaborating with Grace, the Gift from Beyond

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For a year I’m the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer makes a main presentation on her or his tradition and the remaining writers offer responses. Here at Kingsview & Co I’m posting my contributions along with links to the larger conversation.

* * *

It’s interesting to note that Wesley Granberg-Michaelson joins the significant number of “Respectful Conversation” partners reporting having made some sort of journey beyond or at least through evangelicalism as part of embracing their current tradition. I’d count myself among such. Though I was born into the Mennonite church and raised by Anabaptist-Mennonite parents, whether what we believed in was Anabaptism or an evangelicalism tinged with fundamentalism was often unclear.

I resonate, then, with Granberg-Michaelson’s report that he started out evangelical, going back to a conversation in the kitchen with his mother when he was just four. There is indeed appeal in accepting Jesus before going to the dentist to make sure to be saved in case Jesus returns more quickly than young Wesley returns from the dentist.

I made the same move as Wesley except oh, maybe 100 times, and it just never seemed to take. I never seemed to become unqualifiedly saved. I remember when I was maybe 12 overhearing my mom say to my dad something along the lines of “If he doesn’t do it by the time he’s 16 he never will.” To this day I’m not sure if “it” was accepting Jesus, but I think it was. That only added to the pressure and caused maybe another 50 efforts to become saved.

But thoughts and feelings that seemed not to belong to saved people would always return shortly after a few days of the sainthood that would validate that Jesus was now in my heart. For me the solution, if such it was, to the quandary came from choosing in my twenties to try out whatever it meant to follow Jesus. I’d aim to follow Jesus whether or not I always believed there was a Jesus to follow and whether or not I had any confidence that Jesus was in my heart.

In light of that, I feel almost a twinge of envy that Granberg-Michaelson can report that the Reformed tradition “chose me.” There is gift here, the gift of feeling that Someone has chosen you which is moving and affirming in a different way than if it was primarily you who did the choosing. As Granberg-Michaelson summarizes, “Grace comes solely as God’s initiative, as pure gift. Faith is never an achievement or personal accomplishment.”

I mostly concur. And I think we Mennonites influenced by the individualism often linked to evangelical influences can be reminded by Granberg-Michaelson of our tradition’s from-the-start convictions that the walk toward and with Jesus happens as we become members of Christ’s body.

Each of our traditions can also find gifts in the summary of the Reformed tradition as confessional, covenantal, committed to the conviction that the world belongs to God, aware that sin is real indeed yet so is the journey from “guilt to grace to gratitude,” and ecumenical.

Those of us who are grandparents, as am I six times over, may also find blessing in Granberg-Michaelson’s testimony that “When I sit with my two grandchildren on my lap, my Reformed theology gets undone.”

My Mennonite theology gets undone too, though this did send me down a side-trail that may nevertheless deserve a touch of exploration:  wondering how any of us help next generations see gifts in our traditions as religions and denominations and traditions are in so many ways coming undone.

Some of my grandchildren are being raised in ways connected to Christianity, even sometimes Mennonite-flavored. Others less so. In-laws range all over the faith–or lack thereof–map. When we get together, we can’t assume that, say, Mennonite is our common understanding.

Even so, how surprising, and moving it has sometimes been to learn that even grandchildren as young as two pay attention for example to prayer at meals and regardless of their particular background will often propose or even personally initiate prayer. This includes the youngest, whose heart has somehow instructed her to put her two index fingers together and close her eyes as a gesture of prayer.

I suspect at least two factors come into view here. One is that indeed the communal emphases of our traditions hold insight. We are formed together, not simply apart and not entirely by larger cultural influences even as traditions increasingly atomize.

The other is that we do need somehow to take into account Granberg-Michaelson’s testimony to not only chasing grace ourselves but also being chosen and blessed by it whether or not we’re fully capable of understanding it. This takes me back to his thoughts on covenant.

On the one hand, I remain a committed enough Anabaptist-Mennonite that I don’t fully embrace his conviction that covenant includes infant baptism.

When an infant is baptized in a Reformed (or other) congregation, theological critics will complain that he or she has no choice in the matter. But that is precisely the point. Christian faith is carried communally; it’s personal but not individualistic.

I see the power of this understanding and in that sense am drawn to it. Still I’d prefer to look for ways the communal carrying of Christian faith Granberg-Michaelson rightly emphasizes does not preclude reserving baptism for the adult or at least adult-in-training believer consciously committing to the journey with Jesus.

Here I see some analogy with my marriage commitments. I could not have become the married person I am apart from community and “covenantal relationships of love.” And I respect that marriage arrangements vary across cultures in enriching ways. Yet I’m grateful to have had the privilege of intentionally–though certainly not in full understanding of what I was doing!–committing myself to another through sickness and in health until death does us part.

On the other hand, and as I ponder through the prism of my grandchildren, I see much to celebrate in Granberg-Michaelson’s report:

So, I don’t regard my prayer in the kitchen as an autonomous, individual act of free will, but as part of a mysterious movement of grace transmitted imperfectly but certainly through covenantal relationships of love. Believing and belonging are intertwined, and not always sequential.

Amen. Maybe the Mennonite in me can see adult baptism as collaborating with the grace which comes as gift from Beyond. Many thanks, Wesley, for leading us so meaningfully from guilt to grace to gratitude.

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean and is currently participating in Harold Heie’s Respectful Conversation project within which a version of this post was first published.

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, discernment amid differences, God, grace, loving viewpoint enemies, Teachings of Jesus

Can Mennonites and Lutherans Experience Grace, Faithfulness, and Even Fun Together?

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For a year I’m the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer makes a main presentation on her or his tradition and the remaining writers offer responses. Here at Kingsview & Co I’m posting my contributions along with links to the larger conversation.

* * *

Can Mennonites and Lutherans, once bitter enemies, have fun together? Though the journey is challenging, that’s a question Mark Ellingsen’s take on Lutheranism in “Lutheranism: An Evangelical Catholic Way to Follow Jesus” stirs for me.

Noting that, as was true for Anabaptists, the label Lutheran was originally applied by critics, Ellingsen wants to highlight such names as “evangelical” and “catholic.” He explains that Lutheranism incorporates many strands, including Pietistic, Confessional, or the “Neo-Confessional” he names Evangelical Catholicism. He also stresses that most Lutherans can at least agree “that the Christian life must be rooted in God’s grace.”

Where does my Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition fit into this? I resonate with John J. Friesen’s take that we owe much to Lutheranism—which helped create space for the Anabaptist rejection of Roman Catholic indulgences, commitment to the Bible (sola scriptura) above tradition, belief that Scripture should be accessible to the common person rather than only privileged priests, and the ensuing affirmation of the priesthood of all believers.

As Ellingsen notes, “Lutherans . . . join with most Protestants in embracing the idea that all who are baptized, all who follow Jesus, are priests. Christians who follow Jesus are priests, for they have been dedicated to living lives in which they perform the sacrifice of dying to their sin and rising to serve Christ and the neighbor (Luther’s Works, Vol.31, p.53; Ibid., Vol.36, p.145; Apology of the Augsburg Confession, XXIV.26).”

On the other hand, casting a shadow Ellingsen doesn’t address, Luther became a vitriolic opponent of Anabaptists. How did this come to be?

Through establishing Lutheranism as a state church. As Friesen summarizes, “When Luther opted for the state-church model, placed the Lutheran church under the authority of the state, and persecuted minority churches, Anabaptists believed that Luther had betrayed the teachings of the Bible.” Anabaptists rejected models in which church and state together policed the boundaries of acceptable Christianity.

In contrast, Anabaptists, purveyors of the Radical Reformation, believed that the commandments of Scripture and particularly the teachings of Jesus trumped the state if church came into conflict with state. Surely, thought Anabaptists, there was conflict  if the church demanded, contra Jesus, killing enemies, swearing oaths, infant baptism not optional but coerced, upholding civil order and established norms if they blocked following Jesus. Surely there was almost unbearable conflict when not only did the state go against Jesus’ teachings but the very Martin Luther who celebrated grace countenanced the possibility that the state should execute Anabaptists for sedition and blasphemy.

Although they based it more on New Testament practices than a formal take on the priesthood of believers, Anabaptists, and their Mennonite branch, were also often more radical in blurring the line between laity and clergy. I experienced this as a seminary graduate trained in an American Baptist seminary (where Lutherans were classmates) whose professors advocated a moderate setting-apart of ordained ministers within a larger commitment to the priesthood of all. My first pastorate was at Germantown Mennonite Church, oldest Mennonite congregation in North America, established in Philadelphia in 1683 by Mennonites and Quakers. By 1980s a faithful remnant of some 25 congregants was expressing commitment to the priesthood of all through a leadership team that included ordained but unpaid ministers plus several congregants. As a paid minister, I would stretch the pattern.

My first Sundays careful attention was paid to where I stood when preaching. At the front of the historic building was a raised platform and pulpit many congregants’ saw as too prominent, evidence prior generations had strayed from true radicality. With heart pounding I went to the pulpit instead of the humble portable lectern. Whoever was right or wrong, the resulting controversy had roots reaching down to the early days of Anabaptism, not to mention Lutheranism.

But as with all human traditions, Mennonites are complicated. The same understandings that could be understood as discouraging trained professional priests/pastors exercising authority over Christians also generated structures that sometimes straitjacketed individual freedom of conscience. There were reasons for this; as Astrid von Schlacta observes, “Yes, sola scriptura implies that the meaning of Scripture does not depend on interpretation by a priest. Yet Anabaptists believed that collective interpretation of the Bible by the community of believers was indispensable.” True enough. But then in the name of the community others in the community, often themselves paradoxically following the authority of the leaders they trusted, might ban those they considered out of bounds.

This has led to circumstances in which Mennonites seeking to be “without spot or blemish” have generated communities that have policed boundaries of the quest, excommunicated congregants perceived to be non-repentant sinners, and risked crushing grace under law. In her memoir The Merging (DreamSeeker Books, 2000), my aunt Evelyn King Mumaw tells how her parents helping establish an early 1900s Sunday school. In that Mennonite context, this was perceived as violating church norms. Mumaw describes the day the bishop came to put her family out, an event which cast lifelong shadows over the family, including her younger brother who was my father:

Attendees were warned to discontinue their involvement. Those who continued attending there were finally excommunicated. Limerick Sunday school was closed. All persons who were put out of church were to confess that they had sinned in order to be  reinstated. Some would only confess they had disobeyed a conference decree. I still remember that chilly morning when the little Bishop with the cold sharp eyes came driving up our lane in his boxlike Model-T Ford. I think it was the time he had come to tell my parents that the people who kept on attending Limerick after they were told to stop were going to be put out of the church. And that included my parents. The people who went through this experience were deeply hurt.

This takes me back to Ellingsen and the gospel of grace. One could underscore the shadows of Lutheranism. One could claim, as I’ve heard Mennonites do and sometimes done myself, that Lutheranism purveys a cheap grace. One could suggest, and I see some value in this, that those who wrap their commitments around faithfully following Jesus, often rooted in the Gospels, may experience formation complementary to that of those who particularly celebrate sola fide and sola gratia, frequently rooted in Pauline epistles.

But after 500 years, Lutherans have asked forgiveness for persecuting Anabaptists. Ellingsen underscores that there is an ethical component to Luther, who believes “you only sin bravely when you do not give into concupiscence, when you boldly live a sacrificial, sin-denying life (live your baptism), but do so with the awareness that even then you are still sinning, that all good done is a function of God working in and through you (Complete Sermons, Vol.4, p.367).” And Ellingsen paints moving word pictures of the gifts of grace:

When you live in a family, with a lover whose love works on you, the loved one does not have to tell you what to do to please him/her.  You just sort of know.  True human love is spontaneous.  Imagine then what God’s love can do to you.  In fact, when you are in love (fall in love – note the passivity) it is like an ecstatic experience.  You lose yourself.  Should we not expect it to be that way in the arms of Jesus?  This is another reason why Lutherans claim that there is no need to teach Christians how to follow Jesus.  It will just happen spontaneously when you are living with Jesus. 

Here I still want the Mennonite formation that says human commitments are never fully whole so that, like couples who may not always feel love but want to receive and offer it nevertheless, we need teachings and a community that create disciplines of right living—whether or not these spontaneously emerge. On the other hand, how those Limerick Mennonites yearned for a more ecstatic church than the one offered by the cold-eyed bishop. How importantly Lutheranism, drawing on the Pietistic strand Ellingsen embraces, reminds us that with

awareness that everything we do is a sin, it follows that the best Christians can be is simul iustus et peccator (100% saint and 100% sinner) (Romans 7:14-18; Luther’s Works, Vol.32, p.111; Ibid., Vol.27, p.230).    This is a freeing insight, as it entails the awareness that we are loved by God, even despite all our sin and selfishness.

And how helpfully we can collaborate on the Way. As von Schlacta sees it,

The Anabaptists were part of the Reformation and shared basic convictions with Lutherans and Reformed. Yes, sola gratia means we do not attain salvation through works. But living the faith was important for all. The Anabaptists called this discipleship. For Luther it was “new obedience.”

Perhaps together, then, amid grace and forgiveness for the sins evident in both (and all) traditions, we can say a celebratory yes when Ellingsen asks, “Can the rest of the catholic tradition also embrace the freedom, spontaneity, and fun which Lutherans often associate with following Jesus?”

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean and is currently a participant in Harold Heie’s Respectful Conversation project within which a version of this response to Lutheranism was first published.

God, grace, inspiration, love of God

Hemmed in by God’s Love, a guest post by Jen Kindbom

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Caffeine is a mixed blessing for me. It gives me the laser-beam focus especially handy in creative endeavors (such as writing these words) or monotonous tasks (such as grading hundreds of papers). Not only that, it almost instantly relieves those headaches that a couple of Aleve, a nap, and a big glass of water just won’t touch.

But caffeine also makes me jittery, shaky, and paranoid. For example, I distinctly recall sewing in my attic and fearing acutely that at any minute I would be arrested and hauled off to prison–for what offense, I do not know. How to express my relief when I realized it was no accidental crime haunting my conscience, just the frozen mocha. . . .

Then I think of Psalm 139, which I’ve studied with my first-year character ed classes for the past six years or so. Psalm 139 conveys the depth of God’s love for God’s people on a very personal level. We see God’s hand upon each of us at our very core. We see God’s knowledge of each of our thoughts before we’re aware of them, and—one of my favorite images, particularly as one who sews—we see God’s love hemming each of us in. There’s no escaping a good hem.

I find it particularly comforting that the message of this psalm is not one of conditions. The words do not say “You perceive my thoughts from afar and abandon me when they’re too much.” The words do not say “You love me unless my thoughts are off the deep end irrational, or too fast for me to keep up with.” The words do not say “You hem me in until I’m afraid and I can’t quite pin down why.”

No.

They say “You hem me in, behind and before.”

When children are overwhelmed by questions that seem too big or even too irrational, loving and thoughtful adults at their best respond kindly to them. So it is with God, so we see in the psalm. What if it rains inside? What if the house blows away? What if there’s a bee in the field?

Imagine these are your thoughts, as they have certainly at times been mine. Imagine God putting tender hands on each side of your face, kissing your forehead, and then taking your hand and walking with you, listening as we talk it out, answering your questions in ways that acknowledge that to you, the fear is real and also that you are safe. In that moment—as in every moment—God hems you in. God hems me in, behind and before.

The psalmist prays for God to search me and us, to know our anxious thoughts, caffeine-induced or otherwise. He prays for God to let us know of any offensive way within me and you—not to condemn us or to add a brick to the wall between us and God but because God knows the possibility of an unhurried mind. And God desires that for each of us: thoughts and a mind at peace in the hem that is God’s love.

—Jen Kindbom, an Ohio-based writer, teacher, and designer, is author of Cadabra (DreamSeeker Books, 2015)  (2015) and the chapbook A Note on the Door (2011). Her poems have appeared in Adroit Journal, Connotation Press, Literary Mama, and other journals and anthologies. Jen is interested in lifting the veil of poetry for her students, and pursues ways to integrate poetry and creative writing into her high school English classes.

God, inspiration

Brightly Beams the Mercy

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When I was growing up in Mexico, son of missionaries who saw Jesus as light to share with those they believed lost, I listened for endless hours as around and around on the Wollensak turned the tapes on which Roy, Stateside supporter, had recorded countless gospel songs.

Amid culture-shock-related traumas, those songs saved my life. When little else brought comfort, those tapes assured I was tenderly watched over as the storm passed by, hope whispered, I walked in the garden or talked in the fields, or rested, with the Lord my shepherd, beside the still waters of peace.

The day would come when many of the lyrics, more passionate about saving inner souls than bodies lost to injustices shattering communities, would trouble me. When HIV-AIDS struck so hard in one context that funerals for those lost to it became a weekly ritual, a worship service enveloped in gospel lyrics sung as if souls sailed serenely on while bodies shipwrecked in storms of oppression and rejection unsettled me.

Yet I recall loved ones for whom gospel song metaphors motivated  soul salvation and inviting compassion for human sisters and brothers drowning in life’s daily wreckages.

I wonder what such loved ones, mostly gone, would make of today’s Christians who love old or new gospel songs but now mesh saving the lost with policy cruelties. If you’re not the right kind of good Christian American, whatever must be done to you to keep me safe just must be done.

Even this doesn’t entirely shock: I’ve never made sense of a loved one who so nurtured my love of gospel songs that to hear her favorite ones stirs tears. Lovingly she’d minister to prisoners’ souls. And passionately she’d preach, this Mennonite follower of the Jesus whose love for enemies she did embrace, that their bodies should be executed.

I don’t know how to navigate such complexities as cruelty becomes an ever more popular go-to across political and theological viewpoints. But recently I stumbled across a gospel song that encouraged continuing to seek light. “Brightly Beams Our Father’s Mercy,” by P. P. Bliss, was supposedly inspired by evangelist D. L. Moody’s story of a ship that wrecked in a terrible storm. The captain could see the lighthouse, but with lower lights meant to reveal harbor channel hazards extinguished, disaster still ensued.

Though my boyhood self had loved that song, when the algorithms of Spotify threw out almost miraculously a version by The Lower Lights band, I heard it afresh.

For Bliss, the lighthouse beams God’s mercy. But humans also must “trim your feeble lamps,” those lower lights along the shore for which the “eager eyes” of sailors fainting in the angry billows “are watching, longing.”

Yes, the focus remains on spirits and sins. Yet in The Lower Lights version I also seemed to hear the metaphor spreading to bodies and communities the tendernesses, the compassions, the divine mercies we humans are to share as well as experience. I could imagine trimming harbor lights not just to beam out our own visions but also to illumine safe harbor for each other. It seemed fitting, then, to learn that many Lower Lights band members have connections with a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints that some who love P. P. Bliss would reject.

How do we get theologies just right? I still don’t know. But I yearn with soul and body for faith expressions reaching beyond cruelty to blend harbor lights with Mercy brightly beaming.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column.

 

family relationships, formation, grace

Connecting Our Souls’ Carabiners

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“Dad,” said the brilliant negotiator, “you have a choice. If you agree to listen to what I’m doing in college without judging or punishing me, I’ll tell you the truth. Or I’ll just lie about what I’m really doing. Which do you prefer?”

That story has so shaped our relationship over the decades and still so informs my thoughts and feelings about accountability, human relationships, and moral formation that I often return to it. Should I have found some different solution? Should I have explored consequences for this brazen acknowledgment of readiness to lie?

As my daughter’s phase of family building suggests she may someday face that riddle, I remember my mother watching me, her once argumentative teenager, parent my children. When Mom witnessed a trying interchange I’d see a sweet but sly smile. She was sinfully enjoying watching the son once sure he knew more than she confronting daughters confident they knew more than he. If my daughter faces her own reckoning with “or I’ll lie to you,” what should she do?

I‘ll have to let her cope while I smile. Yet maybe she should conclude, as did I, that she has been outfoxed. One reason I didn’t call my daughter’s bluff was that it was no bluff.  She really would hide what she was up to.

I grasped this from knowing her but also myself: I had done the same thing to my parents, if less courageously. I simply invented something like a five-year statute of limitations:  Here’s what was going on then that I didn’t want you to know, like the time I stole a banana when I was a boy in Mexico City, ran across the busy street to throw the peel in the grassy median strip, forgot to check traffic on the way back, got hit by a Jeep but not tragically so, hence pretended running happily on was just my James Bond-esque style.

But a key reason I accepted my daughter’s deal was that I loved her. I loved that teenage mix of bravado and precisely the openness of soul that had led to her to offer terms that would let her stay open.

The years to come were challenging. I’d wrestle with okay, now I know this. Now what? How to honor the bargain when some choices  terrify me and could  lead to bad things that underdeveloped frontal cortex isn’t fully grasping?

I stumbled onto two responses: One was if you do X or Y, dear daughter, other authority figures may impose unhappy consequences; keeping me in the loop won’t spare you. The other was to repeat, in so many conversations such as that classic one over chicken and pasta, that like mountain climbers supporting each other, my rope is clipped to your soul no matter what rock face you climb or cliff you fall off.

What I could glimpse then but more clearly years later is what a gift she gave us both. Social and church glues fail as angers and alienations sever us from each other’s hearts. Rising anxiety, depression, suicide intersect with cruel social media and political worlds that encourage being the best—how many likes do I have?—or one-up: No, I won’t seek the Light with you; I’ll exploit your weaknesses to impose my ways. Mutual-accountability ground between whatever feels good and zero tolerance shrinks.

What if instead we connected the carabiners of our souls to confront life’s mountains and cliffs with ropes clipped together?

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column.