Jeremiah Wright in light of my Christology paper

 

 

One of the things I’ve been struggling with in class this semester as we’ve explored liberation Christologies is the relationship between corporate justice and individual culpability. I was writing my paper to answer the question (ha!) “Who is Jesus in light of race relations in America?” The question of systemic and historic oppression of African-Americans informs part of my thinking on this issue. My commitment to the reconciling Christ who calls us all, oppressor and oppressed alike to account for the ways we have failed in our love for God and neighbor informs another part.

 

Part of my exploration involved Jeremiah Wright who comes from the same stock as James Cone, the father of black liberation theology. I wanted to spend some time thinking about how Cone’s message sounds to people today. As we’ve heard in the past few weeks, people don’t really like what Wright has to say.

 

One side of me, the part that has rebuilt houses in all-black sections of Katrina, worked with students in segregated schools in Alabama, left grad school a month before a cross burning and who has black friends who are followed around grocery stores, can hear exactly where the militancy of Wright (and early Cone) are coming from. While I do think some of his comment, e.g. the US created AIDS to wipe out minorities, is unjustified and inflammatory, I mostly think Wright is prophetic much in the style of Amos and Hosea. These brothers also got in trouble for prophesying against their country.

 

I also seem to be in the minority with my discontent around Barack Obama’s reaction to Wright, especially his church sermons. It is this rhetoric that Obama spoke against in his race speech. Obama describes Wright’s “incendiary language” as widening the racial divide in our country, views which “denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation.” Wright is said to have a “profoundly distorted view of this country.” While race is an issue that cannot be ignored and continues to be a central issue for Americans, the United State’s progression in affirming constitutional freedoms is a sign that racism is not endemic but rather something we can overcome, moving “beyond some of our old racial wounds.” I’m not sure O is being honest about how far we have not come.

 

The people we read this semester who most adequately speak to who Jesus is in this mess are Shawn Copeland and Rowan Williams.  For Copeland there is less clarity regarding centralized community identity than for Wright or Cone. In the opening paragraphs of the essay we read she talks about experiencing her own privilege as a black, educated woman in light of a homeless black woman picking through garbage outside her window. Copeland presents a well-spring of competing identities: female, black, financially well-off, educated, academic, housed. Instead of naming self-referencing communities of color, Copeland asks, “What sort of Christological reflection is needed in our situation? What can it mean to tell the woman who searches my garbage that God in Jesus is also alienated, a stranger, a despised ‘other’?”

 

Copeland goes on to speak about the “way of Jesus,” the complication women bring to the Gospel, the lived experience of being always at “the disposal of the cross.” The way of Jesus is to love “concretely” the outcast as Jesus did. Yet she also speaks from the double oppression of black and female. How this is lived out is not entirely in self-determination or communal identity as Other but in the cross of Jesus where humiliation and brutalization are made known in our discipleship to the crucified one. The resurrection of Jesus is our grafted-ness into the initiated kingdom in the present realities of oppression which confront us. Christology is very much something which takes hold of us, something to which we are to avail ourselves.

 

To me this sounds so much like Williams in Resurrection. I’ve written about this before if you want a refresher on the thesis of the book. The pure victim provided by Christ puts our histories into perspective because we have each condemned the lamb of God. At the same time we encounter a Jesus who resurrects our past.  One contemporary example of how this plays out is the plausibility of “black racism.” Denying black racism “carries overtones of the idea that the victimized group is intrinsically incapable of the kind of violence from which it is suffering” (11). Just as domestic violence against women exists in the white community so to does it exist in black and Latino communities. Just as this violence stands outside the iteration of Jesus’ life for white people, so to it stands outside the discipling of blacks and Latinos. Racism is evil “not because its victims are good, but because its victims are human” (11).

 

In a similar way, Copeland speaks of the God of the oppressed who calls us to the banquet table in full recognition of the suffering Other and the suffering Self. It is this recognition that puts us at the disposal of the reign of God, not simply because our identity as members of an oppressed community. Jesus resurrection is the point at which this transformation begins.

childrens clothing and the redeemed body

Yesterday we went to Pass it On, a children’s consignment sale that happens twice a year in Oregon. It’s a brilliant idea. Families can resell baby clothes (usually worn for a millisecond) and get back part of the profit. For us this is better than fair trade, better than organic. There’s nothing quite like reused and recycled.

The clothes were divided by sex. Since we’ve been waiting for this sale this is the first time I’ve really been able to encounter the deep gendering of clothes on the rack. There were some newborn “unisex” in the green and yellow shades but after that we faced two rows of basically blue and pink.

The boys section had mini Lakers track suits, fire engines, puppy dogs, lions, bears, button up shirts and every shade of blue imagineable.

The girls section was butterflies, bunnies, muted tones, ruffles on everything and rhinestones. I’m thinking, “I would never in a million years where this stuff! That would be humiliating!”

There was no mistaking when an item belonged to a girl. Even overalls had ruffles on the cuffs and there was a preponderance of pictures on the butts of these jeans. Some of the boys stuff could go either way.

I’m particularly aware of these sorts of dichotomies and feeling the need to assign them meaning as we prepare to welcome a child in the summer. I’m also reading quite a bit of feminist Christology in school. One of my supplemental readings this week is Beth Fekler Jones’ Marks of His Wounds: Gender Politics and Bodily Ressurrection. Beth (fellow Dukie; this is her dissertation) argues that the feminist politics which seek to deconstruct gendered bodies is inconsistent with a doctrine of the resurrection. Instead of seeing absolute power at work in gendering or none at all, as the church we understand gender difference to itself be redeemed from the power structures of sin (misogyny) and its consequences (anorexia, genital cutting, slef mutilation, suicide) through the resurrected Christ.

I agree with Jones’ that in the church is one locus for the transformation of gender politics through our particular acts as a church. I appreciate Jones’ attempt to retain embodiment but also don’t want to be too cheery about the way sin works on the particularities of both the masculine and the feminine in our fallen world and our faith communities. In one sense, the gendering of our child to one extreme is present even in the clothing choices presented to her. These attempts at normalization are stiffling.

I also continue to be deeply troubled by the church’s failure to gender by allowing power-shaped identity to creep past the doctrine of the resurrection. The Wild at Heart movement, with its lonely warrior rescuing the maiden and preparing for adventure is the most insidious simply because it it is so wide-spread. But many others have also used the story of our faith to reify fallen gender identity. I could write a book with my thoughts about Eldredge. Suffices say that my thesis of discontent is located in the taking at face value disordered gendering as normative and then attempting to overcome masculine and feminine articulations of this culturally induced panic attack without ever parsing out what’s really going on here. Exurbanization, displacement from the private sphere, dislocation from food sources and production, culturally reinforced stoicism and removal from child-rearing are much more important to scour than to simple say “this is what is in every man’s heart.” Bullocks.

So, Babe Flo-Bix, we hope we can find for you a little space where your gendering will be dictated by love rightly ordered in a community of those who seek to call forth your redeemed self while recognizing that already sin is at work on your body. I pray we can help you see how Christ has made all things new and that the potential for this newness, while incomplete, can be practiced daily in our life as the church. I hope I can be sensitive to the ways the world tries to disembody you, declare your body evil and deconstruct your enfleshed self. I pray my response will be to guide you ever so gently towards the One who called you into being.

God help us.

Reading Resurrection with the Tlingit

Second wind! I started this earlier in the week. Kind of on the long side…

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When I left for Alaska last week I took Rowan William’s Resurrection with me. This is one of my favorite reflections on Easter and the one book I own with more passages underlined than not. It was a good choice for this particular immersion program. Resurrection provides naming for the particular ways Christians can better understand our place in confronting the way our privilege has exerted and has flourished at the expense of an Other’s culture, language, sovereignty, economic viability or freedom. Great for a trip that focused on issues of tribal identity, conservation, language death and our role in shaping the history of a people.

Williams starts by establishing the “pure victim” who is Jesus. While the rest of us are caught in the web of oppressor and oppressed (White Man, black Man, White woman, black woman), Jesus stands apart from these intricacies as the one who, “when he was suffered, did not threaten” (1 Pet). It is this victim who came not to condemn us, but certainly to judge. Jesus is our victim; it is I who put him on the cross. Jesus confronts this in each of us just as he confronted the disciples who returned to their nets. It is in this Jesus that we find the pattern for every other victim of our presents and our histories.

Williams writes, “The formulation, ‘Repent and believe,’ stresses that God’s forgiveness cannot be abstract and general: the authentic word of forgiveness, newness and resurrection is audible when we acknowledge ourselves as oppressors and ‘return’ to our victims in the sense of learning who and where they are” (14). The memory and the wound must be exposed through encounter. Jesus’ post-Resurrection appearances reveal the disciples’ failure and desertion. But it is only as Jesus exposes this memory can it be recovered so that the faithless ones are renewed and sent back into this world. As we confront our historicity we too “learn to act and to hope.” The confrontation is a painful process and Jesus pulls no punch with the deserters. “Peter, will you feed my sheep?” Jesus implores of the one who “would never leave” him.

So we find ourselves among the Tlingit and Haida people where only 50 fluent speakers of the language remain, all over 60 years old. We find ourselves among a people wrestling with land rights, tribes mistrusting tribal corporations which the United State hoisted on them to ensure “proper spending.” We encounter the symptoms of cultural trauma: alcoholism, spousal abuse, neglect. We are walking through clear cut tribal-owned forests where white environmentalist sneer as the desperation for native jobs and resources crescendos. We are being handed “Pure Sitka bottled water” and “native Alaskan Chocolate” from Brazil, economic development that our over fishing and global warming have made necessary to replace subsistence living practices.

Here we are.

We heard stories and more stories, sat the feet of tribal elders, watched in hope as young people showed off traditional dances and stories, wept with women whose sons were bullied in school and waded through the heavy complexities of tribal culture clashing, sometimes violently with an encroaching Western world.

But one of the most fascinating exchanges of the week was with a white administrator of Mt Edgcumbe high school, a boarding school established in the 1970’s for students from around Alaska. If your tiny tribal community had no HS, that’s where you went. Native boarding schools used to be places of deculturation, where native students came to be Westernized. The early photos of students from the northern slope, people who had never spoken English at home, who spent the summers at the fishing camps looks just like my mom’s high school year book.

The woman leading us around was very uncomfortable with any questions that hinted at this kind of past. When one of my students (a native King Islander) asked, “what are you doing to help the early generations at Mt E reconcile the past of this school?” she essentially said, “not our problem.” There were overtones of “we don’t see color here” and a lot of wondering about where our questions were coming from. At one point she stopped her tour and unprompted said, “look, we are about looking to the future at this school. This is now a great school! Can’t we just focus on that?”

Resurrection came back to me again:

“No amount of the rhetoric of ’self-transcendence’ can substitute for the recovery of self, the self as the memory of the crucifixion and crucifying: there are no dead selves discarded or buried to be the foundation-stones of new identities, because God is the God who opens up our graves and gives back our past.”

I understand where the Mt E administrator is coming from. We all like to think we can forget about what happened and move on. But at the other end of every moment of colonial complicity there are a people who are deeply exposed to historic cultural trauma. This is happening in Iraq, it happened in the South with black people, it happened on the reservations and it is happening in Alaska.

The hope is that the one we crucified has risen. Jesus tells us to see in his reconciliation to the redeemed disciples hope for our complicity in the crucifixion/crucified. We have to remember the boarding schools, to engage in repatriation, to listen to the Tlingit language. These are acts of our remembering, not on our behalf but as people in the line of those whose choices brought us here, knowing that we have already made the choice for our benefit at the expense of others a hundred thousand times. To refuse this is to “be trapped in fantasy, in blindness to yourselves and to the reality confronting you.”

And somewhere in this painful confrontation our name is called.

One of the best parts of this trip happened when I wasn’t there. Part of our group was visiting a domestic violence shelter in Sitka which is run by this very hip, very inspiring Haida woman. She really loved the group, their questions, their enthusiasm. But one student, Brian, a freshman, really had her captivated. They talked for a long time after one of the women played a traditional song on the drum about emerging from the darkness of the ice cave. It was a celebration song.

After they talked a while the woman told Brian to hold on and she went and got a drum from her office. It was a beautiful drum she made out of hide and ligament. It looked like she spent a lot of time working on it. The woman said it had been in there a long time, that it was “waiting for someone.” The someone was Brian. She told him to take the drum as a reminder of all the he had to offer the world as he worked to address problems like domestic violence. It was a very moving event.

I think this was one of Williams’ “creative protests,” those moments that names the nameless, empower for the work of the Good and restore us to right relationship with those we have historically oppressed. I hope this moment is repeated in all my students, and in me, throughout our encounters with our selves and our past.

“My self is to be given away in love, not because it is worthless, but because it is supremely precious, given to me by the hand of God as he returns as my memory. Out of my story the Spirit of the risen Jesus constitutes my present possibilities of understanding, compassion and self-sharing. My identity as lover in the community in uniquely coloured by the loves which I have already struggled, failed, learned, repented.”