by Ken Sehested
"If you want to change people's obedience then you must change their imagination."
—philosopher Paul Ricoeur
By the time I finished my cum laude undergraduate work and with distinction seminary degree, my analytical powers were sharply honed. I was capable of researching, selecting, and presenting large troves of factual material; which I immediately put to work as an advocate for justice, peace, and human rights shaped by a passionate theological ethos.
It didn’t take long, however, to discover that people can be convinced (about what should happen) without being 
convicted (to make something happen). Insight does not come with its own legs.
Knowing does not of its own momentum lead to vigorous doing.
Clarence Jordan, one of the great modern storytellers of the Christian community, said that there’s a difference between admiring Jesus and following Jesus, and that the purpose of the Sermon on the Mount was not so much to provoke inspiration as perspiration.
Insightful data does not necessarily lead to the incitement of transformed behavior. The lament over this maddening state of human affairs is at least as old as the Apostle Paul, who famously complained, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:15).
Thus began the second, informal stage of my education (which continues even now), trying to grasp what it is that moves people from being convinced to being convicted. For the over-schooled, there is such a thing as the paralysis of analysis.
When one thinks, separately from engagement with actual history, that the facts will of themselves generate not just light but also heat, the end result is almost always a smoldering wick. In truth, what we need cannot be had apart from a community of conviction, where insight is communally brought to bear on actual circumstances. And nothing holds communities of conviction together more than their shared stories.
In Jewish scripture, the worst sin is amnesia—forgetfulness, of who we are, by whom we are called, and for what purpose. The heart of Torah consciousness, the so-called Ten Commandments featured most prominently in Exodus 20, begins with this preface: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. . . .”
Instruction is tied to drama, performed—and memorialized—on a flesh and blood stage. The sole purpose of religious ritual is to refresh our memories in imaginative ways that lead to new acts of faith. Each new season, each new generation, add additional layers to the stories illustrating how faith overcomes fear, how enemies might be loved, how strangers might become friends, how the least, the lost, and the last might be restored to creation’s table of bounty.
Such practices are not detailed in a grand architectural diagram, to be precisely fabricated. Rather, they are embedded in a beatific vision—strong enough to withstand history’s brutal storms—of a coming age when mercy will trump vengeance, when tears will be dried, when death will be no more.
Incarnational faith is a storied faith. Which stories are told—and the purposes and people they serve—determine whose voices are remembered; and whose, forgotten.
“I will tell you something about stories
they aren’t just entertainment
they are all we have to fight off illness and death
we don’t have anything if we don’t have the stories
their evil is mighty, but it can’t stand up to our stories
so they try to make us confused or forget them
they would like that
because then we would become defenseless.”
—Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko
# # #
Above: Lightning and rainbow, photo by Miriadna
arrogance—between delightfulness and hubris—as we transition at the end of Pride Month to the week of our premier occasion for national genuflecting, the US Independence Day revelry on 4 July. . . .” —
• “Botswana's High Court has overturned a colonial-era law criminalizing consensual same-sex relations in a landmark victory for Africa's LGBTQ movements.” —
get better, but the truth is more complicated than that. For all the progress we’ve made, thing are worse. . . . If #MeToo has reminded us that women alone cannot solve misogyny, the same is true for homophobia.” —
Iraq under President George W Bush, when President Barack Obama dramatically escalated drone strikes on sovereign nations, when Trump ordered the cruise missile strikes on Syria last year and again this year, or now as the US continues its more than half a century of embargo on Cuba.
on the verge of extinction due to climate change, “with alarming implications for human survival.” On that same day, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blocked an Artic Council policy statement referencing extreme polar ice melting, instead celebrating the amount of money to be made on the new shipping lane being created by the thaw, which would add dramatically to the flooding threat of rising sea levels. —
account the interests of other countries. —
use it as a rudder by which to steer.” —Oliver Wendell Holmes
• “
with injustice (“Your doom has come, injustice has blossomed, pride has budded.” Ezekiel 7:10) and violence (“Therefore pride is their necklace; violence covers them as a garment.” Psalm 73:6).
when I first began (timidly) pushing back against the vitriol of homophobia, I thought it would take another century before a significant number of church doors would be open to sexual minorities. It’s worth celebrating the gains made.
ENDNOTES
Most of my fellow North Carolinians would be surprised, maybe shocked, to learn that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operated a “torture taxi” in partnership with a local air service, Aero Contractors. Operating mostly out of a small taxpayer-subsidized Johnston County Airport in Smithfield, a Gulfstream jet would fly to Dulles International Airport, pick up an extraction team, fly to foreign countries, kidnap suspected terrorists, rendering them to secretive “black site” prisons in several regions of the world for “enhanced interrogation” by all manner of inflicted torment.
used” according to CIA counsel John Rizzo.[2] Every journey to that dark side heightens the risk of being inescapably trapped in its web: We ourselves are rendered to the very thing we hate.
accountability, thus far without success. We know, for instance, that rather than taking steps to investigate Aero, North Carolina officials have taken measures to support the company.[7]
[3] Jane Mayer, “
Convention on the Law of Seas (UNCLOS). Complicating matters: Oman, across the Strait of Hormuz, also has legal claim to a 12-mile territorial sovereign claim. Yet at its narrowest point, the Strait of Hormuz is only 21 miles wide.
grievances against the US. Here are but three egregious examples.
test wreck or shooting or wildfire. Or the weather channel, which salivates over devastating storm coverage.
need for improved eating habits is working. —
as sick as I was.”
king 550 years since the birth of the founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak.” —
• “On a larger scale, the country of Rwanda became the first low-income country to provide universal eye-care to its entire population. Although this might seem like a trivial cause compared to fighting poverty, if uneducated parents—particularly mothers—can keep their eyesight sharp, they can continue working their jobs and their work won’t deteriorate as they age.” —Sarah Westbrook, “UN Sustainable Development Goals: What Progress Has Been Made?”, Seeds of Hope
¶ Father’s day specials
Featured this week on prayer&politiks
for climate change” from around the world.]
everything is hopeless, we must do what we can.”