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by Ken Sehested
Texts: Mark 10:46-52  and selections from Hebrews 11

PREFACE for Baptist History and Heritage Society

      Two brief words of introduction before I begin.

      First, this sermon was originally presented on Reformation Sunday, and I have retained that framework even though this is Pentecost weekend. However, given the fact that our larger culture’s liturgical season designates this weekend as Memorial Day (with a new World War II memorial being dedicated today in our nation’s capitol)—and given the lectionary reading from Hebrews 11, with its litany of the believing community’s saints and the brutal account of their frequent sufferings—it is quite appropriate to consider this text as an appropriate Memorial Day text for the church.

            Second, I am fully aware that Baptist history in North America has been forged by and large on the anvil of British Baptist influence. In fact, I like to remind people that the great 19th century British Baptist preacher Charles H. Spurgeon once remarked that he was always happy to hear that soldiers had become Christians but never that Christians had become soldiers. “May the day come when war shall be regarded as the most atrocious of crimes—when for a Christian to take part in it shall be regarded as a most heinous offense!” (Cited in For the Healing of the Nations: Baptist Peacemakers, by Paul R. Dekar, Smyth & Helwys Pub. Inc., Macon, GA, p. 43.)

            However, you’ll quickly notice in what follows that I trace the deepest channel of my own spiritual journey to the history of the dissenting traditions of 16th and 17th European lineage historians refer to as the Radical Reformation (broadly, as the Anabaptist movement)—traditions which have also shaped North American Baptist life. Though too little, in my opinion.

§  §  §

      Today is Reformation Sunday—not generally a high liturgical moment for most Baptist congregations. And the ones who do commemorate the occasion usually focus attention on the Luthers, Calvins and Zwinglis—key figures in the mainstream Reformation, what historians refer to as the Magisterial Reformation. Rare is the attention paid to other dissident leaders of the time—people like Conrad Grebel, Pilgrim Marpeck or Menno Simons. These are among the leaders of the radical wing of the Reformation, dismissed as “incendiaries of the commonwealth,” tagged by their enemies, and now by history, as Anabaptists. More on that later.

§  §  §

      I have two very personal and very important associations with Reformation Sunday. One is the fact that my wife Nancy and I were jointly ordained 22 years ago on this Sunday.

      The second association involves a trip Nancy and I took with my parents several years ago. After retiring, my Dad became absorbed with tracing our family history. He tracked down a good deal of information, linking our origins to what is now the Schlesweg-Holstein region of northern Germany—formerly part of the old Danish Kingdom, where there was once a Danish King named Sehested. But Dad wanted to search for specific documents which couldn’t be obtained from a distance, so we went rummaging through public archives and church libraries in several cities from Hamburg to the Danish border.

      Among the documents we discovered on that trip was correspondence, written in 1866, which named my great-great grandfather, Claus Henrich Sehested. [In the reigning Prussian Empire, spelling of Sehested—pronounced SESted—became “Sehestedt.”] After returning home we located someone who could translate the documents (written in Old German) and were stunned to find out that the letters were initiated by a Lutheran Church official requesting that Claus report to a “Pastor Schwandter” in the state church office to explain why he had joined the “Sabbatisten” congregation.

      (After correspondence with several European church historians, our best guess is that the Sabbatisten—one of the many small dissident Christian groups lumped together under the Anabaptist label—are ancestors of those believers known here in North America as “Seventh Day Baptists,” so-named because of their conviction that Jesus never changed the day for proper worship (from Saturday to Sunday). These Sabbatisten, characteristically of most Anabaptists, were also pacifists, as were Seventh Day Baptists in their early days).

      In reply to this ultimatum, my great-great grandfather replied that he had no intention of reporting as directed; that he found the principles of his new church “more biblical”; and the he did not recognize Pastor Schwandter’s authority.

      I’ve known since seminary that my deepest Baptist roots rest with my Anabaptist ancestors in Continental Europe; so discovering that I actually have the genes as well was quite thrilling.

§  §  §

      There was a time when Baptists (whose Southern-flavored phonetic pronunciation is “Babdists”), like mesquite trees in West Texas, were viewed with annoyance. But somewhere between the Carter and Clinton/Gore administrations, mesquite-grilled food became the culinary rage. And we Babdists started learning the social graces.

      Since Will Campbell has a fair amount to do with the fact that I'm still a Baptist, I'm tempted to start by mimicking his voice with something like 'cause I'm po' white trash and proud of it. But Bro. Will is a species all to himself. I'm just happy to be in the same genus.

      So I'd best speak first-person. Which is a very Baptist thing to do—and a major reason I am willing, after some serious ancestral interrogation, to lean into the tradition of my childhood nurture. "Testimony" is a treasured activity in Baptist circles and an important reason why I maintain that identity. Testimonies are personal, unscripted narratives of faith. They are stories of conviction, of choices made, both for and against, often under trying circumstances.

      The significance of testimony bespeaks the emphasis placed on conversion. In our evangelical passion we have always known what my Roman Catholic friends now say best: disarming the heart and disarming the nations are parallel struggles. As a liturgical genre, testimony is more associated with the laity than with clergy, evidence of our notion of "the priesthood of the believer." When testimony time comes, the floor is open to anybody, even the young, the untrained, the non-ordained.

      As T.S. Eliot complained, we know too much but are convinced of too little. Testimony is the language of conviction. Testimony involves wombish disclosure, the entanglements of Spirit and flesh. The stories come from the trenches. They summon memories of passion, of risky business, of suffering, but ultimately of joy. They are tales of conception and gestation, birth and rebirth. Death is cheated on a daily basis.

      Part of the reason I'm (still) a Baptist is implied in the very name. We Baptists love water music. Our roots stem from the nonconformist traditions in 16th century Continental Europe and 17th century England. Leaders of the "left wing" of the Reformation were convinced, after first hand reading of Scripture, that baptism was for believers only—no faith by proxy. Their opponents dubbed them Anabaptists, or “rebaptizers.” Contrary to popular opinion, the debate wasn't so much about how much water was enough (though the dissenters usually performed the rite by full or partial immersion in water, or by pouring a pitcher of water over the head). The debate was over the question of whether citizenship in the Body of Christ was coterminous with citizenship in the state. The subversive character of divine obedience was framed in dramatic terms, especially so with most of the Continental radicals who also refused on biblical grounds to wield the sword in defense of the state.

      These civilly-disobedient believers weren’t hounded and hung, butchered and burned by Roman and Reformation leaders because of a disagreement over how wet you had to get in order to be really baptized. Or even how old you had to be. No, the conflict revolved around the content of the new covenant signified by baptismal waters. For the Anabaptists, the common purse was a more significant confession than the common creed. (Ananias and Sapphara weren’t struck down because they refused to affirm the Bible was literally true!) For the radical reformers, Jesus’ own rejection of the military option—however sacred the purpose might be conceived—was self-evident. This deconstruction of the “myth of redemptive violence” (Walter Wink), and the reconstruction of a new political vision—a vision articulated by the testimony of Jesus—was what made the Anabaptists such a threat. And also why they found themselves on the run.

      The wedge driven between civil and divine authority, and the ensuing legacy of political dissent, is the singular contribution of these rebaptizers to U.S. history. Roger Williams, founder of the first "Baptist" congregation in England's New World colonies, was driven out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635 because of his preaching. The first of four charges in his conviction was that he declared ". . . we have not our land by patent from the king, but that the natives are the true owners of it, and that we ought to repent of such a receiving of it by patent."

      Williams knew what we—in our sentimental and fraudulent retelling of our nation’s founding story—usually omit: That the impulse for religious freedom was being hijacked by robber-baron forces. And the same forces are still at work, reported by bloody repetition in daily news broadcasts, only disguised by the loud chants of freedom! freedom! democracy! democracy! I dare say, nothing is more crucial in our time than the need for a critique of the ideological use of the language of freedom.

      I am a Baptist (still, despite obvious cause for embarrassment) because of a profound metaphor of faith summoned by my rebaptizing ancestors. To the great chagrin of the major Reformation figures of the day, these unlettered Anabaptists argued that "salvation by faith alone" was a worthy notion but an insufficient alternative to the tyranny of Roman Catholic sacramental control. The rebaptizers insisted on speaking of Nachfolge Christi, "following Christ." They sensed that "faith alone" language was too abstract, too devoid of animation, lacking the capacity to indicate the concrete character of discipleship.

      Which is why, in the Mark story read earlier about the blind man who, upon gaining his sight, responded not by orthodox theological declarations. The text simply says: “he followed [Jesus] on the way.”

      Similarly, this is why the historic survey of the faithful in history, found in Hebrews 11, has not a word about their correct doctrine but of their courage and perseverance in the face of calamity, suffering and martyrdom. The faith of these saints was not that of cognitive assertion but of dangerous assault on the reigning values of their age.

§  §  §

      And what more should I say of this?

      Historically, Baptists have been urgent apologists for freedom. "Soul competency" is the traditional phrase, meaning each bears both the weight and the privilege of decision. No pope, no bishop, not even any T.V. evangelist can prescribe the terms of faithful living. We are populists, in the best sense of the word, and thus also profoundly multiracial. (At least as a whole, though rarely in part.)

      Ironically enough, despite the emphasis on freedom, Baptists are a deeply communal people. Every Baptist churchhouse has a kitchen, and the dishes are well worn. As are the offering plates, because money is not a private prerogative but a covenant commitment. Baptists are also a people of "the Book." This characteristic functions as the tradition (for a notoriously traditionless people) of accountability. In an increasingly rootless and disposable culture, fidelity to Scripture (which includes, in good Jewish fashion, arguing with Scripture) fosters communal identity and the habits of cultural transcendence, forming and informing faith.

      Needless to say, being a Baptist can be a confusing (and confused?) enterprise. Our tent stretches across everyone from Jesse Jackson to Jesse Helms, from Marian Wright Edelman to Jerry Falwell, from Martin Luther King Jr. to John D. Rockefeller (not to mention my Aunt Len). You have to wonder if this is a confessional tradition or a three-ring circus.

      Admittedly, with important exceptions, we are an arrogant and often insular people. The dramatic rise in social power and economic class among Baptists in the U.S. has crippled many of the impulses described above. As we saw in the 1990 Persian Gulf War, Episcopal presidents (G. Bush) now summon Baptist preachers (B. Graham) to bless military adventure. We've become "at ease in Zion."

      But the sectarian quality—the vestigial memory of God's impending, rending Reign—is still there. Baptists at their best are sectarian, apocalyptic, against the world. Not against the earth, mind you (the distinction is crucial); but the world, that complex set of arrangements and powers which now rummage creation. At our best, when we sing "This World Is Not My Home" that old gospel hymn functions not as escapist piety but as the subversive prayer of "Thy Kingdom come on earth, as in heaven;" not as pie-in-the-sky dividend but as recollection of Jesus' warning: In the world you will have tribulation. But be of good cheer. . . . As I've cautioned my daughters, when you talk about heaven—biblically speaking—you're liable to raise hell.

      "You shall know the truth," wrote Flannery O'Connor, paraphrasing a verse from John’s Gospel, "and the truth will make you odd." That's why we Babdists have always been at our best on the run.

      Come to think of it, all of us have.

#  #  #

©ken sehested @ prayerandpolitiks.org

This sermon was delivered at Circle of Mercy Congregation in Asheville, N.C., on Sunday, 26 October 2003, under the title “The Church Formed and Reformed.” This slightly edited version of that sermon won the Baptist History and Heritage annual preaching award and was delivered at their 27-29 May 2004 annual conference in Vancouver, Washington.

by Ken Sehested
Circle of Mercy Congregation, Sunday, 12 October 2003
Texts: Job 23:1-17; Ps. 22:1-15; Heb. 4:12-16; Mark 10:17-31

This summer I learned from a mutual friend that William Sloan Coffin is dying. His doctor has given him a year.

Some of you know of Bill’s legacy: a CIA operative who got saved, began a ministerial career as the Chaplain at Yale University and from that post undertook a nationally-recognized leadership role in the movement to end the war in Vietnam; then, for many years, the beloved pastor as Riverside Church in New York City.

To say he is a personal friend is to exaggerate a bit. We’ve only been together a handful of times. But his life has intersected mine, particularly with encouraging handwritten notes, at a number of important turning points in my journey.

I pondered for weeks about writing him. But what do you say?

“Gee, Bill, I hear you’re dying”?

I did finally compose some words to acknowledge that I know what he knows. That it grieves not only me but a host of others. And I sent him a copy of an article I recently wrote for a Quaker journal—an article for which I drew important ideas from Nancy and from Stan Dotson. “Carpe Noctem/Sieze the Night: Spiritual disciplines for living in dark times.”

Bill wrote back. First he thanked me for the article. Then he said with characteristic humor: “My spirits are fine; I am going to die but I’m not going to seed!”

Then he wrote: “Your letter arrived just before I performed a wedding and, magpie that I am, I ended my homily with your phrase ‘live large, laugh often and love well.’

It’s a phrase I sometimes use as a benediction in correspondence.

It does appear—does it not?–that life is going to seed. And the admonition to live large, laugh often and love well often sounds hollow in the face of lethal and bloody reality, more sentiment than substance, like the weak lips that whistle make-believe assurance while traipsing through one graveyard after another.

Just look around this Circle. There’s plenty of evidence right here. In recent memory several of our parents and our children, or friends and neighbors, have teetered on the edge of health and wholeness or been lost altogether. Several labor in maddeningly vengeful institutions, or have lost jobs and careers altogether. Several live with the fright of financial insecurity. Several struggle with vocational clarity. Many of us have loved ones caught in addictive spirals of one form or another. All of us, I dare say, have known the anguish of broken relationships with people we loved dearly.

We’ve been burned by religious communities, hounded by a homophobic culture, beleaguered by dominant political values, and belittled by economic forces whose drive to “make a killing” results in the escalation of war abroad and the undermining of basic democratic values here at home.

A simple recitation of public malfeasance is numbing. The current Administration’s policies have resulted in the largest job-constriction rate since the Depression, along with a leap within three years from record federal budget surpluses to record deficits. We now have the greatest income gap, between rich and poor, among all industrialized nations. Nearly a fifth of our children are living in poverty. Public librarians are having to fend off the reach of the Justice Department. Our prison population has quadrupled in the past two decades. More than 43 million men, women and children live without health insurance. Many of our historic environmental and civil rights accords are under assault.

Globally, the Bush Administration has withdrawn from a host of international treaties designed to abet environmental degradation, slow the development of advanced weaponry, and establish the rule of international law. By action of Congress in September 2002 we have in place a “National Security Strategy” which grants the Administration virtually unlimited war-making powers. The level of public disingenuousness is such that Orwell himself would blush, as in U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz’s recent statement during a press conference in Iraq:  "I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq." And then there’s the chilling, hardly-noticed recent comment by an unnamed assistant to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfield, commenting on the reports of low U.S. troop morale in Iraq: "This is the future for the world we're in at the moment. We'll get better as we do it more often."

If you’re not depressed, if you’re not complaining bitterly, you’re not paying attention. If you’re not experiencing the stress and strain of these traumas, we’d like to know what you’re smoking!

The texts read earlier, from Job and from the Psalmist, bring these complaints to speech. These sorts of texts aren’t frequently read in church. They don’t accentuate the positive.

These texts—along with Mark’s story which Nancy told earlier—speak of the despair we confront when our efforts—sometimes heroic efforts—to live according to life’s rules do not exempt us from trauma. We’re doing our best to live faithfully, honestly, righteously. We’re peddling as hard as we can. But the bottom keeps falling out from under us. We bargain in good faith, attempting to be masters of our destiny, responsible parents, loyal colleagues, faithful friends, good citizens. And instead of bread we’ve given a stone.

Who wouldn’t bitterly complain? Who, indeed, can deliver us from this body of death?

Like you, I, too, am sometimes speechless. But I’ve found a voice in a very modern text, a novel, by David James Duncan, entitled The Brothers K. It’s the story of a Vietnam-era family. I’d like to read a long excerpt.

One hot summer afternoon some of the kids are playing in the water sprinkler in the front lawn. From time to time they would disconnect the water garden hose, stretch it straight out across the lawn, then give one end of it a violent snap, causing a horse-shoe shaped “hump” to fly from their hands down the length of the hose.

Beatrice asked, “If a hose could reach from here clear to Spokane, do you think there could be a man strong enough to jerk it hard enough to make the Hump travel all the way?

"'. . . I don’t know about Spokane,” Freddy replied. “I mean, I don’t know how far a hump of energy could travel down a hose, because if some muscleman or machine or something jerked it really hard, I guess the hose might just break.'

“'I never thought of that,' said Bet.

"I didn’t either,' Peter thought.

"'But I do think,”'Freddy continued, 'there might be all sorts of humps of all sorts of energy that go traveling all sorts of directions people can’t see. For instance when a person gets mad at somebody. . . . Like when you get really mad and maybe slap somebody or jerk their arm or something, like Mama does to us sometimes, I think an invisible hump of energy might go flying all the way up their arm and right into their skeleton or insides or whatever—a hump of mean, witchy energy—and I think it might fly round and round in there like a witch on a broomstick flies round the sky, and go right on hurting invisible parts of the person you don’t even know you’re hurting, because you can’t see all the ways their insides are connected to the mean thing you did to their outside. And from then on, maybe that hump of mean energy sits inside the hurt person like a coiled-up hose or a rattlesnake, just waiting in there. And someday, when that person touches somebody else, maybe even way in the future, that rattlesnake energy might come humping up out of them by accident and hurt that next person too, even though they didn’t mean to, and even though the person didn’t deserve it.' She paused for a moment. Then, with feeling, concluded,  'I think it happens. I really think it does.'

“'I think it does, too,' Peter said. . . . 'I think what you said can happen, does happen. But every witch who ever lived was once just a person like you or me, that’s what I think anyway, till somewhere, sometime, they got hit by a big, mean hump of nasty energy themselves, and it shot inside them just like Freddy said, and crashed and smashed around, wrecking things in there, so that a witch was created. The thing is, though, I don’t think that first big jolt is ever the poor witch’s fault.'

"Bet thought about this, and finally nodded cautiously. Freddy said nothing. The sprinkler hissed like a Halloween cat. 'Another thing,' Peter said, “is that everybody gets jolted. You, me, before we die we’ll all get nailed, lots of times. But that doesn’t mean we’ll all get turned into witches. You can’t avoid getting zapped, but you can avoid passing the mean energy on. That’s the interesting thing about witches, the challenge of them—learning not to hit back, or hit somebody else, when they zap you. You can just bury the zap, for instance, like the gods buried the Titans in the center of the earth. Or you can be like a river when a forest fire hits it—phshhhhhhhhhh! Just drown it, drown all the heat and let it wash away. . . .'

“'And the great thing,' he said, 'the reason you can lay a river in the path of any sort of wildfire is that there’s not just rivers inside us, there’s a world in there. . . . I’ve felt how there’s a world, and rivers, and high mountains, whole ranges of mountains, in there. And there are lakes in those mountains—beautiful, pure, deep blue lakes. Thousands of them. Enough to wash away all the dirt and trouble and witchiness on earth.'

“'But to believe in them! To believe enough to remember them. That’s where we blow it! Mountain lakes? In me? Naw! Jesus we believe in, long as He stays out of sight. But the things He said, things like The kingdom of heaven is within you, we believe only by dreaming up a heaven as stupid and boring as our churches. Something truly heavenly, something with mountains higher than St. Helens or Hood and lakes purer and deeper than any on earth—we never look for such things inside us. So when the humps of witchiness come at us, we’ve got nowhere to go, and just get hurt, or get mad, or pass them on and hurt somebody else. But if you want to stop the witchiness, if you want to put out the fires, you can do it. You can do it if you just remember to crawl, right while you’re burning, to drag yourself if that’s what it takes, clear up into those mountains inside you, and on down into those cool, pure lakes.'” [Bantam Books, 1992, pp. 209-211]

Sisters and brothers, this is the Gospel secret: That bold confession can only emerge amid bitter complaint.

The breakthrough from bitter complaint to bold confession is not the product of moral heroism. The breakthrough is not accomplished by brilliant analysis, nor by indefatigable energy.

The secret is this: The power to vanquish dragons is given only to those who know that relinquishment is the means of true possession; only to those who know that silence gives birth to authentic speak; only to those who recognize life emerging from the ash heap.

The Gospel secret is this: Hope is only provided to people with their backs against the wall, to those at the end of their rope, to the outnumbered, the outgunned, to those about-to-be-overwhelmed. Bold confession is not an escape clause to life’s apparent death knell. Rather, it is an invitation to grasp that which is available only to those with empty hands.

It is to the mournful that rejoicing is promised; it is to those facing trial that the Spirit’s presence is promised; it is to the meek that the earth is promised. And it is only from the dark and dangerous shadow of night that guiding light is granted.

Bitter is the moment, and weeping endures for this night. But the morning promises joy. This is our confession. And we’re betting our very lives on it.

#  #  #

©ken sehested @ prayerandpolitiks.org

by Ken Sehested
Circle of Mercy Congregation, 8 October 2006
Text: Job 1:1; 2:1-10

            Several things converged to inform my reflection this evening. One is that I simply want to take advantage of the wake of Marc Mullinax’s excellent sermon last week, when he preached on the topic “This I disbelieve.” Disbelieving is a crucial part of our vocation, as Marc so eloquently said. Afterward, I remembered a quote I heard years ago: The reason ancient Rome oppressed the early Christian community was not because Christians proclaimed that “Jesus is Lord.” The Roman authorities were actually quite tolerant of a variety of religious expressions. The thing that got them mad is that when Christians say “Jesus is Lord,” they were also saying “Caesar is NOT Lord.” In Rome, as in lots of places, it’s OK to be religious as long as you don’t threaten the existing order.

            So I decided to flip the coin over to talk about “This I Believe.” As Marc and all our teachers know, students sometimes have to “unlearn” certain things in order for good learning to occur. In the same way, “disbelieving” is integral to deciding what we do in fact believe.

            A second factor that shapes these comments has to do with all the bad news we’ve heard recently. Three school shootings in a week, the most horrific of which was the one in Lancaster, Pa., just a few miles from where Joyce grew up. A man still grieving over the death of his infant daughter 9 years earlier—and maybe still haunted by the memories of his abusing two children many years earlier—attacked what may be one of the most defenseless communities in our country, wounding 10 children (specifically female children—the gender choice was deliberate), killing five of them, in an Amish school house.

            Old wounds, left untreated, often become broken records: They keep on playing the same line, over and over and over again. Keep on re-enacting the same violent response. Keep on screaming, like an infant that receives no comfort.

            On a much larger level: Our war in Iraq now consumes $267,000,000 a day. Nearly 14 U.S. soldiers killed or wounded…every day. An average of 100 Iraqi civilian fatalities . . . every day.

            A couple of weeks ago we lifted special prayers in light of the announcements by the New Vistas mental health program that they would be closing later this month. Four people in or related to this Circle will lose their jobs. And you can imagine the trauma that Carol Minton, chair of the New Vistas board of directors, has had to endure. Worst of all is the precarious existence of New Vistas’ clients in danger of losing medical care.

            Consider this fact: The entire cost of New Vistas’ caseload—10,500 people in the 8 counties of Western NC—could be funded for a year with what we spend in three hours fighting the war in Iraq. Or, to give another frame of reference, New Vistas’ annual budget could be paid for with the amount it will take to build 250 feet of the 700-mile long wall Congress has approved building on the US-Mexican border.

            It’s cause enough to make you wonder: What are the old wounds that feed this kind of national behavior? What unacknowledged traumas are turning us into a “Linus nation,” that makes us clutch ever more tightly to an ever-expanding security blanket?

            It makes you wonder: What are the fears behind the recent U.S. Navy’s issuance of “Prepare to Deploy Orders,” for mobilization of an entire carrier group to the waters around Iran. Is it conceivable that the President is actually planning yet another war? Can it be true, as former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s recently said, that World War III has already begun?

            Old wounds, stored up, ready to explode. And a dearth of vision for a truly new world order. Our is a modern dilemma to which an old text speaks: “Without a vision, the people perish.”

            And then there’s the story of Job, today’s text. If you haven’t read Job’s account recently, I encourage you to do so. It is a genuine cross-cultural experience! And it’s among the most unorthodox books in all the Bible.

            Starting right at the beginning. . . . where the heavenly council gathers. And who should show up, but Satan. Very strange. Actually, Satan’s name can be translated as “The Interrogator.” And he functions not so much as the ruler of the underworld of damned sinners, but as heaven’s own prosecuting attorney.

            Satan actually dares God to put Job’s piety to a test. And God says OK—initially saying can do anything to Job’s circumstances but not to put Job himself at personal risk. When Job does not bend even after his family and his property are taken, the Interrogator says, “Well, sure, he’ll not curse you as long as you don’t threaten his own personal life.” So God says, OK, do what you will, just don’t kill him. And Satan inflicts Job with terrible sores, from his head to his feet. But still Job refuses to curse God.

            What follows for a good part of the rest of the story is a long series of speeches which represent an extended conversation between Job and his so-called friends—Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar Ellihu—each of whom recite to Job some of the most revered and orthodox theology in Hebrew Scripture, trying to get Job to see that he’s got unrepented sin in life. But Job continues to insist on his innocence.

            About the only thing most people know about Job is his supposed “patience.” But the fact is, Job gets very unpatient. And not just with his friends. Job actually challenges God to a debate. And, escalating even further, Job demands that he and God show up together before a courtroom judge.

            If you ever felt the secret (or not so secret) urge to argue with God, here’s your biblical authority to do just that!

            To our modern sensibilities, there’s just so many things about this story that embarrasses us, especially the portrait of God allowing a convincingly “righteous” person to suffer. But in fact it’s our failure to engage in cross-cultural understanding that obscures the question which the ancient author was posing. Namely, for what reason do we love God? Is it possible to love God for selfless reasons? If God provides no goodies for our consumption . . . if God does not provide a personal security detail for our peace of mind . . . if God is not in the business of bartered relationship—“you give me this, and I’ll be not only nice but very, very pious as well”—is there any other reason to love God?

            You probably saw the story in the paper last week of a man who left threatening messages on the Buncombe County Democratic Party headquarters phone. He was sick and tired of receiving what they call those robocalls, the automated, voice-recorded messages that come to your home. I suspect we’ve all gotten a bunch of them recently, both from Charles Taylor and Heath Shuler.

            The man who left those messages was quoted in the paper as saying: “I did all the nice things [to get them from calling me]. But nice didn’t work.”

            Nice didn’t work for Job, either. Nice sometimes doesn’t work for us.

            In case you haven’t read the remainder of the story, or in case you’ve forgotten, I’ll not give away the ending. It’s worth your trouble. . . which is not to say it’s easy to wrap your mind around. But I will give you a clue which has helped me understand the Job narrative. It’s a poem from the 8th century Sufi mystic, Rabia, when she wrote:

            If I adore You out of fear of hell, burn me in hell.
            If I adore You out of desire for paradise, lock me out of paradise.
            But if I adore You alone, do not deny to me Your eternal beauty.

            (Keep in mind that the Arabic word for “beauty” can just as easily be translated “truth,” or even the more colloquial “open arms,” as in “Do not deny to me your open arms.” It is this embrace that our hearts long for more than anything else. And, in fact, it is this embrace that unlocks our own capacity to embrace each other—even our enemies.)

            Here in our Circle we will soon begin the process of planning for our fifth anniversary as a congregation. Those of you who’ve been here know that means we will ask of each other, yet again, “do you want to be here for another year?” If you’re new here, you need to know that membership in our Circle is not assumed from year to year. We ask everybody, even those who’ve been here since the beginning, to decide again. Seniority here gets you nothing, and there’s no hereditary membership. It’s kind of a hassle and requires more bookkeeping. But it’s a structural way that we press each other, year after year, to be clear, yet again, on why we’re here. It requires us to regularly push up against the question of what it is that we believe—and at least by implication, what we disbelieve.

            There are many ways to say what it is we believe—and there are no words finally that can capture everything we believe about God. All human words are frail. But that doesn’t mean we collapse into silence, because words are the basic building blocks of communication, of human community.

            So let me take a stab at saying what we believe. It has to do with old wounds and new visions.

            We are all wounded. There’s no way to escape it. Getting wounded, physically and emotionally, is simply a part of life. Few wounds heal immediately or without our attention. One of the things we do here in this Circle is help each other heal from our wounds. We operate a kind of outpatient clinic, gathering regularly to open ourselves to the healing hands and the loving care which flows from the Spirit through the brothers and sisters which surround us.

            Simultaneously, we are renewing our vision, for we believe, as Seamus Heaney said in his poem which we read as our pastoral prayer, that “a further shore is reachable from here.”

            When I was in high school, one of the downtown streets in our city was changed from one-way to two-way traffic. One afternoon while driving I had this overwhelming sense of confusion. For a second, I thought I was in the “Twilight Zone.” A number of the signs on the street were familiar, but I was thoroughly confused about where I was. It suddenly occurred to me that for the first time I was driving the opposite direction on a very familiar street. I was disoriented because the sequence of signs was backward.

            The process of spiritual formation is often like that. In those breakthrough moments, as the Spirit is reshaping our lives, our values, what we believe in, there is often a similar kind of disorientation. The “facts” are the same, but they are ordered according to a dramatically different pattern, and so the “facts” mean something else entirely.

            This reorienting is what we do together, along with the work of healing old wounds.

            So who are we?

            We are not a social service agency, though there are times when some of our ministries and missions are expressed in those ways.

            We are not a therapy group, though the healing of our hearts and souls is one of the results of our being together.

            We are not a political advocacy group, though we are not hesitant to offer support or resistance to existing authorities.

            And we are not simply a social club, though the relationships we build in the process of being together is surely a part of the glue which holds together everything else.

            What we do here is to keep bringing each other back to the well; to continually rediscover the reason for our counter-cultural values; to be reminded again and again that Divine living in the world is intimately linked to Divine embrace.

            Matthew Fox said it well: The paranoid and the mystic share something in common: but where paranoid persons believe there is a conspiracy in the universe against them, mystics on the other hand believe there is a conspiracy in the universe on their behalf.

            It is this Divine Conspiracy to which we are called. Staying in touch with this Movement of the Spirit requires a lot of disbelieving in what we hear from the world. For indeed imperial powers always want to limit what is possible to what is available. We, on the other hand, believe something more is available and is therefore possible, even if we don’t live to see its fruition.

            Old wounds. New visions. Does this agenda interest you? Soon you’ll have the chance to say so.

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©ken sehested @ prayerandpolitiks.org

by Ken Sehested

      Among the first questions I heard on the epochal date of September 11, 2001, was that of my good friend’s third-grader: “Papa, are we safe here?” Emily had just returned from school in the small East Texas town where I was visiting.

      By now the most turbulent emotions of that infamous rupture have yielded to the daily demands of groceries to buy, laundry piling up, calendars to keep. And children to attend, even more so now, according to demographers who report an upturn in birthrates, as if last September’s devastation triggered not just emotional but biological urges to connect, to repair the breach of life, tikkun olam (“repair of the world,” in Judaism’s rabbinic tradition). But the deeply affective question “are we safe?” continues to roil just beneath the surface.

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      Nothing, absolutely nothing—no religious motivation, no matter how pure; no ideological commitment, no matter how just; no scientific conclusion, no matter how convincing—can justify terrifying a single child. It’s not so hard to agree on this principle, just as it seems self-evident that we all want peace. The problem is that we also want what we cannot get without war. And children sometimes get in the way of perceived security needs.

      Our powers of empathy are truncated: We find it difficult to connect the love we feel for our own children, and for the young of those we hold dear, to little ones without faces, bearing hard-to-pronounce names in places we’ve never been. Recently our youngest enjoyed her wedding feast. Not long after, another wedding feast, in Afghanistan, was raked with fatal fire from the sky. I have no doubt it was a tragic mistake, a military miscalculation. But the connecting conclusion remains: to insure the safety for ours requires putting the others' in jeopardy.

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      The longing for safety, like the impulse to vengeance, is legitimately rooted in life’s soil—human and humus alike, pronounced good at the outset of the Judeo-Christian creation narrative. Yet both have been blighted and disfigured by forces too impervious to accurately describe or adequately name. (“Sin” is the more traditional but largely abandoned name for the culprit.) The longing for vengeance shares the same emotive DNA as the longing for justice—to make right, to reweave the moral fabric of existence—and is a welcomed alternative to nihilism, to life without consequence. In parallel fashion, the world’s logic transforms Emily’s petition for safety into ever-escalating policies and institutions devoted to voracious security needs (be they of nation, class, racial-ethnic identity, religious affiliation, etc.

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      In the book of Genesis, the narrative records this blessing given by Isaac to his son: "May God give you of the dew of heaven and of the fatness of the earth, and plenty of grain and wine" (27:28). This is the earthy materialism of biblical spirituality. But the promise of plenty mutates to a point almost beyond recognition, as recorded in this complaint of the Psalmist against inconsequential living: "[P]ride is the necklace [of the wicked]; violence covers them as a garment. Their eyes swell out with fatness, their hearts overflow with follies. They scoff and speak with malice; loftily they threaten oppression. They set their mouths against the heavens, and their tongue struts through the earth" (73:6-9). This is the backdrop against which the contours of safety, security—salvation—are fashioned and forged. It has been so since the beginning: “Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight; and the earth was filled with violence” (Genesis 6:11). Spiritual corruption and physical violence are mirror images.

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      What then are we to do to break the determinants which transform a child’s need for safety to the existing national security apparatus? Or as the Apostle Paul agonized, Who can save us from this body of corruption?

      I don’t much believe in universal answers, which may seem odd coming from a genuine Bible-believing, baptist-flavored "follower of the Way" (the designation for the original disciples of Jesus). Few card-carrying postmodernists would salute me, however, since I also believe in consequential living and communal accords, difficult and dangerous as they may be to establish. Furthermore, I believe that the only way to puncture (and it will be a conflictive enterprise) dominant systems of the world’s disorder is via religious vision. While I understand the frequent distinction made between being religious and being spiritual, I sometimes suspect that the latter is a form of laziness, like fast-food dinner. Spiritual formation rarely happens quickly or conveniently.

      Every discipline of spiritual formation is reckoned by some form of relinquishment, is oriented to some kind of “dying.” Which makes sense, because every dominant system will claim that what is possible is limited to what is available. People of faith believe otherwise; but in order to move forward a kind of retraction is needed.

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      For many Christians, the inaugural act of this retraction exercise is signified by baptism, which involves the ritualized activity of dying (to the current ordering of values), being buried (severance from the illusion of self-centered life) and being resurrected (to a renewed configuration of safety, security, salvation). “Those who find their life will lose it,” Jesus said, “and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39). And what is the “sake,” the welfare, of Jesus we are called to secure? He gave many clues, none more explicit than the dramatic scenario of Matthew 25 where, on the projected day of judgment, he assigns to heaven or to hell according to the criteria of care for marginalized people—the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the diseased, the immigrant and the imprisoned—all those for whom the world’s dominant systems have little or no use. Thus, people on the Way, those immersed in the Jesus narrative—which, like most narratives, is porous and resistant to philosophical precision—are bound for trouble. I like the way Flannery O’Connor put it, paraphrasing a text from John’s Gospel: “You shall know the truth, and the truth will make you odd.”

      We are God’s odd ones. And according to the Jesus story, God is more taken with the agony of the earth than with the ecstasy of heaven. Connecting the purpose of Jesus with the drama of Creation is the heart of Christian confession. Everything else is footnote.

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            Paul Ricouer wrote: "If you want to change people's obedience then you must change their imagination." My overriding passion is to insist that recovery of baptismal integrity is the Christian community’s most urgent political task. By implication, this suggests that the most urgent political task of each of our respective traditions is to drink more deeply from the wells that nourish world-transforming faith.

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      At this point we must be clear: Ultimately, power does not flow from the barrel of a gun. While violence may destroy power, it can never create it. “Every war already carries within it the war which will answer it,” wrote Käthe Kollwitz, artist of torment. “Every war is answered by a new war, until everything, everything is smashed.” Or as the poet e.e. cummings wrote with such concise precision, “hatred bounces.”

      Such a judgment is not rooted in political calculation but theological affirmation. We believe that the power of God, the Abba of Jesus is the power to claim by relinquishing, voluntarily submitting to body broken, blood spilt, rather than by grasping, by shedding the blood of others.

      The Christian vision affirms that only this kind of power is sufficient to subvert the ruling powers of this age. It is messianic power in the manner of Jesus, whose “name” we confess as shorthand for the career to which we, too, have been called. “The one who believes in me will also do the works that I do,” Jesus reminded his disciples shortly before he was executed in a manner reserved by Roman rule for political subversives. The same thought is central to the Apostle Paul’s proclamation: “For [God] has graciously granted you the privilege not only of believing in Christ, but of suffering for him as well” (Philippians 1:29).

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      Unfortunately, the political relevance of Christian baptismal vows is little understood in the church and virtually oblivious in the larger world.

      In the featured Time magazine op-ed article for the January 1993 issue, essayist Lance Morrow wrote:

       "War is rich and vivid, with its traditions, its military academies, its ancient regiments and hero stories, its Iliads, its flash. Peace is not exciting. Its accoutrements are, almost by definition, unremarkable if they work well. It is a rare society that tells exemplary stories of peacemaking—except, say, for the Gospels of Christ, whose irenic grace may be admired from a distance, without much effect on daily behavior." [italics added]

       This same author, in the special September 11, 2001, issue of the same journal, began his commentary (“The case for rage and retribution”) on the day’s trauma with these vitriolic lines:

      "For once, let’s have no fatuous rhetoric about 'healing'. . . . Let’s have rage . . . a policy of focused brutality . . . [and] relearn why human nature has equipped us all with a weapon called hatred."

      The relation between the two statements is not coincidental. There is an intimate link between skepticism regarding Jesus’ relevance for daily behavior and the counsel to “a policy of focused brutality.”

      In the end, the advocates of both positions—nonviolent struggle for justice versus policies of focused brutality—work from theological presuppositions, whether explicitly acknowledged or not. Both require conclusions (neither of which can be submitted to conclusive empirical testing) about the ultimate nature of power, about the road to safety, to security, to salvation.

      Meanwhile, Emily’s question, the most ancient of questions, invites the baptismal response of reoriented life. Wade in the water children . . . God’s gonna’ trouble the water.

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Originally published in the September 2002 issue of Peacework, magazine of the American Friends Service Committee.
©Ken Sehested @ prayerandpolitiks.org