Common Conversation
Thursday, August 17th at 6:30 pm
When a friend who worships at St. Mary’s recently inquired about the urgency he has sensed in the homilies I’ve shared over the last few weeks, I immediately replied, “It’s Matthew’s gospel.” Beginning in late summer and extending until Advent, the gospel readings from Matthew bring with them an urgency that always leaves me living in the tensions of hope and despair. My go-to companion for this particularly challenging section of scripture is Robert Capon’s Kingdom, Grace, Judgement: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus.
Capon writes with winsome conviction that takes seriously the fruit of justice and mercy without taking himself too seriously. The last three weeks have been full of time with his work focused especially on the parables involving seeds, soil, wheat, and weeds.
In his section on the parable of the sower Capon laments the Christian pattern of equating the sower’s identity with ourselves. After insisting the sower is God who has sown—or spoken—Jesus into every part of creation Capon laments, “But can you tell me that Christians in general have forever long acted as if the Word wasn’t anywhere until we got there with him?“
Willie James Jennings elaborates on the effects of such habits in his commentary on Acts, “We who live on the other side of Christian colonialism have watched the emergence of a soul-killing, people destroying expansionism that forced people into a Christian sameness, an orthodoxy of body and dress, comportment and character that has numbed the minds of many and presented the faith as exquisite subjugation.”
Kristin Du Mez concludes, “The point is, efforts at racial reconciliation or broader renewal aren’t going to amount to much if there isn’t a thorough reckoning with the ways in which much of white evangelicalism has been built around white masculine authority & exclusion. No number of church plants will change this.”
I moved to Nashville thirty years ago as a member of a fundamentalist religious cult. Our leader convinced between three and four hundred people to relocate to Middle Tennessee from Southern California to be part of an end times plan that made us the answer to a question no one outside of our group was asking. As far as I know, not a single person in Nashville was consulted to learn if our arrival might be helpful. As self-proclaimed possessors of the deep and hidden truths of God—wherever we decided to land should have been grateful to have us because proximity to us was proximity to salvation. There were mounds of evidence proving we were not who we claimed to be. Our little group was full of morally unserious platitudes devoid of ethics. Our most developed skill was a willful ignorance that isolated us from any truth that would penetrate our delusions of grandeur.
Twenty years ago this year, I left the cult. My journey out consisted of being exposed to people outside of our insular isolation chamber. The simple gift of listening saved my life. Since then I have bounced around from one group to another—each with similar claims as the cult. I’ve been part of the beginnings of denominations, schools, churches, and ministries who have all claimed to be the purifying agent in a religion gone bad. All of the movements have relied on the same willful ignorance and insulation strategies as the cult I was born into. Theologians and historians like Du Mez, Jennings, and Capon have begun to expose the cancerous replication recruitment of reformation projects and begun the healing of my attachment to them.
The learning hasn’t only come from reading theologians. Nine years ago, I was part of planting a church in south Nashville. It was my last attempt at starting something new that would keep the expansion of reformation going. I had all of the intentions the movement always has and believed that beginning something with the right intentions could launch a new movement. Our community has said from its beginning that we longed to be a place for the displaced, at the feet and table of Christ. Displaced people have found our community and I’ve listened to countless stories of the damage done to their hearts, souls, minds, and bodies through the movements of the Christian enterprise in the United States—of which Nashville is an epicenter.
What are we to do when all we know is expansion? What creativity is left when all we have learned is how to replicate the communities that harmed us in the first place? I was able to ask Dr. Jennings a form of these questions when he gave a guest lecture to a class I was part of. I asked, “Is this United States Christian enterprise already dead—walking around like a zombie mindlessly consuming everything in its path? Or is it dying? And if it is dying, could it be convinced to enter into a season of hospice spirituality to let the old ways die with dignity and reallocate the resources that have been selfishly tied up in expansion. He replied, “It’s got enough money to pretend it’s alive.”
In Letter to an Innocent Bystander, Thomas Merton describes the willful ignorance required to continue replicating the systems that destroy—“For since man has decided to occupy the place of God he has shown himself to be by far the blindest, and cruelest, and pettiest and most ridiculous of all the false gods. We can call ourselves innocent only if we refuse to forget this, and if we also do everything we can to make others realize it.”
Building on these words, he recounts the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes with this charge for how to live with integrity when the king is clearly naked, but the profitable insulation demand pretentious allegiance to clothes that don’t exist. He writes, “Have you and I forgotten our vocation, as innocent bystanders—and the very condition of our terrible innocence—is to do what the child did, and keep saying the king is naked, at the cost of being condemned criminals? Remember, the child in the tale was the only innocent one: and because of his innocence, the fault of the others was kept from being criminal, and was nothing worse than foolishness. If the child had not been there, they would have all been madmen, or criminals. It was the child’s cry that saved them.”
Anna Caudill, David Dark, and I go back a ways. We have been on the same faculty, been part of the same churches, and moved in and out of several of the same circles in Nashville since the early 2000’s. Anna and David are two friends in Nashville I believe are committed to the space of the child in the tale who refused to say the emperor was clothed. They each have an energy that remains undaunted and playful while refusing to forget the violent cruelty of profitable false witness proclaimed in the name of Christ. They also take serious Merton’s charge to do everything they can to make others realize it.
Every few months, St. Mary’s hosts an event called Common Conversations where we attempt to join Merton in addressing our own complicity in the systems that are hurting people with the hope of moving into the space of the wonder-filled child who refused the false peace of the emperor’s pretense. Over the past few years we have talked about ecclesial racial reparations, ecology, and caring for souls in a neo-liberal age. Our next Common Conversation will be held at Glendale Baptist on August 17th at 6:30 and will be a time of Anna and David talking about their own experiences of faith in Nashville. We’ll talk about the challenges, heartbreaks, surprises, and hopes for what faith in Nashville could look like in beloved community. There will also be music, poetry, and time to chat after the official conversation ends. We are hopeful that people who come will bring their own questions for Anna and David.
I hope you will be able to join us. And please feel free to bring anyone you think may be interested in the conversation.
Peace,
Danny