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houseofmysojourn · 7 years ago

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[16] Now Laban had two daughters. The name of the older was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel. [17] Leah's eyes were weak, but Rachel was beautiful in form and appearance. [18] Jacob loved Rachel. And he said, “I will serve you seven years for your younger daughter Rachel.” [19] Laban said, “It is better that I give her to you than that I should give her to any other man; stay with me.” [20] So Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her. [21] Then Jacob said to Laban, “Give me my wife that I may go in to her, for my time is completed.” [22] So Laban gathered together all the people of the place and made a feast. [23] But in the evening he took his daughter Leah and brought her to Jacob, and he went in to her. [24] (Laban gave his female servant Zilpah to his daughter Leah to be her servant.) [25] And in the morning, behold, it was Leah! And Jacob said to Laban, “What is this you have done to me? Did I not serve with you for Rachel? Why then have you deceived me?” [26] Laban said, “It is not so done in our country, to give the younger before the firstborn. [27] Complete the week of this one, and we will give you the other also in return for serving me another seven years.” [28] Jacob did so, and completed her week. Then Laban gave him his daughter Rachel to be his wife. [29] (Laban gave his female servant Bilhah to his daughter Rachel to be her servant.) [30] So Jacob went in to Rachel also, and he loved Rachel more than Leah, and served Laban for another seven years. [31] When the LORD saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb, but Rachel was barren. [32] And Leah conceived and bore a son, and she called his name Reuben, for she said, “Because the LORD has looked upon my affliction; for now my husband will love me.” [33] She conceived again and bore a son, and said, “Because the LORD has heard that I am hated, he has given me this son also.” And she called his name Simeon. [34] Again she conceived and bore a son, and said, “Now this time my husband will be attached to me, because I have borne him three sons.” Therefore his name was called Levi. [35] And she conceived again and bore a son, and said, “This time I will praise the LORD.” Therefore she called his name Judah. Then she ceased bearing.

(Genesis 29:16-35, ESV)

From the skeptic's perspective, it seems like Leah's story was told by someone who's only concern is that God gets praise. It seems like God is using Leah to bring Himself praise and fulfill his will, a divine megalomaniac who will sacrifice anything and anyone to draw out His praise from unwilling lips. It can feel like whoever has told Leah's story, has told it in such a way that her feelings and her desires, indeed her very life, are all subordinate to God getting praise.

Or at least, this was how I felt when I first read her story. Reading Leah's story was a source of deep bitterness for me, a person who felt weak, unloved, and unchosen. I could see that God was using me, like He used Leah to perpetuate the Jewish nation and fulfill his promises, but I could not see that God loved me.

But then I tried to leave the skepticism aside. I tried to assume, instead, that Leah told her own story. She was not under compulsion. She was not giving God mere lip service. And through the naming of her sons in the words of holy scripture, she was really praising the Lord. She is standing in front of me, and really saying, from her own heart, from her own perspective, "This time, I will praise the Lord".

In a sense, Jacob has rejected her. And yet, could it be that although she does not have Jacob's love, that God has still chosen her?

I love Leah, because she's a woman who pushes things just a little further than seems appropriate. Since the Bible likes to do things in threes, we might be looking for praise on the third son. We might feel like God has given her a number of completion, and that she would recognize his abundance in her life. But still, she wants what she wants -- she wants the love of Jacob. She wants Jacob to be happy with her, and not to see her as a stepping stone to what he's really after -- the love of her sister. She is tired of being a pawn in her father's schemes. She wants to come out of the darkness where her father has kept her hidden, and be seen and loved for who she actually is. She is tired of being used, and wants to be genuinely loved.

And she does recognize that God has seen her, when she names her first son "Reuben", and she recognizes that God has heard her, when she names her second son "Simeon". But the hope to be loved by Jacob is still there! "Levi" - "this time my husband will love me, since I have born him three sons". Finally, when her fourth son Judah is born she says, "This time, I will praise the Lord".

In my own bitterness of heart, I can feel like Leah's story is merely being used by the writers of scripture, and even used by God to make a point. I can feel like they are saying that praising God is the highest good, and that God might put us through hell to make us useful. I can feel like they are saying God uses our suffering to accomplish his purposes, like He used Leah's to perpetuate the Jewish nation, and that this should be good enough for us. It should be good enough to accomplish God's purpose in the world, even if we ourselves are joyless and unloved. It should be good enough to be useful to a God Who is essentially a user.

But if I suspend the skepticism, if I suspend the assumption that the narrator is exercising power over the character -- if I allow for the possibility that maybe Leah is telling her own story, and telling it in the way she wants it to be told -- then I must take her at her word. If she praised the Lord, I must assume she had a real reason to do it, that she experienced something that made the Lord truly worthy of praise in her own eyes, weak though they may have been.

Maybe it was not the Lord's express intention for Leah to suffer, but that it was always the Lord's intention to bless her, no matter what happened.

But did she really get a good deal? Was the blessing of her children enough to make up for being the less favored sister? Or would she have given up all of her children for the sake of having Jacob's love? I think the answer must be "no". This is not and could never be an exchange of one for the other. It cannot be God "making a deal". It is not as though being unloved was the price she had to pay for bearing sons. The children she was given were an overflow of God's goodness, plain and simple. They were a response to her suffering, but by no means were they an attempt by God to "make up" for it.

In the end, there could be no comparison between the favor shown to Rachel and the favor shown to Leah. There could be no equivocation. Being unloved was real suffering, but having children was still a real blessing, and neither one has the power to negate or invalidate the other. No transactional models apply here.

Perhaps this is the paradox of possessing dynamic, living contentment -- that even though sorrow and joy are always mixed, we somehow find that we can praise the Lord. We somehow find that even though the sorrow is real, we do not let the joy that's present be stolen or passed over. Likewise, we find that even though the joy is real, the sorrow that is present cannot be ignored or superseded.

We find that we can enjoy what is good, even in such a wretched and weary world as ours. We find that we can love through pain, and that it is a lie which says that we cannot love or be whole human beings in the midst of pain. But, we also know that we do not do justice to our hurts if we try to pass them over, nor do we do justice to our heart's desires if we try to suppress them. We find that to be people of justice, means to be people who are able to grieve appropriately over what is grievous, and to weep appropriately over what is sorrowful. Somehow, the very fact of our joy is what provides for sorrow, and the very fact of our sorrow is what provides for joy. This is how it has to be, so that at the end of the day, we can be thankful for the chance we have to live, and the chance we have to survive the things that have wounded us. In other words, we can love ourselves and trust God. We can believe, somehow, that God is with us.

#dynamiccontentment Jesus genesis29 leah rachel jacob contentment

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houseofmysojourn · 7 years ago

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Dynamic Contentment - New Blog Series

I’m thinking of this as a travel blog, on a journey to the secrets of contentment -- or maybe I should say, the mysteries of contentment. In one way, the way to have contentment is no secret at all. While there is no way to reach out and take hold of it, there are many ways in which we can unclench our hands, and be ready to receive it. But what exactly true contentment is -- in a brutally broken world where we are never allowed to kick back in an easy chair and just pretend that everything is alright -- that is a mystery and a paradox. Holy contentment is born out of a holy discontentment, out of a holy dissatisfaction with the broken cisterns in which we live and work. It’s also really, really hard. This summer, my dad challenged me. “Your problem is that you have not learned what it is to be content,” he said. “And the truth is that I could try to tell you what to do about it, but I know you won’t be able to hear it from me. You’re going to have to figure this out by yourself. Treat it like one of your school projects, go to the Bible, and write about what it means to be content.” Well, as a recent graduate in theological studies, I was ready to clap back. “There’s nothing to study here, dad. The Bible only talks about ‘contentment’ a few times, and in every case it’s talking about money and material things. And I’m not unhappy with my life because I don’t have money.” His reply? “I think you know what I mean, you just don’t want to do it.” Students of church history would call that acedia, the unaccountable resistance toward doing the one thing you know you need most to do for your spiritual health. As much as I hated it in that moment, I knew he was right. I just didn’t want to deal with my crap. I wanted to have a right to be angry.

So, like pulling teeth, I cracked open my Bible. I went and looked at some articles my dad sent me on contentment, and I started writing. All summer long and into the fall, I tried to write my wrestlings with God and take note of what pertained specifically to contentment. Once I put it all in a document, it came out to 28 pages and counting. But the journey so far has been amazing. I hope that as I post a few of the things I’ve learned, I can encourage others to find out what it means to be relentlessly, dynamically content in the love of the God Who made us.

#dynamiccontentment contentment godlinesswithcontentment godliness

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houseofmysojourn · 7 years ago

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Room for Revolution: Reflections on Love at Duke Divinity School

(In case you’re wondering, I’m writing this for my friends, especially those at Duke or at any place like it.)

"So Now You Tell Me"

This was the title of one of the last sermons our graduating class would hear as students, delivered by one of our professors.

The passage? 1 Corinthians 13, the love chapter. The lector read her passage with great conviction, "taking her time". And when she said the words "as for knowledge" she drew out the syllables. Looking directly at the audience she said with a smirk, "it will come to an end", eliciting cheers from many wearied MDivs.

The sermon was, as you might imagine, a sermon about love. Our professor explained to us that if we did not love our congregations and classrooms, we would be ineffective for the causes of justice we would seek to promote. For the first time at Duke, I heard a professor tell students not to champion a cause -- not until their audience knew that they loved them. Our professor told us: If your parishioners do not know that you love them, if you have not sat with them in the hospital and cried with them at the funeral home, your message will fall on deaf ears.

I couldn't have agreed more, and yet I was surprised and perplexed. I wondered if I had entered some kind of a twilight zone. Yeah…"so now you tell me" is right! I stole glances at my classmates seated beside me, and wondered what some of them had to be thinking. I had heard many of them preach. I had heard about their field placements and their "bold stances" on "the issues" and how ignorant and backward and reactionary their audiences had been.

I had heard condescension, pride, frustration, and self-righteousness dripping from the lips of many in that room, including my own. I had heard little, if anything, of love (or even about love!). I had heard few people at Duke say publicly that we needed to love anybody, especially if they were wrong.

Our professor went on in her sermon, "You will not remember most of what we taught you here. You will remember whether or not we loved you. And I want to ask your forgiveness for the ways that we have failed to do that. Forgive us!"

I felt my brow creasing and my eyes widening in disbelief. It was all true, but it felt so out of place -- if I'm being honest, it felt like it was coming out of nowhere. I was glad to hear it, but my heart also ached. It felt like too little, way too late. And honestly, I wasn't sure I was quite ready to forgive anyone.

Somehow, the Divinity School had become a place where everybody I knew felt like they were being persecuted. Everybody felt like a minority, everybody felt alone, everybody was worn down. Hope of any kind was in short supply.

The only conversation that I had ever had with our preacher that day was one that had come to exemplify this lack of hope. A year earlier, she spoke at an event about the realities that had been uncovered in the wake of the election. She spoke with great conviction about the threats of "Trump's America". I raised my hand and asked what we could actually do for the people we feel are wrong, especially those in our families and churches. We need them too if we want to build something better, so what could we do to bring about transformation?

For at least five full minutes, possibly more, she listed all the reasons why she didn't think that was possible. "Trump's America" was irredeemable. Fact after fact, statistic after statistic was listed. Clearly, she knew far more than I did, and her arguments were damning. She finally concluded by saying, "So I don't think there is much hope".

I broke down and cried. How could she say that? How could she resign all of these people to damnation, and all of us along with them? And if we do not think there's hope, then what the hell are we all doing? Why have these discussions at all?

And then I thought of Jesus. Would it be a faux pas to bring up the power of resurrection hope?

After the event, she came up to me and said, "I apologize if I was harsh, but to be honest with you, I am just so tired". And I deeply appreciated that she took the time to do that. In its own fashion, it was an instance of love shown by a professor. Given everything that was going on with the country and the school, I understood her weariness. She didn't have to use her energy to talk with me, but she did.

Still, I had to ask her, what do we as Christians have if we don't have hope for real transformation? In the end, she didn’t seem to have an answer.

As I walked out of chapel after that final sermon, it struck me that it was a kind of late response to the question I had asked over a year earlier. Or at least, that's how I took it. And I was glad that the answer was "to love". Yet who among us had been prepared by our time at Duke to do that? We had not even learned to be both honest and kind with each other, let alone to love each other -- how then were we to love a church full of people we had learned to despise for their simplicity and ignorance? If the only love we had to give our churches and classrooms was the love we had received at Duke, we were doomed. And now, we were supposed to figure this out. How could we learn to love the people we had only been taught to yell at and dominate in an argument?

We had not learned to love. We had learned, instead, to wield our power and influence for the sake of what was "right" (whatever we thought that may be), such that what passed for "love" on behalf of the needy almost always looked like convincing, coercing, and dominating whoever the bad guys were. And most of us had not been taught the difference, the difference between a life of love and a life of power: a difference as wide and deep, as unfailing and unending as all the scriptures say it is; an impassable gulf, fixed between us and Lazarus; a land of promise which we had not the courage nor the faith to enter.

There was so little trust at Duke, because there was so little genuine love. There was so little love, because there was so little room for love to grow. We had rooms to be sure, but we lacked room, and the holy family was hidden from us. They had gone instead to a place where love had room, room as vast as the night sky in which to let His praises be sung and His good news be declared.

But there was no room for them in the inn.

There was no room, because there was no time, no money, no energy left to consider Him. Just as Lazarus was passed by day after day, so we passed by love with all of our more urgent matters.

For this reason, though we sometimes spoke about love, love itself could not be given, because love took effort we could not spare. But more importantly, because we had no room, love also could not be received. Love is something that has to flow between real human beings, and it cannot flow where there is no room.

But what it is to have "room"?

Room is emptiness. To have room is to have a space which lacks all else, in which all else has been negated. It is a possession which is a kind of poverty. In order for there to be room, human beings must give things up. We must keep a space we have chosen not to fill, although we could. Some treasures must be left outside. It might mean pausing from labor, even though more profit could be had. We might even have to knock down a wall and leave ourselves unguarded.

Always, to make room for love means the paradox of having a place for nothing. It is to be rich in neediness. It is a desire which is always demanding not that we acquire more, but that we give more up. It is always urging us, "Make room!" If we do not have a truly empty space, a space that we are not trying to fill with any other good, we will not have room for love. We will have indicated by our fullness that we neither need nor want it.

At Duke, there is a certain extent to which everyone had to be a self-made person. We were expected to fill and fulfill all kinds of requirements. Many would have considered it imprudent to really leave margins or really admit need; certainly, it often proved imprudent to admit we needed someone else to fill a need. Depending on other people got me burned more times than I could count. And so everyone had to fight their fight alone. Self-sufficiency was the name of the game, and if you couldn't be self-sufficient, you lost that game. This meant not only being responsible for doing most of your work alone, but also for your own "self-care". That someone else could or would care for you or you for someone else in a meaningful way, did not seem to be a live option. Fill your own holes, shore up your own breeches.

And yet, if you cannot be needy for love, you will lose your soul.

There was no love at Duke because there was no room. There were no margins in our lives where love could write His notes, and certainly no spaces between the lines where love could make His critiques. When no room is left for love, then every critique is an attack, because it must overwrite what is already written. It cannot make itself clear in spaces that have been left open with trust for that purpose. There is no room for growth, there is no room for editing or expanding, or realizing how wrong you really are. For many of us, there is no room to be anything other than a victim.

There was a sense in which I know we felt we couldn't leave the space open -- there was too much work to do, too many problems to solve, and too much to try and protect. For many of us, there was always a sense of threat, a sense that we could never really say the right thing, write the right thing, or work hard enough to prove ourselves. And for many there was also the sense of oppression, that others in some way were always looking to beat us down or rob us.

And part of us chose to succumb to it. The endless conveyor belt of very-important-assignments and very-important-discussion-topics is irresistible at institutions of higher learning. And it is far easier to deal with those things, than to learn to love one another and to face our true selves. And so we all took on more than we could handle, more in terms of work and more in terms of quandaries and problems to be solved. We were all trying to save the world, to figure out how to stop the literal and figural "Trump's America". And so we tended to live where our professor was when I first met her -- without hope, and so, so tired.

Love was the only thing that could sustain us. Love was the only thing we were so truly, desperately needing, though we could not see it.

And I think so many still cannot see it. There are so many ways for folks in those places to be lost, no matter what side of any issue they fall on, but only one blessed way for them to be found. I pray that those who heard the sermon on that day will go forward to their places and will seriously stop to think about what it means to love. I hope they will be revolutionized, because nothing less than a revolution can give them that ability, a revolution of the self beyond any victimization, beyond any oppression, beyond any rulers or powers or authorities. It is a revolution totally undetermined by power; and yet, because it needs no preconditions, it is the most powerful force in all the world.

If you believe in this revolution, then you will have no need for power or influence or prestige or accomplishments. Neither you, nor your movement, nor your philosophical school, nor your church will be slaves to these things any longer. But if you do not believe in such a revolution, then you will always be itching, gnawing, digging, grasping at what this evil age holds out as the necessary tools for promoting what is "right". You will always be a slave to so-called "practicality" and "reason". You will be a slave to whatever you think you cannot help, be it your social status, your addictions, your pathologies, your disabilities, or any kind of victimization you have undergone. You will deal out what you call love like a capitalist with a commodity: piecemeal, and only to those who deserve it. The only way you will see to accomplish good, is to take power. You will not see good as its own power, and you will not see yourself as either intrinsically good or intrinsically powerful.

You will live and die by the same sword.

The sword or the cross my friends, the sword or the cross.

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houseofmysojourn · 7 years ago

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Part II - The Academy: Issues of Class and Kingdom

For as difficult as it may be to find a calling in church, it may be equally difficult -- if not impossible -- for me to find it in the academy. Certainly, it is impossible to find it in the academy apart from the church. But as much as the church creates difficulties for a single woman with advanced degrees in Bible like myself, the academy is also tough. At the end of the day, it is not my world. I fear that it is not a world that I can ever fully belong to, and if I'm being honest, I fear it's not one I want to belong to either.

I have learned some unexpected things at Duke. I thought I would find a lot of people like myself, people who had the same interests and the same types of intelligences. I honestly thought that there would be a type of belonging I could enjoy in the academy that I could not enjoy elsewhere.

Yet, this has been far from the case. Someone asked me recently if I felt alienated at Duke. As I thought about it, it occurred to me that it is not so much a feeling that I have been alienated as that I am simply an alien. I think there are many reasons for this, reasons that I have only recently begun to fully grasp.

For one, I have learned that the academy is full of people from certain social classes, certain higher social classes. I did not grow up poor by any means; but, I think it is safe to say that my parents did, and I grew up around a lot of poor people, with a lot of what you might call "poor people perspectives". Because I grew up with security for my daily needs, this is not a perspective that I was aware I had. I was not aware that I would be one of the only people from my social class at Duke. I wasn't even aware that I had a social class. But there are significant differences between the way that I think and live in the world, and the way the average Duke person does. The Duke world is hardly intelligible to me sometimes, and it is not intelligible at all to the folks I grew up with.

Likewise, while people here at Duke think they know a lot about the world, there are aspects of life where I grew up that they could never comprehend. (A wonderful example is the absolute shock and horror of my classmates and professors after the election of Donald Trump. I was equally shocked at their collective shock!) There are a lot of things taken for granted here that I cannot imagine taking for granted, and that even my friends in undergrad would never have taken for granted. Some of these things are infuriating, some of them have been deeply hurtful, and some of them just make me feel lonely.

In spite of all this, it is the aspiration of so many in lower social classes to attain to this level, even as they are at the same time (often justly) suspicious of this world and what it promotes. A lot of my friends -- even friends far poorer and more marginalized than myself -- could have made it here if all it came down to was capacity. But they would never think to try. The possibility is not on their horizons.

Furthermore, I think there is something in many poor people which rightly discerns that they would not belong here, and that in order to belong here, they might have to change so much of who they are as to no longer be recognizable. And they are, in so many ways, right about that.

I've been caught up in it too. Without realizing what I was doing, I would help to make poor, ignorant, conservative, white America the butt of every joke, the background of every subtle jab, the gold standard of what not to be, the source of the world's ills, and what we as Christians must attempt to distance ourselves from as much as possible. In places like Duke Div there seems to always be this fear that if we claim Christianity, the world at large might think we are claiming those people -- and by "the world at large," I mostly mean the world of higher class, educated people. I mostly mean the academy. It has taken me two years to wake up to what this means.

So much of what happens here seems to be apologetics for the elites. We think we are in danger of being excised from the academy or thought poorly of because the name "Christian" might lump us in with so many undesirables. We must meet certain standards, standards for language and methods and style of writing, in order to prove that we belong here too, that we deserve our place -- from individual professors trying to get tenure, to PhD students defending dissertations, to master's students seeking affirmation for their dreams.

Poverty, ignorance, ignominy, and bigotry are viewed as contagions, and the way we sanitize and show our cleanliness to others is by publicly denouncing the people to whom these illnesses are believed to stick.

Now don't get me wrong: the folks I grew up with definitely think, in a certain way, that they are better than more educated people from higher classes. There is almost the sense, in some churches, that it is better for people not to pursue advanced education in Bible, even from more conservative institutions. But, I think the folks I grew up around also feel a certain amount of shame, failure, and disenfranchisement in the current social and political scene, and there is not a lick of that feeling here. Here, there is only success and the threat of losing it, of becoming like them. In certain ways, I'm convinced that both sides are right and both wrong. There are truths about each of these locations that can only be seen from a true outsider's perspective, and they are truths that the Evil One works to keep us from discovering. Because in discovering them, perhaps we would be reconciled, and in being reconciled, perhaps we would see where we stand before God.

When I came here, it was on the advice of my professors in undergrad. They thought I would flourish here, and that this was a place from which I could have a shot at getting a job in an ever more competitive field. I also think I honestly wanted to know what it was that my friends and family were so suspicious of. And, part of me actually hoped deep down that people here would, in light of their education, be more open and charitable to others than the folks I grew up with. I hoped I would have breathing room to be charitable that I didn't have in more fundamentalist spaces.

But there is a big difference between me and many of my classmates from evangelical backgrounds: I am not bitter against the people I grew up with. I am not bitter against my parents. I may disagree with them on a few things, but we agree far more than we disagree. There are plenty of people here who do not even know a Trump-voter or a "climate denier" personally, and for many it would be unthinkable to actually take them seriously and listen deeply to them; certainly, they would not allow themselves to be personally critiqued or challenged by them.

Here, there are as many unforgivable sins as in fundamentalism. There is a legalism as harsh and exacting as Puritanism. And this semester it suddenly dawned on me: there are actually some people here who would want some people in my family dead. In the perfect world of many at Duke, my family might not exist.

I type these words through tears, because as wrong as they may be, I love them. I love all of them.

But no matter how much I take from this place, when it comes to my family, I have no choice but to listen to them. I have no choice but to be challenged by them, critiqued, to hear their concerns and perspectives. And I've started to realize how right they are about a lot of things. They're just not in the position to express those critiques in a way that will make any sense to the people who need to hear them. And yeah, they don't wanna hear critiques on their end either.

I get it. There are times when the flip-flop between break and school has felt intolerable. There are times when I have just really not wanted to be asked if I drank the liberal kool-aid, or how I navigate my faith at a "secular" school like Duke Divinity. There are times when I haven't wanted to hear about how the world is going to hell because of liberals.

There are times when I haven't wanted to come back to school and hear people make fun of the simple, uneducated faith of old church ladies -- ladies who have been to hell and back again and who love others in radically Jesus-like ways, ladies who I am sure will gain crowns in heaven far out of our reach. There are times when I haven't wanted to sit through another tirade about how the church has contributed to systemic poverty from people who think they're really sacrificing for Jesus by taking a job where they'll only make a starting salary of 40k. There are times when I haven't wanted to hear about how the world is going to hell because of evangelicals.

Here, being a Christian seems to equal voting for Hillary. Back home, it seems to equal voting for Trump. But I'm starting to think it equals loving God and your neighbor, and that maybe we need to talk more about how to do that personally than about how to vote. I don't know what this so-called Christian madness is that thinks a vote is more important than a cup of cold water. Oh if only we could get back the time we spent watching the news and debating each other about the election, and give it back to God and our neighbors! If only we could cleanse our eyes and our hearts from their disease! If only we could return to the Lord our God, and He would have compassion on us.

I'm exhausted. I have seen how exhausting it is to seek after success, to care so damned much what people think. I have seen the utter vanity in riches and prestige. I have seen demonic things here. God has opened my eyes to some crazy stuff. And I think I have cracked just enough under all the pressure to let at least a little bit of the light in.

In the words of Kendrick Lamar, I have seen that love may get you killed, but that pride's gonna be the death of you, and you, and me, and you, and you, and you, and me. I have come out realizing that "in a perfect world. . .I'd take all the religions and put 'em all in one service, just to tell 'em we ain't shit, but He's been perfect, world."

The "perfect world" for many of the folks I grew up with, and the "perfect world" of the folks I've gone to school with do not agree. The visions that seem to dominate both of these spaces are fractured, damaged visions. I believe that both of them, in certain ways, approximate the Kingdom, but both of them also fall far short. And neither of them have room for undesirables. Neither of them have room for all of the children of God, for all of the ones for whom Christ died. The Kingdom, on the other hand, is so much greater than these visions. The Kingdom includes the reconciliation of all things. The Kingdom calls us to true, personal repentance, repentance that will cause us all to listen to the ways in which the other side is being used by God to show us our wrongs.

If I am an academic, I will not stop being an evangelical, and I will not stop being loyal to the village of people who raised me and made me who I am. I have no problem with being poor, with having just enough to get by. And I hope I have no problem with being despised and being spoken ill of. If I am an academic, I need to see how my work matters to the people I grew up with and to the church in general, as much as it matters to the world's elites. I want to satisfy the requirements of the Kingdom, not the academy, and certainly not the economy. But is that even possible? How does one preach a gospel that is despised, in a place so dominated by prestige? Can a path to career advancement also be a path to repentance, and if so, how?

Does my repentance involve me going on for doctoral work and living into "the dream"? Am I supposed to serve the church (as some of my friends have suggested) by being a light of some much-needed truth in academic circles? Or is this the suggestion everyone makes because it makes sense according to the world's standards? Because we think that Christians should seek worldly influence to make the gospel effective?

The gospel is found first in weakness, but the academy holds itself up as a bastion of meritocratic strength. And sometimes Christian higher ed is the worst.

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houseofmysojourn · 7 years ago

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A Woman with Advanced Degrees in Bible - Looking for a Call, Part I

This is Part I of three posts where I’m trying to figure out who I am in the world, and how to make my life useful to God’s work. In Part I, I will deal with the church side of my difficulty, in Part II I will deal with the academy side, and in Part III I will circle back to church again, because in the end I’m convinced that the church is always where it begins and ends. This conviction is part of my problem, though I pray to God that in the end it will prove to be part of my solution too.

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Right now, I find myself just wanting to be called. I'm realizing that I want to serve the church, now more than ever, but I'm not confident that I really matter there or that my gifts are significant. And a lot of this, I know, is due to my gender. When I listen deeply to the church, the highest call I hear on my life is to get married and raise babies. The fact that this has not happened yet is painful and at times confusing. There doesn't seem to be a category for the many women like myself, and there doesn't usually seem to be any type of a call except to wait and hope for the best. This is because single folks are often not being challenged to serve in ways that are meaningful. We are being treated more like consumers than like members, and it may be that what single people need most is to be a member and to have purpose. And that means being called to serve.

When anyone in the church is treated like a consumer, church becomes one of many options on the vast smorgasbord of weekly activities that may or may not seem to fit with my identity, my preferences, my feelings, and what I think is most important in life. We treat people like consumers when we treat our services like...well...services. Like going to the salon or to the movies, church offers me a service which I sit and receive in a highly transactional manner. It would be unthinkable to challenge me to get up and serve. It would be like the hairdresser asking me to sweep up the floor. In many churches, to challenge one another to service in the church or in the church’s mission to the community is seen as almost as much of a faux pas. And I'm sorry to say that I'm not convinced that many of the church's leaders care, so long as the pews are warmed, the offering plates are filled, and the feeling of "successful ministry" is maintained. Some of them may even think that this how to maintain it! I almost wonder if they’re afraid that people who serve for free will put them out of the job.

And so we so often do not challenge people, especially single people, to live in to any sort of family or membership role. People can come and go without ever feeling that their presence is necessary, and in some cases, without feeling that it is wanted either. For single people, this is especially poignant, and the messages that the church promotes about family and relationships do little to help.

By contrast, in a family, every person ought to know that they have a purpose and that they are needed and wanted. In a family, it is not uncommon for one person to ask another to help with the sweeping. In a healthy family, those -- like children -- who would seem the least useful are showered with the highest degree of praise and assurance that they are wanted and necessary anyway. In a healthy family, each person has intrinsic worth simply for being who they are; and yet, in a healthy family, everyone who is able should also know that they have a purpose and that their work matters to the life of the family. While everyone has intrinsic worth whether they are useful or not, in a family there is the freedom to ask for help and to challenge members to step up. Fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters get joy out of serving one another. It is wonderful to cook a meal and to know that you have meaningfully blessed your family. It is wonderful to clean and to know that you are helping to make a home for your family. And to be asked, "Can you make those cookies again? They were amazing!" is not a burden, but a delight and a compliment.

Everyone, especially in our society, is seeking purpose. For husbands, wives, and parents, some level of that purpose is still given and this is the route for finding purpose which perhaps seems easiest and safest for the church to push (this is partly because we seem to think that sexuality is more easily contained in a family, and because we seem to think that true and healthy abstinence is only possible for a few spiritual elites -- but this is another topic for another time). It is our culture's way of seeking fidelity and intimacy when social individualism rules. But for single people, especially in the church, the idea of purpose is often nebulous and far off. We start to feel that if we are free to go anywhere, to choose any church that suits us, to choose any career path we like, then we might as well go nowhere and choose nothing. If I am free to sit in a pew week after week, and come and go as I please, then why show up beyond any potential consumerist pleasure? If I am not being, in some way, "called" to meaning and purpose then why bother? If it's just another transaction among the hundreds I make every year, why should I care? I can probably hear better music and get a deeper sense of camaraderie elsewhere.

Oh we want so desperately to be needed! We want to know that our life matters, and that it matters to people, people who can be blessed by our presence and who will miss something in our absence.

The too-often-hidden truth is that this is always the case, that in God's eyes we are all full of meaning and intrinsic worth, and all endowed with the capacity to bless others by our lives. If this were not so, then it would not be so painful to see that truth so often obscured, and sometimes even outright denied, by the church. We seem to think that the church is not a family in itself, but rather a kind of scaffolding to real families, and the implication is that single people don't have real families. Families need churches just like they need schools and movie theaters and hair salons. But who needs single people? Who is calling us, challenging us to service, letting us know that we are missed?

For some, it is the random guy they keep seeing at the coffee shop, who keeps asking for a number and keeps saying by his attention, "You are wanted here." For others, it is a high-paced career in which they can succeed, in which their supervisors affirm their talent and in which they are told they are worth something, with the almost undeniable proof given in cold hard cash. For others still, it is fashion or music or art or any number of other identity-markers, ways of getting others to nod approvingly and say "you belong."

There are millions of ways to seek and get worth and purpose, and there are even more ways to distract ourselves from the fear that we don't have it. For some, it is the actors on the screen, playing out the kinds of fantasies that overwhelm the senses and make the question of worth irrelevant, at least for a moment. For others, it is the drugs and the drug culture. For others still, it is Netflix, or food, or drink, or going out. For most of us, it is many of these things calling us all at once, offering significance, or as a next-best option, distraction from the fear of insignificance.

And of course, it is almost all false. In most of these cases, when we give in, we are contributing to the very system of consumer thought and action that leaves us feeling so insignificant, with thousands of options, limitless "freedom," and no real call to say we’re worth something.

This is the first and, up until recently, the most significant pain of my life in the church. The church does not usually offer the alternative family of the Kingdom in a way that is clear and revelatory to single people. This is especially true for single women.

In my case, in addition to dozens of other smaller (though no less devastating) calls in advertising and society, it is the academy which calls, and it has such a pleasant-sounding voice! It is classy, it is almost universally revered, it offers a future of money, and esteem, and maybe even a sort of fame. It can feel clean and pure, and noble, and good, and can be affirmed by almost everybody.

Even folks at church will cheer for me if I answer this call. They'll cheer for a representative of "true Christianity" (whatever it is they mean by that) in the hallowed halls of higher learning. They'll cheer because they think I prove to the world that Christians can be intellectual too. But I have no interest in proving any of those damn things.

For two years, my time at Duke has really made me doubt my capabilities in almost all areas of my life (it has a way of doing that to everybody). This has been part of what’s made the place so hard; but then, over the past couple of weeks, I have heard the following “calls”:

"You certainly have talent for it. If you want to discuss doctoral work over the summer, please give me a call.”

"Of course you can write a dissertation! You have clear, insightful thought and are a good writer. It never even occurred to me that you would doubt it!"

"You could do almost anything -- you just have to figure out what you want."

"I don't think you'll lack for jobs."

"I think your perspective is one that needs to be heard."

Up until this last week, I really wasn’t sure. And certainly it is gratifying when some of the country's most well-known theologians and scholars give that kind of praise. They are, collectively, saying, "Come be one of us!" At this point, they are inviting me to become one of their colleagues. They believe in me, they are telling me that I'm wanted and that I have a purpose. In some ways, it's what I came to Duke to hear (wish I could've heard it sooner, like at any point in the last two doubtful years...but I digress.)

And yet, it is a call as insidious as it is attractive, and that is the greatest and most difficult lesson I have learned here. Just because I can does not at all mean that I should. It is insidious because it offers a lot in the way of worldly wealth and honor, and because this means it's deceptive power is incredibly strong, almost unbreakable. To break through it at all is to pass a camel through the eye of a needle. More on this in Part II.

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