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What do I mean by 'whiteness?'

7/28/2020

I didn’t encounter the word ‘whiteness’ until I was a senior in college. Just a year before that encounter, I was openly racist to a fellow student, a story I told in a previous blog. That blog was about me narrating my own formation in whiteness, a formation I wasn’t even aware of. I thought of myself as a good, compassionate, kind person who treated everyone the same, and I was. I grew up around great people in a great church, I have a kind family, I received a good education, I had black friends, and I was taught to treat other people like I wanted to be treated. However, there was another formation I had undergone and forces present that were subconsciously undermining my efforts to be a good person in this world.

By the time I had graduated from divinity school, I had probably heard the word ‘whiteness’ defined over twenty times, conversed with several professors and peers about it, and taken several courses where it was a central topic, but it was only toward the end of my seminary career that I first thought, “I think I might be able to articulate this concept to someone else.” This word is hard to understand because it does not originate from our traditional sources: the bible, the church, and theology. It is speaking a language with which we are unfamiliar.

Whiteness has to do with all people. When we talk about whiteness, we are not talking about the color of anyone’s skin. We are talking about the ways people are formed to live in relation to one another. Whiteness is a name for the ways we have been conditioned to think about ourselves and others in relation to race, and it affects people of all skin colors. It is a way of thinking and living to which all people are susceptible. So, whiteness is also broader than our own personal experiences of race. Whiteness is a way to name those invisible forces of formation we are not always aware of, which create systems that we oftentimes don’t even see but participate in nonetheless. Systems that impact our communal decisions on where we live, where we go to school, where we go to church, what neighborhoods we value and which ones we don’t, and how wealth and services are distributed.

‘Whiteness’ is not a reference to skin color, and it is bigger than personal experience. When I talked last week about “dismantling whiteness,” I was not condemning people with white skin, claiming that having white skin makes someone a sinner, or asking for an apology from people with white skin for having white skin, or stating that everyone with white skin is racist. Trust me: I am as white-skinned as they come. When I was a teenager, my brother and I had a lawn mowing business. One day it was particularly hot, and I was sure to wear a t-shirt while we mowed. The problem was I wore a white shirt. After 8 hours of mowing, I got home, took my shirt off, and found that I had a sunburn under my shirt. That’s as white-skinned as it gets.

A related question to the conflation of whiteness and white skin, is the question of whether or not God made us the way we are. Didn’t God make me with white skin, brown skin, etc.? Yes, God made each of us exactly the way that we are, skin color and all, and we are each precious in God’s sight. We hear that truth put beautifully in Psalm 139:13-14, “For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.” We know that since God made each of us we are God’s beloved creatures and, like we heard this past Sunday from Romans 8, “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” We might even say we could add “skin color” to Paul’s list in Romans 8:38-39a, “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor skin color, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Having white skin is not a sin. It is equally important to say that having any color of skin is not a sin. God’s love and forgiveness are not skin-dependent, and it is because God loves us that we have to take an honest account of our history and how that history impacts our present. Race has been used in the past to alienate, persecute, and belittle people of color, and that past continues to impact our present and the world we live in. White Christians have used and abused Scripture, especially Genesis 9:25 and the curse of Ham, for centuries to defend slavery and invalidate the humanity of black people, saying black skin was a sign of sin. These past realities continue to impact the present. The conversation about whiteness, then, is a conversation that hopefully leads us closer and closer toward an embrace of the common humanity we have in Jesus, and allows us to better understand and articulate how we have been formed, and how we might have accidentally distorted the Gospel along the way.

The purpose of talking about whiteness is to ask ourselves hard questions about things we do not often have to think about. How did I come to live in the physical place I live, with people that look very much like myself? How did my neighborhood, especially if, like me, you live in the suburbs, come to exist in the way it exists? Why do large parts of our communities continue to live segregated lives? Why is the economic divide between white and black people and families so wide in our country, even after the abolition of slavery and the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1965? When we talk about whiteness, we are not talking about skin color, we are trying to get to the bottom of these very elusive questions. As Christians, this points us to much more important questions: How does our Communion with Jesus actually impact how we live in the world? How does our Communion with Jesus move us towards compassion for those we have trouble understanding? How did my church come to be and look the ways it does? How was I taught to read the bible? How was I taught to think about myself in relationship to God?

I know last week I said I was going to do a series on the story of our faith. Last week’s blog, which you can see below, was about the Canaanite woman, who comes to Jesus begging for her daughter’s life. I used this story to talk about how, at first, Jesus’ back is to us, the gentiles, but, by the Holy Spirit’s drawing, life with God is opening up for gentiles through Jesus. I said, “Jesus does not belong to us; we belong to Jesus.” This radical inclusion and love and welcome is our story. I’m also telling this story because it’s crucial for us as we engage in conversations about race. I wanted to pause that series for a week, though. I thought it might be helpful to give some clarity about this concept called ‘whiteness’ I’ve mentioned in a lot of my blogs because of how confusing the concept can be and the questions it raises.

I hope this blog keeps open or opens up lines of communication as we all dream and work for that world of love, joy, and intimacy with God and each other we desire.

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Our Story: Part 1

7/21/2020

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This past Saturday I got to listen in on a Zoom call that an organization called DurhamCares organized. The meeting’s topic was “Racism: The History of a Problem,” and Willie James Jennings, my professor in seminary, spoke. If you have paid attention to anything I’ve said in my 3.5 years at North Raleigh, then you have probably heard me say Dr. Jennings’ name and pass on to you something he taught me. Toward the end of the hour-and-a-half long call, Dr. Jennings gave three suggestions on how to engage and begin to dismantle whiteness in our churches right now. The first way is to tell the real story of our faith, and for the next three blogs, that is exactly what I’m going to do.

I told the story of our faith a couple of sermons ago when I preached on Jesus sending out the disciples. His first instruction was “Do not go anywhere among the Gentiles.” That could be half of the one sentence summation of our story. I want to start, though, with the story of the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15 because this story helps us realize how we have imagined and read ourselves wrongly in the biblical story.

Jesus is leaving a place and heading toward Tyre and Sidon, which is a coastal region known for its wealth and port-like atmosphere, if you know what I mean. Tyre and Sidon are recipients of God’s wrath and judgment in the Old Testament (see Jeremiah 25:17-22, for example). As Jesus is walking toward this region--which is strange in its own way because Tyre and Sidon is Gentile country (Is this Jesus going to get the lost sheep of the house of Israel?)--a woman(!), a Canaanite(!!) came running up and shouting(!!!) for Jesus to heal her demon-possessed(!!!!) daughter. The exclamation points are all the ways that this woman has no business being around Jesus. These two should have nothing to do with one another, but this woman takes upon her lips the words of Israel’s faithful: “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David.” This plea coming out of a Canaanite woman’s mouth is absolutely crazy. She speaks of the need and hope of which only Israel has spoken. She comes to the place where only Israel belongs: before God. She assumes the position of worship that only Israel practices: on her knees. She is doing what ought not be done by someone like her.

Jesus and the disciples know her actions and words are extraordinary. Think about what Jesus does. This woman begs for help for her daughter and Jesus turns his back to her! That is the beginning of our story of faith. We are those who came running to Jesus, and he turned his back to us. We asked for help, and he turned the other way to help those for whom he was sent. Jesus does not belong to us. We belong to him, but not yet, not first. The disciples just get mad at her, “Send her away, Jesus!”

The woman begs again, but Jesus will not be deterred. He says, “It is not right to give to the dogs what is meant for the children.” Jesus says that. Jesus calls a woman a dog. Jesus ignores her plea and then outright denies her. Again, she’s not asking for money or possessions. She’s asking for her daughter’s life, and Jesus says no. Again, Jesus says no. This woman, though. She keeps pressing. Still on her knees she says, “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.” Talk about boldness! This woman will not accept Jesus’ no to her, and now Jesus turns toward her and says, “Woman, great is your faith!” There is shock in Jesus. There is learning going on in Jesus. Even a Canaanite woman can have faith? Yes, even a Canaanite woman. Jesus learns and opens up to the Spirit’s desire and love, which is a desire and love that will not accept the separation of Jew and Gentile. The way is opening up and Jesus is turning toward a Gentile and saying “Yes.” This is our story.

We have not told ourselves this story, though. We have read ourselves as the disciples. When we read the story of the Canaanite woman, we read ourselves as the disciples standing there with Jesus asking, “What are we going to do with this woman, Jesus? Get her out of here!” We see ourselves standing over this woman, who is on her knees, looking down on her in superiority. When we hear Jesus talk about the children’s food, we hear him talking about us. We think our seats are at the master’s table. We think we are God’s chosen people, inheritors of great faith.

That is not who we are, and that is not our story.

The Canaanite woman is our mother. She tracks our movement into life with the God of Israel. She begs not just for her daughter but for us, too. She shows us our real story: we are outsiders, those who do not belong, running to the God of Israel, begging for help, taking on our lips the faithful words of Israel, falling on our knees, and asking for what does not belong to us. We are guests, unwelcome ones at that. Yet, the way opens by the movement of the Holy Spirit who will not yield. Jesus learns.

You might be asking, “What does this have to do with understanding and dismantling whiteness?” This story is necessary for dismantling whiteness because forgetting this story of radical inclusion, of our gentile existence, is the engine inside of whiteness. We have bypassed Israel and made ourselves the chosen ones, the masters, and whiteness is the drive toward mastery.

What would it be like for us not just to remember but to live as the question, not the answer? What if we entered each interaction and engagement not as teachers but as students looking to learn? What if we saw ourselves as guests instead of hosts? That imagining and living out our story of radical inclusion will help us get there and help us begin to address and dismantle whiteness in our church and community.

Peace,
Brandon

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Weeds

7/15/2020

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“I got caught in the weeds.” This phrase has circled around in my mind this week because of the parable we will read this Sunday for the gospel lesson.

This is a phrase most of us are familiar with, right? Getting caught in the weeds. It means getting lost in the small details of an issue or a problem that solutions can seem impossible.

In my experience, learning about race and racism can become a point of getting lost in the weeds. I mean, just think about all the topics that we have covered in the few weeks we have focused on race: real-estate, economics, land, history, labor, education, personal histories, geography, whiteness, American history. That’s only scratching the surface. That doesn’t take into account all the other small details that each one of us engaged in this work have encountered along the way. Even when you get into the weeds I’ve listed, you start encountering other weeds: guilt, anger, cynicism, hopelessness, etc.

Take, for example, a book I’m reading right now. The first chapter starts with defining whiteness, but it engages history, labor, colonialism, and geography just to name a few. The second chapter focuses on issues of race and racism as it applies to Indigenous Americans. So, there I’m reading about culture, education, and geography. Again, that’s just to name a few. The book moves on from there to how race and racism becomes a global export. One chapter focuses on language complications between missionaries and the Tamil people of India, and how Tamil concepts of family, clan, and class got mixed with colonial concepts of race, meaning skin color. The book will deal with race and racism in Latin America and, ultimately, how racism morphs beyond a white-black binary.

Whew. The weeds.

Take, for example, the COVID-19 pandemic. I don’t think many of us thought that we would spend time thinking about scientific studies on air droplets and their lifespan in an indoor environment. We get caught up in the weeds of daily schedules. Can I get an “Amen” from the parents of young children out there? There might be no better example of “getting caught in the weeds” than what our school administrators are going through right now. All the different plans, all the different schedules. Who goes to school when? What classes are available? What about AP? How do you keep young people who haven’t seen their friends in months from hugging one another? How do you gently communicate the necessity of social distancing and mask-wearing without sounding harsh and mean-spirited?

Whew. The weeds.

The interesting thing in Jesus’ parable is that the farmer says to let the weeds grow. Now, I might be taking some interpretive license here, but letting the weeds grow means that the people out there in the fields have to pay attention to them. It means they have to spend time in the weeds until the harvest. If they’re watering the wheat, then the weeds are receiving water too. If they’re treating the soil, then the weeds will receive the same nutrients as the wheat.

What I’m saying is that spending time in the weeds is not a bad thing. Spending time in the weeds is part of the process of learning and growing. Spending time in the weeds is necessary to prepare for the harvest. Anyone who has spent hard hours on hands and knees weeding a garden, though, knows that spending time in the weeds is difficult. Sometimes it can feel like you might never get out of the weeds.

It’s like when we were driving back to Durham after our quick trip to Oklahoma. Eighteen hours, and that’s if you really push it. Each mile marker we pass becomes its own weed. Time slows down.

Me: “We have to be about 4 hours down the road, right?”
Tayler: “We’ve only been driving an hour and a half.”
Me: [sighs heavily].
Addi: “I want a snack.”

The weeds are part of the destination, though. They are part of the harvest, part of the garden, part of the trip home. We can’t grow tired of the weeds. We need to be aware of the long, complicated history of race and racism in America not just because it impacts other people, but because we will learn that we are also caught in a system and products of a system that we did not choose for ourselves. It’s not for our good, either.

So, do not be discouraged. Get caught in the weeds, and keep the harvest in mind.

Peace,
Brandon

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Time

7/7/2020

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I’ve been thinking a lot about time since last week. I’ve been thinking about time because I’ve been studying the parable of the sower in Matthew 13 (our text for this Sunday).

There’s two very personal feelings about this parable that have to do with time. First, give it enough time and any soil can become “good” soil. When I read the parable of the sower, I can’t take my mind off of the first three soils: hard, rocky, and thorny. No gardener or farmer would just leave soil in that condition. Any gardener or farmer worth her salt knows techniques and methods to soften soil, to remove rocks, and to withstand weeds and thorns and other pests. It just takes time. Second, I empathize with the sower. Her success rate with growing would not land her in the batting order for the Durham Bulls. She’s hitting about .250, which saying that’s not very good is an understatement. But I empathize with her because I see the comparison in her work of sowing seed and my work as a pastor. It often feels like a lot of sowing and not much reaping, but the sower just keeps on sowing seed. She knows that given enough time there will be a harvest. She has to work the soil. She’s not a farmer of seed but of soil. She listens to the soil, she sees what it needs, and she feels how it’s damaged. Give it enough time, and that soil will become good. She has her work cut out for her, though.

I think time and perseverance are the keys. Soil won’t become good overnight. You can’t make compost overnight. If the farming metaphor isn’t working for you, then think about diet and exercise. You can’t lose weight or gain muscle overnight. It takes time and perseverance.

You can’t become antiracist overnight, either. Like I said in last week’s blog: I’ve been on this journey for 7 years, and sometimes I feel like I’ve just begun. It takes time and perseverance. Since Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd, we have gathered as a community for a prayer vigil, the Christian Education Committee has discussed how to educate the congregation on race and racism, the Session has discussed our congregational response, Lisa preached a five-part sermon series on race and racism from the personal to the systemic, we participated in a 21-Day Race Equity Challenge, I’ve preached and blogged about race and racism from the personal to the systemic, we’ve focused on race and racism in the Summer Sunday School videos, in Sharing God’s Story @ Home, and a couple of times in the children’s sermons.

That’s a lot, but it has only been 6 weeks. We are just beginning, and we have only scratched the surface. This is where time and perseverance enter again. The de-formation and deconstruction process we are in takes time. We are like hard, rocky, thorny soil that needs the time to become good soil. We are like the farmer who needs the time to work the soil, to sow seed, to try again, to work some more, to sow some more. There are plenty of reasons to disengage with the work we have done for six weeks. We can harden our hearts, revert to cynicism, become angry, and the seeds of justice will sit on the surface as the birds snatch them up. We can grow tired and fragile of the challenges and pain of learning about our own complicity in systems of injustice. We can get stuck in guilt, and the seeds of justice that have begun to sprout in our hearts will wither away. We can retreat into our silos, hold tight to our possessions, and be paralyzed by the anxiety of interrogating where we live, our money, and our wealth, and the seeds of justice will be choked out.

Talking about this farmer and her sowing reminds me of another parable Jesus told about a tree that would not bear fruit. This tree lasted for several seasons but never once produced anything. The farmer tried all the tricks he knew, but the tree would not bear anything. Finally the owner came to the farmer and said, “Cut this tree down.” The farmer, full of hope and knowing that time and perseverance can do a lot, asked the owner, “Give me one more shot. Let me put manure around the tree. Let me try one more time. If it doesn’t work this time, I’ll cut it down myself.”

There is still time. There is time to work, to persevere, to learn, to have conversations and ask questions, to become soft, absorbent, malleable, to remove the rocks, and to hold back the thorns.

I hope we persevere because we have the gift of time. I want this blog to encourage you to keep going and to persevere in this work. We may not see a harvest for a while and for a time it might seem like we’re not getting anywhere, but let’s hold on to the hope the farmer has. It’s a hope in God’s promise that there will be a harvest. It might be thirtyfold, sixtyfold, maybe even a hundredfold, but there will be a harvest.

Peace,
Brandon

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My Formation

6/30/2020

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Lisa has encouraged us to share our own personal stories about our racial formation. Here are a few of my own stories.

You might say that I was formed in a crucible of Whiteness and White identity. I grew up in Oklahoma, a land, known as Indian Territory that stretched from Oklahoma through Kansas and up to Nebraska, that was supposed to belong to Indigenous Americans. After the Civil War, when human beings freed from slave chains sought freedom from the South, many Black people sought refuge in Oklahoma to create an all-Black state. Oklahoma is the land on which I was formed, and those plains that were once sprawling became the suburbs of south Oklahoma City during white flight in the 1970s.

It is the land of Oklahoma that holds the silence of the state’s violent racial history. It is a history of the eradication of Indigenous life--language, plant, animal, people--and of controlling Indigenous people and land. That fight continues today in the highest court in our country. It is a history of systemic genocide of entire Indigenous people groups in order to gain control of their land that contained vast oil fields, which means vast wealth. It is the whispered history of the Tulsa Riots in 1921 and the destruction of one of the most flourishing Black communities in the entire country. This history, silent and unspoken, I did not learn until I was in college.

I grew up in a mostly white church in a mostly white neighborhood. My community was white, but sports provided me the opportunity to build friendships with Black people. I had a close friend who is Black, and we played sports together and had sleepovers. It was at his house that, looking back, I had my first realization that I was white and that being white meant my life and his life were very different. I knew that his mom and dad both worked and worked hard. She was a principal and he was a UPS driver. They were committed Christians of deep faith. They did everything with integrity, but our worlds were vastly different, our economic status vastly different, our neighborhoods only a mile apart but completely different worlds, our churches less than a mile apart but never any fellowship between the congregations.

I left the Moore Public School System when I was in the seventh grade and started attending a private school: Christian Heritage Academy. The school’s mission statement says, “The ultimate goal of the Academy is to produce true Christian scholars who will be used of God to propagate the Gospel throughout the whole world and to restore our American Christian Republic to its historic, Biblical foundation.” So, I was formed as a young person inside the entanglement of Christian faith and American nationalism. CHA is a small school. In my class of 52 people, though, there was not a single Black student. There were many Korean exchange students, who my white classmates and I constantly reminded that they were different from us through racist jokes and mocking their language. We wouldn’t even say their names but gave them “American” names.

CHA started in 1972 in resistance to school integration in Oklahoma. Their documented history chalks this up to busing and wanting neighborhood schools, but that history fails to see that fear of busing and a desire for neighborhood schools was just as much about fear of white children going to school with Black children. “Neighborhood schools” is code for White schools and Black schools. There are two foundational textbooks for every CHA student: Christian History of the Constitution of the United States of America and Teaching and Learning America’s Christian History. Again, I was formed in the entanglement of faith and nationalism. A group called The Foundation for American Christian Education wrote and published these textbooks, and, just to make the history and timeline clear, that foundation started in 1965.

I went to a private university whose student body was and still is majority white, and it was on this campus that I had the most shameful experience of my entire life. Intramural sports was a major part of campus life, and I was fully invested in playing flag football. My team of all white guys was playing the track team, a team of all Black students, who were also track athletes. In this one particular game a player on the track team and I started mouthing off to one another. I thought I was a good guy, kind and inclusive, definitely not racist. Yet, it was in a meaningless flag football game that my anger and mouthiness brought out the racist in me. I called this other young man--a successful student, a tremendous athlete, and a well-known socialite--a “boy.” I didn’t just say it once. I said it over and over. One of my professors in seminary once said that most Black people are just waiting for the moment when well-meaning white people will call them a racial slur. I became that person. I knew what I was saying. I knew the history of demeaning Black men by calling them “boys,” a history that goes all the way back to slavery.

Over the past few weeks I have written about Whiteness and White identity. These ideas can seem ethereal, unable to be understood, slippery, overly-academic, maybe even elitist, but they always come back to the land and to bodies. These are my stories of the very real formation these two powerful ideas had on my life, my body, the bodies of others, and the land on which we lived. I’ve told these stories not just to show that these difficult concepts work themselves out in real life and on real people but to show that I am still in the process of deconstructing my racial formation. I have been in that process for 7 years now, and most days I still think I’m just beginning.

I hope my stories, my formation, my deconstruction will encourage you, though, because it is in the last 7 years of reflecting on my own life that I have caught glimpses of true freedom and community. Most of all, the past 7 years have shattered me, but it’s in that shattering that I’ve witnessed the Holy Spirit putting pieces back together to make something new.

Peace,
Brandon

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Defining Whiteness

6/23/2020

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This week I watched this video from Jacqueline Battalora’s keynote address “Birth of a White Nation.” Being the cinephile I am, I have to say that the title of her address is a riff on the 1915 D.W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation, a film that depicts a part historical, part fictional origin story of the Ku Klux Klan. Film students across the country still view this film in school because of how influential it was. It was the first 12-reel film ever made and the longest film ever made at that point. It was so influential, from both a film and propaganda perspective, that there was a showing of it at the White House while Woodrow Wilson was in office.

Battalora’s thesis is pretty simple. She says, “White supremacy is embedded in American society as a matter of law.” She starts her talk with a startling claim: “‘White people did not exist in this country until 1681.” She proceeds throughout her talk to cover a vast amount of history, both political and legal. She covers the middle to late seventeenth century systems of indentured servanthood and slavery in the British colonies, specifically Maryland and Virginia, Bacon’s rebellion, and Antimiscegenation laws to track the development of how “White” came to equal propertied American citizen. Battalora also helps us understand a definition of whiteness.

To understand the full impact of Battalora’s thesis and the scale of racial existence we still operate within, we have to go back to August 8, 1444 to Portugal when Prince Henrique the Navigator, with his royal chronicler Zurara beside him, watched the disembarkation of 235 slaves kidnapped from Mauritania. Watching this catastrophic event Zurara says, "On the next day, which was the 8th of the month of August, very early in the morning, by reason of the heat, the seamen began to make ready their boats, and to take out those captives, and carry them on shore, as they were commanded. And these, placed all together in that field, were a marvelous sight; for amongst them were some white enough, fair to look upon, and well proportioned; others were less white like mulattoes; others again were as black as Ethiops, and so ugly, both in features and in body, as almost to appear the images of lower hemispheres" (Jennings, 2017). Here Zurara places the world on a scale of racial existence. There is white and then there is black, and all the space in between.
I was taught to understand whiteness as a “trajectory of endless becoming.” Another way of understanding it is a building project toward maturity. Whiteness is a journey toward maturity from owned to owner, stranger to citizen, and darkness to White (Jennings, 2019). What does that mean? It means lots of things. It means that whiteness is not reducible to skin color. It means it is a way of existing in the world. It is a project, a goal, a system that has real life consequences on people’s lives.
Real life consequences on people’s lives. It’s important to keep that in mind at all times when we’re defining terms or telling our stories or reflecting on our upbringings: whiteness has real life consequences on people’s lives. It has economic, labor, theological, geographical, medical, and a host of other consequences for people’s lives, and that includes you and me, people who have called ourselves white. Perhaps that is the most important thing to remember with our definition of whiteness: it is a building project toward maturity that ultimately leads toward our destruction. Whiteness affects all of us. It affects us differently, but it affects all of us and not for our flourishing.
I’ll see you next week.

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Places and Feelings

6/16/2020

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Whiteness comes to rest in space.
-- Willie James Jennings

Thinking about whiteness and white identity makes us think about the ground, specifically the ground where we live. Thinking about whiteness makes think about neighborhoods, schools, and real estate. The reason that’s true is because from the beginning whiteness and the establishment of white identity and its power in this country was connected to land and labor, specifically private property and the labor on private property. It’s also true because at the intersection of private property and labor and nationalism is where whiteness grew and gains its strength. That means we have to think about borders, fences, boundaries, which leads us back to the ground. Whiteness always leads back to the ground.

I was struck by this connection when I watched this video about the creation of the suburbs. The suburbs weren’t created accidentally. The reality that schools are more segregated now than in the 1960s is also not an accident. It’s a reality of the creation of the suburbs. The reality that suburbias all around this country are predominantly white is not an accident. The reality that wealth among white families dwarfs that of Black families is not an accident. All of this is interconnected, and the video from College Humor lays it out in an approachable, humorous way.

I mention that the video is humorous because it shows that the people at College Humor know what Willie Jennings knows: “Whiteness feels.” I have experienced the feelings of whiteness. I felt the feeling of whiteness during Lisa’s sermon on June 7 when she shared some of her own experiences. I’ve been reflecting on some of my own experiences of race and my own racism. It’s painful. Whiteness feels.

You might be wondering at this point what the connection between place and feeling are at this point. The connection is that whiteness makes us think about where we live and how where we live contributes to segregated life, and that thinking is agonizing and painful and often anxiety-inducing. Here’s a concrete example. When I read recently,
“Overcoming whiteness begins by reconfiguring life geographically so that all the flows work differently; the flows of money, education, support, and attention move across people who have been separated by the processes that have formed us racially, economically, and nationally. We start with the communities that have been left behind in the movement toward maturity [read whiteness], those no longer imagined through the goals of ownership, citizenship, or productive labor, and we join them, we move to them, or we stay in them, or we form them, or we advocate for them, or we protect them. The we here are we Christians and all those willing to live toward a different formation of places. We fight against the segregation that shapes our worlds, and we work to weave lives together.”
I felt the anxiety, guilt, agony, and pain of living where I live and that where I live contributes to the segregation in my own life and the life of my community. I felt the anxiety of the radical call to discipleship, which is that the work of justice and undoing my own formation in whiteness might mean that I have to move myself and my family. There is a lot of feeling going on there.

I’m sure there have been lots of feelings in all of us. We have to attend to those feelings as we are on the beginning of this journey together as a congregation, a community of people. Those feelings will intensify as we think about the land we call church, the ground we call North Raleigh, the neighborhoods we call home. We join in those places, but the formation of those places has meant that our joining is incomplete. Yet this is where we have to begin. What was the land of 11905 Strickland Road before North Raleigh was there? Who was on that land long before North Raleigh was ever thought of? What was the community and neighborhoods we call North Raleigh before our houses were built and our communities formed? How have these places formed our joining as a congregation? These are intimate questions. They make us think about our homes, the money in our pockets, the friendships we have formed, the ministry we do. But, it is in thinking and feeling these questions and places that we will be going on the road toward a new way of life.

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The Start of a Journey

6/9/2020

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My first blog post last week would have been a good time to outline what I wanted to do on here. Alas.

It turns out to be a good thing, though, that I did not pin myself to a specific theme or topic because so much has changed since I started thinking about what to do. I would have thoughts as I was falling asleep about fun topics to cover, and I would email myself those ideas so they would not escape me during sleep. I thought about keeping a movie diary and trying to connect some of the films I’ve watched to bible stories or theology. I thought about taking some of my favorite theology books and picking a different passage each week on which to reflect.

Then Ahmaud Arbery was murdered while out for a jog. Breonna Taylor was killed inside her own home. George Floyd was killed. In our own city we saw buildings and businesses destroyed, people tackled and beaten, fires, and curfews put in place. I looked back at all my ideas and they all seemed ridiculous. People are dying in the streets and the country is burning, and I’m writing about movies and my favorite books. Am I so disconnected that I choose to think about movies instead of these life and death issues?

This past Sunday we heard about the 21-Day Race Equity Challenge. I decided, then, that my blog will be a weekly diary of my engagement in the Challenge. Before Lisa’s sermon and Debbi’s invitation I read an old interview in Esquire magazine with James Baldwin, an author and civil rights activist in the 1960s. In that interview, the white interviewer asks Baldwin, “Let’s talk about the average citizen, the white man who lives on Eighty-ninth Street and Riverside Drive, what should he be doing [about racism in America].” Baldwin’s answer has stuck with me: “It depends on what he feels. If he feels he wants to save his country, he should be talking to his neighbors and his children.”

I hear Baldwin challenging me to take care of my own issues with race and racism before I try to do anything else for anyone else. Take the log out of your own eye, first, Jesus said. In these diaries, I will reflect on resources from the 21-Day Race Equity Challenge that deal with white identity because, like Baldwin’s challenge, I want to focus on the smallest thing, which is me. I want to go through a time of introspection of my own indifference to, entanglement in, and even my own investment in systems of racial oppression first. I want to figure out and confess how I am still complicit in and captivated by whiteness.

So, to start, I want to invite you, whoever might read this thing, into this slow journey with me. One of the most difficult classes I took in seminary was with Willie James Jennings, and every class was like being deconstructed. Dr. Jennings warned us that this would happen, but he didn’t leave us alone in our struggles and pain. I remember that he pushed each individual person in the class toward the other people in the class. He taught us to lean on each other while going through this tense and intense class that was a personal struggle for just about every person in there. Engaging with issues of race and racism is still personally challenging and a struggle, but I know I need other people with me in the struggle. We weren’t meant to do this alone. So, please reach out with questions and ideas. I am with you in this struggle and journey, and I want you to be with me.

Peace, Brandon

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Birth in the State of Crisis

6/2/2020

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“The church was given birth in something like a state of crisis, of mingled joy and terror,
in a moment out of time, as one age was passing and another was coming into existence.”
-David Bentley Hart, Theological Territories

This quote has been on repeat in my brain. Hart’s point with this quote is about how Christians think about history. Historical perspective, he says, is from the vantage of the ones who historians deem history-makers. Historical perspective is the perspective of the powerful, the authorities, the victors, the rich.

But, with what perspective do Christians view history? Jesus blows up traditional historical perspectives. Now the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of a Palestinian Jew becomes the focal point of history, and this is totally new and unprecedented. Christian historical perspective is the perspective of the One who ate and drank with sinners, showed mercy to the diseased and prostitutes, broke the Sabbath, and befriended tax collectors and demoniacs. Ultimately, Hart states, the historical perspective for the New Testament writers was that the moment of Jesus is a moment outside of time, when the end of all things is near and God’s Kingdom is on the horizon, even as it is within them now.

That’s the state of crisis. Everything they knew is coming to an end, and a whole new world and existence was opening up to them. Thus, the “mingled joy and terror.”

It feels like we are in the same kind of moment. I don’t even need to name the COVID-19 crisis. We’re in an economic crisis and an unemployment crisis, and the virus has disproportionately impacted communities of color for a whole host of structural reasons. We have seen the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and last night David McAtee was killed. Cities have been turned upside down, there are protests, riots, and looting.

“The church was given birth in something like a state of crisis.”

I wonder what birth or rebirth our cities and our state need. I wonder what birth or rebirth needs to occur within myself. I wonder what birth or rebirth needs to happen in our church. In the state of crisis within which the early church was given birth, they prayed, lived, and ate together. They shared all their possessions, they eschewed even the idea of private property, and they gave to each person as was their need. They created a way of life that is tangential to the way everyone else was living.

How might we do that in our own state of crisis? How might our church go on a tangent and be a part of creating alternative forms of community and communion?

I believe some of us started that tangent Monday night in a prayer vigil on Zoom. We lamented and grieved together the long history and recent deaths of our sisters and brothers of color. We lamented and confessed our own sins and failures. We confessed our idolatry of whiteness and white identity. We lamented and confessed our indifference to suffering, our judgment of how people respond to tragedy, and our fear to look ourselves in the mirror and ask, “Am I part of the problem?”

It was only a beginning, and the work must continue. I invite anyone reading this blog who wasn’t able to be on the Zoom gathering to join us in our work of undoing and unlearning racism and prejudice and working for justice and peace. Begin with us by praying the prayer we prayed together last night, and then join us in this moment of crisis as the Spirit leads us toward birth and rebirth.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Gracious God, by day and night we pour out our prayer to you. We are crying out for justice, yearning for what is right, longing for your peace. Come quickly to help us, O God; save those who call upon your name.
We lament, O God, the senseless and needless deaths of your children. We lament the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery.
We lament that these killings are but the most recent points in a whole history of violence against our sisters and brothers of color. We lament the thread of shed blood: George, Breonna, and Ahmaud, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Philando Castille, and Sandra Bland, to Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Emmett Till, countless numbers whose names are known only to you, and ultimately your Son, our Lord, Jesus Christ.
And we confess, O God, that each of these killings is an affront to you, for having sewn your very image into them, you created and loved each one.
We lament, O God, the history of racial violence, prejudice, and hatred in our country and our state.
We lament the unjust economic realities that exist because of a history of racial prejudice in our country. We lament the substandard housing and school systems, the healthcare inequalities, and employment opportunities.
We lament and confess that these realities are not accidental but the consequences of slavery, pillaged lands, lynching, Jim Crow, red-lining, and mass incarceration.
We lament, O God, and we recognize and confess our own privilege and our own complicity in systems and structures of injustice and discrimination.
We lament the conditions that create rioting and looting; we lament the looting and theft from communities of color that goes unnoticed, ignored, and too often passes as normal and good business. We lament and confess our rush to judge the actions and responses of the oppressed without first judging our own violence, indifference, and culpability in unjust systems of racial oppression.
We lament that we have served other lords besides you. We lament and we confess that we have not realized that racism destroys all of us. We lament and we confess that we have hoarded our riches, gloried in our privilege and power, and looked out for our own interests over those of the poor and weak. We confess our own weakness and fear to acknowledge our own prejudices. We lament and confess that we have all too often imagined ourselves to be white and not called ourselves disciples of Jesus.
We lament and we confess the church’s failure to live into the beloved community of the Kingdom of God. We lament and confess the history of using theology to suppress and oppress people of color. We lament and confess how we have used Scripture to justify racial segregation, slavery, violence, and killing.
Help us to grieve and weep and to be angry with our sisters and brothers who are grieving. We pray for the families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many more families who have had to grieve the loss of a father, sister, brother, mother, uncle, and aunt. We pray for the children who fear not only for their own lives but for the lives of their parents just because of the color of their skin. We pray for the mothers and fathers of little boys and girls as they carry the weight of teaching their children that their skin color will mean they are treated poorly and looked down upon and seen with suspicion.
Help us to commit ourselves or recommit ourselves to the cause of justice and peace. It is hard work, O God, and the answers are never simple and they don’t come quickly. Help us to be diligent in the work of justice, grant us perseverance when we feel fragile, and continue to convict us and prod us so that we will not leave the work of unlearning racism behind us.
Help us to listen and pray, but do not let us stop there. Help us to look at ourselves and to speak to each other and our families and to ask the Holy Spirit to search our hearts and lives for the prejudice and racism and violence within us. Help us to do justice peacefully and fearlessly and relentlessly; help us to refuse the call to return to “order,” that old “order” is so tempting but so destructive to our sisters and brothers of color and also to us and it is not what you desire.
Help us, against all odds, to be hopeful and joyful.
Gracious God, keep us working and praying for the day when your justice will roll down like waters, and your righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Replenish our strength and stir up our hope as we look for the signs of your coming reign. And fill us with the peace that passes understanding--the deep peace of Jesus Christ our Savior, the one who was crucified on the cross unjustly, and in whose name we pray. Amen.
Peace,
Brandon

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Putting it All Together: Developing a Rule of Life

5/26/2020

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Today I can’t help but recall the promise Isaiah issues on the Lord’s behalf:
   On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples
   a feast of rich food, a feast of well-matured wines,
   of rich food filled with marrow, of well-matured wines strained clear.

What a feast Soul Feast has been! Perhaps Thompson should edit her chapter 9 (on hospitality) to include the particular form of hospitality that is inviting disciples to a Soul Feast. Thompson has been our gracious host for these last nine weeks.

Thompson invited us to a well-set table and she has offered us all kinds of delectable treats at her table: Study, Prayer, Worship, Sabbath, Fast, Examination and Hospitality. In her presentation she has made nourishing food enticing – everything’s been tasty, and so good for us, too. A Soul Feast, indeed! It’s been the kind of feast that seems to double down on God’s promise of the ultimate feast that is God’s kingdom come.

>Pause to consider: Think back over the seven practices we’ve explored these last few weeks. Which ones were new for you? Which ones did you find tantalizing? Which ones made you want to scrunch up your nose and refuse?

Amaryllis. I think this might be "Apple Blossom"? Anyone know for sure?

This last chapter is an invitation to incorporate some of these Soul Feast practices as daily bread.

Looking back over these last nine weeks I can say that I’ve rediscovered a couple of practices that nourish me. Most of all, I have rediscovered my garden. There has been a lot of hard work out there and there’s still a lot of hard work to do, but I’ve found that my garden labor has created time and space for prayer and reflection even as it has connected me to God’s creation.

Even the gardening process has been a metaphor for spiritual work. I’ve cleared out weeds, turned over soil, pruned/moved/tended existing plants and I’ve added some newcomers to my garden. Gardening has also let me do spiritual work that parallels those garden tasks.

My interior “weeds” have been subject to confession and pardon (even if they may well grow back again!). I’ve turned over texts, from the Bible, to commentaries, to books, to Thompson’s chapters. There’s been time to tend to prayer concerns from the personal to the global. And as I was out in the garden yesterday, I kept asking myself if it’s time to add another intentional spiritual practice to my routine. (Honestly, I might just keep up the gardening!)

Thompson suggests three questions for discerning whether and which spiritual practice(s) to adopt: 1) Practice-wise, what am I deeply attracted to or repelled by, and why? 2) Where do I feel God calling me to balance or stretch my spirit? 3) What practices best fit my circumstances or season of life? Her hope is to encourage us toward a commitment, but not a commitment just for the sake of having made one, but that we might find ourselves drawn “into greater intimacy with the Lover of [our] soul[s].” (p. 161)

>Pause to consider: A quote in the margin of page 161 says “Abba Poemen said about Abba Pior that every day he made a fresh beginning.” What Soul Feast of a fresh beginning might you make?

If I had smellavision I'd send you the scent of the Jasmine that's blooming. Better than the perfume, though, was this - is it misshapen or perfectly shaped? - leaf from the Jasmine vine.

All through this blogging experiment I’ve wondered why I’ve been including photos from my garden. I’ve wrestled with whether I was somehow trying to show off the fruits of my garden labor or whether I was simply trying to engage readers by way of the photos. Spinning back through each week’s photos, though, I realize that the garden has been the place where my own Soul Feast has been happening. I’m thinking that a weekly appointment with my garden might be the fresh beginning I need to make.

I nearly missed the Amaryllis that’s in the above photograph. Siberian Iris have grown up around the place where the Amaryllis was planted years ago and I don’t know that I’ve ever seen the bulb bloom. This year there were two flower stalks, each with two flowers! I was overwhelmed when I discovered them Sunday afternoon.

Wondering what an Amaryllis might mean, I did a bit of googling. The Breks bulb store shares the myth of Amaryllis, who is persistent and patient in pursuing the object of her deep love. After plenty of effort, Amaryllis found her love reflected back from her beloved. Pretty wild connection to this Soul Feast journey, huh?! Breks further says “Amaryllis is the living symbol of love, determination and ethereal beauty, and an ideal gift for those you love and care for.“ (https://www.brecks.com/blog/amaryllis-symbology) If only I could beam an Amaryllis onto the feast tables of all who’ve been making this journey with me!

I've been saving 'Trinity' blossoms to share without realizing that I'll be taking a blog break starting next week. Fascinating how many threes are in the garden.

Brandon will pick up the NRPC blog for a while beginning next week. I’ll be interested to see in what direction he takes the project. Meanwhile, I’ll sort out a plan for when he passes the baton back to me.

Until next time,
Peace
Lisa!

Thompson, Marjorie, Soul Feast: An Invitation to the Christian Spiritual Life (New Rev edition). Westminster John Knox Press, 2014.

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