Martin Luther King, Jr. – Rev. Dr. Reggie L. Williams

In preparation for our annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Day celebration at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago on Monday, January 15, 2024 at 12 pm CDT (click here to register), we are releasing an overview of Dr. King’s life and priorities, written by the Rev. Dr. Reggie Williams, which gives also gives some much needed historical background to the Montgomery Bus Boycott – history on how the boycott was inspired by the abuse and sexual assault of Black women, Read, comment, and share, and we’ll see you on Monday, January 15, 2024 at 12pm CDT!

Rev. Dr. Linda E. Thomas
Professor of Theology and Anthropology; Director, Albert “Pete” Pero, Jr. and Cheryl Stewart Pero Center for Intersectionality Studies

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‘Out of the Mountain of Despair, a Stone of Hope’ – the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial in Washington D. C.

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. remains one of history’s most significant public theologians, worldwide. Politicians and private citizens from around the world have gone to great lengths to acknowledge his history-shaping impact since he was assassinated in April of 1968. Today, he is the only U.S. civilian with a national holiday in his honor. There is a monument in the nation’s capital dedicated to him; ‘Out of the Mountain of Despair, a Stone of Hope.’ In 1964, he was the youngest-ever recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize at age thirty-five, and the second African American to receive that recognition. There are more than one hundred K-12 schools across the country that carry his name, and it is estimated that nearly a thousand streets in the U.S. alone are named for him. Dr. King is widely recognized by the recorded sound of his voice, and his legacy is invoked at the mention of a phrase, ‘I have a dream.’ He is a towering historical figure, a champion of the modern American civil rights movement.

King’s Family
He was given the name ‘Mike King Jr.’ at birth, in Atlanta, Georgia, on January 15, 1929. For reasons that scholars dispute, his father changed both of their names to Martin Luther when he was five years old.  He was the eldest son, and the middle of three children, born to Michael and Albertina King: Christine King, Mike King Jr, and Alfred Daniel Williams King. At birth, he inherited a lineage from Black ancestors who knew enslavement and sharecropping, among other myriad forms of white racial terror. He had great-grandparents on both sides of his family who were once enslaved, and his paternal grandfather was a sharecropper, accustomed to debt peonage and other creative forms of abuse. For his maternal grandparents, Adam Daniel (A.D.) Williams, and Jennie Celeste Williams, education and a faith tradition that connected personal piety and social justice were core to survival in a white racist nation.

King’s family refused the allegations that whiteness made about the world and the place of Black people in it. Those assertions meant that Black people have no rights that White people are obligated to respect. They are the practical implications of a centuries-long national habituation in a bio-political organizing scheme that makes the bodies and even the families of Black people fair game as targets of White lust for ownership and domination. Whiteness is that scheme. It is a body of discourse; a species of reality that reproduces itself as timeless truth, with seeds of procreation internal to itself. Meanness is not the main trait of this ideology; it makes meaning and is productive. It populates our desires and demands our loyalty. Like parthenogenesis, it reproduces itself, by itself, as a logical narrative of human hierarchy, imparting societies with a continued obsession for White racial ascendency over everything related to earth and heaven. Whiteness is the self-sustaining ideology that makes white supremacy legible. It generates knowledge of human difference, capturing all of humanity by an account of racial types that is replete with portrayals that make the types knowable in the abstract, and arranging them as a hierarchy of being with White at the apex and Black as the nadir. 

Segregated water fountains during Jim Crow, circa 1940s.

From chattel slavery to ‘separate but equal,’ whiteness is fundamentally an argument for ownership and belonging. It teaches a hierarchy of human difference for a community we should all want in the world that is based on one’s supposed ability/inability to properly possess oneself and the earth. Proper possession is a capacity that is recognized by ones positioning within the hierarchy of human difference and is key to the plot in the script of our life together. King’s family knew of this script and its implications for Black people. Whiteness includes religious ideology that recognizes Jesus as the figurehead at the apex of the hierarchy of human difference with the term ‘human being,’ or ‘fully human,’ as a hegemonic concept for whites only.  

King’s Inheritance
King’s family inheritance included a Christian response to whiteness. He was raised in a tradition of Black abolitionist Christianity, within which, he was the third generation of Baptist preachers and Morehouse alumni that included his maternal grandfather, A.D. Williams, and Daddy King. His was what Gary Dorrien identifies as a Black Social Gospel; rooted in Black abolitionist religion and the teaching of the Bible that God favors the poor and the oppressed. The Black Social Gospel saw eternal salvation paired with a this-world focus on the dignity of Black people where matters like race determine social value, as the way one must think through the meaning of the gospel. This Christian protest tradition taught that God was concerned with our eternal soul, and our everyday well-being.

King’s Education
Knowledge of this history is fundamental to understanding the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. He emerged as a leader from within a Black Christian protest tradition, in a moment when the ongoing tradition of Black struggle against political evil was thrust into the spotlight by a providential convergence. In Montgomery, Alabama, the insatiable cruelty of white supremacy met with ideas for Christian resistance already present within the local Black community. Those ideas were subsequently buttressed by King’s rhetorical appeal, his take on the Black church protest tradition, and newly emerging technologies that made it possible to quickly reach a global audience with a voice, a photograph, or video footage.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is arrested for loitering outside a courtroom where his friend and associate Ralph Abernathy is appearing for a trial in 1958.

King came into public view in 1955, as a young, highly educated Black preacher from the Jim Crow south, with a penchant for Christian socio/political activism. He was the new pastor of the prestigious Dexter Ave Baptist Church, who became the prominent voice of aBlackcommunity that was undertaking what would become a successful city-wide protest against racial abuse on city busses. He arrived at his new pastorate in May of 1954. He was Dexter Avenue’s twentieth pastor; twenty-six years old, and still finishing his dissertation for a PhD in Systematic Theology from Boston University. 

The Movement Starts
Ten years prior to his arrival in Alabama, twenty-four-year-old Recy Taylor was brutally raped by a group of white men while she was walking home from church in Abbeville, a town that is neighbor to Montgomery within an hour’s drive. Mrs. Rosa Parks, branch secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, was dispatched to Abbeville to investigate. The assault against Ms. Taylor was widely known in Alabama, as were her white assailants. Yet, no arrests were made. Racism kept the lives of Black people within constant reach of white prurience, and outside of the moral scope of political governance.

Eight years after Ms. Taylor’s assault, in 1952, sixteen-year-old Jeremiah Reeves was sentenced to death in Montgomery after police secured a forced confession from him for the alleged sexual assault of a white woman. Three years later, on March 2, 1955, fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin was likely upset about the unjust treatment of her friend, Jeremiah Reeves, when she was physically dragged from a Montgomery city bus and arrested for refusing to comply with the bus segregation ordinance, and for resisting the police. On October 15 of the same year, Mary Louise Smith was also arrested for refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger.

Rosa Park’s arrest and protest inspired the country, as can see here in a promotional poster for a speaking appearance less than 10 months after her arrest on December 1, 1955.

Black organizational leaders had their eyes on the city busses where its primarily Black women riders were habitually mistreated. They were working on a plan to address the conditions for Black bus riders prior to these two arrests. At first glance, young Colvin’s arrest seemed to be the catalyst they’d been awaiting, until it was decided that she would not be the right person to inspire community support for a boycott. The newcomer, Martin Luther King Jr., was already organizing his church to engage in social action for justice as a matter of Christian faithfulness. But he was not yet an active participant in plans for change on the city busses.

Mamie Till is held by her future husband, Gene Mobley, as she sees her son’s brutalized body. She insisted on her son’s casket being open so that the world “could see what they did to my baby.” 

From the Pulpit to the Public 
King was volunteered and voted into a key position of leadership for the protest before he could object. He rose to the challenge, helping to guide the city’s Black populace through a tender balance of direct and aggressive, yet Christian resistance, to white supremacy. The outlook that whiteness forced upon society was disrupted by a black social gospel claim of ‘God with us,’ in the struggle to build what King later called ‘The Beloved Community.’ King’s theological language of Jesus preferential option for the poor and the oppressed was a Christian assertiveness in which King advocated a revolution of values.

Accordingly, the giant triplet of racism, materialism, and militarism that caused people to value ownership, belittling personality by treating black people like things, must be transformed into an ability to respect personality, and to value all persons, blacks included, as human beings. Satyagraha, or ‘love force’ was key to this effort. It included an interpretation of the way of Jesus as described in the Sermon on the Mount, and the methods of Gandhi’s non-violent resistance.

The Montgomery movement gave Dr. King a global stage, and an international presence. He subsequently published five books: Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958); a collection of most requested sermons under the title Strength to Love (1963); Why We Can’t Wait(1963); an assessment of America’s priorities and a warning that they need to be re-ordered entitled Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (1967); and finally, The Trumpet of Conscience (1968), taken from his 1967 Massey Lectures delivered for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. 

His influence continues with further emphasis on the broader impact of white supremacy that is today recognized as a load bearing concept, housing multiple oppressions—racism, sexism, classism— in its practice of naming and stabilizing the racial world of the U.S. post-bellum imagination. Yet, it is also true that scholars question whether the U.S. democracy that King called to account is at all capable of being more than hegemonic, given that it was established with black people as contrast to its founders, which is to say, as non-human, and non-free, non-citizens. At the state level, the equivalent notion of “human” is the citizen, and despite King’s efforts to make those concepts, human and citizen, broad enough to include black people, scholars are doubtful that they can be legible in any other way than by contrast to black, which has historically been the default role of black life in a nation of “freedom and liberty for all.”

That withstanding, the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. yet remains in the Black social gospel interplay between religion, morality, law, and politics, summed up by the claim that justice is what love looks like in public.

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Dr. Williams received his Ph.D. in Christian ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary in 2011. Dr. Reggie Williams book Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance (Baylor University Press, 2014) was selected as a Choice Outstanding Title in 2015, in the field of religion. The book is an analysis of exposure to Harlem Renaissance intellectuals, and worship at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist on the German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, during his year of post-doctoral study at Union Seminary in New York, 1930-31. Dr. Williams’ research interests include Christological ethics, theological anthropology, Christian social ethics, the Harlem Renaissance, race, politics and black church life. His current work is an examination of the field of Christian ethics through the lens of Black studies.
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The Albert “Pete” Pero, Jr. and Cheryl Stewart Pero Center for Intersectionality Studies is hosting a special event on Monday, January 15, 2024 starting at 12pm CDT. Our annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration, (click here to register) it will begin with some worship and praise, be followed by a light reception, which will then lead into a showing of the short film Otis’s Dream. The afternoon will then end with a panel discussion with. Rev. Dr. Joanne Marie Terrell and Dr. Christopher D. Ringer from Chicago Theological Seminary and the Rev. Honorable William “Bill” Hall, Alderman of Chicago’s 6th Ward and Pastor of St. James Community Church.

To Sing While You Burn – Francisco Herrera

I’ve asked long-time contributor and blog manager Francisco Herrera to write something, and he doesn’t disappoint. Life in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is often hard for members of the Latiné community, and yet so many stay. Why? Because as so many people who live under oppression they turn to poetry and song to remind them of their humanity. Keeping this in mind, as Indigenous People’s Day signals the final week of Latiné History Month, read, comment, and share!

Rev. Dr. Linda E. Thomas, editor.

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Wanderer, there is no path
You make the path by walking. 
Stroke by stroke, line by line.

And it’s impossible for me to think about Latiné culture, let alone Spanish-accented Christianity in the Americas, without drowning myself in its poetry – y por eso, cuando pienso en mi fe, when I think about my faith – I always start with the above verse, here now in the original.

Caminante, no hay Caminos
Se hace camino al andar 
Golpe a golpe, verso a verso^[1]

With Latiné History Month almost done, Dia de Muertos/All-Saints Day less than one month away – not to mention the farce of ignorance and violence at play among conservative politicians in the United States – Antonio Machado’s words have a comforting fatalism perfect for my mood, and the mood of so many other Latinos in this country.

Love is poison, a lie.
Death taints everything.
Injustice is all there is.

Yet in the stubborn silence of continued life there is an odd dignity, a lyricism so pungent because its power springs from its inability to crack under hardship.

Me voy al transbordador
a descargar la carreta
I’m going to the ferry
to unload my cart

para cumplir con la meta
de mi penosa labor
so that I can finish
with my painful labor.

This is from the song El Carretero, “The Cart Driver,” (written by Guillermo Portables) immortalized in the 1997 documentary “The Buena Vista Social Club” – a simple story sung by an indigenous peasant (un guajíro) cart-driver in the Cuban countryside, working everyday so that he can afford to marry one day –its final refrain proof that existentialism means much more to the barrio than the academy.

Chapea el monte,
cultiva el llano
Recoge el fruto de tu sudor

Flatten the mountain,
cultivate the field
Reap the fruit of your sweat

By the Rivers of Babylon –
Michelle Meyers

But if – anglos queridos – you think there is hope to be found in these verses, think again. Even something oozing major-key merriment like the mariachi classic Camino de Guanajuato, from the golden days of Mexican cinema, leaves no room for such thinking.

Life is worth nothing.
Nothing is worth life.

La vida no vale nada.
No vale nada la vida.

It always begins by crying
and, likewise, ends crying.

Comienza siempre llorando
y así llorando se acaba.

That is why in this world
life is worth nothing.

Por eso es que en este mundo
la vida no vale nada.

And since, in Luther’s eyes, Satan has filled this world with sorrows and enemies I’d like to think this aesthetic would appeal to him, in part because he didn’t think that such hardship should necessarily lead to despair. In his bold commentary on Psalm 71 Luther insisted that in even in the darkest of times God would ever protect and guide us.^[2] And for this protection, this loyalty and the sure promise of justice, the Christian can still sing and give praise even when death has us up against a wall and by the throat.

Just look at my friend, the Rev. Nelson Rabell-González – pastor of La Iglesia Luterana Santa Maria – Peregrina, just called a little over one week ago – on October 1, 2023. On the surface this wouldn’t be too spectacular. Father Nelson is a pastor and skilled mission developer of some experience and of great fortitude. So much so that he started this church in March 2021, right in the middle of the pandemic.

Pastor Nelson Rabell-González on the day of his official call vote as pastor of the Iglesia Luterana Santa Maria Peregrina, sanding next to his wife Dr. Fabiola Ramos, their son Hiram (white shirt with palm trees), along with members of the congregation and the Vice President of the Sierra Pacific Synod, Simon Wong.

Except when he started it was known as
La Misión Luterana Latina.

Why the name change?

Because when Pastor Nelson preached #BlackLivesMatter in the Central Valley of California in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, a deeply conservative and racist region of the state known as ‘Cali-bama’, his previous congregation tried to silence him into signing an NDA, taking three months’ severance and leaving. But instead he refused to sign the NDA, resigned, and then left, taking the majority of the church’s Latino ministry members with him to form this church.

Then after making a significant impact in his synod because of the pandemic – organizing vaccination clinics and giving out $500 to struggling migrant families – he was nominated for bishop for the 2021 Sierra Pacific assembly.

But then the day before the elections he got an email from his bishop saying that he was accused of conduct “unbefitting a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America” and was told that he’d have to talk about this with the assembly if he accepted the nomination. He agreed, but when he did talk about it, his bishop didn’t think he shared enough info, so the bishop gave more info and discounted Rabell’s self-defense before the entire assembly.

Rev. Dr. Megan Rohrer the day of their installation on September 11, 2021.

Needless to say, he didn’t win the election, but the Rev. Dr. Megan Rohrer, a trans Lutheran pastor and activist with a long history of advocating for people the world had abused, did and many people – myself included – thought that now-Bishop Rohrer would do right by him.

But of course they didn’t.

Turns out that showing sympathy for an Afro Latino pastor forced to gut himself on unfounded accusations before his entire synod was too much of an ask. Worse? Rohrer was so upset with Rabell’s constant, public appeals for justice that they eventually fired him from his call at La Misión Luterana. This, effectively, meant that the church would close for good, but the congregation wasn’t having it. Furious that their pastor was fired on the Feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe of all days (December 12, 2021), a day of great importance to the Mexican and Mexican American membership of the church, they rose up in mass and marched out of the church in protest to found a new church…

La Iglesia Luterana Santa Maria – Peregrina
The Lutheran Church
of Holy Mary – Pilgrim

Reader, believe me, it gets worse, so much worse, because the trans, social justice pastor showed themselves to be no better than the most entitled white man. As bishop they did nothing but harass Pastor Nelson, even kicking him off the roster and hence stripping him of his ordination, slandered the people of Maria Peregrina in public and private, discounted and ignored their own staff people of color when they raised their concerns, and created such an atmosphere of distrust that many pastors in the Sierra Pacific lived in fear of losing their jobs if they criticized them openly.

And this from a bishop who once invited me to speak on a panel on “Intersectional Lutheranism” that highlighted intersectionality among Latino Lutherans. So clearly, they could talk the talk but not walk the walk.

But I’d seen it before.

For years I had been trying to get white LGBTQ leaders in our denomination to confront the racism among them and they never did. And Megan clearly was no different. And the months and months and months me and so many other Luteranos Latinos spent screaming into the void, sharing screenshots and emails and testimony of pain and abuse like the family members of so many desaparecidos in Argentina back in the day.

¡Amigos, lo que sufrimos!

But we kept on – kept on because despite the fact that the people who said they welcomed us kept abusing us, we were going to stay no matter what they said or did. We had created spaces of welcome and power that the gringos never could, and these spaces were now our homes and we wouldn’t just leave them. Even if they cast us down after lifting us up. Even after breaking every promise of Christian love and solidarity they had ever made to us.

We had been called by God to preach the Gospel and welcome people in love and no betrayal, no matter how thorough and evil, could deter us.

Mexican American rapper Snow Tha Product in the video
“Immigrants – We Get the Job Done.”

Mexican America rapper Snow Tha Product nails this sentiment during her part of The Hamilton Mix-tape’s high-power track “Immigrants (We Get the Job Done)” – pointing out the way that  people like us know the cost of making this new life, of following this call before us, and will continue to follow it no matter what. No matter how we are discounted and how people try to take credit for our work.

But there ain’t a paper trail
when you’re living in the shadows.
We’re America’s ghost-writers,
the credit’s only borrowed.
It’s a matter of time
before the checks all come
but – immigrants…
we get the job done.

And so Latinos have used writing and singing to help sustain us through endless empires who cared for nothing but our assimilation at best and our slaughter at worst – holding a steady flame of lyric and song before us as we marched through total darkness, abandoned in every kind of wilderness by people who said they’d support and protect us.

And we continue, still singing and laughing and loving, because we know that one day, while our tormentors revel in the songs of Zion and gorge themselves on the fruit of our violated souls, our Redeemer will come down to the rivers of Babylon and take us home – demanding payment on all of that credit drawn from the strength of our backs.^[3]

Or as that great poet of Puerto Rico, Residente, writes in the song El Aguante…

Por lo que fue y lo que pudo ser
For that which was,
and that which could have been

Por lo que hay y lo que puede faltar
For that which is, when what we want cannot be

Por lo que venga y por este instante
For what is coming, and right now in this moment

Levanta el vaso y a brindar por el aguante!
Lift high all your glasses!
Raise a toast to our resilience!

¡A brindar por el aguante!
Raise a toast to our resilience!

Amén

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Before coming to Chicago Francisco Herrera studied classical music (viola and orchestra conducting) in his hometown of Kansas City, Missouri and then Geneva, Switzerland. After feeling the call to ministry at his home church in Geneva, The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Geneva, he returned to the US to enter seminary in 2005, completing his M.Div. from Chicago Theological Seminary in 2012 and beginning his Ph.D studies at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago (LSTC)  in Fall of 2013. Starting in 2015, however, he began serious involvement as a strident voice for justice and inclusivity in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, first the program assistant for the Albert “Pete” Pero Multicultural Center at LSTC, then as the convener for #decolonizeLutheranism, next as a fundraiser for various individuals and organizations, and eventually (as he calls himself) a ‘freelance deacon for Christian agitation and education.’ In addition to his love of Lutheran theology, post-colonial/decolonial theory, and Christian socialism, he is dedicated to the application of insights from intersectionality to Christian community formation, especially through the work of Chicana feminist, Gloria Anzaldúa. He’s @PolyglotEvangel on Twitter, @PolyglotEvangel on Facebook, and when not on the socials – polymath and scatterbrain that he is, Francisco likes to write worship and devotional music, spend time giggling with his wife, and writes furiously in order to finish his dissertation on intersectionality and church planting so he can graduate with his PhD in May 2024.

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^[1] “Cantares” by Antonio Machado.
^[2] Luther Works, Vol. 24 pp 396-399.
^[3] Psalm 137.

OTHER LINKS

The Rev. Dr. Leah Schade, Professor of Preaching and Worship at Lexington Theological Seminary, wrote a series of thorough and easy-to-follow blog posts the length of Pr. Rabell’s ordeal. If you want to get the best overview of the entire struggle, months long and filled with ups and downs, click here and dig in.

Because the outcry against Megan Rohrer’s treatment of Pr. Rabell and La Misión Luterana Latina was so great, the head of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America – the Rev. Elizabeth Eaton – eventually commissioned a three person team to interview people in the Sierra Pacific Synod about the events leading to the destruction of the nine-month-old congregation. The Listening Team Report Regarding the Actions of the Sierra Pacific Synod, then, brought forth disturbing allegations of persistent racist behavior and administrative incompetence on Rohrer’s part.

Orlando ayer, tomorrow who knows? – Francisco Herrera

Francisco Herrera is no stranger to the blog, and when asked to share thoughts for Pride Month, he easily said “yes.” Tying the massacre of the queer Latiné community at the Pulse Night Club in 2016 with the current anti-trans legislation wracking two-thirds of the statehouses in the US, he reflects on pain, destruction, and exile – and the new life possible there with. Read, comment, and share!

Rev. Dr. Linda E. Thomas, editor

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Vigil for the victims of the Pulse Massacre – June 17, 2016.

I will never forget the shock that the Pulse massacre sent through me in the summer of 2016. On the eve of my fourth attendance at the Hispanic Summer Program – this time meeting in the very Latiné friendly Oblate School of Theology in the even more Latiné rooted San Antonio, Texas – being with other queer Latinos helped to ease the burden of fear and pain, but still, we struggled. Omar Mateen did more than take advantage of a “soft target” that horrid night in Orlando, Florida – he violated a sanctuary, a place where we as LGBTQ folk could be free – making the tragedy all the more total. In the hours that followed, then, Mark 13:14-19 looped itself in my brain… 

“When you see ‘the abomination that causes desolation’ standing where it does not belong—let the reader understand—then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. Let no one on the housetop go down or enter the house to take anything out. Let no one in the field go back to get their cloak. How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers! Pray that this will not take place in winter, because those will be days of distress unequaled from the beginning, when God created the world, until now—and never to be equaled again.”

And there we all were, drowning in the horrid desecration of the Temple of Jerusalem and the surrounding city, with its sea of refugees and dead and wounded, played out real-time among the 49 dead in Orlando, all of them brutally massacred in a temple of life and joy. Me and the other queer Latiné students had a moment of connection, mourning our dead and screaming that we didn’t know where to go next. We had each other, though, and could drain our sorrow, our fear, and weep together less than a week after the massacre and it got a bit better.

But in the hours and days following the killings a wicked pattern emerged.

First, most public discussion around Orlando centered on terrorism, with barely a mention that Pulse was a gay club. The buzz then switched to gun control, only to be shouted down by the NRA. But still more horrifying, and even among the most sympathetic mourners and many in the gay community itself, most discussions of the attack doggedly obscured the fact that the Orlando martyrs were people of color. So here was the Latiné queer community, once again, like the poor victims foretold in Mark 13 – our sanctuary made an abomination of desolation; pregnant with hope for life, nursing the hope for life, but running in fear because our holy of holies had been utterly destroyed and our wailing muzzled by a self-serving, self-deluding, and self-righteous public. 

My scriptural gut-reaction had proved to be, sadly, more fitting than I’d imagined.

But gracias a Jesucristo, the Latiné community knows that life is eternal – that the martyred and the murdered will rise again – and that we will never stop telling our stories despite drowning in eager censors and hails of bullets. And once again, the we will ever use our very own resurrected bodies, our resurrected dreams and hopes, to forever grind and dance and sing our songs so that we cannot be drowned out, can never be forgotten. And our dreams, our sanctuaries, our stories, will rise again despite any and all manner of silence and violence. Our names, too, are written in the Book of Life, after-all, and are gloriously read by Christ and proclaimed before God and all the angels in the heavens…

“The one who is victorious will, like them, be dressed in white. I will never blot out the name of that person from the book of life, but will acknowledge that name before my Father and his angels.” (Revelation 3:5). 

Fast forward to June 6, 2023 – almost seven years later – and now I’m participating in the peaceful end of yet another sanctuary, thankfully before its invasion and desecration, of a small community of internally displaced refugees fleeing Nashville, TN–soon to be born anew in a new land a three-hour drive from the Canadian border.

It hadn’t even been that long since its two leaders, the Revs. Alaina Kailyn Cobb and Jeannie Alexander, hosted a wedding at their house, ground zero for their community Earthfire Abbey. Hopping off a bus in Nashville thirty-six hours before the wedding in order to lend a hand, enjoy their company, and to savor the richness of their house, it was clear that not only was this a southern household with southern hospitality, but that every inch of it was dedicated to the most holistic sense of welcome I’d felt in years.

(the wedding night – truly a lovely evening. left-to-right, Rev. Jeannie Alexander, Rev. Alaina Ascenith Alexander, a very happy me)

Alaina taught me how to make a roux. Before that, her then-fiancee, Jeannie, asked for my help in preparing several massive baking pans filled with Basque oxtails. I felt so at home I even put up the photograph of my abuela, Maria Luisa, that I often carry with me on the house’s ancestral altar in the kitchen so she could witness everything we did that day.

(Mi abuela is on the far right)

And when I flew to New Jersey two days after the wedding, I felt so at home there I couldn’t wait to come back – come back and not only savor more of the plentiful food and hugs, but even give some back in return. Cook them some soup. Help feed their chickens.

It wasn’t going to happen though. Alaina is trans, Jeannie is queer, as were all of the supporters and friends of the Abbey, and as the political climate in Tennessee “just got worser and worser” they started making definitive plans to leave barely a month after the wedding. Worried out of my mind, I helped them set up a fundraiser to pay for home repair and moving cost and helped ease their worries through crowdfunding. It took some doing, but they signed on a house in mid-May and, plans in place for six months, they set a date for the move.

(Me and Alaina just before we started loading the U-haul)

Then there I was, June 6, 2023, in the throws of dissertation writing, but so worried for my friends that I took that overnight bus from Chicago to Nashville again, all so I could spend a little over half-a-day helping them load a cavernous U-haul. I met more of Jeannie and Alaina’s friends, too, and with them shared a last, precious meal before crawling back on the bus I’d crawled out of that morning and headed back north.

My heart in tatters, yes, but I felt deep gladness knowing that my friends would be safe. 

And, again, Scripture came to me – this time the words of Jeremiah (29:7), God commanding the Israelites in Babylon to “seek the welfare of the city where [they were] sent… into exile,” ordering them to “pray to the Lord on its behalf… for in its welfare [they would] find [their own] welfare.”

And as I sat on the bus, making a final 10-hour trek back to Chicago, I couldn’t help but think of saying to those that would hurt Alaina and those who love her…

THE PROUD MOVING TEAM

We will outlive you.

We may go into exile, but we will move and rebuild.

You may expose the lie of support that so many make to us, but God themselves will make a way to our freedom. And even if you kill us, we will rise again – be it in new homes and new friends and new dinner tables or in scarred-but-resurrected bodies. It is guaranteed to us in millions of songs, billions of poems, and in countless promises in the Bible.

And we don’t take those promises, God’s promises, lightly.

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Before coming to Chicago Francisco Herrera studied classical music (viola and orchestra conducting) in his hometown of Kansas City, Missouri and then Geneva, Switzerland. After feeling the call to ministry at his home church in Geneva, The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Geneva, he returned to the US to enter seminary in 2005, completing his M.Div. from Chicago Theological Seminary in 2012, beginning his Ph.D studies at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago (LSTC)  in Fall of 2013. Starting in 2015, however, he began serious involvement as a strident voice for justice and inclusivity in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, first as the convener for #decolonizeLutheranism, next as a fundraiser for various individuals and organizations, later (as he calls himself) a ‘freelance deacon for Christian agitation and education.’ In addition to his love of Lutheran theology, post-colonial/decolonial theory, and Christian socialism, he is dedicated to the application of insights from intersectionality to Christian community formation, especially through the work of Chicana feminist, Gloria Anzaldúa. He’s @PolyglotEvangel on Twitter, @PolyglotEvangel on Facebook, and when not on the socials – polymath and scatterbrain that he is, Francisco likes to write worship and devotional music, spend time giggling with his wife, and writes furiously in order to finish his dissertation on intersectionality and church planting so he can graduate with his PhD in May 2024.

LSTC Celebrates Juneteenth – Marvis Hardy

Juneteenth has been a big deal in the African American community, but it has taken on broader significance these last two years when US President Joe Biden made it a federal holiday. This month’s author, Marvis Hardy, gives a good overview of the history of Juneteenth for those new to the holiday. Please read, comment, and share and join the celebration!

Rev. Dr. Linda E. Thomas, editor

In June 2021, President Joe Biden signed a resolution proclaiming June 19^th as  “Juneteenth National Independence Day.” The name Juneteenth is a combination of June and 19^th, and recognizes June 19, 1865, as the date news of the end of slavery reached those enslaved in Texas and other states in the southwest. 

On the afternoon of June 19, 1865, U.S. Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, with 2,000 Union troops dressed in military red.  Maj. General Granger had been ordered to Galveston to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation, signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln, 2-1/2 years earlier. Yet, Galveston, Texas remained one of the last Confederate States where African Americans were still enslaved. According to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, “Texas was one of the seven Confederate States, and many slave owners had moved from other southern slave states to Texas because they knew they would be permitted to continue the practice of slavery, despite the Emancipation Proclamation.” Newly appointed President Andrew Johnson sent Granger to Galveston to deliver General Order No. 3, informing all Texans that, in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all enslaved peoples were now free. It was for this reason that Federal soldiers marched into Galveston, Texas to deliver the following order: 

The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.

Upon hearing the news, an estimated 250,000 formerly enslaved left the state immediately and headed north or to nearby states in search of family members who had been taken during slavery. Thereafter,  June 19^th became known as Emancipation Day, a symbolic date representing African American freedom, and the emancipation of slaves after the end of the Civil War.

In 1997, the Juneteenth flag was created to represent the slogan of the celebration, “the star of Texas bursting with new freedom through the land, over a new horizon.” 

 In January 1866, the first celebration kicked off when about 1,000 African American families gathered in Galveston.  And by June 1866, Black churches across the country, particularly in the South, began celebrating Juneteenth.  Also referred to as Black Independence Day, Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration commemorating the end of slavery in the United States.

The celebration of Juneteenth  has provided an opportunity to commemorate the Black experience and the contributions of African Americans to the building of the United States. In 2016, when First Lady Michelle Obama took the stage at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, she reminded America that the African American story is a story of how America was built. In her speech she stated;

“The story of this country… has brought me to this stage tonight, the story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, but who kept on striving and hoping and doing what needed to be done so that today I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves….”

And so, on this day June 19, 2023, the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago (LSTC) honors and celebrates Juneteenth. LSTC is unwavering in its commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion and Justice for all marginalized and oppressed communities. As a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, we strive to become an antiracist institution prioritizing transformational values over white institutional values. We invite members of our community to join us in honoring the legacy of those brave Americans who helped build this great nation and persevered despite overwhelming odds.

Happy Juneteenth!

Marvis Lisa Hardy is a power house. As a published author and journalist she has garnered awards from West Suburban Faith-Based Peace Coalition, the National Association of Black Journalists, and (as MLisa) publishes a social justice blog titled “JusticeJournals” which highlights social justice issues and public theology. As a bank community development officer, a nearly 30-year career culminating in being named president of Credit Administration and Lending at a premier Chicago bank, coupled with being a real estate investor herself, and a savvy business woman who is  the African American female to operate the South City Lakefront Concessions operating and managing the South Lakefront food concessions for the City of Chicago.   

A world traveler, MLisa is an alumnus of the American University in Paris (AUP) and La Sorbonne in Paris France and even works as the president of  the Black Alumni at AUP and serves on the Diversity Committee as a member of the Presidents Alumni Advisory Council at AUP.  She received her MDIV from McCormick Theological Seminary and a Master’s in Sacred Theology, with a focus on Education, from Chicago Theological Seminary in Chicago. She is currently working on a book with plans to continue her doctoral studies on the topic African Contributions to the Development of Christianity. 

Increased Devotion/Part Two: Reflection on Race and Religion from the Place of Gettysburg

Rev. Leonard M. Hummel, PH.D. and Rev. Dr. Teresa L. Smallwood JD, PH.D.

After a long hiatus, We Talk. We Listen is back – but we are taking it in a direction even more vital and poignant from years past.

Since becoming the director of the Albert “Pete” Pero, Jr. and Cheryl Stewart Pero Center for Intersectionality Studies, this blog is now going to be focusing on intersectionality – the ways that “categories of difference” such as race, gender, class, ability, and sexuality (etc…) interact and overlap and influence each other, for good or ill. The first of these posts, as we continue these closing days of Black History Month, focuses specifically on is by the Rev. Dr. Leonard M. Hummel, Ph. D. and the Rev. Dr. Teresa L. Smallwood JD, Ph. D. and the historical-political and racial-political implications of arguably the most famous battleground of the US Civil War – Gettysburg. Read, comment, and share!

Rev. Dr. Linda Thomas

Professor of Theology and Anthropology; Director, Albert “Pete” Pero, Jr. and Cheryl Stewart Pero Center for Intersectionality Studies

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^{Following the deadliest battle (over a three-day period) of the Civil War in 1863, many prominent U.S. leaders have visited the grounds of Gettysburg to reflect on the meaning of that battle for America, both then and now.   Standing in its new cemetery four months after the slaughter had ceased, Lincoln called for a new birth of freedom to ensure meaning for those deaths.  In March of 1963, John F. Kennedy toured its park, and, later, Lyndon B. Johnson gave his own address on race and freedom where Lincoln earlier had stood.}

^{However, as we noted in the first installment of this Blog, a President who had announced that he would deliver a Gettysburg Address in November of 2013, 150 years after Lincoln had done so, Obama did not do so–for reasons that have never been made public.}

^{As we shared in our earlier entry, through the activities of anti-slavery civic and religious leaders, underground railroad conductors,and an African American community whose members risked enslavement/re-enslavement, “Before the war came . . . Gettysburg had primed to respond to issues of race/racism; slavery/freedom; suffering/consolation for suffering.”}

^{In this installment of “Increased Devotion,” we reflect on race and religion from the place of Gettysburg from the time following the battle until now.  We tell this story of Gettysburg as one of endurance and hope amidst the persistence of racism. Endurance and hope amidst racism had been the experience of Frederick Douglass before the war and of his unfinished work of war against racism that continued in post-bellum years—including at his Gettysburg lecture in the Agricultural Hall there on January 25, 1869.}

Gettysburg’s Agricultural Hall, circa 1950

^{Much could be said about Douglass’s address at Gettysburg—and much has been said by Codie Eash about this lecture in which the orator linked the revolutionary work of the 16th century Dutch Prince, William of Orange, with the revolutionary new birth of freedom called for by Lincoln six years earlier.}

^{But much also must be noted about the racist remarks that Douglass—who had received death threats when he had spoken elsewhere—had laid before him by one local newspaper, the Gettysburg Compiler, before his January address: “The negro is not the white man’s equal, and no attempt to force him upon the white man, .. . can ever be successful.” (The Gettysburg Compiler, January 15, 1869, 2). And as Eash has painstakingly and painfully documented, the worst racist epithets of both his era and our own were directed at him by this same newspaper following his Gettysburg address.}

^{After the Civil War, amidst the failure of the United States to ensure the Civil Rights of African Americans, Black Americans throughout the United States relied on many resources to survive and thrive—including, if not especially, leaders, teachers and organized religious life. And so did many African Americans in Gettysburg – Among such leaders was Basil Biggs (1819–1906).}

Basil Biggs

Throughout the borough’s post-bellum life, there have been many such leaders and teachers who acquired wealth following the battle from his oversight of the interment of fallen Union soldiers, and then, with these earnings, real estate.

Not satisfied with his own financial security, Biggs transported black Gettysburg citizens to the polls in 1870 to ensure that the words of the 15th Amendment had not been adopted in vain but, rather, might be made flesh.

Throughout the history of Gettysburg, many teachers emerged to serve the black community. Following the war, the first was Lloyd Watts (1835-1918) who was a veteran of the 24th United States Colored Troops and following the war, a dedicated instructor of young persons. Along with Biggs, he helped found the Fraternal Order, Sons of Good Will, who provided that provided burial of U.S.C.T soldiers.

And, along Biggs, Watts was a leader in Saint Paul’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, Zion.

^{Following the battle of Gettysburg, its battleground became a place of tourism for many Americans.  In the late 1800s/early 1900s, many visitors to Hallowed Ground often found much pleasure with picnics, excursions, recreation—and, for a minority, occasional minor misbehaving.  During this same period, Blacks from nearby locales also traveled to Gettysburg.  Many who did so journeyed from Baltimore across the Mason-Dixon line.}

^{African-American Tourists from Baltimore}

William Francis Penn (kneeling in front) 1842-1 Feb 1925 one of two colored (early 1920’s) Battlefield guides shown with an expedition of tourists from Baltimore, Md. Mervin Henry Winfield Jones were the other colored Battlefield Guide. (note the badge on his left shoulder)

^{On occasion, some Black Baltimore church leaders chastised their flocks for making this pilgrimage—perhaps for their focus on having fun and, thereby, for not lifting up uplift.  And some Gettysburg whites were discriminating in directing their attention toward those few black tourists whose spirited recreational activities “broke boundaries” rather than also minding that a significant number of white tourists also did so.  In the end, however, most Gettysburg whites appreciated the money spent by all African-American visitors even if a few did not appreciate any of the visiting African-Americans who spent it. (Jim Weeks, Gettysburg: Memory, Market, and an American Shrine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003, 90-98)}

^{After the war and up until now, tourists have not been the only groups to journey to Gettysburg:}

Ku Klux Klan Annual Convention, Gettysburg, 1925

^{Threats by the Klan to appear in the borough continue now—threats that on certain occasions have resulted in their making appearances,and sometimes not.  However, in all instances, these threats have aimed to terrorize by the very process of threatening to appear.}

^{In the first installment of this blog, one of us wrote,}

^{“The battle of Gettysburg is arguably the turning point of the American Civil War and is unarguably the most iconic event of that war and its many meanings.  Among those many meanings is the particular significance of Gettysburg for white racism.”}

^{The meaning of the “Klan at Gettysburg” for white racism manifests itself in the informed judgment of the Louisiana State University historian Gaines Foster’s that, in the post-bellum South, the hooded Ku Klux Klan often portrayed themselves as the original Ghosts of Gettysburg—that is, they donned spooky garb to represent Confederate soldiers slain at Gettysburg who had returned from the dead to wreak revenge on emancipated blacks.  Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, The Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South: 1865 to 1913, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987, 48).}  

^{And in her essay, Haunted Histories: A Cultural Study of the Gettysburg Ghost Trade, Pamela Cooper-White has argued that, hovering above all the fanciful ghost tours that float around Gettysburg, the real ghost that haunts the borough—and the U.S.A.—is the unhealed trauma of racism then and now.}

^{In the previous installment, we noted that, before the war, leaders like Samuel Simon Schmucker and Daniel Payne led the church and society in addressing racial justice through the lens of religion?  What has been the response to the seminary after the war?}

^{After the war, the seminary’s response to race and religion was much like its reaction to the battle itself which swept over its grounds.  Summarizing the period from this immediate aftermath of battle until well into the start of the twenty-first century, the late Frederick Wentz, a leading historian of this seminary, commented, “The Seminary–intent for its 175 years upon training leaders for the Lutheran Church–has not cultivated the story of its involvement in the battle..[i]}

^{Many others would concur that from the time of the battle until now, Gettysburg Seminary has engaged in a kind of collective forgetting, not remembering, of the many violent, sad, and compassionate occurrences on its grounds, so that it might instead focus on preparing its students for ministry. Until recently, that is.}

^{It is no wonder to both of us—one, an African American, lesbian woman currently living in Gettysburg, PA and, the other, a non-black cisgender man now living in the rural Minnesota where some Confederate flags do fly}

^{–that President Barack Obama did not attend the 2013 celebration of the Gettysburg address. One reason is obvious. It has very little to do with Obama’s speech making capacity, as George E. Condone, Jr. of the Atlantic opines. It is a simple calculation of safety. One of us had been in Gettysburg less than one month when she was warned to back my car into the park at her home so that people could not see the “Biden/Harris” sticker on her bumper. No speculation was needed. It was a clear indication that certain political views, indeed worldviews, are not wholly tolerated here. Fortunately, that has proven less a threat and more an invitation to engage. However, for a sitting president whose ontological being was questioned from his birthplace to his intellectual fitness, it is not hard to see how such a decision could be made. Weighing the circumstances as they currently exist in America, one can see how safety is an issue generally for many non-white Americans. While we acknowledge that much has changed in the centuries since the Gettysburg address, specifically regarding race relations in America, much has remained the same. According to African Americans during the Gettysburg Campaign (U.S. National Park Service), “Gettysburg’s black population made its escape. Abraham Brian, a farmer on Cemetery Ridge, left with his family. Basil Biggs, a veterinarian, made a hasty retreat, as did Owen Robinson, a retailer of oysters and ice cream. They knew … better than anyone, that Gettysburg was not safe for people of color.”}

^{In some places in America, presently, it may be noticeably worse. As evidence to this fact, January 6, 2021, looms large in our theological imaginary.}

^{At the Capitol Insurrection, there were folks carrying the Bible while marching in lockstep with folks carrying a hangman’s noose. Why? The ‘theological crisis’ that this fact alone conjures marries well with the thesis in Mark A. Noll’s book The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. Noll illumines the paradox that both sides of the battle cited the Bible as their inspiration for the fight. The proslavery contingency and the anti-slavery advocates both relied upon biblical authority to support their stance in the war. The Bible has been used for millennia to support radically oppositional views. Abraham Lincoln commented “In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God can not be for, and against the same thing at the same time” (88–89) The interesting thing about this observation is that despite its obvious veracity, the phenomenon continues. In a class with four women currently in ministry, three of whom are pastors, the instructors learned what blacks living in Gettysburg, PA before, during, and after the Gettysburg battle confronted as part of their lived theology: hate-talk disguised as God-talk is still hate.} 

^{The presence of both icons—the Bible and a hangman’s noose recalls the tensions that were obvious in the Civil War—a fight over who is legitimately a human, who can participate in this government, and who should be relegated to permanent involuntary servitude with all its brutality and terror.  These are questions that earlier leaders such as Samuel Simon Schmucker and Daniel Payne engaged in on the grounds of the seminary at Gettysburg and which the seminary on the Gettysburg campus is called on to engage now.}

^{The display of the Confederate flag is another icon of the Civil War, which, quite frankly, unmistakably harkens back to the time and place fraught with treachery and perfidy so dynamic that it caused fissures in the American psyche plausibly evident in present generations.  As we noted earlier , we understand the trauma of Gettysburg to be the ghost that not only haunts this borough but also the ghost that takes on flesh which  visits both the nation’s capital and the nation itself.}

^{Americans committed to the acrimony of a bygone age, (July 1-3, 1863), sought to reenact its reign of terror on the nation in 2021. Reminiscent of the battle of Gettysburg, the rancor displayed on January 6, 2021, fills the anachronistic lacuna, which fuels disparate winds in government, politics, society, and faith.} 

^{At the Gettysburg campus of United Lutheran Seminary (ULS), one of us co-taught a course with Rev. Dr. Martin Zimmann entitled “Let’s Talk: Racial Reckoning in Ministry Context,” where we engaged our students in an intensive week of critical thinking around race relations. Through this “course for church leaders either engaged or preparing to engage in conversations about race in America within their ministry context, we posed the following questions: How do we walk with people from white fragility to white humility? How can we help folks understand that Critical Race Theory and The 1619 Project are the truth that sets us free from fear and encourages us to see the world around us with Christocentric and inclusive focus?” Faced with congregants who express the kind of hostility pictured in these images where challenges to authority, physical violence, terrorism, and mayhem are freely engaged, current ministry students face the challenge of faith versus fear. This fact was affirmed in a life-learning seminar collaboratively produced this summer by ULS faculty, life-learning director, and Peter Miele, director of the Seminary Ridge Museum and Education Center. We assembled over 15 persons to the Gettysburg campus for a 2-day conference entitled Sites of Conscience in concert with the International group. The pastors who attended were all part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) or affiliated with the seminary as alumni. All expressed frustration at how to engage the struggle around divisions stemming from race and racism. As a “site of conscience” the battle ground and the museum offer much to assuage the concerns of those in clerical positions, if the location serves as a site of conscience–a place destined to bring people to truth and reconciliation as opposed to a place where people come to square off with old divisional lines where reenactments seek to lean into the divisiveness from two centuries ago.}

^{Our country has once again internalized its own fears such that building a wall of separation from perceived enemies is promoted as a sufficient method for national protection, in theory, against immigrants who seek our refuge; when in reality, a wall is a metaphor for the fears within that give rise to the same people who promote building the wall literally climbing the walls to mimic the very thing they name as a threat.}

^{The fear that drives them transfers to those whom they seek to conquer. That same fear drove this country to war against itself  from 1861 to 1865 and it is postured to do so again. Paradoxically, we call that war “Civil.” How do we combat this fear? Fear is not of God. Fear is an emotion that characterizes a lack of faith. The apostle Paul put it best in his second letter to the young preacher, Timothy, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and self-control.”}

^{Our students at United Lutheran Seminary engage with several conscience forming exercises to prepare them for this work. The students in the racial reckoning course completed a media project helping them focus critically on the subtle messages of racism, sexism. xenophobia, intolerance and the like in media. One student discovered in her work on the “racialization of media” that “while narrative frames may not directly change the views of readers, readers who consistently rely on single news sources risk falling into an echo chamber, where their prior beliefs and shared assumptions are reinforced.” (Duxbury et. al., 2018) This fact helped our students discern the many ways that marketing strategies intentionally tap into the psychology of people to drive racialized narratives.} 

^{Gettysburg College has an exemplary teacher in Professor Scott Hancock whose valiant efforts to confront hate-talk speaks to the societal corrective that is needed. Professor Hancock’s dialogue with oppositional voices offers pastors and lay people a modicum of resistance narrative that is powerful and transformative. In one exchange Professor Hancock stood flatfooted on the Gettysburg battle grounds to speak truth to power by saying “that the organizing principle for the Confederate government, the reason there was a battle here was because of slaves.” Those in the crowd shouted back, “it was not!” Scott defiantly continued, “yes, it was!,” in response to a chorus of “no, no, no, it was about money!” Scott retorted “What money? Money generated by black men and women!” When this country can square its conscience with that truth, we can start the journey to racial reckoning.}

In these reflections on race and religion from the place of Gettysburg, we have striven to speak of endurance and hope amidst the persistence of racism in the United States of America.  In doing so, we have striven to illustrate that the place of Gettysburg offers a story of endurance and hope for not just to this particular town but for all towns, cities and places in the nation itself.  As Lincoln argued in his Gettysburg Address that meaning of Gettysburg is for increased devotion to a new birth of freedom for all Americans (lest those who died for this unrealized freedom might have done so for no real purpose at all), we here address all who listen that all of us are called to devote ourselves to the unfinished work for a free, just and democratic America.

We close by noting one source of our own “audacious hope” in the determined will of President Barack Obama to find, after all, more than one way to address Gettysburg in November of 2013.

One way was to produce his own recitation of President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address:

And his other way was to compose a handwritten letter of his reflections on that address.  President Obama addressed racism and slavery:

He [Lincoln] knew that even a self-evident truth [“all men are created equal”] was not self executing; that blood drawn by the lash [A reference to Lincoln’s reference to slavery in his Second Inaugural Address in 1865] was an affront to our ideals.

And then President Obama called on all of us to devote ourselves to the unfinished work for a free, just and democratic America because…

“…it is through the accumulated toil and sacrifice of ordinary men and women — those like the soldiers who consecrated that battlefield — that this country is built, and freedom preserved.”

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[1] Codie Eash, “Douglass at Gettysburg, 1869” (Unpublished Manuscript, 2021).  Codie Eash is the Director of Education and Museum Operations, Gettysburg Seminary Ridge Museum and Education Center 61 Seminary Ridge, Gettysburg, PA., 1732

[i] Frederick K. Wentz, “Foreward” in Michael A. Dreese, The Hospital on Seminary Ridge at the Battle of Gettysburg(Jefferson, NC, London: McFarland & Co., Inc., 2002), 1.

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Rev. Dr. Leonard M. Hummel is Professor Emeritus of Pastoral Theology at United Lutheran Seminary (Gettysburg/Philadelphia) and currently serves as Hospice Chaplain/New Ulm Medical Center, New Ulm, MN and as Adjunct Professor of Pastoral Care, New Brunswick Theological Seminary, New Brunswick, New Jersey.  In 2017-2018, he was the Visiting Professor of Religion at Augustana University and the Visiting Scholar at the Zygon Center for Religion and Science at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago.  At Gettysburg Seminary, he was Co-Project Leader of the Templeton Foundation funded AAAS grant, “Science for Seminaries.”  His co-authored book, Chance, Necessity, Love: An Evolutionary Theology of Cancer was published by Wipf & Stock in 2017.  He is a co-editor of Gettysburg:the Quest for Meaning, (Seminary Ridge Press, 2015) and was the Faculty Liaison to the Gettysburg Seminary Ridge Museum.  A native of Baltimore, Maryland, he has lectured in South Africa and widely elsewhere on race and religion in the American Civil War.  Hummel is a graduate of Haverford College (A.B.), Yale Divinity School (M. Div., S.T.M.), and Boston University (Ph. D. in Religious and Theological Studies).

Dr. Teresa L. Smallwood, a native of North Carolina, earned a B.A. degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she majored in Speech Communications and Afro-American Studies followed by a Juris Doctor degree from North Carolina Central University School of Law in 1985. Answering the call to ministry, she earned a Master of Divinity degree at Howard University School of Divinity in 2010, followed by a PhD degree from Chicago Theological Seminary in 2017. Her PhD concentration in Theology, Ethics, and Human Sciences informs her multivalent methodological approach to racial justice. She was the Postdoctoral Fellow and Associate Director of the Public Theology and Racial Justice Collaborative at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Dr. Smallwood now serves as the James Franklin Kelly and Hope Eyster Kelly Associate Professor of Public Theology at United Lutheran Seminary in Gettysburg, PA. Dr. Smallwood is licensed and ordained to public ministry in the Baptist tradition and most recently served as social justice minister for New Covenant Christian Church in Nashville, TN under the pastoral leadership of Rev. Dr. Judy Cummings. 

Blessed Are You Among Women – Rev. Alaina Kailyn Cobb

What does Mary and mother mean to you when when society doesn’t even see you as a woman – though you are? Sanctuary‘s founding pastor, Rev. Alaina Kailyn Cobb, shares her thoughts about Mary, love, sexual assault and consent, and how Mary’s love for Jesus fills her with wonder and awe – submitted as we near the night of our saviours birth. Read, comment, and share.

Francisco Herrera – PhD student, Interim Editor

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TW – extensive discussion of rape in Biblical context, transphobia

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I have no womb. 

I am barren. 

Let’s establish that from the beginning. 

In part because of this I have what I think is an understandably difficult relationship with Mary. I have often found depictions of her saccharine and unrelatable. I’ve written poetry about it. I have talked to friends about it. I find the Christmas season’s focus on birth and pregnancy narratives, at times, emotionally unbearable. I’m the woman who simply cannot attend every advent service because I find the salt in the wound particularly astringent this time of year. 

Mary is a trying subject for me.

I say that because I want it to be clear that I am not writing this out of some personal need to elevate her. And while I find this season difficult neither do I wish to demean her because of my own struggles. Rather I am writing this out of concern for a woman that I feel has been wronged. I am writing this as a woman who also knows what it feels like to be stripped of her agency, whose grace has been seen as insufficient, who has been made into something other than what I am by a church that does not know what to do with me.

And most assuredly… I am writing this as a woman who has also survived rape.

The idea that Jesus came about as the result of the rape of Mary is not new. In fact I’m certain those arguments began before he was born. Even in modern theological circles the idea itself is not rare, it’s just not often discussed or at the very least not often discussed to my personal satisfaction. Because while most theologians get caught up in how this complicates their Christology, no one seems to notice the woman at the center of this. She is relegated to a footnote in the discussion, just another rape victim. Just another woman stripped of her humanity.

And despite my best efforts to avoid her, that is not what I have come to see. 

To me, even in my seasonal bitterness, I cannot help but be shaken by the revolutionary holy strength of Mary. Even in my barrenness, I cannot help but be in awe of the joyous rebellion of daring to believe in the divinity of a child conceived in violence. And if I can see it so clearly then why are those discussions missing? 

Even Luke’s shoehorned consent cannot cover up the risks forced upon Mary, so why are we not talking about it? Why do we ignore what must have been a maelstrom of emotional turmoil? Why are we not talking about what all of this must have been like for a first century woman?

When we ignore Mary, when we remove her agency in the middle of her own story, when we ignore the pain and fear and frustration and shame that must have been heaped upon her, we miss the actual miracle at the heart of Christmas: a young woman dejected and victimized, with every reason to hate the cause and constant reminder of her struggle that was growing inside her, instead called him divine. 

Called him blessed. 

Called him the future savior of the world. 

She dared to dream that this curse was her blessing and in so doing blessed the whole of creation.

If we believe in a God of love, then how is this not a more fitting narrative? Does it not make more sense? Is it not so much more in line with the character of the God revealed in Christ? 

We can talk about power dynamics, we can talk about Mary’s supposed age, we can talk about tainted consent, about patriarchal structures of oppression, there are so many angles to consider. But the question I come back to, is which reveals more about the character of God and what fits the story of Jesus elsewhere? Is it condescending to be with us through a virgin birth in an immaculate conception or is it a young woman deciding to love a child forced upon her so deeply and with such holy fury that he grew into a man possessed of that love?  

And furthermore what would have become of Jesus born of Mary’s Uterus if she had not dreamed of loving him? If she had not transmuted the rage and hatred deep within her body into love, into the water of life he floated in?

I do not believe we would be having this discussion. 

But she did.

And so I, a lifelong Protestant who has always had a problem with Mary, have found myself with very high mariology indeed. 

Precisely because I believe in her rape.  

It’s through that understanding I find myself calling her Mary the Mother of God because she birthed love long before she birthed the Christ. I see her easily as Mary Most Holy for she took the sins of this world upon her body and used it to feed her child. I gladly adore Mary Queen of Heaven still bearing the scars of the conception of God in her vagina, smiling upon a son who would perform the miracles she taught him? When I lose the one dimensional “vessel” that patriarchs have always sought to condense us down to and I look upon Mary truly full of Grace; How can I look away?

So yes, I have a complicated relationship with Mary. I still can’t stomach the Mary we sing about, the one we put on christmas cards and rosaries. But the one who limped home carrying the pain of a world that had no place for her? The one who cried herself to sleep and begged God that her period would come? The one who birthed God in her heart? That woman will always have a place in my own heart.

She knows what heartache feels like, and she knows how to make it into something that can heal the world. 

________________________________________________________

Rev. Alaina K. Cobb is is a mother, minister, theologian, activist, poet, trans woman, anarchist, mystic, anti-fascist and Interfaith Pastor and Director of Sanctuary – a collaborative effort between queer and trans activists, ministers, and organizers to provide a space of healing, education, and resistance. Raised in fundamentalist Pentecostalism, as a young girl she began a lifelong obsession with theology in her quest to understand who she was and how her transness and bisexuality fit into her faith – and since transitioning, realizing the startling lack of pastoral care and affirming faith resources for her community, she pursued ordination as a way to serve those who could never feel safe within the bounds of the traditional church. Co-Chair of the Leadership Council of the Progressive Christian Alliance and Founder of the Transgender Crisis Ministry Network.

Have You Seen Mary? – Madena Sophia

As Advent ends and Christmas begins, We Talk, We Listen is going to be presenting a series of reflections on Mary – the mother of Jesus. Mary receives short schrift in most Protestant communities, and yet our faith would be impossible without her. Madena Sophia, a student at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, MN, starts the series – reminding the reader that in her day, Mary was likely seen as scandalous or questionable and how depicting her as a paragon of virtue disrepsects the fullness of her power. Read, comment, and share

Francisco Herrera, PhD student, Interim Blog Editor

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I remember the first time a preacher included teaching about context in the sermon, I was in my 30s. I remember that for the first time, the people and the stories became vividly real and not just caricatures. It also helped me to see the Mary’s and Martha’s and Hagar’s in my life and context.

When we read Biblical text, do we do so as though we are entering into a fictional existence in a far-off place with fictional characters playing a role for our entertainment or do we allow the text to shift our eyes to our own surroundings and to the people and situations around us? Do we make super heroes of these characters because we “know how the story ended?”

Growing up and into adulthood, the only teaching and preaching I had heard about Job was about patience and faith and the victory of a life redeemed.

Until I began to study Job for myself, I didn’t know that Job didn’t just skip and whistle his way through his trauma. No, Job didn’t do the spiritual bypassing that negated his trauma, his loss, his depression, his despair, his suicidal ideation. No, Job shook his fist at God in agony. Job asked questions.

Job cursed the day he was born.

It is easy for us to look at this allegory without allowing ourselves to really sit in the grief and what it might have been like to live that existence. You see, we know how that story ends, so we rest in the comfortable victory without allowing ourselves to find the sacred and holy that was found in the “dark night of the soul.”

What does this have to do with Mary, you might ask? We do the same thing with other ministry leaders of history. We make heroes out of them. We create a perfected ideal of who they were. We recreate them to look like, sound like, act like, and think like us. We are so far removed from their reality that we don’t see them for who they really were and because we don’t see them for who they really were, we can’t see them walking amongst us today.

Have you seen Mary?

I asked people through a Facebook post to tell me what came to mind when they thought of Mary. I asked that people not spend too much time, I wasn’t looking for an essay. I just wanted the first words or images that came to mind when people thought of Mary, mother of Jesus…according the Christian tradition, the mother of the savior of the world – and here’s what they said:

Faithful-Underappreciated
“You have filled the hungry with all good things and left the wealthy no part”
Mary did you really know?
Resilience
Trusting and believing
Young and scared
Rape*
Powerful
Called
Peaceful, in spite of her “unacceptable” condition
Wisdom; chosen to uniquely suffer; change agent
My mother and abuela, raising and protecting a family from poverty,
privation.
Momma
Presence
A child
Young, courageous, connected (relationship with Elizabeth)
Her Magnificat
Constant/Unyielding
The Holy Spirit and the 4 th member of the trinity*
Ready…
Willing participant in an unknown plan
Confused about her biological makeup…
A big heart
Holy vessel
Vulnerability x2
Humble
Cherished

Please take a moment to reflect on these words.

Take a deep inhale…and exhale…now, sit in the stillness for a bit as you think of Mary and these words. What comes to mind for you now? What images do you see? Who do you see? Jot down what you hear, see, and feel.

Mary was a poor, Jewish teenager from Galilee. Mary had agency and a choice as to whether or not she wished to participate. If you have ever been seduced by the spirit, it is difficult to think that her body was simply used as a receptacle as opposed to a willing participant. Mary was a radical, teenage, badass Black woman. She could have said, “no” to an ask that was beyond conceivable to most…still is. I wonder if she had a flood of realization once she had said, “yes.”

What did it really mean for the everyday living of her life? Everyday, the sideways looks she must have gotten. The mumbles she must have heard. The people that walked away and betrayed her, the ones that didn’t believe her. The ones that didn’t value her because they didn’t value the body the message was coming in.

Behold Mary’s words in the Magnificat:

My soul magnifies the Lord
And my spirit rejoices in God my Savior;
Because He has regarded the lowliness of His handmaid;
For behold, henceforth all generations shall call me blessed;
Because He who is mighty has done great things for me,
and holy is His name;
And His mercy is from generation to generation
on those who fear Him.
He has shown might with His arm,
He has scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart.
He has put down the mighty from their thrones,
and has exalted the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich He has sent away empty.
He has given help to Israel, his servant, mindful of His mercy
Even as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his posterity forever.

When I read this and think of Mary, not the Westernized version of Mary, but the real and raw Blackity Blackness of Mary, I think of a 15 year old Sudanese girl I heard speak at an event at George Floyd Square this Summer. She spoke with a similar fire of wisdom far beyond her years. The confidence she had as she paced and spoke words that make her a target for attack.

She said, “yes.”

Have you seen Mary?

Maybe you have seen a Black pregnant teenager in your church or community. Maybe you might even know of a Black pregnant teenager who can’t identify who impregnated her. What words do you use to describe her? What words or images do you think of when you see her? Have you observed the reality of her life? What does that look like?

Did you think Mary would have a life like that?

Have you seen Mary?

Have you seen the mothers of the unarmed Black people who keep getting murdered in the streets and in their homes and out for jogs and in other ways enjoying God’s creation? Have you seen their grief on the news? Have you seen them cry out to God? How about the mothers of the prophets who are slain? The activists, the organizers? The Freddy Hamptons and the Dr. Kings and all of those whose names are not as well known. When you see these mothers, what words and images come to mind? Do you use the same words to define these Black mothers? These Marys? Have you observed their lives in grief and has that observation led you to think of Mary’s grief at the state sanctioned murder of her son, Jesus.

As Christians, we talk all the time about whether or not we are seeing Jesus in others. Might I call us to also begin to see the Marys who live amongst us.

Have you seen Mary?

_______________________________________________

Madena is a budding Womanist Theologian who has completed 3 years of theological work at Luther Seminary. This Fall, Madena was Endorsed by the SE Iowa Synod of the ELCA, however she has decided to leave the ELCA Candidacy process to pursue ministry outside of the institutional church. Madena has a passion for all things Spirit related and is a dedicated prayer warrior, intercessor, and healer. Madena has facilitated racial healing workshops for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, Bodies of Culture), facilitating work to unlearn the myths of white body supremacy, and is currently developing an online ministry entitled “Living Inverted: Following Jesus’ Lead.”

The Cross at El Rio Grande: A Reflection on shame and grace – Vicar Sergio Edison Rodriguez

Rivers are gates, crossings, borders. In this next reflection for Latinx History Month, vicar and Latinx theologian, Sergio Edison Rodriguez, shares how his faith, sexuality, and vocation came to light along the banks of two rivers in Texas. Please read, comment, and share!

Francisco Herrera – PhD student, Interim Blog Editor

El Rio Bravo – the Rio Grande

El Rio Grande

El Rio Bravo

Un Rio en mi mente, espantosa, poderosa °

The Rio Grande, the murky, treacherous bridge between two countries, haunts me nightly with its ageless specter; ageless as the flow of life that is God. This specter carries a force that continues to shape me and ensnare my imagination even as I now serve a congregation as a pastoral intern in Houston, TX. I grew up near this river but if you were to ask me where I am from, I hardly know what to say. Born in Hidalgo, TX, I consider my identity to be formed by this river as a bridge between this land I know and a land that my heart aches over. This river captures my sense of belonging and my way of seeing this world in what folks have called a thin-places where heaven and the world meet. Then the world smells and feels a bit like heaven. I would rather think that the specter of this river follows me in a different fashion. We call it Nepantla[1] where the otherworldly and this-worldly places meet but resolve differently (rather do not resolve). They stand in-tension that leads to confusion, disorientation, loss of direction, familia and self. Simul Justus et peccator[2] but keep the peccator at full force.

the Brazos River

I fled to Waco to start my undergrad degree with the hopes that I would flee the grasp of this river upon my imagination. The Brazos river would be for me the waters of salvation, a new birth into a new world of boundless possibilities; I am my own person with my own thin-places. So, I sought to conform to my fellows, adopt a nickname that English speakers could easily pronounce, join a fraternity, recover a form of Roman Catholicism unlike what I had grow up with. I fled this river traga-familias[3] because I desperately yearned to swim upon my own waters of sexual freedom. As a gay Latino, I craved this gift of new life where I could authentically live into my identity as a believer without the stigma and homophobic aspects of my faith-culture. Yes, I fled El Rio, my familia and form of iglesia because I had the privilege of being able to cast aside this tension and plunge head-first into the aguas of the Brazos River. Of course, El Rio Grande does not easily let one escape its totalizing grasp. But I grew painfully aware that no matter how far I could swim away from el Rio, other folks clearly saw me for who I am; a Mexican-American. I became Brown by the banks of the Brazos River. I became aware of the drops of water that slowly trickled down my back, whose flow goes on like endless song.

So, I felt compelled to find some solace outside of the Brazos (with all its cultural trappings and shouts of “Sic’ Em Bears!”) and el Rio Grande. I became a religion major, being drawn to the breath and depth of images from the entirety of Western Christendom. I discovered Bartolomé de las Casas and his work as the Bishop of Chiapas. I read Silence and wrestled with mystery of Christ’s presence. I uncovered Gutierrez and saw the pages of my life near El Rio Grande come alive with God’s life and grace. I faced the specter of the river, its wounds upon my memory, as I read page after page of The Death of Josseline. The injustice, the anguish, the thirst and the horror of the Sonoran Desert signaled for me the quality of the thin-place along El Rio Grande. Instead of nails, there are craigs. Nopales[4] for thorns. The endless sands, the old, rugged wood of the cross.

I wanted to escape the shame of this cross I carried upon my back. I wanted to toss off the mortal coil that drug me unto the death-dealing embankment of El Rio Grande. I wanted not to be associated with the painful memories of poverty and privilege, of living on both sides of la Frontera[5] but seen as coming from neither, of the violence of the Cartels, of being seen as a maricon[6] but never gay. For me, the shame became to much to bear and the overwhelming waters of this river too strong to carry on forward with life. And so, I planned to put an end to my life and to reach some resolution to this shame I felt, the specter would again claim another to its depths of misery. Of course as you read this, it is abundantly apparent that something within me resolved this tension. I am alive and in a much better place. For that, I thank another fellow friend who accompanied me through this challenging time of my life and who likewise walked within this challenging Nepantla.

By the time I voluntarily entered the hospital, I already identified as a Lutheran and read extensively Luther’s Theology of the Cross by Von Loewenich, C.F. W. Walther’s The Proper Distinction Between Law and Gospel, the Apologia and Augsburg Confession and the Heidelberg Disputation. But as much as these theological tomes provided for me a framework that spoke to my understanding of the Christian faith, they failed to speak to this specter of El Rio Grande and its accompanying shame until this moment in my life. As I laid in my hospital bed during the first night of my stay, after countless sleepless nights battling intrusive thoughts of shame and death, I finally closed my eyes and fell into a deep sleep. But as I approached the mid-way point between alertness and rest, a finally entered into a nepantla that swept me into a different experience all together.

On my hospital bed, the words of the Psalmist entered into my mind; “for you are with me…my cup overflows (Ps 22).” Each of the words uncovered for me, as if in a sudden flash of insight, what this specter of the Rio Grande actually meant for me. I saw the cruciform shape of that Rio; bending, twisting, murky and filled with the wounds of a people. At that moment, I felt the weight of the craigs, the nopales, the sands and the currents of the Rio as death and life to me. I didn’t just know the theology of the cross, but my very body carried this truth beyond all systemic certitude. This specter of the Rio Grande became to as a baptism of my own Christian baptism in Reynosa, MX. What had been pursuing me all those years now finally had its way. I was drowned in the cross of mi gente with all its messiness on my hospital bed. Yet the Spirit of God raised me to life with Jesucristo. I began to understand my woundedness and trauma as parts of a larger story of people groups held down by the weight of a colonizing, slave-holding form of Christianity. I was raised so that I may no longer run away from el Rio but embrace it, swim around in it and call it my spiritual home. This river became for me a point of life and solidarity with others whose lives have been baptized by this river. The goodness and mercy that pursues me trickles down my back whenever I seem to want to lean deeply into my peccator, into my desire to flee this river of life and death. 

El Rio Grande

El Rio Bravo

Un Rio en mi mente, espantosa, poderosa en forma de cruz.°°

_______________________________

Sergio Edson Rodriguez is the Pastoral Intern at Christ the King Lutheran Church in Houston, TX and the Campus Minister for Rice Lutherans, a Lutheran Campus Ministry at Rice University. He is currently finishing his final semester at Wartburg Theological Seminary. He’s the proud dad of two cats and several plants.

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° The Rio Grande River / The Bravo River / A river in my mind, hideous, powerful

°° The Rio Grande River / The Bravo River / A river in my mind, hideous, powerful in the form of a cross

[1] Nepantla – comes from the nahuatl word (the language of the Aztec/Mexica people) for “in the middle,” but Latinx/Chicano writers relate this to the idea of “being in between” – neither being from Anglo-American culture, nor from Mexican/Indigenous culture.

[2] “Both saint and sinner” – an important concept for Luther and Lutherans.

[3] Traga-familias is a Spanish term – literally “carrying/packed-up families” – to describe the way that individuals and families pack up whatever they can carry and make the long trek, over land and through water, to from one country to another.

[4] The Spanish word for “cactus paddles,” or the tear-dropped shaped, flat out-growths from certain cacti.

[5] Spanish for “The Borderlands” – the in-between place along the border between the United States and Mexico.

[6] Pejorative Spanish-Mexican slang for “fag,” “sissy,” or “coward.”

The Withered Fig Tree, the Fruit of Righteousness – Rev. Dr. Javier Alanis

Rev. Dr. Javier Alanis has a special message for the first post of Latinx History Month – one grounded in his own family. Preached in chapel Mexican Independence Day (September 16, 1810), Prof. Alanis’ sermon delves into the richness of Latinx identity and what his family’s story has to say to the the story of Jesus and the fig tree. So enjoy his word, share with friends, and ¡benvenidos!

Francisco Herrera – PhD student, Interim Editor

¡Viva Mexico! 

¡Viva Mexico! 

Today is the celebration of Mexico’s Independence from Spain, a great way to kick off Hispanic History Month!  My compliments to the worship committee Y GRACIAS for inviting me to deliver today’s message.  Latinx History Month is a more inclusive term and one that I welcome even though it’s not a perfect descriptor for this month’s celebration.   So, indulge me if you will with a teaching moment.  

Back in 2000 I returned to Austin to begin teaching at LSPS.  I had just finished my doctoral exams and I had not yet started to write my dissertation.  I was invited to speak at a forum at my church on a Saturday morning with the Latinx parishioners at the church.   As I was speaking, I referred to the gathered community as Hispanic.  A parishioner raised her hand and respectfully said, “Pastor, I am not Hispanic, I am Guatemalan!”  Ouch!   She taught me something that has stayed with me ever since. 

Never assume a person is Hispanic just because you know her as “Maria!” 

The term “Hispanic” was imposed on Spanish-speaking peoples by the U.S. government back at the 1970 census in order to count us and keep tabs on us!   So, I want to share with you two lessons that I have learned over the years: 

1. Never assume that someone is “Hispanic”; and…  

2. Always ask folks to self-identify so that you may learn how a people claim their own history and their own IDENTITY.   

As my colleague and professor, Dr. Eliseo Perez Alvarez who will soon join your faculty, taught me several years ago, the term Hispanic hides our indigenous, African and Asian heritage that also colors our skin, our stories and our diverse languages of all of the Americas. 

So perhaps the month should be renamed in the public forum to include all of the beautiful diversity of our creation stories. Our Latinx community is beautifully diverse and varied in its expression.  We need to hear ALL the VOICES that make up the rich fabric and mosaic of our community.   

Diversity among US Born Latinos

Enough said on naming and othering others! 

As I read the Genesis text for today, I could not help but find resonance with Joseph’s story and my own family’s story of exile and diaspora.  We have all heard the story of Joseph and his brothers; it’s a story of betrayal, of human trafficking and slavery.  The brothers sell Joseph out of spite and jealousy for their Father’s favoritism. Sort of the way my 5 older siblings treat me, their kid brother, or as the comedian Rodney Dangerfield used to say back in the 20^th Century when I was growing up:  “I get no respect!”  You may have to google Rodney Dangerfield to see how truly funny he was.  

 Joseph’s story is also one of redemption and forgiveness.  It’s a story of a dysfunctional family that leaves their sojourn in Canaan and flee to Egypt to escape the famine of the land. It’s a narrative full of drama; Joseph is enslaved and mistreated and then finds favor with the Pharaoh when he correctly interprets the Pharaoh’s dream about a future scarcity in the land. The Pharaoh delivers Joseph from slavery, names him the Prime Minister and puts him in charge of the granaries of the nation.  It’s a rags to riches kind of story. In today’s reading we find Joseph at the end of his life asking his family to bury him in the land of promise.  

And here is why the story makes me think of my family. 100 years ago, my parents’ family emigrated from Mexico to south Texas. 

Mi familia…

It was the time of the Mexican Revolution that lasted 10 years; my parents told me their story, an oral history that I wrote about in my dissertation when I was a student here. My grandparents did not want to leave their ancestral home, but they were forced to leave by the economic turmoil of the Mexican civil war.  My father would tell us that his family was hungry which forced them to take whatever they could on their person and cross the border into Texas.  He would also tell us:   El Pueblo tenía sed y hambre por justicia!  The people were thirsty and hungry for justice!  On the frame, my father is the young boy standing behind my grandfather Felipe.  

The U.S. Mexico border had crossed the family some sixty years before when Texas used to be Mexico.  Now they were aliens in their own land. My father was so attached to his tierra, his land of birth that he never became an American citizen; he remained a Mexican citizen until his death at 95 years. When he died my brothers and I hired a band of mariachis to play at his burial site, something not uncommon in Mexican burials.  The mariachis played the popular Mexican song, Mexico Lindo y Querido. 

The lyrics of the song go like this:  

Mexico Lindo y querido, Si muero lejos de ti, 

diles que estoy dormido y que me traigan aquí.  

Mexico, dear and beloved, If I die far from you,

tell them that I am asleep and bring me back here to rest in Mexico.”  

The song was a moving tribute for a man who had lived his life and raised his family in a land where his native language was subjected to a more powerful one.   

My mother on the far left…

My mother was born in south Texas in 1913 just three months after her parents came across from Mexico.  She too would tell us how her family was forced to emigrate because of the famine and the danger of violence to the family.  Se va poner feo, the people would say.  It’s going to get ugly.  So, they joined the many other Mexicans who crossed the border during that period to join family members who were already living in south Texas.  If you are looking at the frame, my mother is the 2 year- old standing on the chair.  She lived to be 102 and was the church’s and the town’s oral historian.  

I am sure that many of you have similar stories that you have collected from your families of origin; your ancestors may have come through Ellis Island or Angel Island on the West Coast, or perhaps Galveston Island or other places of entry or conquest as in the case of the borderlands, Puerto Rico and Hawaii as a Hawaiian student at the Episcopal Seminary taught me.   He carries the painful memory of that conquest and unjust takeover of the islands wherever he goes.  Many of us can relate to that kind of existential angst as we try to figure out who we are in our own country of origin, or what space we can safely inhabit without being subjected to deportation or family separation.  Joseph’s story is intriguing to me because it contains the elements of family and community trauma that finds resonance in many of our own stories.

site of detention centers in Texas – very close to where I grew up

In Texas where I live there are detention centers that keep people unjustly enslaved much like Joseph was when he was in Egypt; There is family separation at the border that keep mothers and children apart from each other.  They are placed in cages similar to what Joseph may have experienced when his alienness was a mark of shameful otherness.  It would take trust in God and a gift of holy visionary discernment to free Joseph from his cage.  It would take a condition of food insecurity to bring about the reconciliation with his family.  But Joseph can somehow see the good out of bad situation. As he indicates to his brothers in the narrative, what they meant for harm, God intended to use for the salvation of many; that is to say, God takes a bad situation and turns it around for good.  

God redeems the tragic dysfunctional family system because that is the nature of holy redemption.  God redeems what humans intend for harm; we see the fruit of it when Joseph forgives his brothers and provides for his family in Goshen where they will multiply and be fruitful in Egypt, the powerful nation of the day.  

I hope that one day soon we can say the same for the asylum seekers at the U.S. Mexico border, our siblings in Christ who are suffering the condition of criminalized otherness for being poor, for fleeing violence in their native countries and for being fearful of their persecution from organized criminal gangs.  Many people of faith reach out to them with food, medicines, hygiene care kits, and advocacy for humane treatment as a human right.  There is a group at the border called:  Angry Tías and Abuelas, Angry Aunties and Grandmothers…

…a group of justice-oriented women who meet the asylum seekers in the middle of the bridge between the two countries and take food and supplies to the many who wait for a chance to enter the promise land of the north. These women and the men who help them are the signs of hope-filled redemption; they gather with people of different faith traditions; they band together to form communities of conscience who speak truth to power by their presence at the bridge.  These are folks who are willing to use their bodies as protest signs before the bulldozers that tear up sacred ancestral land in order to construct border walls to keep the asylum seekers out.  These women and men are visionaries who see and hear the holy in the most squalid of conditions and interpret for the church and the nation what Holy redemption looks like at the border.  

The Mellenbruch family.

100 years ago, my family received this same kind of care from a German family who reached out to them with their healing arts during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, just like the one we are going through only worse.

The Mellenbruch family reached out to the Alanís and Treviño families to nurse them back to health; the Mellenbruchs were the holy visionaries compelled by the Gospel to cross borders of cultural and linguistic difference in the name of the Crucified and Risen Christ.  

They were the faithful visionaries bearing fruits of righteous action in the name of the Gospel.  They brought salvific healing to Mexican families in exile and founded the church where I was baptized and confirmed, ordained and installed as a professor at the Lutheran Seminary Program in the Southwest.   

Joseph has Been Recognized by His Brothers – Marc Chagall

The Joseph story contains the fruitful figs of forgiveness, redemption, healing, and reconciliation that Jesus was referring to in the Gospel when he cursed the tree that would not bear fruit.  Joseph desired to be buried in a land of promise, a land of rich soil where fig trees do not dry up but bear much fruit such as the fig trees of achievement and contribution to the common good.  We the church bring our own Gospel figs of love, forgiveness, acceptance and healing arts to people of faith harmed by the rhetoric of unwelcomed alienness.  

We follow the Crucified and Risen One who forgave and redeemed our own alienness from ourselves and from each other and made us a Familia en Cristo, one family with many names who heal others and bear the Gospel figs of justice in His Name. 

So here is my final lesson:  If there is one thing that I have learned from the Joseph story and the Gospel over the many years of my ministry at the border, it is this:  The land of promise of the north is what we make of it in His name by God’s grace and the bread and tortillas that we share at the table are the work of a people of faith who till the soil of justice living so that no one goes hungry and all eat from the walls that have been turned into tables of welcome.  

May the people of God join me in saying, Amen.  

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Rev. Dr. Javier Alanis

After his graduation from LSPS in May, 1992, Jay was ordained and served Trinity Lutheran Church in San Antonio, Texas for four years.  During that time he chaired the Multicultural Committee of the Southwest Texas Synod and also served on the board of the Multicultural Commission of the ELCA. He was then invited to pursue doctoral studies at LSTC and graduated with a Ph.D. in June, 2002.  Jay joined the faculty of the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago at its extension program in Austin in January of 2000, a program in partnership with Wartburg Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa.

Jay’s academic interests include contextual borderland theology, Latino/a spirituality and the ethics of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King, Jr.  His doctoral dissertation focused on the history of the imago Dei (image of God) construct as a venue for welcoming the stranger in an alien land.  In 2006 and 2019, he was invited to be a part of a panel that examined the subject of border walls at an international conference held in Berlin and at the Lutheran center in Wittenberg, Germany.  He was a keynote speaker at the Rocky Mountain Synod Assembly in April, 2009 and the guest preacher at the Southwestern Texas Synod Assembly in May, 2009.   He has been a presenter and preacher at various church forums and assemblies.  He has also taught from his dissertation topic at ISEDET seminary in Buenos Aires, Argentina and at Holden Village in Washington State.  He has been appointed to serve on the board of Texas Lutheran University in Seguin, Texas. For a more comprehensive view of his bio, you are invited to visit the LSPS website or his personal website.

The Queer Ground – J. Pace Warfield-May

Brace yourselves for the beauty you are about to read, friends. Ever wanted to know what systematic, queer, Lutheran theology looks like? Well, here it is – in the form of J. Pace Warfield-May and their powerful reflection on queer joy. Happy Pride, and read, comment, and share!

Francisco Herrera, Ph.D. student and Interim Blog Editor

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TW: sexual violence mention

CW: violence against queer people and people of color

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“The air (caeli) and the ground (terra) are full of your glory” – the Sanctus

…

To look at me

through a smirr of rain

is to taste the iron

in your own blood

-Kathleen Jamie, “The Wishing Tree”

“In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens” begins the second creation story.[1] We are told that the first human was made out of the ground, shaped out of mud, and then God breathed into their nostrils “the breath of life,” and that first human became a living being.

Out of the ground we were formed, and for the next three million years we have tried to distance ourselves from the ground with which we share our bodies.

Okay, sure, maybe we were not literally made from the ground, surely we evolved over millennia through the process of evolution by natural selection, but our bodies, our physical selves, are made of carbon and iron and calcium and oxygen and the same elements that make up all life and make up our universe. How quickly we try to align ourselves with the heavens and focus on our intellect, come up with myths about being some pinnacle of evolution, create elaborate dualisms that align our bodies with their dirty, earthen origin yet our minds with heaven, and then, how much of a stretch is it to go from earthy body to sinful body, heavenly mind to godly soul?

I struggled for a long time with what to write about when asked to write a post for pride month this year. A global pandemic with 7.5 million people infected and half a million dead continues to burn through countries. Protests over the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others, named and unnamed black men, women, and nonbinary people as a result of police violence continue to call for justice even as news coverage begins to fade. As I am typing this, it is on the eve of the four-year anniversary of the Pulse shootings in Orlando, Florida, where 49 people primarily Latinx, primarily queer, were murdered.

I have a strong urge to write about queer joy, the beauty of queer happiness and love, the holiness of queer touch and intimacy and longing. But then I remember that LGBTQIA+ people are at greater risk for food insecurity, housing instability, underemployment and unemployment, and on average earn lower wages than cisgender, heterosexual people.

This affects LGBTQIA+ people of color at an even higher rate. The average black transwomen, for instance, makes less than $10,000 a year. [2] I remember that 40% of homeless youth identify as LGBTQIA+, and 30% of homeless people of all ages accessing services identify as LGBTQIA+.[3] And I remember that there is a long history of violence and harassment of the LGBTQIA+ community by law enforcement, which continues to be a pervasive issue. Nearly one quarter of trans women report receiving harassment from law enforcement, and six percent report receiving violence from police. This again disproportionately affects LGBTQIA+ people of color.

Additionally, 73% of LGBTQIA+ people living with HIV had interactions with police in the prior year, with 21% of those reporting harassment or verbal or physical violence from law enforcement.[4] I remember how prevalent racism is even within the LGBTQIA+ community that can make building support networks, finding romantic or sexual partners, having access to community resources, and access to representation even more challenging. LGBTQIA+ people of color, and in particular black and brown trans women and non-binary femmes, disproportionately are victims of violence, sexual assault, and homelessness.

I remember these things and I think that I’m not sure cis straight people deserve to see our joy.

Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.[5] But all I taste is ash and the iron in my own blood. It is too easy to talk about heaven when you’re standing on poisoned ground.

So let us address the ground first.

The ground I am speaking about is a metaphor, to be clear. It is what humankind was molded out of, and it is what we shall return to when we are dust. It is the valley of dry bones in Ezekiel 37. It is the mud that Jesus mixed with his spit to bring healing. The ground that held Jesus’ lifeless and broken body for three days. It is the ground from which dead blood cries for justice. It is the ground in which 32 million people who died from complications from HIV/AIDS are buried. It is the ground from which the rock of ages and the firmament springs forth from, spiraling into the universe. The ground that is considered unclean, dirty, riddled with creeping, crawling things. The ground that is pumped full of pollution, the ground under which every war has ever been fought.

The ground which absorbed my tears after the death of my brother. The ground which was a source of fascination for so many children who play and get their hands dirty in it. The ground which supports life and sustains it.

The queer person is tied closely to the ground.

Remember that dualism I brought up in the beginning, about a strict heaven/earth distinction, in which philosophy and learning and intellect are tied in with heaven and godliness and things like the body and its functions and even entire categories of people like women are associated with the ground and sin? The queer body is tied to the ground, and so too queer love, desire, pain, longings, joys, and heartbreaks. Our sex is called dirty and unclean. Our love is called unnatural. Our entire lives are seen as sinful, broken, and disordered. The queer ground—containing our bodies and our lives—is so often seen at best as a perversion of God’s natural order and at worst as entirely removed from God’s grace, love, and glory.

And when we experience trauma in our lives, that trauma is so often absorbed into our bodies and hearts and minds and seen as absolutely unworthy of any redemption. And sometimes, it is seen as deserved.

As an example: I was around ten years old when I first experienced sexual violence. When I was sexually assaulted again, once in college, and then once more a few years ago, all of those experiences were written on my soul and in my body as deserved because I have been taught that my entire life as a queer person is a life of sin, so any sin done to my body or heart or mind is sin on sin. There are so many similar stories from my queer friends. About half of trans, nonbinary, and GNC people have experienced sexual violence. A quarter of gay men and 44% of lesbian women have experienced sexual violence, and numbers are even higher for bi men, women, and nonbinary people.[6] So many of us don’t report, so many of us don’t even realize the violence done to our bodies is even violence.

With therapy, a strong support network, and a doctoral level of theological training, I was able to find redemption in my body, to find new life and hope brimming just underneath the surface of the queer ground. Not everyone has that luxury.

But let me give a small taste of what that looks like.

Taste and see the goodness of the Lord. Today it tastes like strawberries as I kiss my beloved’s strawberry lips. Let me tell you about the safety of an embrace, about how deeply I can feel at home in a touch. Can I tell you about the first time I felt at home—truly at home—in my fat and queer body, was at a pride parade surrounded by a myriad of other bodies of various shapes, sizes, colors, and ability levels?

Do you know the sacrament of a kiss? Have you heard the whisper of God’s love fill your heart as she whispers alongside the voice of your beloved? Have you eaten your fill of bread only to realize how deep your hunger still goes when you participate in that foretaste of the eschatological feast to come, that foretaste that is called brunch among your closest and queerest friends? When you have community in spades because you finally gave yourself permission to look for community beyond the church walls and find it in queer salons—the living rooms of friends—often gathered around houseplants and cats and dogs and…

The earth springs forth from God’s left hand—the firmament, the ground of all being. It rises. And continues to rise, spreading further and further apart, in every direction, an ever-expanding universe. What is to prevent the universe from expanding into oblivion? The right hand, the delta. The right hand of God is the air–the heavens—and it holds the chaos in place, a continual rapturous swirl, from spinning too far, the broken from shattering too deeply, the death from outpacing the life. Every breath, every loss, every heartbreak, every death, every birth, every touch and taste, every whisper, every ecstasy, everything remembered and everything forgotten, has taken place in this space between the ground and the heavens, the firmament and the delta.

It is easy to find holiness in community. It is heartwarming, enriching food for the soul to experience God’s love in queer joy.

I find redemption in my queer body, sparks of God’s joy and grace in the here and now, every time I give my permission to love myself, to claim my voice, to work for justice, and especially every time I give myself permission to feel queer joy.

It’s harder to find redemption in queer pain, sorrow, and suffering. But it’s there.

My blood shares the iron with the ground as it pulses through my heart and throughout my circulatory system. The queer body is the queer ground, and that ground is holy. As the Sanctus says, all of the air and all of the ground is full of God’s glory. God breathed life into the queer ground and look at how it grows and lives and loves. Look at how it tells the goodness of God.

There is no separation between heaven and earth, the air and the ground. It is all saturated with divine love and grace.

It is the queer ground I was made from. I will be buried in that same ground. And one day, from the ground, new life will be breathed into these dry bones. I am made of ground, and the ground is full of God’s glory.

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J. Pace Warfield-May (they/them/their) is a PhD student at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California and received their MA in systematic theology from the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg (now United Lutheran Seminary). They are studying systematic theology, with research interests in Martin Luther and the Reformation, queer theology, and deconstruction. Pace presently lives in the Baltimore-DC metropolitan area with their husband, Matt, and two dogs.

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[1] Genesis 2:4b and following.

[2]http://www.thetaskforce.org/povertyreport/

[3] https://nationalhomeless.org/issues/lgbt

[4] https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/lgbt-discrim-law-enforcement/

[5] Psalm 34:8.

[6] https://www.hrc.org/resources/sexual-assault-and-the-lgbt-community