The Slow Way Newsletter: The Possibility That God Is For You
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The Possibility That God Is For You
The opposite of faith is not doubt, but fear. Faith implies risk. I will cast my life on this possibility that God is for me. I do not have to have any proof except my commitment. I do not have to claim complete understanding – that is idolatry.
-Verna Dozier, The Dream of God
As I’ve studied and worked out my own theology through the Beatitudes, the blessings of Jesus, I’ve found myself struggling again and again in how to apply Jesus’ blessing of the persecuted to modern day American life.
It’s hard to write about this, because I feel the need to push back on how persecution is often defined in the right-leaning American Evangelical Church. One of the greatest problems in the Church right now, in my humble opinion, is an obsession with fear, and the distortion of that fear into a belief that our fear is the same thing as persecution. We can find this everywhere in White America, but especially in the Church. It seems to me that this is the story we’re seeing play out on Facebook, in our media consumption, and in our families. Fear is not the same as persecution, but it’s being packaged as such and it’s changing the face of our relational, social and political landscape.
Listen, it’s not persecution when healthy people are asked to wear masks to protect the vulnerable. It’s not persecution when those who don’t celebrate Christian holidays ask those who do to honor their cultures and expectations. And it’s not even persecution when movies and TV portray different morals than you hold. (It’s especially not persecution if you watch said movies or TV!) It seems to me that for the past forty years in the American Church, we have been dressing up our fear in language of persecution, and by doing so, the White church has become more and more self-seeking, and has built a way of faith that is self-centered. When our faith is focused on our own fear, we miss the opportunity to join Jesus on the side of the actual persecuted.
So what does it mean to be persecuted? And what is the blessing that Jesus is offering his followers? I’ve talked about Mark Scandrette’s book The Ninefold Path of Jesus a lot here, and for good reason. He’s distilled the Beatitudes into powerful and wise pathways into the way of Jesus. When he teaches about Matthew 5, verse 10 in which Jesus blesses the persecuted, he translates it as “mistreated for doing good,” he invites his readers to embrace suffering and continue in good work. He recognizes our human impulse to react defensively and instead invites us to nonviolent resistance. “When we respond with nonviolence, we break the cycle,” he says. “Love is stronger than hate, and no pain is final.”
This week I’ve been going deep into Verna J. Dozier’s theological working out of what it means to be invited into the biblical story: what she calls The Dream of God. Her book was published in 1991 when she was 74. She passed away in 2006. I would never have found Dozier if Stephanie Speller’s book hadn’t introduced me to her. (Don’t you love it when your books talk to each other?) Dozier was a leading African-American lay theologian, and her love for scripture and her freedom-of-spirit is all over the pages. As I read her work I keep thinking, if only I’d found her sooner! She is speaking peace to my heart.
One gift of stepping away from the white voices that have ruled my bookshelf for too long, is the clarification that there are Christians who are persecuted in this country. They are the BIPOC followers of Jesus who have been speaking, and teaching and who have been actively ignored by the White Church for as long as there has been an American Church. Black, Indigenous, and theologians of color are writing from an actual space of persecution, living in a country where racism touches their everyday life. Because of that their theology is shaped by the mistreatment Jesus speaks about in Matthew 5: the true suffering by being alive, misunderstood, and mistreated simply by being non-white in a world where white supremacy distorts reality. Jesus is saying that the faithful who suffer mistreatment for the good they do are given the Kingdom of Heaven, what we’ve been calling around here, The Really Real. Or the phrase Stephanie Spellers reshaped from Dozier’s work: The Dream of God.
What I hear in Dozier’s words is fearlessness. The opposite of faith is not doubt, but fear. Faith implies risk, she says. Listen friends, don’t hear me saying that you can’t possibly have experienced persecution if you’re white. The question I’m asking myself and you is whether or not what White Christian Culture calls persecution is actually fear, the opposite of faith.
There is so much more to say about these things, but I hope you’ll sit with Verna Dozier’s words. Here’s your reminder that doubt is not the thing that should trouble your soul. Fear is. The blessings of Jesus are particularly there for those who wrestle with their fear, hold it up to the light of Truth, and choose to embrace suffering for the sake of joining the good work of God in the world.
a slow practice
Let’s come back to Verna Dozier’s words: I will cast my life on this possibility that God is for me. I do not have to have any proof except my commitment.
Today I want to ask you some questions about your own fear, and your own faith.
Let’s take a breath together:
Breathe in
Breathe out
One of my favorite stories in the Hebrew scriptures is the story of Jacob wrestling the angel. This is also a story of blessings, but a different sort of “giving away” than the talk Jesus gave on the side of a hill to a ragtag group of followers. In this story, Jacob is running away, desperately afraid, because he has not only just lied to his father in law and run from him, he’s also heard that his brother who, twenty years after having deceived him, was coming for him with 400 fighting men. Jacob was rightfully terrified. He might have said he was being persecuted. But also? He was the trickster who had stolen his brother’s rightful inheritance. All the violence that was after him he had chosen for himself.
Can you wonder with me about how he felt, knowing that he had failed his father in law, his own father, and now that his brother was coming for him ready to fight?
He sends his two wives and servants and kids on ahead of him. And then he has this supernatural wrestling match with what some translations call “a man” and some call “an angel.” The story says they wrestle all night. (Reader, that’s a long time to wrestle.) And Jacob says to him, “I won't let go until you bless me.”
There’s something healing and whole in this moment. Jacob is leaning into the fear instead of doing what he’d always done, running away from it. The wrestling is not persecution, it’s hopefulness, it’s a “casting of his life on the possibility that God is for him.” And he goes from that moment into a new life, one where nonviolent peacemaking allows him to weep, repent, and embrace the brother he had cheated.
Can you imagine yourself in that dark open space where Jacob sat, waiting for his fears to catch up with him? What does it look like? What is the feeling you hold? Dread, Fear, Exhaustion?
Can you imagine with me that in the dark distance a figure is coming. It’s beautiful. And it’s terrifying, because it is somehow the combination of your greatest regrets and failures and fears. It’s the embodiment of your own weaknesses and dread. And who wants to look at that? Take a moment to ask yourself, what do you need to wrestle? And what might be the blessing you need on the other side of your fear?
What are you casting your life on right now? Dozier asks. Join me in imagining your casting of your life as a moment of wrestling your fear, and coming out on the other side.