The arrival of 2021 is freighted and illuminated with grand dreams, even some magical thinking—new executive leadership at the federal level, a vaccine that will immunize the entire global population against a lethal virus and end a death-dealing pandemic, a bipartisan effort to alleviate ongoing global warming and save our planet Earth, bipartisan policy and legislation that will save democracy and end racial, class, gender, and economic inequities, and finally, multi-faith cooperation to end the crisis of inequality by promoting an image of Divinity that is both true to scholarship and frees Godde’s image and identity from limitations imposed by patriarchalism’s sexist language.
My hopes and dreams of all the years are at stake. What in my own history will help me weather such a deluge, help me not succumb to white supremacy? Am I too white?
(To catch readers up in this “racism” series, I write about 1980; I’m in seminary, a commuter, hoping to be ordained priest in the Episcopal Church, and learning some new theological words that assure me that the image of God is not, well, white.)
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Scene XLI. The Christian Testament, Called “New”
In my second year at Yale Divinity School, I sat in the same huge lecture hall, my pen poised, my mind open. I was ready for the New Testament—“our” testament, the one starring Jesus, the hero of Christianity. I wondered whether anything could top the Old Testament, also why this one was not called “young” instead of “new.”
I was a Christian; I did not know Jesus except through stained glass windows or sermons from mile-high pulpits. The sermons were either sentimental or divinely untouchable. It was obvious Jesus was divine, but not clear how he got that way. I felt guilty about my ignorance—a little.
Nevertheless, I was alert and bewitched just to be where I was.
Scene XLII. Luke Timothy Johnson and Immanence Theology
This professor was spry, darn near jolly-old-elfish, and laughed a lot.
This man promised something new. We were to begin with the biblically obvious order: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. The syllabus, however, indicated that we would begin with Mark whose gospel was chronologically first. Every Sunday School thing I’d ingested was about to be dashed on the rocks of scholarship.
The room fell silent. Into the solemn silence someone sneezed—loudly and explosively. Luke Johnson responded without missing a beat: “God bless you and all vegetative processes.” Everyone laughed—and breathed. Thus was launched the New Testament. Thus began my first inkling that Jesus was human like us, and like his predecessors in the Old Testament.
I was to benefit from Luke Johnson’s scholarship as well as his style and his pastoral care. He was totally delighted doing what he was doing—lecturing about holy texts to unformed—or ill-formed—students, some even middle-aged! This professor’s spirituality was contagious. I made an appointment to talk with him about my fears and frets about the Episcopal Church and my having been turned down in the Connecticut ordination process. I knew Luke was Roman Catholic, had even been a monastic. He too had been hurt by his church when he tried to get laicized. I was trying to get un-laicized. He wanted out of the ranks and I wanted in.
“I loved the Bible and your course, of course,” I stammered when we met. Luke nodded. “I am trying to get ordained priest in the Episcopal Church, and the resistance to women priests is, well, stiff.” Luke listened to my feelings with care. He was supportive with no answers. As we wrapped up I stood to leave just as another professor walked by Luke’s open office door. He was a learned professorial type—tall, erect, and fully uniformed in black with the traditional high-rise Anglican clerical collar. He was a nice man, kind and learned, specializing in Patristics (old guys—the Fathers—who articulated early church politics and theological justifications thereof). We students liked him, while also joking that we bet he slept in his collar.
Nodding in his direction, Luke said softly with a smile: “Lyn you don’t fit the model.” He added, “But God knows who you are, so trust God.” That could be good or not such good news.
For now I would dive into my latest God-word:
Immanence. Luke used this word a lot and I thought he lived it pretty well. Immanence attracted me. It was close to
imminence but with much more— ah!—profundity. Imm-AH-nence had not been on any of the lists of God-defining words I’d heard in Sunday School or from any pulpit. Now I heard it from an academic podium and soon would read more in an essay about the Jesus of history written by a man named Marcus Borg.
One reason I found Immanence so alluring was that it described the God I’d met under the table as a child— intimate, reachable, and silently conversational. Immanent means “remaining within.” Pulpit Gods were mostly transcendent, almighty, unreachable, and remaining without. Jesus knew all about Immanence.
Scene XLIII. Bill Muehl and Immanent PreachingAs I was rejoicing over Immanence I was simultaneously more and more exposed to people in seminary whose skin was not white like mine. God, I figured, was immanent in them as well as in me and all living things. This I got from the Genesis Creation story, but Immanence was the classy theological word for it—a word that made racist imagery for God impossible.
Hearing black students preach properly and firmly confirmed for me the absurdity of racism. I heard them in the regular chapel worship and in the preaching class required of us all. Students prepared written sermons of course, but the moment of truth came when we had to deliver them—out loud from a pulpit in front of the class and the professor, William (Bill) Muehl.
Meuhl had a sharp, wry wit, was a lawyer by training, and famous for his book
All The Damned Angels (1972) deploring all sorts of rigid moralisms and gooey piety about the Cross and its bold dominance in Christian parlance. He once said that a miracle could be performed by accident, and in his book he landed square on the dirty business of Immanence, God’s life in the flesh: “I have had to be content with damned angels and the facts of life.”
I was already suspicious of too much unfleshly transcendence, and really did not adore the cross, although having to preach to Bill Muehl might feel a bit like that. I took courage from the black students who did not seem scared and let it rip with vigor, energy, and an intimacy I loved but knew I didn’t have in me. I was too white.
None of this helped me feel less fearful about Muehl’s critique. I’d heard of it but hadn’t yet experienced it. Good thing because it might have caused me to die before I ever got to the pulpit for my turn.
I remember the text he assigned the day I was to be the preacher in class. It was one of St. Paul’s semicolon-loaded passages in Romans 5— all about justification by faith through grace via Christ, and then actually bragging about your sufferings. I was already suffering. But all would be well, St.Paul assured us, because “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.” Why? Because God’s love had been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. No problem. As far as I could tell, this passage was supposed to include the answer to all of life’s problems—just not mine right now.
Crucifixion suffering was overkill, and resurrection felt like avoidance of suffering altogeher. So, I focused on “poured” and imagined a huge pitcher full of Divinity, somehow liquified or magically de-solidified, pouring into me for the better. I’d never heard of water-boarding, thank heavens, so water seemed safer to me than Christ’s blood. This was a kind of suffering I figured, because I tried to convey the joyful horror of drowning in God. I passed the class.
Muehl would bemoan the fact that he never understood how students did well in his preaching classes and then got out there and preached “pap” in their parishes. Was I a future pap-preacher? I’d already developed a severe case of pulpit-paralysis in a small class.
Listening to the black students preach helped. These students had to be just as scared as I was, but when they got in that pulpit their words sang with Immanence, jumped for joy. It was so intimate that listeners talked back:
Preach it sister! Say it! Amen! Yes. I felt exhilarated and daunted all at once.
But I was white.
White preaching was emotionally reserved, distant, bleached—transcendent. Was God even in it? Was I? Muehl advised against imitation and told me to be myself. “You’ll get used to it,” he told me, adding something like, “but of course you’ll get flack about your female voice, so pitch low." I told him I was an alto.
Nevertheless I promised myself that I would experiment with preaching from the center aisle not the pulpit, maybe without a script, aka “cheat sheet.” Pulpit and written manuscript provided distance and a shield of protection from Immanence.
My promise would prove impossible to honor—but not completely so.
