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Before we launch into today's topic, during that fun panel time that we had yesterday afternoon, one of you raised a very good question, which, you know, I probably woke up early this morning pondering some more, you know, what are the differences between Pax Romana and Pax Americana, and that's a important worthy project that needs much further development and treatment. But the two things came to my mind that I just want to share that were, you know, that are disturbing images that harken back to this Pikes Romana. You recall that summer morning when Saddam Hussein was captured, right?

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And what was the image that kept playing over and over on TV? The The mouth opening and the doctors looking down. You know, that was a very shaming, humiliating image.

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Wasn't it? Do you recall that? I mean, I remember feeling just kind of like I needed to go take a shower when I when I saw that on TV and and it had the effect that was that was the intended effect was to try to humiliate. Again, that's what we heard about yesterday.

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That's what the Romans would do. You take the generals through, you humiliate them through town in front of the people and. In this group of pastors and theologians that are meeting, one of the pastors said, You know, on that Sunday, one of my parishioners just stood up during prayer time and he said, I feel so ashamed to be an American today. He said, I just need to confess that.

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He said, I'm glad we call it Saddam, but he said, Something in me is feeling a sense of shame today. And I think that's part of the reason why, because of just that little incident and the way it got played out over and over. So that's one image. And then another thing to think about is, you know, how our own tradition, our religious imagery gets, again, co-opted for supporting purposes of the American empire purposes.

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In one of his speeches, you know, President Bush said, There's power, power, wonder-working power. Where? Was it in the blood? No, it was in the American people.

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And, you know, if you listen carefully, you'll hear that a lot of the hymns and religious themes and images are woven in very artfully to a lot of the speeches. But that's where we have to say, you know, stand up and say in a good near orthodox fashion, you know, there is one who is holy. And we need to, you know, on a Sunday like that, the Sunday following a speech like that, we need to sing that hymn and we need to look for hymn up and say, there's, you know, there's one working powder in the blood, you know. That's not a hymn I grew up singing in North Alabama, but I'll sing it now.

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Okay. So, Yesterday we talked about this whole business of the Christian faith in the context of the Empire and Jesus day and time today. And the second lecture kind of flips around.

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It purges the imperial nature of Christian faith itself. Stated another way, the Kingdom of God has imperial designs on the world. Because God so loved the world, God wants to redeem every square inch of creation. I call this the No Creation Left Behind policy, if you will.

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God inaugurated this cosmic plan of redemption through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. For that reason, Christian faith plays a decisive, although I would argue not an exclusive, role in mediating God's redemptive activity. It can't be exclusive because the Spirit will blow where it will, but yet we have a decisive way to play in that plan. So how does this happen?

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Well, at the heart of Christian fate is the scandalous claim that God assumed human flesh actually became human and dwelt among us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. As you know, in the midst of the Greco-Roman culture of that day and time, spirit was viewed as sacred and matter as corrupt. So Christianity was considered an abomination by many because of its blatant concern for the material world. Throughout the pages of the New Testament, we read that the early church's concern for people's spiritual well-being was always required concern for their physical well-being as well.

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To be fair, Jewish tradition had already had a significant visionary emphasis that Jesus just took and magnified in his teaching and healing ministry. But the doctrine of the incarnation thrust the Christian community into a radically new relationship to culture. a paradoxical relationship that continues to this day. Now by paradox, I mean the holding together of two truths that seem to be contradictory, without collapsing one to the other.

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Okay, a paradox from physics is the way that light behaves both as a wave and a particle. You know, they're both true, it doesn't somehow make sense, but they're both true and we have to hold that together. Theologically, a wonderful paradox that Martin Luther expressed, to convey incarnation as his phrase, He whom the world could not enwrap, yonder lies

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in Mary's lap. Get the press of that? He whom the world could not enwrap, could not contain, yonder lies in Mary's lap. So, paradox.

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This is something we are all familiar with. So, what are the twin truths that incarnation holds together? Well, first, in Jesus of Nazareth, the Almighty God graciously accommodated to our limited human capacities and understanding, became embodied in human form at a particular time and place. Likewise, for us today, the gospel comes not just out of the blue, but always through the embodied, concrete material stuff of our culture, such as water and bread and wine and wood.

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Always through the material stuff of the world. John Calvin, following in the tradition of Augustine, used scripture as God's gentle method of approaching human beings in a way we can grasp. Calvin said, We can safely follow Scripture which walks softly, as with a mother's step, in accommodation to our weakness. Love the maternal imagery there.

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We accommodate to others when we make room for them in our hearts and minds, paying attention to where they live, how they talk, what their passions are, how they spend their time, energy, and money. Most all of you know that effective communication requires accommodation, requires us making room. Think about good preaching. How does good preaching work?

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Well, as Fred Craddock and others have taught us, you know, one of the most effective ways of preaching is through indirect communication, the way Jesus taught with His parables. It's about crafting a story, crafting a world within that story, And that the characters in the story are the ones being addressed. So when the lawyer asks, you know, what he has to do, Who is my neighbor?

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Jesus crops that story of the Good Samaritan. But who is the man lying in the ditch? It's the lawyer. The lawyer is the one who's lying in the ditch.

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He sees himself in that character. He doesn't identify with the Samaritan. He identifies with the man in the ditch. And then

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He has to, assuming that position, He has to address the question, Who is my neighbor? Well, when Jesus told the parable of the lost sons from Luke 15, He has sitting at the table with Him, you know, sinners and tax collectors who might identify with the prodigal son, but He has those Pharisees who would be identifying in the story with the older brother. So, you know, both people could identify with these characters. And then,

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The story is not wrapped up. The story is left hanging. It's a question mark. You know, are you going to step into this character?

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How will you act? How do you go from here forward? So, indirect communication, you know, is accommodating to the very particular situation of the learner. In good teaching, it's the same thing.

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One of the problems with teachers, when all of us, when we're going to teach, we say, Oh, goodness, what am I going to say? What am I going to do? We start with a focus on ourselves.

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Okay? But the change has to happen when we turn around and we say, Okay, the first question I have to ask is, what changes do I hope for for the learners? What do the learners need to know about? What do they need to experience and do and feel and become?

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Then the second question is, well, what do those learners need to do for these changes to occur? Then the third order question is, okay, what do I do or what do we do as teachers to enable the learners to do so that these changes can occur? Do you see the shift there that's involved? The shift from starting out just thinking about my own anxiety or my own condition, you know, and what I'm going to do and say, the shift that occurs from there to beginning with the question,

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Hey, what do these learners need to do? What hopes do we have for them? Within the Jewish tradition, another form of accommodation is in the Levering Passover Seder meal, where each child, it was each son, now it's been extended to include daughters, and there's a question for them depending on their maturity level. You know, they have a way to ask a question and participate in the meal, there's room made at the table for them.

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And even a child who cannot formulate a question, there's a ritual for that child. Even holding the candle or lighting the candle can be a way that that child can, there's room in this millennial, you know, 2000 year liturgy almost of the Jewish tradition. There's room at the table. And if someone has a sister with Down syndrome, you know, that means a lot to me.

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I always admired the Jewish faith because they made room at the table, even when often in our congregations they couldn't figure out how to make room for someone like my sister. But that tradition does. So we accommodate ourselves, and the Gospel is this radical way of accommodating to

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the particularity of people in their life circumstances. God's accommodation to us means embodiment. It means communicating with us through the particularities of language, religion, and culture, not some vague spirituality. Jesus typically spoke to his followers, we believe, in Aramaic, his native tongue.

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Likewise, we believe that the gospel can be mediated to us today in our native tongue. Jesus encountered folks in the midst of their daily lives and occupations. Likewise, we believe Christ can encounter and accompany us in the midst of our concrete individual circumstances. There's no naked truth, as we said, because Christian faith, like all other faiths, always wears the clothing of a particular culture.

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And yet, Christianity has a peculiar wardrobe, especially when you think about it in relation to other world religions. Now what I'd like to do for just a minute is on the handouts you have, flip over to the side that has the Christianity and Islam and Judaism. And I want you to take a moment to fill that out. What are these three world religions?

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What is the sacred script of each religion? The sacred writing. What language would that be in? And then what is the sacred place for each of those three?

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Okay, take a moment. We can pause the tape if we want to, but take a moment and just do that and then share that with one other person beside you. Has everybody at least had a chance to think about this a few moments? Let's hear what you got.

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What is it for Judaism? What's sacred script? Well, what's the language? The Hebrew, okay, that's the language.

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And as I was asking Teresa about this, because I was really clear, you know, there was a time before Jesus spoke, when of course the Septuagint came into being, and so that was a contender, in terms of scripture being remunerated through the Greek culture and language. But then you said after the temporal destruction, that was no more really became Hebrew again. is the primary language. And the sacred place would be Jerusalem, okay?

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For Islam, what would be the sacred script? Arabic. That's when God speaks to the Arabic. And for a sacred place, Mecca, Medina maybe also.

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How about for Christianity? Thank you. But only the red letter part, right? Only the red letter part, okay?

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What is it for Christianity? What's sacred script in? Western languages, huh? Well, you know, now, there was a time, right, when the church said, it was Latin.

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And a sacred place would be, well, this is, you know, under the conditions of empire. And yet, you know, from the very beginning, The church was fighting with this issue, struggling with this issue, and decided that, you know, no, indeed, the Christian faith was going to be available to everyone, but the big debate in Acts 10, you know, did Gentile converts need to become ritually Jewish? First, only way to becoming Christian.

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No, God revealed to the early church that the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ, to be embodied in and through every culture. So Christianity above is a religion that can make sacred use of any available objects, words, and places. So you don't have to have a separate place, a special place.

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If you need to have a place, but any place can offer itself as an opportunity, as a possibility. This is a radical a radical understanding of embodiment. And it leads us to the second part of the paradox of incarnation.

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Namely that Christian faith relativizes every culture it inhabits. Due to no particular culture as more special than any other. Now I call this the closed horse gospel. I sort of coined that phrase.

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I guess I'm thinking about this because my understanding now of a closed horse would be a middle-aged woman who has discovered Chico's. Chico's clothing store. Not that I live with anyone like that.

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But, no, a clothes first gospel, and by that I mean, that, you know, just loves to buy clothes, loves to try on different outfits, okay? So we have a gospel that It delights somehow in getting embody in a variety of wardrobes. And the way I try to think about this, again, this paradox, is God's saying yes and saying no, the practice of saying yes and saying no.

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So we say yes to culture, we need the cultural forms, but there's also a no saying involved, because it doesn't just happen. have to be this one. It doesn't have to be just here, there, or through this language, or that language. So it's both saying yes, and saying no.

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Is that your following? In terms of what incarnation means for us. The imperial church, you know, from the time of Constantine, would drop the half of this paradox, asserted any of the need for embodiment, but without relativizing the culture, saying yes, but not saying no. So, you know, what were some of the features about Imperial Church?

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Well, you know, men were in charge instead of some of the early patterns of church leadership that were obviously women who were part of the leadership there. Power became centralized, there's hierarchy, there were land holdings. Just like, you know, Rome, they started imitating the conditions of empire. In fact, some New Testament early Christian scholars say that one of the reasons Rome fell was because so much of the church had so much land holding that was a tax shelter for them, that there was not enough taxation to support the infrastructure of the whole Roman Empire, so it was just able to be pushed over.

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And the church was complicit in that, because they said, Oh, this is our land, we're not paying taxes on this. You know, there was not benefiting for the common good, the common welfare. You know, as the church continued in this policy, dissent became muzzled, there was violence became sanctioned, there was collaboration with conquest. A lot of the themes that we explored yesterday of empire, you know, the church became complicit in that.

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There was the same yes to culture, but not the same no, it was necessary. And that's why the four movements were in the church all along, you know, not just in the 15th to 16th centuries, they were all along the way, the reformers saying, you know, we've got to say no here to some of this. And Calvin in particular, he articulated this principle of accommodation that we talked about.

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He deployed idolatry. I think some of that had to do with an early experience he had as a child in France, where he saw a statue of the stoning of Stephen, and he said he was just, uphold that the people were putting reeds not only around Stephen, but around the people throwing the stones. They were generating just everybody, indiscriminately.

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And this scandalized him. And so he was very set against sniffing out idolatry and all that scary scorns, and helping us to understand the problem with that. So how is it that idols function for us? Idols are aspects of life that can be genuinely good for us, things such as money, friends, family, nation.

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The problem arises when we construe any of these as something of our ultimate loyalty, a way of securing ourselves in the face of our vulnerability and our finitude. We know we're going to die. All of us know that. And so to allay our fear of this, you know, inevitable chaos down the road, we run for cosmos.

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We run for order. And we run for those things which will bring us order in our lives. And likewise, we are vulnerable as human beings. We are vulnerable to manipulation, ridicule, coercion.

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And so we also run for others that will help us to resist coercion and help us be more invulnerable. So artists function in this way to recruit our loyalty. And it's the next week.

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Again, they promise cosmos order instead of the chaos in our lives. Okay? On a personal level, you know, they give our loyalty to things that are candidates for allaying this fundamental insecurity that we have. And I know at the institutional level, people protect -- we protect ourselves and promote our artists by ideology.

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That's the way ideology functions. I know Gordon is going to be talking about that, I think, today. You know, but the interpersonal level, the personal level, the way artists function for us. And at the institutional level, ideologies help support that.

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Now, I like to think of this in terms of teenagers in our culture. in the way idolatry and ideology function. Here's the way I see it. North Americans idolize youth and youthfulness, but not youth in their particularity.

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When youth are idolized, they're reduced to the telos and the purposes and the features of perpetual youthhood. To function successfully as anti-chaos, youth are dehistoricized. They're taken out of history. They're invested with perfections, tiles, marvelous attributes.

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Those two models you see in the fashion magazines, they have no pores. They would be They have no skin damages. Since sex is nature's solution to death, teenagers become symbols of unbridled sexual energy for us.

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And we have an adult generated youth culture, such as MTV and probably most of the shows on TV today, that propagates this kind of idolatrous imaging over and over. These adult projections of youthfulness. are internalized by young people. They become the scripts that young people are given.

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And they take them on and internalize them as images of how they see themselves. We use the term adolescence to talk about teenagers. You know, that was, as you know, an invention, G. Stanley Hall, 1904.

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It's a late invention. I don't like to use that term because I think adolescence is the way we socially construct young people. We pull along all this baggage, including the idolatrous notions. I'll talk about teenagers.

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That's their chronological state in life. I don't talk about adolescence because it carries all this ideological baggage for me. And it helps to reinforce the idolatrous notions we have often of the way youth are. Okay, so youth, again, they function in this way for us.

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to the extent to which we deny the finitude of young people and imbue them with immortality. We can also view our fear of young people as the expression of idolatry. So it's not only our learning to be like them, it's our fear of them. And fear of, say, young men of color, for instance.

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The fear that is there is, you know, they represent this chaos for us. That's idolatrous, too. Okay? So,

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Let's consider, though we talked about youth, let's consider how something that's basically good might garner our loyalty and function as an order in our lives. Let's look at something that we talked about yesterday, namely the family. And the way, you know, that functions in our larger, as a metaphor in our larger North American ethos. Where everyone agrees that families are essential for human well-being, right?

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Even dysfunctional families are better than no family at all, research data suggests. So what do we do about those troubling remarks that Jesus made about the family? I mean, we can understand why He told us we couldn't be certain of two masters, and we have to choose between God and Mammon. But what do we need to make of Jesus saying that we had to...

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We have come to set family members against one another, that one stays will be members of one's own household. Or even worse, whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, even life itself cannot be my disciple, in Luke 14. Isn't there already enough instability in that first century Gallean family context? Why did Jesus come along and fan those things?

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Well, Stanley Halleross, who jokes about the ontological superiority of being Texan, that's his phrase, even though he's from Dallas. He first opened my eyes to Jesus' family values in a sermon called Hitting Our Mothers as a Way of Peace. My mother Stanley, I bet he preached this on Mother's Day. Anyway, Halleross

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pointing out that few people kill out of sheer malice. Instead, what prompts us to take up arms and take another's life is deep-rooted, deep-rooted loyalty to our loves. The soldiers we sent to Afghanistan and Iraq are not fighting for something as abstract as the United States of America, in spite of what we all said about Pax Americana yesterday. Our soldiers are fighting to protect their parents and wives, their husbands and children.

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They're fighting to protect their loves. And in the heat of combat, they're shooting the enemy to protect other members of their platoon. That's why you take these people who don't know each other, and they have to be bonded into a platoon so that they will go out there and fight. Not just to save their own skin, but to save their buddies.

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That's how it works. Violence lies in our lives, Holy Rust contends. So how in the world do we break this vicious cycle of violence? Well, for starters, we could refuse to love our family members more than we love our neighbors.

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Expressed positively, we could learn to let our neighbors and even our enemies as much as we love family members. That's really hard. That's the same yes and saying no in relation to our family, our own primary members of our family.

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Doesn't this seem unnatural and far-fetched and foolish? I suppose it is. But I reckon if enough people started behaving that way, we'd have a hard time finding faith to fighting all our errors.

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And I've heard tell of people who actually put Jesus' teaching into practice, and it changed their lives and even changed the course of history. Walter Wink was in Selma, Alabama, one evening during the throws of the Civil Rights Movement. Activists were gathering outside a church when suddenly a messenger from Montgomery announced that mounted police had viciously beat a group of Dutch student demonstrators in the Capitol that very afternoon. The crowd in Selma surged with anger and prepared to march.

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Across the street stood a phalanx of state troopers with the local police forces of Sheriff Jim Clark. The situation, Luke recalls, was explosive. A greenback minister stepped to the microphone and said, It's time we sang a song. And he opened with the line, and I wish I knew how to sing this, it was, Do you love Martin King?

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And the response back was, Certainly, Lord. Do you love Martin King? Do you want to say, Certainly, Lord. Do you love Martin King?

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Certainly, certainly, certainly, Lord. And he went right through the chain of command of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. And each time the crowd was warming to the song, echoing it, louder and louder. Certainly, certainly, certainly, Lord.

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Without warning, he's saying, Do you love Jim Tuck? And he went, Certainly Lord. Kinda turned out, now how can you apply?

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Do you love Jim Clark? Certainly Lord. We're stronger this time. Do you love Jim Clark?

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Certainly, certainly, certainly Lord. The Reverend James Bevel then took the mic. He said, We're not just fighting for our rights, but for the good of the whole society. It's not enough to defeat Jim Clark.

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Do you hear me Jim? We want you converted. We cannot win by hating our oppressors. We have to love them into changing.

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And according to Wink, Jim Clark did change. Maybe it took a while, but he stopped persecuting the black community. And some years later, he even confessed to a change of heart. He renounced his former racist views.

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Jim Clark had been loved into changing by folks who understood what Jesus meant. when he talked about this mother-hating business. Now, again, Jesus is not anti-family. In His saying, support marriage is the creation of a new family.

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Yet, He doesn't view the biological family as sacrifact. Indeed, the Gospel, the liberating good news of redemption through Christ, consistently relativizes family models based on biological kinship, and instead advocates covenantal households based on mutuality and hospitality to strangers. With Paul in the early church, even, you know, Israel is relativized as the condition of God's election and saving grace.

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So what's the paradigm instead of birth and biological kinship? Adoption. Remember Paul. It's we're adopted in.

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It's not you can't be born into it. And new households are formed this way. I'm going to show you a clip because I'm a big Robert Benton fan. You just have to bear with me.

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I even made a pilgrimage to Waxahachie one time. And so this is just two scenes I want you to see of this family. This is from Places in the Heart. We start out with the...

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Can we do the first scene first? Yeah. Just see what family you see at the beginning here. Working with our technology.

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We need to go right from the... Yeah, probably seen two, maybe. No, it's before that. Tell you what, let's go back to the one you had.

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You just run ahead to that one, maybe. Do you know how it's set up in the beginning? Has everybody seen this movie? You haven't seen it?

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At the beginning, what you have is a, there's a nuclear family, the sheriff of the town is the husband, and Southfield is the wife, and they have two children, they're sitting around having sunny dinner. Okay, that's the scene, and then the sheriff is killed in a very unfortunate accident. And as the movie progresses, you're going to see then, this is the scene later on, How, what happens with the household now, later on?

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Okay? Got volume? I don't know. Okay, that's all.

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I'm sorry, that's all we have time for. That's not going to give you a fair enough representation, I don't think, I'm sorry, of the change in the family. But the fellow who's sitting there breaking beans is Mr. Well, he's blind.

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He's a world veteran, he's taken into that house. Because they have to to save the, it's the banker's brother, brother-in-law, and they have to take him in so they can stay there. And then they've also taken in Mose to work the farm, and Mose is the one who knows how to work the cotton. So this nuclear family has somehow been reconfigured here.

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And, you know, they're fighting for survival. But it's a family now that has been extended to a continental household. And if you haven't seen this movie yet, you must see it. It's just one of the most powerful films ever made, I think.

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And when I see the development of that, I don't just see, you know, this movie set in the 30s in Waxahachie. I see Romans 12 being played out. What you see is the body with the different members of the body, and how, you know, one member suffers, they suffer together, one honors, they rejoice together, and how they work together as a body, as a covenantal household. So that when you come to that amazing final scene of communion, when the preacher reads,

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I'm sorry, I said Romans 12. 1 Corinthians 12. Sorry. When you read 1 Corinthians 13, you know why, because you've been seeing 1 Corinthians 12 played out through the form.

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The purpose of this, again, is to help you see some of the contrast between, you know, just family that models the way things are supposed to be. the pater familias, if you will, of that day in time, and how that gets changed to a continental household that has a mutuality and freedom. So I encourage you to see it, kind of looking at it through that perspective. Again, not that God is trying to destabilize the families and has in mind that that's not a good way to do.

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It's just to see what happens in this particular case and how a tragic situation gets redeemed in light of the gospel. Well, let me ask this question to you, because I think this is very important. Given the nature of this closed-horse gospel, you know, and the way it insinuates itself into different places, all Jews, Muslims, and people of other faith right to be worried about the imperial nature of our faith. After all, it's like crabgrass.

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It's like crowd grass. It spreads its tendrils in every direction and eventually takes over the land. You know, even when they're not trying to convert other people, they're drawn into this way of life that Christian faith makes available. High in the mountains, the central mountains of Puerto Rico, is a Friday Church of the Brethren congregation in a little town called Costania.

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There's a reason it was established there is that there were some Church of the Brethren, young people who were conscientious objectors during World War II. And so as alternative service, they went down to Puerto Rico. They were under special instructions to establish a hospital, but not to proselytize the local people for the church. But the folks in Castanero were curious about what these Yankees were up to and who were helping them out.

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They admired their craftsmanship, their witness, their hymn singing. They wanted to join in this way of life themselves. I know, said the brethren, we didn't come here to start a church. We just want to help you out by going to this hospital and teaching you how to run it.

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Besides that, we're kind of peculiar people. We all have German-sounding last names, and well, we're kind of a cringe group because we won't fight our country's wars. So if you want to start a Protestant church, why don't you hook up with one of those successful mainline denominations? You know, like the Presbyterians.

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But the good folks from Costa Mira persisted, and finally, despite resistance from headquarters in this country, they formed a lively congregation which I had the pleasure of visiting about 14 years ago. They didn't have German-sounding surnames, and they sang most of their hymns in Spanish with guitar and tambourine and the gourd accompaniment. Yet the spirit and fellowship of this congregation were decidedly brethren with a Latino flair. I visited with Presbyterians on the island, too.

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I'm happy to report to you that the Presbyterian Church in Puerto Rico has gained great respect there. Unlike generations of evangelists who sided with conquistadors and imperial rule throughout the Caribbean basin, Presbyterian missionaries stood in solidarity with the people in Puerto Rico, especially the enfranchised.

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When Puerto Rico was annexed as U.S. territory in 1916, do you know what the first action of the next presbytery meeting? It was just a newly foreign presbytery. You know what the first thing they did was?

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They declared that Spanish would be the official language, because the U.S. had declared that English would now be the official language of Puerto Rico. So right away, the first action of this presbytery was to say, We are with the people. We're not with the empire that's ruling here.

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So they're very affectionate toward us in Puerto Rico, toward the presbyterian church. Well, crabgrass, like crabgrass, the gospel sometimes can be annoying when it's in your face. People can resent and resist the faith when it's imposed by imperial might. Barbara Kingsolver portrays this powerfully in her book, The Poisoner Bible.

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Must read book, must read novel. Nathan Price is an evangelical Baptist missionary. He takes his wife and four daughters into the heart of the Belgian Congo in 1959, despite the objection of his Baptist mission board. Nathan is determined to bring the light of the world to the people of this dark continent.

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He doesn't pause early enough to get to know the people and learn their language and their customs, let alone their spiritual beliefs. Nathan is convinced that he'll simply plant the seeds throughout his through his biblical preaching and watch his ministry take root and blossom and flourish. King Solver employs a wonderful metaphor to portray Nathan's lack of accommodation to the people in the land. The garden seed that he brings from home to plant there in Africa.

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First, he doesn't know that you're supposed to plant the seed in mounds, instead of in rows, in order to withstand the torrential rains. The people there tell him, you know, No, you have to plant in mounds. In fact, when he plants in rows, they go out at night and they replant it in mounds. He just says, Oh, these stupid people.

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I've been a farmer all my life. What are we doing? So he goes and he levels it out, sure enough, the rains come, wash the seed away. But even then, when he finally learns, you know, to plant in mounds, he has not realized that these squash bean and pumpkin seeds are useless in Africa because there are no pollinators there for them.

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A world of bugs who have no idea what to do with the Kentucky wonder bean. Likewise, nature's preaching, his preaching is a disaster. He has no good news for these people, only words of judgment. In fact, it sort of reminds me of what my wife says when I start talking in a certain tone of voice.

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She says, Uh-oh, I feel an insult coming on. Kingsolver invokes Fanny O'Connor in naming this man Nathan Price. Do you get it? What is Natan in Hebrew?

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Gift. A gift with a price, or with a price tag attached. That's what he is. Natan Price.

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It's a gift, not freely given, but with this price tag. And in contrast, we meet the former missionary. You have to get halfway through the book. But even just reading that chapter is worth it.

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Because this former missionary to the village is named Brother Fowles. And Rachel Price, the teenage daughter, thinks when she first sees him he looks like Santa Claus, except where he's been on a diet, because he's been living there in Africa for a while. He, indeed, he is like Santa Claus. He comes bringing abundant gifts for the entire family.

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And he has a very different take than Nathan on the condition of a village of spiritual life. He says, These are very religious people, you know. Everything they do is with one eye to the Spirit. They plant their rams and their monarch.

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When they do that, they're praying. When they harvest, they're praying. Even when they conceive their children, I think they're praying. I think the Congolese have a world of God's grace in their lives, along with the burst of hardship that can kill a person entirely.

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I happen to think that they already knew how to make a joyful noise to the Lord a long time ago. Have you heard the songs they sing here in Kalanga? They're very worshipful. It's a grand way to begin a church service, singing a Congolese hymn to the rainfall on the seed yams.

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It's quite easy to move from there to the parable of the mustard seed. Many parts of the Bible make good sense here if you only change a few words. Brother Files really goes out on the rim, so to speak, when he challenges Nathan Price's interpretive framework for Romans 10. He says, Brother Price, don't you sometimes think about this as you share the food of your Congolese brethren and glad in your heart with their songs?

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Do you get the notion that we're the branch that's grafted on here, sharing in the richness of these African roots? Oh, Nathan can't stand that interpretation stomps out of the out of the house, but the rest of his family thinks, wow, this may be the case. Verdie Files does not view these African people as problems to be solved, you see, but as many mysteries to be encountered.

00:44:02.160 - 00:44:24.160

Not problems to be solved, but mysteries to be encountered. Moreover, he encounters them in their world with abiding, wondering delight. Some of you may know Seren Kierkegaard's understanding of love as non-possessive delight in particularity. It's delight in the particularity of something, but you don't have to own it.

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It doesn't have to be yours. You can still delight in it. It's a non-possessive delight, and in the very particulars of something or some person. That's what Brother Fowles has in his life in relation to these people.

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Now, particularly this spiritual posture was exemplified by this knight of faith, someone who's firmly grounded in this world, yet always by virtue of the transcendent. And I think it's to invert Carol's metaphor, the knight of faith runs human software with a divine operating system. Firmly grounded, yet always with a transcendent move of spirit.

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And like Kara did yesterday, I need to play the Desmond Tutu card at this point. I had the great privilege of picking up Archbishop at the airport when I was at Emory. And we were in the terminal. He had two other people with him.

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They had been on a trip to Denver. And so here we are in the Atlanta airport and we're heading to baggage claim. I don't know if you've ever...