Faith Works 6-6-20

Faith Works 6-6-20

Jeff Gill

 

Racism and our own history

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I'd love to walk away from racism. It would be pleasant to not have to talk about it, or deal with it . . . and as a white male, I could in many ways, ways that friends who are people of color cannot.

 

But here's the thing. My ways of de-stressing and getting away from the pressures of day-to-day life as a minister are history & archaeology & nature. So I go to pull up some early Licking County narratives out of the records, and turn to one of the classic sources, Edwin Brister's 1909 "Centennial History of Newark and Licking County."

 

He heads a chapter "The First White Men in Licking County" and opens it with the words "Following the Mound Builders and the Indians came the superior race to occupy the soil of Licking County." Even allowing for shifts in terminology over a century and more, the framing of the chapter is jarring, and the simple impact of the words "came the superior race to occupy" jolts me even now, having read past that opening many times. Also making me wonder what other less blatant biases are filtered into my thinking as I thumb through this necessary early source.

 

And you may or may not notice the subtle jab about distinguishing between "the Mound Builders and the Indians." That's intentional: the racially tinged viewpoint that the ancestors of modern Native American Indians could not have build the earthen geometric enclosures of Ohio left a "Moundbuilders myth" that's still hard to lay to rest, whether it takes root in the ten lost tribes of Israel, Vikings, wandering Romans, or Welsh princes.

 

Oh. Welsh princes. I have a many years long fascination with Chaplain David Jones, a primary shaper of the Euro-American settlement of Licking County from his 1773 journey through our valleys for the first time to his last visit in 1820. I've found some new letters from his hand, echoing his original manuscript, a copy of which was in Thomas Jefferson's personal library; he makes it clear that any time he meets an intelligent or articulate Shawnee or Wyandot person their better qualities are always Welsh. He's convinced that there's Welsh blood in the finer native people he meets, and their language is rooted in his native Welsh tongue . . . but is continually disappointed in his attempts to preach to them in that language.

 

And I go for a much needed walk this afternoon, and a few hundred yards from my home, a stone marking the death of one of those early settlers in 1802, people directed here by Chaplain Jones, which has displayed along a busy road for nearly a hundred years not only that sad death, but how before Lilly Jones died she gave birth to "The First White Child Born" in the township. I'm not saying racism was the whole intent in 1938 when it was placed, but that you start to see in the historical record, especially after the Civil War, how "white" becomes an important category and a distinct marker of status.

 

Thanks to my dad, I often relax by reading Civil War history, and . . . well, do I have to spell it out for you? But sometimes, as I read about, say, the Vicksburg Campaign (and think "wow, Dad will really enjoy this one" then pause, and go back to reading), and the depth of the racial injustice that got us here just shakes me, the end result of that conflict notwithstanding.

 

This isn't even getting into my equal passion for and professional understanding of how congregational and church history more broadly is an active force in today's debates over polity and process and planning . . . echoing Faulkner's "The past is never dead. It's not even past." This has led to an ongoing and unpleasant if necessary project in unearthing and unpacking of the role the 1920s Ku Klux Klan played in the history of our county, my church, and across the Midwest and beyond for many church bodies that would be shocked today to realize how complicit their ancestors once were.

 

So I could kid myself, and walk away from racism. It would require lots of strategic seeing and not-seeing, evasive action and outright denial. The kinds of choices racism depends upon. So I can't escape it, even as a white male. I can only choose how to confront racism today, how to try and understand it, and learn in community how to take it apart into its constitutive elements (one of which is sin, of course) and then be able to discard that which is corruption and decay, and preserve what we need to remember.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's been trying to come to terms with how racism is a part of the sin that besets us for many years, and he's not done yet. Tell him how you are working for racial reconciliation at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

 

 

Faith Works 5-30-20

Faith Works 5-30-20

Jeff Gill

 

Pentecost and the idea of Jubilee

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With this Sunday the end of Eastertide in many Christian churches, and that festival for even more being Pentecost, there are many who can see the roots of that name, pentagon and pentathlon and the concept of five or in this case fifty.

 

Pentecost marks, actually, 49 days after Easter Sunday, and in England "Whit Monday" is a holiday as it is in much of Europe; the whole period inclusive of Easter to Pentecost is fifty days, itself an echo of a pattern of seven weeks and fifty day periods in the ancient rabbinic calendar of Israel.

 

And behind those sets of fifty day periods in the year, is a tradition witnessed in the Torah and Writings of Hebrew Scripture, the Christian Old Testament, of seven times seven years, forty-nine of them, being followed by a Year of Jubilee.

 

One of the hints of this idea in ancient Israel is also on America's Liberty Bell, where on one of the bands is the citation Leviticus 25:10, "proclaim liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof." Because that's what a Jubilee in principle was, a time of freedom and release.

 

Biblical scholars still debate this, but there's more evidence of the idea of a Year of Jubilee than there is that one ever happened, and sadly you can see why. The cycle of seven days with a Sabbath for rest, seven weeks and a feast or celebration or observance like Pentecost, and then the seven years times seven was a culmination of these cycles believed built into creation for our good, for the blessings of humanity and all the earth – to cancel debt, to release slaves, to set free peoples. Even the land would be "freed" in a Jubilee year, with no planting or harvest. With the trumpet blast on the shofar, the ram's horn, the "jubilee" sound would tell everyone in God's realm that freedom would reign, and secular matters would be reset, from the highest rulers to the lowliest people.

 

In the ancient and medieval world, this was not as exotic an idea as you might think. It was common when a king or queen would die for prisoners to be released and commercial debts to be canceled, a dramatic sign of transition and reaffirmation of divine providence. A jubilee of sorts.

 

This year, as Pentecost and the Sundays after it come, we are leaving behind a strange sort of jubilee – stimulus checks in the mail, jobs lost and found, closures resulting in bankruptcies and permanent shutdowns, and at home and personally, many are finding this has been a season for reassessment. What do we really need or use, first in the fridge and freezer, then in the pantry, and onwards into closets and cupboards and even basements.

 

In no way do I want to minimize the disruption and pain many have experienced since mid-March. It's been a very hard time, and I'm painfully aware of that myself. But the reason even ancient Israel never observed the intriguing concept of a Jubilee Year is likely because it's a painful path to seek blessing, and it would take strength and commitment on the part of rulers to stay the course – canceling debt, freeing prisoners, resting the land and living off of the built up reserve. The pain would not, as it has not, fall evenly across the people. The pressure to get back to "normal" was and is strong.

 

Yet I look at much of the winnowing and sifting that's been happening, and is still going to occur, all around us. Quite a few businesses closing or declaring bankruptcy were on the way out already, this just sped the day. There are going to be churches and charities that will not survive, but I doubt it will be just because of the coronavirus restrictions alone. Camps and ministry programs will end with the blame put on COVID-19, but was that really the whole story?

 

The truth is we need a Sabbath, and not just each week. We need those pauses in our lives that give us time and space to reassess, and not just to clean out closets. And if we don't choose to take them, the cosmos and the Creator has ways of imposing on us that discipline, in hopes that we will ultimately choose to rest, and reflect, and renew.

 

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's not always good at resting himself, but God has a way. Tell him about how the Lord blows a horn and a halt for you sometimes at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 5-23-20

Faith Works 5-23-20

Jeff Gill

 

How seminary prepares us for the unexpected

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So there's my Hebrew class.

 

Truth be told, I've really not used my studies in Hebrew in any, or at least many substantive ways as a preacher of the Christian Gospel.

 

While the good news has many roots in the Old Testament, and I reflect on them often in my preaching, there are plenty of great resources for understanding everything from Genesis to Malachi in English (yes, including the version ol' King James authorized and oversaw).

 

Occasionally I'll consider aspects of the Hebrew text in the language it was first recorded, I have to admit it's rare. What the study of Hebrew for a mere year did do for me, though, was to awaken in me an awareness of the essential distance between me and the original manuscripts, and the various textual and editorial bridges God has used to get those insights to me, on a page or in pixels on a screen.

 

When I read "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want" I don't always think precisely in the moment about "Adonai roee, lo echsar," but I'm aware it's there, hovering in the background.

 

Which is relevant to our present moment not because you can find a cure for CO VID-19 in Hebrew, but because that wider, deeper awareness of how things fit together is really what's equipped me for dealing with the complications of life "under quarantine."

 

It's been a running joke for many of us in ministry that Bible college or seminary or our pastoral training did not include how to shoot and edit video, or ways to link up technophobic people through online conferencing tools, let alone ways to set up a worship area where everyone is six feet away from each other.

 

And it's an older piece of dark humor that we don't any of us get an education on how to read financial reports or audits, in plumbing or electrical work, or even much training on teaching (which is different than preaching, let me tell you).

 

What most ministerial training does do, whether it's online or by extension or residency, is give us a deeply rooted grounding in the theology and devotional understandings of our tradition – how we think with and respond to the great questions of faith in our time. Why is there sin and evil in the world? Why doesn't God stop bad things from happening to good people? How can communities of faith respond to the brokenness of this world with a healing word and a redemptive message, both in word and deed?

 

The thinking being, I'd say, that you can learn financial literacy from a number of sources, and definitely there's lots of advice on broken toilets you can get from the home improvement store to your church parking lot, but there are relatively few places where you can sit down, in person or virtually, with a group of people and wrestle with what it means to be faithful, ethical, and holy. Holiness is not discussed on many street corners, or with your average person on the street.

 

One theology professor I had in seminary, who was challenged on his sharp tone in quizzing a student about the day's reading, responded "if you find question's about God's goodness hard to answer on a sunny weekday afternoon in a classroom, wait until a grieving parent asks you to explain these things at 3 am in an ER waiting area." The class was very quiet for a few moments, and then we went back to work on the text at hand.

 

Which is where the challenge of doing digital and distanced worship, while simultaneously reaching through these electronic obstacles and opportunities, is directly related to Hebrew and Greek and theology and the Bible, in my mind. We have to be aware of the complex and layered reality of the human condition, and that both sin and blessing are often pretty tangled up in people. As we deal with this world problems, we're trying to hold up eternal realities to the light of day, to illumine dark corners of our experience.

 

And I can say this after thirty-five years and more of working in church contexts: if we tried to tidy up the curriculum by current standards, and teach today's seminarians about video production values and online tools, how relevant would it be in twenty years, in ten? When I was in seminary, electronic stencil cutters were pretty cool (but I learned about them on the job, not in class).

 

Like any level of education, what's cutting edge today is junk tomorrow. The need for ministerial training is to help develop those deeper understandings of God and world and renewal and connection . . . and learning Hebrew is simply a tool to that more lasting work.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's still trying to master Zoom. Tell him what you have enjoyed learning from scratch at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes from my Knapsack 5-27-20

Notes from my Knapsack 5-27-20

Jeff Gill

 

Where there's no smoke, are there flames?
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Due to some deaths and illnesses in my family, my wife and I have been traveling more during these last two months of restrictions than we have probably in any other two month period of the thirty-five years of our marriage (see how I slipped that in? Happy anniversary, hon!).

 

We have sadly been like too many working Americans, not taking the time off we could, and usually taking it in short pieces, and putting off until retirement more than perhaps is prudent, but here we are.

 

Yet after decades of four and eight day vacations, we've had to spend literally months apart, with trips to Texas and Indiana and managing "self-quarantines" and care and caution while helping out elderly parents. All our travel has, we believe, fallen into the "necessary" category, while working hard to minimize risk, not so much to ourselves, but to those who are at risk that we need to be able to be around.

And my own work, to the extent that I've been "working" as a minister, has been contorted beyond recognition, the hardest part being pastoral care when people die (yes, including one from COVID-19) and there's effectively no way for the usual ministry of presence to be part of my response.

 

Looking ahead, for all of us, is hard. We have to take the best counsel we can, and sort out various and competing visions of what might happen next. And where there's competition, there's likely to be politics, and sure enough, we've politicized epidemiology and public health. Okay, so we factor for that, too, but neither extreme is going to guide most of us.

 

What really baffles me, though, is that no one really knew until about fifteen minutes ago even 50% of the likely course and speed of this virus. The certainty I hear from some about what was known and what we're sure of now I think is misplaced.

 

So people saying the public health actions of mid-March were extreme and foolish I think are like people we see evacuated from homes downwind of wildfire, who come back to untouched homes a few days later and say "that was unnecessary, nothing happened."

 

Our problem now is that this is still burning in patches upwind, so to speak, with unburned fuels between us and the fire, so it's a tough call all around between mitigation and evacuation. But if you insist you won't evacuate a second time, and you've got brush and scrub growing right up to your house and under the eaves . . . and your home has redwood siding with cedar shingles, I'm going to really be surprised if you don't even want to put out sprinklers in the lawn on the upwind side.

 

I still don't know for sure what the right course of action going forward is, but I'm certainly thinking at the very least we all need to reduce potential fuels around structures, and inhibit the spread of new ignitions, even if the initial wave of grass fires didn't do as much damage as we feared at first.

 

And yeah, I'm gonna wear masks when I'm out and about. Call it mitigation, call it excessive, but to me it's like extinguishing campfires thoroughly and reporting smoke and trimming brush near my house. Call it prudent, if that old fashioned word still has any weight.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he is, to be honest, not always prudent. But it's a good goal to have. Tell him how you measure prudence at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

 

Faith Works 5-16-20

Faith Works 5-16-20

Jeff Gill

 

Floods, fires, and infections
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As a preacher, my stock in trade is bringing people together.

 

Whether for Sunday services or special occasions, a big part of what my work has always been about is how to call an assembly into session, convening gatherings, taking people to church. Even if it's not in a church building, whether up on a hilltop park or out at camp, a circle in a parking lot or a group on a work trip, the point is always about bringing people together.

 

A congregation is literally a collection with one another ("con" in Latin is usually "with"); a convocation is a body called ("vocare, as in vocal") to be with each other.

 

But sometimes our calling as ministers is to call people in different ways than just into a physical gathering. I've been involved in situations when flooding was threatening an area, and people were sent to notify residents and tell them it's time to evacuate.

 

With a flood, especially in the Midwest, we all usually have some warning, some ability to anticipate what's going on. Days of rain, and the creeks rise over their banks, rivers move into flood stage, and weather staff can start to measure upstream rainfall and calculate crests and risk.

 

Even then, you can run into issues where someone after you knock on the door says "I'm not leaving." It can be because the resident doesn't understand the risk, and you have to explain things; it might be someone saying "the river's never gotten up to this house" and they've not evacuated before, thinking they never will. Often it's simply fear: where will I go? What will happen to me, or my possessions? It's a pastoral kind of act to explain and interpret and ultimately get the person at risk to grab their papers and photos and get away.

 

A little more outside of most people's experience is wildfire. It's more common out west, but in theory and practice it can happen in open areas after long dry stretches right here. This is why our fire departments have grass fire training and even special equipment, up to vehicles, to fight a spreading conflagration burning out in fields. Our many roads even in rural Licking County make for natural firebreaks, but it can happen that a fire burns across a section, and residences downwind are at risk.

 

So once again, rescue personnel can find themselves in an awkward situation. You're knocking on a door, and the person who answers might not even know there's a fire out there. You can't say for certain what the risk is, but it's there, because of wind direction and terrain and the known natural patterns of spread. If the resident says "I'll take my chances," you don't have the time and leisure to drive them around, show them the current extent of the flames, and lay out on a map in detail why you think they're at risk. And generally, only law enforcement, and then under certain circumstances, can mandate evacuation. So fire service and volunteers can be as convincing as they want, but if the smoke let alone the fire isn't visible, and the occupants unwilling, you can find yourself with a known hazard in the middle of your fire fighting plan.

 

Floods, fires – those in public safety let alone pastoral care have certain challenges in front of them asking the public they are trying to reach to do something they may not want to do. Whatever your job title or hat, it's preaching. You have a saving message you wish to communicate, and often it's a resistant audience you're preaching to, one at a time or in groups or en masse.

 

Infection, though. Very few of us have any training, basically none any experience with dealing with that sort of threat to public health, or how to respond. Not preachers or even those in public health, let alone public safety. And the public we're trying to communicate with, in church communities or the county as a whole, doesn't see the smoke or fires except for those tragically very close to the source of concern. The idea that waters are rising may cause some to say "floods have never reached me, and if they do, it's my time." But we evacuate people as much to reduce risk for others as for themselves, since a later rescue is risky for more than just the rescuee.

 

The best part of an evacuation is when people go back home and nothing happened. The floods didn't rise above the doorsill, the fire burned around your lot. It's also easy to say later it was unnecessary. Maybe so. It was a precaution, an inconvenient and uncomfortable precaution with risks of its own. But sometimes you call people apart, so that later you can call them together again, to share with them good news.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's been out on a couple of fire lines, and knows that you can't always predict which way a wildfire will spread. Let him know how you're doing evacuated to your own home at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.