God's Voice in Quarantine and Civil Disruption

God is forging our faith on the anvil of our lives.

God uses our experiences to shape our spirituality in a way that equips us to flourish and remain faithful in the changing circumstances of our lives (Romans 8:28).

Carlyle Fielding Stewart III writes that the experiences of African Americans—slavery, Jim Crow, lynching, discrimination, and racism—have been translated into a spirituality that “has enabled black people to develop, translate, and ritualize the hazards and adversities of their social condition into some meaningful culture of survival [Black Spirituality & Black Consciousness—Soul Fore, Culture and Freedom in the African American Experience. P. 17].”  The spirituality born of this experience has worked as a countervailing influence to the devaluing and delegitimization of African-American peoples (p. 54).   According to Fielding, this spirituality has spawned 3 keys that have led to the survival of African Americans: a strong sense of community; a capacity to embrace nonviolence; and resiliency.

Life changes us.

I remember the first time I held our newborn son.  In that moment I realized my life would be changed forever.  

As a parent, I have come to understand God and God’s love for us in fresh ways, God being a heavenly parent. I appreciate in deeper ways the meaning of commitment and partnership through shared parenting with my wife. I know what it is to love someone yet let them choose for themselves.  I know sacrifice through the experience of raising children.  Through parenting, God has changed me.

John Claypool, after his 8 year old daughter had just been diagnosed with leukemia, said to his congregation at Crescent Hill Baptist Church in Louisville KY:

“Long before this happened to me, I had come to the conclusion that, it was the nature of God to speak to us through the language of events, and that it was the nature of the church for human beings to share with each other what they thought they had heard God say in the thing that happened to them (Tracks of a Fellow Struggler—Living and Growing Through Grief).

God is and will continue to speak to us through our experiences of both pandemic and a refreshed awareness of racism in our country.  We—our churches, our families, our nation, and our world—will be different moving into the future.  This is a liminal experience.  That means that we are in a place where we are passing from one place to another, and we are standing with one foot on each side of the threshold. It can be a moment of disorientation and uncertainty.

It can also be a moment of profound opportunity for people of faith.  God can teach us through these experiences if we listen to our lives.  Claypool points out that the church is the place where we talk about what we hear God saying to us as we listen to our lives.  At this point it is still premature to venture a guess as to what all God will say, but God will have a transforming word for us.

When we are back together—and we will be back together someday—let us listen to God and then share with one another what we have heard God saying.  God is even now forging our faith on the anvil of our living.

Jim Kelsey

Executive Minister—American Baptist Churches of New York State

Woundedness, Anger, and Reconciliation

It was a moment of healing for me.

I sat in a classroom on the outskirts of Kigali, Rwanda.  My fellow students, the overwhelming majority of whom were African, and I were being led through the chapter on “The Wounded Heart” in the curriculum of the International School of Reconciliation, a course of experiential training that has been used with great success to heal the wounds of the genocide in Rwanda.  It is now being used to bring transformation in other places of conflict. 

Joyce, a Kenyan woman, asked us to write down the wounds we carry in our hearts.  I looked around me at people with a living memory of genocide, civil war in South Sudan, and election violence in Kenya.  A woman who still lived under the legacy of Apartheid in South Africa and an African-American woman who remembered the days of Jim Crow sat among us.  Some of these people carried visibly in their bodies scars of their woundedness.

I felt uncomfortable.  I wondered what wounds could I be carrying that would measure up to their scarring.  The wrongs done to me seemed so trivial.  Then Joyce said:  “You do not measure your wounds by the wounds of others.”  She went on to say that woundedness is not a relative thing.  We each have our wounds; great or small, they hurt and hinder us.

This was a liberating moment for me.  I was able to own the wounds I carry. 

The goal of this exercise was that, having owned our woundedness, we would carry those wounds to the cross and find healing and freedom from them in the love of Christ.

This was a part of our training in the way of reconciliation.  We are better equipped to acknowledge the pain of others and foster empathy if we have first owned our own wounds and found healing and freedom from their power over us.  This opens the gates to the journey of reconciliation.

The Bible acknowledges the woundedness we all carry, referring to a “crushed spirit” (Prov. 18:14 and Ps. 34:18).  God heals the brokenhearted and bandages their wounds (Ps. 147:3).  Jesus healed more than people's physical maladies; he healed lives and hearts as well.  Before God can do this for us, we must own our wounds and acknowledge our broken hearts.

Americans, particularly men, are not good at owning woundedness.  Samuel Osherton, in his book Finding Our Fathers—How a Man’s Life is Shaped by His Relationship with His Father, writes about the unexpressed and unacknowledged woundedness men carry.  Below much male anger, he writes, lies a deep sadness and loneliness (p. 110). 

All of us, men and women alike, want to bury our hurts because they, well, hurt. Yet no matter how deeply we bury them, they still shape us.  We try to clothe ourselves and our nation in the trappings of power and might, untouched by failure, hurt, defeat, and disappointment.  We want to move through the world as winners, untouched by loss and defeat.

There is so much anger in our nation these days.  Is it because we deny our vulnerability?  We bury our hurts and pain so deep we can no longer name them, but they still haunts us.

God wants to heal our broken hearts and bind our wounds, both personal and national.  Recognizing and owning our hurts is the beginning of healing and the freedom that follows.  When we have submitted to that process, maybe we will be more successful at healing the brokenness of our communities.

That day in Rwanda, Joyce gave me permission to own my wounds and find healing.  From that flows greater freedom to be reconciled to those around me.

Jim Kelsey

Executive Minister—American Baptist Churches of New York State

Preparing for This Child

Debbie and I have friends who had a baby last week, a baby we have been anticipating for 7 months.  The new parents sent us a picture of baby Joshua, and our first impulse was to jump in the car and rush over to see him.  We wanted to hold him in our arms and touch his smooth soft brown skin.  I would get him to make eye contact with me.  I can do that; I am good with babies.

Then, we remembered the quarantine.  We will get there and hold him someday--just not now. 

In Joshua’s face you can already see a beautiful spirit incarnated in that little black body.    He is already a fully formed person, crafted in the image of the Maker of heaven and earth.  Already, his life matters.

When I finally get the chance, I will hold him and will not want to let go.  I will want to continue to hold him even as he grows into a toddler and then into a school boy.  I will want to hold on even more tightly as he becomes a teenager and then a young black man in America.  I will want to hold him and never let him go to make sure that he gets every opportunity he deserves and grows old enough to complain of stiff knees and kids walking on his lawn on their way home from school.

I know I cannot do that.  At some point he will go out on his own and face what awaits him.  I hope it is a gentler, kinder, fairer, more just and accepting nation, where he will be judged by the content of his character instead of the color of his skin, as Dr. King put it.  

Change has become personal for me in this child.  He will grow up quickly, and I have work to do to make this place in this world ready for him.

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” He called a child, whom he put among them, and said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.  Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.  Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.  If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea.  Woe to the world because of stumbling blocks! Occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but woe to the one by whom the stumbling block comes!” (Matt. 18:1-7)

Everyday children of color are being born in our nation.  We need to get busy preparing this land for them as they grow and go out into our the world we are everyday building, for better or for worse.

Jim Kelsey

Executive Minister—American Baptist Churches of New York State