Pete Rollins is on his tour through America. I’ve mentioned Pete on this blog before and really enjoyed his first book, “How (Not) To Speak of God”. But perhaps more than his book, I enjoy listening to him speak.

To cut to the chase, Pete came via some of our Emergent connections to CTS where he spoke to our class, Foundations of Evangelism (taught by Steve Hayner!), yesterday. I had the opportunity to record the conversation and wanted to share it with you. Enjoy~

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Calling all Asian American Christian exiles in the Metro Atlanta area ~ there is a new gathering in town that will be meeting the first and third Thursdays of every month called Asianamergence.

This means we meet this Thursday at 7pm at Communitas (directions) in Chamblee. You can read about Thursday here on our new blog as we gather to watch the film, “The Grace Lee Project.”

This is not a new church plant. This is an experimental community to ask questions, explore, and create what it means to be an Asian American Christian.

It will be part Bible study, part emergent cohort, part discussion, part poetry/psalm readings, part pecha kucha night, and part wherever the Lord leads us. If you come, you will be both audience and participant. We want to hear every voice and encourage every question and journey together.

We would like this to be a space in the middle – a wilderness of sorts – where we can ask questions about our identity and faith, the collisions of our different cultures, and seek to the connect the dots back to a Jewish messiah.

Quite ambitious I know, but it’s only in community that we can find these answers or at least companions. And here you will find myself and a few friends (from Merging Lanes) and Danny Yang and Consider this an open invitation if this resonates with you at all. Hope to see you there.

David

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A good friend I grow in admiration of every time we break bread together is Jimmy McGee. And although I’ve mentioned him on this blog before, I cannot fully express how much I learn from this man simply being in his presence and in conversation with him.

If you’ve never heard of Jimmy, I invite you to check out his first published article entitled “Re-visiting Rev. Wright.”

I recommend it particularly if you were turned off by the statements that Jeremiah Wright made that were turned into fodder for the political machine recently. My own mother felt that a Christian who made such bold, seemingly anti-American statements was not fit to pastor a presidential candidate and that a serious presidential candidate should not be found in a church like Wright’s. But the thing that many people missed out on was the fact that this man is not a raging anarchist, in fact, on the contrary, he’s thoughtful and active in service. The posture that I have come appreciate about Black theology and of Wright in particular is they have enough detachment and skepticism about the powers and principalities of this world to question them and call the US government or any government really to the carpet about these issues. They take the biblical role of prophet seriously in asking how the church is to be a light unto the world, and therefore questioning those inclinations where the world can co-opt the mission of the church. Here’s a clip from Jimmy’s article and a video of Wright’s sermon (again, I highly recommend reading it in its entirety):

The mainstream also does not understand that our critique comes from a deep love for the country and the ideas captured in the Declaration of the Independence and the Constitution of the United States. We have historically participated in every war that jeopardizes the values held in these documents. We have also fought with the hope that the freedoms we defended would be extended to our community, and our humanity recognized as equal in worth.

When the sermon of Rev. Wright was being replayed on YouTube and news services throughout the country, all of a sudden the country was “peeking behind the veil” into the second consciousness of Black folks. This consciousness is not a singular phenomenon, but a collective one….

Eventually, it became humorous to hear evangelicals join in the chorus of criticism aimed at Rev. Wright and question his position as an under shepherd caring for the flock of Jesus’ followers. I wondered how they would’ve responded to Frederick Douglas and his comments regarding Christianity within the United States in his book Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave:

“… between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference–so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: …Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels. Never was there a clearer case of “stealing the livery of the court of heaven to serve the devil in.”

I find this posture absent in the Asian American communities of faith – meaning that it seems that we care more about our citizenship in heaven and completely disregard any obligation or struggle that we should tend to here; or we seem to remain complicit to the authorities and play by their rules and somehow expect to “win” at this game by being good citizens as though that were to reflect the strength of our faith. And it is from our shallowness that we lament the fact that our youth are leaving the church in droves. But what do we expect, really? The language that we use about the gospel is more doctrinaire than challenging, it is more about application than inspiration. How can a gospel based on pragmatism and compliance ever give people a glimpse of the radical nature of Christ? Would we ever have the courage to turn over the tables of business in our houses of worship? Would we ever shout down our idols of prosperity and education from our pulpits, even as our robes are filled with the pomp and circumstance of those very golden calves?

We exegete a passage but cannot understand the signs, diagnose the wounds in our midst, relate to God in light of our neighbors, or expand the vocabulary of our worship. We never answer the question of how we might sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land, but merely adopt the songs of the natives, as though we had no ownership and responsibility to tell how the Lord delivered us to the generations to come. We should retreat from the Promised Land into a Gilgal if nothing more than to circumcize ourselves again, to hold up the American dreams of our parents and sacrifice them all. The days of random acts of kindness should be banished. We must inquire of the Lord what it is He has created us and called us to do. We are not honorary Whites, we are not honor students, we are the called out ones. We must step into a confidence of who we are and remember who we were made to be. I’m tired of grasping for reasons why our youth are falling away and our services trite, it is not merely for lack of prayer, it is for lack of dreaming and hoping that there is more to this Christ than what we can see. There is much more we have not been willing to see or to take hold of. And in taking hold of it, we can hold others and other communities accountable to the calling God has respectively given to them as well.

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Found this quote on Eric Musselman’s blog regarding Malcolm Gladwell’s latest work, Outliers. Here are a few very interesting quotes:

Success also has a lot to do with culture. For example:

“Asian culture has a profoundly different relationship to work. It rewards people who are persistent. Take a random group of 8-year-old American and Japanese kids, give them all a really, really hard math problem, and start a stopwatch. The American kids will give up after 30, 40 seconds. If you let the test run for 15 minutes, the Japanese kids will not have given up. You have to take it away.”Gladwell contends that value — of sticking with something — is grounded in Asian history and culture:

“Asian cultures are all wet-rice agricultural economies. Growing rice is this extraordinarily complex, labor-intensive activity that requires not just physical engagement but mental engagement. So a farmer in 14th-century Japan or 14th-century China was working 3,000 hours a year – three times longer. I know it sounds hard to believe, but habits laid down by our ancestors persist even after the conditions that created those habits have gone away.”According to Gladwell, “instead of thinking about talent as something that you acquire, talent should be thought of as something that you develop.”

OK, so I want to say that these habits cannot be perpetuated without those conditions and that a certain nihilism has set in with the recent crop of Asian Americans. We do not have the same sense of success as our parents I would venture to say, but are running off an inertia of success. And while our prosperity and success may bear fruit into future generations, it is not the same kind in as much as good management is not synonymous with good entrepreneurship.

Furthermore, because success has given rise to a sense of nihilism (although unlike the nihilism of poverty), we must be cautious as to what this means as it relates to our souls. Just as Dubois wrote on the “Souls of Black Folk” to shed light on the weight of racism for black folk, it would be good for us to have some dialogue as to what the weight of our own commoditization has done to us. There is something inherently dehumanizing when all gifts and talents are measured by our outputs valued in a capitalistic economy. And it is problematic when we profit so much over selling our souls that we scarcely miss them.

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Reading the book, Re-Visioning Family Therapy: Race, Culture, and Gender in Clinical Practice these days.

We’re having some good, constructive conversation about race at Open Table Community Church lately, but it hasn’t been all easy. But these couple of paragraphs have made me feel that I’m not crazy when I bring up the notion that racism is still alive and well, particularly within the context of church. I have noticed that bringing this subject up in church can make people feel very uncomfortable, but in the introduction to this book it is mentioned that problems behind political correctness and multiculturalism is that “it draws our attention to the discomfort of the privileged rather than to the pain of the oppressed. Such discussion implicitly blames those who attempt to discuss their oppression for making the privileged uncomfortable–thus blocking discussion of privilege.”

Here are “three techniques by which accountability for injustice is undermined.

In paralysis, people become so overwhelmed by their own pain that, fearing the possibility that they might offend again in the future, they do nothing and feel impotent. A response of overwhelming guilt can end up entrenching the status quo.

Others respond in a patronizing way, taking on the issues of the oppressed to the extent that they inappropriately become self-appointed spokespeople for them.

A third response is individualizing, through which a person denies the relevance of group norms and behaviors, making it impossible to discuss issues of power, privilege, and accountability….Denial that one belongs to the category of privilege, such as denying that one is “white,” for example, keeps one from having to be accountable for the privileges of whiteness and makes discussion of the problems of racism, sexism, and other discrimination impossible.”

This helps me to understand the nature of the responses I get when bringing up the issue of race. Just as with all sin, I know that it is in my nature as well, to deflect and de-fuse responsibility. I always have the suspicion that injustice and sin is something outside of me, but it is wholly a different thing to realize that these atrocities, whether incipient or explicit, are inside me, requiring me to ask for forgiveness and extend grace because hypocrisy begins with me.

And I cannot credibly claim to know the one who is without hypocrisy or sin without acknowledging my own need for that one. In other words I cannot legitimize to you that I know there is someone who never tells lies without confessing that I was once a liar. It would only be fatal to my claim if you discovered that I was a liar but did not tell you. How could you believe me then?  And this is the precise problem with the contemporary church and the issue of justice. How can we believe that the mission of God is justice and love if we can barely see ourselves as even part-time criminals and haters who desperately need that very God?

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I had never heard of Walter Brueggemann until a few years ago. And if you should scoff at my ignorance, let me just say that he was never big in Korean immigrant circles in rural corners of the Southeast or in the charismatic community I met in Nashville. And I was a student of economics and history in college, and let’s just say that Brueggemann, as prolific as he is, didn’t make the reading lists as far as I remember.

Of course, as my thoughts turned to attending Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, a few people overwhelmed me with mentions of the great Walter Brueggemann. And as fate would have it, he had already retired by the time I matriculated. But he was still a presence on campus and all the students consider their day to have taken a definite upswing if and when the patron saint of CTS should cross their path. My first face-to-face meeting with him came as he was exiting Campbell Hall and the great Brueggemann held the door for me. I was floored – I recognized his picture from the refectory (cafeteria) and I couldn’t believe that in both literal and figurative terms, he was holding the door for me. I was humbled at his humility before I ever read one word he had written.

As luck would have it, he did guest lecture a couple of times in my Old Testament Survey class. Just before his lecture (the first one I’d heard him give) I ran to the bookstore and because I am pragmatic and cheap, not having read any of his work, I decided I would get the least expensive work I found, which turned out to be Prophetic Imagination. I ran to class and he gave an outstanding lecture on the Psalms. In the break of lecture, I sheepishly pulled out the book and asked him for his autograph, I always consider it an opportunity to have an author sign their work. He looked at the book and at me and said, “Of all the books I written, I consider this my best.” I oooohed and ahhhhhhhed and said “Thank you very much” (I’ll have to blog on that some other time). Needless to say, I definitely read the book not long after and was amazed – I finally get it – Brueggemann is a bona fide genius.

And today, I bought my third Brueggemann, a book entitled, “Prayers for a Privileged People”. I had the chance to ask him what to make of Asian American theology and how we have succumbed to the American consumerism which has co-opted the manner in which we do church and flit and fly about the message of the gospel. He replied that is work that this generation has to do. That is the middle ground that is only capable of being carved out now. So I’d like to share one of his prayers with you so that this work may begin in the shadow of the privilege that we now own to some extent. It also resonates with the sense that we were once immigrants and their children. So here is “Leaving That Is So Hard,” a prayer for my fellow privileged Asian Americans by the great Brueggemann.

It is difficult to leave home
and, very differently,
it is difficult to leave slavery.

It is difficult to leave home,
but people do it.
Graduates do it.
Soldiers do it.
Job seekers do it.
We depart the comfort and familiarity and affection of home,
but sometimes to depart to freedom, and
new well-being, and
fresh fulfillments of all sorts.

It is difficult to leave slavery,
but people do it.
Our ancient people in Egypt left Pharaoh,
our black citizens have become free at last,
and on a lesser scale,
addicts of all sorts depart to freedom and new life.

But we do not want to go,
because it is safe and familiar and protected
to remain “under the spell” of another power.

And having left, we yeart to return…
to families only to find them different and strange,
to slaveries because freedom demands too much.

So we leave and return,
we grow and depart home and come home again;
we choose freedom and depart, but stay enthralled
to too many enslavements.

We confess, as we depart and return,
that you are the God of all our comings and goings,
you are the one who watches our
going out and our coming in.

For such trouble we pray your mercy,
that we may have courage and freedom,
and peaceable rest.
You homemaker.
You emancipator.
You, God of all of our futures.
Give us wisdom to follow where you lead us.

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