Rachel Weeps Again

The news out of Charleston late Wednesday night has served to once again remind us of what a fragile world in which we live. The horror of knowing that this happened inside a church building where brothers and sisters in Christ were studying Scripture and praying only adds to that realization. Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston is the second oldest AME church in the United States and occupies an important place in the history of Charleston and on the historic tours you can take while visiting this great city. Growing up near Charleston and having a mother who grew up there, I knew Charleston as “The Holy City” – a name it claims because of its many beautiful, historic, and influential churches. Emmanuel AME Church is one of those churches.

When Matthew tells the story of Herod’s wickedness in killing the baby boys in Bethlehem in hopes of getting rid of this pretender to being King of the Jews, he reminds his readers of words from Jeremiah – “A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.” (Matthew 2:16-18, Jeremiah 31:15) For Jeremiah, it was the bitter grief of exile for the people of God. For Matthew, the bitter grief of innocent babies being killed in the name of evil. For you and me – the bitter grief of knowing that nine followers of Jesus no longer walk among us because of the vicious evil that seems to raise its ugly head in our culture all too often.

If we read but a few more verses in Jeremiah, we are reminded that despite the awful grief such moments bring, we serve and worship a God who has promised “there is hope for your future . . . your children will return to their own land.” (Jeremiah 31:17) And for the family, friends, and loved ones of those killed in Charleston’s Emmanuel AME Church, we know that in Christ there is great hope for tomorrow.

Would you join with me in praying for these families, for the members of Emmanuel AME Church, for the City of Charleston and its residents, and for our country. These events are great reminders to us of just how important what we are doing at Point University in educating students for Christ-centered service and leadership throughout the world really is. Would you also pray for Point’s influence to grow so that these events can become less and less as the kingdom of God advances.

Many Parts . . . One Body

What if your body were nothing but one giant eyeball? Have you ever thought about that? Think of how trying it would be to live during pollen season – especially if you had to wear contact lens to see well? And what kind of chairs would need to be manufactured in order for you to sit down! In fact, exactly on what body part would you sit if you were this giant eyeball?

Or what if you decided that your ears were so beautiful, you would like to be a giant ear. I’ve never actually met a person who thought their ears were that beautiful, but what if God had decided to make humans giant ears!

No doubt none of us would willingly get rid of our eyeballs or ears – equally of no doubt is that none of us want to be only an eyeball or ear.

In 1 Corinthians 12, it appears that Paul is making precisely that very point. Our bodies have “many parts,” but when all is said and done, those “many parts” make up but “one body.” By the time he gets to 12:20 -   “But now there are many parts, but one body” -  he has long since left the analogy  about our human bodies and is meddling a bit in our understanding of the church – the one body of Christ. He seems to think it more than merely odd that while we understand the “many parts” nature of our one human body, we struggle with the “many parts” of the one body of Christ.

One of the things I like best teaching at Point University is that I never walk into a classroom that looks like all the students could be my own children. There are some Caucasians, some African-Americans, some Latinos, some Asians, some – seemingly from every ethnic background imaginable. The classroom looks so much like “many parts . . . one body” that I can’t help but think it’s an amazing opportunity to be included.

In our current cultural context two troubling things stand out in this area – and I think they aren’t unrelated.  One is that in most Christian contexts, we tend to worship with, study with, work with “parts” that are almost always just like us. MLK was right when he described Sunday morning as the most segregated moment of each week! It is as though we want to be “all eyeballs” or “all ears.” The other thing is that it seems reasonable to suggest that our greatest cultural challenge right now is rooted in a kind of latent racism that separates us in to groups in more ways that we imagine.

But in 1 Corinthians 12, Paul won’t back down on his insistence that there is but one body – no matter how many “parts” it takes to make up the one body. The paragraphs 12:14-20 begins and ends with “one body” – and that idea is the subject of the whole paragraph – and entire section for that matter – of this chapter.

Where is the prophetic voice of Bible-believing Christians who have the courage not only to say that the only solution to our cultural challenges is for the church - the one body of Christ – to begin living up to its calling? Of course the real issue isn’t just ethnicities – it could be economics, it could be class, it could be gender, it could be – it could be almost anything.

The bottom line has to be that we have no right to be overly critical of divisive issues in our culture if we aren’t leading the church to model what it means to live out the Jesus story in a way that makes it clear that matters of group identity, gender identification, or geographical origin don’t matter anymore. Jesus came to redeem humankind and creation from the curse that fully expressed itself at the Tower of Babel. Pentecost undid that.

May we learn to model better what we believe!

Theology Is About Life

On the first day of my Theology in Life class every spring, I start out by telling students in the class that theology is about life and can’t be truly learned in a vacuum of a classroom where you can take notes and pass tests. Those two things are important – after all I have to turn in grades at the end of the semester – but they are far from being the whole story.

While I think writing well about theology is a good discipline, I also think that actually doing something that connects what we are learning with how life works is a good discipline. Students in the class do have to write – especially summaries of textbook chapters and supplementary reading responses; but the big project is not a term paper on a theological topic. They are asked to do what I call a “Theology in Life” project.

The process looks something like this. Early in the semester I assign them to groups of four. I do my best to create the groups in a way that doesn’t allow best friends to be in the same groups. I don’t want all athletes or non-athletes to make up a group. I try to create some ethnic diversity in each group. Creating the groups like this in itself makes the project a challenge. For those of us who have been around Point for a long time, we remember the days when everyone knew everyone else and our backgrounds were very similar. That’s not true anymore, and that is one of our great stories to tell!

Today, we are far too big of a school for that to be true and the rich diversity of our student population in so many areas means that in order to do well on the project, students have to learn to work together with people they don’t know, people from different backgrounds, and a whole host of other “different” sort of things. If students succeed in doing that, the project has been worthwhile. Every team either in their classroom report or written assessment of their project noted how good it was to learn to work with people they didn’t know.

This year my class had ten groups of four students. After the groups were formed, they were required to read a collection of comments on issues of social justice and evangelism from the books of John Stott. That assignment is designed to give students an awareness of how the Christian gospel can impact the world around us at every level.

Students know from the start that they can’t do this project in a local church. I’m not opposed to serving the local church, I’ve spent most of my life doing just that. But that’s too easy. I want them to do something that creates a little discomfort and forces them to stretch themselves in ways they aren’t always sure they can. Every team, while making their report in class, had someone on the team say something like “I didn’t think I could do this” but they did!

The ten teams this years contributed somewhere near 250 hours of volunteer work in this community because of these projects. They did everything from working on an elderly lady’s home and yard to having a diaper drive for a ministry in the Greater Valley Area that ministers to unwed mothers. They bought enough diapers for a baby in this area to have a clean and dry bottom for over three months! Another team spent the day with women who are in a home for alcohol and drug addiction issues. Another team had a field day for students at a school for special needs students. They taught them tennis and soccer skills. 

Another team worked with a coffee shop to create an evening of interaction between various Latino groups in the area with others, and several teams did after-school events for students in different schools. A group worked with an animal shelter run by a couple who do most of the work on their own, and helped get a few pets adopted in the process. Still another group worked with Circles of Troup County, a ministry that helps poor people learn job skills, budgeting, and a host of other activities that can lift people out of poverty.

One of the most encouraging moments in each presentation was hearing students say “I plan to go back” or “I can do something like that also.” A few students said something like “I wish someone had helped my family when I was growing up like we did.” For most students, I don’t think these projects end up being a “one shot deal.”

Group Six worked at a local community garden called “Garden Patch.” Mr. Jack Coombs is the one who has headed up that project for years. Four students contacted him and spent an afternoon working with him. They did nothing glamorous – and in fact spent a good bit of time picking up litter on the streets around the garden. In their report, they talked a lot about how appreciative he was of their help and that they had never met a person more grateful for volunteers. They learned some great lessons from Mr. Coombs.

As I was writing this post, a friend who works at Point and lives in this community told me that Mr. Coombs died suddenly last week. I sent the four students an email letting them know and told them that a part of the blessing of this project was that they were among the last volunteers to help him at the garden, and I hoped they would remember how grateful he was – and how their service impacted his life.

These projects weren’t complex, costly, time consuming activities. But each one of them made a difference in the lives of a variety of people – including my students who discovered that I was telling the truth on the first day of class. There is an academic side to theology, but when all is said and done, theology has to be acted on to be learned well.