MTJ

I started graduate school in the spring of 2010, and that semester I took a class with the locally famous choir director, Mr. Summerville.  The class was called “Harmonizing Select Differences Through African-American Sacred Music.” (It used to be called “Harmonizing Differences Through African-American Sacred Music,” but he added “Select” because “we’re not gonna argue about whether or not Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior and that He’s in this room because He IS.”  Got it.)  The class was a trip.  I’d go into some of the stories, but it’s impossible to do so without somehow giving the impression that I’m making fun of Mr. Summerville (because some of the shit that he said and did was funny), which I have no interest in doing.  I learned so much from him in that class.

One of the things that we had to do was visit a bunch of historically Black churches in town for Sunday morning services and write up reports of our experiences.  I loved that assignment because it got me further into a practice I was already doing, visiting various places of worship in town to see where my students were on Sundays (or Fridays).  As a teacher, I could not recommend this practice highly enough.  I did learn so much about the spiritual, cultural, and linguistic communities to which my students belonged, but more importantly I learned that I had so much more to learn about them, from them, with them.

As a person, I came to believe in God.  It happened sort of gradually, and it happened sort of suddenly.  The gradually part I’ll leave for some other day, but the suddenly part I’ll take up now.

I was visiting New Covenant on the invitation of a dear friend and co-worker.  The teaching that day was on Acts 12:1-19, a story I’d never heard before.  Because it’s a good’n’, I’ll quote The Message version of it in full here:

Peter Under Heavy Guard  

^1-4 That’s when King Herod got it into his head to go after some of the church members. He murdered James, John’s brother. When he saw how much it raised his popularity ratings with the Jews, he arrested Peter—all this during Passover Week, mind you—and had him thrown in jail, putting four squads of four soldiers each to guard him. He was planning a public lynching after Passover. 

 ⁵ All the time that Peter was under heavy guard in the jailhouse, the church prayed for him most strenuously. 

 ⁶ Then the time came for Herod to bring him out for the kill. That night, even though shackled to two soldiers, one on either side, Peter slept like a baby. And there were guards at the door keeping their eyes on the place. Herod was taking no chances! 

 ^7-9 Suddenly there was an angel at his side and light flooding the room. The angel shook Peter and got him up: “Hurry!” The handcuffs fell off his wrists. The angel said, “Get dressed. Put on your shoes.” Peter did it. Then, “Grab your coat and let’s get out of here.” Peter followed him, but didn’t believe it was really an angel—he thought he was dreaming. 

 ^10-11 Past the first guard and then the second, they came to the iron gate that led into the city. It swung open before them on its own, and they were out on the street, free as the breeze. At the first intersection the angel left him, going his own way. That’s when Peter realized it was no dream. “I can’t believe it—this really happened! The Master sent his angel and rescued me from Herod’s vicious little production and the spectacle the Jewish mob was looking forward to.” 

 ^12-14 Still shaking his head, amazed, he went to Mary’s house, the Mary who was John Mark’s mother. The house was packed with praying friends. When he knocked on the door to the courtyard, a young woman named Rhoda came to see who it was. But when she recognized his voice—Peter’s voice!—she was so excited and eager to tell everyone Peter was there that she forgot to open the door and left him standing in the street. 

 ^15-16 But they wouldn’t believe her, dismissing her, dismissing her report. “You’re crazy,” they said. She stuck by her story, insisting. They still wouldn’t believe her and said, “It must be his angel.” All this time poor Peter was standing out in the street, knocking away. 

 ^16-17 Finally they opened up and saw him—and went wild! Peter put his hands up and calmed them down. He described how the Master had gotten him out of jail, then said, “Tell James and the brothers what’s happened.” He left them and went off to another place. 

 ^18-19 At daybreak the jail was in an uproar. “Where is Peter? What’s happened to Peter?” When Herod sent for him and they could neither produce him nor explain why not, he ordered their execution: “Off with their heads!” Fed up with Judea and Jews, he went for a vacation to Caesarea.

In her teaching that day, the pastor talked about Peter’s half-sleeping fumbling.  He's about to be lynched, but then he gets saved, and he’s like, “Wha..? Nah, I’m cool.  Just let me go back to sleep.  Weird dream.”  He doesn’t really see or believe what’s happening.  And there’s no reason for him to do so.  Duh: His participation in the leadership of followers of the Jesus Way has made him an enemy of the state.  The authorities have gone to great lengths to securely isolate him from the movement.  His comrade James has been imprisoned and executed.  He is imprisoned and will be executed.  He gets it.  It all makes sense to him.  And maybe the reason he’s even able to sleep that night is because he’s just so clear on the fact there’s not shit he can do about it, and he’s “given it to God” as some Christians say. 

It’s easy to judge him as having no faith in God’s capacity to deliver, that faced with the choice between freedom and oppression, which should be a no brainer, he’s un-believingly dragging his feet.   But it seems more kind and right to see it from his perspective: He’s in a shitty (the shittiest?) spot, and he’s being asked to make a choice between the known, what makes sense, and the unknown, which seems ridiculous.  (An angel?  Aren’t they just metaphors or something?)

The pastor asked us to offer our own selves the same compassionate understanding as we teeter on the edge of decisions.  If the tough choices we had to make presented themselves as “choose freedom or choose continued oppression,” we’d know what to do.  But they don’t show up like that.  Often, they show up more like, “take a risk and change your life and trust in … whatever it is that you believe there is to trust in… or keep doing what you’re doing and just, y’know, suck it up.”

God wants for us freedom, and God will lead us there if we just let God and quit trying to predict and know and calculate.  Peter doesn’t really get that he’s being led to freedom by God until it’s already over.  The angel’s gone, and then he’s like, “Holy shit, I’m free.”

(And then there’s that whole Rhoda scene which reads like something from a romantic comedy about somebody coming home for Christmas.)

When I heard this teaching that day, something in me assented to this version of explaining what life is all about, to explaining why the hell we all even exist.  I was (like I am now) in the middle of a serious depressive episode, the way out of which I could not see (like now).  So I decided to just… believe in this Jesus Way even if it didn't really make that much sense.  Until that day, I identified squarely in the atheist camp.   Until that day, I could not argue with the logic of “Nothing happens when you die.”  But that morning, sipping my Dunkin Donuts (side note: Why the hockey puck is there no Dunkin Donuts in the Bay Area?), I opted for the illogical, the nonsensical.  Hope when there’s no reason to hope.

A few days ago, I posted about the dream-as-the-sign-from-God thing that I’ve been worrying about.  I’ve been stressing about wanting to feel some kind of sacred guidance and feeling sure that if it came in the form of some dream, there’s no way I’d notice it, let alone have the courage to radically change my life because of it.  A close friend and I use the disparaging phrase “Magic Trick Jesus” to refer to silly shit like that.

When I was home in Champaign-Urbana last week, I shared my worry with some loved ones from New Covenant, all of whom seemed to share my skepticism about “signs.”  God probably doesn’t care, we decided, whether we take this job or that job, wear this shirt or that shirt.  But I’m not willing to extrapolate from that that God doesn’t care about the deep depression and anxiety I’ve been living in because of the need to make a difficult decision about my job.  I kept coming back to that in our conversation.  Finally, one of my friends said, “God knows you well enough to know how to get you to listen if God really wants you to.”  I was like, “Oh yeah.”

Last night, I felt for the first time an overwhelming sureness about some of the ideas I’ve been having about what to do now and next.  I won’t get into the details of it because it’s impossible to do so without sounding super cheesy (and also super weird and, like, flighty or dumb or something.)  But I was at Bible study again, and the text that the pastor had chosen for us to read and discuss was Acts 12:1-19.

The sense of calm and peace I felt then is gone this morning, but I still think I’m on to something.