The Right Rev. C. Andrew Doyle
“There is something in every one of you that waits, listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself and if you cannot hear it, you will never find whatever it is for which you are searching…”
These words are by the great preacher and theologian, Howard Thurman.[i] The prophet Jeremiah heard the genuine[ii]
The word of the Lord came to Jeremiah, (it is written)
and the Lord said, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”
Jeremiah and Thurman’s vision invite us to be curious about this genuine within
Can we hear
The voice before
Our own narrative drowns it out?
Inviting us to discover
God’s invitation
In our passage
From Jeremiah
We hear echoes
Of just such
An enticement
Jeremiah
Invites us to hear
That God
Creates Us
God Writes upon our hearts
God invites
The Genuine in one individual body
To meet
the genuine in the body of another
God invites us to see
That we are part of God’s creation
Creatures of difference
unique bodies
genuine bodies
We
find that which is genuine
Written with the same hand
That pre-scribes all of us
Thurman eloquently wrote, “I must wait and listen for the sound of the genuine in you. I must wait. For if I cannot hear it, then in my scheme of things, you are not even present. And everybody wants to feel that everybody else knows that she is there.”
That we are present
Recognized
Seen – I would add
When we look
And our eyes are opened
Or our ears unplugged
(that recognized ministry of Jesus
In so many healing accounts)
We become
Aware transfixed and transformed
And the God through me
Meets the God through you.
We come to terms
With the inscription
Written so long ago
Enlivened by
the re-interpretation of those words
the translation
the re-tracing
that reveals itself
when one gazes upon God’s
hand written cruciform body of Jesus
and receives
with clarity
what is written on
one another’s hearts
from the day before our beginning
Here then we
“Know the Lord,”
The Genuine
know The Forgiving one
know the merciful one
the loving one
And see iniquity,
For what it is
see sin
and sibling rivalry
Crossed out
Undone
Trampled like death itself
By the embracing body of Jesus
Jeremiah’s gift
Recognized by generations
is
Good news
That All exiles
have an opportunity
To begin again.[iii]
God invites us
To begin again
All exiles are forgiven
They had once forgotten
Each other
Especially the poor
They had forgotten to care for one another
They had forgotten
The creatureliness
And iconography
In each of us
Jeremiah,
Speaks God’s invitation –
Begin again
so
Dive deeper
Than our own inner dialogue
And speech
and hear the words
Inscribed on our hearts
If we are able
As Thurman writes,
To wait
To listen
To see
And know
The Genuine written on the hearts
Of mothers
Fathers
Brothers
Sisters
Our circle of friends
And
And those
Who are our enemies
Politically
Socially
Psychologically
Those
“people [we cannot] stand,
Who
if [we] had the power
[we] would wipe them out.”
Says Thurman
if you can read
each others cross inscribed heart
We will discover
“that if [we] wipe them out,
[we] go with them.”
“So,” Thurman wrote,
“You fight for your own life”
by not killing them.”
Here is the sacrificial
Picking up the cross
Jesus is fond of talking about
The cross of Christ
Does not allow the Christian
To dismiss the exile in each other
Nor our pre-exilic nature
For the Christian
Sees
Always
In another body
a vision
Of one’s own exilic nature
One’s own enslaved body
We also see the genuine
The whole arc of God’s narrative
Suggests that we are created to be
embodied relations
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
called it “anologia relationis.”
Nahum D. Chandler
and W. E. B. Du Bois called it
the “between.”
We are invited
By God’s own
Cruciform Handwriting
(Before we were in the womb)
To Participate in a “poetics of relation”
As poet Édouard Glissant puts it
Such “Poetry is not a Luxury,”
Author and poet, Audre Lorde wrote
I draw on that work here
A poetics of relation
It Is where our names come from
The ideas which are
Until this deep connection
“nameless and formless,
“about to be birthed, but already felt.”
What is heard in the deep
Whispered in the genuineness of poetry
Lorde says
Is that which “precedes understanding.”[iv]
We glimpse an icon that speaks
That “diety is not repugnant in the cosmos”
Not repugnant to bear flesh
An icon of
our human “unicity”
phrases I am borrowing from theologian Kate Sonderegger[v]
- Cameron Carter,
Calls this the ante, the before.[vi]
this is a glimpse at
the para-ontological
nature of embodiment
Before it is drowned out
By the hatred
Thurman
Helps us with this thick theological language
Again he refrains
We see
The Genuine
Thurman wrote with a tongue
of his own mystic prophecy,
“It is possible
for me to go down in me and come up in you.
So that when I look at myself through your eyes
having made that pilgrimage,
I see in me what you see in me
and the wall that separates
and divides will disappear
and we will become one.”
As Jeremiah prophesied
all exiles
Have the opportunity
To begin again
We are invited to a
deep turn towards
One another
Just as God has turned
To us
A turn so as to hear that genuine
Cruciform voice
Of God
inscribed on every heart
It is not
That we are to speak out
a prophecy
But that our bodies
Are to be the prophecy
That repairs
and binds
and
fights for the life
of the exiled in each other
that fights
the fight of
Love
to the exiled in all of us
[i] The Sound of the Genuine–by Howard Thurman, Nov 30, 2017 https://www.dailygood.org/story/1846/the-sound-of-the-genuine-howard-thurman/ Howard Thurman (November 18, 1899 – April 10, 1981) was an influential African American author, philosopher, theologian, educator and civil rights leader. He was Dean of Chapel at Howard University and Boston University for more than two decades, wrote 21 books, and in 1944 helped found a multicultural church. Thurman, along with Mordecai Johnson and Vernon Johns, was considered one of the three greatest African-American preachers in the early 20th-century.
[ii] While we may wonder why Jeremiah remains in the scripture because of his obvious entanglement with the Babylonian court, what we see is that his words prophesy a new faith. The first Christians, without a New Testament, understood their work as community and the person of Jesus Christ as revealed in the prophesy of Jeremiah.
[iii] Walter Brueggeman calls this part of the prophetic book of Jeremiah “the book of comfort.” God is watching and planting and build the new community of hope. While we may well remember the proverb that the parents sins are visited upon the children (even Jesus quotes this), we see in the passage that the people have an opportunity to begin again. The proverb is “null and void” says Brueggeman. All exiles have the possibility of the new. Walter Brueggeman, Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming, (Eerdmans Publishing: Grand Rapids, MI, 2003), 504.
[iv] Audre Lord, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” in Sister Outsider (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007), 36.
[v] Katherine Sonderegger, Systematic Theology: The Doctrine of God, (Fortress Press, New York, 2015), 14.
[vi] Karl Barth described this bodily disruption as a “counter logos.”