By Rev. Lynice Pinkard
Sometime in the months leading up to the 2024” Spiritual Roots of Protest” retreat, retreat co-organizer Bill Wylie-Kellermann had a dream in which the words came to him: “Spiritual openings in a dead-end time.” That phrase became the topic of a panel at the retreat, and the following is Rev. Lynice Pinkard’s contribution to that panel.
In my spirit, I hear these words: “The ministry of Jeremiah the prophet.”
See, in Jeremiah’s time, Babylon was breathing down Judea’s neck, and everyone was going around hoping against hope that somehow King Nebuchadnezzar wasn’t going to come along and trample them, but Jeremiah’s message was “Get ready to be invaded. Stop hoping for a miracle and prepare yourselves.” Jeremiah saw the false hope offered by the false prophets as worse than a distraction. It was a dead end!
Our situation is even worse. Right now we are moving full stern ahead in a 500-year empire process, and we are in a nose dive that hits the ground; it doesn’t pull up at the last minute.
That is not to say that there is not ebb and flow or that there are not periods of respite, or that Kamala Harris would not have been better than Donald Trump, meaning she would have been what Paulo Friere calls an “aspirin.” She was going to be a prophylactic measure, a palliative, a better alternative to the death process on steroids. And that mattered. Had she become president, it would have occasioned a garbled hallelujah. Her term would have prevented or at least postponed some suffering.
Yes, she would have been better, but she would also have been…president. And that office signifies in some particular ways. All we have to do is take a look at history: Every president, starts out right of center, at best, and then they move further to the right. The system is set up to ensure that prophets will never be presidents. Presidents, at best, pass out aspirin gel caps. So, this business of choosing the lesser of two evils only gets us so far. Why? Because, it turns out that gonorrhea is not preferable to syphilis. DEAD END!
So we are in an end stage, and things are getting worse—again, not denying the aspirin practices and the prophylactic measure. We are not getting to grips with it, and America is intent on cutting off the limb we are sitting on.
This is a hard message. Starting when we are five years old, the world tells us that things are getting more and more civilized, that our country is great and wonderful, the one indispensable nation, that we are on a never-ending quest for a more perfect union etcetera etcetera. Presidents all give speeches like that. “There is no problem that we cannot solve. There is no situation that we can’t face.” So, it is a hard leap for us to say ok, we are going to stop hoping that things are going to get better due to human efforts in this age.
This is where we need some biblical hope. See, a long time ago, there came a time of disillusionment in the idea, within the Wisdom Tradition of Israel, that if you are a good person, and if you do right, then you will be blessed and you will come out on top. It wasn’t working out that way, and so God had to intervene in creation. God had to take a hand in the eschatological future. So that is the big-scale eschatological hope that beyond death and beyond the crash of our civilization, there is God’s work as creator.
We may be at that moment today, the moment where we have to stop hoping in our own ingenuity—the idea that we are always one technological innovation from salvation—and start focusing on God’s creative power, which is to say the power, the wisdom of the ecosystem, and faith in a loving God who is its Creator, reminding ourselves that “We can’t erase God’s goodness. God has a mind…They have a mind to do good in creation, and you can’t defeat God, the Spirt of Life and Love.”
A mere created being cannot destroy God’s work. What we injure, God can heal. What we kill, God can resurrect. The Creator can repair anything in the creation that is harmed. If we break it, the very one who made it can also repair it. That is what healing and resurrection are about—resurrection not only for ourselves but also for our world. But that doesn’t look like what we’ve been trained to expect.
The thing that we Christians do not know how to do, in this country, is to look beyond the disaster to God remaking what has been harmed. We can’t recognize God’s resurrection work because we hope for a future that involves things being the way they are, mostly, but a little better. Technology will lead us to greater and greater heights of achievement, and we will just keep getting better and better. That is not the biblical hope! Dead end!
Biblical hope is a resurrection hope. Now, that kind of hope, the hope of people brutalized and oppressed, the hope of the slave, the hope of the majority of Black people in this country that are America’s favorite people to hate, a people whose whole job it is to survive our own murder—that is the hope of a people who know that things are not working out by our own efforts!
The spiritual opening in dead-end times requires a dying to the old hope that we can fix this thing, tinker around the edges and make it go. Such release is heresy, for middle, upper middle, and owning class liberals and progressives—Black, white, across the board. We are so sophisticated and we are so smart! It is heresy, especially for white progressives who think they know more about what other people need than they do and who feel sorrier for other people who, actually feel sorrier for them. When people are satisfied with what they get from this world system, there is no incentive for surrender, and you don’t see gifts of the Holy Spirit working dramatically among us because that is not where our hope is. We are not desperate and do not even realize we are in a desperate situation.
Resurrection hope requires first that something die.
Resurrection is about rising, but not just any rising. It requires rising above ourselves and our petty self-interests and getting over ourselves—not absolutizing our own individual identities. (We are not individually salvageable!) It means wanting, not as individuals but as a collective, to lay down all of the parts of ourselves that are death-dealing, our complicity in the death-culture, all the parts of ourselves that work against the flourishing of all life. We have to lay down our weapons and get up off our assssets to share the good things that the creation has bestowed on us. We have to get our hands free in order to join in solidarity with all living things, to allow what is bull-whipping us, what is killing us, what is compelling us and use that to connect to everything alive. We get to keep the “us” that works for Life and Love, that catalyzes flourishing for a harmed people and a hurting planet. Our role in resurrection is to want that and only that.
I believe that the eschatological future of God’s creative power, God’s loving power for life, is already here. It’s here in the community of faith when we look to God to do dramatic acts of healing and restoration. God wants to work dramatically for life, and we become portals, entry points, opportunities to mediate new life. This involves struggle. There is no hope without struggle. We cultivate hope by entering (or being pushed into) a cauldron of struggle. Hope lies in the lives of oppressed people who cease tolerating oppression and move to struggle against it. And all people live into hope through solidarity. We must work toward the time when the inner contradictions of the systems of social injustice become so obvious that they move people from apathy to struggle, from despair to hope.
So, practically speaking, among ourselves, I think major spiritual openings are to seek God together, and ask God to bring powerful gifts of the Holy Spirit so that in the midst of a dangerous situation, we have the evidence in front of us. It’s not just pie in the sky, we see the power of God dramatically manifesting herself among us. Because if we are going to risk all for the full aliveness of humanity and the more than human world, for Life and Love, we can’t do all of that on the basis of a list of doctrines and tenants and creeds, like “I am going out there and face martyrdom because I keep repeating to myself the Nicene Creed. We have to know God the Creator by way of experience. We have to believe that God is the creator of heaven and earth, and on that basis, become willing to risk everything! Or, in the short term, to risk our wealth, power, status and security, and our attachments to those things. That is hope manifest! I am going to dare to release resources that I have been hoarding—this is the culture—we are hoarders. If we’re going to dare to step out of the pattern of me first and the idols of this age, we need more than simply a doctrine in our heads; we need more than what we can do in our own strength because everything that we do in our own effort collapses from exhaustion—trust me! We need more than good hearts and radical ideologies! We need to have personal experience together which means collective experience of Love’s piercing in beyond our own capacities, and then we have a basis for taking huge risks. The opening for hope is to see God working among us.
We cannot necessarily fix the big thing, but we can show among us, at the local, regional, national, international level what love, justice power, oneness, compassion, mercy and generosity look like. The scriptures don’t bear out that we are going to be successful in this age. Was it Thomas Merton who said, “Success is not a name for God”? Daniel 7, many, many passages in the book of revelation and in other parts of scripture do not bear out that we are going to be successful in this age, but we can be what I call pockets of the New Creation. We can help to catalyze that piercing-in process, and sometimes suffering crumbles, and new life is made manifest, but it is in the midst of a death culture that we show what God looks like on this planet, and thereby, with our irrepressible lives, we make a down payment on the New Creation.
If we want to live in spiritual community, big-scale—we have to start acting like we expect God to pierce in among us. This is our calling: to be a people who call upon God to work through us to do dramatic acts of newness. We pray for healing, and it doesn’t always happen that way, but we take risks. We are willing to be humbled, to come to the end of ourselves.
People often work hard, in their own strength, toward a result and gain nothing. But there are times when we “bottom out.” We wear ourselves out grazing the surface, pretending, denying, moving, moving, moving, trying to do enough, to get enough, to get by. And, in that place, we are ready to go deep, to risk being drowned, immersed, baptized into and overtaken by something new.
Peter had fished all night and caught nothing. Jesus told Peter: “Push out into the deep.” Push out into the deep; push away from the safe place; push away from the shallow place; push out beyond the bounds of convenience and propriety. Don’t just cast your net, but cast your life, cast your own body and mind and heart into the waters of the deep.
Sometimes we must be forcibly excised from our seductive myths of privilege and pushed back down into the messy inchoateness, the tentative, amorphous, embryonic, undeveloped, unclear space of new birth. Perhaps this is such a time. We have to learn how to groan again. Human groaning opens out into the groan of all of history and time, indeed the very groan and urge of creation itself against bondage.
Push out into the deep so that it is possible for the agony and ecstasy of Christ inside to be brought to conception within this community. Push down and out beyond the top levels of the hierarchy of anguish in our society, and allow your own pain to become a kind of guide to sound out “other” depths. In the deep, dark waters of baptism, we can be remade, into a new form, and this form will not be controlled by us, beholden to our positions and identities, mapped by our social programming.
So, “wade in the water children,” deep in the water, down in the water; God’s going to “trouble the water.” The waves of violence are angry, and the winds of injustice are high, and the ways of imperialism are dark, but we must not falter in our resolve to wade, to wade, wade in the water, we must dare everything because God is going to trouble the water. What does this mean? The Spirit of Christ, that creative, convulsive power that makes evident everywhere the messianic birth pangs of healing and abundant life, is calling us.
Take us to the water, take us to the water, take us to the water to be baptized.
