Along the Way

These reflections illuminating areas of church, Christian and spiritual life are offered in each Friday email by our Plymouth clergy.

Using our Imagination

Rev. Dr. DeWayne L. Davis

This Week at Plymouth, October 25, 2024

“If there is among you anyone in need, a member of your community in any of your towns within the land that the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor” —Deuteronomy 15:7.

Whether one reads the Bible literally or metaphorically, it is undeniably imaginative. The imagination of the biblical witness challenges us to recognize and anticipate, despite evidence to the contrary, the movement and intentions of the Divine amid failure, scarcity, and barrenness. The Divine imagination looks beyond our current struggles and failures, continuously creating and re-creating us, even when the world insists that all hope is lost. When Moses confronted God about the suffering of his people in slavery, God unleashed this divine imagination, proclaiming that God sees, hears, and knows their suffering and has come to deliver them. God is close and present, deeply affected by pain and suffering. In response, God imagines how to bring justice to those in need.

How do we respond to desperate human needs? Many of us donate generously our time, talent, and treasure in hopes of making a difference. But what would expanding and broadening that instinct and practice nationally look like? Even when our national conversation turns to how to respond to poverty, inequality, and injustice, some people quickly remind us about scarce resources or warn about fraud and waste. But in God’s divine imagination, there are no qualifications. There is no discussion about the cost of forgiving all debts. There is no debate on how to eliminate the need. There are no talking points about poor people’s worthiness to receive forgiveness, remission, and liberation. No lobbyists argue that such measures would undermine the freedom of the most privileged, who claim their success is due to initiative and industriousness alone. The directive remains clear: “There will be no need among you; do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted when you see a need.”

Unfortunately, our God-talk has been domesticated and downsized, so the realm of the possible now reflects the limitations and conventional wisdom of our political rhetoric, bureaucratic hassles, and lack of imagination. The world needs people of faith to see, hear, and know the suffering, to lay out a vision for what’s possible, and to inspire people to imagine again what justice looks like. I invite us to exercise our imaginations to reclaim justice in our own time, inspire a new generation of disciples to embody God’s radical love and grace, and enlist a new vanguard to practice community and neighborliness. We, those close and present to suffering, who see, hear, and know, will answer the world with forgiveness, remission, and liberation. We will be that faithful remnant using our imaginations to break business as usual by daring the world to let there be no need among us. May it be so.

When Hope Is Our Best Answer

Rev. Dr. DeWayne L. Davis

This Week at Plymouth, October 18, 2024

“It is the work of the church to engage in hope that is neither optimism nor a notion of progress, but a confession that God’s resolve for a new heaven and a new earth is not precluded or hindered by the power of death” —Walter Brueggemann, “Resisting Denial, Refusing Despair.”

I recently attended the funeral of a friend’s mother. It was one of those Black church funerals I grew up attending, filled with gospel choir music, ecstatic praise, and celebration preaching. But more than the familiar sights and sounds from the church of my youth were the powerful articulations of hope, the overwhelming sense among even those with tears flowing that they knew that something else better would emerge beyond this moment. In their loss, grief, and pain, the family and the church community testified to their enduring hope for life, victory, and overcoming. In their hopefulness, they did not avert their gaze from what they had lost. They knew, as Walter Brueggemann described, that “the loss . . . is a runup to God’s newness that is beyond our capacity” to evoke relying on their own will and steam.

Earlier this year, so many of my friends despaired about the radicalization and illiberalism of our politics, finding it hard to be hopeful about the future. Conversations about the latest bizarre attack on immigrants and LGBTQ people or the most recent norm-busting outrageous act often turned into talk about leaving the country or fears about life imitating art with our nation becoming some version of The Handmaid’s Tale. But something shifted when we began naming what we feared would happen to us and allowed ourselves to face it. We started to think about the life we desired and the liberation we fought for. And I remembered the testimony of the old saints in the church of my youth who testified that God didn’t bring us this far to leave us. Truth opened our eyes and filled us with courage. Hope was reborn because we remembered that whatever stands against us cannot stop what God has in store for us.

I hope we sing and pray for our hope even as we confront our loss and fear. My prayer for us is that when we come to the end of our endurance, and we think that we can’t go any further, when we find ourselves looking for life in places of oppression and domination, when we find ourselves unable to imagine a life of blessing and abundance beyond the current malaise, that we will remember that the promise of our faith is newness. We confront our fears and anxieties, combining truth-telling about our loss, failures, and weakness with hope-telling of our trust in God’s faithfulness “to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine” (Eph. 3:20). Hope is our best answer to despair, and with God, it won’t be disappointed. Amen.

Choosing Love . . . Over and Over Again

Rev. Dr. DeWayne L. Davis

This Week at Plymouth, October 11, 2024

“Love is more than a feeling. Love is a form of sweet labor: fierce, bloody, imperfect, and life-giving—a choice we make over and over again” —Valarie Kaur, See No Stranger.

Last week, Plymouth Church was a stop on activist and filmmaker Valarie Kaur’s Revolutionary Love Project Bus Tour. Using stories, music, and wisdom from the Sikh tradition in which she was born and raised, Kaur takes the audience on a journey through the origin stories of her faith, inviting us to see the humanity, courage, and path of love of her ancestors and discover within our own stories similar experiences and resonances. Surrounded by her family and colleagues, Kaur paints vivid pictures of ordinary people and their heroic acts of compassion and liberation, holding the audience in rapt attention and breaking open our hearts with narratives of revolutionary love.

What surprised me most about the experience was how those stories about the sages of the Sikh tradition mirrored the stories that my family told about Black people’s struggle for freedom in the American South. Faced with the uncompromising refusal of powerful forces to recognize the humanity of those they oppressed, vulnerable people responded with love and faith, refusing to give into hate and despair and sacrificing their lives and bodies to create their world anew. It took work to love, to refuse to see your opponent as an unredeemable stranger, to tend to the wound of rage, and to reimagine how to resist and subvert injustice in all its forms. The power of their love inspired others to join in the work. Kaur refers to this love as a choice to act: “If love is sweet labor, love can be taught, modeled, and practiced.” Behold the power of those who choose to love over and over again.

Before attending the Revolutionary Love Project event, I underestimated the adjective “revolutionary” as a qualifier of love. How can love be revolutionary? Perhaps we often underestimate what is possible when we choose to love because within the human condition lies the instinct to return hate and violence with hate and violence. Some part of us fear that love is neither strong enough nor big enough to counter the worst instincts and behaviors of humanity against humanity. I hope we do not labor under the misguided notion that love is just a feeling. What if we operated with the understanding that “revolutionary love is the choice to labor for others, our opponents, and ourselves?” Our times of polarization and radicalization call for something different from us than doubling down on seeing our opponents as enemies to be utterly destroyed. So many people we admire and follow—King, Baldwin, the Apostle Paul, and Jesus come to mind—prophesied about the power of love to transform us and the world. I pray we heed their witness and choose love over and over again. May it be so.