james baldwin, caitlyn curtice and jesus...

The late Thomas Merton – monk, author, and activist – discerned that to speak of Christ’s blessing to the weird among us, he needed poetry more than prose and wrote:

Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ comes uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it, because he is out of place in it, and yet he must be in it, His place is with the others for whom there is no room. His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power, because they are regarded as weak, discredited, denied status of persons, who are tortured, bombed and exterminated. With those for whom there is no room: Christ is present in this world.

Today’s appointed lesson from the gospel according to St. Luke says much the same thing. As Jesus opened the scroll of the prophet Isaiah at his home synagogue, his public ministry began among friends and neighbors. They were eager to hear what he might have to say about this ancient text – and hoped he might bring them a word of comfort, too.

He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Merton, Jesus, and the prophet Isaiah are explicit: when we are inspired to share
compassion and act to right human relations one with the other and all with creation, it is the Spirit of the Lord at work within us. The incarnation did not occur only ONCE in theology or history, but wherever the poor or wounded experience comfort and solidarity, God’s word becomes flesh. James Baldwin and Kaitlyn Curtice have accepted this anointing – one old and one young – albeit in different contexts.

One is black, the other mixed race; one is male, the other female. But to paraphrase words ascribed to St. Paul from a baptismal liturgy in Ephesians 4, Baldwin and Curtice are of one heart : leading lives worthy of the calling which comes from the Spirit; with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace (we trust that) there is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called into the one hope of… one Lord, one faith… and one God and Creator of all. This is what Baldwin and Curtice have done as writers, poets, and activists: they’ve linked their literary creativity to faithful activism challenging the status quo on behalf of the oppressed as the spirit empowers them to give shape and form to the blessed weirdness we’re celebrating on the road to Lent. The astute words of marketing renegade, Rob Siltanen, proclaim:

Here’s to the so-called crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them; disagree with them; glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as crazy, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do it.

So, let me offer a few insights about today’s text from St. Luke’s gospel before considering the anointing the Spirit has poured upon James Baldwin and Kaitlyn Curtice. As kindred within our tribe of blessed weird ones, I invite you to open your hearts with me in prayer that we might be ground-ed in grace. Using Padraig O’Tuama’s words from the Corrymela Community of Belfast, we pray:

O God of Yesterday, we knew you then: your promises, your words, your walking among us. But yesterday is gone, and so, today, we are in need of change. Change – and change us. Help us see life now not through yesterday’s stories but through today’s. Amen.

Today’s story, like all New Testaments texts, is layered with multiple meanings and best NOT to treat it as literal, linear history. St. Luke’s purpose in writing both this story as well as the Acts of the Apostles – part two of his gospel – is to teach a Gentile community how the ministry of Jesus is both the natural continuation of the blessings God first shared with ancient Israel in the Exodus wilderness and to show the world how the church now supersedes Israel’s once favored status. As Dr. Amy-Jill Levine notes in The Jewish Annotated New Testament: Luke’s “presentation of Jews and Judaism is complex… it solidly locates Jesus within a vibrant Jewish environment of faithful Jews engaged in faithful Jewish practices… while also depicting the synagogue as a place of violence (including) scathing caricatures of Pharisees and chief priests.”

· She adds that while the “harsh rhetoric resembles that of the Biblical prophets and the Qum-ran writings (of the Dead Sea Scrolls), the distinction is that Jesus’ criticisms against his fellow Jews are now embedded in a text directed primarily to Gentiles.” One critique was internecine, a family feud among Jewish equals, while the other is oppositional between theological and cultural adversaries. We should note, too that by the time St. Luke’s gospel had been codified, most likely at the close of the 1st CE or the start of the second – after Roman legions had beaten back a Jewish insurrection, decimated the second temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, and banished Jews from living in their own capital city – this gospel told a story from the perspective of the victors of history, not the vanquished.

· Consequently, St. Luke sometimes romanticizes Christian community, creating idealized descriptions of life in the church that were never historically accurate; other times it willfully misrepresents the intent and practice of Jewish rituals; and regularly minimizes the tensions existing between the followers of Jesus before the Temple’s destruction in 70 CE and those enforcing the Roman occupation of ancient Palestine. It’s a REAL mixed bag. And while I love lots within it, it’s good to be clear about its baggage as well, ok?

What I want to highlight today, however, is St. Luke’s refusal to spiritualize the pain and suffering of those allied with the Jesus Movement of his day. Our text, as well as the version of the Sermon on the Mount in chapter 6 of St. Luke, use what most scholars consider some of Christ’s earliest words: Blessed are you who are poor for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hun-ger now for you will be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now for you will laugh. Here Jesus doesn’t speak metaphorically about the poor as St. Matthew does in his beatitude where the poor become: “the poor in spirit.” Rather he uses the word for those who are dirt poor – ptochus in Greek – those who have been reduced to begging in the street because they are “destitute of resources – especially farm and family.”

Jesus in St. Luke’s text addresses the discarded homeless who beg for alms and sometimes find themselves locked away in debtor’s prison. St. Matthew universalizes God’s blessing while St. Luke exposes the agony of class struggle. Consider the careful restatement of these differences in Eugene Peterson’s The Message. In Matthew’s “sermon on the mount” we read: You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and God’s rule. You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you. Luke’s parallel verses become: You’re blessed when you’ve lost it all. God’s kingdom is there for the finding. You’re blessed when you’re ravenously hungry. Then you’re ready for the Messianic meal. Do you sense the distinctions? One is metaphorical and personal; the other is existential and class conscious.

Like Matthew and Mark, Luke sets this story as Jesus returns from his desert vision quest: he’s been initiated by his wild man cousin, John the Baptist in the Jordan River; he’s fasted and prayed for 40 days in the elements of Mother Nature; and now starts to slowly meander through the region taking-in what’s happening to his kin as he teaches in the synagogues of the area where the text tell us he was well received wherever he went.

Scholars suggest that this is the evangelist’s way of saying that Jesus had started to assume the mantle of a prophet. He’s wandering, watching, listening, learning, and responding to the broken and discarded among his people and receives their blessing. In time, he returns to his hometown of Nazareth where, on the Sabbath, he reads from the prophetic poet’s promise of God’s Jubilee Year from the scroll of Isaiah. In our era, this portion of Isaiah is only ritually included in the “haftarah” – a passage from the prophets (Nevi’im) that complement the sabbath Torah lesson – at one specific time of year: the last Sabbath before Rosh Hashanah and the Days of Awe called Yom Kippur.

· We should recall, however, that during the time of Jesus there was a measure of fluidity in the public liturgies of the synagogue as Jewish tradition was still emerging in the 1st CE. So, whether in keeping with the practices of his home community or personal innovation, Jesus reads Isaiah’s poetry about God restoring and renewing blessings upon the most destitute: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because I have been anointed to bring good news to the dirt poor of Israel.

· Closing the scroll, he then identifies himself within the Jewish Jubilee tradition of Leviticus 25 and Deuteronomy 15 telling the congregation: Today, in your hearing, this promise of the Lord has been fulfilled.

To make sense of this proclamation, let’s note that Leviticus articulates a series of

practices de-signed to make the rest and renewal of a holy Sabbath normative within Israel’s economy. The first stipulation states that people as well as the land and its animals be allowed to lay fallow and free every seven days. To honor the Sabbath and keep it holy in creation is to practice weekly what God once set in motion in history: Six days shall ye labor but on the seventh you shall rest. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.

The second qualification was that Sabbath rest was to be given to the land every six years to allow creation itself the restoration and replenishment human beings need to thrive. And the third obligation was that every seven weeks of years – that is seven years times seven years – on the day of atonement THAT year was to be marked as the acceptable year of the Lord: The Jubilee where all land, humans, animals, insects, and all of creation seen and unseen would celebrate God’s grace by freely experiencing God’s rest and renewal for the entire community. Jubilee opened the doors of the debtor’s prisons and returned any land that might have been sold during the past 50 years to its original owners. Over a thousand years, Deuteronomy built upon the older Jubilee of Leviticus insisting that the seventh year of sabbaths bring rest to the economy by liberating any acquired slaves. In St. Luke’s gospel, THIS is how Jesus begins his public ministry: proclaiming to his home synagogue that the ancient prophecy had been fulfilled by his anointing. Small wonder the poorest and hungriest cheered, yes?

Now, we should be clear that Jubilee in ancient Israel was more often a sacred intention than a well-developed fact: it was the aspiration of a people committed to God’s generosity some fifteen hundred years before Jesus told us that we cannot serve both God and wealth. I think our tradition’s wisest contemporary scholar of the Hebrew Bible, Walter Brueggemann, got it right when he wrote:

God’s holiness was not simply a cultic affair or a religious phenomenon. God’s holiness was relentlessly committed to the neighborhood; for that reason, holiness tilts toward covenantal neighborly justice. And the Bible insists – most clearly in the Jubilee tradition – that faith and ethics are necessary aspects of the same coin, though they are by no means identical. Faith must demonstrate its authenticity by the way it operates in the ordinary affairs of life.

Given this spiritual and ethical legacy, coupled with the condition of his kin as they struggled under the boot heel of Roman occupation, it is no surprise that Jesus would search for the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and reclaim the Jubilee promise as the acceptable year of the Lord. My seminary advisor, Cornel West, used to tell us that: Justice is what grace and love look like in public.

Biblical sociologists Bruce Malina and Richard Rohrbaugh amplify this in their definitive Social Science Commentary on The Synoptic Gospels writing: The passage Jesus recites in the context of his ministry is Isaiah 61: 1-2. The captives he is referring to are probably the debtors in prison for nonpayment (of loans.) Debtors (in that day) were put in prison as a form of extortion since it was their families that would have to pay for their release. The release proclaimed is that of the Jubilee year in which ALL debts were canceled. The acceptable year of the Lord was the Jubilee: a year-long Sabbath. Which to my weird way of holding the sacred and the profane together – honoring the unity of both the heavenly within ALL that is human – the struggles of real people for bread and dignity as the marriage of justice with grace – a Jubilee Jesus sounds a lot like both God’s blessed weird ones we know as James Baldwin and Kaitlyn Curtice. Brother James spins it for us like this in “Jimmy’s Blues” from 1983.

If the hope of giving is to love the living, the giver risks madness in the act of giving. Some such lesson I seemed to see in the faces that surrounded me. Needy and blind, unhopeful, unlifted, what gift would give them the gift to be gifted? The giver is no less adrift than those who are clamoring for the gift. If they cannot claim it, if it is not there, if their empty fingers beat the empty air and the giver goes down on his knees in prayer knows that all of his giving has been for naught and that nothing was ever what he thought and turns in his guilty bed to stare at the starving multitudes standing there and rises from bed to curse at heaven, he must yet understand that to whom much is given much will be taken, and justly so: I cannot tell how much I owe.

From out of the African-American community, Baldwin arose as a bi-sexual prophetic poet of love and fear, writing novels, plays and prose that named the demon of race hatred as America’s original sin even as he searched for common ground with his oppressors. Curtice, born into a white /native mixed family in Oklahoma, traces her roots back to the First Nations Potawatomi people of lower Wisconsin. From her experience she rages, celebrates, laments, and challenges us much like Baldwin did a generation before she was born. Her 2017 poem, “Why EVERY Day is Indigenous Peoples Day” is righteous:

Step out and beyond. There are invisible realities in the world, stories the history books cannot tell us. Put your bare foot into the water of a river or a lake and let it remind you– there are unspoken histories that can only be honored, felt, often misunderstood. Because so many of us walk around with invisible prison bars around us. We are bound by our currencies, our schedules, our loud voices and un-listening ears. Do you wat to know why every day is Indigenous Peoples’ Day? It is because of the land. It is because of the rivers and rocks, mountains and trees. It is because the dirt still holds our feet to the ground and the fires that still burn. The forest trees still shed their leaves, the wind still blows, the waters still erode the rocks to create stones that we skip across her reflective face. You see, we belong to the land, not the other way around. That is a constant lesson that indigenous peoples are taught, that we continue to learn, that we wish others learn as well. She is our storyteller, our creation keeper. She continues to re-create us, to tell us our own story. So we take the sage and sweetgrass, tobacco and cedar, and while we let their smoke rise over us, we listen. For non-native people, the stories are still there. People still came before. Learn their names. Learn their stories. That takes more than an afternoon, doesn’t it? It takes more than resisting a colonial holiday? And so, every day we continue to learn. Every day that I look in the mirror, I celebrate that I am indigenous. That I am still here. Every word I write is to bring us closer to the Kingdom of God, the God who sees and knows my Potawatomi blood, who mourns when I mourn and celebrates when I raise my head and pray in my native language, Migwetch, Mamogosnan. Migwetch Mamogosnan. Every day is Indigenous Peoples’ Day because our histories tell our stories, our language tethers us to each other and this earth, and while we are here, there is justice to be done. There are wrongs to be made right, and there is healing on the horizon. Will you join me there, beyond our prisons? Will you join me on the other side?

This is 20th and 21st century Jubilee poetry: sacred, righteous worship talk mixed with a call to action asking what do we want: chaos or community? Race wars or circle dances? A barren earth of strip mines, strip clubs, and strip malls, or, the beloved community where I cherish the sacred in you and you are safe enough to trust doing the same for me? James Arthur Baldwin was born in New York City’s Harlem in 1924. Kaitlin B. Curtice was born in an Indian hospital in Ada, Oklahoma in 1988. Brother James died a year before Sister Kaitlin was born – but what does the Appalachian hymn tell us about the circle? It’s unbroken, right? We are surrounded by a great cloud of witness bigger than time, class, race, gender, and culture. And I cannot help but see and hear these two weird, blessed souls as part of God’s never-ending choir inviting us to join them singing: O freedom, oh freedom, oh freedom over me; and before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord and be free.

Before I ever heard the early feminist insight that the personal is political, Baldwin’s fiction spoke to me of a quest for identity and meaning that mirrored the intertwined tumult raging through the United States in the 50’s and 60’s. His first novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain from 1953, speaks of a young black man coming of age in the city who aches for more love and creativity – more freedom than he found within the constraints of his father’s Pentecostal religion. At 15, I was struck by the contradictions in my own New England Puritan spirituality – it’s blind spots, sexual hypocrisy along side its inspirational hymnody and legacy of social justice – Baldwin’s words rang true for me.

I still remember watching the debate between Baldwin and William F. Buckley on our black and white TV in February 1965: I was knocked-out by Baldwin’s clarity, moral outrage, tender heart, and articulate challenge to the pompous, white arrogance of Buckley’s just barely constrained bigotry. When Baldwin said, looking straight into Buckley’s eyes, “It came as a great shock around the age of 5, or 6, or 7, when I discovered that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you.” In a manner inconceivable to me in 2022 – but still all too real – Buckley replied without a hint of irony, “You, sir, have been treated with kid gloves as you claim to be a victim. But the fact that your skin is black is utterly irrelevant to the arguments you raise.” If you’ll pardon my bluntness, that same bullshit is being said about critical race theory today almost 60 years later. Buckley’s refusal to acknowledge a reality in these barely United States that was different from his privilege, race, gender and class can be found today among those giving credence to the Big Lie. So, what makes Baldwin’s words and witness so blessedly weird – even salvific to me – is the “complex and creative way he honors the social, psychological, spiritual, and personal pressures of his race, gender, and class with clarity, humility, and pizzaz!”

I experience the wisdom and wonder of Kaitlin Curtice in much the same way. She’s much younger than Baldwin. Her oeuvre is more limited, too – although every week she adds to it through blogs that didn’t exist in the era of Brother James. This past Indigenous People’s Day, Di and I were away from America’s discord for a short retreat to Quebec’s Eastern Townships, I spent some time with this insight from Curtice:

The trees are nearly bare, and leaves cover the ground. It’s taking a long time for Autumn to visibly come to an end and we still have a few weeks left. We wait and wait for the next season to come, and when it does, we forget how magical it is. We forget that the leaves changing and falling are teaching us something every day about the way things work, perhaps about magic, perhaps about love. We are still learning to love and honor the earth’s ways, and we are still learning to love and know ourselves. I continue to be amazed at my AHA! moments, how they come from nowhere and tell me something new that I never realized, or something I had for-gotten over the years… That’s why this year we cancelled Thanksgiving. November is always a hard month. Despite it being Native American Heritage Month, we watch people carry on toxic stereotypes of Indigenous peoples around the Thanksgiving narrative, especially in public schools. Despite the difficulty, I continue to romanticize the idea of a meal around a table, because I want these moments of hospitality and community to be perfect, meaningful, and good. I was ready to hold a special Friendsgiving meal with my family and a few friends, in the safety of my questions. I was going to cook Indigenous dishes and speak truth and acknowledgment. Then I got a stomach virus and everything was cancelled. When, as life happens, things don’t turn out so good or meaningful, I’m left disappointed, and I struggle with the tension of holding things loosely and being okay with things not working out when I hoped so much for them. I struggle with the tension of things left unresolved.

A big reason we left the US over our Thanksgiving holiday was respite care – taking a break from the tension of things left unresolved – to walk in the woods in the bitter cold and eat incredible French baguettes. Sister Kaitlin not only describes the spiritual and social schizophrenia of being a mixed-race woman in 21st century America, like Baldwin, she grasps that her discernment is both political and personal. She’s one of the wise voices I listen to as I try to make peace with this massively broken culture and country in the presence of Mother Nature.

It’s all too easy to slip into despair these days. Cynicism, too. Every week I’m bounced about on an emotional roller coaster that wears me out. Exhaustion and angst have become our new normal. And that’s why the witness of Brother James and Sister Kaitlin are so important for us all.

Baldwin lived through the murder of his beloved MLK, Malcolm X and Medgar Evers. He endured realities I only know in my nightmares. And still, with conviction and compassion, he told us: You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive. I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with their pain. That’s what he did – dealt with his pain with love and clarity – inviting us to encounter and trust one another’s pain as well. Jesus did exactly that when he told his home synagogue: I’ve been anointed to honor the wounds of the most broken poor among us. THIS is how our wounds are bound – by seeing them and sharing them – and honoring them with love.

Curtice, I think, walks this same road albeit as a 21st century Native woman. Her book, Native, tells of a time she joined the protests at Standing Rock against big oil’s pipelines. “Indigenous resistance s NOT a one-time even,” she writes. “It continually asks: what proliferates in the absence of empire and settler colonialism?” She answers that saying that when she stood:

With the elders as water protectors, gathered to both pray AND resist… the Spirit of creation said go and listen: listen to the land that is still broken but speaking. Listen to the acorns falling from the tops of the trees that remind me that gravity is meant to ground and sustain us right here. Listen to the birds arguing in the sky who remind me that my angle of seeing is limited. That I am small. Listen to the dying autumn leaves that remind me it’s part of life to die and then live again, that death itself can somehow be beautiful. And listen to the rocks and dirt at my feet that remind me that though they are sore, they still have something so say to me just like they had something to say to the people who came before me in this place.

Listening with love is resistance right now as we learn to trust that weariness and winter will one day become a spring of freedom and joy…