“The Baptism of John—From Heaven or From the Human?”: A Brief Riff on the Rain of God

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By Jim Perkinson, a sermon on Matthew 21:23-32, preached at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Detroit, MI on September 27, 2026

“Not Me” Attention

A prelim footnote: my evangelical, born-again, Pentecostal, tongues-speaking, word of the Lord-seeking “Christianity” all to the good, much of my adult life has been about learning to see, appreciate, honor, and finally be amazed by what is not me.  “Not me” in terms of living for 15 years in community sharing all things in common under the same roof with as many as 20 other people in one single family dwelling; “not me” as a white male in east side inner city, Black Detroit; “not me” in terms of gender and orientation; “not me” in having a wife who is Filipino-born and enculturated; and with her, “not me,” in learning from indigenous cultures and peoples how to turn aside from human focus on human concerns to fall in love with the Wild World of more-than-human elders and co-dwellers, whether plant, animal, soil, season, weather. Or water. 

We are in the Christian lectionary “Season of Creation” with a central theme of Living Water.  And the question for me is: Can I pay attention to water outside of my concern to drink it, wash with it, ask it to cleanse my dishes and tools and take my garbage and pollution away, grow my crops or transport my computer chips from Taiwan or my I-phone from DRC?  Can I get fascinated with Water on Her own terms and for Her own sake?  Can I stop being human supremacist and only paying attention to such things to the degree they support me or give me some kind of experience I can capture in a selfie?  Can I stop being the center of my own universe?  After all, I am more than 60% water myself and Her dwelling in me means I am not primarily “me,” but another creature who is literally billions of years old and only for an evolutionary split-second, “agreeing” to be in this strange conjunction of all kinds of other creatures—eaten plants and metabolized animals, cavorting bacteria and provocative viruses, a little bit of residual iron and copper, bone and nails and hair, etc.—whose sum and substance for some 70+ years has rambled across a small piece of this planet as an upright oddity called “Jim Perkinson.”  Can I relate to Water without instantly colonizing it?

Nepal Devastation

8:37 am Nepal Time on August 26, 2026, a seismic thud registered at 5.2 magnitude on the Richter scale. A slice of glacier-covered-rock 5,000 feet long, 3,300 feet wide, 425 feet thick, sheered off the north face of Langtang Lirung Mountain, plunged nearly a mile almost straight down into the Lhende Khola valley tributary to the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli river systems, landing with the force of 950 tons of TNT, pulverizing the rock, melting the ice, and then surging with a force 30 times that of Niagara Falls, at times racing more than 100 miles an hour with a wave crest as high as 300 feet, downstream for 60 miles before finally slowing and settling into a “mere” flood. 

A “Water Word” sounding at a mega-decibel level heard round the globe.

The human consequence is still being figured in the multiple thousands of deaths, entire villages wiped out, 41 bridges swept away, thousands of homes destroyed.  And we can be tempted to say—Ah, Nature! So cruel! So brutal! So uncaring in the trajectory of its “wild agency,” mindless of its effect, in an eyeblink taking out vast numbers of our species who did nothing to warrant such an annihilation!”

But the cause of this event is not simply Wild Nature. It is rather being assessed as a combination of rising temperatures due to climate change repeatedly melting and re-freezing “permafrost” in rock cracks and thus amplifying the cracking process, and of industrial and mineral soot flowing downwind from one of the most heavily polluted urban corridors in South Asia, over decades coating the high mountain glaciers with black carbon such that sunlight is no longer reflected back off the planet, but absorbed into the ice, intensifying melting and destabilizing the ice. 

None of us who drive cars, or use computers, or rely on electric grids, or love our metal tools and cement roads and glass houses, are innocent.  In spite of capitalism’s drumbeat celebrating competition, and Peter Thiel’s championing of The Sovereign Individual book manuscript advocating the replacement of democracy with tech-bro fascism, and all of our I-phone fetishizing of selfies re-making us into a Me-first, Me-central, Me-focused mirroring of Me, Me, Me, as the entire concern of human being on the surface of this amazing Blue Marble cruising the Big Black Mystery called the Universe—in spite of all that, we are actually profoundly interdependent and yes, “dependent” beings, deeply entangled in local watersheds, and by Water, Wind, Rock Crust, and Shifting Temps interlinked on a global scale, such that a community’s fate in Nepal is not separate from my choice for a latte on a Sunday morning in Detroit. 

We have decided we deserve to live at global scale, violently pillaging any and every mineral, metal, and molecule we desire, from whatever corner of the planet they can be extracted to serve our extension of our bodies by armatures and prostheses, airplanes and fiberoptic cables, satellite eyeballs and concrete roadways, etc. across the entire surface of the earth, no matter the consequence for those few human communities still living at scale in local niches much less the whole of the more-than-human biosphere that begot us and feeds us, every millisecond of every day. 

We are deep in it, brothers and sisters, and before centering down into John’s baptism as this morning’s reading suggests, I can’t resist one more rant, one more omen, one last emblem, of the travesty we have unleashed on the entire globe largely beginning 10,000 years ago when we re-tooled our collective profile from small-scale, roughly egalitarian communities synched up in respectful mutuality with local ecologies and instead moved toward ever-expanding, ever-aggressing settlements, utterly committed to squeezing every drop of surplus we can from wild nature before discarding the remains as polluted garbage and lifeless dead zone, savagely incarcerating that surplus in rapacious domination systems, run by self-absorbed elites, fetishizing themselves as the paragon models of how to be human, relentlessly promulgating their images everywhere by both reward and punishment such that most of the rest of the species is caught up to one degree or another in envy and effort to emulate that lifestyle if not that persona. 

Chemical Inundation

That “one more” example is this: according to the American Chemical Industry data bank, we have now flooded the planet with some 360,000 chemicals that are partially regulated and more than 280 million chemical hybrids completely unregulated—none of which occur naturally and would never have come into existence except for our insistence that we have the right to re-engineer everything according to our mere whim and fascination.  Carcinogenic plastic now found on Everest heights 5 miles up, in Atlantic Ocean trenches 5 miles down, and in every living body on earth. PFAS chemicals now borne by every single raindrop falling anywhere on the planetary surface—so-called “forever chemicals,” produced now to the tune of 7 million different kinds. Most—toxic to life at any level of concentration, remediation of merely one of which would cost more than the global GDP for a year, leaving the “forever-ness” of the other 6,999,999 untouched.  Welcome to the story of this amazing species called homo sapiens, racing off the edge of the knowable horizon in the name of an absolutely unquestionable value and supposed reality called “progress.”  Homo sapiens—”human wise ones”?  I think the more accurate label, as climate scientist Bill Mcquire renames us, is homo stupidens!  And yes, Elon—please “progress” to Mars.  And take Thiel, and Bezos, and Zuckerberg, and Elliot, and Karp, and Amodei, and Altman with you!

John’s Baptism

Public Disinformation

Such is the preface to what I want to look at in today’s scripture.  Jesus asks: “The baptism of John, whence was it? From heaven or from men?”  And we typically swallow too quickly here, thinking we know.  We need context—which is a dangerous statement for me to make, because I might just start a sentence that has no punctuation or concluding period until sometime tomorrow.  But I’ll try to make myself be brief.  Where are we in the gospel narrative? Not far from the end—at least in synoptic telling.

We are in Jerusalem, immediately after Jesus has taken his posse from the outback of Galilee where he had been operating for more than a year, teaching about Sabbath-Jubilee requirements to return to a land-based economy of sharing goods in common, relearning the foods the wild offers “of itself,” without human intervention, establishing a network of sanctuary-villages inhabited by peasants and rural safe-zones frequented by the marginalized. 

A contract had been taken out on his life within the first month or so of his public ministry, elites quickly beginning a disinformation campaign, charging him with exorcising “street-level” demons by the Prince of Demons, Beelzebul, hell-bent on destroying his reputation so they could then destroy his body without creating a riot or worse.  That “hidden agenda” of the ruling elites marks much of the dramatic tension of gospel narration.  Official figures asking him pointed questions in public gatherings to try to provoke an incriminating “soundbite” they could then take up into the kangaroo court they want to—and will—convene to get him sentenced and six feet under.  And Jesus dancing deftly in ironic send-ups and parabolic come-backs, avoiding the political retribution waiting in the wings and pillorying the effort in subtlety and parody.  A continuous “battle rap” scenario with “grave” (figurative and literal) consequences. 

Storm and Seed Affirmation

We could drill down on the Beelzebul reference (and may do so in next week’s Wednesday bible study)—a cryptic attempt to associate the Nazareth prophet with the Canaanite Storm God known as Baal, denigrated as “Lord of the Flies.”  Ah yes, “flies”—who under Moses’ conjuring “finger” and summoning rod, were integral to Israel’s ability to walk out of Egypt into desert freedom.  A liberation occasioned by frogs and flies, gnats and pests, hail and storm!  Wild nature as slave redeemer!  But that is another sermon. 

Suffice it here to note: Jesus will gain renown—and air-time in gospel writing—as frequently offering up Seed Teachings, pointing his movement towards Plant Kernels as models for how to be “human,” which teachings are then “answered” from Heaven by Thunder-claps of approaching Storms seemingly entering the dialogue by affirming, “Yes, be seeds, and we will honor the sowing by bringing rain and life!”  And indeed, the movement leader will promise himself as a literal seed—a bread crust of eucharistic wheat grains—as one of his incarnate forms, even before he goes into the ground and comes back up as “resurrected life” . . . like any plant in its spring time return to sunlight!  Nature has such an amazing presence in the gospels if we pay attention.

Jerusalem Confrontation

But in any case, Jesus is in Jerusalem, the day after having cleared the Temple which is also the national bank where all the records of indebtedness are kept, detailing who had been foreclosed upon and kicked off their land into impoverishment, by which fat cat landlords assembling their estates to pass on in their families. Jesus had flipped over the computer terminals and teller-windows and money-changer tables and dove-cages of the loan-sharks, occupied the Temple mall for an entire day, shut down all transport of goods across the grounds, and named the place “Thug Central,” “Den of Robbers,” to its face. 

And of course, had immediately then “gotten out of Dodge” for the night, knowing his fate was now sealed and his public appearances extremely fraught and dangerous.  Sure enough, next day back up in the Temple precincts, he is immediately called out in public by a hastily-convened ensemble of so-called “authorities”: priests, scribes, and elders, making common cause to take down this upstart threat to their oligarchic grift using God’s name and law to pick the pockets of the poor and increase their own profit margin. Jesus had dared name the game outright in the hearing of the crowd and the ruling elites are charging: “Who gave you the authority to do such things?”  Jesus refuses to defend and instead counters question with question.  “You tell me, the baptism of John—whence its origin? Heaven or men?”  And we instantly go metaphoric and spiritual, thinking “heaven” is a stand-in for “God” over against what is “human.”  But let’s recover the situation. 

Wilderness Formation

Jesus had begun his movement in the wilds, east of the Jordan, where John was baptizing in Wadi Cherith, famed as the hideout of renegade flamethrower, prophet Elijah, when on run from Jezebel and Ahab.  There John had convened a movement joined by Jesus among others. 

And part of the take home here, is the role of the Jordan in Israelite formation and identity.  Arguably, John is calling people not so much to a ritual as to a recovery, not primarily an experience but an embrace.  The crowds that flock to his call as he moves up and down the Jordan River basin as Water Guru are actually coming to that flow from the west and moving east into the waters.  They are stepping out of grain-growing settlement in the Canaanite hill country and reclaiming the primal experience and history of Israel escaped from Egypt—the Wilderness where for 40 years they had been debrided of imperial formation and de-programed from the economics of surplus accumulation and re-learned how to “gather” what the land offered free of charge and without recourse to violent human agency like planting.

In Egypt, as slaves, they were building storage cities for grain for Pharaoh’s “Food as Weapon” policy, in which produce wrangled from the Nile Delta was accumulated under lock and key and divvied out on the basis of loyalty and subservience.  Counter to that, once in “the Sinai Wild,” the walk-outs under Moses relied on the provisions provided by their herd animals and also ate “manna”—likely aphid defecation that even today Arab Bedouin gather from the base of tamarisk trees whence it puddles once dropped “from the sky” by the insects 15-50 feet up in the limbs eating the leaves and pooping 130% their body weight every hour.  The Bedouin call it “man” in Arabic and cook it up into honey loaves. 

Not Purification But Reclamation

Arguably, John is not actually engaging in a ritual but challenging one. More well-to-do Jews of his time in urban centers were catching water in cisterns called miqva’ot, used for washing especially for those deemed ritually impure such as poor working people of the land, who had to bathe in industrial-scale pools each morning as they entered the workshops owned and controlled by the elites, before drying and packing the fish, bottling the oil or wine, or working the textiles and woolens—in order to ensure the marketability (“purity”) of the products they touched and handled with their hands.  Or any woman at the end of her menstrual cycle, who had to bathe to ensure the “purity” of the ancestral line she might conceive and birth.  Here the vector of movement was away from the land (rural folk living in the outback) or from natural body processes (women in menses) and into carefully monitored “purity standards” by way of miqva’ot cisterns built for urban workshops and houses controlled by the wealthy and the men.

John’s summons is the exact opposite. He is calling the crowds and multitudes (but not the elites whom he will confront and repudiate for trying to join what he is convening) out of the cities and into the wilds east of the Jordan, in the process to be cleansed by a river not created or shaped by human hands, but itself a flow coming directly from clouds inundating mountain sides (like Hermon at the headwaters of the Jordan) and coursing across the landscape untampered with by aqueducts or cisterns. 

At Sinai, before a Storm-Draped Mountain flushed with Rain and lit by Lightning that was the primordial “incarnate” revelation of Deity to nascent Israel, Moses had called for altars to be built for that Deity made only of earth or unhewn stone not touched by tools (Exod 29:25). John is standing at the edge of an “Unhewn” River of “Living Water” and calling for crossing back up the ancestral line to “Unhewn” Land to be re-schooled and re-made anew. He is calling Israel to recover its primal identity and practice as pastoral nomad and hunter-gatherer, before it settled into Canaan, and went agricultural and settled and then monarchical and urban. 

Not Purchased Provision But Naturally-Given Fecundation

And one last bit of input on the throw-down Jesus is offering as a send-up to the Powers in the Temple precincts who are desperate to arrest and kill him.  He had already—in a previous visit to the Temple according to John’s gospel, during the autumn Rain Fest called the Feast of Sukkot or Festival of Booths that ritually conjured the fall Storms to roll in off the Mediterranean to end the devastating droughts and desiccation of summer siroccos and heat—he had already engaged in a kind of “civil disobedience” action, on the last day of the Fest, suddenly standing up next to the altar and proclaiming “Free Water” to anyone thirsty, saying, “Come and drink, for out of your belly shall flow rivers of living water!” 

So much implied in such a small handful of words!

The Temple priests, centuries before, had effectively “privatized” water, mandating a half-shekel “head tax,” to be paid to the Temple annually by every family to ensure the rains would fall and the fields yield crop—making themselves the guarantors of the Palestinian water cycle.  Jesus is directly challenging that claim and payment, by quoting Isaiah 55’s proclamation, “Ho everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; the one who has no money, come ‘buy’ and eat! Come ‘buy’ wine and milk, without money and without price!”—an admonition that ends a few verses later by asserting, “for as the rain and snow come down from heaven and return not thither but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall the word be that goes forth from my mouth [it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose and prosper in the thing for which I sent it].”  And the priority here is that God’s Word is like Rain, not the other way around.  Rain is the Reality; the Word models itself on that pre-eminent natural Mystery and Gift. 

Not Engineered Circulation But Living Parturition

And what’s more—the invocation of “Living Water” is not an invention of Jesus, but a reference to a centuries-old understanding in the Jewish community that water that is “alive” is water untouched by human hands or designs, untampered with by technology like aqueducts or cisterns, but rather “Wild Water” coming directly from the skies, from clouds hitting mountains and raining down.  And finally, in the John 7 cipher, the word translated in English as “belly” is more literally in Aramaic, “womb”; the image very concretely that of a woman “breaking water” in birth; the implication a gender-bending combination of the male pronoun “his” with a noun of strictly female anatomy, “womb.” 

But in the piled-up references of those few words, it gets even deeper. For the assertion is finally that the real “Living Water” coming from the “Big Living Mother” is that of Clouds regularly drenching Mountains with inundation that then flushes nutrient and biodiversity downstream to every living creature making “Life” possible in the first place.  And what human mothers do in breaking water is just one small version of that much older, much more pervasive “water break” we call “Rain.” 

“From Heaven or From Men” Authorization?

So, the baptism of John, whence was it?  From Heaven or men?  The actual authority in question here are Clouds deluging Heights, birthing Rivers, engendering Life.  That is where Jesus gets his authorization to clear the Temple and announce its demise.  The real Temple is what happens in the skies on the heights of Hermon and its accompanying peaks in the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon Mountain ranges up north whence comes the Jordan from its particular “womb.” 

And finally, remarkably, we can then remember Jesus’ own immersion in the Jordan flow, in which he comes from Nazareth in the west, goes east to the watershed boundary, goes under, comes up, immediately “the Heavens open”—most other places in scripture a reference to a Storm Bank of Rain Clouds that suddenly “open up a downpour.” And from such comes a Voice, presumably of Thunder—“articulated” for human comprehension by a few verses from the psalms and the prophets (Ps 2:7; Is 42:1) that are usually only recited during the Feast of Booths gathering in the fall that is itself the preeminent Rain Fest in that particular ecology.  And immediately, a dove descends from that Jordan River flyway for migrating water fowl and indeed drives Jesus east of the Jordan, back into the shaping Wilderness whence his people had come and where they were re-formed and re-taught how to live on the land after having been warped for generations in imperial Egyptian conscription and enslavement. 

Which is to say—if we so want to read, in his baptismal experience, Jesus moves through his bioregional “boundary water” back towards his ancestral line where they were re-indigenized, is immediately adopted by a Storm Cloud and Thunder Voice upon surfacing, further adopted by that animal-form whose own pathway every season is that watercourse, a Dove-Pigeon who as Spirit-Bird “Familiar,” drives him into the Wild Stone outback where ancestor Jacob was dream-taught and tested. And there Jesus is himself re-made, initiated by those outcrops and mountain heights, tested by those Wild “Powers” before being eligible to return back to “civilization” to start challenging his entire generation about exactly what they are doing as a supposedly spiritual people “of God.”

Conclusion

To sum up: I once wrote—in a 2020 piece crafted for the Detroit water-shutoff struggle: “Water in our time is ‘speaking.’ It is demanding a new hearing—in the ‘Shouting Voice’ of hurricanes and floods; in the ‘Withheld Voice’ of droughts and wildfires; and in the ‘Peoples Voice’ of a cry for access as shutoffs continue in Detroit, poisoning remains un-redressed in Flint, and war over such breaks out in Syria and elsewhere” (Perkinson, 208). And now in Nepal—in the Crescendo-ing Voice of a melting glacier!   But actually—water has never not been “speaking.”  The real question now is, under threat of planet-wide annihilation, are we willing to re-learn how to listen?  Rather than just take, pipe, use, abuse, and “flush”?

And a last footnote: We heard three weeks ago, from Joe’s sermon, that there is no Wilderness left to escape to.  Which is true at one level.  But at another—it is “Wild” all around and within us, even if coerced in extraction, deformed in re-engineering and commodification, enslaved in marketing, and disappeared in I-phone mystification and self-absorption.  But it is not gone.  And if we continue to insist on our own delusions of self-importance and human-supremacy, rather than self-limitation and more-than-human collaboration and honoring—it will make its “wildness” unmistakably clear.  By making us gone.

Bibliography

Perkinson, James W. 2020. “Race War, Climate Crisis, Indigenous Witness and the Bible:  The Word of Water,” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 20:2 (Fall, 2020), 208-230.

The Hip-Hop Gospel

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Another compelling offering from The Alternative Seminary.

An Online Gathering on Saturday, October 10, 2026 from 10:30am to 12:30pmET – Led by Rev. Donte Milligan.

Hip Hop is a genre of music deeply rooted in and inseparable from Black culture and community. More than almost any other genre, Hip Hop has created space for marginalized voices to speak, resist, testify, and imagine new possibilities.

In this program, we will explore Hip Hop as a prophetic and mystical tradition. Rappers often function as prophets and mystics of marginalized Black and Brown communities, giving voice to experiences that are too often ignored, silenced, or misunderstood. Through their lyrics, they name injustice, expose systems of oppression, wrestle with suffering, celebrate resilience, and imagine liberation. 

Even when its language is bold, brash, or profane, Hip Hop can speak a gritty truth on behalf of God’s beloved. Together, we will ask what happens when we take those voices seriously as sources of theological reflection and prophetic wisdom.

Come listen with open ears, wrestle with the theology, and find God in the places you least expect it.

If you have any questions, contact Will O’Brien at willobrien59@gmail.com or 267-339-8989.

Whatever is Unsure is Possible

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Wendell Berry died yesterday at the age of 92. He was a writer and farmer and activist for the earth. Jeremy Porter passed this poem along this morning. Porter is a spiritual director, farmer and bus driver in Lexington, KY who been influenced immensely by Berry’s life. The poem is called “Testament” and it was published in 1984.

Dear relatives and friends, when my last breath
Grows large and free in air, don’t call it death —
A word to enrich the undertaker and inspire
His surly art of imitating life; conspire
Against him. Say that my body cannot now
Be improved upon; it has no fault to show
To the sly cosmetician. Say that my flesh
Has a perfect compliance with the grass
Truer than any it could have striven for.
You will recognize the earth in me, as before
I wished to know it in myself: my earth
That has been my care and faithful charge from birth,
And toward which all my sorrows were surely bound,
And all my hopes. Say that I have found
A good solution, and am on my way
To the roots. And say I have left my native clay
At last, to be a traveler; that too will be so.
Traveler to where? Say you don’t know.

But do not let your ignorance
Of my spirit’s whereabouts dismay
You, or overwhelm your thoughts.
Be careful not to say
Anything too final. Whatever
Is unsure is possible, and life is bigger
Than flesh. Beyond reach of thought
Let imagination figure

Your hope. That will be generous
To me and to yourselves. Why settle
For some know-it-all’s despair
When the dead may dance to the fiddle

Hereafter, for all anybody knows?
And remember that the Heavenly soil
Need not be too rich to please
One who was happy in Port Royal.

I may be already heading back,
A new and better man, toward
That town. The thought’s unreasonable,
But so is life, thank the Lord!

So treat me, even dead,
As a man who has a place
To go, and something to do.
Don’t muck up my face
With wax and powder and rouge
As one would prettify
An unalterable fact
To give bitterness the lie.

Admit the native earth
My body is and will be,
Admit its freedom and
Its changeability.

Dress me in the clothes
I wore in the day’s round.
Lay me in a wooden box.
Put the box in the ground.

Beneath this stone a Berry is planted
In his home land, as he wanted.
He has come to the gathering of his kin,
Among whom some were worthy men,

Farmers mostly, who lived by hand,
But one was a cobbler from Ireland,

Another played the eternal fool
By riding on a circus mule

To be remembered in grateful laughter
Longer than the rest. After

Doing that they had to do
They are at ease here. Let all of you

Who yet for pain find force and voice
Look on their peace, and rejoice.

I Entrust You With Palestine

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Today is the one-year anniversary of the martyrdom of Anas Al-Sharif, a 28-year-old Palestinian journalist who grew up in a refugee camp and committed his life to tell “the truth as it is, without distortion or falsification.” Because of this bold commitment, he was murdered by an IDF missile (probably made in America).

In his final message to the world, he called Palestine the heartbeat of every free person in the world. He wrote his message two months before his murder because he knew they were coming for him.

More than 260 journalists have been murdered in Gaza over the past three years.

This week, Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM)- is organizing a week of action, in honor of Anas Al-Sharif, to ensure that the voices of Gaza are heard and to let complicit media know that we will hold them accountable.

As Anas Al-Sharif said, don’t let chains silence you.

Be bold. Break rank. Go public. Free Palest1ne.

Pay Close Attention

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An urgent message from Rev. Dr. Edgar Rivera-Colon. Re-posted from social media.

I would pay close attention to this transparent warning to all progressive and left forces that the Trump regime published as a press release yesterday. I assume further arrests and violent repression in the run up to the midterms and more intensely during the national elections.

The US imperial state knows that the best way to neutralize justice movements is to entangle them in legal defense for political prisoners. A word to the wise should be sufficient.

The quote below is by Stephen Miller:

“One of the hallmarks of left-wing violence and terrorism is its completely pre-textual and disingenuous appeal to civil liberties in an effort to shield its own violence… When the leftist — who does not believe in freedom, who does not believe in civil rights, who does not believe in any ordinary notion of justice — protests that we are violating his rights, understand the he is lying to try to persuade people who are not closely following the political scene that some injustice has perpetrated against him. We must stay the course and be completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization.”

One of its Founding Habits

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This is what journalist and professor Dr. Stacey Patton wrote on the Fourth of July.

I was curious to see what Heather Cox Richardson would write about today.

Not surprisingly, she is doing the classic liberal historian move, which is trying to rescue America’s founding by treating slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and women’s exclusion as tragic “contradictions” rather than constitutive features of the American project.

Look at this phrase she uses in her piece: “the sticky little problem of Black and Indigenous enslavement”

Sticky little problem? Seriously?

Slavery was not a “sticky little problem.” It was THEEEE economic, political, legal, and psychic foundation of the country these men were building. You can’t sit there and call the Declaration of Independence “astonishingly radical” while treating the exclusion of most human beings as some damn parenthetical inconvenience.

Basically, her big argument in this piece is that America was founded on equality, betrayed by reactionaries, redeemed by civil rights struggle, and now its all being threatened again. She’s saying, yes, the Founders had blind spots, but the idea was radical. Yes, America excluded people, but eventually Americans expanded the promise. Yes, we are in danger now, but we can return to our better angels.

Listen, America was not merely founded on “the radical idea that all men are created equal.” America was founded on a RACIALIZED EXCEPTION CLAUSE hiding inside that sentence. The men who wrote “all men” did not accidentally forget Black people, Native people, women, the enslaved, the colonized, the poor, or the propertyless. They built a political order where equality could be proclaimed precisely because inequality had already been naturalized. Let’s start there ffs!

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The Counter-Revolution of 1776

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By Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly, aka “Dr. CBS,” re-posted from her Substack newsletter. This month, in the lead-up to the celebration of 250 years of “independence,” Dr. CBS has been posting excerpts from a revolutionary thinker from the Black radical tradition every single day. She calls it the “This is America” project.

We must be clear about the difference between radicalism and reaction, revolution and counterrevolution. Let’s talk about it.

I’m Dr. CBS and we have just three days left of of my “This is America” project!

Today we’re thinking with the people’s historian Dr. Gerald Horne’s and his magisterial work, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of United States of America, published in 2014.

Let’s start with our bar”:

Defenders of the so-called Confederate States of America were far from bonkers when they argued passionately that their revolt was consistent with the animating and driving spirit of 1776. Slavery fueled a rising capitalism. However, ironically, breaking the bonds of slavery was necessary if capitalism was to realize its full potential, not least since enslaved Africans were fiercely determined to destroy the wealth they were creating, along with the lords of the lash. Contradictorily, slavery was both a boost for nascent capitalism and ultimately a fetter on its productive force. More than this, chattel slavery grounded in racist chauvinism—of a uniquely republican and toxic type—was one of the more profound human rights violations of the previous millennium. To the extent that 1776 gave such slavery a renewed lease on life, it was truly a lineal ancestor of 1861 and, thus, a counter-revolution of slavery.”

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Offering Cultures, Sacrifice Cultures, and Us: Behind the Abraham and Isaac Story: Gen 22:1-19

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By Jim Perkinson (above), a sermon preached at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Detroit last weekend. Click here to check out (and suscribe to!) Dr. Perkinson’s new Substack newsletter.

I’ll begin retrospectively.  A month ago, we had a lectionary passage from Genesis about humans being given “dominion” over the animals and plants of the planet.  Four days before that I had just gotten back from leading a bible study at Kirkridge Retreat Center in eastern Pennsylvania, 544 miles one way by car from Detroit.  And I could not help instantly relating the two things—the scripture passage and my “passage” to and from Kirkridge.  As I had driven east on I-80 to get there, I counted the number of deer, lying in grotesque postures, killed by autos careening across the landscape.  I stopped at 26.  That is our dominion over deer. 

And with every one of them that I passed at 78 miles per hour—staying just under the speed at which I know police would pull me over in a 70-mile-per-hour zone—I loathed my behavior.  If I really lived what I believe, I would not dare pass by such a supine body without stopping and at least burying the departed one with appropriate ritual, if not more respectfully skinning the body, gathering the bones, preserving the back strap and ligaments, removing the horns—making sure every feature of that magnificent creature was being honored and lived up to in gratitude for its unwilling gift.  Instead, I held myself responsible to cry out to each and every one I passed—as well as all the smaller-sized little ones also lying by the side of the road—“I’m so sorry, I lament my kind doing this, please go over to the Other Side, be healed, find peace!”  And in every instance, I would find tears flushing my eyes and often dribbling down my cheek. 

And then after the Kirkridge time, I came back to a Motor City in full levity, celebrating the Grand Prix auto fest.  We use the French pronunciation to give it seeming status, but I would rather pronounce the “x” in “Prix” as an English “x.” Pricks”!  Yes, celebrating the Grand Pricks, the Big Dicks, the high-tech MFs plundering the planet for ever greater speed, going . . . around in circles (the planet is round after all)!  Even when we are already energy-strapped and facing fuel crises!  What could be more indicative of our insanity!

I don’t believe in dominion.  But I live it.  I drove to church today.  I lament much of what I do every day—but I don’t stop doing it. I am part of the plundering and killing of the planet. 

Continue reading “Offering Cultures, Sacrifice Cultures, and Us: Behind the Abraham and Isaac Story: Gen 22:1-19” →

Healing Haunted Histories

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Our exclusive interview with Elaine Enns, the author of Healing Haunted Histories: A Settler Discipleship of Decolonization (2021).

Radical Discipleship: Elaine, I cannot believe it has been five years since you published Healing Haunted Histories: A Settler Discipleship of Decolonization. I continue to hear from friends and comrades who rave about your book. Just last week, in one of the men’s groups that I facilitate, one brother recommended it to the rest of the crew! For folks who might be unfamiliar, could you give us a brief synopsis of the book? Also why did you write it and who did you write it for? 

Elaine Enns: Tommy, thank you for this opportunity to be in conversation with you.  I continue to be humbled and gratified by all the folks using and promoting Healing Haunted Histories. 

A synopsis: Most of us white settlers believe that colonization is something that happened in a distant past that doesn’t concern us; has nothing to do with our own family or history; and/or is too complicated for regular people like us to understand. The truth is that colonization has a politics, economics, culture and a spirituality that runs right through each one of us who reside on Turtle Island. Healing Haunted Histories is about developing a sense of “response-ability” (an intentional double entendre) to an ongoing historical project that we are socialized to keep at arm’s length, or worse, to dismiss.

Ched and I developed a “landlines-bloodlines-songlines” framework that instructs and empowers us to examine—compassionately but critically—how our family benefited from, has been implicated in, and harmed by colonization. 

Landlines looks at how, from the beginning of our ancestral migrant journeys, our people were pushed and pulled by macro forces of boom and bust (such as war, economics, famine, or racial politics), and how different people came (or were forcibly brought) under vastly different circumstances. We encourage readers to research where and how their ancestors arrived in North America; what privileges or entitlement they experienced (or not); and what impacts their settlement had on Indigenous peoples. We also need to reckon with our own resettlements across the landscape, whether in pursuit of adventure, education or jobs. How do these movements essentially reproduce unconsciously colonial entitlement to “help ourselves” (in both meanings of that phrase) without relationship or permission, while remaining ignorant of the history, culture and present situation of Indigenous peoples we continue to displace.

Bloodlines work is about:

  • How we were shaped by the loss or distortion of our ethnic identities through assimilation into whiteness, and how we internalize attitudes of white supremacy while holding onto myths of settler innocence and nobility;
  • Looking at intergenerational patterns of privilege, moral injury and trauma that we have inherited and by which we’ve been shaped and misshaped;
  • And the narratives and myths into which we have been socialized by family, community, and dominant culture, which tell only part of the story while distorting or silencing problematic aspects.

And Songlines are the liberatory traditions of faith, courage, service, neighborliness and mutual aid that also inhabit parts of our ancestral story. These help animate and support our own commitments to restorative solidarity and justice. 

While our focus is how this work interfaces with the original inhabitants of this land, the same work is required concerning legacies of enslavement and systemic racism that have similarly impacted both self and society. We have facilitated many workshops where white settlers use this process to address enslavement in their ancestral history and where BIPOC participants use the framework and adapt it to their context.  The book concludes by focusing on practices of a decolonizing discipleship, illustrated by examples of individual, congregational, denominational and political efforts that experiment with relationship building, solidarity, reparations and repatriation.

I started researching this project in 2010 because I wanted to understand the impact of intergenerational trauma in my community and how it was hampering our ability to see and respond to the historical and current realities of our Indigenous neighbors in the prairies.  Ched and I wrote this book primarily for white settlers, but many different groups are experimenting with the model, taking what is helpful and adapting it to their contexts and questions. We have been workshopping this material for ten years, and it has been a transforming journey of deepening and broadening our discipleship. 

RD: Elaine, I’d love to hear some of your own testimony. How has this ancestral work healed and liberated you?

EE: Over the last dozen years, I have taken a deep dive into how the ancestral stories we carry influence and shape us.  I am particularly interested in how—for those of us who are descendants of white settlers—the narratives, myths and half-truths with which we grew up and the impact of intergenerational moral injury, form and de-form us. The work of Healing Haunted Histories is to examine these compassionately yet critically, in order to become more “response-able” to the work of reparative justice.

The seeds of my involvement in this ancestral work were planted by my experience of three teenage girls.

                       i.            Over a century ago, in December 1918, my maternal grandmother endured a home invasion in Osterwick, Ukraine during the Russian Revolution, when anarchist soldiers commandeered her house for two weeks over Christmas. She was fourteen when, with her sister and girl cousins, she was hidden up in the attic, while her mother (my great-grandmother) fed, clothed and bandaged the wounds of the hostile soldiers. This was just one episode in a continuous climate of violence during this period.

                     ii.            When I was thirteen, I knew something horrible had happened to my grandparents, and wanting to know more, I interviewed this grandmother. She began by speaking about the beauty and abundance growing up in Ukraine, but as her account approached her teenage years, she began to weep and could not continue. Because I knew her only as a joyful person who was full of laughter, seeing her cry left an indelible impression on me. I later came to understand such symptoms of unresolved trauma, which has been intergenerational for my family and many others in our Russian Mennonite community. 

                   iii.            Third, in my final year of college in Winnipeg, MB, I volunteered with the Big Sisters/Little Sisters program. I was paired with a thirteen-year-old Cree girl who had just been released from juvenile detention after three years. Her “crimes” had been sniffing glue, stealing food and clothes, and getting into fights. Though I had no race or economic analysis at the time, she helped me see that the Criminal Justice System was unable to address the impacts of injustices on this Indigenous child. This experience was my first tutorial in the hard truths of colonization, and began to raise deep questions about how her ancestors had been displaced by mine on the Canadian prairies. This compelled me to begin exploring restorative justice, first in the criminal justice field, and later as a response to historical violations.

As I considered the latter, I realized that while I heard in my family and community about the violence my grandparents’ generation experienced, I never learned about the genocide of Indigenous peoples in Saskatchewan. These three experiences laid a foundation for me to wrestle with decolonizing the narrative I inherited from my Mennonite subculture.

In my research into these issues, I came upon the critical lens that Unangax scholar Eve Tuck calls “Settler Moves to Innocence.” In our book we outline ten such strategies through which we settlers typically seek to exonerate ourselves from responsibilities for and to the past and present violence of colonization. For example, we consciously practice what Canadian scholars call “agnosia”—a kind of “aggressive unknowing” which justifies our ignorance concerning historic and continuing injustices: we neither want to know nor care that we don’t know.  Thisis rooted in the pervasive ideology of ahistoric individualism (e.g. “I didn’t own any slaves”; or “my family didn’t displace anyone – they bought their land fair and square.”) We imagine that we are free-floating entities, unaccountable to what has preceded us and dissociated from patterns and systems that have benefitted us.

Another strategy is a willingness to acknowledge that violence may have occurred, but was never intended, so there is no need to take responsibility or make amends. Anti-racist educator Robin DiAngelo says that such distinctions between intent and impact is the “foundation of white fragility.”Nor are folks in progressive communities immune; for example, we think by adopting the right talking points and critical consciousness we have exonerated ourselves from doing the hard work of making things right.

   In the final chapters of Healing Haunted Histories we outline four practices of restorative solidarity that can nurture our healing and liberation:

  • Re-schooling the colonial legacy and identity we have inherited through building literacy, critical analysis and moral imagination;
  • Relationship-building with Indigenous communities (especially our neighbors), to de-abstract the issues;
  • Restorative actions that support work for Indigenous Justice; and
  • Reparative experiments—both personal and political—with resources we own or influence.

I have experienced how such practices of a settler discipleship of decolonization can contribute to healing of our haunted histories and to the liberation of our hostage future. I have become far more attentive to:

  • how the land holds stories in both my homeland of Saskatchewan and my adopted land of California (my landlines work);
  • my own ethnic community’s costly assimilations, blind spots and moral injury (my bloodlines); and
  • all the ways our faith traditions can animate us to heal parts of us that have been deformed by colonization—from scripture to song and from pilgrimage to protest—which give us courage to take concrete steps towards reparative justice (my songlines).

RD: As you know, most people read books like Healing Haunted Histories individually. Tell us why reading your book together can be so transformational – and how your new group study resource (Throughlines) can help with this.

EE: It is both countercultural and counterintuitive to do this work because we white North Americans have been socialized to deny past injustices, and to shrug off responsibility for present inequities. Though each of our stories has different particularities, all of us have grown up in a world impacted by the history and continuing structures of colonialism. But we are intimidated to take this on, because it is so deep and wide in its implications. Working the LBS process collectively allows group participants to name the resistances that arise within and among us, share and probe what we are learning by comparing notes, and encourage one another’s steps deeper into decolonizing discipleship. This reduces our sense of being overwhelmed in our implication and isolated in tackling such big and taboo subjects. 

We believe that doing decolonization work in community functions to deprivatize our anxieties (since we are all facing different types of hauntings, moral injury and/or trauma); and communitize our imaginations concerning how to do genealogical work (approaching our families and facing difficult narratives) and how to take next steps in each of the four restorative solidarity practices outlined in the book (see above). Groups can become a safe container of encouragement and empathy as well as challenge and accountability. Some participants decide on restorative solidarity practices to do together, and some continue to meet to accompany one another deeper into reparative praxis.

For a decade we’ve workshopped HHH with in-person and online groups small and large. This led us to create the newly releasedThroughlines companion, a ten-session guide that resources processes of study and practice.  It includes:

  • a 49-page Facilitator’s Guide (PDF), step-by-step instructions to lead a group through difficult but animating conversations and commitments;
  • a 27-page Participant Workbook (PDF), offering mapping exercises and worksheets to help participants learn the Landlines of their settlement, decode family myths and find Songlines that inspire and sustain resistance and solidarity; and
  • Nine Key Concept Videos: Links to downloadable files for 15- to 30-minute illustrated summaries, narrated by author Elaine Enns.

Steve Taylor, United Methodist Church Home Missioner and Director of Antiracist Discipleship and Beloved Community for his denomination in North Carolina, recently facilitated an HHH group using Throughlines, and offered these reflections:

It was a shared journey of discovery, truth-telling, and transformation. Together we engaged the stories that shape us: the lands we inhabit; the peoples our ancestors encountered, displaced, or benefited from; and the systems of colonization and white supremacy that continue to de-form our lives and communities today.  We learned that decolonization and healing are not solitary accomplishments, but practices we learn and live into alongside one another as we move beyond abstraction and into embodiment. We listened deeply, spoke honestly, and learned to be accountable to one another as we discerned and continue to discern faithful steps toward reparative action.

So on this fifth anniversary of HHH’s publication, we encourage RadicalDiscipleship.net readers to consider forming a group using Throughlines to deepen their own decolonizing discipleship. Here are two discount codes to facilitate this:

  • a 40% discount code for Throughlines: RDSAVE40 (for a group of nine sharing the cost it would be just $20 per participant) order here;
  • a 40% discount for Healing Haunted Histories: order directly from Wipf & Stock and enter HHHGRP26 at check-out.