Tonetta Landis-Aina: Marks of a Liberating Church - Steal Away

All right, Table Church, it is good to be with you at least virtually.

You may have heard that the 'rona has gotten me, and that is true.

Still, I wanted to talk to you today out of just a bit of the fruit of what I've been

thinking about.

This will be more of a sermon reflection than a formal sermon, but I pray that it will be

something to consider as we enter into this Black History Month.

So if you would, please pray with me.

God of all creation, God of our liberation and of our becoming, thank you for this holy

moment in which we are able to meet you.

Thank you that your goodness is abundant in this moment, even if that is deeply hard for

us to see.

I pray, Lord, that no matter how we've entered this room or this space, that we would know

ourselves held by you.

And I pray, God, that as I come here surrendering and coming from a place of deep imperfection,

I ask that you would bless what is created.

Thank you so much.

In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, so I'm a person who reads every single word at the beginning of a book.

I read everything at the opening.

If I have my e-book, my Kindle e-book with me, and it starts me not at the first page,

I will go back to the cover so that I can look at the art.

And I'll say that one of my favorite things to read are the full words in books, particularly

if they're by prominent authors or other well-known scholars.

And one of the best full words that I know is from Grace G. Sun Kim's book, Healing Our

Broken Humanity.

And the full word to that book is by Willie James Jennings, who's a scholar, theologian

in his own right.

And he opens that full word talking about 2 Corinthians 12, 9, that verse that says,

"My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness."

He says that that truth of God's power being made perfect in weakness has never really

been received by the disciples of Jesus.

He says the great temptation is to continually try to overcome weakness.

We contort ourselves to receive worldly power instead of God's power.

And that contortion, what Jennings calls actually a mutilation, is at the heart of the legacy

of modern Christian colonialism.

And then Jennings goes on to make clear the ways in which the colonial settlers are practicing

Christians.

He talks about for paragraphs and paragraphs how these were people who participated in

faith practices.

They consider themselves faithful Christians, and yet they were formed by practices of worldly

power.

Jennings says, and probably my favorite line of that full word, "The crucial matter for

today for Christian discipleship is not what you practice, but who you practice with."

Not what you practice, but who you practice with.

Here at the table in the past six months, we've unveiled new values.

We've unveiled a new vision, we've unveiled a new mission.

And all of those, the vision, the mission, and the values have continuity with the self-understandings

of both the chapel church and Resurrection City.

And yet they are fitted for the season ahead, the season that we are going into as a church.

It seems good to acknowledge today the truth of Jennings' words that we need, along with

a new vision, a new mission, and new values, that we need different departure points as

a community if we are to be formed outside of the colonial Christianity that has dominated

the Western world.

We have to, yes, practice our faith outside of segregationist ways of being.

We have to practice with people different from us.

But we also need to operate on the basis of different assumptions, different ecclesiologies,

different teaching methodologies, different ways of knowing, different ways of structuring

life together.

In short, we need different models of church than the ones given to us by the Western church.

Different models.

As we enter this first Sunday of Black History Month, what better time to begin to talk about

how at least one of these models is deeply embedded in Black history.

So this week and next week, what we're going to do is we're going to explore what we can

learn from the hush harpers created by enslaved folks in the Antebellum South to inform us

of what we might need to consider as a community of faith desiring to be formed outside of

colonial Christianity.

As we talk through this series, Marks of a Liberating Church, we're going to be using

Brandon Rensher's book, Liberating Church.

Brandon Rensher is a fabulous human being and pastor who actually is in my hometown

of Greensboro, North Carolina.

And essentially, Brandon in his book with the group of people sets out research into

the hush harbors.

And from that research discerns marks of sacred community and sacred space that are liberating

as opposed to oppressive.

So in this week and next week, we're going to explore two marks.

And then after Ash Wednesday, we're going to spend a little bit of time more broadly

thinking about things we need to repent of in terms of dominant forms of Christianity.

And then a little bit later in the year, we're going to return to these marks as well.

Now I have to say that a major part of my formation took place in, you all know this,

more conservative spaces.

And I can remember hearing of and being encouraged toward the nine healthy marks of church or

the nine marks of a healthy church.

This is I think trademark that language.

Those marks include things like expository preaching and biblical theology, a biblical

understanding of evangelism, biblical church discipline, the leadership of godly men.

And yet I think we need models that give us something different to aspire to that set

out different marks, marks of a liberating church.

So here are some of the ones that Brandon Rensher and his team came up with.

Steal away, hidden in plain sight alternative to empire, North Star, all God's children's

got shoes, egalitarian leadership, Sankofa, talking book, Ubuntu, joy unspeakable and

staying woke or remembering.

These are some of the marks that he sets out for liberative community, marks that were

discerned through research in hush harbor communities.

And we're going to talk about some of those marks in the coming weeks and then later in

the coming months.

But the first thing I want to do is just define what a hush harbor is.

Here's his definition.

I think this is a good one, pretty basic one.

He says hush harbors emerged alongside of and worthy antibody to slave holding religion,

the precursor to the religious right.

Many enslaved Africans were not content with slave holding Christianity, the racially integrated

plantation church, which upheld it or black folks as approximation of plantation culture

that was under the master's gaze.

Hush harbors were secret and illegal meetings, often in the wilderness, away from the plantation

church and culture where enslaved Africans would gather to worship and organize for personal

and political transformation, blending their native religious beliefs and practices with

Christianity.

From the hush harbors emerged the spirituals, underground railroad and slave revolts.

The hush harbors were decolonizing monastic missional communities, faith rooted small

groups on the fringes characterized by radical formation, friendship and fierce revolution.

Virtually overlooked when interrogating what faithful Christian community entails in the

US, the hush harbors are a needed witness to cultivate new liberating expressions of

church for these spiritually and politically volatile times.

As a North American church grapples with an eroding position of privilege in society,

how do the antebellum hush harbors often offer a vision of church from the margins?

In what ways did the antebellum hush harbors function as expressions of church?

Where are the contemporary hush harbors?

Where are the contemporary hush harbors within the North American church among black communities?

So key things to know.

The hush harbors were small gatherings of enslaved folks who escaped secretly often

in the night and went down into the woods outside of the plantation or they went to

swamps or ravines or they met inside cane breaks.

They met, they found essentially these natural refuges where they could gather in secret.

And they worshiped in the ways that they wanted to.

They sought God and they found Jesus, which is what I love about hush harbors.

They were spaces in which enslaved folks were able to discern by the spirit that there was

something deeply wrong with the theology, the plantation theology they were being fed.

And they discern that often without being able to read and write, without often only

knowing a few Bible stories.

They learned to interpret the stories they did know from scripture along liberative lines.

They would gather and lament and celebrate and testify and dance and witness and sing.

And when I talk about the hush harbors, I don't want to romanticize them.

They were spaces for survival, absolute survival.

And there are things that we can learn from them, even as many of us are trying to do

more than survive.

So if you don't remember anything else about the hush harbors, just know they were these

risky places outside of the plantation gaze where people discovered the sacred and they

plotted liberation for their communities.

I love what one writer talks about, Laniece Pinkard.

She talks about our call to sign onto a different account of reality.

And essentially that's what was happening in these hush harbors, this different view

of what the world was and could be.

These folks were at risk of their lives signing onto that.

Now when I thought about this in scripture, this scripture came to mind that I want to

just explore a little bit and it's Exodus 5, 1 through 9.

And I'll just read that.

Exodus 5, 1 through 9.

After Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said, "Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel,

let my people go so that they may celebrate a festival to me in the wilderness."

But Pharaoh said, "Who is the Lord that I should heed him and let Israel go?

I do not know the Lord and I will not let Israel go."

Then they said, "The God of the Hebrews has revealed himself to us.

Let us go a three days journey into the wilderness to sacrifice the Lord our God or he will fall

upon us with pestilence or sword."

But the King of Egypt said to them, "Moses and Aaron, why are you taking the people away

from their work?

Get to your labors."

Pharaoh continued, "Now they are more numerous than the people of the land and yet you want

them to stop working?"

That same day Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters of the people as well as their supervisors,

"You shall no longer give the people straw to make bricks as before.

Let them go and gather straw for themselves.

But you shall require of them the same quantity of bricks as they have made previously.

Do not diminish it."

So they are lazy.

That is why they cry, "Let us go and offer sacrifice to our God."

Let heavier work be laid on them.

Then they will labor at it and pay no attention to deceptive words.

So the first thing I just want you to note here that I find fascinating is that the Israelites,

at least Moses and Aaron in their name, are asking to go to celebrate a festival in the

wilderness.

They asked to leave what I'm going to term the plantation gaze, the empire's gaze, which

is a threatening act in and of itself.

Now there's a lot of scholarly controversy about did they really only want three days?

Some people would say that that's all they were asking for initially.

And some people would say, no, they were using holy deception.

They really always intended to go and escape as soon as they could.

But no matter what, there's this sense where they know they have to leave and enter into

the wilderness place as a way to attain greater freedom, greater dignity.

And then there's a ton of places in scripture where you can see this, the way in which there's

a subversive energy in the desert.

Think John the Baptist, we'll talk about probably as we get into Lent.

Think about the ways in which he's outside of kind of the status quo, things as they

are.

There's this energy out in the wilderness where the sacred can be found in a new way.

So their first move is to try to get off the plantation even for a short time.

And I think what a critical question that we always have to be asking ourselves is,

what is the plantation that we need to get off of?

Like what is the plantation that you need to get off of?

And what is the plantation that we as a church need to get off of?

How do we think about that for ourselves as a community who's trying in some way to think

of itself in light of the hush harpers?

And then the second thing I just want you to notice in this passage is that the God

of the Hebrews, this is verse three, then they said, "The God of the Hebrews has revealed

himself to us."

And I love this because that phrase, God of the Hebrews, the term Hebrew was a sociopolitical

identity.

It was used most frequently by foreigners to refer to Israelites and to indicate their

status as slaves.

It has connections in Hebrew to the language of outsider.

So there's this sense that when they begin to leave and to want to leave the plantation,

when Moses and Aaron begin to lead them in that direction, it is the God of the Hebrews

who begins to speak to them.

And I think about this a lot, the way in which our understanding of God has to shift.

And probably the easiest way to talk about this and the easiest way, or maybe the most

prevalent way you'll hear about this in Black History Month is like moving away from white

Jesus and all that white Jesus is and stands for.

Later this month, we'll talk some about antisemitism.

Antisemitism is connected to white Jesus.

So over and over, we have to find these ways to identify deeply with the God of the Hebrews,

even though I would argue identifying with the God of the Hebrews is a slippery slope.

Because as you identify with the outsider, you only see more and more who the outsider

is and you only are called into deeper and deeper solidarity with the outsider.

The third thing I just want to say about this passage that I find interesting is that the

second half of it, in the second half of it, basically things get worse.

There's this sense that they're not allowed to go out into the wilderness.

And then Pharaoh says, "Why would I let them stop working?

Why would I let them essentially have a Sabbath?

They're more numerous than the landowners.

Why would I do that?

And I'm going to punish them."

So now they don't have brick or straw to make bricks.

So they're punished.

And I think another thing to just remember as we consider what it means to move into

a place of not living out dominant forms of faith that oppress other people and not being

the kind of community that does that, it's important to remember that the first attempt

that these people make at it is a failure.

And how do we talk about that?

How do we talk about that our first attempt to leave the plantation might not go well

and may place us at risk?

And we have to be thinking about that, what it means in some ways to live with a fugitive

mindset.

How can we be honest that as we leave the dominant business as usual status quo way

of doing things, we are guaranteed less security, not more.

See, fundamental to hush harbor spirituality was an ability to steal away.

That's the first mark of a liberating church.

And that's what is similar to what's happening in Exodus 5, 1 through 9.

Moses and Aaron are attempting for a little while or forever, potentially, to steal away.

And you might've heard that spiritual steal away, steal away, steal away to Jesus, steal

away home.

I ain't got long to be here.

Stealing away, Rensher says, was a metaphor for a lifestyle of fugitivity and a holy deception.

Think of the Hebrew midwives, Shifra and Pua, who they don't actually leave the quote unquote

plantation, but they have this mindset that they have to break laws, that they have to

stand outside the status quo no matter what in order to bring liberation.

Stealing away is about betraying plantation, religion, and economy, and the mythology of

superiority, the economics of extraction and the politics of domination.

And it's important to know that stealing away is something that is both physical, sometimes

we literally have to exit systems of domination, and sometimes it's interior and we have to

be shrewd.

It's something that's happening within us that we continually maintain.

So I think that's mostly what I have for you.

Just to consider and to go into this week and into this month, considering how you are

called to steal away, how we as a church are called to steal away from these dominant models

of doing church and of being church that have only led to deep oppression of most parts

of creation.

In order to close today, what I'm going to do is there are a couple questions on the

screen that I'm going to ask you to discuss for about six or seven minutes.

To get to know one another, it's kind of a way of meeting and gathering in a different

way is to talk to each other.

So get into a group of, I would say five people or so, and talk to each other, say your name,

your pronouns, and then consider what it is to steal away and what it is you need to be

considering this month.

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