The Other Side of the Podium: Preaching and the Horizons of Liberation

I remember vividly the first time I spoke in the capacity of a preacher, unmediated by the role of worship leader, MC, or other function that was separated from the platform of public engagement from the "pulpit." In this case, it was a flimsy black music stand, standing near the aisle between unnecessary rows of black chairs set up in a room at Allan Hancock College, where I spent the first two years of my career as a campus minister. It was a warm night in April, free of the fog that normally cloaks coastal Santa Maria like a blanket, or the persistent winds that funnel from the sea into the inland valleys festooned with grapevines and fruit orchards. That year was one of radical reorientation to a new life out of college. I lost the dependable rhythm and purpose of a regimen of courses, for I had recently graduated from Cal Poly a few months before. I also lost the emotional support of a long romantic relationship, and was just feeling the stabbing pain and gut-twisting angst that comes with a prolonged period of grief. The depression of those days was lifted only many months later as a new community of faith welcomed me along with a transcendent sense of spirituality (through my transition to Catholicism) and eventually as I embraced a season of singleness, grappling with the potential of a life free from that kind of intimacy. Coexstensive with this isolating grief was my failure to adequately express the trauma of alienation that I faced while studying at Cal Poly. I could name examples of abject racism, relationships lost along racial and political lines, and the systemic oppression imposed by powers both secular and religious. The empowered consciousness of Black Lives Matter and the solidarity of #NoDAPL wouldn't arrive for years: 2012 brought us the trauma of the Newtown Massacre and Trayvon Martin's death, but little comfort beyond the disturbed and plainspoken interpretation offered by our President.

I chose one of my favorite texts that night: the visit of Mary Magdalene to the tomb in the early morning hours that can be found in John's Gospel, chapter 20. We know little about this early witness to the Resurrection of Jesus, but John renders her with startling significance: she is the very first to speak of the Risen Lord, and thus the progenitor of all evangelism and the spread of the church. The weight of patriarchy and an exclusivist tradition have buried the role of the earliest apostles like Mary, for according to Luke and Paul there are others counted among the Twelve that walked with Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem: Mary Magdala, Phoebe, Junia. Not only do these voices, in some cases only identified by their names, represent hope for all who labor for the sake of Good News under regimes that silence them, but they offer a model worthy of all - men and women alike. Jesus invites Mary to go, telling her not to cling to her, for he still has more to do. This was important in my experience at the time, for my faith in Jesus had been shot through by the Imperialism of American Christendom, but also my own existential doubts. How could Jesus be who he is to be while remaining clasped in my grip? I'm not sure my students, all ten of them gathered in that room, understood what this invitation could mean for them.

As my ministry shifted away from campus interactions and evangelistic engagements my conversations with students took place more consistently in the context of small groups, prayer gatherings, or occasionally in manuscript scripture explorations. When I assumed my eventual role as an urban ministry leader the classroom became my focus, and opportunities to preach came less and less. It wasn't until my parents' church invited me to speak in December 2013 that I brought out my notebook to sketch a new message, my mind spinning with the realities of the gap between Millennials and the previous generations. The darkness of my first mental breakdown stripped me of more than my capacity to do ministry in those days, but also led me to question my entire faith system. In recovery, and at the hands of wise and gentle therapists, I realized that something within me still felt called to offer my unique perspective on the scriptures, even if my frailty was all that I could see at the moment. I preached on John the Baptist's birth: he was the fulfillment of his family's hope, and yet his father experiences the alienation of his ministerial office when he is stripped of his ability to speak. Not only did this have direct overlap with my own experience, but I felt that Zechariah, in the lovely song that we find in Luke 1:67-79, was singing to encourage me to encounter the "tender mercy" of the Creator, present throughout the long and often traumatic history of his people.

The years beyond brought more joys and hardships, and another tragic spiral into mental illness that brought implications of chronic suffering and crippled nearly a year of ministry. There would be a long gulf of silence in this time, with long months between the last time I preached in November 2015 on the first Sunday of Advent, to the next opportunity after my long recovery. When it came I spoke in a vastly different context than the last. Whereas in Advent I spoke of embracing hope in the midst of our pain, appropriate for the liturgical season, I offered a message of rest as a tool for opposition to oppression. That place was a small immigrant community church in Southeast Fresno, its pastors away on sabbatical. I laughed when I saw my name in the bulletin: "Pastor Karl Gurney."

I never thought that the process of preaching would bring me into the midst of some of the deepest struggles and challenge me to expand the horizons of my own vocation. I see my task as engaging the theological constructs brought to us by the diverse traditions of the Church, and allowing them to evolve in honest conversation with an intersectional, multivalent ethnic identity for communities and individuals. My years working with college students has led me to value the development of the mind as a crucial task in linking spirituality with education, but it has also exposed me to some tragic shortcomings of the Euroamerican church. Many students coming from evangelical backgrounds are taught to be suspicious of academia, inheriting a latent anti-intellectualism, and maintain dangerous oppositions to scientific thought (evolution, genetic research, medical science, and climate/environmental concerns). Moreover, political and religious sectarianism leaves most students of all stripes poorly equipped to engaging cross-culturally, and especially across ideological divides. When I consider the task at hand, I envision a long journey into a sphere of influence in the theological world, but specifically because I yearn to see our young people engage with their faith with a full, three-dimensional understanding of their humanity. The Jesus preached in most of these congregations is stripped of his humanity and would bring Augustine back to the days fighting Docetists who claimed that his humanity was a mere illusion designed merely for our sensory engagement. Liberation theology introduces us to the Jesús of history, who experienced life as a marginalized Galilean Jew in the distant corners of the Roman Empire. He challenges us to view the conditions of sin in structural terms, with the demonic corruption manifested in our political and economic systems that dehumanize and objectify people. But he also invites us to see him as a person, intimately relating to us and capable of bleeding, suffering, and yes, dying alone in shame.

This Sunday we greet the great Paschal Mystery, the celebration of Resurrection that marks the ultimate expression of our Christian hope. Yet before that we must embrace the necessary death on Good Friday and the hopeless darkness of Saturday. Many of us feel that we are still waiting for the Resurrection to be made known to us, weeping like Mary Magdala at the tomb before she recognizes her Rabbouni. Disenfranchised and only accepted in the company of Jesus, she is now left with little more than memories of the horrific violence days before. This week is an opportunity to reflect on my journey with the Lord thus far, the wonders seen on the camino con Jesús as a follower in his ministry, the early messages on the margins of Galilee, all the way to confronting the institution of the Temple in Jerusalem, weeping that the city would never know peace (Luke 19:41-42). I come to terms with the pain of my people, those long dead in Poland, Russia, Mexico, and New Mexico, many in the midst of brutal violence. I come to face my own weaknesses, the ways I am sensitive to stress and must protect myself from the terror of mania and depression. But I must also grapple with the deep wounds that prevent me from seeing all of those in front of me as fully human. Most of my life was spent attempting to reconcile my multiethnicity with the structural and social opposition to my personhood. I could never write in the line; I always had to check a box at the exclusion of others.

All of this left me unable to cope healthily with the trauma accrued during my years at Cal Poly and even beyond living in San Luis Obispo. Years of shame and rhetorical violence levied against immigrants and particularly Mexican-Americans led me to associate whiteness with oppression, violence, and hatred. I resented my own skin color as I internalized these messages, aware that I have the unwanted privilege of "passing" in white society as a light-skinned man with European (though not exclusively, to those who know what to look for) features. I would tell my friends that I simply "wasn't attracted to white women" when they suggested going on dates with colleagues. The defense mechanisms I employed to protect myself from the trauma of xenophobia and racism ended up eating away at me, poisoning my internal perspective to the point that the cops were not the only people that I regarded with suspicion and derision when I walked down the street. For the majority of my time in ministry, I did little to regard the sickness in my heart that corrupted my sight.

On Monday, however, I spoke in front of around twenty-five or so students at my alma mater, every face but one white (and occasionally flushed with pink from discomfort, or at least this I presume). I preached on Romans 13, the notorious passage that is so often used to decry political opposition to the current regime, encouraging us to "submit to the authorities, for they exist because they have been instituted by God (13:1)." I wanted to shift the focus of the conversation to Paul's thesis when he writes to this church: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no harm to the neighbor, therefore loving fulfills the law (13:9-10)." Yet I also wanted to practice what the Creator has taught me in this season of my life, namely, that there is truth, significance, and beauty in every part of my heritage, and I especially need to heed the way my white heritage can teach me about God's presence in my life.

You may read a more thorough treatment on the subject of whiteness and how I understand it in this season of my life, but this juncture is where the theology of my own ethnic reconstruction meets the praxis of love in the Reign of God. I cannot erase the trauma and pain inherited through years on this journey of taking my ethnic identities seriously. But I can refuse to allow that trauma to do more damage, and invite the Spirit's providence to repair the years that I allowed that pain to harm me, recycled into the seemingly endless circuitry of reaction and revenge. I see my whiteness as a necessary part of who I am, a beautiful inheritance from diverse and proud peoples in their part of the world. They did not know a life without suffering, and I honor them when I speak frankly about their own struggles to build a new life in the aftermath of exile from their Old Country. The work of the Lord's healing and mercy in my life is evident in that at the start of my years in ministry I would never have been able to talk to them openly, gently, and plainly about my experience, showing them the subjective lens that I bring to the conversation and how it affected my time at Cal Poly. I would have liked nothing more than to preach the judgment of the Lord from the great Prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures. Anger unhinged, I remember preaching for fun to the air in San Luis Obispo, spinning webs of rhetoric to trap the unwary white evangelical. It's true that more would suffer since then and will continue to suffer now at the hands of the Euroamerican church. And yet these students, and all of my white family, friends, and neighbors, are lovingly created in God's image as well. To name and honor this is something that woefully few are willing to do, and I cherish this opportunity to do so as both a white man and a person of color. Though the streams and torrents of my multivalent consciousness may rage loudly from time to time, I saw God's mercy at work that night. I was able to be Karl, fully aware and embracing my people: the white and nonwhite, the Indigenous and Colonists, the conquerors and the conquered.

In speaking on Paul's radical invitation for the Roman church to practice self-emptying love, I allow God to expand the horizons of my vision. Beyond my own personal and lifelong journey to understand who I am and where I came from, I am choosing to live into the way that embracing our pain, allowing love and truth to bind and subdue my ego, and looking into the eyes of my onetime enemies, and there...I behold the miracle, for I see the eyes of Christ.