Episode 13: “We Belong to God,” with Lisa Sharon Harper
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Show Notes
Co-hosts
Jeff Chu
Find Jeff online: @byJeffChu on Instagram or @JeffChu on Twitter. You can also subscribe to Jeff’s newsletter, Notes of a Make-Believer Farmer on Substack.
Sarah Bessey
Find Sarah online: @SarahBessey on Instagram or @SarahBessey on Twitter. You can also subscribe to Sarah’s newsletter, Field Notes on Substack. Explore Sarah’s recent books on her website.
Featured guest
Jennifer Knapp
Lisa Sharon Harper is a prolific speaker, writer and activist. Lisa is the founder and president of FreedomRoad.us, a consulting group that’s dedicated to shrinking the narrative gap in the United States by designing forums and experiences that bring common understanding, common commitment, and common action. A columnist at Sojourners and an Auburn Seminary senior fellow, Lisa writes widely on shalom and governance, racial and gender justice, and transformational civic engagement. She also hosts the Freedom Road podcast. Lisa’s books include Forgive Us: Confessions of a Compromised Faith, The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right, and most recently, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family And The World–And How To Repair It All.
Learn more about Jennifer on LisaSharonHarper.com, or follow @JenniferKnappMusic on Facebook, @LisaSHarper on Instagram, or @LisaSHarper on Twitter.
“Jesus—Brown Jesus, indigenous Jesus, colonized Jesus—is here to set the image of God free on earth.”
Thanks to our producer, SueAnn Shiah, who also provided the music for this episode, you can listen to her album A Liturgy for the Perseverance of the Saints on Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube, or Bandcamp and find her at @sueannshiah on Instagram and @sueannshiah on Twitter.
Transcript
Part 1: Introduction
SARAH: [Ad] A call to ministry can feel strange and awe-inspiring at the very same time. Union Presbyterian Seminary hopes to support you in your discernment. They equip leaders to live into their calling. With campuses in Richmond and Charlotte as well as a variety of online and hybrid options, theological education is more accessible than you may realize. Contact their admissions team at admissions@upsem.edu to hear more about their community.
LISA : Only God can be perfect. God does not want us to strive to be God. God wants us to be human and to love. That's it. That is all of it.
SARAH: Hi friends, I’m Sarah Bessey.
JEFF: And I'm Jeff Chu. Welcome back to The Evolving Faith Podcast. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram as @EvolvFaith that's e-v-o-l-v-f-a-i-t-h and on Facebook as Evolving Faith. Thank you for joining us today. We're so glad you're here.
SARAH: Jeff, we did promise our friends a recurring segment a few episodes ago called Welcome to the Party, Jeff wherein you get to talk about past pop culture that you have recently discovered for the first time. So I am wondering which party we are welcoming you to this week.
JEFF: Do people actually have parties all the time? Is, is that a thing people do? Because I feel like I discovered one new thing in the past couple of months and shouldn't that be enough?
SARAH: So what I'm hearing from you is, no, no, you have nothing new that you have discovered.
JEFF: I think I told you a while ago that we are working our way through NCIS. This is a new project that we started during the pandemic, and it turns out that this show is very, very, very long.
SARAH: NCIS? It feels almost too aggressively on-brand for your grandma brand. So basically what I'm hearing is now this is an annual segment that once a year we will have a welcome Jeff, we will welcome Jeff to the party. It will be a once-a-year segment. And so stay tuned, folks. You will not want to miss it.
JEFF: So is it still a party if everyone else has left? Because actually, I really enjoy those. I get to pick through the leftovers in the kitchen by myself.
SARAH: Listen, the best parties always end by nine. Everyone knows that.
JEFF: Okay, so before we convince people that we are the most boring humans alive, maybe we should just get on with the rest of the show. Today we have a talk from Lisa Sharon Harper, who has such a tremendous heart for justice and equity. So, Sarah, why don't you share her bio with us?
SARAH: Sure. A prolific speaker and writer and activist, Lisa Sharon Harper is the founder and president of FreedomRoad.us, a consulting group that’s dedicated to shrinking the narrative gap in the United States by designing forums and experiences that bring common understanding and common commitment and common action. A columnist at Sojourners and an Auburn Seminary senior fellow, Lisa writes widely on shalom and governance, racial and gender justice, and transformational civic engagement. She also hosts the Freedom Road podcast. Lisa’s books include Forgive Us: Confessions of a Compromised Faith, The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right, and most recently, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family And The World–And How To Repair It All. Here’s Lisa Sharon Harper speaking to us from Evolving Faith 2019 in Denver, Colorado.
Part 2: Lisa’s Talk
LISA: Sixteen years ago, I took a pilgrimage and that pilgrimage changed my life. We were on the road. We were on the road for four weeks. We retraced the Cherokee Trail of Tears and the African experience in America from slavery through civil rights. And I got to the end of that pilgrimage, and I was rocked by a question, one question that literally changed everything. The question was, if I were to go up to my third-great-grandmother, Leah Ballard, who was the last adult enslaved woman in my family, who was what we believe a breeder, because she had about 17 children, five of whom are not listed anywhere so we believe that they probably died or were sold away before the end of the Civil War.
If I went up to her with my understanding at that time of the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ and I were to share with her what I believed that good news was—So. Knock, knock, knock. She opens the door. “Great-Great-Great-Grandma Leah! I have good news!” She said, “What is it? What is it, Lisa?” “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. But you are sinful and therefore separated from God. But Jesus died to pay the penalty for your sin. So all you need to do, Great-Great-Grandma Leah, is to pray the prayer in the back of this little gold booklet and you get to go to heaven.” And I imagined how she would respond to me. Okay. So it's not a question of whether it was good news; it's whether it was a question of good news to her. And I ask the question, would she receive this as good news? Would this news make her jump and shout for joy. “Ah! Hallelujah!”
And the answer was no. Was no. And as an evangelical, that literally cut the feet out under me. It took the ground out from underneath me because the gospel is the center of the evangelical world. It's the ground that you stand on. It's the axis in the middle. It is everything. And so if, if my understanding of the gospel was not good news to my own family, then what did I have?
So I was depressed for a year. And then that really kind of led me into the Book of Genesis. And for me, because when we went on that pilgrimage in our orientation, we studied Genesis 1 and I have to tell y’all, we've been hearing so many, so many stories of people finding, like realizing, that they are not on the bottom of God's hierarchy. Hello, somebody. But I want you to know that that comes from somewhere.
This text. This text was written by Brown, colonized people. This text. This text, I believe, does have the power to show us the way. But you have to have eyes to see it. And there's no way to see it unless you are reading and studying this text with Brown, colonized people.
I found as I was going into Genesis 1 for about 16 years. Hello, somebody. I was on that journey, and I've been on that journey. God has not released me from that journey. I found four words that have given me life, and I want to share those four words with you. Because for me, those four words and understanding those four words in their context changed everything.
The first word is actually a phrase. It's not a word. It's a phrase, tov meod. Tov meod. It means very good. Right. So very good. That sounds easy, right? So tov is good, very is meod. Tov, though, when you're when you're thinking about it, in Hebrew, they didn't see tov or goodness as existing inside the thing necessarily. They actually understood goodness to exist between things, not, they were—it was the Greek project to find the perfectly level floor, the perfect podium, and to become the perfect human being. But it was not the Hebrew project. The Hebrew project, the Hebrews understood goodness to exist between. And friends, that changes things. Because that word meod, that word meod, it's overwhelming, abundant, overflowing, crazy, crazy, crazy good.
So when God looked around at the end of the sixth day and said “Yo, this is tov meod! This is very good.” what God was actually saying was the relationships in all of creation were tov meod. All of the relationships, the relationship between humanity and God, the relationship between men and women, the relationship between all of us, humanity and the rest of creation. There were no whales that needed to be saved on that day. Hello, somebody.
Because we had tov meod relationship, then also the relationship between all of creation and the way things work, the systems that govern us. And so when God said that all things were all good. Which is what God is talking about is that all worked to bless all. Oh, yes.
And look at this. There was no cursing on the first page. There's no cursing. And yet even though the sea monsters were there, and the sea monsters, that was like the thing they feared the most. And yet, even with the sea monsters present, there is only blessing.
So that's the first word. The second word and phrase. Second word is tselem. And it comes at the beginning of the sixth day or somewhere towards the middle, actually, when it says, “Then God said, ‘Let us make you humankind in our image according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish and over of the sea and over the birds of the air and over the cattle and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’” So this word, tselem, is the same word that we understand as icon, right? So it's actually the Hebrew version of the Greek word icon.
It's the word that Jesus uses in the temple when when the Sadducees and Pharisees and scribes are coming in, are trying to entrap him, and they say to him, you know, Jesus, you know, should we be paying taxes? And by the way, everybody in the Bible is from Philly because I'm from Philly. So there you go. So, “Yo Jesus, what should we be paying taxes?” And Jesus says, “Ay! You know, show me a coin.” Right. So, so, like so they give him a coin and and he says, “You know, whose what icon is on the coin? Who's tselem?” If he was talking Hebrew. Right. So who is on the coin. And so they say Caesar's icon is on the coin. And then what does he say? Remember what he says. Right. Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, but give to God what belongs to God. What is God's? What belongs to God? Everything.
But. But think about this. We belong to God. Because we bear the tselem of God. We bear the icon of God. That's the way that the icon of the king, the tselem of the king or the royalty used to work, is that whatever had bore the image of the king belonged to the king. It was a marker of where the king ruled.
Have you ever thought of yourself as being a marker of where the king rules? Probably not. Or maybe, maybe you've even ditched that. But think about this. Think about this. This is actually a radical moment in history because it's revolutionary because of who wrote this text. The people who wrote this text—There's a few theories, and I'm just going to share with you mine for the interest of time. And well, the one that I ascribe to is the theory that there were multiple writers of Genesis, and there was a company of priests in particular who wrote Genesis 1 and a few other texts throughout Genesis.
And this company of priests, they were coming out of 70 years of slavery. Slavery. I had a moment when I was writing the first chapter of my book, The Very Good Gospel, when I literally broke into tears and then worship when I realized the context within which Genesis was written. It was written as the people were coming out of slavery.
And I realized, I understand that. Something in me understands that. And they could have grabbed power for themselves in that moment. But they didn't. They could have said it, could have read, this could very well have read, “Then God said, ‘Let us make the priests in our own image according to our likeness,’” because that is the way it had been done from time and millennia. But they didn't. At the very moment when they could have grabbed power for themselves, they didn't. Instead, what they did was they cast it out for all humanity.
And then in case people didn't get it, they added the third word and that third word is the word radah. So that word, it actually means dominion, right? So but that's been sorely misunderstood, y'all. And the thing is, in the church, especially, quite honestly, in the liberal church, we have erased that word is if it doesn't exist there because we just don't like it. We just think it's bad. It’s a bad word. Just don't even deal with it. But, honey, this text was written by enslaved people. Do you think it means domination? No. No.
This, this word, and I'm sure you've heard it, it's much closer to stewardship than domination. It literally means to tread down. So I get it. I understand how we could get that mixed up. Right. But it's the, it's the image of the untamed wilderness. It's the image of that time when there was, it was the very beginning. And stuff is growing up all over the place.
I was in Bosnia in 2004, the year after I took that pilgrimage. I took students to Bosnia, and we did a similar, a similar journey. And we were driving up this main road in Bosnia. And you could see, you could see that the houses had been bombed. And that was because that was one of the strategies of the Serbs, and the Serbians who came in and Milošević, was to kill the homes.
So what they did is they would sit across the street, and they would literally gunfire a house so that they would kill the home and bomb the home. So as we're going up the middle, this main path in Bosnia, you can see houses that have holes in their roofs and gunfire throughout the facades. And you see trees growing up through the center of the homes, through the roof. And that's what it looks like when there's no one there to exercise stewardship of the land. And there's an even clearer picture of dominion in Genesis 2. When God takes the human and places the human in the garden and says, “Till and keep it.” Do you know what those words till and keep mean when you translate them? They mean serve and protect. Serve the land, protect the land, not dominate.
So there are some implications here. The first implication is that very goodness is about the radical wellness of all relatedness in creation, all relationships. The second implication is that to be human equals to be made in the image of God. Can we all agree on that? Good. The third is that if you are made in the image of God, then you are called by God and created with the capacity to exercise dominion in the world.
But we have to know and face the reality that we have crafted a world according to a lie, the lie of human hierarchy, the lie of human hierarchy that we have been hearing in story after story, session after session at Evolving Faith. And I think that our faith is evolving now because we are beginning to wake up to the reality that it is actually that faith, that contorted, twisted malformed faith that spoke human hierarchy into the world and enforced it.
And we're finally waking up to it and we're saying no, but now we have to find out what was it supposed to be? What's the vision of what it was supposed to be?
And I think that the Scripture gives us that vision, because, you see, there were these two trees, you know, in the next in the next section of Genesis 2. And one of those trees was the tree of life, and the other one was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And that good and evil, some people think it's like, you know, you eat of the tree and, you know, it's like the Wicked Witch of the West. I'm dying. I'm dying, you know? I don't think it was like that. I think, I think that that tree just simply had a command attached. And at that command, that command really helped us to understand whether or not we were actually in a love relationship with God or not. Whether we trusted God. Whether we chose God.
Because God gave it for our life. “Don't eat of the tree because I want you to know shalom. I want you to understand the wellness of all the relationships in creation.” And yet we ate. And when we ate, all of the relationships that God declared very good just a chapter and a verse before all fell down. All of them. And now we live in the wreckage.
And I think, I think that when our politics, our conversations and decisions about how the polis will live together, when our politics leads us to govern in ways that crush or erase or diminish. Or twist. Or exploit or exclude any people or people group from the call to exercise dominion. Then we are also crushing, covering over, exploiting, twisting, beating down, and erasing the image of God on earth.
Now consider this: The ancients considered the image of the king to be a sign of the health of the kingdom. Where the image flourished, you also understood that the kingdom was flourishing. But, where the images of the king were toppled or crushed or fallen, then you understood that there was war being waged against the kingdom in that land. What if, when we govern in ways that topple or crush or cover over the image of God? What if, when we do that we are also declaring war against God on earth? Friends, what will it take? What will it take for us to lay down our arms against God? What will it take for us to renounce the lie of human hierarchy? And what will it take for us to repair what our politics has broken in God's world? I believe it will take the coming of the kingdom and the kin-dom of God.
And I think that we see it, I think we see it in the text. This text written by Brown, indigenous colonized people. This text in the beginning of Luke, you see in Luke 1, the writer actually sets up the text by saying, “In the days of King Herod, in the days of a despot, in the days of a man who loved to build tall buildings and put his name on it. In those days, God broke into the world.”
Ha! Yes. Yes. In those days, the king of the kingdom of God came to confront the kingdoms of men that are hellbent on crushing the image of God on earth. Jesus in the end of Mark says, “Repent.” Mark 1. “Repent and believe the kingdom of God is near, is at hand.” What did that mean? It meant Jesus—Brown Jesus, indigenous Jesus, colonized Jesus—is here to set the image of God free on earth.
And then you see it again in Luke 4 when he gives his very first sermon. He actually said that he tells us why he came. He came. “The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he's annointed me to bring good news to the middle class?” No. To the poor. “He sent me to proclaim release to the captives.” And friends, those captives were both criminals and political captives, political prisoners. To recover the sight to the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.
And then we see it in Matthew 25, and we see it at the cross when Jesus becomes sin. And what is sin anyway, y'all? It's not a bad word. It actually helps us to understand. Sin—if you understand that very goodness is about the radical wellness of all relationships, then sin is anything that breaks any of those relationships. It's not about me being perfect. It's not about you being perfect. It's not about anybody being pure. Only God can be perfect. God does not want us to strive to be God. God wants us to be human and to love. That's it. That is all of it.
And so I think that we actually find an image, a ritual that we've been given in Scripture to help us to move forward, to help us to rebuild the first step, not the second, the third, the fifth or the thousandth. The first step is baptism. Baptism. And why do I say that? I was never Baptist. I never was.
But Paul says in Galatians 3, “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ, there is no longer Jew or Greek. There is no longer slave or free. There is no longer male and female. For all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Is Paul saying there's no more genitalia? No, is Paul saying slave and slavery doesn't exist? No. Here's what I think Paul is saying, is that before you were baptized, before you went under the water, you saw people, you saw them the way that empire taught you to see them. You saw the hierarchies of human belonging and placed yourself in it and resigned yourself to your level or strove to get a little higher. But when you go under the water of the king of the kingdom of God, no sprinkling here, full immersion. And you come up, all you see is the image of God. In all. And what that means is that you see the call and the capacity of all to exercise dominion in the land. Let it be so. Amen.
<<<<TRANSITIONAL MUSIC>>>
Part 3: Conversation
SARAH: If you’ve been listening to and loving this podcast, join us for Evolving Faith 2022, the live virtual conference. It’s on October 14 and 15.
So many of us are engaging in good, hard, holy work right now to cultivate love and reimagine and build a faith that works not only for us but for the whole world, and to find our way in the wilderness together. We need to be reminded of what matters, who is alongside of us. We need connection, inspiration, good conversations, and laughter, and we need some hope too. We are gathering not in spite of these turbulent times but because of them. So please join us.
We have set a big, rowdy table in the middle of the wilderness, and together, we will have a feast. We’re saving a spot for you. Go to evolvingfaith.com and register today. You won’t want to miss this moment with this community. It's pretty special. Okay, now back to the show.
JEFF: This was a full, full, full talk. So much we could sift through, so many provoking thoughts. But, let's start with the fact that because in my soul, I am actually a cardigan-wearing, rocking-chair-loving grandpa, as we have already established, I love a good grandma story. But until Lisa spoke, I had never heard a great-great-great-grandma story before. And I appreciate how Lisa drew us in, in a very personal way, with this powerful imagining of what it would have been like to try to share good news with her ancestor.
SARAH: We do talk about family a fair bit, actually. You know, we talk about your grandma, you know, your grandmother, for instance.
JEFF: Well family stories, ancestor stories, they matter deeply to me. And I think many people don't talk about them enough. We carry the past with us, even if we don't always acknowledge it. And I'm grateful for how my culture taught me this. And Lisa does a couple of things by invoking her ancestors. She points us to the history of how Christianity has been used and sometimes misused. Something that should have been good news somehow wasn't. And she helps us to understand how personal the stakes can be and can feel when it comes to theology. Theology doesn't exist in some theoretical realm. It isn't academic here. We're talking about ideas and concepts that make a real difference, whether for good or for ill, in the lived experiences of other humans, and to imagine how those words and ideas might have been received by someone she respects, someone she honors, someone we respect, someone we honor, that gives it dimension and shape in a new way. I think it's a really interesting thought experiment.
SARAH: Well, I think it's an interesting way to think through, not only, like you said, our own story, but how our stories were formed, but even how they are forming us right now. So I'm actually curious now, what do you think are the conversations that you think would be life-giving to have with your ancestors?
JEFF: You know, that's such an interesting question because I think I just want to hear their stories, and I would want to ask them lots of questions and then just listen to the answers. But, that would require me to break protocol in traditional Chinese culture, because it isn't typical to ask probing questions of one's elders. I know a tiny bit of my great-grandfather's story because I met him when I was a kid. But I'd love to know about his early life before he became a Christian, and I'd love to hear stories about his missionary journeys. He would sail off to Southeast Asia and minister there. What was that like? What, what motivated him? I don't know. I'm curious about those things. How about you? Who's an ancestor you would like to talk with?
SARAH: Well, I think I'm very similar to you. I do, I do wish for those stories or yearn for them even. It's maybe one of the big differences between our time and other generations. You know, we are holding out for any scrap of a picture or a story or a journal from their lives while we have all kind of flooded each other with our selfies and our status updates like the generations after us will be like, “Thank you. I have too much awareness of my ancestors and their stories.” But yeah, you know, I would really love to have some of those conversations. I've always had more of a kinship with my grandmothers who were very different women. And so I think honestly, just like you, I wish that I could hear their stories more often. And again, I feel like I would ask different questions now at this stage of my life in my mid-40s than I thought to ask back when they were still with us when I was a teenager or in my 20s. You know, but even then, going back to their mothers and their mothers, those are conversations I would just, I don’t know, you yearn for, you, you hope for at some point.
JEFF: Speaking of mothers, you've talked about how your mom took a trip back to the Isle of Lewis, where her people are from, and that’s sort of a pilgrimage. And another theme that's woven into Lisa's talk is pilgrimage. Lisa was deeply affected by two pilgrimages she mentioned. The one that took in the Trail of Tears, as well as followed in the footsteps of enslaved people, and then one to Bosnia. And I'm curious about your experience of pilgrimage and what that concept means to you.
SARAH: And I thought about it a wee bit because I've actually written about pilgrimage and how deeply personal that experience can be. I think it might have been, actually, it was in Miracles and Other Reasonable Things, because in that book I shared about how we, my husband and I, were invited to go to Rome, and we even got to meet Pope Francis, as one does. And so we got to be in these sacred spaces, these basilicas and cathedrals that are the site of pilgrimage for so many. And I did witness so much emotion and fulfillment in our traveling companions and even with strangers in these places. But for me, you know, it just, it just wasn't. Like, I'm not Catholic. That's not my family's story and hasn't been. And so it wasn't my place of pilgrimage. I mean, it was cool. I understood it from like a detached place, but it wasn't my own story. I was, I was a guest in this story. But then, you know, a few months later, I actually happened to be in Prince Edward Island, where certain stories and landscape had been deeply formative to me in my younger years. And I found myself kind of almost reenacting a lot of the same behaviors that I had seen in Rome here as if it was, you know, a pilgrimage. It wasn't a cathedral. Right? It was maybe the sea or this particular spot of land, you know, that sort of thing. But I've always felt more at home in pine trees than in pews. And I do think that we all are on our own sort of pilgrimage in some way. It's just that our holy sites or our spaces and stories can be so different.
JEFF: I don't think the pilgrimage has to be explicitly religious. The kind of pilgrimage you're talking about is a travel experience that engages a different part of your spirit. But I might quibble with your assertion that we're all on pilgrimage, because I do think a pilgrims journey is one that requires a particular attentiveness.
SARAH: You're not wrong. I mean, maybe that's the attentiveness of contemplation that if we bring a contemplative posture and heart or practice, almost any aspect of our life could be and is moving us towards the sacred. I remember when I was a kid growing up in the charismatic church, like language, like pilgrimage wasn't reserved for things like going on a walk on the Camino de Santiago. Right. That was not a thing I knew about or was a reality for any of us. But that language of pilgrimage was for your whole life. Like your, your life was the pilgrimage because you were bringing the posture of a pilgrim to it, like you said.
JEFF: I think that comes, at least in part from John Bunyan and his book, The Pilgrim's Progress, doesn't it? That was such an incredibly influential book. I think it came out in the 1670s. And I think Bunyan's portrayal of the life's journey of his main character, who is not so subtly named Christian, has shaped the way future generations of the church have viewed life.
SARAH: So I found Lisa's rebuke of what she calls the lie of human hierarchy to be really thought provoking, because we do have all kinds of hierarchies, whether we're talking about political office or celebrity, church structures, bestseller lists. Humans have invented all these ways to rank ourselves. And some of those have been deeply dehumanizing, including the ownership of people. And so it's deeply countercultural for her to rebuke that and to call that out.
JEFF: I do wonder sometimes, though, whether we have a very human tendency to want to invert the hierarchies that we have rather than flatten them, because inverting a hierarchy just creates a new one. And I'm not sure that's any more faithful than the hierarchy we had before, even though it might feel better to some of us. I often think of that comforting call in Isaiah 40, where the prophet talks about a future in which every valley shall be lifted up and every mountain made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough place is a plane. And that suggests to me holy equalizing. And maybe Isaiah isn't just telling us how things are going to be. Perhaps he's also inviting us to participate in our own small ways in bringing it about. And that can happen in so many different ways. For instance, even how Lisa reminds us of the background and the context of Genesis and Genesis’ original authors (that's really hard to say). And be understood as an example maybe of holy equalizing because it gives honor to their life experiences, and it gives shape to the world from which this ancient story, which is so dear to so many, how it came about. And the temptation for a reader can often be to center ourselves and to jump instantly to the question, “So how does this apply to me here now?” And that's a form of hierarchy too. How is this text useful to me? How does this text benefit my spiritual life? What does this text have to teach me personally? How can I center Scripture around me and my own existence? Not that personal application isn't important, but it can also often not be the primary thing, and it's also often not an empathetic or holistic or even faithful way of reading the text.
SARAH: So maybe what we're hearing here then is, is that posture of humility, of knowing that the story didn't start with us and it doesn't end with us, that our ancestors are present in the story, that the writers of the text are present, that the Spirit is present. And at our best, we are in cooperation with that.
JEFF: And where do we find good news amidst all that? Where is the good news in the story? Not just for us but also for our neighbors, not just for us but also for our ancestors, not just for us but also for this whole world.
JEFF: You can find all of the links mentioned on today’s show as well as information about Lisa Sharon Harper and her work in the world as well as a full transcript of this episode in our show notes at evolvingfaith.com/podcast. Sign up for my newsletter at jeffchu.substack.com. Sometimes, against my better judgment, I tweet at @jeffchu. More often, you will find me posting pictures of the things I’m trying to grow on Instagram at @byjeffchu.
SARAH: You can all find me mostly at my newsletter Field Notes these days, which you can find the link for at sarahbessey.com, but I do still occasionally show up on social media now and then as @sarahbessey in all the places. The Evolving Faith Podcast is produced by us, Sarah Bessey and Jeff Chu, along with our brilliant colleague SueAnn Shiah, who also wrote and recorded our music. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Evolving Faith Podcast. And until next time, remember, you are loved.
[ Instrumental Music: It Is Well With My Soul by SueAnn Shiah ]
JEFF: Throughout our time together at Evolving Faith, there is one thing we’ve heard over and over from you: We need community. Being in the wilderness can be really lonely. You can feel too isolated—even those of us who are profoundly shy introverts. We all need companions for the journey. And we need folks to accompany us and be alongside us.
So we are delighted to invite you to join the Evolving Faith community online, a new space we’ve created—and we hope you will co-create with us—for better conversations, deeper connections, questions big and small, and content that we hope will be inspiring and meet you where you are.
It is free to join the Evolving Faith community. Our desire is that you might find some fellow travelers in this oasis with whom you can feel a renewed sense of belonging and maybe even some hope. So come, explore, and share. All you have to do is go to community.evolvingfaith.com and sign up. We can’t wait to greet you. See you there.
