When the east wind blows

Part One

The east wind came through my screen door on the first day of September, still warm and carrying the smell of sweetness and fertilizer. At the bottom of the hill, a hundred-acre field of corn stands nearly ready for harvest. Out of this same door a hawk, perching on the porch railing, startled me on Saturday morning when I looked out straight into his eyes.

He’s my new neighbor, who sits often on that railing, looking over the field of corn. He built his nest in a tall black locust tree standing at the edge of the wood, south of the house, about as far as you might throw a burnt dinner roll. His call is not particularly beautiful. He announces his presence when I step outside: a call that testifies, “I am still here.” That morning he looked back at me, as if his head were on backwards. Our eyes locked as I witnessed his glory, cloaked in rich auburn feathers, a glory that radiated from his piercing brown eyes.

A baby squirrel hurried across my yard, moving from tree to tree. I was watching her from the kitchen when, like a bolt of lightning, the hawk swooped down from his perch, his talons stretched out in front of his body, almost materializing over the squirrel. For an instant, my heart was caught between two irreconcilable realities: the hawk in his incredible majesty, and the baby squirrel in her playful tenderness. In that moment, my soul cried out. I didn’t have time to yell, or pray, or beg God to spare her. My heart just moved.

At the very last moment, at the last possibility of life, the hawk turned. He aborted. He swung around, landing a few feet from the squirrel, his talons sinking into the clayish dirt. They both stopped and looked at each other. It was as though from up in his perch, he couldn’t see her tenderness; but, as he approached, his heart changed. That baby squirrel is still dashing around my yard, and that hawk is still perching nearby on a tree.

So she called the name of the LORD who spoke to her. She called him El Roi, meaning “You are the God who sees,” for she said, “Truly here I have seen him who looks after me.” – Hagar (Genesis 16:13)

An old King James Bible sits on my shelf. It has a red leather cover with gold lettering that glimmers when the morning sun hits it. It says she was caught “in the very act.”¹ The woman was having sex with a man. He was not her husband. In the midst of intimacy, with her body bare, they caught her. They dragged her without dignity in front of Jesus. I wonder if the dirt turned to mud as her tears rolled onto the earth beneath her. I wonder why no one asked where he went—the man—who scandalized her.

Jesus stooped. He was deaf to the accusations. He drew his finger in the dirt, and he marked the ground.

I don’t know why Jesus did this. I don’t know what he wrote in the dirt. I don’t know what those words said. I wonder how it felt to be heard when she had no power to speak.

Jesus knelt down, stimulated his saliva, and spat in the dirt. His spit mingled with the small dusty particles that formed a warm paste. He scooped it up and smeared it over a man’s eyes, a man who couldn’t see, and then told him to go wash it off.²

I don’t know why Jesus did this. I don’t know why he spat in the dirt. I don’t know why the man trusted him. I wonder how it felt to be seen when he had no capacity to see.

The name of Jesus is his identity and his function; he is Yeshua, in Hebrew, meaning God saves.³ This is who he is. This is what he does. When he came to sanctify his creation, he called Adam dirt man, because Adam was born from dust and to dust he returned.⁴ He then crafted Eve not from spirit but from the rib of her husband. Eve, he called her, because she was born to breathe.⁵

When Mary’s amniotic sac ruptured, water gushed from her vagina. The baby was born covered in her blood. They cleaned him. They laid him in straw. Simeon told her, “This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many.” Simeon warned her, “He will be a sign that is opposed. He will cause the thoughts of many hearts to be revealed.” Then, he spoke directly to her, “And a sword will pierce your own soul too.”⁶

In your silence, the rocks will cry out. – Jesus (Luke 19:40)

Part Two

I once had a conversation with a young white man. We sat with two cups of steaming coffee. I felt the cup’s warmth deep inside my hands as I held its smooth white body. The man wore a dark red-and-gray plaid shirt.

I was reminded of that conversation yesterday when I read a piece by Samuel Sey. He said, “Christ didn’t come to earth to rescue you from poverty and diseases. He didn’t come to earth to rescue you from racism and injustices. He came to earth to rescue you from sin and hell. Don’t let the prosperity gospel and social justice gospel distract you from the real gospel.”⁷

I want to hear about his real gospel. It reminds me of the story the man in the plaid shirt told me. It was a story that separated the gospel from social change. It was a story that demonized political action. It was a story that found the hunger of those impoverished satisfied only in the vigor of their belief. “Only Jesus can save them,” he said, “not welfare.” Their salvation was spiritual; their salvation was individual; their salvation was above their starvation. He is a smart young man: kind, thoughtful, generous. He has the kind of heart that will tear into a room with joy and goodness. How is it, I thought, that his idea of Jesus seemed disembodied from mine?

On my porch, I hear that east autumn wind bring the trees to life. In their sound, I wonder about Jesus. I wonder why he spat in the mud. I wonder why he stooped. I wonder why the God who saves was born in the blood of his mother. I wonder if the dust beneath Mary turned to mud as she watched his body hanging from that tree, as the spear pierced his side, as blood and water gushed out, as the same spear pierced her soul, too.

Shalom is a Hebrew word. It means wholeness, soundness, and peace in both body and spirit.⁸ My worldview is too Greek, I confess, to understand this. I am engrained with this Platonic perspective that divides reality between the idea (perfect and non-corporeal) and physical (imperfect and spatial). I wonder if this makes me too blind to see incarnation.

“The Hebraic view that dominates Scripture does not conceptualize human beings this way. There is only a whole person animated (alive) by the breath of God. They are either alive, and have breath (same word translated as ‘spirit’), or they are dead and do not have breath. The biblical writers could certainly distinguish between different aspects of humanity, such as the difference between thought and hunger, or between pain and love, but never developed dualistic notions of a person being made up of divisible parts. The person was the whole. Anything less than the whole, was not a person. This extended even to how they conceptualized death. For us, it is a biological fact. For them, anything that diminished life was a form of death. All this says, from the biblical view, there cannot be a person without a body.

That’s why the biblical conception of afterlife requires a bodily resurrection that has a physical dimension, including scars!”⁹

God did not come to deliver our spirits without our bodies; he does not come to liberate us from our minds without liberation from our physical chains. He does not come to rescue us from our individual sin while ignoring our systems of evil. I know this because God did not come in spirit; he came in flesh: dark, calloused, sweaty, flogged, and crucified flesh.

I don’t know where this disembodied Jesus draws his line in the sand. When is his action too political? When is his gospel too generous? When will we—white men—stop preaching about spiritual freedom while standing on stolen land, tilled by the bodies we shackled: dark, calloused, sweaty, flogged, and lynched bodies?

If we believe that the embodiment of Christianity is only a spiritual deliverance, we believe in only half of God, and we tell Jesus that the nails which pierced his hands need not have drawn blood.

Son of man, can these bones live? – Ezekiel (37:3)

Part Three

I don’t know if it is the hillbilly in me or the Hebrew influence on me that finds God in the mud. We seem, in the church, to talk more about where we’re headed than where we are. This is strange to me since the scriptures we testify describe the earth a lot and heaven just a little. This is odd, again, I think, because the kingdom Jesus inaugurated was advanced in bodies, blood, and spit, but we often build theologies to hide our bodies, our blood, and our spit.

I don’t take lightly the work of the spirit. But I understand the work of the spirit is born heavily onto our flesh. It is a real cry for restoration as our bodies fail: a cry for physical resurrection that moves our spirit. Nothing less will do. God does not come to separate our spirits from our bodies; he comes to restore the cracks, to resurrect dry bones, to birth new life. Why would I imagine a form of spiritual salvation when with such meticulous craft, my creator has breathed life into the real dirt, the same earth which he does not plan to abandon, when he formed me from dust, and when God himself was raised up from the tomb, still carrying the scars of my sin? It is this gap between my real degradation and the coming resurrection for which I yearn.

“You ought to come down to church in the mornen and listen to his sermon,” said Ida.

“Lord, Miss Ida,” laughed Clay. “The roof would fall in if I ever walked in that Baptist church.”

“Don’t joke about it, Clay,” admonished Ida. “Don’t you want to save your soul so you can go to Heaven and be with all decent folks when you die?”

“Miss Ida,” said Clay, “the Baptists have got one idea of Heaven and the Methodists have got another idea and the Holly Rollers have got still another idea what it’s like. I’ve got my opinion too.”

“I can just imagine what your idea of Heaven is,” sniffed Ida. “A fishen pole and a river bank.”

“That’s part of it, yes ma’am,” agreed Clay. “I use up a little bit of Heaven every day. Maybe it’s just haulen off and kissen the old woman, or haven one of my babies come and crawl in bed with me at night and snuggle up against my back, or a good day’s work on my house on the mountain. I don’t have to wait to die for it, Miss Ida. I got Heaven right here.”

“That’s not Bible Heaven,” said Ida.

“It’s the only one I ever expect to see,” said Clay.

“I’ll pray for your soul anyway, Clay, if you don’t mind,” said Ida.

“Appreciate the favor, Miss Ida,” replied Clay sincerely.

Spencer’s Mountain, Earl Hamner, Jr.¹⁰

Danté Stewart says, “The schools, the professors, and the theologians I was studying never really took seriously the life of the black body in America.”¹¹ I wonder how from the same text we—white men—have proliferated a worldview so different from our black brethren. I wonder how we—white men—could proselytize a salvation so abstract when our text is filled with a salvation so concrete: from hunger to mana, from enslavement to freedom, from dry bones to life. We know this real rescuing when we see it: the freedom from addiction, the survival of cancer, the child pulled from chaos into adoption. But when the problem is not white—when the problem is systemic injustice—our white Jesus no longer saves. When the problem is a white culture which has demonized black bodies, then this gospel is too political, too prosperous, and too unbiblical.

Do not take my word for this. The words of non-white thinkers, scholars, preachers, authors, speakers, activists, believers—the words from non-white mouths—are too powerful, too rich, too generous, and too full of hope and liberation and kindness for you to take my word for it. Do you hear them? Do you see them? Do you know them?

When Paul says that our battle is not with flesh and blood,¹² he does not mean that our hope is not incarnation, and neither does he mean that our enemy’s plans are not made real in this world. We don’t battle people: we battle the systems of power and principalities that incite violence upon neighbor, colonization upon community, that tell us we are not worthy, and that make us desire control over others. To Paul, the evils of this world were tangible (they killed him).¹³ His refusal to engage in violence against flesh should not constitute our ignorance of the real movement of evil which our flesh transmits. Jesus spoke of evil (sin) as if it had physical form,¹⁴ a force manifested on earth as it was in hell. While his resistance to these systems of power was entirely nonviolent, we must remember that it was the very real manifestation of this state-sanctioned violence that put his physical body in the tomb. The irony of our evangelic culture is that we believe in a real Satan while we disbelieve his incarnation in our systematic oppression. Paul, like Jesus, spoke of empire as a tangible force of evil;¹⁵ and Jesus himself recognized that the nations were under the authority of Satan.¹⁶ For Paul, the answer was found in incarnation, and he was persistently against those that tried to make the message of Christianity a message of merely spiritual salvation.¹⁷ I wonder what he would say to the church folks who preach a kind of biblical justice that is intangible to the lives of the people around them. I wonder what he would say to the church folks who lock their large wooden doors while the people marching in their streets cry out for righteousness.

If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you. – Paul (Romans 8:11)

Part Four

I was reminded today that a tree’s only job is to grow. As the rain comes, its roots receive the wet soil. As the sun shines, its leaves receive the light. The waste from this process is oxygen, which sustains our bodies, our thoughts, and our theologies.

In 2019, a respiratory disease emerged, attacking our lungs. In the last year, seven-hundred-thousand people died near us, and over four million people died away from us. They lost their capacity to receive oxygen.

Soon, the conversations in our churches shifted from televised services to gathering inside the four walls. Inside them were renovated sanctuaries, sanitized pews, and freshly waxed floors. I spent fourteen years learning that the movement of God was not found inside these walls—that the church was not this building. Then, like the wind swirling up a pillar of dust, we talked about nothing but the building.

We did not talk about our sacred vessels, our animated flesh, our breathing, our lungs, or our blood-oxygen saturation. We didn’t talk about our bodies or the bodies of our neighbors: how to cherish them, guard them, and honor them.

We talked about religious exception. We talked about our right to worship. We talked about our beliefs. Through our reaction to a global pandemic, we found extraordinary ways to maintain our focus within, to rekindle our rituals, and to enact sameness.

I wonder if we forgot how to grow. I wonder if we forgot how to care for our bodies—and each other’s bodies. I wonder if we lost the sacraments—if we forgot that it was his body broken for our body and his blood spilled for our blood.

I witnessed a church at best irrelevant to our shared survival and at worst a threat to it. I witnessed as we ignored safe practices. I witnessed as we gathered in cities for worship protests, our faces bare, without care for those spaces or communities. I witnessed as the strong and the healthy tested the Lord while the weak and desperate found no helper. I witnessed us serve the desires of the many over the needs of a few. Here, on the margins, I cried. I cried because somewhere along the line we left Jesus, in the temple, doing his father’s work. We left him as he attended to the grave diggers in India preparing mass burial sites for those bodies that the disease did not spare. We left him as he cared for the mother whose immune system failed her. We left him as he clothed the naked and fed the hungry. And I am left holding onto a faith that says, “Christ didn’t come to earth to rescue you from poverty and diseases.”

People tell me I’m living in fear. I used to rebut this. But I think they might be right. I’m afraid. I fear the look in the eyes of Jesus as my life ends and I stand before him. It’s not a fear of rejection. I’m afraid he will hold me in his arms as we weep over all the times I could have chosen love but chose selfishness.

One of my very best friends once told me something profound. She said, “I’m not afraid that the people in my life won’t love me anymore. I’m afraid that one day I’ll realize I lost my love for them.”

Then I stretched out my hand over the sea, and the LORD drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided. – Moses (Exodus 14:21)

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END NOTES

1. This passage is taken from John 8:1-11: “in the very act” is αυτοφώρῳ (Strong’s 1888).
2. You can find this story in John 9:1-12. Notice how the religious folks are concerned with sin; Jesus is concerned with the works of God.
3. See Matthew 1:21: Strong’s 2424 Iēsoús (transliteration of 3091 Hebrew Lṓt, “Yehoshua,” which means “Yahweh saves”).
4. Genesis 2:7, 3:19: Adamah (Hebrew אדמה) means “ground” or “earth.”
5. Genesis 2:22-23: Chawwah (Hebrew חַוָּה) means “to breathe.”
6. See Luke 2:34-35.
7. You can find this on his Twitter (@SlowToWrite) on 16 July 2020 at https://twitter.com/SlowToWrite/status/1283844551451582465. He follows this dialogue with admitting that these issues (poverty, injustice) will be rectified when Jesus returns.
8. See Strong’s 7965, also 1 Thessalonians 5:23-24.
9. Dennis Bratcher (PhD, Union Theological Seminary), professor of Old Testament. You can find this text here: http://www.crivoice.org/bodysoul.html.
10. Earl Hamner, Jr., Spencer’s Mountain (Buccaneer Books 1961), p. 48-49.
11. Danté Stewart, Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle (Penguin Random House 2021).
12. See Ephesians 6:12.
13. Early Christian tradition holds that Paul was beheaded by Nero in c. 64-68 CE. See Tertullian, De Praescriptione Haereticorum, Chapter 36.
14. See Matthew 5:29-30. Throughout his ministry, Jesus speaks of evil, sin, Satan, and demonic forces as a tangible threat. Notice in Luke 5:17-26 how Jesus compares the forgiveness of sin to the healing of the physical body! More on this later.
15. Paul’s “missionary work, it appears . . . must be conceived not simply in terms of a traveling evangelist offering people a new religious experience, but of an ambassador for a king-in-waiting, establishing cells of people loyal to this new king, and ordering their lives according to his story, his symbols, and his praxis, and their minds according to his truth. This could only be construed as deeply counter-imperial, as subversive to the whole edifice of the Roman Empire; and there is in fact plenty of evidence that Paul intended it to be so construed, and that when he ended up in prison as a result of his work he took it as a sign that he had been doing his job properly.” NT Wright, Reflections, vol. 2 (1998) in review of Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society edited by Richard Horlsey (Trinity Press International). You can find this text here: https://ntwrightpage.com/1998/01/01/pauls-gospel-and-caesars-empire/.
16. See Matthew 4:1-11.
17. See 1 Corinthians 15:12-20.