Tag: Love

Who are the crucified people among us?

On By Halden KirkwoodIn Race, Theology

James Cone speaks powerfully of what it means to truly understand redemption, both personal and social, spiritual and cosmic, as coming through the cross of Jesus. According to him a twofold imagination is required to actually live out and believe the idea of life arising out of death, newness out of darkness:

One has to have a powerful religious imagination to see redemption in the cross, to discover life in death and hope in tragedy. What kind of salvation is that? No human language can fully describe what salvation through the cross means. Salvation through the cross is a mystery and can only be apprehended through faith, repentance, and humility. The cross is an ‘opening to the transcendent’ for the poor who have nowhere else to turn—the transcendence of the spirit that no one can take away, no matter what they do. Salvation is broken spirits being helped, voiceless people speaking out, and black people empowered to love their own blackness.

And yet another type of imagination is necessary—the imagination to relate the message of the cross to one’s own social reality, to see that ‘They are crucifying again the Son of God’ (Heb 6:6). Both Jesus and blacks were ‘strange fruit.’ Theologically speaking, Jesus was the ‘first lynchee,’ who foreshadowed all the lynched black bodies on American soil. He was crucified by the same principalities and powers that lynched black people in America. Because God was present with Jesus on the cross and thereby refused to let Satan and death have the last word about his meaning, God was also present at every lynching in the United States. God saw what whites did to innocent and helpless blacks and claimed their suffering as God’s own. God transformed lynched black bodies into the recrucified body of Christ. Every time a white mob lynched a black person, they lynched Jesus. The lynching tree is the cross in America. When American Christians realize that they can meet Jesus only in the crucified bodies in our miles, they will encounter the real scandal of the cross. (The Cross and the Lynching Tree, 158-59)

I think Cone’s challenge to Christians in America, particularly white Christians in America is the right one, and it is rightly framed under the call to powerful imagination. What if our fundamental task is to be able, through this double imagination of the cross to discern where are the crucified people among us? And then to learn how to be among them, to stand with them, to cease recrucifying them, and instead work with them unto a new life that we await, imagine, and hope for?

Are we really interested in looking to see where the crucified people are among us? Or does that sort of imagination ultimately not interest us? Do we really just not want to see the recrucifying with which we are all complicit, whether passively or actively? I know I don’t care for seeing such things. But we must if we are to be able to imagine redemption in a truthful way. Cone is right. A powerful imagination is indeed necessary. Who are the crucified among us? This needs to become our constant question and search and commitment.

Remembering Mama Kelly

On By Halden KirkwoodIn Memory

It was exactly one year ago that I spent about an hour or two recounting some poor version of the story of the life and death of Kelly Gissendaner. She had been murdered under the law by the State of Georgia on September 30th of that same year. I remembered Mama Kelly, as she was called by the many women and girls who she loved, nurtured, and cared for in prison as a saint, as one of the faithful followers of Jesus whom we celebrate in the small churches that I hail from every year around this time. I wanted to remember her again this year, a year later. Mama Kelly is countless news cycles behind us now, but the love, her love, Jesus’s love that she branded into the lives of so many lives on, as does the witness of her death at the hands of the state.

The New Testament speaks of Jesus’s death as putting the powers to shame, putting them on display: He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in [the cross]. (Col 2:15). Kelly follows Jesus in this. In her death at the hands of an implacable, resolute state intent on killing, her life of transformation, love and hope “make a public spectacle of them” as well. The story of her life, new life, and death speak to the truth that the powers of this world are intent on death rather than justice, and that even in the face of absolute newness of life they will continue to deal death.

But death has no enduring power against witness. Kelly’s witness lives in her words, in the lives of the women and girls who were prisoners with her, many of whom are alive and living now because “Mama Kelly” would sit with them in their times of darkness. Her witness is alive in the lasting impact she made on the theologians who were her teachers, alive in her children who were transformed along with her from hatred and bitterness into love and reconciliation.

All of this shames and scandalizes the gods of power. It puts the truth on full display and cuts through the lies of the powers of this present time, this present country. It shows the forth the hollow veneer that America’s legal and judicial system in fact is. It puts on display beauty of God’s justice, the justice of repentance, reconciliation, and new life. This is Kelly’s beautiful witness. That the new life that God brings to the world in Christ is more determinative than any sin or any crime we commit. That state disagrees, with cold lethal ferocity. Nevertheless, the witness stands, and continues to speak.

Kelly believed and lived unto the truth that God brings to us a future that is undetermined by the past. That in God there is hope and life and calling for us all, regardless of the chains of the past. Her life stands as witness to that truth. She bears, in her life, death and coming resurrection with Jesus, and with all of us the revelation of the Lamb that was slain, who is worthy to receive power. That is faithfulness worthy of celebration and remembrance.