By David Gushee
Christmas draws near and 2010 comes to a close. For my year-end column, I offer scattered musings on what were, for me, some of the biggest surprises of 2010.
In no particular order, I am surprised:
— By how much I am enjoying teaching a Sunday school class in a local Baptist congregation. After 20 sometimes-happy but often-disillusioning years in the world of religious, secular and academic politics, there is something refreshing about gathering in a room with sisters and brothers of all walks of life, studying the Gospel of Luke, praying and weeping and laughing together, just being the body of Christ to one another.
— By how Baptist I feel right now. For example, the idea that “the church” should first be understood as the local congregation, which is autonomous and yet voluntarily connectional, makes more sense to me than ever. I don’t see “the nation” functioning as a workable polity, nor the “church universal” nor “the denomination” nor “evangelicalism” nor “American Christianity.” But the local congregation sometimes still functions as a covenantal community of proclamation, disciple-making and love.
— Though I probably should not be, by how American democracy and institutions seem to exist almost entirely to serve American prosperity, business interests and the individual checkbook. I guess you expect, and you get, what you most value. We want money. Somehow I think the Founders had broader interests.
–By the waves of irrational fear that swept the nation in 2010, and then were gone like a sudden fever breaking. The year 2010 will be remembered for its illegal-immigrant-phobia around the time of the passage of the Arizona law, and then the Islamophobia around the manufactured “ground-zero mosque” controversy. There is always a constituency for whatever the phobia of the moment happens to be. Like lemmings we rush to the sea.
–By what I learned this year about Francis of Assisi. Did you know that in Egypt, during the 5th Crusade, he crossed enemy lines and tried to make peace with the Muslim sultan, at the risk of his life? This story and other stories of Christians getting it both right and wrong will appear in my new book, Sanctifying Life, in 2012.
— By the desperately poor student writing that my profession requires me to grade. Recent, rather shocking, international statistics show how desperately the United States has slipped in its academic performance compared to other nations. People used to read books, and elementary and middle schools used to teach both reading and writing. Now far too many students carrying college degrees cannot write a paragraph. Tax cuts will not solve this problem.
— Everything about Sarah Palin.
— By how much I am enjoying reading classic literature in a book club that Jeanie and I host. This year’s collection of authors included Jerome K. Jerome, Agatha Christie, Leo Tolstoy, Graham Greene, Betty Smith, and Carson McCullers. Favorite fiction of the year: my first read of Anna Karenina, an astonishing book.
— At how appealing Jesus remains, to me and to so many others, even when the religion called “Christianity” and the people called “Christians” often disappoint. The text I am teaching this week in Luke is 14:1-23. Here Jesus turns an apparently elite dinner party gathering into an occasion to shatter all comfortably exclusionary social hierarchies. The kingdom of God is a party in which Jesus welcomes “the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.” That is, in every form of poverty and illness that so deeply besets us, we are all welcome at God’s table.
The invitation to this party was first sent via a manger in Bethlehem.