Who gets to keep the Sabbath?
Spotted outside Farragut High School on Monday.
Last week I mentioned an interview I participated in that covered some connections between worship and justice. For me, Sabbath is another one of those important and often overlooked connections with justice, so I was interested to read this short article by Jonathan Walton about why sabbath-keeping is a challenge for him.
After the Civil War, slavery changed forms and my being unproductive could be grounds for arrest. So lack of production was criminal and forced labor again is the punishment. This mindset made its way into my family as the oppressive marriage of work and value cemented itself into my DNA passed down from my Black and White ancestors.
It’s not that I can’t Sabbath because I don’t love God, don’t value His word, or don’t believe in honoring His commandments. I don’t Sabbath because I don’t believe that I’m valuable to God if I’m not being productive and useful. Somehow being about my Father’s business equals constantly being busy. Setting a reminder in my phone, listening to another sermon, or getting the right planner isn’t going to break 450 years of indoctrination. Only an eternal assignment of value can do that. The core reason I can’t Sabbath is a belief in the lie that I have no identity outside of my work and no value apart from my approval in society.
(Thanks to my mom, Linda Swanson, for pointing me to this article.)
I’ve mentioned the 1619 Project from the Times at least once in a previous newsletter. It’s going to be interesting to see how people engage with the project’s aim to “reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.”
Dr. David Daniels, professor of Church History at McCormick Theological Seminary, is taking up the challenge of the 1619 Project by asking some important and provocative questions about the history of African American Christianity.
The Africans of 1619 came to North America, according to Thornton and other scholars, from one of the most Christianized regions in Africa: the Empire of the Kongo and its neighboring kingdoms of Loango and Ndongo located along or near the west-central African Atlantic coast. By 1619, the Kongolese Empire possessed its own cathedral, churches, lay Christian societies, and schools for girls and boys; Africans served as Catholic priests, catechists, church musicians, school principals, school teachers, court scribes, and Christian monarchs; in the prior century, there even existed a Catholic bishop of Kongolese descent. At the Catholic college in the nearby Portuguese colonial outpost at Luanda, Africans were enrolled as students and were among the graduates. In comparison to the Kongo of 1619, early colonial Virginia was an undeveloped Christian society.
He goes on to imagine some of the questions that might be provoked by this historical backdrop.
If the origins of African American Christianity might be found in Kongolese Christianity and not solely on the slave plantation, then new questions will need to be crafted: When did the practice of Kongolese Christianity turn into African American Christianity? If the “God of the oppressed” framed the theological discourse of the post-1776 era and later, what theological motif framed Kongolese Christianity in North America during the 1600s and early 1700s? How did the Kongolese theology of freedom critique the British philosophy of liberty? If all African Christians were not first introduced to Christianity by “slave masters” and their preachers, how do we reconstruct the role that Kongolese Christian theology played in the development of the Black Church and American Christianity? What role did African Christians shaped by Kongolese Christianity have in evangelizing Africans and non-Africans in North America? Since the British often distinguished between Christians and Negroes with the Christian as white and the Negro as heathen, how did these African Christians of the 1600s construct their own religious identity as well as the image of the British? These are the kind of questions promoted by shifting the origins of the Black Church to 1619.
We can hope that some historians of American Christianity will take up Dr. Daniels’ questions and help us imagine more accurately how foundational Black expressions of Christianity have always been to the United States.
This week I spent a couple of hours with a group of undergraduate students from a nearby Christian college. I shared some of my story of being called to a ministry with a racial reconciliation focus. They asked a bunch of good questions, but toward the end a woman asked an especially insightful one. It went something like: How do you help people see the spiritual nature of justice work?
I appreciated the question because among justice-minded people - including Christians - it’s common to ignore the spiritual dimensions of the work. This tendency, in my experience, is far less common among Black Christians. Perhaps the woman who asked the question - who is herself African American - wanted her peers - who are mostly white and Asian American - to notice this unnecessary bifurcation.
We went on to discuss the obvious biblical relationship between Jesus and justice. I hope that they saw that, while these biblical connections may be new to them, much of the church has never been confused about how personal devotion to Jesus is necessary as we pursue the righteousness of his kingdom.