Still here...

Greetings from Dublin! Specifically from the sofa in my apartment in Dún Laoghaire, where I’m now on Week 12 of home-alone Covid-19 restrictions. So much solo time at home, so many jigsaw puzzles. The good news is that our travel limit increased from 2km (1¼ miles) to 5km (3 miles) in mid-May. And on Monday – drumroll – we expect it to be increased to 20km (12 miles). For someone who visited nine countries in the twelve months before the pandemic, the fact that I haven’t been more than 3 miles from my house since early March is a major life adjustment. But what I really miss is sitting around chatting with groups of people. We’re starting to get to do a little of that now – outdoors, in limited numbers, and with appropriate distancing, of course. When our radius increases next week I’m looking forward to a picnic with my Serge team in Dublin’s Phoenix Park where, fortunately, all our 20km circles overlap.
 
While physical constraints are in place, online constraints aren’t – for me at least. One of things I’ve been working on is video interviews for Theologians Without Borders, helping share solutions from Majority World theological educators facing challenges as they move their programs online due to Covid-19 shutdowns. Challenges like limited internet bandwidth, students who don't have internet access at home or need to share a single device among multiple family members, many who have phones but no computer – or no smart phone at all – and the sometimes high cost of internet data. You can see a couple of those videos below.
 
I’m also getting ready to do a Serge webinar next Wednesday, June 10, ‘Seeking God When Your Life Falls Apart.’ It’s essentially my testimony about how I saw God work during the deaths of my family/unexpected return from Kenya/divorce/unemployment. I'm feeling a bit anxious about how to tell this story well, but glad for the chance to point to God's goodness in hard times. I need prayer for choosing what’s best to say and how, and then having it go smoothly on the day (and that I won’t cry!). Thanks! If you’d like to join in, here’s the registration link. (It’s free.) Otherwise, it should be on the Serge website for the following week or two.

And I’m teaching my biblical interpretation course online for Fuller Theological Seminary, helping my Ethiopian supervisee finish up his MA thesis, and the usual assortment of other projects. You know, stuff. But my regular September teaching trip to South Asia has been delayed till January – God willing – and I have very little idea what the coming months will look like for my theological education work.

I would have liked to end this update here. However… Like many of you I am deeply saddened by the race-based social injustice that is so viscerally evident in my home country at the moment. I am particularly saddened that many of my Christian brothers and sisters seem more concerned about quieting the tumult or rationalizing government responses than about acknowledging and addressing the underlying issues of injustice and – let’s be real – the generations of systemic advantages that I and others have inherited as white people in America.

I affirm that our ideas about appropriate social and political solutions to such inequity can look different for Bible-believing Christians across the political spectrum. But let’s unite around Jesus' concern for the poor and marginalized and our hope to change unjust systems – in whatever ways our own politics suggest are best to do that. I believe it is possible for us to hold fast to the gospel and to speak truth against injustice and racist social systems, however unintentional the development of those systemic imbalances may have been on the part of any of us individually. My dream is that as followers of Jesus our passion to address the need can unite us even while the solutions we pursue may differ.
 
“Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves,
for the rights of all who are destitute.
Speak up and judge fairly;
defend the rights of the poor and needy.” (Prov 31:8-9)

Prisoners of Hope

Eastertide greetings from Ireland! Where I, like most of you, am in stay-at-home mode due to the corona virus pandemic. Here in Ireland we're allowed out for grocery shopping and exercise within 2km (1¼ mile) of our homes. Fortunately, for me that 2km includes the seafront, which I'm taking full advantage of to walk or bike each day. A very important outlet for a super-extrovert like me in lock-down alone!

And fortunately I’m too busy to feel lonely most of the time. No international travel at the moment, of course. But because much of my work is at a distance anyway, all of that continues. I’m teaching Bible interpretation to Fuller Seminary students online, supervising my Ethiopian student’s MA thesis, reaching out locally through MeetUp connections (though no face to face MeetUps at this point!), trying to get some academic writing done, and trying to stay on top of the usual collection of other theological education projects. Plus lots of people are adding lots of other online meetings.

So, much of my day probably looks a good bit like yours does at this point:

Thank goodness for video chat! Last week the missions committee from one of my partner churches zoomed in to ask how I'm doing and about life in Ireland during the pandemic. Since they recorded our conversation for their website, I'll share the first part of it below for those of you who are interested in hearing more.

Even with all that, though, I do feel like a prisoner – of my limited space, but perhaps more profoundly of the severe and unpredictable circumstances we’re all facing. Which may be why I resonated so deeply with the passage from Zechariah 9 that formed the center of our Serge Easter celebration. It comes just a few lines after the part that predicts the messiah king’s arrival on a donkey. God says:

¹¹ As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you,
   I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit.
¹² Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope;
   today I declare that I will restore to you double.

At a time when the Israelites are relieved to think their exile is over, when they are going home to Jerusalem with the expectation that things will be great again, they discover that their national life is still complicated and precarious. God speaks to them in that disarray and uncertainty – looking back across centuries to ‘the blood of my covenant,’ and at the same time ahead to future restoration. He calls them ‘prisoners of hope.’ Is their ‘stronghold’ the city of Jerusalem? Or is it God himself? In fact their hope is built on the solidity of God’s own initiative in declaring them his covenant people, and on the certain promise of a future where all God’s plans come to fruition. While Jerusalem is still in tatters around them they are ‘hopeful prisoners’ and people captivated by the hope God offers them.

I keep coming back to the idea of being a ‘prisoner of hope’ during this pandemic and its unpredictable aftermath. Yes, fear and anxiety about the present and the unknown future are real. It’s tempting to think that my work or my home or anything else is my stronghold. But my only real hope is grounded in looking back to God’s choice to make me his own, and in looking forward to the surety that God is taking human history exactly where he intends it to go, that restoration – re-creation, resurrection – will happen. I want to be a ‘prisoner of hope’ during this time. Maybe you do, too?