25  LEARNING FROM EXILES

I ONCE HAD THE GOOD FORTUNE to see a touring production of Hamilton for my birthday, thanks to my brother-in-law. When the day came, I woke up with a fever, plugged sinuses, a miserable headache. A head cold to end all head colds, perhaps the worst of my life—but I couldn’t not go. I watched as gorgeous men and women of all shapes and colors reenacted a history that was profound and relevant and revisionist in a way that called us to a better future. When it came to the part where George Washington sang the song “One Last Time” about the radical act of abdicating power and responsibility in order to invite others to do the same, I couldn’t stop sobbing.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the musical, has Washington sing one of our Founding Father’s supposedly favorite Bible verses: “Everyone shall sit under their own vine, and fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid, they will be safe in this nation we’ve made.” It’s a reference to Micah 4:4, which also speaks about the nations beating their swords into ploughshares, about there being no more war when God is the judge. When the actor who plays George Washington sang those lines, it was as if my own heart was being laid bare, and I couldn’t stop crying. This dream was my dream too.

As I sobbed at Hamilton, I felt a homesickness for a world I had never fully experienced. Was I having a spiritual moment, or did I just have a wicked fever? I don’t know, exactly, but this is why, for me, the word joy does not adequately describe how I feel when I catch glimpses of God’s dream for the world. C. S. Lewis described this feeling with the German word sehnsucht, which means a longing, wistful nostalgia, which he sometimes called Beauty.1 In The Weight of Glory, Lewis writes,

These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.2

What Lewis calls beauty and I sometimes call “longing for another world” is translated shalom in the Bible. In the Hebrew Scriptures the word shalom is used 550 times, and it connotes a combination of well-being, wholeness, the perfection of God’s creation, abundance, and peace. And as theologian Lisa Sharon Harper writes in The Very Good Gospel, it shows how the individual is connected to the larger system. “The peace of self is dependent on the peace of the other. God created the world in a web of relationships that overflowed with forceful goodness.”3

Harper looks at the beginning of the Bible, the story of creation. There God’s creation was imbued with inherent goodness between the living creatures, the land, and humanity. This is where our dream starts, and it was given by God. Even though the nightmares crop up frequently—the Bible is full of stories so horrible they make my teeth ache—the dream keeps cropping up. Shalom still pops up over and over again—from the Garden of Eden to the Sabbath laws to the prophets and their declarations of God’s Holy Mountain and the Day of the Lord.4 There are the Jubilee laws about freeing those in debt and bondage every fifty years and letting fields lie fallow every seven. There is the manna in the wilderness and an economy that rejects the immorality of both extreme poverty and extreme wealth. There are the Ten Commandments, the antithesis of Pharaoh, who made the empire god and exploited his neighbors for the sake of progress. There are all the places God admonished the people to care for the vulnerable, the orphan, the widow, and the foreigner. And there is the persistent refrain that God’s dream for the world will always come hand in hand with justice: that without justice there will always be neighbors who go unloved, who are exploited, who are forgotten in our quest for affluence, autonomy, safety, and power.

Exiles point out where shalom is not being experienced in our world—both currently and in our pasts. As I continue to study history, the story of Ida B. Wells, the famed antilynching crusader, leaps out of the pages for me. Ida lived through the Reconstruction era in the 1860s and 1870s. It was a time when freed Black men and women began to hold more political, social, and economic power for the first time, pushing the limits of the rhetoric of democracy so freely espoused and yet rarely enacted for all. And then came the backlash, the post-Reconstruction era, when the White establishment responded with various forms of racial terror. One of the ways this happened was the enactment of Jim Crow laws decades after slavery was abolished. Another was public lynchings—Black men, women, and children were killed without trial for supposed crimes, a violent visual means to inspire terror and subjugation while consolidating power in the hands of the White perpetrators.

Ida was angry watching her rights stripped away through Jim Crow, and when three men she knew personally were lynched on the outskirts of Memphis, Tennessee, she wrote an editorial lambasting the injustice she saw. Ida crisply pointed out that eight Negroes had been lynched since the last issue of the paper had gone out,

three for killing a white man, and five on the same old racket—the new alarm about raping white women. The same program of hanging, then shooting bullets into the lifeless bodies was carried out to the letter. Nobody in this section of the country believes in that threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women. If Southern Men are not careful, they will overreach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction.5

Ida dared to publicly call out the myth used to justify lynchings—that all Black men were violent, especially toward White women. That editorial changed the course of Wells’s life. The same day it went to print, the same Southern men she had named in her piece—White newspaper editors—called for her to be publicly killed and mutilated (in a horrible twist, even as they advocated for violence against her, they still somehow found a way to congratulate themselves on their Southern respectability at holding off as long as they did). Wells was forced to flee Memphis, and the newspaper office she co-owned was ransacked and destroyed by mobs; her fellow Black journalists barely escaped with their lives. In a statement about the ordeal, Ida signed her name as “Exiled”—this was her new reality. She didn’t return to Memphis for thirty years. She was exiled from her home because she wrote the truth when no one else would. In her case the truth was a question: if this isn’t really about Black men raping White women, then what is it about? It was about strategic, vigilante terrorism aimed at suppressing an entire race, carried out in public without any consequences.

Wells wrote that she was exiled from her home for merely “hinting at the truth” that public lynchings were one step in a concrete effort to terrorize Black people and take away their rights in a post–Civil War America. The truth she was hinting at was the pervasiveness of White supremacy at work, which led to Jim Crow laws, housing segregation, unequal and segregated education, and eventually soaring mass-incarceration rates. All legal, respectable ways of dehumanizing and criminalizing an entire race of people. Wells, along with so many others who have chipped away at the lies and the myths that surround us—declaring that only some people are our neighbors, that only some people deserve power and privilege and God’s blessing—their hintings have become a street lamp to light my path, at great cost to themselves.

The suffering of exiles like Ida B. Wells—and Larnell Bruce Jr., Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Alonzo Tucker, and John Perkins, among many others—ties us to the Christian story of a God who came to earth and suffered with humanity. Theologian James Cone writes that in the lynching era, 1880–1940, “White Christians lynched nearly five thousand black men and women in a manner with obvious echoes to Roman crucifixion of Jesus.”6 But the Christians perpetrating this violence didn’t notice the similarity between the cross of the Lord they worshiped and the crosses they created out of lynching trees. For decades, Western theologians were unable to see Jesus in the bodies that swayed from those trees, the victims who were killed to satisfy the fear of the masses. This omission, this obvious and terrifying lack of understanding haunts me. I myself did not and could not see the connections between people experiencing racial terror in my own country and the Suffering Servant I claimed to follow. I couldn’t see it, that is, until exiles in the landscape of the American Dream pointed it out to me.

George Washington referred to the beautiful dream of Micah 4:4 over fifty times during the course of his life.7 The irony of this should not escape us. This country’s first president owned hundreds of slaves. He created a mythology around his teeth (he claimed they were wooden, just like the cherry tree he supposedly chopped down and refused to lie about) in order to cover up the truth: he had the teeth of slaves arranged for his own macabre dentures. He was a president, who, like most of his peers, justified a practice he knew to be wrong—the enslavement and dehumanization of an entire race of people—to promote the success of certain kinds of people in America. Freedom, liberty, and justice for all: he wrote and spoke about these values, even as he used his power to deny these values to enslaved people on his property. He spoke of longing for a world where everyone flourished, where each person had their own vine and fig tree, yet all the while he built his own plantation—his own American Dream—on the backs of broken families and broken cultures. He wrote with bright hope for America’s future, even as he stole hope from those he enslaved.

I want to be careful when I talk about shalom. There is a long and storied history of people working to ensure the flourishing of only a few and calling it good news. Indigenous author and theologian Randy Woodley calls the kingdom of God the community of creation, reminding me of this connection to true shalom, to Eden as it was before we were exiled. But it doesn’t stop there. The only way to learn to both identify our longing for and live into shalom is by being in relationship to those who are the most affected by broken systems and broken relationships. Exiles, or the stranger or the foreigner, are a part of the triad of the vulnerable—including widows and orphans—that the Scriptures constantly tell the people of God to care for. Why is that? Woodley says a consistent standard is given through the Bible: “Shalom is always tested on the margins of society and revealed by how the poor, oppressed, disempowered, and needy are treated.” Much of the Bible is concerned with wealth and economics, pointing out how a huge gap between the wealthy and the poor is an indicator of the lack of shalom in a society, and Woodley writes that these wealth discrepancies both then and now lead to all sorts of societal ills—including injustice, false imprisonment, unemployment, homelessness, hunger, and more.8 He also says that God has a special concern for the poor and needy, “because how we treat them reveals our hearts, regardless of the rhetoric we employ to make ourselves sound just.”

There is a reason I cried at Hamilton. I wanted to believe that my country really was a place where all kinds of people could flourish. I cried because I want to live in a world where Micah 4:4 comes true, and I cried because I don’t, not right now. I cried because I live in a country full of Christians where there are also camps full of migrant children being held at the border, separated from their families. It’s a country where there is little popular incentive to create legal pathways for citizenship for the majority of people seeking economic opportunities or freedom. It’s a country that encourages excess consumption and consumerism paid for by the exploitation of others, a country that refuses to acknowledge its past sins and so repeats them. At some point the Christians who live in this country have to decide: Are we okay with the way our world works? Or do we long to see a different dream start to grow?

Part of the work of listening to exiles means putting down our knee-jerk reaction to only highlight the good, the revisionist histories that only amplify the parts we want to keep. For people who come from a dominant culture background or multiple variations—someone like myself, who is White, American, and Christian—it can often feel overwhelming. Do we need to dismantle everything? How can we fix it quickly? And how in the actual world are we supposed to move forward? I acknowledge that some readers might be experiencing these feelings right now because I myself contain those questions within me. But as someone who came from power and was raised to seek out power, the truth is that I cannot and will not answer any of these questions. I sit in my loss, in my blindness. I sit in the loneliness of watching my carefully constructed theologies and ideologies crumble as I listen to the stories of those who have been wounded along the road. I sit in the wide, wide shadow of the dream that people like George Washington had for my country. I practice the discipline of cultivating the tenacious hope of a world where no one is ever made afraid, where everyone has a vine and fig tree, a place to live and a place of meaningful work and dignity.

This dream is not yet a reality, and at times I despair of truly ever seeing glimpses of shalom in the land of the living. The only ones who can help us inch toward this new kind of world are those who have never felt safe, who have never had access to all that I who have taken for granted. The only way we will ever start to see the kingdom of God come to earth is by following the lead of the true exiles among us.