Violence & Memory: Thank you Choir Camp 2011

Today concludes Choir Camp. One of our music directors, Lucy Lower, gets kids from all over Battle Creek to come play, practice and perform various biblical stories each summer. Choir Camp lasts a week. I've done morning devotions for the kids the last two years. Last year the kids performed the story of Jonah. This year they are doing "Are We There Yet?" which is a production of the Exodus story. 

Anyone who knows me well knows that doing "children's moments" in worship is about my least favorite thing on Earth. But Choir Camp devotionals are nearly my favorite thing on Earth. The difference being the presence of adults. In worship there are 100 adults surrounding the 5 or 6 kids drawn to the center of the sanctuary to be seen (rarely heard, though) for a total of 4 minutes. In choir camp, it's just me and the kids. No pressure from the on-looking grown ups. No real time constraints. Space and time for interactivity where the kids are seen and heard, and the text for each morning is consistent with the text that consumes their lives for the entire week. It's relevant to their day-to-day lives, it's meaning-making in a consistent way and I actually think the kids experience some critical faith formation as a result. 

This year I've run into some core commitments of my own in the devotional preparation process. If you ever want to know how you *really* feel about something, consider whether or not you'd be willing to teach it to children. Great litmus test. 

The biblical narrative of Exodus exhibits the best and worst theology connected to the historical and imaginative G*d YHWH. This is the G*d that so believes in freedom that He is willing to rise up as liberator a former criminal and power-hoarder: a man who is lied to about who he really is; a man who commits murder and then flees the scene. This is the G*d that so despises enslavement of any kind that He is willing to part the ocean into high-flying walls and create a dry path of deliverance for the aching feet of formerly enslaved captives now walking/running/dancing into the possibilities for new life. But/And.

This is the god who takes issue with Pharaoh for killing Israelite first-born sons and then does the exact thing in the final plague upon Egypt. Let me be specific: this is a god who kills children, lots of them. Let me be more personally specific: if I were to teach this story to the kids at Choir Camp in its fullness, I would be saying that God participated in a sort of ethnic cleansing and that the target of his wrath was the most vulnerable in society. Would you be willing to pass this theology onto 4 & 5 year-olds? I simply could not. So I skipped the plagues. And when we got to the ocean crashing down upon all the Egyptian soldiers, I cringed and wished there was a way to tell the story without including that part. But there wasn't. So even in the most deliberate attempt to keep violent theology out of the room, I faltered. 

Not that I am afraid of deconstructing biblical violence. I preach against the Bible regularly. But I'm not sure there's cognitive capacity for this kind of sophisticated theological thinking among preschoolers, first graders or even seventh graders for that matter. I am reminded of Rev. Dr. Robert McAfee Brown (Emeritus Professor of Theology and Ethics at my alma mater Pacific School of Religion) who once said: "Any philosophy or theology I do must put the welfare of children above the niceties of metaphysics." We may not be able to guard against all theologies of violence making their way into the imaginations of children, but it's one of the deepest prayers of my life to do all I can in that vein. 

The other theme of the Exodus story that’s causing sustained reflection for me this week has to do with memory. I’ve been using clips from “The Prince of Egypt” with the kids because the movie makes alive what comes across so bland and boring in the book. In the film, Moses’ sister Miriam plays a significant role of reminding the former-prince-turned-prophet-and-liberator who he really is. He is a Hebrew, not an Egyptian. He was born to a particular people and it is those people who need him to be reminded of his place among them. Moses has three sibling figures in this story, but as my colleague Rev. Thomas Ryberg reminded me this morning, there’s a direct parallelism between Miriam & Pharaoh. Pharaoh wants Moses to claim who he is in terms of power and empire building, an identity claim that could possibly bring Moses “personal comfort” and social esteem. Were Moses to acquiesce to this seductive invitation, he would have to continue denying his ethnicity, his blood-relation to those he is oppressing. Miriam, on the other hand, invites him to reject imperial power and to choose a life of truth, one where his ethnic and kin connections take precedence over personal comfort and social esteem.

How often are we confronted with these kinds of invitations?

The stripping of one’s ethnic and domestic identity is nothing short of psychological terrorism. Often this kind of stripping happens under the guise of ‘building something better’ for future generations. But which generations, exactly? Who stands to benefit, in the long run, from being lied to about their identity? No one. Not victims. Not oppressors. No one. When we lose who we are and where we come from, whether that happens to us or through our own decisions, there is tremendous loss. That’s why memory can play such an incredibly spiritual role in the redemption of individuals and communities. When we remember where we come from, remember who we come from, remember who we are—literally (not according to some new age “we are all children of light worthy of healthy snacks and hybrid cars” bullshit)—we cannot help but feel an obligation to the whole, which is healing and restorative and inspiring.

There’s a line in one of my favorite passages in Trito Isaiah, where the prophet is talking to  once-exiled-now-returned Israel about what actually pleases God. It goes like this:

          Is this not the fast that I choose (…) Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?      

As a fourth generation European American whose lost most of my ethnic heritage because of the ideologies of assimilation (yes, some “white” people get screwed by this too) and as a person living in Michigan who is the daughter of a mother once exiled from the Mid West—not hiding myself from my own kin has become salvation for me. It’s remembering that I was born to a particular people and it is those people who need me to be reminded of my place among them.

So yes, the bible contains horrific theologies. But/And. It also invites me into the lasting truths of my life and the truths of lives around me. How could I ever let it go? I can't. At least not today. 


I want to thank Choir Camp 2011 for giving me the opportunity to teach. So I could learn. Amen.