by Dr. Lani Wilson

Good morning, prayer and fasting faithful. This has been a rough week. Nevertheless, we continue to pray for our little outpost for God and especially for all those who are suffering the loss of loved ones to gun violence everywhere.

The word for us to consider is testy. Yup, I know. We know what it means. More importantly, we know how it feels: “Easily irritated; impatient and somewhat bad-tempered” (Oxford English Dictionaries). Yikes. That is the antithesis of what we are told Christians should be like.

The good, the right, the true-these are the actions appropriate for daylight hours. Figure out what will please Christ, and then do it.
Ephesians 5:9-10 (TMB)

Want to see another translation of this one verse?

for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness, and truth – trying to learn what is pleasing to the Lord.
Ibid. (NET)

We know what that means, right? We can’t be crabby, impatient, unreliable, disagreeable. We must be patient, loving, forgiving, longsuffering. In a nutshell, we CANNOT be testy. Okay. We can’t “fly off the handle” when we feel all of the frustration and hurt that comes from working with other people. Paul is writing to the church at Ephesus about how they must heal their divisions and do what is right between each other. No testiness allowed.

Yet, if we put ourselves in the place of the first disciples whom the LORD sent to minister to people, Jesus displayed some real irritation with His crew.

Jesus said, "What a generation! No sense of God! No focus to your lives! How many times do I have to go over these things? How much longer do I have to put up with this? Bring your son here."
Luke 9:41 (TMB)

And here it is again, in Mark 9:19 (NASB).

And He *answered them and *said, "O unbelieving generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I put up with you? Bring him to Me!"

Here is another account of this Jesus’ words before His healing of the boy who had seizures in Mathew 17:17 (TMB).

Jesus said, "What a generation! No sense of God! No focus to your lives How many times do I have to go over these things? How much longer do I have to put up with this? Bring the boy here."

Apparently, Jesus got a little testy with the fellas. But why was it so important to leave this portion of the pericope in the New Testament that clearly shows Jesus’ impatience with the disciples? Is it merely for us to be able to identify with Jesus’ humanity? Was it left for us to feel chastised when we grow short tempered with each other or ourselves? Should we be afraid that Jesus the Christ would get angry with us and is that even possible? Or was there a greater historical purpose that God had in mind for us 2000 plus years later?

The African-American (Black) Church has always been a contradiction within a contradiction. Critics of Christians from within the African-American community rail against Black people worshiping a White Jesus. We are fairly clear that Jesus wasn’t just painted a Black man to make Him more acceptable to us. He was actually a dark-skinned man with more Negroid than Caucasoid features. It is the link of Jesus to the oppressor inculcated by those same neo-European, North American slavers that is the true violation. Our critics think we are worshiping the same Christ of the oppressors, and there is ample evidence to the contrary that African slaves brought their cultural history with them to these shores. And now, African-American Christians have symbiotically evolved our own theology of Who God is and Who S/He isn’t for ourselves.

Liberation means independence from oppressive and alienating voices. It means a return to and repristination of the originating experiences of Africa not as a mere romantic retrieval of the past but as powerful symbolic experiences to evoke a usable past, one that is creative of the future. Mere adaptation or translation still bears the marks of dependency. The human face of Jesus must be an African face, one that bears the marks of original African experience and, indeed—given the whole of African history—the marks of the crucified African Christ (see Gal 6:17). In telling her own story, Africa unveils to the world her own proper face of Christ, one that comes from deep within her own experience and especially from within what Engelbert Mveng has called "anthropological poverty." That is, she must affirm her own dignity and integrity as a human person, as Jesus was fully human. She must affirm with the Apostle Paul: "By the grace of God I am what I am and his grace toward me was not in vain" (1 Cor 15:10). Africa's history, her cultures, and her religious traditions have intrinsic value. The first step is to value them for themselves; the second is to envision how they do or do not relate to Africans' experience of Jesus.
Cook. M.L. (2009). The African Experience of Jesus, Theological Studies, 70(3), pgs. 677-688

African Christianity (as much as one can loosely lump together all the different people of the largest continent on the planet) seeks to accept The Christ not in terms of the superimposed Passion story, but as God who comes from within indigenous African culture. We are not going to belabor this vast and complex topic of indigenous culture and the oppressive European, Christian colonization of Africa. What we are going to consider is the idea that perhaps African-American Christians play a unique role in God’s intended evolution of His church.

Succinctly, we could say they there are four (4) critical attributes of the African worldview as follows:

• African peoples or clans see themselves in terms of kinship bonds
• African peoples or clans have a reverence for Ancestors, the dead, who can influence the living
• God has to understand the human condition, be an anthropomorphized God who created the land and natural world from which they sprung
• There is no distinction between the visible and invisible world.

If we consider that African clans still reside on their ancestral land, in spite of the rape of colonialism, we can then understand the significance of the abovementioned four (4) attributes. Thus, in order for Africans to accept The Christ, He has to

• relate and be able to enjoin Himself to one’s clan or people
• know and value the experience of the Ancestors
• know what it is like to be fully human
• fluidly exist in both the physical and spiritual worlds.

www.oikumene.org

Although this seems like we are bringing Jesus down to human level, isn’t that in fact exactly what God did? The African experience of Jesus must be felt; He is more than just a healer or liberator or a grantor of requests. Jesus is God – He just IS. And this Jesus the Christ becomes a member of one’s tribe, clan, people, nation. Sound familiar?

John Taylor sets the scene: "The African myth does not tell of men driven from Paradise, but of God disappearing from the world."'*' Africans have traditionally recognized a transcendent God but normally have had no need of such a God in daily life, because the essentially this-worldly "closed circle" of being, that is, the self-sufficiency of the clan and its ancestors assures an afterlife. But Christ has broken into this closed circle. "He that should come, the Emmanuel of Africa's long dream, is, I believe, this God who has been eternally committed to, and involved in, the closed circle, even to the limit of self-extinction. . . . His is the lost Presence that the primal faith of man has always sensed." The risen Christ comes to Africa as a personal presence (Emmanuel), not as one who imposes himself from outside but as one who takes up into himself what is deepest and truest in all human experience and transforms that into the fullness of human life as the second Adam, the new human being.
Ibid. (684)

If there is any discomfort in Who Jesus is to African peoples, as Michael Cook reveals in this article, it is in the tensions inherent in secular decolonization of both nation-state and nation-individual. In other words, regaining what was suppressed and repressed and expressing that regained identity through the liberation of a resurrected Christ, a fully human man, Who was rejected by His own people. Africans see Jesus not necessarily as one of them, but as One whom they can relate and invite in to their clan.

We humans have been created to contemplate the glory and beauty of God's creation. We do it in different ways according to our cultural heritage. The genius of African culture is that it makes no separation between the visible and the invisible. This esthetic experience connects readily with Roberto Goizueta's analysis of praxis as "communal, aesthetic performance," that is, praxis is a matter of doing something for its own sake, because it is inherently valuable, rather than making something for an extrinsic purpose, which is poiesis. The fundamental form of praxis is the celebration of life itself which is "inherently communal." The sense of community as family is "the highest form of beauty." These reflections on Hispanic/Latino culture have profound resonance with the African experience. To celebrate the fullness of life as a communal relationship—"I am because we are; and since we are, therefore I am"—is truly African. In this sense, the risen Jesus is himself black as the revelation of God's glory and beauty in all of creation. To paraphrase the Song of Solomon 1:5: "I am black and beautiful." If the Christian churches in Africa, whatever the denominational affiliation, cannot embrace the esthetic experience of blackness as the experience of the risen Jesus, then they have nothing to say to the African soul.
Ibid. (688)

www.nomorefear.wordpress.com

So, what of the African-American church? How did we/do we receive the Christ? And what does that have to do with Jesus being testy in the Synoptic Gospels? If we observe that the tensions in the growth of African Christianity can be referred back to colonization in their own homeland, on the soil which their people have lived as far back as anyone remembers, then we can see the obvious strident difference for the African on North American soil: Slavery, not that there was and is not slavery on the African continent because there was and is. But the African slave was required to renounce all affiliation with Africa which meant that all kinship bonds, all ties to ancestral lands, all acknowledgement of human-ness were violently severed.

Yet, somehow the four (4) attributes mentioned above have survived with major distinctions: There was no clan history, were no kinship bonds to renew, no common ancestors, and no land to root each person. Thus, the African-American had to develop those attributes in a hostile, genocidal environment…and we did. It’s called the Black Church. White slave owners didn’t give us Jesus: God followed us and hovered over us in the belly of the slave ships, kissing the foreheads of those who couldn’t stand the separation from home as they jumped into the Atlantic to their deaths, and standing with us on the slave block. We found Him deep in the woods, swamps, and forests at midnight where we could whoop, holler, scream, sing, and dance, reaffirming our existence as human beings in a new tongue, with new kinship bonds, under a suffering Southern moon.

To celebrate the fullness of life as a communal relationship—"I am because we are; and since we are, therefore I am"—is truly African. In this sense, the risen Jesus is himself black as the revelation of God's glory and beauty in all of creation. To paraphrase the Song of Solomon 1:5: "I am black and beautiful."
Ibid. (688)

Although the land we now call “home” was not ours by choice originally, our adaptation to it has very nearly created the culture that is now called “American.” We gave America its “soul.” Because of this grinding against a violent, anti-Black society, there exists at the core a testy relationship between the freedom to claim America for African-Americans and liberation in the name of The Christ, the fully human God who knows and sustains us here at home in a foreign land.

Pearls are created by the constant friction of a grain of sand in a clamshell.

Natural pearls form when an irritant - usually a parasite and not the proverbial grain of sand - works its way into an oyster, mussel, or clam. As a defense mechanism, a fluid is used to coat the irritant. Layer upon layer of this coating, called 'nacre', is deposited until a lustrous pearl is formed.
www.pearls.com/pages-how-pears-are-formed

In “defense” this “irritant” has to be repeatedly covered with layer after layer of nacre, the hard shiny lining of the inside of a clam, its very belly, if you will. Eventually, this irritant becomes a pearl. We might consider that this tense, testy relationship that produces this “lustrous” gemstone is akin to the tense, testy relationship between America and African-Americans and is akin to the tense, testy relationship that The Nazarene modeled so clearly thousands of years ago. Somewhere in the First Millennium, the early church made Jesus an either-or god: Either He was a passive, quiet, self-effacing lucky charm or He was a damning, fire-breathing, bone-crushing overseer. But He seems to be neither. To be sure, He is Mystery itself, but just as He revealed the short-tempered impatience of a surly parent, He is simultaneously pushing us with that same fervor to a new identity in Him; not just as individuals but as a church body, as One. Can we stand the irritation that new lessons, new insights, new growth requires? Can we stand the testy retorts of The Christ as he eggs us on when we just want to plop down and stay? Are we afraid of His correction as He keeps pushing us forward toward His agenda? Do we believe Him when He says He will never leave us? Whose pearl are we anyway?

www.treesculptpearls.com                                               www.gauguinspearl.pf

Thank You, dear Jesus, for Your patience and Your impatience. We might not immediately recognize why but we will always recognize Who. Thank You for saving us from our own irritating selves. Push us closer to one another as we move forward together. As You know, we scare easily and can be quite testy with each other. When we really lose it, we try to get testy with You. Thank You for not ending us right then and there but keeping us in that clamshell we call Your church. Yes, we are irritating, but we will come out anytime to do what You would have us do. Just please be sure to regularly shake up the shell. We need it.

Chinese Proverb
“Pearls lie not on the seashore. If thou desirest one thou must dive for it.”

Amen.