escapingbabylon.com

Dean Rankine is an unusually good cartoonist. He does Christian comics that more closely represent Christ than almost any I’ve seen elsewhere. For example here is A Kind Of Pro-Life I Could Believe In. If someone was interested in my views on the subject, watching that flash animation would sum it up pretty much perfectly.

I don’t know if anyone will understand this. But earlier this week, I got a call from the InterVarsity regional office. Apparently they had to do a report for the national office, and so they called me to ask me what my ethnicity was.

You see, I am obviously of African descent, and as this woman knows me and knows who I am, she could easily have taken the shortcut of putting me down as African-American. She didn’t, she chose to ask. It’s sort of a little thing, but I chafe a little bit when I’m called African-American, or put into a group that talks specifically about African-American issues because of the color of my skin. This isn’t because of any dislike, or disdain for African-Americans, but it’s often hard for people to realize that being African-American is as much about being American (and being a part of that history) as it is about being African.  I am not American.

Everytime I’m grouped in this way, instead of making me feel included, it somehow makes me feel excluded. The message is conveyed that there isn’t a place or that there isn’t space for my background, history, and ancestry – for my Afro-Caribbean-ness. This is why I would prefer to use the word black or, if I’m in a particularly pc crowd, of African descent. The former describes (though one may argue the accuracy of the descriptor) my appearance, the latter, my ancestry and neither assumes anything more than the obvious. I may be alone in feeling this way, but I do. And so it made me happy when she asked. She gave me the space to say who/what I was, and didn’t try to force me into an ill-fitting category. And for that I am grateful.

I haven’t posted a sketch in a long time, so in honor of my new sketchbook, here’s Robin in his new costume.

So I teach Sunday School for 7th and 8th grade students. As do many Sunday School programs, we use a Sunday school book as a guide/curriculum. Tomorrow we are supposed to be looking at Lazarus’ story from  John 11:1-44.  It’s a pretty interesting story, with lots of moments that make for good discussion, like how Jesus had the opportunity to go to Lazarus before he died, but didn’t, or the moment where Jesus shared in Mary and Martha’s pain, and of course, Lazarus’ resurrection.

So of course you would expect the book to include all three of these moments in the printed text (that’s also in the student books) right? No? Ok then, maybe two of these moments? One? Instead the book chooses to print John 11:17-27, and while that may be the theological crux of the story, it completely neuters the dramatic power of the story, and abstracts it away to the point where I would be completely bored in reading it. Not only that, but read out of context, it also abstracts away Jesus’* work on the earth (both then and now) to a theological belief and not an actual thing with real, physical effects in addition to the theological. I think that is probably one of the major issues of faith today. Religion/Faith in general is being reduced to abstract concepts instead of being expected to have actual effects.

That’s my lament. Suffice it to say I will be going beyond the book this week(although really, if it did suffice it to say that, I wouldn’t have posted all those paragraphs above would I).

*by the way, how do you write the possesive of Jesus, I’m always confused whether it should be Jesus’ or Jesus’s. Could someone with a better grasp of the grammatical rules in this case let me know?

So I know you haven’t seen me for a while, but between BreakAway, an intern at work that I have to train and Hamline stuff, I am sort of drained. It’s a good weekend for playing music, alas my favorite jamming partner is out of state. There is praise and worship practice this evening but it’s not the same thing.

Anyway, just wanted to let you all know that I’m not dead, I just haven’t had the capacity to write anything thoughtful lately.