This month’s bonus episode features Jonathan and Sy talking about the power of the incarnation during hard times over the holiday season. They discuss:
Why exactly the holidays can be so hard
How our values about justice and systems of oppression interact with the vulnerability of this time of year
What the hope of the incarnation has to say about all of it
And, during our new segment, a recent newsletter highlight about the audacity and courage of abolitionist work throughout history
Resources mentioned in the episode:
Jonathan’s essay about Poverty and Shame
Mastodon thread about the Civil War military operation led by Harriet Tubman
Correction: in the episode Sy discusses the Abolition Riot of 1836, but mistakenly identified the year of the riot as 1831.
Shake the Dust is a podcast of KTF Press. Follow KTF on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our newsletter and bonus episodes at KTFPress.com. Transcripts of every episode are available at KTFPress.com/s/transcripts. And you can find the transcript for this episode here.
Hosts
Jonathan Walton – follow him on Facebook and Instagram.
Sy Hoekstra – follow him on Mastodon.
Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.
Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.
Production and editing by Sy Hoekstra.
Transcript by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra.
Questions about anything you heard on the show? Write to shakethedust@ktfpress.com and we may answer your question on a future episode.
Transcript
[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes, the first three ascending and the last three descending – F#, B#, E, D#, B – with a keyboard pad playing the note B in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]
Sy Hoekstra: The narratives that we tell ourselves that allow us to dismiss other people and absolve ourselves of moral responsibility, the incarnation is the complete opposite of that. Who better to relieve themselves of responsibility for your actions and behavior than God?
[laughter]
And what does God do? The opposite. Says, “I'm going to shoulder the responsibility of everything all of you have done, and I'm going to come down. I'm going to empty myself of the privilege, I'm not walking away. I'm going to be as in it as I can, I'm not kicking you out the house. I'm not leaving. I'm not cutting you off.” That example, the ability that we have to follow and commune with that person just gives me a ton of hope.
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Sy Hoekstra: Welcome to Shake the Dust, leaving colonized faith for the kingdom of God. I'm Sy Hoekstra.
Jonathan Walton: And I'm Jonathan Walton. Today, we are talking about the vulnerability, loneliness and intimacy of the holiday season. We'll discuss why the emotional stakes seem so high this time of year, how those feelings are often at odds with our own values around justice and resisting oppression, and how the incarnation gives us a path forward to wholeness and flourishing. We're also going to be doing our new segment where we talk about one of our recent newsletter recommendations with a little more depth, but we'll do it at the end of the show this time, so we can jump right into our main topic.
Sy Hoekstra: Thank you so much for joining us on this bonus episode, we really appreciate you, our subscribers and everything that you do to keep us afloat and growing at KTF Press. And we just have one quick request of you, one quick favor to ask, which is go to Apple or Spotify and give us a five star rating. And if you're on Apple leave us a written review. These really help people find us, like they help us actually get up the search and the charts and all that sort of thing. They also help us just when people look us up, they see that other people have listened and like us. You give us credibility. And so insofar as you want to support what we're doing here at KTF press which we know you do because you are subscribing, then please do open up Apple podcasts or Spotify on your phone, give us that five-star rating.
As Jonathan said last month, if it's four stars, keep it to yourself, give us a five-star rating. We really appreciate it. And that's all we're going to ask of you because we don't have to give you the pitch because you're a subscriber, and again, we so appreciate it. Jonathan, let's get into it.
Jonathan Walton: Let’s get started. It's not a new idea to say this, this time of the year is vulnerable and hard for a lot of people, either because they're facing complicated family relationships or facing loneliness or isolation because they don't have the family relationships they want to lean on. Why are we talking about this on the show about leaving colonized faith? What does this have to do with following Jesus, resisting oppression, centering marginalized voices, any of the stuff we normally talk about? We will definitely get there soon. But first, let's lay some groundwork. Can we talk from an emotional health standpoint about what is going on exactly this time of year? Why do people feel so vulnerable and anxious around the holidays?
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, I'll start, but I should say in general, this topic, the whole topic of this episode is more your bag. I imagine you will do the majority of the talking this time around, because we are in the realm of how you kind of integrate your beliefs about the world and systemic oppression into the interpersonal. And that is Jonathan Walton [laughs]. That’s is literally what you do on a lot of your actual job. But yeah, I guess I'll give some of the, you'll do the deep stuff. I'll give the more obvious ones now just to…
Jonathan Walton: No worries. And then you'll be deceptively deep and then be like, well, but go ahead [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: I wasn't planning on that, but if that happens I will sound cool. So, I mean, part of it is when you're among family, and when we're talking about family we mean, I think both biological or chosen or whoever you're around, whoever you happen to be around this time of year. There's often a lot of unresolved trauma. There's stuff that you've buried. It can be something traumatic that happened that was hurtful that you've kind of buried and stopped talking about just for the purposes of being able to move on. It could be trauma that you're not even aware of that just comes from years and years of patterns of behavior amongst you and your family.
And those things, I don't know, just kind of heighten the stakes of a lot of conversations and behaviors and everything. There's political, this probably happens more with your biological family than your chosen family, but there's political polarization. There's just, there’s a ton of anxiety and fear around a lot of really important subjects. And when people get out of their tribes and their bubbles and get back into these groups of people that they are clinging on to, because they're a part of… The fact that we don't have a choice, but to be a part of, it breaks the bubbles, and that makes things very uncomfortable for everybody a lot of times.
I just think when you're not talking about chosen family, when you’re talking about biological family, obviously, you're talking about people that you didn't choose. And you're stuck with them, and they are like, deeply a part of your identity and your upbringing, whether you want them to be or not. For a lot of people, that just makes you feel stuck, when there's unresolved trauma, when there's tension when there's whatever. And that kind of stuck, being stuck in things that are difficult, and having no way really of ever fully escaping them, like, that's really complicated. And then even when you're among chosen family, there is some amount of increased pressure there, even though those are often like more, if you're there, they're often more copacetic relationships than you had with your family.
But there is some pressure there too, because if that's the family that you're with, but you can choose not to be and then if you're not, or if somebody else chooses not to be part of your chosen family anymore, then you're back to either being isolated and lonely, and we'll talk about loneliness too. Or with the people that you were stuck with, who you don't have a good relationship with. So there's, I don't know, just a lot of that going on. But Jonathan, you're the one who knows about all the terms and the family systems theory and the [unclear 00:06:42]
Jonathan Walton: [laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: So why don't you take us a level deeper here?
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I mean, I don't know all the things. I am not a therapist, let's preface that right now. I am in therapy.
Sy Hoekstra: That’s enough.
Jonathan Walton: But I like to think about the things that impact me the most. And I do believe that I have a responsibility to share the resources that I've been given, and I fortunately have a robust, chosen family. And I think two things that stand out to me, as we're having this conversation, and the fancy words are like enmeshment versus differentiation. And then the other term, which we should acquaint ourselves with is grief.
Sy Hoekstra: Can you just define, we've talked about enmeshment and differentiation before, but can you just define that real quick?
Jonathan Walton: Sure. So enmeshment simply is when our identities are so affixed with other people that we are unable to distinguish ourselves from them. So that can look like an inability or unwillingness to let people have their own thoughts, actions and feelings independent of someone else. For example, you may have a parent that is deeply uncomfortable or angry with you and you think, act or feel differently from them. You may feel blamed, you may be blamed. You may be critiqued and made to feel guilty when you have changed your political beliefs, or you are eating differently, or you have decided to bring a person home that they are not happy with, right?
There's a lot of things that can come up, when we have times with family based on with our biological family expectations that come from that, when we are enmeshed with them, and they are enmeshed with us. Differentiation is when we are able to be ourselves and have our own thoughts, actions and feelings while remaining connected to people. It is possible to differentiate ourselves from someone without destroying them in our minds [laughs], or completely engulfing ourselves and their identity. And so my invitation to you, as I talked about in our one of our cohorts this week is, can you go home to your family and not turn back into your childhood self and play the role that is expected of you?
And I think when we're able to do that, and not to individualize in a way that cuts your family off, but individualize in a way that allows you to be more present to the community, that's the goal. So I think that the flip side of differentiation is actually grief. A lot of us, as Sy was talking about, are carrying around this unprocessed trauma. Big T- Trauma or little t- trauma. And so I think…
Sy Hoekstra: Wait, sorry, what's the difference between big and little T trauma?
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. So big T- Trauma would be something that happened to you, and little t- trauma would be something you didn't receive that you should have.
Sy Hoekstra: Oh, okay.
Jonathan Walton: So yeah, so let's say big T- Trauma, these things that happen to us that are traumatic, that cause us to have these earthquake events in our lives. Little t- trauma would be something like neglect. I did not, like I can count on one hand how many times I initiated and my mom reciprocated a hug. That's little t- trauma. I should have received that when I was younger. Little t- trauma would be going into my house, and I talk about this in the poverty and shame essay like, there should have been stability in my house around furniture and things like that. Do you know to come home and our furniture is gone [laughs] or to come home and cars are gone? There was a constant sense of instability in my life. So these things should have been there, but they weren’t.
Sy Hoekstra: Having been repossessed, you mean?
Jonathan Walton: Yes, having been repossessed [laughs]. Yeah, man. Some of you all have experienced that before. It's not fun when literally the furniture you were sitting on is now not there anymore.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: And these are things from our childhood, but like I said, there are things to grieve each year with our families around the holidays. People get married, they don't come back for holidays anymore, people pass away, they don't cook that dish anymore. People are estranged, and they just aren't present anymore. So there's things that we have to grieve and let go of and reengage with and all of that takes time. But it's exceptionally important to be differentiated, to be able to do that in a mature, conscious and intentional way.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. And just to expand our examples a little bit, grief can also just be the fact that you're lonely, because you don't have anyone to be around this time of year, and there's so much pressure to be with your family. Or it can be the grief of having, even if you are with people who love you, it can still be the grief of having been cut off from your family or whatever. That's something that a lot of people experience. I'll say I in particular, well probably both of us, when we're thinking about like chosen family or people being isolated and cut off, I just really don't want to leave out like that's a ton of our queer siblings, right?
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: That's just so many, there's like such a disproportionately high number of people who have been cut off from their family, because their family are bigots. And that gets in the way of, it's just a way that kind of, I'll start to bring in the systemic stuff that gets in between families and people and I just, I don't know. I feel a, burden is the wrong word. But just feel a desire to make sure we're bringing that into the conversation. Any more thoughts on that or should we get into this systemic stuff? Did I do a segue or not?
[laughter].
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I think if you're listening to this and this is you, I wouldn't rush through this process of processing. And my prayer for you, if you have questions or want to process more, you can obviously email us or reach out for resources or more conversation. But I would not sit alone in these things and think to yourself, nobody else is going through this, but I would reach out because we could actually be a community for one another amidst the hard stuff that's happening.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, even if you are at home happily with a family who loves you and is healthy and great, it also just helps you too. I think this whole conversation I think will just help you too to be a better friend to people who are in this situation. Be a better example of how Jesus comes towards us and tries to be with us, Emmanuel.
Jonathan Walton: Amen.
Sy Hoekstra: So yeah, I think this conversation is for everyone, not just people who are feeling grief, that's just a note that I wanted to make. But Jonathan, let's bring this kind of into the realm of what we talk about in general, now that we've laid the groundwork. So we and I think a lot of people have a lot of values about when it comes to how we engage with systemic oppression or systems and structures in our society, how we want society to engage with vulnerable people, all kinds of things that we think that when we bring them into really intimate vulnerable settings like our families, some stuff happens [laughs]. Some stuff happens that makes things, that raises the stakes and makes things complicated. Can you tell us what happens a lot of times when we're combining those values in that setting?
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I'll tell a quick story, and I may have told the story before, just to ground our example. I had a young racially assigned white 18/19 year old student who learned about the oppression of BIPOC folks at the hands of police and went home and told her dad Black Lives Matter. And he kicked her out of the house and said, “Don't come back until you learn how to think correctly.”
Sy Hoekstra: Kicked her out of the house?
Jonathan Walton: Yes, kicked her out of the house.
Sy Hoekstra: Okay…
Jonathan Walton: I've also had students that make decisions around LGBTQIA+ issues and had their money drained from their account by their parents. So these are interpersonal realities that happen because of changes about how a student or a person thinks about oppressive systems. So one of the things that I've noticed in these conversations is that some people in our families literally cannot handle the reality or thought that we would think differently from them. And that we might actually have our own thoughts, our own feelings, and still love and want to be in relationship with them.
Sy Hoekstra: You're talking about basically someone who feels really enmeshed, not knowing how to comprehend someone who feels differentiated.
Jonathan Walton: Exactly. Right. And so, I think one of the things that I've tried to do in these situations is, how can I be a son, be a father, be a cousin, be a brother, be a friend, in relationship to my family, primarily, rather than being a pastor, a teacher, a leader, a writer, a speaker? That to me feels like the more vulnerable thing, to be able to share myself with my family before I share my ideas with my family. I think that is a lot of work, usually because the way that our quote- unquote, minds are changed when we go to college, when we go to a protest, when we watch a documentary, or when we have conversations with someone, is like we're getting new information introduced to us independent of the home environment that we grew up in.
And when we get that information, we often cannot take the people with us who actually helped us make those changes. So this young woman's father did not bring, I mean, this young woman did not bring Jonathan Walton and an entire week's worth of experiences to her dad to have this conversation.
Sy Hoekstra: She just brought the new idea.
Jonathan Walton: She just brought the new idea. And similarly, like with the person who decided to say, “Hey, I want to make space for my queer family.” They didn't bring the queer people there. They just brought this new idea and this new decision that was not consulted with the leaders in the family.
Sy Hoekstra: By the family.
Jonathan Walton: And so I think it's helpful to remember that sometimes loving the people that we come from equals acknowledging where they're at and being there with them, as our whole selves, us quote- unquote, changed and them being unchanged, and pursuing the relationship before we try to correct people. In parenting speak it's, we build a connection before we bring the correction. I think something beautiful about Jesus is that he is remaining connected to his disciples primarily before and during their correction. He never left them. He always pursued them. And I wonder, would it be possible for us to pursue our family members? And I'm not talking about big T- Trauma family members that do unhelpful, abusive things. That's not what we're talking about.
Sy Hoekstra: That’s an important distinction to make.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, that is a fundamentally different conversation. How do we handle inter-relational familial tension with Jesus at the center as people who are maturing and changing and desire to be in authentic relationship with the families that we come from? That's what we're talking about. And so when the stakes are that high, I think pursuing the relationship and prioritizing connection over correction is a paramount thing to do. Because we want to win the relationship, not just win the argument.
Sy Hoekstra: Which is not to say don't have integrity with what you believe.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: You're actually saying, have full integrity, but just do whatever you can to make it clear that you still love the person or want to be in relationship with them. So you might face a situation where you just want to say black lives matter, and if you say it your dad is going to kick you out of the house. And that's like, you can't do anything about that, right [laughs]?
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: So we're not saying hedge your bets and maybe say all lives matter just for the sake of the relationship.
Jonathan Walton: [Laughs].
Sy Hoekstra: We're not saying like change the message [laughs], but we are saying be careful. What I'm saying is be careful and thoughtful about who you're trying to correct and when and where they're at. That's all. It's I just want to make sure that people understand the limit, you know what I mean?
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: Just so we're not suggesting stay silent, do nothing, let people go on and on about horrible things in your presence or whatever [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, exactly. It is possible to lovingly confront the people and nonsense in our lives.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: It's possible. I think of [laughs] I have, some interesting people in my life. And sometimes they say things that are really, really unhelpful and demeaning to people that I love and care about and I think Jesus loves and cares about deeply. And usually, the way that presents itself is me asking a question, when they say said unhelpful thing. So, for example, someone said to me, “Well Jonathan, like what about men's rights?” And my response is, “You know what? Yeah, you're absolutely right. There is a crisis among men.” Because that's true, I'm not violating a value when I say that. There are real problems with men in this country. I can say that without disparaging women or delegitimizing feminism.
But when I also follow up with that and say, it's true, there are real problems with men, but I wonder if the quote- unquote, men's rights movement is just a reactionary movement compared to the rise of women's rights?”
Sy Hoekstra: And then you have a conversation about that.
Jonathan Walton: And then we have a conversation. Because I'm asked, I'm genuinely having a conversation. I didn't pull out my like one, two, or first, second, third wave feminist philosophers. I didn't start like [laughs], “Let me go get my notes.” I didn't take my phone out. I was just like, this is something I'm thinking about, because they are my peer. This is my, in this case, one of my cousins. They're not a person in my section A discussion class that I'm trying to debate. This is my cousin who I grew up playing sports with, and really care for his mom, my aunt, and like [laughs] we're going to eat biscuits and gravy after this conversation.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.
Jonathan Walton: That I think is, we just have to prioritize loving the people who are in front of us, while not dismissing the people who are not there. So if I'm having a conversation with this person in front of me who I think is flattening out women's rights and dehumanizing women, it doesn't justify my dehumanizing him or reducing him to an argument to just be beaten down, just so I can justify the humanity of somebody else. I actually need to hold both of them in tension and love my neighbor, in this case my cousin, by having a conversation about women's rights, which honors him and his humanity, while also honoring the humanity of the women that are in the room in that conversation.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Which is always like, it's just always tough to do, but that is the line you have to walk, in my opinion.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: You have to walk the, “Everybody's a human,” line
[laughter].
Jonathan Walton: Right, which sounds so basic.
Sy Hoekstra: It feels basic, I say it that way to make it sound basic, because it's easy to lose it. It's easy to lose track, it's easy to just say either, depending on what your personality is, or kind of what your politics are, it's easier to say I'm not gonna rock the boat, and I'm gonna let this person dehumanize women. Or I'm going to beat this person down in an intellectual argument and care nothing for them as a human, which is also dehumanizing. And you can feel pressure to do either one of those things from both sides, and I just think neither of them in the end are our Jesus, frankly [laughs]. And we will be we… I don't want to put too many caveats in everything I say, but you have to exercise wisdom, right? There are going to be situations where you need to walk away from a conversation, or you need to just flat out tell someone, “Shut up.”
[Laughter]
Those situations will arise and people need to figure out where those are, but we’re talking about like what your guiding principle is, right?
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: And just everybody's human [laughs]. That's a pretty good guiding principle.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. And I will be… listen, like something that I think was a learning I had to do is that just because I don't speak up in every situation does not make me a bad friend. Or I lose my integrity in some way, all these things because my temper when I was younger was really bad. So I actually didn't have the skills to lovingly confront the people around me. I would just argue and try to destroy them. With all of the anger and frustration communicated clearly, the talking over them, the shouting them down the statistics. I was like, you cannot debate me. But that was not loving at all to the person sitting in front of me, and ultimately did not make it better, quote- unquote, downstream for the people that I was actually trying to defend. Because this person in front of me may leave thinking Jonathan is right, but they don't leave thinking I should do things differently on behalf of these people.
Sy Hoekstra: Why not? Let's say you just utterly destroy them in the argument, why don't they leave thinking I should do something differently on behalf of these people?
Jonathan Walton: [Laughs] Sadly, I think it's because it was disrespectful. I don't think that presentation matters, but I do think presentation matters. And how we share things with people is not ultimately how they will change, but how we share things with people will dictate if and how they stay connected to us and engaged in the conversation. So I think it was a transformative thing, the way that Jesus chose to talk to the Pharisees in different situations. So when he managed the crowd, when the woman quote- unquote was caught in adultery, and started to write down, write on the ground, he took the attention away from the woman that was presumably standing there naked in front of a crowd about to stone her, everyone started to look down at the ground and stop looking at her.
And then he said, “If any of you are without sin, let them cast the first stone.” That to me is a loving confrontation. It's not violent, he doesn't pick up stones and throw them back at them. He doesn't call down angels to have the stones fall on the people who are holding them, he doesn’t do any of those things. He just asked them a question, a rhetorical question in that way. And then they dropped the stones and then walked away. And then he looked at the woman who he did not condemn, and condemnation in the Torah would have been death. He did not condemn her. He said, “Go and sin no more.” So there's an invitation to stay in relationship with him while also taking an action, and I think if we're able to do that, then something transformative can happen.
Sy Hoekstra: And that's really hard to do, I think. Because just throwing rocks at the other people who are judging her or depending on what your orientation is maybe joining the rock throwers.
[laughter].
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: Like it's hard to… I was thinking of what my temptation would be, which would be to punch the people in the face who had the rocks [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: But for some people, they have different temptations. I just think it's hard to resist those things because those are, as Jesus would put it, kind of the patterns of the world. Or maybe that’s how Paul would put it. And doing the stuff that Jesus does just requires such a different way of thinking.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: Because so, when I was thinking about this question I was actually thinking about this question of what happens when your values about systems and structures sort of collide with your intimate family relationships?
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: I was imagining a scenario where it's like, let's say you have someone in your family who uses drugs. And you maybe zoom out like not somebody who's your family, how do you think we should be approaching the issue of drug use in our society? Maybe you think it's a public health issue, we shouldn't be criminalizing it. It's something where people need support, not judgment and shame. It's a psychological issue. It's a disease. It's not just like an immoral choice. All those things. Okay, so you have all those beliefs, then bring a drug user into your home, and what changes? Now all of a sudden, it's not like an arm's length policy question, it's is this person going to steal from me to feed a habit? Is this person going to bring, I don't know, a bag of heroin into a home where my kid is or something?
Jonathan Walton: My kid, yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: You know what I mean? There's all these questions, that just, it raises so many issues of stuff that you have to deal with, and it's so much easier to go back to the way that the world thinks and just erase the traumatic things, cut them off, get rid of them.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: If there's someone who is sick and in need of support, you can't kick them out of your house. But if there's someone who's just making bad decisions and is just selfish, not thinking about other people, and they’re a criminal, and they deserve to be locked up, you can kick them out of your house, no problem. And then all the problems go away, then you don't have to worry about your kid. Then you don't have to worry about all the time and energy you're going to have to put into being creatively supportive to this person. So I just think, I'm using this as an example, but this could be people with mental health symptoms, this could be people with, it could even be like you, Jonathan, all the stuff that you just said about how to approach someone who's racist, when you're actually faced with a racist person.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: That's a lot harder to do, you know what I mean? Like, now they're insulting… you know what I mean? It just becomes so easy for us to follow the patterns of the world because they help us reduce trauma. That's why they're there. That's why those narratives about personal responsibility… It's like we were talking about Maxine Davis, actually how the criminal justice system, a lot of it is to put yourself in a hierarchy where you're a good person and the people who commit crimes are bad, and we can get rid of them.
Jonathan Walton: Yes, absolutely.
Sy Hoekstra: Those kinds of narratives make the lives of the people who tell them easier. They absolve the people who propagate the narratives of moral responsibility for other people.
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: And for being in a society and they allow us to make things simple and cut and dry. And we do that most of the time by demeaning and dehumanizing other people, and by ignoring their actual circumstances, ignoring psychological and circumstantial situation that they're facing that you've never faced before. You have no idea how you would react if you're in their situation. Forget all that, it doesn't matter. They're bad. We can lock them up, we can kick them out, we can get rid of them, you know?
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, I just appreciate you saying you want to do what Jesus did in the situation with people trying to stone the woman because that's the hardest thing to do. And there's so much soft narrative power that is so subtle and so pervasive against us doing that exact thing what Jesus did.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, and in to push back, or actually not to push back against you, but to push back against the narratives of the world. Let's say you pick up stones and fight on behalf of the woman. The pattern of the world would say, when you realize that you shouldn't have picked up stones to stone the crowd, even though you beat all of them, justify why you did it by this person's, like by protecting this person, as opposed to saying, “Hey, I'm so sorry I resorted to the tactics that you were trying to employ against this person. I used those against you, and that was wrong. I wish that I had done this differently, and I hope that we can all protect the vulnerable people, not using the same tactics of dehumanization and violence.”
Sy Hoekstra: Okay. Jonathan, any other thoughts there or should we move on to Christmas?
Jonathan Walton: No, we can move on. I think we’re good.
Sy: All right. So tell me what happens then with the incarnation, Jonathan. We're here talking about Christmas in theory. Now we're actually gonna start talking about Christmas. How does the example of Jesus and the incarnation change kind of how we think about these things or help us move in the direction that we want to move?
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I think there's a beautifully difficult photo of the Nativity scene right now at the church in Bethlehem. And it's baby Jesus on a pile of broken concrete from a building that was destroyed by a missile there.
Sy Hoekstra: Right, and for people who don't know, Bethlehem is in what is now Palestine. Right?
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: Currently being bombed, the place where the Christmas story happened.
Jonathan Walton: Yes, and Christmas services there have been canceled because of said bombardment. So I think one of the things the incarnation teaches me in this moment, we had a Bible study on Sunday, and leaning into the reality that Jesus is vulnerable as a baby under an oppressive regime. Mary is vulnerable as a teenager who is pregnant about to be quietly divorced or dismissed by her husband that she was committed to. Elizabeth is vulnerable as in a married woman who has been childless for years and when Angel Gabriel shows up and says, “You're gonna have a son,” she says, “My disgrace has been removed.” The entire story of humanity, of the divine encounter with humanity in Luke 1, is about vulnerability. Mary is vulnerable, Joseph is vulnerable. Zacharia is invited to be vulnerable, he doesn't want to opt in, the angel shuts him up [laughs].
Elizabeth is invited to be… and Jesus comes into the midst of an oppressed, vulnerable group of people and does not announce himself for a decade. 12 years old, like where do you think I was gonna be? So there's all these stories about what did Jesus do, blah, blah, in all those years, but all that to say is he was silent about the, at least the narrative is silent to us about all the problems in the world. It's fascinating to me that Jesus paid taxes to the Romans and those resources oppressed other people. When I think about, oh, like 54 cents of my tax dollars goes into the military industrial complex of the US, like, Jesus paid taxes. That is, I don't know what to do with that. Jesus was a vulnerable person in the midst of an oppressive system his entire life.
So how do we be vulnerable in the midst of the oppressive systems and structures we are aware of and not aware of, and pursue intimacy with God and respond to him in ways that bear witness to this new kingdom and this new family? That's what I'm getting from the incarnation right now.
Sy Hoekstra: And what answers if any, have you come up to with that question?
Jonathan Walton: It's not so much an answer, but I think one of the things that stands out to me is that the most vulnerable thing I can be, not just with my family, but in any situation is just Jonathan. Like not hiding behind accolades or whatever story I can tell myself, but that reality of… like I was praying with one of our cohorts, one of the people from our cohorts yesterday, when I tell Maia I am accepted, God is not ashamed of me, I'm a son of the most high God, then she says “daughter’ and we do that thing, she doesn't have the same generational trauma that I have. But I'm realizing I'm telling her this because I'm debunking narratives within myself and trying to give her the gift as opposed to giving her the liability.
And it's fascinating to me that Jesus would subject himself to that, to just be himself. To be 100 percent, human 100 percent divine, but lean into, at least when he's a baby, like his humanity. So how can I lean into my humanity and see it as a good thing?
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. That's really good. I think I want to also emphasize on top of that, that the gift of God's presence especially in the vulnerable circumstances that you were just talking about in the Roman Empire and all that. In poverty, in being a refugee and everything that he was, is supposed to signal the idea of Emmanuel, the idea of God with us, which is such a direct contradiction to our vulnerability. Meaning, this is not a complicated point I'm making, but if you really believe in the idea of Emmanuel that's going to help you with your loneliness, that's going to help you with your fear [laughs]. That's going to help you with your insecurities when you're around your family, that's gonna help you with your insecurities when you're alone, if you're feeling like… how much more of an answer can you have for loneliness and isolation than God is with you?
And that doesn't mean that me saying that immediately cures everybody's loneliness and isolation, or heals their wounds with their family. But it is just a gift for us to meditate and reflect on and to live into, and to find, I don't know. To find a greater sense of ways that we are not alone. So there's that component of it. There's the somewhat of an antidote to loneliness and fear [laughs]. And then I think there's also just the example of the incarnation meaning in. like how Paul describes the incarnation as God emptying himself of privilege, emptying himself of riches and status and coming to be one of us. The problems that I was talking about before, like when I was talking about having the family member who's a drug user or whatever, that was just my example.
The narratives that we tell ourselves that allow us to dismiss other people and absolve ourselves of moral responsibility. The Incarnation is the complete opposite of that [laughs]. Who better to relieve themselves of responsibility for your actions and behavior than God? [laughter].
Jonathan Walton: Amen.
Sy Hoekstra: And what does God do? The opposite. Says, “I'm going to shoulder the responsibility of everything all of you have done, and I'm going to come down. I'm going to empty myself of the privilege, I'm not walking away. I'm going to be as in it as I can. I'm not kicking you out of the house, I'm not leaving, I'm not cutting you off. And at the same time, I'm not one of you. I'm going to be…” It's like perfect differentiation [laughs]. “I'm gonna be here, but I'm gonna be entirely myself and separate from who you all are.”
Jonathan Walton: Yup.
Sy Hoekstra: And I just think that example, the ability that we have to follow and commune with that person just gives me a ton of hope. Like that's the person that we're following, that we're trying to become more like, is the person who does not cut people off. The person who finds the way to be in the suffering. I don't know. I guess it took me probably a while to get to that point because it's hard what Jesus did [laughter] and following him is hard as the Bible warned several times. But it's just if we were following that example, all of us, man, what a different world we would have,
Jonathan Walton: Yes.
Sy Hoekstra: What different policies we would have, what a different government we would have.
Jonathan Walton: And I mean, a different church.
Sy Hoekstra: Very different church.
Jonathan Walton: Like imagine if the Catholic Church had done that instead of the papal bull that was manifest destiny.
Sy Hoekstra: Oh that was enshrining White supremacy and theology in beginning the colonial project. Yeah. Right.
Jonathan Walton: Let it be so.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, amen. Let's wrap up that discussion there, but then we have our segment to do Jonathan.
Jonathan Walton: Cool.
Sy Hoekstra: All right. So we still, by the way, we still need a name for this segment. We need to figure out what we’re gonna call this. Maybe I need like a sound effect or something. We'll figure it out.
Jonathan Walton: Behind the blurb, sound drop [makes the air horn noise].
Sy Hoekstra: Behind the blurb [laughs]. Yeah, I'll get an air horn. So what I wanted to talk about today was one from our newsletter last week, if you're listening to this when it comes out. And it was ever since Twitter went from the dumpster fire that it always was to sort of like blazing dumpster inferno that it became in the last year. So I've left and looked for other places to find things.
And I spent some time on Mastodon and have discovered the incredible work of D. Elizabeth Glassco who's a Rutgers history professor on Mastodon, who just leaves these incredibly long threads of really cool stories from Black history.
It's like a ministry that she's doing over there on Mastodon. And okay, so I'm reading this thread that's about the Civil War, and basically, the Union Army has captured this area in South Carolina. Abraham Lincoln has issued the Emancipation Proclamation and they are noticing of this one kind of area that they've taken over in South Carolina, that they have this one person who's volunteering with them, who is incredibly good at speaking to the slaves that they have freed and creating networks of communication among the slaves, and getting information, getting reconnaissance and espionage, recruiting people to her cause. And she's really good at speaking with the Gullah-speaking populations, even though they're not they don't speak the same language, she's finding ways to communicate.
She has camaraderie with them, and the person is Harriet Tubman. Harriet Tubman is down in this encampment of the Union Army, basically creating networks of currently and formerly enslaved spies effectively. And she's just doing this kind of out of her own accord because she's used to doing it because it's how she operates the Underground Railroad. So they recruit her to lead this one stealth mission. She's the first woman in US history to lead an armed mission for the US Army. They recruit her, she leads about 250 Black soldiers and 50 White soldiers into these basically really backwoods parts of South Carolina, where they're getting into plantations that are just really far away from town centers or anything, going up this river in these boats with a bunch of soldiers.
And she has so effectively scouted with all of her spies the area, that they know where all of their anti-troop explosives and traps and gun stations are and everything. And they're basically sneaking up these creeks and rivers at night. They literally in the course of one night, they pull 700 enslaved people off of plantations. And the people who live there have no idea that it's happening, and they basically just gut the economy of this whole area of South Carolina, and free 700 people in like one night, and with one death in the middle of an army. So it's like a huge blow for the Union Army, and all led by Harriet Tubman. So this is more people than she ever freed on the Underground Railroad. She did it in one night with these people.
And it's just wild to me, the reason I bring this up and the reason I put it in the newsletter is because of how much I think hope it brings me that people like her exist [laughs] or existed. That like just the sheer amount of bravery and the sheer amount of skill that she had and that she actually deployed on behalf of her cause, as a Black woman in US history, as a disabled woman, she had epilepsy… we don't know if it was epilepsy or not. She had a…
Jonathan Walton: Injury.
Sy Hoekstra: …seizure disorder caused by head trauma. It gives me hope, and I don't want to say that in a flippant way, because I know a lot of like, you can have White people talking about slaves who did stuff like that. And just like, “Look at this, isn't this great [laughs]? Golly, gee, this is fantastic.”
I'm not trying to diminish the ridiculous circumstances that she was in or how hard she had to work, but the story gives me a lot of hope. And I just want to hear what your immediate reactions are to it, because you were raising your eyebrows [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I'm reading this in real time, but one of the things that it reminds me of is that there's a reason why people in power want to ban books and change stories and not tell all these things. I remember I wrote a poem called Just Black. It was the first time I ever did poetry about race in front of crowds in New York City, and I was so nervous that I did it. And one of the lines, it says they don't want us to remember the Martins or the Malcolm's and I just went through all the revolutionary people that had impacted me. Because if we don't know them, we can't change things. And if you don't have the imagination, or the history, then we'll just keep the status quo going.
So yeah, this reminds me to get creative this Christmas season around the Congo. Get creative about what to do about Gaza, get creative about the people who are still on the proverbial plantation that we're trying to get off of. So I'm grateful for this story. And I need to reactivate my Mastodon account.
[laughter]
Sy Hoekstra: The abolitionists that yeah, so much of abolition, I studied a lot of abolition history. I was a history major in college. And so much abolition is like that, like the imagination that it takes to do the stuff that they did.
Jonathan Walton: Right.
Sy Hoekstra: To be that audacious and that bold and to just like, you're going to just pull a new world into this one.
Jonathan Walton: Yes. Right.
Sy Hoekstra: Because nobody could have possibly have imagined this kind of raid being pulled off, because you needed someone as uniquely gifted and dedicated as Harriet Tubman to be able to pull something like this off. And I just, I don't know, there's so many other… Can I do one more before we go, just one more story?
Jonathan Walton: Sure. Yeah, go on.
Sy Hoekstra: Here’s another example of this just imaginative, absolute bold stuff. So there was this, they call it an abolition riot, which is a slanted way of thinking about it, but it's 1831 in Boston. And there are these two women on trial as runaway slaves. They show up on the day that they're having the legal proceedings, and the courtroom is just full of abolitionist Black women, like just packed from wall to wall, the whole gallery, they're out in the hall they're everywhere.
Jonathan Walton: Oh wow.
Sy Hoekstra: And they let the proceeding happen and then when it becomes clear that things are not going to be fair and these women are going to be shackled, a woman sitting in the crowd just says, “Go,” and they flood the court, like the area where the judge and the attorneys are [laughs]. They all just run in and then they all just leave. And when they leave, the two women are gone. And they have a chariot, like a horse drawn chariot waiting outside of the court. They put the two women in the chariot, it takes off through the streets of Boston, and there's no historical record of those two women anywhere else ever again.
Jonathan Walton: [laughs] That’s amazing.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. And that's what I mean. Like, that's the kind of stuff, I don't know, to have just the sheer gall to do it. You know what I mean [laughs]? Gall is maybe is the wrong word. Just the audacity.
Jonathan Walton: Wow. Like, “Go.”
[laughter]
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. They were all ready. They were all just sitting there totally ready.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah, they knew the deal. They knew the assignment and that’s what we doing.
Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] But coming up with the assignment is the incredible thing to me. Just the imaginative power of this. That's again, like you said, this is why stories like this get banned and put away and diminished in importance and whatever.
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. So let's end on that note of hope, shall we [laughs]?
Jonathan Walton: Yeah.
Sy Hoekstra: Get imaginative, get creative and bold this Christmas season everybody with the power that comes with the knowledge that God is with you.
Jonathan Walton: Right. Amen.
Sy Hoekstra: Before we go, just again, a quick reminder, please rate us, give us a five star rating on Apple podcasts or Spotify. Give us a review too, just write a sentence or two or five paragraphs, whatever you feel like writing on Apple, if you're there on Apple, they let you do that. It really helps us. We're not kidding, please. We were going to have some news early next year, I think about kind of how we're trying to really grow and we have some big plans and big goals. And you doing little easy free things like this actually really helps us. So stay tuned. In the meantime, five-stars on Apple and Spotify, please.
Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra. The transcripts for this show are available at ktfpress.com, click podcast transcripts, those are by Joyce Ambale. Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess. We will see you all in January for our next episode. And everybody Merry Christmas.
Jonathan Walton: Merry Christmas.
[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you’re building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]
Sy Hoekstra: I like that when I have to do something on the outline I never write it out for myself. I just wrote, “Sy, colon, welcome, comma et cetera [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: Yeah. I’m like I don't... Yeah, I need more than that in all of my notes.
Sy Hoekstra: Well, you’re not the… Yeah, but I also want to make sure that you have what you need, but I apparently don't care if I have what I need [laughs].
Jonathan Walton: I also think you think you will be much more succinct than me, so therefore a script for Jonathan.
Sy Hoekstra: I'm the… whatever.
[laughter]
Jonathan Walton: I also appreciate it a lot. I'm like, “Yep, staying on task. This is wonderful. Sy knows me, I feel seen.”
[laughter]
So I see it as exceptionally helpful.
Sy Hoekstra: Oh good, I'm glad.
