Deeper Waters: Sermons for a New Vision

By Rev. Nibs Stroupe

Deeper Waters is a sermon collection--but also a manifesto. Its sermons sound forth a call for Christian preaching that is evangelical and emancipatory: unashamed of the good news about Christ's death and resurrection and resolute in resistance to white supremacy, male domination, and redemptive violence. The author, pastor Nibs Stroupe, is a white son of the segregated South, nurtured in its twin traditions of anti-black white racism and Christian faith. But through the courageous witness of black Americans engaged in the Civil Rights movement, Stroupe experienced conversion to a new theological vision. God's loving claim on humanity in Jesus Christ abolishes oppressive idols and breaks down dividing barriers. This conviction propelled Nibs into a lifelong ministry of gospel proclamation and antiracist struggle. For thirty-four years, Stroupe pastored at Oakhurst Presbyterian Church, a multiracial congregation in metropolitan Atlanta. The sermons of this collection present the mature fruit of that ministry, and they offer a gift and example to the next generation of preachers and workers summoned as witnesses of Jesus Christ to the American context.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Sep 6, 2017
• ISBN: 9781532631399

Rev. Nibs Stroupe

Nibs Stroupe grew up in the Mississippi River Delta in Arkansas. He retired in 2017 after thirty-four years as pastor of Oakhurst Presbyterian Church, a church nationally known for its leadership in multicultural ministry. He is the author of three books, including the award-winning While We Run This Race. In 2007 he was inducted into the Martin Luther King Jr. Board of Preachers at Morehouse College in Atlanta

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Deeper Waters

Sermons for a New Vision

Nibs Stroupe

Edited by Collin Cornell

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Deeper Waters

Sermons for a New Vision

Copyright © 2017 Nibs Stroupe. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Wipf & Stock

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-3138-2

hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-3140-5

ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-3139-9

Manufactured in the U.S.A. September 19, 2017

Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

Jesus Christ

Going into Deeper Waters

My Name is Legion

When God Calls

Make the Tomb Secure!

The Stuff of Recognition

God

And God said . . . 

The Joy of the Thin Places

Self

By Grace We Have Been Saved

The Devil in Birmingham

Words to Live By

Community

Man on Fire

Surely She Has Borne Our Grief

Setting the World on Fire

The Power of Nonviolence

Woman, Great is Your Faith!

Sitting Down at Jacob’s Well

Appendix 1: Editor’s Foreword

Appendix 2: Editor’s Afterword

Bibliography

This book is dedicated to those who have mediated the grace of God to me: my mother Mary Stroupe, my spouse the Reverend Caroline Leach, my children David and Susan, my daughter-in-law Erin Graham, grandchildren Emma and Zoe, and many friends and colleagues.

Foreword

What you have in your hands is a sermon collection. But not only that: Deeper Waters is a manifesto. As its subtitle indicates, these are sermons for a new vision.

New vision is needed because ours is a time of scarce vision and a famine of the word of God (Amos 8:11). Of course, each Sunday in the United States, multitudes of pastors ascend the pulpit and address the Bible to their congregations. Sunday schools proceed apace and parachurch organizations mushroom. The theological academy churns out books and articles by the thousands. Much of this industry is even evangelical in name, meaning that it seeks to articulate good news about God’s Son, Jesus Christ.

And yet the vast majority of that preaching and theological endeavor—particularly and emphatically among white Christians—has not yet addressed the American social system that protects and profits white people at immense cost to their black and brown neighbors. To the crises of police brutality, staggering economic inequality, de facto segregation, mass incarceration, and much more, the greatest share of white preachers and theologians have responded, Peace, peace (Jer 6:14). Like the priest and Levite of Christ’s parable (Luke 10), they pass by on the other side of the road from their assaulted countrymen. These calamities are simply not, for them, gospel issues.¹

Their quarantine of the gospel from American public life resulted in the ascendancy of Donald Trump. Evangelicals—Christians confessing a special concern for Christ’s saving power—provided critical electoral support for an administration promising to undermine civil protections for African Americans and other oppressed communities, to reduce their healthcare access, and to empower police aggression against them. If the Word of God, Jesus Christ, advocated the Samaritan’s way of love and loyalty to the enemy, if he lived it out in his passion and death for God’s enemy humankind, then it would seem that Word has fallen on barren soil. New vision is needed, and a bold new proclamation of God’s Word.

That vision and that proclamation are the subject of this book. Its author, pastor Nibs Stroupe, is uniquely qualified to offer guidance: a white son of the segregated South, Stroupe was nurtured in its twin traditions of Christian faith and anti-black white racism.² The church he grew up in was caring and supportive, and instilled in him a deep sense of God’s love in Jesus Christ. But its members were also committed to maintaining the supremacy of white people in American society, and were passive—or resistant—towards black peoples’ initiatives to achieve equity.³ In just this sense, Stroupe’s upbringing and formation anticipate our own theological climate, which may often be evangelical in prioritizing Jesus Christ but is as frequently absent from or opposed to the fight for a more just society.

Stroupe himself awakened to the full humanity of black people and to the evils of white racism through the hospitality and courage of black Americans engaged in the Civil Rights struggle. Seeing Martin Luther King, Jr. on television gave Stroupe pause, despite rumors circulating in the southern white community that King was a communist agitator. Working alongside black people in a summer church program dramatically impacted Stroupe’s perspective. In fall 1966 while he was a college student, Stroupe contributed to the campaign of a black mayoral candidate, and in 1968 he helped to support the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis. Stroupe became a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War and started a halfway house for formerly incarcerated men. In a word, he threw himself into the freedom struggle. Emancipation became his passion.

But this question occupied him: "how [can] I affirm the church and efforts to fight racism? He writes: On the one hand, I was deeply tied to the church because of its history of transmitting God’s love to me. On the other hand, I felt strong anger at the church because it seemed so tied to the culture, especially to racism . . . how could I put these two pieces together?"⁴

How could he—and how can we today—put these two pieces together? In the era of Trump that is dawning, many Christians are urgently asking themselves some form of this question. We stand to gain from Stroupe’s journey towards an answer from over three decades of pastoral leadership. In these years, Stroupe assumed the pastorate, with his wife Caroline Leach as co-pastor, of Oakhurst Presbyterian Church, a then-failing multiracial congregation in metropolitan Atlanta. In conversation with congregants black and white, in friendship with elder Inez Fleming, in concert with the remarkable musical ministry of Joanne Price,⁵ and in partnership with associate pastor Brady Radford, Stroupe grew into his own distinctive theological vision: one that is at once evangelical and emancipatory; unashamed of the good news about Christ’s death and resurrection and resolute in resistance to white supremacy, male domination, and redemptive violence.

Flashpoints of a Vision

In other publications, Stroupe himself has narrated the encounters and events that helped to form his pastorate and preaching.⁶ The systematic theologian and former Oakhurst member Chris Boesel has elsewhere mapped out Stroupe’s theology in eloquent detail.⁷ What the present foreword intends is more modest: it is a sketch of Stroupe’s characteristic sermonic moves for preachers and students and interested Christians. It is also a tutorial on preaching for a new vision that is evangelical and emancipatory.

The sermons of Deeper Waters were preached from various biblical texts, and their contents reflect the Bible’s own range of idioms and concerns. A sermon on Matt 3:1–17, for instance, resounds with John the Baptizer’s own harshness and zeal, while a sermon on Gen 1:1–19 unfolds, like the scriptural text itself, more meditatively and leisurely.⁸ Stroupe leans into the particularity of each biblical text in confidence that the Bible is a primary place for meeting God.⁹ As such, Stroupe’s sermons oftentimes provide an overview of the biblical passage in its own integrity before turning to God’s work in the congregation at present. Stroupe also often dwells on a certain word or image from the text—an emphasis that emerges from his practice of lectio reading, undertaken in dialogue with others during the church’s weekly Bible study.¹⁰

But at the same time as Stroupe treats scripture in its diversity and particularity, he is also persuaded that all biblical texts witness to the same fundamental human dilemma and the same fundamental Good News: even though we are captive to death, God is rescuing us in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.¹¹

Stroupe evokes the human dilemma with a repertoire of words describing helpless subjection: captive, caught, captured, bound, mastered, dominated, possessed. This helpless subjection is, moreover, always to superior forces. Stroupe’s preferred phrase to name the forces that hold humanity hostage is the powers.¹² Humans are in the thrall of spiritual powers. As in the statement quoted above (captive to death), these powers are death-dealing and destructive to humans. They are demonic, in the sense of exerting a god-like influence over our lives, and intending our suffering and demise.

The human problem is not, in other words, the so-called personal sins: discrete choices made against God’s will, or unruly habits of the heart. Instead, humans are far more basically and comprehensively compromised. From even before we could meaningfully exercise our will or take initiative to feed our own imagination, powerful and destructive forces saturated our hearts and lives. Stroupe’s vocabulary for these malevolent influences draws most directly from two biblical sources: the gospel stories of Jesus confronting demons and Paul’s apocalyptic rhetoric of the powers. Stroupe speaks in his most native voice when expounding these texts. But he also finds other texts giving witness to the same dynamics in human life: so, for example, Judg 11 does not depict any superhuman creatures such as Jesus confronted or Paul declaimed, and yet Stroupe’s sermon on Jephthah identifies the story as a warning about "the power of anxiety and fear to dominate us and make us hurt ourselves and hurt others."¹³

Besides its biblical rootage, Stroupe’s vision of the human dilemma also finds descriptive purchase on numerous situations in which otherwise upstanding people lend their energies to doing evil. In America, this scenario applies aptly to the behavior of white people throughout their generations:

How else can one explain a good and decent father who nonetheless participates in lynching? How else can one explain a white banker, a good mother to her children, who nonetheless refuses to approve a loan to a black family because she decides it is a bad risk, despite the family member(s)’ having an acceptable job and income? It would be easier to dismiss them as evil people [who have made individual, evil choices].¹⁴

These and many other, similar situations suggest that there must be a manner of contributing to evil that exceeds the choices of the personal will and the habits of the individual heart—even if it also includes the same. In Stroupe’s memorable image, participation in evil is not a matter of choices and practices that can be easily suspended through a self-improvement regimen, or shucked off like leaves on an ear of corn. Rather, the evil forces at work in our world have, like a corn worm, burrowed deep into the corn itself, [such] that part of the corn ha[s] to be cut off, or even the entire ear of corn thrown away.¹⁵ Anti-black white racism is like this: burrowed down deep into the lives of people classified as white, so deep that it can hardly be separated from their very selves. It’s not that white people don’t intend well. It’s just that the hostile powers have (it seems) taken up residence at the center of white lives, so that damaging and deadly effects radiate out in individual and collective behavior quite apart from would-be good intentions.¹⁶

Indeed, Stroupe insists throughout his preaching that the control of destructive powers like racism or misogyny or homophobia or violence is so complete that they have even hijacked our self-definition. There is no us left that does not answer to their intentions and demands; no way of being white that is not already caught up in exploiting and destroying black and brown humans. Stroupe says that these demonic powers have so defined reality for me that their definitions have become normal and routine; [their] importance to my life is so strong because they have become interwoven with my own identity . . . when I am asked to give my name, my identity, I name them.¹⁷ The attempt of these powers exhaustively to define us appears in nearly all the sermons of this collection.

This is profoundly bad news. But the Good News that scripture everywhere attests is this: while these powers lord it over us and claim to be at the center of our lives, God is at the center of our lives.

God is first. God is last. God is the true Lord—our east, our west, our north, our south.¹⁸ The demonic forces are god-like, yes—but they are counterfeit. Their claim is fundamentally false, because the true Lord is the God made known in Jesus Christ.¹⁹

And, thanks be to God, what the life and death and above all the resurrection of Jesus show is that this God loves us. The God who is at the center of all that is loves, and loves us with unimaginable vulnerability and inventiveness—to bend towards us in the life and ministry of God’s Son, Jesus. Our captivity to death is nowhere clearer and bolder than in Jesus’s death on the cross. There we see the full extent of our bondage to the powers of evil: we would prefer to kill Jesus rather than be transformed by his love.²⁰ When God comes to us, we aggress and destroy.

But the impossible abundance and tenacity of God’s love is shown in this: that God called Jesus out of the grave. The outermost limits of our captivity and resistance could not stop God’s loving and healing power. The terrified disciples had locked the doors of their room