Reporter and editor, teacher and pastor Jeff Chu delivers the opening plenary at APCE’s Annual Event
One way to envision an epic wrestling match is to view art across the centuries
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LOUISVILLE — The Rev. Jeff Chu, a reporter and editor, teacher and pastor whose upcoming book “Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand” to be published March 25 explores his time working on the Farminary at Princeton Theological Seminary, delivered the opening plenary Wednesday at the Annual Event of the Association of Partners in Christian Education. The Annual Event is being held this week both online and at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee.
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The theme is “A Stirring in Our Souls: Wrestling with God and Church Toward a More Beloved Community.” Read a report on opening worship featuring the Rev. Dr. PJ Craig here.
“It’s time for a little writing exercise,” Chu told attendees, asking those present in person and online to offer up “two or three things you want or need from God.”
Chu got dozens of responses, including “direction for the future” and “answers, guidance and lots of chocolate.”
“Over and over, there are tiny deaths and minor sorrows,” Chu said. “Pastors and teachers, shepherds and disciplers, you all bear witness in the midst of this.”
“Each of you is here to testify,” Chu said. “You pour so much of your heart and soul for the sake of an aching world.” He wondered: Do you feel loved?
“No small number of you tell your people about love even when you don’t feel it yourself,” Chu said. If they learn nothing else at the Annual Event, Chu wants attendees to leave “believing you are enough and have done enough.”
“You who are relentlessly sunny and you who walk around with an invisible cloud around your head, you are loved,” Chu said. “You who knew you’d be one of the few people of color in this room, you are brave and you are loved. You who wish to stand out and you who wish to blend in, you are loved. … You who are revving up your engines and you who regret not having another cup of coffee after lunch, you are loved.”
Using Genesis 32:22-32 — the account of Jacob wrestling all night with God — Chu explored a number of pieces of art dating back centuries that depicted the epic grappling encounter. Chu concluded a slide presentation with “Jacob Wrestling with the Angel,” the ca. 1990 work of African American sculptor Bessie Harvey.
“Struggles in her life were an inspiration for her work. She insisted God was the true artist, not her,” Chu said of Harvey, who created her work from wood, paint and plastic beads. “I knew I had a friend in nature,” Harvey said, “the trees, the grass and the wind — all the things that God sent to keep me and to grow me up.”
Harvey, a woman of deep faith, said she learned of the prophetic vision of the trees clapping their hands when she was older. “The Word said the trees clapped their hands, and so she would gather [twigs and branches] and turn them into sculptures that we in a sense her testimony,” Chu said.
He left attendees with at least three additional insights:
- Wrestling is tiring. “You might say, ‘Jeff, I knew that already,’” Chu said. Wrestling is tiring “because it is an embodied act,” a lesson Chu learned from Harvey. “I had perceived wrestling as a metaphor, not truly of the body,” Chu said, adding, “We have been formed in a culture that gives precedence to thought and heart and diminishes bone and sinew.” Maybe we too have sometimes failed to notice “an angelic touch, an unspoken blessing,” like the sound of children laughing or birds chirping. “The invitation for us as it was for Bessie Harvey is to acknowledge that when we thought we were wrestling alone, we were actually contending in a grander way, through our bodies,” Chu said.
- The key to Jacob’s wrestling story may be found in the following chapter. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks notes that in Genesis 33, Jacob “emerges whole” with Esau in Succoth. “Even with the hip, he was whole,” Chu said. After claiming a blessing that did not belong to him, Jacob “wasn’t complete until he received the blessing that did belong to him. That blessing freed him and it transformed his very self. Wrestling is finite.” Wrestling also “was never meant to be the destination for us,” Chu said, “just as it wasn’t for Jacob.”
- Can we just let go? “I see you wrestling with budgets, with feeling like the work you’re doing isn’t always understood, with this disorienting time in our society, with whether you are enough, have enough and can do enough,” Chu said. “I see you wrestling with the church’s declining influence in the world. What if you just let go? Not forever, but just for one blessed moment.”
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