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Dr. Ellen Davis - Psalms, Sacred Places, and Hope in Faith Communities

• Chris Nafis

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Discover the transformative power of the Psalms with our special guest, Dr. Ellen Davis from Duke University Divinity School. Through her profound insights, Dr. Davis illuminates how Psalm 145, an "alphabet of adoration," serves as a timeless bridge connecting spirituality and community across generations. As she opens up about personal experiences, particularly during times of mourning, you’ll find inspiration in the Psalms' ability to foster a candid and emotive dialogue with God, allowing for an authentic expression of praise and lament.

Travel with us into the heart of sacred places and environmental theology, sparked by Wendell Berry’s compelling notion that every place holds sacred potential. We explore how, amidst the chaos of modern mobility, spiritual stability can be achieved by grounding ourselves in the sanctity of familiar places. Delve into personal stories that highlight the importance of maintaining our connection to roots and the spiritual grounding offered by the communities and locations that have shaped us. This discussion encourages a deeper appreciation for the metaphorical "place to stand" in our spiritual journeys, even in moments of physical displacement.

As we navigate hope in the realm of faith communities, discover how it is more than just a fleeting feeling—it's a steadfast commitment. With stories of beauty, like the creation of the St. John's Illuminated Bible, we underscore the role of storytelling and art in nurturing hope and faith. The episode concludes with a thoughtful reflection on the evolving nature of the modern church, guided by the wisdom of Stanley Hauerwas. Join us in celebrating acts of beauty and kindness as heavenly treasures that contribute to healing a divided world, offering a renewed vision for the church's role in promoting justice and compassion.

Pastor Chris Nafis:

Hi and welcome back to the Current. My name is Pastor Chris Nafis, pastor of Living Water Church, and today I am excited and humbled and honored to have Dr Ellen Davis join us on the show. She is the Amos Reagan Kearns Distinguished Professor of Bible and Practical Theology at Duke University Divinity School, where I was extremely fortunate to have her as a teacher. Dr Davis has writtena lot of books. They're all great. I tell people if they're working on something in the Old Testament and Ellen Davis has written on it, they should read whatever she wrote first. I mean read the text first, but then read Dr Davis next. My favorites of hers have been Getting Involved with God, rediscovering the Old Testament, which I've assigned in my Old Testament class, scripture, culture and Agriculture an Agrarian Reading of the Bible. Her commentary on Proverbs, ecclesiastes and Song of Songs is amazing. She has a book on Ruth called who Are you, my Daughter? Her most recent book is called Opening Israel's Scriptures. Read it all. Read any of it. It's great.

Pastor Chris Nafis:

In our conversation we talk about the theology of place. We talk about ecology, poetry, despair and hope. I hope that you find it inspiring and hope-filled here. It is Well, dr Davis, you've been a huge inspiration in my life. It's hard to overstate the impact you've had on the direction of my life and ventures into farming and just the way that I've understood myself and my ministry. So thank you so much. It's like an honor to have you here. Thank you for joining me on this. It's a real pleasure. Thank you, chris. I wanted to start with the Psalms and I guess I was just wondering first, do you have a favorite Psalm? Do you have one that's your favorite?

Dr. Ellen Davis:

Well, I have a lot of favorites, but I would say that one that I gravitate toward is Psalm 145, which is kind of the. The Psalter ends with a big crescendo of praise in Psalm 145. It's an alphabetic Psalm, so each verse begins with a different letter of the Hebrew alphabet. So it's A to Z, aleph to Tav in Hebrew and it's I sometimes call it an alphabet of adoration. And I think what moves me about it is that in Jewish tradition it is said that if you say Psalm 145 three times a day, you earn a place in the world to come. World in the world to come, no questions asked, um, and you know, of course that's a sort of simplistic from one perspective, but I think the point is that if you're orienting your life in such a way that you were praising god extravagantly three times a day, there's probably going to be a lot that follows from that organization of your life.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

And I'm saying that prayer I think I've told you my husband died 18 months ago and so it's part of the prayer service, the morning prayer service, and I've been welcomed into the synagogue in my neighborhood to say the prayers that mourners say, which has been really a wonderful experience over 18 months. It's almost entirely. The whole service is a service of praise of God and that Psalm service of praise of God and that psalm of course appears multiple times. And to think about people having prayed that psalm when they're grieving, when they're in persecution, in the death camps. You know in Europe in the middle of the 20th century that whatever thing was happening, people were still digging deep to find 22 different ways to give praise to God. You know one for each letter of the alphabet. I find that just as a piece of historical theology, in a sense of the presence of the text in community over centuries and millennia, that that's deeply moving to me yeah, and I mean what?

Pastor Chris Nafis:

what are you talking about is how kind of a couple a lot of things, of course but, um, how the psalms and that psalm in particular, but how the psalms shape us, like how praying them and speaking them kind of changes us, and also how it connects us to all these people in all these places throughout history who have prayed them before, and how it's kind of shaped us collectively. And you know, I find it really cool that you're not just like a Bible scholar, you also are a practical theologian is kind of how you're described in your position and I feel like the Psalms and the Proverbs where you spent a lot of your time at least, really kind of they really kind of exhibit that like they are meant to shape us right, absolutely.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

So I'm an Episcopalian my whole life and there is not a prayer service in Anglican Episcopal tradition.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

There's not a single service in which at least a part of a psalm does not appear, and sometimes whole sections of the service are structured by just sort of exchanging lines from the psalms.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

So it becomes a kind of language and it's the language that shapes the prayer book with which I grew up, that I still use, the Book of Common Prayer, and so when Psalms Psalms of lament, psalms of praise, but either way intensely interacting with God in a very direct way, the Psalms are the only. Most of the Bible speaks about God or speaks about human life in the presence of God, tells stories, but the Psalms are direct interaction with God and of course they bespeak the conviction, the very form of them implies, that God, as one of the Psalms says, hears prayer, that God is listening and cares about what we have to say. And sometimes what we have to say is expressing disappointment in God or saying where are you? I'm crying out, are you listening? And that kind of permission to be real in what we have to say to God or of God in the presence of God, that I think without the Psalms we would not be as sure as we can be that we have that permission.

Pastor Chris Nafis:

Right, yeah, yeah, you know I spent, we spent a year. I kind of committed myself to preaching a Psalm every week for a year in our church.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

Wow.

Pastor Chris Nafis:

Such a if anyone's listening and thinking of preaching out there like I was worried it would be tiresome and get repetitive.

Pastor Chris Nafis:

It did not feel that way at all. In fact, it was one of the most formative years of my life. I feel like just digging in every single week to the Psalms, and one of the things that I found in myself was I don't even know if teaching would be the right word, Like it wasn't, like it was teaching me this, but I felt like I was kind of discovering my place in the world, both in terms of, like the cosmic order of things, finding humility before God and also finding some audacity to say things that I didn't think I was allowed to say, and also some responsibility towards neighbor and land and gratitude for, like, the abundance of life, but also like my place in, like the geography of things you know, noticing where I am and the beauty around me, and you know there's so much geography in scripture. I guess my question for you is you know, how has the Hebrew Bible maybe the Psalms in particular, but just more generally how has it taught you to think about place?

Dr. Ellen Davis:

Well, maybe the first thing I should say is that I didn't learn Hebrew and I didn't study, I didn't really study Bible until I was a student, my junior year in college, living in Jerusalem, jerusalem, and so there's never been a time in my, there's never been a time when I really was beginning to engage the Bible deeply that I did not know the land in which it was written, to which it refers as you say continually to which it refers and the language in which it was written. So, for me, the Bible altogether, but the Psalms, which many of them are oriented around the temple or life in that land in various ways, there was never a time when I was really paying attention to them, that I didn't have a pretty lively imagination of the place in which they're based. So I just think that's important to say, and maybe one reason that I am susceptible to the power of the Psalms is that place has always been important to me in my personal life. I grew up in an extremely beautiful place. I grew up on an island in the San Francisco Bay, san Francisco Bay and so, and every afternoon after school, my best friend and I would just walk around the island talking about the books that we were reading. So so I was outside very much of the time, just being conscious of. I mean, maybe one of the best things I can say about myself as a child is that I lived in a beautiful place and I knew it. So I don't live there now, I couldn't afford to live there now, but you know, but at least when I did live there I received the grace of it and it made me feel that I and I suppose, as I got older, we as human beings cannot be fully who we are without being sensitive to the places that we are, the places that we are. And and in terms of a particular place, of course, the psalmist speak most often of Jerusalem, which they see as a place of consummate beauty and and a place that God has chosen to in some way be present to human beings.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

But Wendell Berry, farmer, writer, poet and certainly one of the people who has sensitized this generation to the importance of place and the fragility of place, he has a wonderful statement.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

I think it's in one of his essays, I don't think it's in a poem, but he says there are no unsacred places, there are sacred places and there are desecrated places. And I think what I, and that rings true for me, and I think the first place I ever really thought of as sacred is Jerusalem, and for me it's palpable. It's a war-torn place, as we know very well, but that doesn't mean it isn't a sacred place. It's never been a really peaceful place. That's why the Psalms say pray for the peace of Jerusalem, because it's not a peaceful place, but I think, really feeling that in some way that place needed to be recognized as holy, that disposed me to a certain way of looking at other places and recognizing that our beloved places and probably every place has been beloved to somebody and probably every place has been beloved to somebody that are beloved places are endangered and often treated very, very badly, desecrated.

Pastor Chris Nafis:

Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. Yeah, through war and through, like the ecological crisis, which you've written a lot about and spoken a lot about, and I wonder you know you talk about growing up in a place where you were very aware of the beauty of the place where you were and you seem like you were very present in that place. Like, physically walking around more common for people to almost intentionally stay, not rooted in a place, to have the ability to transplant, to move around, to not feel like they're tied to any place, so that they can go for a job over here or so they can go and spend six months over here. And I wonder how that might be disruptive of our theology and our spirituality. Um, like, do you think that shapes our imagination? This isn't necessarily a bible question, I guess, but do you think that shapes our imagination in a way that's unhelpful or that's particular?

Dr. Ellen Davis:

I'm just making a note so that I don't forget. I think, first of all, I should not be taken as a model of the spiritual virtue of stabilitas for the Benedictine tradition. Stabilitas, the three vows they take poverty, chastity, not obedience, but stability, stabilitas, staying, having and it comes from the Latin to stand, having a place to stand. And I have moved around a great deal in my teaching life. I've been at Duke for 24 years, so I think I've finally attained the grace of stability, but I moved a lot before that. But I moved a lot before that, and I moved a lot for my studies as well as my teaching. So I just need to be honest about that. And those moves, none of them was coerced, they were all moves that I made voluntarily, moves that I made voluntarily, and I think each of them opened up a new sort of form of blessing in my life, new experiences, that a blessing that wouldn't have happened if I hadn't entered into that place. So, having said that, yes, I think that place is important. As I say, we need to have a place to stand at, you know, if not literally, nonetheless in some real sense in our formation.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

So I'll say two things. I think that, for me, study of the Bible has provided a great deal of the stability in my life. I could say that the tradition of study has often been my place to stand and it's real for me, and it's populated by people I can name, some of whom died centuries before I was born. But I'm deeply grateful for what they did that made it possible for me to do what I do, and some of them, of course, have been my teachers or the people with whom I've studied, or my own students. So it's a strong sense of community shaped in relation to this text and tradition, traditions in the plural of interpretation in which we all stand. So that's metaphorical, but it's not abstract.

Pastor Chris Nafis:

Yeah.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

And it's not less real for being metaphorical. But I would also say that if one is going to move around a lot, as I have said, then it's important to pay attention to where you are and value it and remember it when you leave it and, as much as possible, maintain connections with it, and for me that's through personal relationships. I'm the only member of my rather large extended family who has made my life away from the West Coast, and I've lived away from my family of origin for 50 years. I still miss them, they miss me, my family of origin for 50 years. I still miss them, they miss me, but I cannot be with them for many of the important changes that happen in our common life. But I have made it.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

I rarely take a vacation. It's been years since I've taken a vacation that did not take me to be with a member of my family, and it's not a discipline. I mean, I'm lucky. My family lives in nice places and they're wonderful people, but it's a way of staying connected with the place that formed me and the people of that place. And, as one of my cousins said to me, there's a death. We're anticipating a death in our family. A very kind of life I live, which is different from my other family members. Yeah, yeah.

Pastor Chris Nafis:

And I mean it's interesting to think about place in relation to community, in relation to scripture. I mean, if you read the story of the Old Testament, I mean the Jews are often not in the place that they want to be right. I mean Abraham is called out of his homeland to a new place. We've got the you know the wilderness stuff. We've got a huge chunk of the Old Testament is around the exile and the Jews being removed from their place and it does seem like the stories of scripture, the tradition, the prophetic word, the poetry, is what kind of binds them together, even when they're scattered and even when they're not in their homeland.

Pastor Chris Nafis:

And so it's that memory of the place, right yeah.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

Absolutely memory of the place, right, yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

And of course, this is something that Jewish communities are even more aware of than we.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

In fact, I don't think Christian communities on the whole are very sensitive to matters of exile and being bound to a particular place, but at Passover but at Passover, virtually every Jew says this year here, next year in Jerusalem.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

Well, it's a way of expressing that sense of belonging to a place that we are not, and Christians have understood that, as this is no lasting city, you know, there is another place to which we belong, and I think that's very important to me, and I have a sense of a place to which I am going, and that sense strengthens as the people closest to me age and die, assist me, age and die, and I think it's really critical not to devalue the place where we are. This is how we live, here is our formation, for whatever life will look like on the other side of death and of course, I have no idea, but I have noticed that, through the centuries, people have tended to imagine life on the other side of death as being characterized by the things we value most on this side of death. So, then, we should be valuing the places that we are.

Pastor Chris Nafis:

Yeah, even now, right, and I mean, I think a lot of what has been inspirational from your work has been your focus on the land, right and care for the things that are around us, for our places, and that doesn't necessarily need to be Jerusalem. I mean, it is Jerusalem, but it's not only that, it's it's where do we find ourselves and how do we care for the land that we are? Um, that's been put in our charge and so I guess you know maybe a bit of a transition. But like, how has, how has your study of scripture led you to focus on ecology? It's like the guy, but others may not, it's so.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

This goes back now 35 years, something like that. I made a trip to California and went to an area that I had remembered as a child, a very rural area when I was a child in Sonoma County, north of the Bay Area, where I grew up, and I noticed highways running through across areas that I remembered farmhouses, and now they had a highway running in front of them and it was quite shaking to me front of them, and it was quite shaking to me, and so I was teaching in a very urban area, new Haven, connecticut at the time, and I came back and I decided that I was going to teach a class on a biblical theology of land, as I called it. I didn't even know what that meant, but I thought, somehow I intuited that that was the only way I would be able to reckon with what I was seeing and the way that it hurt me. In a sense, even though these places had never been my home home, I could just see how much they had changed in, you know, between my childhood and my young middle age, and I thought this is not a sustainable trajectory, um, with highways running across you know, where people had been grazing animals, growing crops, and so I started teaching this class, I was again. I was in a very urban area, very urban university, I think. I wound up having everybody at Yale Divinity School who'd ever been on a farm in that class. They just kind of came to see what was going on.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

And when I started teaching the class, I thought I was going to have to be very careful to pick scripture texts that dealt with land, with food, with care of these things. And, of course, you know, I, within a couple of weeks, I began to realize that everywhere I turned in the Bible, it was there, because almost all Israelites were farmers and even those who lived in the city grazed their sheep outside the walls, you know. So, um, so everybody was sensitive to where the food and water came from and sensitive to the fact that the land of israel, um, is an ecologically fragile zone on the planet. Well, now, in a sense, the whole planet is an ecologically fragile zone. So it was one of those sort of self-confirming experiences of beginning to read the Bible through this lens and then seeing that what in fact I was doing was not bringing a new perspective to the Bible, but getting just slightly closer to the mindset of the biblical writers themselves, but one that I had been really completely insensitive to, even though I did as I said.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

I've known the land of the Bible since I was a teenager and but, as I sometimes say to my students, you need to bear in mind that no developed culture has ever lived at such a distance from the mindset, the sensibilities of the biblical writers as we do. And that's not just time, that's industrialization to reduce it to a single word urbanization, industrialization on the scale that we know it. So if we're going to understand the way the biblical writers understand a healthy formation of human life, we need to begin poking some holes in our ironclad, industrialized mindset in order to let something else begin to seep in. And something that has been enormously encouraging for me in the last, I'll say, going on 20 years is that I don't have to make this case now to my students because they already know it, and so now they don't know the Bible many of them as well as I do and so they want help reading the text in a way that's sensitive to these issues and can help them then bring it to others through teaching and preaching.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

But I don't need to tell them that our relationship to the land is broken, that our food system is broken, and a number of the young people that I know, and some of the most talented students that I have, are engaged, as you have been in, directly in farming, in food production, in addressing the brokenness of the system. That just wasn't happening. When I started teaching, you know, people would have said why I have a theology degree, why on earth would I do that? Well, now the answer is exactly why on earth would I do it? I know the answer because we are on earth. That's just that to me is sort of the again speaking metaphorically, that is the fruit of my labor and I don't mean it's all because of me, but I just mean that it's. It is rewarding when I see it happening.

Pastor Chris Nafis:

Yeah. So I mean there definitely is an increased awareness of the ecological crisis, of the, I mean, and some of it is just because it's undeniable. I mean just this week we had a terrible hurricane go through the entire area, including North Carolina. We're not in Durham but in Western North Carolina and you know there's. I guess I have mixed feelings about it because in some ways I do feel like there's a much greater awareness in my generation and below than there has been in some of the generations that are a little older than us. But on the other hand, I feel like we're all sort of just on the edge of despair, thinking that this is like an irreversible thing, and I feel like the, I feel like the scriptures are written largely to people in that exact position, who are like on the edge of despair. You know how can they help us through it? Like, yeah, where do we find help in that journey?

Dr. Ellen Davis:

in the Old Testament, I guess, yeah, yeah, one of my students in a class that I'm teaching right now, but this is an earlier iteration of it. Um, I teach a class with my preaching colleague, jerusha neil, on preaching biblically in response to climate change, and the class is called Hope for Creation An Exilic Perspective, and a number of students have said exactly what you say, that they're on the verge of despair or maybe already have crossed that line, and and so a number of them have said it's really important to me that the question mark is there, hope for creation question mark, because they don't want someone just telling them it's going to be fine, right, but one of my students who is a professional he works in the area of, in fact, his organization is called Creation Justice Ministries, so this is what he does for a living and was doing that before he came to divinity school and he said, or probably wrote in a paper, that when he started taking the class, he wasn't very keen on the word hope, because he said, when I hear Christians speaking about hope, I think that means they've got their heads buried in the sand. They just don't, they don't want to see the problem and the depth of it. And he said now, after, at the end of the class he said now I understand my own role differently and I see that my place in the church is to be an agent of realistic hope. So you know, realistic hope is not the same as optimism. It's it's all going to be an agent of realistic hope. So you know, realistic hope is not the same as optimism. It's all going to be fine.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

And I don't know, because my work is all within the context of, in the broad sense, the church. I do know that there are practitioners of hope who do not have faith that God is at work. But the people I work with do have faith in the reality of God. And hope is a practice. It's certainly not a personality characteristic, it's not having a sunny disposition. It's a practice and it's a job. And I think it's a job that the biblical writers instill in us, the psalmists, when we started this conversation, and that's an imperative and it's very much directional hope.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

By Romans it would read.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

By ruling class Romans it would read differently than it does.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

It's people who are on the underside of empire and yet believe, without denying all the evidence to the contrary, often naming it and lamenting it, sometimes throwing it in God's face and yet believe that God is listening and that God cares and that history does not end with this present, seemingly irresolvable defeat, often as it feels like Not knowing what the history of life with God looks like on the other side of that, and different that's envisioned different ways by, in different parts of the Bible, by different people.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

I don't think they would all ever come to agree with each other. And yet some a conviction that it is worth telling the story and naming all of the evidence that can be marshaled against hope, because somehow they believe that God has not given up on us and we should not give up on God. I mean, I think of somebody I know have known a survivor of the death camps of Auschwitz and he said I don't know what it means to believe in God after what I've experienced, but I know that people, you know that all the people who stood stand behind me didn't give up on God. So who am I to give up on that? You?

Dr. Ellen Davis:

know I just just keep passing it on, and so that's one thing. Hope looks like. I think, and I was just preaching this morning on the first illuminated hand-illuminated Bible. It's called the St john's illuminated bible. It's the first hand illuminated bible to be created in something like 700 years. It's a remarkable project and the question I asked is why would it be created by a monastic community of benedictines in collegeville, minnesota?

Pastor Chris Nafis:

what can I? What is a hand illuminated bible? Could you um?

Dr. Ellen Davis:

I don't know what that is. It has been written by hand on parchment on okay vellum, animal skin and painted with 160 gorgeous illuminations, done in gold and pigments. It's absolutely, absolutely unbelievable. And Duke Divinity School has been given there's an original, but then there is a printed version of it that is still illumined with gold by hand. It's an amazing thing, illumined with gold by hand. It's an amazing thing.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

And so I posed the question, preaching in response to receiving this gift this morning. I asked when does beauty become a matter of urgency? You know, what does it mean for us to receive these seven, very, these seven very, very beautiful and, frankly, very expensive volumes? Why was it worth it to a community of monks to spend 15 years producing this, and is this a good use of resources to give to the school? And my answer was that beauty is urgent, not when it's trying to sell us something, but when beauty is summoned forth in the service of hope.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

And I often look at the biblical text. Some of the texts that I know for sure came out of a situation of exile, of people in a desperate condition the last half of the book of Isaiah, many of the Psalms, job. One could go on a lot of Jeremiah, ezekiel. Those are such beautifully written books. I mean, jeremiah is one of the best poets Isaiah ever to have worked in the Hebrew language. And they were in a desperate situation.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

Why was it worth it to write in what would have seemed to be a doomed language when the Babylonian empire was coming in and imposing their language, their control as far as the eye could see, both geographically and forward into history? Why was it important to be creating beautiful Hebrew poetry that only survivors could read? But that's nothing to me because in fact, 26, 2600 years later, I'm reading it and I'm teaching it to my students, and nobody is very, very few people are reading the texts of the babylonian empire in the language in which they were written. Right, it's somehow. That's. This is what Psalm 145 is speaking about when it says your sovereignty is sovereignty over all kingdoms, right.

Pastor Chris Nafis:

Reminds me, I was kind of flipping through one of your more recent books that covers basically the entire Bible and the chapter you wrote on Ezekiel kind of caught my eye. I was just thinking about this conversation and I think you said in there that probably Judaism, christianity, the whole tree of religions that comes from there, would not exist without the book of Ezekiel. Does that ring a bell?

Dr. Ellen Davis:

I'd forgotten. I said that the first book I ever wrote was on Ezekiel. I have something to say yeah, thank you, I think I know. I mean, I don't know what I meant when I wrote it, but I'll tell you what it means to me hearing it now. And so I'm going to go back to a conversation I had with a nine-year-old child at a church some years ago now. Child at a church some years ago now.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

She was a student in, I think, a really wonderful Sunday school sort of program called Godly Play, and it's just a way of telling the story of the Bible, not in a sort of souped up way, just going to what's theologically significant about it and leaving children lots and lots of time to hear the story and then just wonder about what that story could mean for them. And so I was visiting at a church that used this program for the children and I had always wanted to see it, I'd heard of it, so I went and sat in and then a nine-year-old, at a certain time when children do their work, the work she was assigned was to host me, their work, the work she was assigned was to host me. And so I said to her I wonder, picking up sort of the language of godly play. I said I wonder what your favorite book, what your favorite story is? And immediately, without pausing for breath, she said exile. This is a nine-year-old. And I said, oh, and I wonder what's important to you about that story went in, or maybe she said the people I don't know what she said they went into exile and they thought they were leaving God behind and when they got there they discovered that God was already there ahead of them. Well, that's the book of Ezekiel. And I thought, well, if people like you, chris, any of my students who've been in my introductory Old Testament class, if they came out at the end and could sum that up, I would be satisfied that we'd done our work. And this was a nine-year-old child in a Sunday school class in an Episcopal church not a very promising location to learn a lot about biblical theology in my experience. Learn a lot about biblical theology in my experience.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

Yes, and that's exactly right that Ezekiel is called to be a prophet out beyond the, on the far side of nowhere in Babylon. He's been driven away from Jerusalem and heavens open and he sees God, and he can hardly. Ezekiel is almost inarticulate because he can't describe what he's seen. He's just stumbling over his own tongue, palpably present in some way that could barely be articulated on the beyond the end of history as anyone had ever known it.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

Ezekiel was a priest in the temple in Jerusalem. He had seen the city fall, the throne of David fall, the temple destroyed, everything that seemed to guarantee God's commitment to the community washed away. And he is given a vision of God on the other side of all of that, in not the land of promise, but the land of absolute desolation and desperation. And I think it's because the Bible comes to us out of the least promising situation imaginable, or multiple situations, because the New Testament comes to us after the crucifixion, after Jerusalem is destroyed by another empire, the Romans. But it's because our scripture comes to us, you might say, out of losing situations, that it can be taken up by people who feel themselves to be in losing situations and look and see if there's hope for us there.

Pastor Chris Nafis:

So biblical theology really speaks right to the heart of despair in a lot of ways and calls hope kind of out of those places, and I can think of all sorts of ways that people in the church or the church as a whole, or like humanity, feels like we're in, like on the brink of destruction.

Pastor Chris Nafis:

You know, like I just feel like that. That is like the overwhelming sense we get as we watch the news, as we just kind of talk to people, is that there are all of these like existential threats to us and you know you go to any churchy conference and they're, you know the church is dying and there's all these other kinds of existential threats and maybe part of the calling of Scripture is to well, you know, I think there is a calling to get to work and to do the hard work of, you know, changing how we live and what we do in this world that's leading to some of this destruction, but also to make beautiful things. I don, you know, changing how we live and what we do in this world that's leading to some of this destruction, but also to make beautiful things, I don't know, is that what I'm kind of hearing you say?

Dr. Ellen Davis:

No, absolutely. In whatever way it is given to us to magnify the Lord by putting our energies on the side of beauty rather than destruction, and that and of course I mean, as you know, not the most important forms of beauty very likely don't have a material form. It's saying something kind to somebody, paying attention to somebody. You know those are acts of beauty and those are recognizing, when you recognize value. That is something other than monetary value.

Pastor Chris Nafis:

Right.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

When you see a situation, a person that is fragile and honor that with recognition is fragile and honor that with recognition, and that's that's magnifying the beauty in the world and, through that, magnifying the Lord, who is the maker of all.

Pastor Chris Nafis:

Yeah, Love that and yeah, it's connecting to all kinds of things that we've talked about in this podcast in recent days. But I don't want to take up all of your time. I'm really grateful that you've come on at all and joined me. Dr Davis, I know it's been a long day for you already. Is there anything else? Any closing thoughts that you want to share before we kind?

Dr. Ellen Davis:

of. Yeah, one thing that when you were just speaking a few minutes ago about people saying and I know they do that the church is dying, I would say some forms of church need to die. And I'm not naming what they are, I don't know what they are but if the church is going to live, then it's going to have to keep emerging into new forms to realize new possibilities. And I'm pretty deeply traditional After all, I am an Episcopalian but nonetheless I try to be open to what is new.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

But I think of someone who's doubtless been your teacher, my now retired colleague, stanley Howell Ross. My now retired colleague, stanley Howell, was saying a few years ago not a very promising time as we were beginning to feel the deep division in this country, and I'm sitting in my office right now looking at the chair in which he sat when he said well, at least now we know what the church is for. And that seemed to me to be a very simple way of expressing a truth that the church is exactly for finding ways to live, putting our energies on the side of beauty and kindness and justice in situations that do not seem to foster those things. And if we are proclaiming the name or the symbols of Christ, and doing it out of anger and in contempt for others, then we're really standing on the wrong side of the cross.

Pastor Chris Nafis:

Yeah, yeah, I mean like the image of writing poetry in the midst of, like destruction and annihilation really kind of rings forth from that what I hear you saying, and not kind of getting caught up in the anger and the frenzy and all of the stress and everything of the division and the pain. I mean, in some ways, at some point we have to kind of recognize our own limitations and to recognize that, like I'm not the one that's going to save us, right, and, uh, I'm not the one that's going to make everything, make everything better, but I can be part of this little work of beauty and that, like you said, can look like something, a literal work of art, poetry, something like that, or a shared meal, or an extra 10 minutes of time that you didn't have to give to somebody who doesn't necessarily deserve it or doesn't seem like they deserve it, or whatever that might be, and, you know, kind of committing ourselves to things that we know are going to fall short of the solution to the world's ills but that are going to carry a sort of a legacy of beauty. It reminds me of, you know, jesus telling us to store up our treasures in heaven because the things of this earth are coming down. But that's kind of how we've been going through the book of Matthew in our church, that's kind of how I've been reading. That is that you know, do these little things that will last for eternity and let go of the things that you think are necessary for now and commit yourself instead to these little bits of beauty, these little treasures that are heavenly and not passing away.

Pastor Chris Nafis:

Well, thank you so much for your time, dr Davis. Uh, as I said, I'm grateful for just your writing, your time, your teaching. Um, I was very fortunate to have you as a student at Duke and um you've just been a blessing to so many people over the years and I'm glad that um get to share a little bit of your thought and wisdom with a few extra people here. Thank you so much for the time.

Dr. Ellen Davis:

Thank you for giving me a little bit of insight into your ministry, god bless.

Pastor Chris Nafis:

God bless you, thank you.

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