Contending with Captivity

My people were never meant to be free, but since when has that stopped our joy?

Photo by Kristen Reynolds on Unsplash

I love the psalter. Since late 2003 when I was discerning my call to ministry, Psalms has been my favorite book in the Bible. I’ve turned to it repeatedly when life has felt scary uncertain: when I left my tenure-track psychology job to go to seminary, during my two experiences with breast cancer, and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The psalmists’ honesty about their anguish, anger, fear, depression, and hopelessness is refreshing in a faith tradition where people love to espouse cliches like, “we do not walk in fear.” The biblical giants of our faith walked – and sometimes ran – in fear all the time. They openly expressed their anger toward God. They ranted and railed against their enemies and invoked divine destruction upon them. And somewhere in the ranting and railing, they remembered their hope and their faith. They called for God’s will to be done. They demanded that God show up in the midst of their turmoil.

We’re living under a lot of uncertainty right now. It is not confined to one aspect of our lives but is all-encompassing. Will the US descend into the civil war that people on the alt-right seem desperate for? Will the global economy collapse into recession, or worse,? Will climate collapse accelerate under the current administration, hurtling us even faster toward a post-apocalyptic future? Will the constitutional guard-rails hold, preserving the civil liberties that Black Americans and other people have fought desperately for? How much danger are we actually in?

It’s a season when I’d normally be looking toward the psalter to remind me that I am not alone in my anger, my fear, and my confusion about where God is right now. Interestingly, though, it is another set of biblical texts that is resonating with me more strongly right now: the exilic literature, the books that describe the forced removal and captivity of Judah by the Babylonians.

One of the most commonly cited passages in the exilic literature is Jeremiah 29, where the prophet shares this word to the people who had been taken into captivity by Nebuchadnezzar:

Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon:

Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiple there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare (Jeremiah 29:4-7, NRSV).

I have heard this text preached and taught more times that I can count. In every instance that I can recall, the text has been approached as though Christians are the people in exile, albeit not from our ancestral homeland but from our heavenly one. In other words, this world is not our home, but since we are stuck here until we can return to our true home in heaven, we need to seek its welfare. White evangelicals (and people of color from that tradition) especially love that interpretation.

I, however, interpret this text as the descendant of Africans who were literally kidnapped, trafficked across the ocean, and held in captivity for centuries. My ancestors were not held in bondage as divine punishment, but rather out of human greed fueled by imperialism, racism, and capitalism. Their bondage lasted for 250 years, not the 60 years of Babylonian captivity. And that’s not counting the century of sharecropping, Jim Crow segregation and economic exploitation.

The African American migration narrative differs from any other people group that I can think of. It is different from Native Americans who live under the rule of the colonizers who stole their land. It is also different from immigrants from Africa and Asia, who often maintain familial and material connections to their homelands. For the descendants of enslaved Africans, our ties were severed by distance, time, and cruelty. Our names, languages, and tribal identities stripped from us as we were forced to become a new people, an amalgamation of West African tribes.

By the time slavery ended, most of us had forgotten the stories of where we had come from. Or we’d never heard them to begin with, having been sold away from the few who remembered them. Back in Africa, the names of the disappeared had long ceased to be spoken; those who had mourned them were long gone. Two hundred and fifty years is a very long time. Unlike the people of Judah, the freed captives in America did not have elders who had lived through the exile, people who could still remember how to return, who could remember what there had been to return to. We were stuck in the land of our captivity.

Just as Audre Lorde reminds us that we were never meant to survive, we were never meant to be free. And while we have made significant strides toward freedom, we have never truly been free. Our captors keep coming up with new ways to contain us – first sharecropping and lynching, then segregation and redlining, and more recently, mass incarceration, gerrymandering, environmental pollution, and military occupation of our communities. We still live in captivity.

Jeremiah’s letter reminds us, however, that we can thrive in captivity. Indeed we must, because our welfare – our freedom – is bound to the freedom of our captors. OThat’s why I choose to thrive in the midst of captivity. I choose joy and wellness and relationship because it is what will sustain us so that we can move a step closer to freedom. I choose to emulate my own ancestors who danced and sang and prayed and loved and hoped when there seemed to be no reason to. I choose to emulate my ancestors who spoke of freedom, who pushed this nation to live into its promises, because they knew that making America better for all was the path toward making it better for themselves.

Amerikkka may keep trying to hold me captive. But I claim my own freedom always.

What does it look like to thrive in the midst of captivity? Join the conversation and let us know.

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