An Unrelenting Hope
Inaugural Address
The Reverend Javier A. Viera, Ed.D.
President
Professor of Education and Leadership
Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary
October 20, 2021
In what felt like an instant, the hope and joy of a people, of a nation, erupted in uncontrollable celebration. Moments before, the nervous energy was palpable wherever you found yourself as Jasmine Camacho-Quinn waved to the camera, knelt at the starting line, and waited for the starter’s gun to sound. Five years earlier she had also been the hope a nation, but at the Rio Olympics, while leading the pack, she tripped on the third to last hurdle and her pain, tears, and shock were representative of much more than just her personal disappointment. In a post-race interview, she made a promise to herself and her people: “I’m not going to let this race define my future…I felt embarrassed, like I let the whole country down,” she said, “but I also received a lot of love. Everybody was so supportive and proud of me for making it this far, being so young, and representing Puerto Rico.”
Five years later the expectations and hopes were even higher. She was the highest ranked hurdler in the world. As fate would have it, in her qualifying heat in Tokyo, she broke the world record in the 100m hurdles. So imagine the pressure she felt, worried that this time around, ranked #1 and a world record holder, she might come home empty handed again, no medal, no victory. The suspense lasted for 12.37 seconds, and this is how it unfolded—first the race, then the reaction, then the moment that said it all.
[A Video is played of the final heat of the 100m Hurdles at the Tokyo Olympics, followed by scenes of celebrations around Puerto Rico, and concluding with the playing of the Puerto Rican national anthem as Camacho-Quinn stands on the gold medal stand and the Puerto Rican flag is raised above the U.S. flag.]
That last video of the medal ceremony is the moment I claim said it all. There is so much going on there; so many subtle messages and emotions to unpack. Sure, it’s a moment of personal redemption and triumph, but that’s not the moral of this story. I’m not the sort of preacher who uses sport to make generalized lessons or pronouncements on life. I’m somewhat suspicious about those kinds of sermons. My point today is not about perseverance in the face of odds, or about redemption after humiliating defeat, or even about new life on the other side of suffering or after hitting bottom. This isn’t a redemption story; it’s an identity story. It’s about what claims one and about what one claims; it’s about how one sees the world and about how the world sees you; it’s about knowing who you are even when the world tells you you’re someone else; it’s about being connected to your deepest love, your deepest identity, your deepest purpose—which is always bigger than and beyond you. Let me explain.
Whilst standing on that podium three things instantly jumped out to most Puerto Ricans: 1) The visual power of Jasmine wearing the Flor de Maga in her hair, the Puerto Rican national flower, that dots the countryside and most roads and backyards on the island. It wasn’t just a lovely or fashionable accoutrement. A ubiquitous symbol of our small paradise, it was a message to a people back home that they were in Tokyo with her. 2) The moment the national anthem began to play and how her head almost uncontrollably flew back and looked up to the skies as tears flowed freely with emotion, in exaltation, and who knows what else, but it captured the sentiments of an entire people perhaps better than anything else could have. 3) The moment when the Puerto Rican flag is hoisted higher than the American flag, since all of our lives we’ve seen it the other way around. It was brief, but oh so significant and powerful. Even the most ardent proponents of annexation and statehood had to admit—that felt good. Really, really good.
The reason that this isn’t a redemption story, but instead and identity story, is because Jasmine Camacho-Quinn embodying the Puerto Rican nation so fully and completely is a conundrum. She doesn’t easily check all the boxes of what is “a real Puerto Rican,” and being who she is—an Afro-Puerto Rican woman, raised outside of the island in the cradle of empire, speaking the empire’s language, studying in its schools, claiming multiple, fluid identities— was a bit much for the purists among us. Because we live in a world of social media haters, the reaction was swift and before you knew it the debate raged on whether she was truly one of us. Everyone was grateful for her victory and proud of her accomplishments, proud of how she represented us, but for some, albeit a small number, Jasmine being who Jasmine is was a threat to how they understood themselves and pushed the limits of what they would accept. And a national debate ensued.
Jasmine being who Jasmine is prompted serious reflection about our own history and about our own internalized coloniality. It exposed contradictions like how we resent the racism and second-class status that we often experience at the hands of our colonial superpower, and yet, we often inflict our own version of racism and second-class status upon ourselves. It exposed the contradiction between how hypocritical and indecent we find that the United States Supreme Court ruled that Puerto Rico is “foreign in a domestic sense” and yet we often practice a similar kind of hypocrisy in our own caste, class, racial, and gender hierarchies, often erasing blackness, indigeneity, and gender. The myths and tropes we tell ourselves about who are and who we’ve been all seemed to be under a microscope and up for reconsideration. Families who were willing had some seriously uncomfortable conversations, including my own. Who could have predicted that a little black girl born in South Carolina to an African American father and Puerto Rican mother would have the power and influence to provoke such critical reassessment? Jasmine being who Jasmine is momentarily lifted the spirits of beleaguered island while simultaneously holding up a mirror so that we could take a long gander at who is really there.
But there’s hope to this story, a hope that helps frame my own thinking about the future of Garrett-Evangelical. I’m so proud of many editorials, articles, tweets, news reports, etc. that I read or saw in response to questioning of Jasmine’s Puerto Rican-ness. Her victory and our subsequent elation provoked an honest conversation about who’ve been and who we want to be. Her presence on that podium and the pandemonium it generated on the island and in the diaspora generated honest reflection about whether we will create ever-expanding space and make room for an expansive understanding of our peoplehood. Jasmine momentarily changed the national conversation and mindset—away from the colonial reality and economic challenges that reign supreme—and enabled a deeper, penetrating assessment of who we are, what we value, and who we are determined to be.
I hope you see where I’m going with this long story of identity and reckoning. Over the last 18 months we too have been engaged in many conversations and serious reflections about who are, who we’ve been, and who we are determined to be. It’s been painful and exhilarating, humbling and hopeful, revealing and invigorating. Some of the myths and tropes we tell ourselves about ourselves haven’t borne out as we hoped, and yet our spiritual and institutional DNA proved to be resilient.
And in our scenario, what I envision and long for is that we might be the Jasmine Camacho-Quinn of our moment— the institution that provokes a larger reckoning and reconsideration of what the church and the academy have been, who they serve, and who they are determined to be. Like Jasmine, who said after stumbling badly in Rio, “I’m not going to let this race define my future,” our story is bigger and grander than our stumbles and shortcomings, and we cannot let them define us. We repent and grow from them. We get stronger by reflecting honestly on them. We change as a result. And then we lean into that brilliant spiritual and institutional DNA that has marked us for so long and forge a path that has yet to be laid.
And as I learn about who we’ve been it clarifies for me who we should be determined to be. How many institutions like ours can claim not one, but two foundresses at a time when women couldn’t even be ordained, or vote, or exercise much public leadership? Yet, Eliza Garrett sensed in her spirit that a theological education could transform minds and lives and communities, and ultimately society as a whole. Lucy Rider Meyer knew deep in her spirit that regardless of who the church had been, the church she wanted to be a part of was one that served the poor and the least; that the church couldn’t sit idly by, praying and singing while our city was filled with suffering and hopelessness. The church she envisioned and worked to make possible was one that stood with the poor and with them fought to create a different reality and forge a different future grounded in the theological vision of the city of God. Our Evangelical Association forebears in Naperville knew that the church and the academy had to be responsive to the needs of recent immigrants and different language communities; they were determined to make more room, to draw the circle wider, so that the church and the academy would live into the biblical mandate from Leviticus…“When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall do them no wrong. You shall treat the sojourner who dwells among you as one of you, and you shall love the sojourner as yourself, for you were once sojourners in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” (Lev. 19.33-34) Our forebears took that seriously, embodied it, and left us that tremendous legacy to advance.
In her most recent book, Dr. Nancy Bedford writes, “People who are not in a place of much power in society are constantly told, directly or indirectly, that they have no true value, and that they are not even fully human. By contrast, Jesus spent his whole ministry caring for the well-being of persons, particularly those who were not valued by the powerful in his society. In his actions and words, he showed that each person is intrinsically of value, starting with the most vulnerable. When he speaks in Mark of people ‘denying themselves’ when they become his followers, he is calling them to deny all the distorted versions of themselves that dominant societal norms and values have imposed on them. In exchange, he promises that they will receive the gift of being truly themselves in wholeness and flourishing, made in the image of God, beloved of God.”[1]
That’s it. That’s the work we’ve been called to and that’s the legacy our forebears left for us to refine and accomplish. From our earliest days as a community of learning, we have been called to the margins, called to make the wisdom and the resources and opportunities that exist among us available beyond us and especially to those who cannot yet fathom being a part of us or that we have inadvertently or intentionally left out.
When I’m constantly asked, “What is your vision for Garrett?” I’m reminded of that verse from 1 Peter that we read earlier, “…always be prepared to give an account, to anyone who asks, of the hope that is within you.” And we all should be so prepared. The truth is that I am filled with hope, an unrelenting hope, about our future, because I believe that our future belongs to God, the God that we encounter and find at the margins, the God who calls us to the work that Professor Bedford described. What she described is what I believe Jasmine did for her people: calling them deny all the distorted versions of themselves that have been imposed on them and to instead receive the gift of wholeness and flourishing that being made in the image of God bestows. She didn’t set out to do that, but the beauty of her story is that simply being who she is caused that. Oh, may that be said of us.
My unrelenting hope and vision for Garrett-Evangelical is that we do that work; that we are a community unapologetically claimed and identified by the Spirit of Jesus, called to the margins where Jesus served, seeing and relating to the earth and its people as he saw them and related to them. I believe that as we sustain our connection to that Source, that Spirit, we will equip leaders to grow and thrive in spreading hope at the margins and wherever people are gripped by distorted versions of humanity and of themselves. Garrett is called to be both a mirror so that distortion can been exposed, and also the bearer of the gift of wholeness and flourishing that Jesus promised.
In his most recent book, Dr. Patrick Reyes, a good friend to this seminary, speaks to what he calls The Purpose Gap and how that gap can be closed or bridged to include and welcome and see those at the margins. “The work is not hard,” he says. “Like [when] being in Yosemite, we need to learn to slow down and value the beauty that is already present. We do not need to control it or extract it but simply be inspired by it. For those from marginalized communities, the work is about honoring the lives of everyone who makes up the community. For those from the dominant culture, it is about looking at those places and communities that have been cast aside and violated and valuing the experience, knowledge, and wisdom that exist in that space… We must practice [this] together. To create conditions for future generations to thrive, we must practice a new way of seeing the world.”[2]
What Drs. Bedford and Reyes are claiming is not that the world is changing. Rather, how I read them is that they are revealing or reminding us of who God has always been, where God has always been found, and what Christian communities have always been called to do. Theirs is a call to faithfulness; a call to recover a Christian identity and purpose that makes very clear how our work can and should align with the work Jesus set out to accomplish long ago, and, I would argue, the work that our foundresses and founders also set out to accomplish long ago.
Jon Sobrino said that Hope is the seed of liberation, and honestly, that’s why I actually think that Puerto Ricans everywhere erupted in celebration when Jasmine crossed that finish line. It’s why we recognized all the symbolism of her standing proudly on that medal stand, bearing our flag and our people in heart. It was much more than just a race, it was a seed, a seed of hope that may one day lead to our real liberation. But Sobrino’s claim is also why I cling to an unrelenting hope about Garrett, because I believe that we can and must be that seed of hope in the world, that seed of liberation. At times that work will feel daunting, and what it requires of us personally and collectively may even be overwhelming, but we must not lose hope. As the psalmist began a potentially daunting and overwhelming journey, they wisely asked, “I will lift my eyes to the hills, from where will my hope come?” A fair question indeed, and the answer is swift. “My help comes from the Lord.” My mother used to sing this psalm to my brothers and me every night before we went to bed. She’d sit on our bedside and rub our back or hair and just sing it to us like a lullaby. “Alzaré mis ojos a los montes; ¿de dónde vendrá mi socorro? Mi socorro viene de Jehová, que hizo los cielos y la tierra…”
I cannot tell you how often these words and that lullaby have accompanied me during life’s most difficult moments. Their truth grounds me when I otherwise despair. They’ve grounded me in these first months here with you. We must remember that as we walk this sometimes-perilous path together, and whenever we’re riddled with doubt or fear or gripped by uncertainty about who we are or why we’re here, I implore you to return to this psalm. Find hope and confidence in its closing words, words that today I hear as a promise to Garrett-Evangelical, the foundation we stand on as we risk, as we dream, as we dare together. The psalmist promises: “The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade at your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord will keep you from all evil; will keep your life (our life). The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time and for evermore.”
May those words be the hope that seeds the work of liberation among us and through us. Amen.