No Need to “Cook the Books”
Reflection Roundup reports from conversations couched in relationships. Here, readers will find boots-on-the-ground and “live from the field” items important to Christian leaders. As always, listening broadly draws together differing perspectives from which we can learn but with which we may not concur. This month’s post reflects on experiences of listening to Esau McCaulley during his recent visit to the ACU campus. McCaulley treads the terrain of God’s ministry in his own family, with his students at Wheaton, and throughout the world via his writing and speaking.
“What is Jacob’s Dream?” It has become my favorite question and has surfaced every year. I wish I could see it coming and be prepared with the two chapters in Genesis on a tract in my hip pocket, but each year it has arrived when my students and I are utilizing the garden around the Jacob’s Dream statue at Abilene Christian University for some other purpose. We might be gathered to read some key passages in Matthew or to wonder together at the foolishness of the Galatians, and there it is: “Hey, what is this statue for anyway?” It is not a small question, but one through which the entire story of scripture can flow in the answer, containing every ounce of the good news of the gospel. We are people created and called by a God who desires to bless. Lovingly, Yahweh created free will, which yields our blooming tendency to wrestle with God, a characteristic God lovingly accepts and through which gave Israel her name, “people who wrestle” (Gen. 35:10). Throughout McCaulley’s visit, he shared the truth of his own story, which he also portrays in his writing: we are a people who wrestle, and in this we find God. We have since ancient times.
Esau McCaulley recently visited ACU for The Siburt Institute’s fall Summit gathering, “Holy Discomfort: Our Journey Toward God.” He spoke at the Thursday evening “Anchor Point” dinner and lecture, bringing with him just the words of hope that attendees come from all over the country anticipating. McCaulley actually came to campus early that week and spoke to the student body in one of the large chapel gatherings in Moody Coliseum, in addition to visiting several classes. God has clearly given McCaulley something to say and has brought him to a time, both in his own life and in partnership with the mission of God in the world, in which to say it. His clarity is a gift. Like Samuel of old, “the Lord was with him and did not let one of his words fall to the ground” (1 Sam. 3:19).
In each of McCaulley’s lectures, he emphasized God’s obvious love for story as evidenced in the narrative of scripture: “God is stubbornly committed to poetry, song, story.”[1] McCaulley elaborated describing scripture as “argumentative theology balanced with stories,” and challenged his listeners to examine our own lives as a living hermeneutic of the story of scripture. He posed two questions to his audience: 1. “Where is the narrative, the story, in the Christian imagination?” and 2. “What kind of story do I inhabit?”[2] It is these questions his own life addresses in a way that serves as a model for his listeners. By expressing the interpretation of scripture as an exercise in hope in Reading While Black, and in exegeting his own family’s story as a hopeful journey to the promised land in his most recent book How Far to the Promised Land, McCaulley lives Peter’s admonition that we “explain about the hope (we) have” (1 Pet. 3:15). This, I believe, is the key to generational faith.
In Reading While Black, McCaulley proposes that “we adopt the posture of Jacob and refuse to let go of the text until it blesses us. We adopt a hermeneutic of trust in which we are patient with the text in the belief that when interpreted properly it will bring a blessing and not a curse.”[3] This is what McCaulley led the group through on the night of October 12, wrestling through the stories of scripture that led us to our own stories—many of them family stories.
One might have overheard the comment “He preached about seven sermons tonight!” He sure did that night. But he was careful with his narrative. McCaulley pointed out the family dysfunction in Joseph’s story alongside the fact that Joseph doesn’t articulate his trauma. He faithfully watches the narrative of God unfold in his own life. On the other side of his suffering, he found usefulness and a place for Israel to grow into a nation of people while in Egypt, of all places. Setting the narrative of his own life alongside scripture, McCaulley says, “[I wanted to write] a book about trauma that doesn’t travel through destruction. I could not undo the past, but I could write an ending to it. I can speak about forgiveness without normalizing that wrong.”[4] In this way, he has patterned his own life after what he has found in scripture and is letting God write the story. Jesus wrote the ending to the past with his life and offers it to us to claim as our own, something McCaulley’s words offer a roadmap for how to do. “The usefulness is on the other side of suffering. (It is a) story to set you free.”[5]
So often, in matters closest to our hearts, we look for answers. These matters, often of family or of faith, leave us wrestling for God’s presence to be revealed. Jacob was in a mess with Esau from an early age, as was Joseph with his brothers. We so often want God and life to make sense—and there are seasons of clarity—but McCaulley emphasizes the fact that, moment by moment, God comes in presence rather than in coherent answers. His story shows how the narrative of scripture trains our vision to look for God’s presence in our own lives, in the development of our faith, and in the lives of those we love. God has promised presence, not abandonment, and to the people who accept an identity and a place, God has given a promised land, where fear and violence are replaced with courage, honesty, and beauty.[6] As he said, “There is no need to ‘cook the books’ for God to look good.”[7]
In How Far to the Promised Land, McCaulley shares a story about his Great Grandmother Sophia, a version of the story he shared at his dinner lecture in Abilene. It was not lost on me that a matriarch in this family carries a name meaning “ wisdom,” even bearing sacred knowledge. McCaulley’s narrative in Abilene, the telos of the story of scripture he emphasizes, and the reality he encourages we all embrace within our own stories is to “strive for beauty in whatever way makes sense in your context.”
The extent of Sophia’s efforts and the depths of the familial trauma my father experienced confirmed a suspicion that had been growing…It was not enough for me merely to survive, I had to find beauty. I had to see something in the struggle itself that was worth carrying forward. That was Sophia’s gift to me. She showed me that a Black life could be lived with honor through faith even when the world was set against you. I would need to do something with this gift.[8]
It is this admonition that McCaulley left his Summit audience and his readers, and that I take on myself and leave with you: “Beauty is harder than tears” because it involves an active perspective that must be passed, hand to hand, throughout the world.[9] Where might we find and share the beauty of our story today?
Rev. Esau McCaulley, PhD is an author and associate professor of New Testament at Wheaton College in Wheaton, IL. His research and writing focus on New Testament theology, African American biblical interpretation, and articulating Christian theology publicly. McCaulley completed his doctoral studies at the University of St. Andrews where he studied under the direction of N.T. Wright. McCaulley published the award-winning book Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope in 2019. His most recent works include Josie Johnson’s Hair and the Holy Spirit, a 2022 children’s book with a poignant message for all, and his 2023 memoir How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family's Story of Hope and Survival in the American South. McCaulley contributes opinion pieces to The New York Times and has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Christianity Today. He and his wife Mandy, a pediatrician and Navy reservist, have four children.
1. Esau McCaulley, “Holy Discomfort: Our Journey Toward God” (Fall Summit, Abilene Christian University, October 12, 2023).
2. McCaulley, “Holy Discomfort.”
3. Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black : African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope (IVP Academic, 2020), 21.
4. McCaulley, “Holy Discomfort: Our Journey Toward God.”
5. McCaulley, “Holy Discomfort.”
6. McCaulley, “Holy Discomfort.”
7. McCaulley, “Holy Discomfort.”
8. Esau McCaulley, How Far to the Promised Land : One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South (Convergent Books, 2023), 97.
9. McCaulley, “Holy Discomfort.”
