At that point all the many people
who had rushed to Lula’s defense when he was falsely accused
of being an alcoholic rushed with equal speed to denounce Lula’s
apparent attempt to undermine freedom of the press in Brazil.
Finally, wiser heads within Lula’s cabinet prevailed, and
today, May 18, Lula agreed to forget the whole thing. But that
gives you some idea of how confused Lula and his people are right
now. Having campaigned about twenty years for the presidency on
a radical reform platform, Lula has, once elected, embraced the
highly conservative fiscal and monetary policies of his predecessors
in the hope that eventually favorable macroeconomic developments
will facilitate his promised reforms. Meanwhile, however, it looks
as if he is not doing anything at all and has no plan.
Fortunately, the people at ITEBA, the Institute for Theological
Education in Bahia, are accustomed to governmental incompetence
and inertia and are quite prepared to go on about their business
in spite of national politics. ITEBA is in serious need of a building.
For more than twenty years ITEBA has shared space with a private
high school, but recently that high school, wanting to expand
its own activities and needing the space, has asked ITEBA to move.
By the grace of God, ITEBA has received a grant for approximately
$150,000, enough to build or buy its own building. By the time
Keiko and I arrive, talks should be going on there about a new
or re-habbed building for ITEBA.
ITEBA has told me that in the semester beginning the end of July,
I will be teaching beginning and advanced Hebrew along with a
course in theology. What course in theology I do not know. For
that reason I have been reading in historical theology and Christology
as well as in religion and science. I don’t really feel
competent to teach outside of Biblical studies, but if ITEBA needs
me to do so, I’ll give it a try.
Keiko has been busy studying too, and she’s making reasonable
progress in Portuguese. But since Portuguese is nothing like English
and even less like her native Japanese, she doesn’t expect
to win a Portuguese-language speech contest any time soon. Her
short-term goal is just to learn enough Portuguese so that she
doesn’t feel totally out of it in her first few months.
We’re confident that in time she’ll learn to get by
pretty nicely.
Since March 10, we have been living in student housing at the
Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, which is physically and
academically connected to McCormick Theological Seminary. Together
these two seminaries completely cover the perimeter of a square
city block, with a beautiful green courtyard in the center. Both
buildings are extremely modern, and the McCormick building is
new and very handsome. This is a nice place to live and await
visas. In fact, it’s where Keiko and I lived and raised
our children from 1978-1990. So we’re back in our old neighborhood
with our daughter Sarah and lots of old friends, seminarians,
and theologians. Socially it has been very pleasant for us with
many parties, dinners, and get-togethers of all kinds.
Part of my daily routine here is to read the Brazilian newspapers
on the Internet, and I have yet to find any opinion favorable
to Bush. In fact, there’s a consensus among Brazilians that
Bush and his unilateralist policies represent a significant danger
to the whole world. Whether that assessment is fair or correct
I don’t know, but it is clear that Brazilians now have more
reason than ever to think of us Americans as bullies, devotees
of power and violence. The bright side of the Iraq war—and
believe it or not, there is one—is that with all the bloodshed,
scandals, embarrassment, and bad publicity it has produced, it
reminds us Christians of something frequently forgotten, namely,
that Jesus rejected violence. As a student of the Old Testament,
I am always struck, in reading the New, to discover that God has
decided to hide God’s awesome power just where no one would
think of finding it: in Jesus’ active non-violence. This
may be the single hardest thing for us Americans to wrap our minds
around, that Jesus’ rejection of violence has within itself
great power, in fact, world-changing power. By comparison, even
“shock and awe” seem pathetic and futile. Yet we Americans
not only have power understood in the conventional sense; we like
to use it. It’s the way we get what we want, and it’s
so much a part of our modus operandi that we are often not consciously
aware of our involvement in it or dependence on it. Now, at last,
we’re getting close to the heart of the difficulty of the
mission to which Keiko and I have been called in Salvador, Bahia,
Brazil. Our mission is not only to teach in a seminary but to
demonstrate to the Brazilian person-on-the-street that we are
really followers of Jesus and not adherents to the American cult
of power and violence. Keiko will have no problem because she
is Japanese, not American, and is obviously a very gentle, non-violent
person. No one is going to think that she secretly worships power
and violence. But everything the United States has done over the
last three years in particular could lead Brazilians to assume
that an American like me does, even if I do it unconsciously.
In fact, I fully expect that my students, colleagues, friends,
and others will find little ways of showing me that I am not so
detached from the cult of power as I thought I was. As a result
I will be standing in more or less constant need of self-examination
and re-direction as I attempt to follow Jesus.
Maybe such self-examination and re-direction wouldn’t be
such a bad idea for other Americans too, whether or not they plan
to teach in Brazil.
Yours in Christ,
Bob
Bob and Keiko Butterfield
Mission Co-workers
ITEBA
Salvador, Bahia
|
