The sound of children laughing is a sure sign that ‘something’s going right’

LOUISVILLE — When the president of Auburn Theological Seminary, the Rev. Dr. Emma Jordan-Simpson, imagines a world that’s healing, she hears the sound of children laughing.

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“I say that because as a parent, a pastor, an organization leader and a member of the community, I know that when children are laughing, something’s going right,” she told the Rev. Bill Davis during the most recent edition of “Leading Theologically,” which can be heard here.

“When you are pursuing the sound of children laughing, it changes the way you are engaging the world,” Jordan-Simpson said. When she heard her oldest child laugh for the first time, “it changed the way I engaged the world, because that’s the sound I want to hear, and I want to do everything to elevate that sound.”

During recent editions of the podcast, Davis, the Senior Director for Theological Education Funds Development at the Presbyterian Foundation, has engaged in conversations on repair, reconciliation and reparations with a number of faith leaders.

“One of the most powerful aspects of the difference that Jesus made was the vision that we could be reconciled with each other and with God, with humanity and with nature — that it was actually possible for us to do that,” Jordan-Simpson told Davis. As a pastor who has worked with leaders in other faith traditions, it “has been affirmed for me that spirit of reconciliation, that belief in reconciliation, is common to us,” she said. “We may use different words, but the basic tenets of forgiveness, the ability to address resentment and offer pardon, the atonement, making amends for wrongdoing and damage — the work of seeking peace — is indeed work. … Peacemaking doesn’t just happen. It needs to be pursued and it has to be lived every day.”

“Even after great harms, it is possible for us to be healed,” she said, “and to remember and learn from the past so that we can work together to create a different future. That is the work of it all — the work of remembering, of telling ourselves the truth about history, about our past, learning from that not just so we have that as objective information, but because it forms the world we are called to build together.”

She called that approach to reconciliation “common in faith traditions. It’s not unique to Christianity. Sometimes people are put off by the word ‘reconciliation,’ particularly when your experience has been that you live among those who don’t want to reconcile or who demand reconciliation without accountability.”

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Davis asked: What are those early steps in accountability?

“The peace that we settle for is the peace that’s about quiet,” Jordan-Simpson responded. “It’s about silence and about not acknowledging. It’s about keeping a stiff upper lip and going on. That’s a very fragile peace, because we’re human beings and we’re complex.”

Rather than a linear process, reconciliation is “a way of life,” she said. “It’s the complexity of our lives that has us at any moment seeking peace or reckoning with our past,” which is true “for people who have been historic harmers and those who have been historically harmed.”

Reconciliation “is not for the faint of heart,” she said. The first step, a step Auburn Seminary has taken, is to “invest in people’s ability to imagine — to imagine a world where we are reconciled.” At the memorial service for longtime Auburn Seminary President Barbara Wheeler, mourners heard a sermon from Zechariah 8:4-6, the prophetic vision of old men and women with staffs in their hands, sitting along the streets of Jerusalem while boys and girls play in those same streets. The vision ends with these words from the Lord of hosts: “Even though it seems impossible to the remnant of this people in these days, should it also seem impossible to me?”

“I think that’s the imagination for a reconciled world,” she told Davis, but “how do we help people to imagine that when we have conditioned people to believe that’s really not possible? It is possible.”

Citing 1 John 3:14, Jordan-Simpson said we know we’ve passed from death to life when we have love for our siblings.

“To me, that means that reconciliation is not a project for heaven,” she said. Eternal life “begins now with our love for each other. If we say these words are true, then it absolutely is possible. We have to not just preach that — we have to live it and understand that it is a way of life, and not just an end goal.”

Religious leaders, including preachers, “have to understand that you don’t just preach a sermon. You don’t just tell a story and then you go home. Something happens when people listen to your stories — to the sermons that you preach and in seminary classrooms where you teach. People do things with those stories and with those theologies. They shape the way in which we create policies, set up communities, and, ultimately, [determine] who gets to be a human being. There’s incredible import on those stories.”

What many institutions struggle with is “we want this one magical big blast of a thing that immediately absolves us,” she said. “We can set aside some money, we can do these things and it will be over and we’ll be done with it.” The truth is, “the legacies of those past harms are telling us something about the world we have created, and we can’t pay our way out of that.” But “we can change how we engage this world, and that change creates a new world.”

There’s “nothing we are contending with now that was caused last week. These are the great grandchildren of old wounds, but what we can do is listen deeply to somebody’s story, somebody who’s been ignored,” she said. “It’s not the magic in that story — it’s the posture.” We ought to be asking ourselves, “What am I now responsible for after hearing this?”

Asked to name one of the best things she’s heard, Jordan-Simpson went back to her experience helping a mutual aid organization deliver groceries in New York City to people who need food. On her initial effort, she was accompanied by the program director, and it started to snow. At one stop, the two carried bags loaded with food to the house of a woman obviously happy to see them. On the way, “I said to him, ‘Why are you delivering food in the snow?’” Jordan-Simpson said. “He said, ‘because people are hungry.’”

“He didn’t say, ‘that’s my job’ or ‘they filled out an application,’” she told Davis. “He said, ‘because people are hungry.’” With little fanfare or acknowledgement, neighbors were working to get food in the homes of people who needed it “because people are hungry, because people are lonely — not because it’s their obligation,” she said. “That, to me, is the sign that God is working.”

The final guest in the “Leading Theologically” series on reconciliation, repair and reparations is the Rev. Dr. Bruce Grady, executive presbyter of the Presbytery of New Hope. That podcast will drop June 4.