Kate Bowler: Do you think it’s possible for anyone to really change? Like to change their mind? To change their beliefs? Change their priorities? The self-help and wellness industry would love to tell you, yes, change is possible. And with this six-step process or magical elixir, you, too, can have the life you always wanted. You can become a new person tomorrow. Just get more sleep. It’s easy, no problem. Or, maybe you should pick that fight with your friend again about that thing you still disagree on, I’m sure it’ll work this time, just try it. Change is harder than we think. We get stuck. We get stuck in our certainties and our habits and our worldviews and our bad attitudes. I think that’s why maybe we should give ourselves and other people a tiny bit more grace to celebrate when we actually see anyone change anything.
Kate: I’m Kate Bowler and this is Everything Happens. Today, I’m speaking with someone who is near and dear to my heart. His name is Richard Hays. Richard and I work together at Duke Divinity School. It’s a place where we train pastors and community do-gooders and academics and people who want to have very specific opinions about what Paul meant when he said so and so. And Richard and I were pretty certain about a lot of things. But then we had to live it out. We were diagnosed with cancer at almost the exact same time. And we spent many days walking the halls at Duke Hospital, walking through Duke Gardens, walking around the neighborhood. And Richard was someone who understood the kinds of questions I was asking. Questions like, is this still true? Does this center still hold? What exactly do I mean by being hopeful in the face of this much uncertainty? In the face of these odds and this diagnosis? Or questions like, is it too late to change? Change my mind? What if we paid in too much into these careers and not enough in other areas of life? And then, miracle of miracles, we both kept living. But we can’t unknow what we discovered. What we learned about hope. About how our disease and treatments changed the way we spent our time. And how we hope to change still. When we taped today’s episode, Richard was in the middle of a new pancreatic cancer diagnosis, and it was, it was brutal. He looked unrecognizable from the person that I had walked the gardens with. So when you hear this conversation, you are hearing us in the middle of incredible fragility and uncertainty and hearing his very hard-won wisdom to share about what it means to change or to be changed, especially as we age. Look, his official bio is a fancy one. He is the George Washington IV Professor Emeritus of New Testament at Duke. He’s internationally recognized for his work on the Gospels, the letters of Paul, and on New Testament ethics. His book The Moral Vision of the New Testament, was selected as one of the top 100 most important religious books of the 20th century. So he is the guy people turn to when they have questions about how to read and live out what they read in the New Testament. Which is why a lot of people have anticipated his new book, which he wrote with his son Chris. It’s called The Widening of God’s Mercy. It sheds light on how Richard’s theology has continued to develop since he wrote Moral Vision all those years ago. Richard, thank you so much for being here with me today. I know this is precious energy.
Richard Hays: It’s good to be with you, Kate.
Kate: It’s also a chance for me to be nosy in a way that I’ve never been nosy with you, so.
Richard: Okay…
Kate: “Okay,” he says, worriedly. It did kind of make me want to start at the beginning. Because I totally forgot you were from Oklahoma. What was it like growing up? What were your parents like?
Richard: Well, my parents were divorced when I was less than three years old, so I grew up with my mom. My dad was an airline pilot and spent much of his career during my growing up period, being based in Berlin, Germany and flying for Pan American Airlines, and he would come back to visit once or twice a year for a few days, so he was mostly absent from my life. My mom was a church organist.
Kate: Really?
Richard: Yeah. She later went back, after I went off to college, she went back to seminary and got an M.Div. And was ordained.
Kate: So she became a United Methodist pastor?
Richard: She did, she did, yeah.
Kate: That’s amazing.
Richard: When I was in the seventh grade, my family sent me to an Episcopal day school called Cassidy School. It was a, it was a wonderful, but, you know, very small—my high school graduating class had 55 people in it. Including Judy, who later became my wife.
Kate: Did you really?
Richard: Yeah.
Kate: I didn’t know you knew each other as…
Richard: Yeah, we we went to high school together.
Kate: You think a lot about what makes a life, gives life a scriptural shape. I kind of wondered if there was any clues you had early on that you’d be the type who would have these kinds of questions about transcendence your whole life.
Richard: That’s an interesting question. I am that part of the answer is that I was, with my mom being the organist, I was always hanging around the church. I was in the church choirs and church, you know, our church was pretty ambitious in the presentations of musicals and things like that. And it was, you know, it wasn’t anything terribly serious. It was just, you know, there was there’s a lot of music in my home. And music has always been very central to my life. But in terms of transcendence, by the time I was in late high school, I had decided that the church was full of, hypocrites, and I didn’t want anything to do with it. And when I went to college, I sort of threw it over, but I thought I was going to be a philosophy major until I took some philosophy courses. And then I thought, no, I don’t think so. And, I gravitated to English literature, but the, the sort of draw towards questions that I would think of as seriously theological emerged later. And it was at that late in my college career, and it came maybe more through. Reading English literature, reading John Donne or T.S. Eliot, that crystallized my fascination with those questions.
Kate: Yeah. Did it go from just being fascination, curiosity, did something kind of light the fire of… Because I don’t exactly know what you did right after you graduated.
Richard: I started in at Perkins School of Theology, as I, because I thought by then I should have said, by the way, that a huge influence on me when as an undergraduate was William Sloane Coffin, who was then the chaplain at Yale and very prominent in leading civil rights and anti-war movements in the 1960s. And a big influence on me, and with regard to my earlier thinking that the church was full of people who are hypocrites. Coffin demonstrated somebody who was not a hypocrite, whose convictions led him to very concrete actions for justice in a way that I hadn’t seen the Methodist Church of my suburban upbringing representing. And so I, I was very much influenced by him. I spent one year at Perkins School of Theology right out of college, where I discovered that I was maybe the most theologically conservative and most politically liberal person in my class, and I didn’t think I wanted to be part of the minister-making machine at Perkins. Yeah, so I left and I got a job teaching high school English in Massachusetts. And so Judy and I moved up there.
Kate: Someone told me a long time ago that you had attempted to live in a deeply scriptural way, in a very Acts way, in a sharing-all-things-in-common type community.
Richard: That’s right.
Kate: Tell me about that season of your life.
Richard: Well, it was it coincided with that move to Massachusetts. So I was teaching high school English. Through friends of friends that we met, we started living in an extended household that had us and one other married couple and three single guys who were trying to explore what it would mean to live out a call to radical discipleship. We were reading Bonhoeffer and Life Together and the Cost of Discipleship and we were, you know, morning prayer every day before the day started. That community grew. We started a prayer meeting in the house that developed into a house church, really, over the course of 4 or 5 years. Yes, it was a, you know, at its at its high water mark, the community had about 50 people who were committed to this model of attempting to to live out the book of Acts. Although what happened over time is I soon discovered that thinking that we were going to reinvent the New Testament church, we also ended up reinventing all of the schisms and heresies. So, over time, the community disintegrated. At which point I went back to to Yale Divinity School and finished my M.Div. work.
Kate: Do you think that experience gave you the feeling of, like the beautiful and hard weight of Christian idealism, that we have these deep hopes about the person that we might be, and then we get to try being that person?
Richard: Yeah, that’s that’s very well-put. Kate. I think we did discover that. We discovered the tension between the radical idealism and the radically flawed character of ourselves as individuals and of Christian community as such. We really ran up against the limitations of our idealism there.
Kate: It kind of cuts both ways, I find. It can either sort of retrench my belief that nobody is any good and I’d like to actually do this by myself, thank you. And, like, return to a feeling that actually, everyone’s a hypocrite, and screw it. Or, or maybe alongside that, I end up feeling deeply humbled by how what a miracle it feels like when anybody ever lives out and how kind of gorgeous it is, then, in the future, when you see it in anybody else or even in yourself.
Richard: Well yeah, I don’t, I don’t think it soured me on the idea of community, but it, it made me more aware that God is a God who justifies the ungodly, as Paul wrote in Romans four, and that we are all, in various ways, broken. But precisely for that reason, we also need one another, and we need community to help counterbalance the ways in which we’re broken. I’m sure that Judy and I, in our own marriage might not have made it through the first five years if we hadn’t had these friends around supporting and modeling and calling us to accountability.
Kate: We’re going to be right back after a break to hear from our sponsors. Don’t go anywhere.
Kate: I’m thinking of young, ambitious Richard, like coming into the height of his power, Richard. It’s that spring-to-summer feeling of our lives where we have we have some runway and we have plans about what we hope our work will accomplish. What were some of your biggest ambitions and hopes for what your work could accomplish?
Richard: You’re asking me to think back a long time, but you know, when I when I first began, I, I struggled with the, when I realized that I’ve increasingly felt a vocation to the academic life. I didn’t, I had trouble making up my mind when I was applying to graduate school, whether I wanted to do theology as such, systematic theology, or whether I wanted to do biblical studies and New Testament. And I ended up deciding I wanted to do New Testament for two reasons. One was that I just found when I was digging into working with the text, that was the thing that caused my heart to rise. But the other thing was that I, as I looked around at what I thought was wrong with the church, it was that I thought that the, the interpretation of the Bible was inadequate. And that, so to remedy—I thought—the church’s ills, one way to get at it was doing better biblical studies.
Kate: What were the main trends, biblical trends at the time, and how did you hope you might kind of cut across it?
Richard: Well, you remember I said I was an English major as an undergraduate. And when I got into my first Old Testament classes in seminary, at that point, the influence of a certain kind of German biblical source criticism was very prominent. And I got into these classes where people were looking at texts and I thought, what are they doing to these texts? This isn’t how you read a text. You read a text in such a way, sure you see the cracks and fissures in it, but you also ask, how does it hold together? And how does the the tensions in those fissures get resolved narratively? So, part of it was wanting to, recover a more cohesive narrative approach to biblical interpretation.
Kate: And along with, I mean, you started teaching in divinity schools, you kind of get in the game, then.
Richard: That’s right.
Kate: Where you’re both a scholar of and a participant in shaping what it means to be in the church. And for people who—and this is like an awkward question, because I just want to ask you to boast about yourself, because otherwise I will, I will joyfully. But when you think about what your work accomplished. How people started thinking alongside of you, what was the big dream that you got to see realized there?
Richard: Hmm. Well, again, thinking back to my very early days, from the first day that I started lecturing in New Testament Introduction at Yale. I thought, wow. The Holy Spirit is at work through me. Oh, this is, this is what I came into the world to do. This is what I’m called to do. I mean, I know that sounds grandiose, but it really was a sense of experiential confirmation of my vocation to teach in that way.
Kate: But I meet pastors all the time who quote you to me, and I know that you’ve shaped how they think. So I just wondered if you were going to characterize how you changed how people preach, for example, what would you say?
Richard: I would say, number one, you come to the text not assuming that you already know what it means, that you come with a mind and heart open to have it address you as a reader before you ask how you’re going to preach it. Number two, I would say that you make a commitment that whatever you preach is an attempt to represent and articulate the message of the text itself. One simple illustration of what I mean by that is that when you’re looking at different gospel narratives. Don’t just mush them together. But if you’re preaching, Matthew, try to preach Matthew’s message. If you’re preaching Luke, try to preach Luke. One example I used a lot in introductory teaching is the, the example of Jesus stilling of the storm. That in the Gospel of Matthew, the disciples at the end of it worship Jesus, and in Mark they have no clue. They just say, what? And, you know, I think that a preacher has to pay attention to that, the difference in those two accounts. And do something with that analytically in preaching. So, I mean, there’s nothing, revolutionary about what I’m saying, but it’s it’s letting the text speak to us. And through us.
Kate: Yeah. It has always struck me, Richard, that one of your, the loveliest bits about knowing you as a teacher and knowing you as a scholar is, it is a rare combination of thinker who wants the rigorous, scriptural, academic, guild-minded, footnote-obsessed particularity, but then who also really cares about the theological import, the like bigger history of in which we constantly fold one bit of a story into a longer arc, but also the pastoral implications. I mean, those three, I mean, very few of us do one. Some of us do two. Yeah, not many of us do all three. And it feels like that has always been… I’m just thinking of Moral Vision of the New Testament. That’s always been key to how you hoped that the study of Scripture could be woven into the Christian life and the life of the church. It sounds like a simple thing to say, but I just, I do think, you never wanted us to segment our our minds on the application of our argument.
Richard: I think that that kind of integrative approach certainly is something that I’ve tried to model and foster and promote, and I don’t think I’m alone in that at all. I think it’s partly, partly what I’m describing is something like a generational shift.
Kate: I think I was trained into hyper-specialization that I mean, if you would, I mean, you know, I still get nervous if someone’s like, yes, but what does Scripture say about…? Even if I know, I’m, I, I have stayed so narrowly in my lane. Yeah. It was really only after I got sick that I started feeling much more responsibility to speak theologically or pastorally about what it is that I learned about American Christianity, our individualism, our hyper-therapeutic culture. I was just so nervous, I think.
Richard: Sure. Yeah. If you get outside your immediate specialization you feel more vulnerable.
Kate: Let’s return again to what I know. I wrote one book, it says… It is very, let’s come back to my well. You had a long career at Yale and a long career at Duke. And then then you were my boss, which was of course my glory time. We were in a band together. I feel like I just need to say that we did.
Richard: Yeah. We played Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen.
Kate: We had different performances. You sang and played guitar. I played cello and sang, but not at the same time. Even though my dream as a child was to be the, what I hoped would be the first famous singing cellist.
Richard: It’s not too late, Kate.
Kate: I was not entirely coordinated. But in 2015, we both had a reckoning in our lives. I wondered if you could tell me about that season?
Richard: Yes. Well, it really was virtually simultaneously that we got cancer diagnoses. Mine was pancreatic cancer. At the time, I thought that was likely a short term death sentence. Most people who have pancreatic cancer don’t live more than a year or two. I stepped down from my role then as dean of the Divinity school and started the treatments, the chemo, the radiation, the eventually got the surgery and I was the incredibly fortunate rare case where the diagnosis had occurred before the cancer had metastasized. So they were able to cut out half of my pancreas and I recovered and went on with, with life in a way that, I’ve been very grateful for. So.
Kate: You kept pace with me with. I mean, I remember I remember being able to walk out of the hospital and walk in the garden with you. We both looked kind of terrible and kind of wonderful for being that sick. We both had great hair.
Richard: You know, viewers of this should know that as of the time of this interview, I’ve had a new diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, weirdly, with a different type of cancer cell. So it’s not a recurrence. It’s a, it’s a separate move. So I’ve been undergoing chemotherapy and, and now I’m doing radiation and the chemo. My hair is actually growing back, I lost almost all my hair. So we’ll see how, what comes of it this time. But, Kate, it was wonderful that you and I were able to weep together, support one another. I can, I remember coming over to your house and we went for a walk, and it was it was very meaningful to me to have a companion who who’s going through similar experiences.
Kate: Because they felt the same. And when I look at you, it always feels the same. Like you keep time in a way I really understand. Like when you when when you got scans. I know how it feels. I know how the intervals feel. And then you know how my intervals feel, felt, because for so long I had the, I mean, I was getting scanned every month and every two months, and it was so nice to have somebody that can really keep pace with exactly the the bearable amount of hope and plans that you can kind of pour into the thimble of whichever interval you get. And even when you said, oh, it’s different for me, I’m old. Well, I mean, thank you for saying that. Thank you for making me feel. Like it was costing me something, but I could tell that it wasn’t different because we both, because when you have so much life, you want to fit into life, it doesn’t feel different at all. And that did really teach me something. And we both had a really, I think, kind of odd response at first. Because most people, they I mean, I think fold into the, you just need to get through the day the, the bearable. Ordinary. But you and I were like flares that went off. I mean, we both had things we wanted to get done, so I wrote Everything Happens in three months in like, a fit of swan song desperation and Hope. And what did you do? Tell me about your weirdness.
Richard: Well, I guess my weirdness was that I had a big unfinished book on the use of the Old Testament in the Gospels. That had been. More or less put on the back shelf or in the deep freeze. During the years that I was dean of the Divinity School. I hadn’t finished it. But when I got this cancer diagnosis and, stepped down and started undergoing the intensive cancer treatment, you know, Judy and I sat down and sort of made a list of what must we do? And alongside being sure our wills are up to date and such.
Kate: All the horrible stuff.
Richard: My writing out the plan for what my memorial service should look like, I said, I’m going to finish that book.
Kate: Yeah. That’s good.
Richard: And so I. You know, in the midst of all the chemo and radiation and exhaustion, I would drag myself to my desk and within about three months, I finished the book.
Kate: I came to your book release right from chemo. And, I mean, it was one of those, like it was in this beautiful room, was like a parlor. Everyone looked gorgeous, and I just, I mean, it was all dressed up. I was so proud of you. And, I just I, absolutely saw you with so much, so grateful for your life. It’s so beautiful to finish anything. And in the midst of that, it was. It was an act of real courage, I thought.
Richard: I don’t know, if it was courage or stubbornness, but it seemed important to me. Yeah. And, you know, you used the word grateful. And I think that’s an incredibly important word. And I think both you and I came to understand this in a funny way. I remember you saying to me once, in the middle of all this, I wouldn’t go back. I wouldn’t go back. And I think I understood what you meant. But maybe you could say what you meant.
Kate: Because it felt, you know, part of it is always untrue. Of course, I would undo cancer. Of course I would bring back certainty that I would be my kid’s mom. And, yeah. All the things that you promise people when you make a life. But there was something I. I knew that I was so terrified I would forget, that, you know, well, now I know. Now I know this bizarre thing about God’s love. And I know I felt more overwhelmingly connected to everyone else who had ever… It just felt like you could see the cracks in the universe. And then how did I not know that before? And that weird kind of humility made me feel close to people that I think in my little climbing the ladder story of whatever thing I thought I was doing. It was just gone. So.
Richard: And for me too, it was a feeling of feeling grateful for every day.
Kate: Yes.
Richard: You’re always, the preciousness of every day. It does clarify one’s priorities and values, you know, what gets valued.
Kate: Yeah. Because right after you knew exactly what you wanted to do with the rest of your time. You were like, great. I survived. You made a kind of a vocational shift, if I could say it like that, to be like, I’m going to be a husband and a grandfather.
Richard: Well, some of it was. An attempt to rectify what I thought had been an imbalance in my life, that it, the…
Kate: Like you were paying back? Would you say that?
Richard: Well, yeah, to some, to some extent, I don’t think I’ve. That’s not quite the way I would have put it, but it was, you know, my focus on my career and maybe especially the almost six years that I was Dean was very, very costly to Judy who’s my wife, and my commitments to my family. I was just I was so caught up and consumed in the work. And not just when I was Dean, but before that too. That the… I hadn’t paid attention and I thought attention must be paid to this woman I love, to these kids, the grandkids, that I love. So that really has been, to the extent I’m able to do it. The focus of much of my life for the last 5 or 6 years.
Kate: Yeah. Yeah. I was obsessed with paying and overpaying. That’s the word I would have picked for everything. I thought, when I thought I was going to die at 35, I was like, I overpaid. I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have ruined every family vacation. I was just like, really, I had to work? We’re at the beach. I didn’t know until I was preparing for a conversation that you and Judy, who is. You had co-written an article together about aging, and there was this lovely, lovely thing I wanted to, you said about growing old, that as people face death with the expectation that your story, like Jesus, will continue in the life of the resurrection, but that that confidence is not a natural fruit or reward of age itself, but it’s the consequence of practice. I thought maybe I want to ask you, how have you practiced?
Richard: I mean, there are some people who face death either with a kind of bitter desperation or with a kind of, well, on the one hand a a resignation or on the other hand, a fierce commitment to fight it. And I’ve always disliked the metaphor of battling cancer. It’s ubiquitous in our culture, people, that’s the first thing, “I’m going to battle cancer.” Are you?
Kate: “You’re such a fighter.”
Richard: Yeah. So for me, that was never the right metaphor. For for me, it was always. Instead, what I’m going to do is open my hands to receive what God has for me in this, what… I hope to receive healing. But if not, to receive whatever comes as God’s gift and in, in the confidence of the hope of resurrection. I like to say that I’ve been teaching about resurrection for my whole career, but then I had to decide whether I really believed it or not, and I decided I did. So I think I think that the, that thing about the practice, the fruit of practice, it’s all the years of experiencing the liturgy of the church. Whether it’s repeating the creeds or living through the seasons of the Christian year that have their climax, of course, at Easter with the celebration of the resurrection and the the hope of eternal life.
Kate: Oh my gosh, Richard, I have the strongest memory of you preaching an Easter sermon when I was just trying to figure out how to keep, I mean, I was still in my scan intervals and it was out in Duke Gardens, and it’s that gorgeous sunrise service. You’re standing there in your robes looking like laundry the way that robes do, and you’re preaching about the that like, we shouldn’t fear death because we have great hope in our, in our the God who loves us. And it’s like right above you, the sun starts to rise. And I just I think what kills me about you is that every time we both keep living, I think every time, I think what we’re both experiencing is surprise.
Kate: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s, it’s, there’s a kind of glorious surprise in it. And I don’t I don’t say that to minimize—and you understand this as well as anyone—the suffering and grief that you confront at the prospect of having your life, cut off or foreshortened. I mean, I’m, I’ve turned 75 years old, but it, you know, Judy and I are still working through the grief that, you know, damn, I’ve got cancer again. And this, you know, my prospects of, you know, continuing to see my grandchildren grow up and go to college or, you know, being able to do some of the travel we’ve talked about, you know, maybe it won’t happen. And, you know, it’s, for me, there’s there’s grief in that. And Judy has a different kind of grief watching this happen. So I don’t mean to minimize any of that, but despite that, the, you know, the mystery of our faith has to do with the fact that ultimately life conquers death and that, you know, as Desmond Tutu used to say, “I’ve read the end of the book. We win.” You know? And we win because God has won victory in Christ.
Kate: Yeah. We’re going to take a quick break to tell you about the sponsors of this show. We’ll be right back. You’ve been working on a book over the last few years. I wondered if you could tell me about it and why it’s so important to you.
Richard: This is a new book that my son Chris and I are working on. Chris, as you know, is an Old Testament scholar. Although, you know, the thing with Chris is, I’ve always said about him is that when he was growing up, because I was a Red Sox fan, he had to be a Yankees fan. And, you know, I’m ordained as a Methodist. So when he felt a call, he had to be ordained as a Presbyterian. And, so then when he decided to become a scholar, he had to do the Old Testament because I was doing the New Testament. So it’s a little family in-junk.
Kate: You have your own tomato-tomato routine?
Richard: Yeah. But anyway, this this book really was catalyzed by Chris. It’s a book called The Widening of God’s Mercy. And the overall thesis of the book is that if you read the narrative of the Bible from beginning to end, the account we have of God’s character, is that it isn’t frozen and static, but that God is continually revealing new aspects of himself that move rather consistently in the direction of widening the sphere of mercy. So that people who were once excluded are included. And, the people who are despised are embraced. And that’s not simply a question of Old Testament versus New Testament. Chris has written a number of chapters on the Old Testament, illustrating the way in which you see this process already happening in the Old Testament. And it’s fairly obvious to anybody who spent any time reading the New Testament that that pattern is there, that Jesus is the friend of tax collectors and sinners, and he embraces lepers. And, and then that same process carries forward into the expansion of the message of grace to the Gentile world, so that the separation between Jew and Gentile is overcome as they’re brought into one new body. And we’re we’re writing this book partly to try to take a fresh angle of approach to the church’s current battles around issues of sexuality. And for me, it is a way of taking a different position, particularly with the question of same sex relationships from the position I took in moral vision of the New Testament.
Kate: Yeah. Tell me about that for a minute. You had, like, an incredibly famous book that a lot of people read and was maybe read in a particular way.
Richard: Yeah, well, apparently a lot of people read only the chapter on homosexuality and didn’t read the whole book. So, you know, there’s one chapter, 20 pages out of a 500 page book that I’m most famous for, probably because, I took the view there that the attempt at revising the exegesis of the very small handful of biblical passages that address same-sex relationships, the attempt to revise those is unsuccessful. That those texts say what they say, and that the Bible as such, insofar as it addresses the question, simply disapproves of same sex relationships. And I say you can’t talk your way around that. But the position I took was that if gay people aren’t welcome in the church, I have to walk out the door with them and leave in the sanctuary only all the people who are entitled to throw the first stone. That was what I said. But I thought: gay people, welcome in the church, but we can’t have same-sex relationships or unions because the Bible disapproves. I’ve come to think that that position that I took is very much like the position of the scribes and Pharisees in the gospels. Who, there’s one very poignant story where there’s, a person who’s suffering from a physical ailment, who’s brought to Jesus on the Sabbath. Some of the crowd around are disapproving of Jesus healing this person. And Jesus says to them, is it permitted on the Sabbath to do good? You know, to heal or or or to harm, you know. And the scribes who are standing around are silenced. They can’t answer because they are passionately committed to an interpretation of the God given law, which they believe leads to the position that you can’t do this. You can’t do this on the Sabbath. Come some other day, but not on the Sabbath. And so they they stand back sort of helplessly, because of their commitment to a text. That causes them to deny the extension of healing to a person standing in their midst. And I see myself as of 25 years ago when I wrote that chapter, as being that person who is caught up in defending a narrow interpretation of the text and ignoring the human suffering in front of me. So anyway, the. The book isn’t mostly about sexuality, it’s mostly about the fact that the God of the Bible is a God who is always unfolding a wider mercy. But then there’s a final chapter that brings that to bear on these sexuality questions. And for me, there’s a mea culpa in that that I, I’ve written an epilogue saying I’m sorry for what I wrote. I’m sorry that this has hurt people. But the main thing, though, is, though it’s not a book that argues on the ground of rights or something like that. It’s more a book about who God is and we’re, we are all in need of God’s mercy. All of us. In one way or another.
Kate: I have one last question. You and I, I think we we both think a lot about hope. In our work and our lives. What does it mean to be hopeful right now?
Richard: I think to be hopeful means, to trust, ultimately, that we are in the hands of a merciful God who loves us. A merciful God who loves us, and therefore, we are enabled to act in hope, even when the circumstances don’t look hopeful from a pragmatic point of view. But we we carry forward and. Try to extend, extend that mercy to other people we come in contact with.
Kate: Yes. Hope, and not just for me. For all of us.
Richard: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. My son Chris. We’re working on this book. He sent me this quotation from Nick Cave, the musician. You know, he’s a singer songwriter. And, here’s the quotation: “Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position, either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act as small as you like, keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time we come to find that it is so.” Now, the only thing I would say if I were editing that quotation is it’s not that the world is worth believing in, or if it is, the world is worth believing in because the world is God’s creation and God is ultimately redeeming the creation. That’s me, not Nick Cave. But I thought that that was a very hopeful, it’s not just that we sort of sit here and hope, but that it’s, you know, it involves hope is involves a sort of call to action in the present time.
Kate: Richard, you have been my friend IN hope, and I am grateful to be yours.
Richard: You’ve been my friend, Kate. It’s a blessing to be with you.
Kate: Let’s start a band.
Kate: Okay, look, I’m taping this conclusion a few months after that conversation, and I wanted to give you an update. It is with great joy that I tell you that Richard’s treatments worked. And he is in remission once again. It’s so ridiculous. I’m so happy. I’m just so happy about it. And I hope he continues to grow very old with his beautiful family. Writing these thoughtful books for us to debate and wrestle and argue over. Man, every time somebody lives, you just can’t believe it. He just keeps teaching me things. Given the number of health situations that man has had, Richard could have shut it all down, like, no one would have blamed him. He could have just let his life’s work stand as it was, and leave it up to someone else to figure it all out. Instead, he chooses to keep learning and keep leaning in to keep changing. And I think his life and work teaches me something about what it means to keep changing and keep hoping. Hoping that we continue to be shaped and reshaped by the gospel, even if we realize we had some things wrong. Hoping that we can lean into our callings, even if the way they played out might have to shift. Because it is a miracle when we see anyone change or be changed. Whether it’s watching your parents get a newfound post-retirement hobby. Oh my gosh, of course it’s pickleball. Or someone you love who’s been shaped by grief and hasn’t let it swallow up every bit of hope. Or maybe it’s someone you know who’s revisited a belief or certainty they once held dear, someone who’s willing to be wrong and have their minds changed.
Kate: May we all have the audacity to hope. With hands wide open to what God has for us next. To be changed. To be wrong. To keep learning and ask questions. To be surprised. To reimagine what life should look like now. And that all sounds like resurrection to me. Thanks be to God.
Kate: If you want to read it yourself, I tell a story about Richard preaching his Easter Sunday sermon at dawn. It’s like a very emotional moment for me, and I write about it in No Cure for Being Human. So you can read or listen to it there, if you like, it’s in the very last chapter. We love hearing from you, especially any of your gentle wisdom that you’d love to share, because it is so hard to change. What is your gentle wisdom for someone trying to change? Leave me a note on social media. I’m at @KateCBowler or leave our team a voicemail. Call us at (919) 322-8731. Don’t miss our weekly email sign up at KateBowler.com/newsletter so you can hear about upcoming events, new podcasts, and free gifts we want to send your way. And hey, podcasts are very weird. And so if you leave us a review or if you make sure that you’re subscribed on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, it does us so much good in helping other people discover us and also go to war with the algorithmic overlords. It only takes a few seconds and we’d be so grateful.
Kate: A big thank you to my team and the partners that we have for the work they put into this season. Lilly endowment, the Duke Endowment, and Duke Divinity School. They support all of our projects. This podcast is also one of my very favorite things to do with very favorite people. Thank you so much, especially to Jess Richie, our new office baby that she has created, Harriet Putman, Keith Westin, Baiz Hoen, Gwen Heginbotham, Brenda Thompson, Iris Greene, Hailie Durrett, Anne Herring, Hope Anderson, Kristen Balzer, and Katherine Smith. Can you believe it? So many great people. Who would I be without you? You do not want to miss next week’s conversation. I got to sit down with an actual genius, Dr. Francis Collins. Physician, geneticist, former head of the NIH, mapper of the human genome, and kindest person ever. So basically, all my favorite things in one episode. I’ll talk to you next week, my loves. This is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.
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