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Sermons from this World
SERMONS FROM THIS WORLD
DURING THE TIME OF CRISIS IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
2025
ENCOUNTERS
WITH
THIS WORLD AND BEYOND: THE MARBURG SERMONS OF RUDOLF BULTMANN
1936-1950
BY JIM BODEEN
12 SECTIONS AND CODA with notes and acknowledgments
WINTER 2025
●
PREFACE
I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is--
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
Gerard Manley Hopkins, As Kingfishers Catch Fire
All things counter, original, spare, strange--
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty
At 13 years of age, in a large junior high school in Seattle, newly transplanted from rural North Dakota, my English teacher, Mr. Collins, had two obsessions, poetry and diagramming sentences. I earned my first D in his class, learning to diagram sentences. He also taught us William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. The Lamb and The Tyger. They made sense to me. Later, but maybe even then, I would say to myself that I knew about these poems before we left North Dakota. These poems, along with the Chambered Nautilus, but these poems. I knew the cry from our family home, the old Victorian mansion where we lived rent-free because my father was manager of the Farmer’s Union grain elevator, the house located across from the Lutheran Church where I was baptized, and the church itself.
Tyger tyger burning bright. What the hammer! What the chain! In what furnace was thy brain?
And more, and all of it:
What immortal hand or eye
dare/could--
Which?
I knew that my house would be built of poetry and literature when I enlisted in the Army at 20, in 1965, in New Orleans. Wasn’t failure the point?
When that dark green bus went through the gate at Fort Ord, California, I asked myself, What have I done? The Army chaplain holding weekly classes for ones like me, never told me that it was his move that put me in with the medical service corps, but he did tell me that as a Lutheran chaplain, our church, his and mine, believed in the war.
These were the years 1965-1968.
Bultmann’s Marburg sermons compiled in the book This World and Beyond, contain sermons delivered between 1936-1950. I will not encounter Bultmann’s work until 1976.
Here’s William Blake again. Sitting in the English professor’s office one day, after the Army, back in school, newly married, I pull a small, beautifully bound on boards volume titled A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis. It turns out that my professor had recently lost his wife in childbirth, and he was newly relocated, widowed, and the sole provider of two young children. Professor Don King would become my graduate adviser, my friend, and the godfather of our daughters. By the time I finished graduate school, part of me believed, or thought any way, all puffed-up, that I was C.S. Lewis.
I never let go of that woman who I had caused so much trouble for, and we were married three months after I had come home from Viet Nam in August of 1968. We had joined a church and the Icelandic pastor would introduce me to the prophets through Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. He looked askance when I brought up C.S. Lewis. I couldn’t read the New Testament, or the Gospels. William Blake’s poems. They sounded like Jesus. Hosea and Amos--they spoke for me.
Somehow I found a course offered at Seattle University on the New Testament. When I inquired, they said, Yes, but. This is a 3-year program for priests and nuns in Vatican II. This before I told them I was Lutheran. There was a certain interest from the Jesuits at Seattle University in making this possible. When I told my wife about it, I would have to tell her there would be some pre-requisites. She would have to participate in the communications course, with me, on campus. It was a 3-year course. Everyone had doubts. My wife said, Three years?
I entered the 3-year program at Seattle University armed with C. S. Lewis. I would soon meet what I was looking for, the man who would open the New Testament for me, my Christology professor, Stanley Marrow, Iraqi, who would take me to Rudolf Bultmann.
This was in 1975. Fifty years later I’m reading Bultmann’s sermons from Marburg written between the years 1936-1950.
One day Stanley saw me reading at a table, remembering the look on my face during class. He asked me, Jim, What’s wrong? What you said today about C.S. Lewis. Jim, compared to Rudolf Bultmann, C. S. Lewis is an ant. Then, what does that make you? Jim, C. S. Lewis is a very great man.
Death and resurrection.
I have never told the Rudolf Bultmann story in a way that made sense.
I open these sermons during the time of the American crisis.
Jim Bodeen
February 2025
Kindness is always undeserved. And what rejoices man’s heart is precisely what he is given as a sheer gift, i.e. the bestowal of a gift which he has not deserved.
Rudolf Bultmann, This World and Beyond: The Marburg Sermons: 1936-1950
May 10, 1942
“Will any one of you, who has a servant ploughing or keeping sheep, say to him when he has come in from the field, ‘Come at once and sit down at table’? Will he not rather say to him, ‘Prepare supper for me, and gird yourself and serve me, till I eat and drink; and afterwards you shall eat and drink’? Does he thank the servant because he did what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that is commanded you, say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.’”
St. Luke 17: 7-10
AROUSING TOTAL OPPOSITION: The Beginning
Down from the mountain, legs worn,
stretched and dry from leather boots,
Chafed muscles cry for lotion. Waking in bed,
the lost pencil for margin notes
in the library-loan book of Bultmann
sermons* on living room floor
under footstool. I get up to pee,
applying lotion while retrieving
the pencil. The old man must die,¨
Bonhoeffer says. Bultmann turning
the parable every possible way.
Workers in the vineyard,
can they not see God’s generosity?
Even when crops fail? Remembering
an old man talking about his pastor-
father, You were able to work, no!
Bultmann, too, like
a Navajo Blessingway Singer
from another world. Hozho.
And Tillich arrives in the mail.
Nothing can be hidden—It is always
reflected in the mirror in which nothing
can be concealed. My old pastor
brought you to me. Dear Paulus,
You learned men of crises
at my door, me, the worst of sinners
as Bonhoeffer says to seminarians,
common, a Dakota prairie dog.
How else to have hope?
The parable insists the vineyard owner speak.
Do you begrudge my generosity?
So many helping to understand.
Poverty written on my face. Bultmann ending
his sermon at the beginning,
August, 1942, with lines from the poet,
another Paul, Gerhardt, (the poets
at every trailhead with Bultmann),
We are guests at a strange hearth.
Too many houses have been built
in the forests. The cities are on fire.
Holderlin, C. F. Meyer, Rilke,
signs themselves, declarations
of suffering leading to grace.
Unarmed in a simple message.
Salve from poets rubbed
into an old man’s legs.
To be nothing here.
*Rudolf Bultmann, This World and the Beyond: Marburg Sermons, 1936-1950.
●
ANOTHER ANNIVERSARY POEM
Writing in the pew, after worship,
Bell Choir practicing, each pew draped
with handmade quilts sewn during the year,
Bart’s directing choir,
an artist himself, jazz pianist,
Karen is on the near end
closest to where I sit. Next Sunday
they will ring for the congregation.
They’re practicing, O Come, O Come,
Emmanuel. God with us in the pew.
It’s my dad’s middle name, never
used by him, but he could sign the E
with a flourish. Karen plays four bells
at the same time—G, A, A flat, B flat.
They’re talking back and forth now.
Bart is laughing. My Notebook’s open, along
with Bonhoeffer’s, Cost of Discipleship.
I’m three weeks living with his work
on the Beatitudes. I’ll never finish.
Blessed are the merciful. [May I die,
right here, Lord?] For they shall receive
mercy. Jesus speaking to his disciples,
Bonhoeffer reminds us. They have
renounced their own dignity. Bonhoeffer's
27 years old writing this. The same age
as Jimi* and Janis when they died.
The year is 1933. Bonhoeffer will be
hanged in 1945, at the age of 39,
the same age as Flannery O’Connor,
Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm.
It will be spring right before Allied
Liberation. The day will be the 9th
of April, sharing the same day
as my mother’s birthday. They’re
ringing again, the bells, Rejoice!
Rejoice! Bell ringers throwing
out the sounds with their arms.
The disciples have wed themselves
to the poor, the stranger, and the wronged.
They wear the clothes of shame
and dishonor. This is the beatitude,
great gift, given to me by my mother,
and I have passed it on to my children
who have wrapped others in mercy
for more than half a century. It’s
too much. I imagine my children
as bell ringers. Cowering before
their courage, I often find myself unable
to praise. I hear them most clearly
in Cannonball Adderley’s great
song, Mercy, released in 1964,
written by Joe Zawinul, Adderley’s
piano player—Austrian, by the way,
who often had to ride hidden
in the car driving in the South
during Jim Crow because everybody
but Ziwinul was black. Mercy, mercy, mercy,
how Adderley introduces the song. Often times
we’re not ready for adversity, he says,
Zawinul playing in the background.
Returning to hear the song on YouTube
over the years, is how I memorized
Adderley’s words, and his speaking
voice, repeating, Mercy, mercy, mercy.
Rhyme in adversity. Its marriage to trouble.
One time at Thanksgiving my sister drops
a bowl of olives, crying, Oh mercy me.
A granddaughter asks her why she said that.
She says, We laugh so we don’t have
to cry, Baby. Mercy. It’s the joke that hides
our treasure. The way Jesus says, Price paid.
The way Karen rings four bells.
*Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin both died in 1970.
●
[Why wouldn’t I invite the man to my table, the one who opened the New Testament to me? Why wouldn’t I invite him to my table? He was the one who has been ploughing the field for ones like me
for half a century. jb]
●
LET ME SEE IF I CAN SAY IT FOR MYSELF
Lines for Rudolf Bultmann
My country is in crisis and so am I.
Blessed by family, I am surrounded by books and art.
Karen and I—60 years knowing, 56 married.
You met her in the anniversary poem.
Sit with us. My son-in-law
made the Gathering sign
and the crosses come from El Salvador,
the ones over this table.
Of the twenty-two sermons in the book,
This World and Beyond, by Rudolf Bultmann,
I have written them into 12 sections. Why 12?
There are 12 apostles, yes.
But there are more than 12 apostles
inside these pages. There are 12 steps
in the Alcoholics Anonymous program,
too, aren’t there. There are. And there
are more than 12 alcoholics inside
these pages, too. The poet, Lucille Clifton,
who is here, was born with 12 toes.
Twenty-two sermons, 12 sections.
More than one world, too.
May my prayers for these pages
include 22 petitions and one prayer
for each of the 12 sermons.
But there are 22 sermons.
Correct. There are 22 sermons.
There are grandchildren, too.
Beautiful children, children
also in crisis. My grandchildren.
There are poems for the grandchildren here.
The poems for the grandchildren
show them in their beauty,
in the before of what’s coming.
Not all of them are mine.
None of the grandchildren are mine.
All of the grandchildren are here.
Not all of the poems for grandchildren are here.
All of the grandchildren, none of the grandchildren.
This is the part that I can say, Let the poems be written.
This is the part where what can be said
and what can’t be said is said like this.
When you meet Josh you meet them all.
When you meet Samantha you meet them all.
When you meet Deanna you meet them all.
You meet them all when you meet Katie.
Some of this is about saying what can’t be said.
All of the children are at risk.
It is beyond my understanding to contemplate
a world of children who do not have poems
written for them. It is that simple.
The man who wrote these twenty-two sermons
during the years 1936-1950, Rudolf Bultmann,
found a way through crisis. That this book
has come into my hands at this time,
is a blessing for one such as me,
one who was given the beyond
as a country boy at a young age.
A man living in crisis, a crisis
he didn’t always recognize.
A man who knew he could never
get there on his own.
A man whose country is in crisis.
And all these children. All of these
grandchildren. They’re all his.
None of them are his.
“...to stand already at the terminal point of this age. For such a one true prayer is already
a reality. But the promise of the gift of prayer is preceded by the promise of the gift of joy, of a joy ‘which no one will take from us.’. This implies a joy which is no longer threatened by the world, because the believer is as it were already removed from the world and has overcome it, as is suggested in the first letter of John: ‘This is the victory that overcomes the world, our faith’.” (5:4)
Rudolf Bultmann, This World and Beyond: The Marburg Sermons: 1936-1950
May 30, 1943
“So you have sorrow now, but I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.”
St. John 16: 22.
I. THE SERMONS THAT MATTER
In all this, have we been speaking of a remote past, which may be
of interest to us but which fundamentally no longer concerns us?
--Rudolf Bultmann, June 7, 1936
Driving down Fruitvale to have
my tires checked by Russ at Tires U-Save,
in the Honda Fit, three days,
three sermons into Bultmann’s
Marburg Sermons, This World
And the Beyond, 1936-1950,
twenty-one sermons, available
to me by way of Inter-library Loan
from the local public library,
I pull off to the shoulder of the road
after failing to steer safely
writing in my notebook,
Mostly, I just breathe,
holding this book, relieved,
(still in dis-belief) at what
I hold, I’m holding these sermons!
They’re in my hands.
This confirmation. These 50 years.
Afraid that I’ll lose it
before getting to the air machine
and the life of my tires.
There. Now I can drive again,
turn into traffic, arriving.
Sitting in the waiting room,
cold, two doors opening,
closing, in and out of the shop
workers, seated in the plastic
and aluminum chair, notebook
and sermons bound and not
remaindered, Bultmann writes,
This is the critical advent question.
He is with his students and colleagues,
with them, in their language, ahead
of them yes, but in hearing distance.
1936. It is January 11, 2025.
Here, there has been an election.
Bultmann cites the poet, The story of our days,
he has been reading forgotten poems
of Karl Immermann, gazing into evening,
and lo, beyond our time to guide
our children’s course, the story
of our days, our age’s stain,
must be effaced. Only in the waiting
then, we see ourselves with a chance
come from elsewhere. Forgotten
in the stacks, maybe stored in the library
basement, retrieved, delivered,
temporarily mine, 42 more days!
Fragile binding eternal, even
conscious fingers and hands
breaking under use, under-used
before evangelical clamor.
●
II. RUDOLF BULTMANN’S FIRST SERMON FROM MARBURG:
[from the second book of Marburg sermons : This World and the Beyond]
Acts 17: 22-32
June 7, 1936
“I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship
as something unknown, I am going to proclaim to you.”
Acts 17: 23
This is Paul talking to the Men of Athens.
Paul introduces his God, the creator, “who does not live in temples built by hands…”
Acts 17: 24
“In Him we move and have our being.” Paul says more about his God, before returning to the inscription on the altar to the Greek god.
Acts 17: 28
“...as even some of your poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’
Acts 17: 28
“For we are indeed his offspring…”
Paul is quoting Aratus of Soli, here, Acts 17: 28, and see also Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus.. Aratus was a poet and astronomer from Cilicia, Paul’s own province. Aratus’ poem is called “Phenomena.”
Having marked his territory, and his boundaries now, Bultmann sets out, moving deeper into his sermon, quoting the young Nietzsche: “Thou, unknown God, thee will I know…”
This is from the first of twenty-one sermons in Bultmann’s This World and the Beyond, collected in the book, The Marburg Sermons. In this first sermon, Bultmann names the following poets:
Aratus, Cleanthes, Epimenides, Holderlin, Virgil, Karl Immermann, Dwinger, Goethe, Nietzsche, R.A. Schroeder, Wilhelm Busch, Ernst Wiechert, Paul Gerhardt, Mathias Claudius—AKA ASMUS, Schubert, Jesus, Eichendorff, Homer, Wilhelm Raabe, Klopstock, C. F. Meyer, Hebbel, Thomas Carlyle, Adalbert Stifter, Schuler, J. Chr. Gunther, Franz Werfel, Novalis, Rilke, A.V. Arnem, Pindar, Paul Fleming, Tibillus, Hoffmannshal.
My list here contains 34 poets. I may have missed some. My apologies to Rudolf Bultmann. I do not count poets included in the Bible, except for Jesus. I do not count David, the psalmists, the author/s of Lamentations, or others. Naming the poets Bultmann cites is one of my points in this documents.
In addition to introducing the first poet like this: “As some of your own poets have said,…” Bultmann introduces the poets like this:
“This the poets also know…”
“The poet says…”
“For the poet wishes…”
Try doing this work without the poets. Many have tried it. Many haven’t given it a second thought. Ask yourself, those of you with ears to hear, what is missing? Or who? Among your listeners maybe. Among your listeners, What doesn’t get heard?
Poets are present in 20 of the 21 sermons in This World and the Beyond.
This first sermon with Paul in the Aereopagus, is also a sermon full of repetition. In Him we move and have our being… said 5 times? More? In this sermon? I’m not counting here, but the movement, the transport, my God! It’s immense—the territory covered. I’d love to see the notes from those in attendance. Wouldn’t it be something, to see the notes of the students? Of Bultmann’s colleagues in attendance! And this, too, Did even some of these notes reach me, in some even fragmented form—somewhere in my own pilgrimage? Know, too. I didn’t have the qualifications to have sat in that auditorium, chapel, sanctuary, listening.
●
After listening, walking,
my son calls from his mountain
where he’s walking himself,
it is a day of calls. My grand-daughter
calls from the university, telling
of her mornings with meditation
and writing. She studies psychology,
and asks questions of my reading.
Her questions mirror her own listening,
and I feel like the grandfather
vulnerable, aka the fool, too ready
to believe his stubbornness understands.
Bultmann’s talking about fear
and security. My wife returns
from quilting with her friends
and hands me a poem, The Way
It Is, by Bill Stafford: There’s a thread
you follow. It goes among things that change.
We talk about the poem at dinner.
We talk about the thread
over coffee. We have been doing
this for a long time. Bultmann writes,
How seldom now are we terrified
at ourselves, refers to Dwinger
who wrote about a man in Siberia
constructing a piano of wooden keys
so he could play music in a bad time,
a man holding onto his thread.
Poets want to believe history
is avenged, but the gospel
does not suggest this. Witness
to Christ takes many forms.
Thread that vexes the world.
●
III. AT THE END OF A TERM
“Were it not for this intrusive word, then life might be mastered.”
Rudolf Bultmann Sermon, Marburg, June 27, 1937
Waiting for generosity in the out-breath
one asks, How long has be been like this?
The one who says he’s so grateful. Walk
away from that one, Soldier Boy.
One can say, imagining this situation,
end of school term, professor
talking, exploring with students,
what they got right, what they didn’t get to,
this term—but not only these few—all,
everybody, the entire faculty present,
what it means to come up short. Also this:
What’s coming. Some of it, even here,
said between the lines, dangerous.
Cristo peligroso. When family members
become casualties of war, of war’s lies,
one becomes existentially different.
Existence is different.
After death, too, it’s different.
This June 27, 1937 Marburg letter,
listening from this far,
where fear has found us
returning to your Christ-Hope
center, surrendering pride, discovering
insecurity of what seemed secure.
We have outdone you
in the belief of ourselves!
Those justified by faith, deportees
and all others othered.
Deportation is trauma.
What made us proud now
makes the oppressor bold.
Christ has truly laid His grip
upon us, falling back, only
on His resurrection.
We could not have done this
on our own. How
can it not be?
This intrusive word.
These tentative steps.
●
IV. THE PEW
I sit in the pew.
This is where I worship from.
On Sunday.
On Sundays.
Other than Karen,
the people who sit with me
in the pew
are not in the pew.
My people are not here.
The pew.
It’s not easy.
Pastors say,
It’s never easy
stepping
into the pulpit.
How could it not be lonely?
Still, we fill it up each Sunday.
It was crowded this morning.
This pew.
Filled up.
All of us scrunched together.
Shoulder to shoulder,
scrunched in the pew.
●
V. LET US WITH THE POET INVOKE SUNDAY THUS*
What has Sunday to say to us, this day on which the appeal
of Christ strikes home to us with peculiar power?
Rudolf Bultmann, July 28, 1938, This World and Beyond
Decades before Ellington, too.
And decades before I became conscious,
I was a boy from the country, dry-land farming before oil, winter wheat,
town boy on top of that, before we had to leave.
Ellington, black band leader traveling by night
during the time of Jim Crow, the segregated time
you knew from reading, before you crossed
the Atlantic. You might know it, too--
Come Sunday, from the jazz suite,
Black, Brown and Beige, 1943.
Musical history of Black Americans.
In ‘58 Ellington added text
and the song becomes an American Standard.
God almighty, God of love
Sitting at kitchen table with your sermon.*
You’re working with Matthew 11: 28-30--
Vengan a mi todos ustedes que estan cansados,--
take my yoke—Duke, riding passenger at night
crossing state lines, used to say, Wake me
when we get there. He wrote in the car,
more music than any American composer.
Your sermon from This world and beyond,
offers this petition, If only each day began
with quiet self-recollection in the presence of God.
I transcribe sentences into my notebook,
this book on loan from a university library,
to me of all people, Sunday is the day
for the soul. Here we find those hidden things,
slowing down the struggling empire, His yoke,
not mine. You remind us to give thanks
for this new beginning. This time is how
I know, how I connect Ellington to Bultmann,
all that we never learned when you both
were here. Here’s Duke: He’ll give
peace and comfort, to every troubled mind.
And here’s you. We are truly weary…
Work is not our master. Mi carga es liviana.
The time we live in graces me. So many
carry me in song and sermon. You invoke the poet,
thus: ...all week-day wanderers, burdened.
Come Sunday. Gustav Schuler ends
your sermon, Mahalia ends Duke’s song.
Go in secret. So many listeners.
These are the mountains from another land.
*24 July 2938, Rudolf Bultmann, The Marburg Sermons
St. Matthew 11: 28-30.
●
WAITING FOR THE ARRIVAL OF THE PASTOR
I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope…
T.S. Eliot, East Coker, Four Quartets
...for we cannot touch bottom in these deep waters; the world
that is revealed to us entirely exceeds us. We can understand
only what God reveals to us.
Michael Edwards, The Bible and Poetry
Snow and ice on the driveway
when you knock, But come in.
Excited by your presence
I go looking for a book
and get lost in my own bookshelves.
Ice everywhere bringing danger
beyond falling. This winter storm
has nothing to do with snow on roadways.
I return to sit empty-handed,
learning of your installation, order
this book, and it comes on time.
Maybe I ordered the wrong one?
The psalmist walking rails slips
back and forth between anger and praise.
It doesn’t matter, Pastor Kathleen.
The pastor who knows the walk
is dangerous knows to use a shovel.
Being so close to death, she can stand on her feet.
Installation marries the word to the walk.
That pastor can point to another way.
--for the Installation of Pastor Kathleen Anderson
First Lutheran Church, Pasco, Washington
31 January 2025
●
DRIVING TO ELLENSBURG ON I-90
TO STUDY BONHOEFFER WITH STEVE
BEFORE THE 2024 ELECTION
--for Steve Hill
Driving home he says these things
come up on his phone every day--
I get the last one: What good shall I do?
This thing called grace, the cheap one,
what we talk about. Steve’s catalogue
built from yard sales, a garden with no
white space, surrounded
(immersed?) by the homeless
(and every homeless plant
re-planted) is a catalogue of things
to do daily advocating for those
living in tents, sleeping under tarps.
Shopping carts, dogs, doorway
urinals, letters to city hall, nothing
eliminated from Steve’s agenda.
You don’t go off the handle,
ever? Nope.
What would that do? The book
in his bag, today, Trash.
But I thought you were reading Bonhoeffer?
Steve is costly grace. Steve has
his twenty people, it’s such a small
circle, he says, walking me through
his compost system, from kitchen
waste to aged top
soil, showing me how his sprinklers
keep things moist. Here pick
some figs, he says. This is Cedar
Monroe’s poor white journey, Trash.,
still deep suffering to attend to,
still much work to be done,
Steve handing Monroe’s book
to me in the car, paraphrasing
his own neighborhood full of color,
and poor whites: 66 million poor
whites in America: If you are housed,
or at least a verbal agreement to live somewhere…
Pastor Monroe. His cross on his desk:
We are not trash. The systems that kill us
are trash, his epilogue his anthem. Steve’s
got his hat on, his suspenders,
in cutoffs, looking at a boarded up
Victorian house as we drive
neighborhoods: Wouldn’t it be fun
to get that house and a bunch of kids
and fix it up! Bonhoeffer knows
deeply, he knows, how the Gospel
gets turned into its opposite through
such easy moves. How does Jesus
read scripture! So interesting.
Where do you begin?
The way Steve opens his phone--
Names what he’s grateful for,
three things, asks, What good shall
I do today, saying,
Good things will happen.
One can’t be Christian and nationalist.
Answer your own questions.
●
VI. “THE WRITTEN WORD BECAME A VOICE AGAIN”--Michael Edwards,
The Bible and Poetry
The New Testament contains no word which has a direct bearing on a situation
such as is ours to-day….The New Testament pays no attention to these time
periods which are so significant to us.
Bultmann, 27 July 1938, Marburg Sermons
It won’t be there, that word we’re looking for,
but there is a word contained in the word,
we have that, and that’s the assuring
thread, as woke as I am blind. Farewell
words of Jesus for seminarians. Am I not
the school boy beginning to get the idea?
Isn’t this a good sign, if it’s anything.
We’re not going to get there on our own.
In-breaking time, Father Hopkins:
I am soft-sift in an hour glass.*
Riding the breath of now,
breathless, how could I ever think
I was the strong man any-way?
Look. Hope is the chink saving
me from satisfaction. Even
with the gift of a listening notebook.
Make peace. It’s been given.
Why these dare-deaths, this crew
in Unchrist all rolled in ruin.**
Time is in the other, beyond,
and can be heard without fear.
29 January 2025
*The Wreck of the Deutschland, Gerard Manly Hopkins
**The Loss of the Eurydice, Gerard Manly Hopkins
●
VII. RAW NOTES FROM THE AMERICAN SONG BOOK
LET ME ASK A QUESTION: Is the American
Songbook the same thing as your Leuchtturm1917?
RESPONSE: It is, it is. Very good. This is called
witnessing for the defense.
As of now Sunnyside police is not working with ICE.
We live between the ridges, and this is an organization.
This is how we talk with each other up and down the valley.
Every day is a lobby day.
It’s already happening.
What it means to take direct action is what’s being explored.
NPR is here. Accompaniment.
Most of our work has been in churches
because they’ve got big buildings and they’re empty.
I remember the first time I heard B. B. King sing,
Don’t open the door for nobody. It wasn’t on no record.
Live, baby, live. Live blues.
Playing Lucille, his guitar.
The guitar that can’t be replaced
He didn’t see this coming. No, no, no. He didn’t.
That’s what I hear. It’s a point of emphasis.
Unless they’ve got a search warrant, don’t open that door.
Don’t open that door for Nobodaddy.
The strong man keeps coming on.
They taught you the religion they disgraced.
Don’t open that door. It was the poet Carl Sandburg
who said, Strong men coming on.
This is a history in rivers. Call it Upstream.
Call it from mothers coming from a dark sea.
Two names merging, diverging, calling Yes,
Carl Sandburg, calling Yes, Sterling Brown.
Celebrate Chicago. Celebrate African origins.
Celebrate any bodaddy who knows American poetry.
A quiz: Answer Sandburg. Answer Brown.
A clue: Both of them are saints.
Who wrote: They go down shot, hanged, sick, broken.
Who wrote: They put hammers in their hands.
B. B. King sang: ‘Cause I don’t want a soul, baby
Hangin’ around my house when I’m not at home.
If you see something, you call.
You call.
Every time information gets passed around, it gets distorted.
The strong man talks everyday.
These raw notes.
They’re part of the preparation.
These woven voices.
Some of this stuff, some of this stuff
we have to be prepared for.
It takes people to circle the familiar.
Strong men keep me.
Strong men help me sleep.
There are others, keeping me
from sleep, but these are the ones
who come to me in song.
●
VIII. THE POETS ALWAYS SHOW UP IN PROFESSOR BULTMANN’S SERMONS
“The poet says: ‘World history implies world judgment.’ But this is not the meaning here. For the poet wishes to affirm that in the course of world history all wrong is avenged, all right finally triumphs, and that the development of world history is an upward progress towards the light. But the gospel does not suggest this.”
Rudolf Bultmann, May 15, 1938. This World and the Beyond
Still here, with just this much,
and this much is a lot
being just this much.
And the kitchen, plentiful.
Discovery while baking.
Here one can be fooled by success
One can also be flat-out fooled.
Different things.
All beautiful. Today,
building a Boston Cream Pie,
baking for a woman elder
who has never been given a party--
there is joy in the kitchen
even while I’m weeping non-stop
while friends face deportation,
Help me understand this.
Knowing just this much, only
this far. Trauma
has entered the kitchen,
I say to Karen,
who rings bells in the morning.
Bells are not neutral--
There must be more
than the four theologians
of crisis come from Germany*
during the World War--
Bells are not neutral.
The bells themselves.
Made to ring,
they are adversarial
like hope. They are sounds
of the universe ringing,
Dis-arm, dis-arm!
and built for penetration.
Bells call for listening,
not manipulation.
Bells pursue a path
overcoming sorrow,
thrown even in anger.
The poets who hear the bells
listen for what the listening gives them.
They want to listen like Crazy Horse.
The poets are complete in their complaint.
Some of the poets quit listening.
Listening itself fails to understand.
And the other ones, too, who are so many,
the he ones who chose silence, who adopted it,
silence become their way and practice.
becoming what cannot be coming--
become a program of separation and deportation.
What about them? The ones that are so many.
There is a cake in the oven.
Deportation is trauma.
The carefully tempered eggs
in cream do not call for attention.
The oven respected, is not feared.
Poets mostly have accepted their vows,
as other poets in other times
suffered, were suffered, ignored and laughed at.
Become other in memory and word
what Martin gave with the arc of justice bending wild.
And just like that turned into a bumper sticker.
I sit stupefied in front of the television.
Bultmann and King together
weep for us
in our blind marching joy,
not seeing
what is,
what isn’t,
gospel.
What am I doing?
Friends asking.
Carrying the raw notes
from last week’s meeting
Between the Ridges,
smoke signals from up and down the valley,
and YIRN—Yakima Immigation Response Network,--
pages—each line a cry from a different person.
Raw Notes. Carrying. Walking. Not neutral.
Adversarial. Warrior emotions in an old man.
And listening. And listening--
my wife is ringing bells in the morning.
She rings in a bell choir. For worship.
Practicing before worship. I will be present,
listening to the bells. This listening
is what I do. Third ear listening. I will sit very close
to the bell ringers as the sound of the universe
comes from the bells when the ringers
connect to the striker on polished brass
as the music is released. The priests in my head
tell me solidarity begins with discomfort.
It is not very much, no, it is not, this kind of listening,
this kitchen work, cooking,
this thrilling work calling out, tears in the cake mix.
*Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Tillich
●
IX.
“WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?”
LETTER TO RUDOLF BULTMANN FROM AMERICA,
FEBRUARY 6, 2025
PART ONE
Forgetting and losing ourselves, we too pass through the Red Sea, through the desert,
across the Jordan…
“February 6”: A Year With Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Daily Meditations from His Letters,
Writings, and Sermons, Carla Barnhill, Ed.
How many of our compatriots still allow themselves to be summoned by the bells
to enter the house of God?
Rudolf Bultmann, 22 June 1941, St. Luke 14: 16-24, This World and the Beyond
Somewhere Bonhoeffer says,
I used to think Bultmann
went too far, now I wonder
if he went far enough--some-
thing like that. In his new existence
in America, more trouble for the beloved
martyr. After worship one Sunday
I mention to a man,
I’m reading Bonhoeffer, to which he says,
Which side are you on, be careful.
A man in a Lutheran Church.
Turns out there are sides, and he and I
are on different ones. Just like that
I find myself thrown to the curb.
There’s a new movie, too, Christian Century
asking, Has Bonhoeffer been hijacked?
You know the magazine, Professor Bultmann,
It’s good. However, No one asks me questions
about you, and you’re the one
who opened my eyes to Jesus. Others
carried me to Bonhoeffer. 40 years ago,
when I told my Icelandic pastor about
the man who brought me to Bultmann,
I say, the Iraqi Jesuit Stanley Marrow.
My pastor drives across the mountains to see.
He wants to know how this happened:
Who was this priest who brought
a man back to Lutheran roots? My pastor,
Harald Sigmar, knew his Bonhoeffer,
I was a sergeant in a MedEvac Hospital
in Vietnam when King was killed on May 8th,
listening to Black Gis on bunks, barracked,
asking, We’re fighting for the guys
who killed Dr. King? When I come home,
late 1968, after Tet, Bobby Kennedy also gone,
I’m listening to gospel, Odetta’s deep voice,
thinking King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail
should be bound with Paul’s letters, but I can’t
read the New Testament. That’s how I found
the Catholics and Vatican II. Through Merton.
Mid-70s now. Sigmar, my pastor, knows
what happened to Bonhoeffer in the Bronx.
He knows Tillich and Rollo May.
He doesn’t know poetry, and he’s trying
to write himself away from apology,
and fundamentalism. He loved Stanley Marrow.
He didn’t know what would happen
when I came home loaded with Rudolf Bultmann.
That rejection happened. It’s your great gift. It’s why I’m here.
Sitting alone. Maturity that slow. Nationalists
seeding themselves in power and glory. And
a man in my church asks, which side are you on?
●
X.
NEITHER HOT NOR COLD
the reason why I do it
though I fail and fail
in the giving of true names
is I am adam and his mother
and these failures are my job
Lucille Clifton, the making of poems, two-headed woman
Behold, I stand at the door and knock.
Revelation 3: 14-20
December 8, 1940—from the sermon of Rudolf Bultmann, This World and Beyond
“Amen”. Amen signifies validity: what is unshakably true. R.B.
I.
Black history month. Where I learn to say, Amen.
Heat came from my mother and she gave it to me.
But the poets: Countee Cullen:
To make a poet black
and make him sing.
If only I could do something like that.
II.
And from that hidden beyond, there can and there will one day break forth into this world
a power for judgment...R. B.
A boy walking railroad tracks. His father at the grain elevator.
Rural North Dakota.
He sets out walking rails.
A rope-pulled elevator takes them up,
father and son.
Holding his father’s leg rising into dust and sky.
Unbalanced on rails. Through dark silos of grain.
This was Indian country with a church.
across the street from his house.
He searched the sky for Smoke signals.
Later he heard about the Blessingway Singer.
Hozho. Frank Mitchell and his wife.
Everyone told him he couldn’t go.
They told him he didn’t belong.
But when he asked the family
Each member said it would be a blessing.
III.
Or perhaps the inner void of our lives has become painfully apparent
to us at some moment when we have been called upon
to help and comfort another…R. B.
My parents would cry in their sleep from the cold. The pastor didn’t like what he heard.
The church right across the street from our house. Jesus Christ. Real loud.
I knew they were prayers. Jesus knew that too. Jesus heard. Nobody here cursing.
This is a house of prayer.
IV.
A poet, Wilhelm Busch, with his vein of playful fantasy,
describes with somewhat grim humour
a dream which transported him…R. B.
Men and women made of numbers,
hollowed out.
Still running into them.
As soon as they open their mouths.
Makes me want to get out of town.
Up to seven, numbers speak of God.
Talk bottoms out in a hurry.
Moves to a kind of middle...
Like painted lines on the highway.
So much traffic to get there.
From the inside of a painted line
you won’t recognize
suffocation or salvation.
From this side of the line, no survivors.
Alcohol everywhere.
You can’t see the line
but on its other side, small talk.
V.
...the word of God which resounds from the invisible world of eternity: R.B.
We are connected in time, Dr. Bultmann.
I am born 9 August 1945.
I am young, back from war.
An old pastor gives me the kairos
for my questions.
Word arriving in the instant.
Like a goodnight kiss.
Poem come from nothing.
What came to me
as a boy
come to me
as a man
Accessing that place
from a town not on the map.
Belonging to everything.
God-world.
Eternity’s sand.
The chimney sweep’s pillow.
William Blake in the living room.
My living room.
Matter of fact world,
this one.
VI.
...the depths of divine love are opened out only to him
who allows himself to be emancipated in his life. R. B.
I know this about him.
He had to know.
At every point in his life.
Every time it came up—where ever.
He went down that road.
●
XI.
TRIPTYCH TO RUDOLF BULTMANN, TRYING TO SAY
SOMETHING OF WHAT HE GIVES ME
“The Poet who feels that poetry is born from this strange punishment—from the punishment that creates the strange--”
Michael Edwards, “Poetry and Isaiah’s Burning Coal”
This morning, four men at coffee.
Poet, photographer, jeweler.
I no longer know what to call myself.
Between it all. The photographer’s
birthday, 78, the youngest. The jeweler’s
85. Two poems. I take notes on the poems.
Four of us making an odd bunch. Friends
over decades, historical eyes and ears,
listening in a snow storm. Before coffee,
this from my friend Terry, poet friend given
cancer as a retirement gift ten years ago:
Look to the Margins, from Richard Rohr,
priest who runs a center for meditation.
Path of prophets, an essay from Cassidy Hall,
Queering Prophecy. First a word about margins.
Everywhere not geographical—we’re
everywhere. The illuminated margins
of El Salvador: Los Marjinados.
Those who live between railroad tracks
and the street, building casas de carton.
Mi amiga que vive en los marjinados
me envieron café desde esta frontera.
If the prophetic is queer, Cassidy writes,
..roots from 16th Century Scots, when
the word meant things like odd, strange,
transverse, or oblique. Ezekiel ate a scroll.
The poet at coffee reads his poem
celebrataing the birthday of his friend
and the history of photography,
light and dark. There’s a hidden
eye in the jewelry torched by fire--
and our nation queered by an election.
●
“Maybe poetry always begins with such a double
awareness, of sorrow but also of something else: not necessarily of God…”
Michael Edwards “Poetry and Isaiah’s Burning Coal”
El Salvador is always somewhere close to me,
Professor Bultmann. Five decades ago, Stanley Marrow,
Iraqi Jesuit priest, confronts me with my own questions
and brings me the end of the world. At first
I think I can tell others, This is how.
This is how to change your life.
Like Rilke said we must.
This world and the beyond. Right here.
A tiny cross on my dresser before me
where I put my glasses the night before.
I place it around my neck, sitting in the pew.
The Subversive Cross from the small
Lutheran Church in San Salvador.
The cross that went to prison, prisoners
painting the sins of the state on the cross.
Injusticia social, violencia a los derechos
humanos, sea pobre y marjinado.
Descriminación contra la mujer. Hambre.
After decades of failure to show others
Christology in daily walking, God
fed me pupusas, liberating nuns
and a Jesus who walked with the poor.
Obispo Medardo Gómez, Fr.s Jon Sobrino,
Ellacuria and Dean Brackley. I sat
in the pew where Rutilio Grande
gave the Santa Biblia to campesinos.
After the murders of Romero and Ellacuria,
I read the letters Sobrino wrote to Ellacu--
and Obispo Medardo—bishop to the poor,
walked me through barrio-soaked tsunamis,
taking me into his home, telling me how
he told the president to return his cross,
the Subversive Cross, the replica I place
around my neck this morning. All of this,
part of my walk, Medardo promising
I would be given this poem to write--
his great unsaying, the bewildering
unsaid, gift of a simple amen.
All of this written down in a notebook.
A Chinese koan.
●
“If a threshold is meant, we perceive even more clearly the ability
of poetry to open the world for us, to cross
a trembling limit, to penetrate into the otherness of things.”
Michael Edwards, “Poetry and Isaiah’s Burning Coal”
Your sermons open in many ways.
Today I’m looking at your homily from 22 June 1941,
not the news that Germany’s now at war with Russia,
not the text your preaching from, but this calling
for more understanding for spiritual, intellectual life
of our time...the burning questions and struggles—I want
to speak here of American voices who listen deeply
for prophetic presence. Dropping names--
American crisis calling. Calling Bultmann?
You’re part of this, How shall I live with myself?*
Barry Lopez, Gary Snyder.
Terry Tempest Williams, Rebecca Solnit.
So many names caring for our dying planet,
names who speak in the world as you spoke, ones who
mentor and confront. Snyder you could have
known, born in 1930. Trailmaker crossing
into Japan, coming home Buddhist. Lopez
stared into melting glaciers. In our town,
where I sit at coffee with friends, where
I worship, still—unsettled, with my wife,
I ask the pastor to sit with me beside
another cross, on three chairs, one for
her dog, Goldie, trying to talk between
the poem and the pew, the pew and the pulpit,
that between place. She listens.
She lets me. She isn’t afraid of Bultmann
or the poets. Of pastors or pews.
You wouldn’t know Michael Edwards,
of course. He comes later, now.
Poet and Christian. English writing in French,
translated back to English. I read him now, reading
your sermons, This world and beyond.
P.S. This short thanks—for taking us there, and always, for courage,
for believing in us, the ones in the pews. For words in dangerous times.
●
*In a letter to Karl Barth, Bultmann states, asking, What shall I say to my children?” but consists of the question: How shall I say it to myself? Or rather: How shall I hear it myself? #94 Marburg, 11-15 November 1952. Karl Barth—Rudolf Bultmann Letters, 1922/1966.
THE POEM INSIDE THE FOOTNOTE
Railroad grafitti
wooden fence sentries
protecting grand kids
●
XII. THAT OTHER WORLD IS THIS ONE—RUDOLF BULTMANN
●
RUNNING BACK AGAIN, MORE THAN WORDPLAY,
MAGIC ON FABRIC, EFFIE, LUKE 9:36, JOHN 3: 16
for Rex DeLoney, again
On the wall in the living room
beneath the butterscotch chair
where I sit, Rosie Lee Tompkins,
African-American quilter,
from a painting, looks down
at me, every morning, like this,
her luminous eyes, woke open
and framed by her kerchief,
tied in a knot at back, looking
at me, as I’ve said, and speaking too,
saying, God gave me these colors
to see. Saying, The pool
is giving birth to itself all the time.
It is February, African-American
history month. This painting,
by a friend, Rex DeLoney,
colorist, commissioned by me
for my wife, who is also a quilter.
Rex, a friend, also gave me his painting
of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme
when I left the classroom. Mss. Tompkins,
born in 1936, began with pillow cases.
She is famous now. Her imaginative
portrayals of God and freedom,
quote scripture. Her mother’s here,
also quilting, and the cross to the left
of her face (Magic Johnson’s on it),
which she had to cross through
enabling her to do her magnificence.
Extremely shy, known as Effie,
she called herself in fabric
Rosie Lee Tompkins. If you listen
while looking at these quilted squares
embedded in paint, you will hear
the horn of Ornette Coleman.
You will know the word, Palindrome.
●
ON RUDOLF BULTMANN’S SERMON, 17 JUNE 1945
2 Corinthians 4: 6-11
“For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’, who has shown in our hearts
to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.
‘But we have this treasure in earthen vessels.”
Rudolf Bultmann
“The spiritual strength of Paul springs from the fact that he lives in two worlds; not only in the visible world of change and decay, of tears and death, that world in which we are, ‘afflicted in every way’ and ‘perplexed’, but also in the invisible world in which there is no fear and no despair.”
Rudolf Bultmann
“What she said next sounded barbed...’I don’t know how you can sleep at night.’ Obama replied, ‘You know what? I don’t really sleep at night. It’s not just that I worry about these kids from El Salvador. I also worry about kids in Sudan, in Yemen, and in other parts of the world. And here’s my problem. We live in a world with nation states. I have borders.’”
Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, Jonathan Blitzer
●
Last night on the news, They can move you
if they have a bed—and they’re building centers
with 40,000 beds. Call this country as you call me.
Can I turn myself inside out? Transcending
anxiety on my own? It’s June, 1945--
my mother is seven months pregnant with me.
Born 9 August 1945—that day. Nagasaki.
Invisible realities. 80 years later, having lived
this life, consuming as no one in the history of mankind
has ever consumed. No one. Not like this.
Physicians desperate, I recommend
putting medicine in the water for all.
What you say at Marburg: Right cannot
be maintained without power.
The world demanding practicality.
This world. Where our church--
ours—hijacks Bonhoeffer.
How does anyone sleep at night, not,
What have we become, but who we are
in our expediency.
How you address June, 1945.
And still you call on the poets.
I say, Thank you, again. Galway wrote
that short poem seeming to channel you:
“Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.”
This world and the beyond,
coming back to you, understanding.
Understanding ourselves, 2025.
Sterling Brown in the 1930s, again,
you were delivering sermons at Marburg
against the strong men, writing to his people,
like you, the two of you, worlds apart,
They taught you religion they disgraced.
To have been in that pew, Professor Bultmann.
To hear you now is to have heard you then.
Empathy won’t take me that far.
Cancel myself, Rilke? Rilke, tan poco,
won’t get me there. You call
for the first question, How,
while in the midst of it all--
Church, Black Church, children
crossed and border-separated.
Crucified children. On the cross with the criminals.
First congregation revisited.
Here among the sacrificed. Say their name.
And still, you call on the poets
from the pew where the poets have fled.
And here, in America, mass deportations.
●
You wrote
that sermon,
finishing
with the psalm,
Psalm 115:
Not to us, Lord, not to us--
La gloria, Señor, no es para nosotros,
No es para nosotros--
giving us then Paul Fleming’s poem,
Be content and know your part.
●
“...our hopes to the world of unseen realities. It is just in so doing that we shall win true inner freedom for the urgent tasks of the present, courage to accomplish the work which in the distress of our days is laid upon us. For then no disillusionment can paralyse our strength; then we have become unassailable. Patience…”
23 June 1946, Rudolf Bultmann, This World and Beyond, Lamentations 3: 22-41
And that sermon sandwiched between two others. One on Guadalupe’s Day, December 12, 1943, on the Beatitudes, asking, “Do we belong to the circle of those to whom these promises apply?” And you single out, the one in particular addressed to your people: Blessed are they who mourn for they shall be comforted. We feel what we cannot see in your words. Strange. Offensive, Bewildered. Frightened, astonished, piercing all humanity to its depths, renunciation. With an attitude of waiting. Suppressed, distorted. Thrust forward by achievement or pose. And then this: “...or whether our waiting for the future is so radical that we renounce all dreams and yet are cheerful in our waiting...true joy is promised to those who wait upon God.”
Jump to the third sermon, following the 17 June 1945 sermon using Paul’s text from II Corinthians, Let light shine out of darkness. Here, the twenty-first of twenty-two sermons in This World and the Beyond, the sermon this study will close with, you turn to Lamentations 3: 22-41. The date is 23 June 1946. “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end.”
You ask in a series of questions: Do we feel the pain and suffering of our people? You say, “...perhaps in our case, the situation is one of irremediable ruin.” And you let the poet in Lamentations have full rein. My eyes flow without ceasing...El Señor es todo lo que tengo...The Lord is my portion.
Again and again we listen from the African-American songbook. Stony the road we trod. How we hear you, Professor Bultmann, citing poems, citing scripture, here, this:
As God shall guide, so will I walk,
resigning all self-will.
And again, Moses only permitted to see God’s back:
As God shall guide, so will I walk,
Though hard and stony be the way
Black church. People of color. La Raza. Difficult truths. Cheap grace again. How far from solidarity, America. Your sermons, Rudolf Bultmann. Your reading of Lamentations. Your reading the poems. Ending this sermon with the toughest love in the toughest time:
What has a living man the right to complain of?
It is his sin that each man should lament.
This one, a long, tough sermon. “Yes and no. The way to God leads not to hell but through hell, or, in Christian terms, through the cross. It leads us not to hopelessness but to a hope which transcends all human hope; and we must silence all human hope, if that divine hope is to dawn for use...For man as he is...This hell we must traverse.”
●
THE ODD VOCATION
OF A FOLLOWER
Blind Bartimaeus
Almost eleven pm
When vision arrives
Void of all content
Yesterday is left behind
For a way of life
●
ADDENDUM, INSERTION, AND VOICES OF GOD
Some years before things went bad, I arrived in an Aboriginal settlement called Willowra, in Australia’s Northern Territory….This simple technique of awareness had long been my way to open a conversation with any unfamiliar landscape. Who are you? I would ask. How do I say your name? May I sit down?
Barry Lopez, Barry Lopez “Love in a Time of Terror: On Natural Landscapes, Metaphorical Living, and Warlpiri Identity
Once tried a haircut at the Barber College too –
sat
half an hour before they told me
white
men use the other side.
Goodwill,
St. Vincent de Paul,
Salvation
Army up the coast
For
mackinaws and boots and heavy socks
–
Seattle
has the best for logger gear
Once
found a pair of good tricouni boots at the under-the-public market
store,
Mark
Tobey’s scene,
torn
down I hear –
&
Filson jacket with a birdblood stain.
Gary Snyder Bubbs Creek Haircut
If the world is torn to pieces, I want to see what story I can find in fragmentation. I have taken to making collages. I want to see whether a different narrative might arise from poring over American magazines, tearing them up, and putting them back together in a shape that makes sense to me.
“The Turquoise Triangle Erosion: Essays of Undoing, Terry Tempest Williams
The word emergency comes from emerge, to rise out of, the opposite of merge, which comes from mergere, to be within or under a liquid, immersed, submerged An emergency is a separation from the familiar, a sudden emergence into a new atmosphere, one that often demands we ourselves rise to the occasion.
Rebecca Solnit: A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
●
If you see something, you call.
You call.
Every time information gets passed around, it gets distorted.
The strong man talks everyday.
These raw notes.
They’re part of the preparation.
These woven voices.
Some of this stuff, some of this stuff
we have to be prepared for.
It takes people to circle the familiar.
Sterling Brown’s Strong men
●
So, in a way, we know what’s coming.
And so it begins!!
●
ACCOMPANIMENT, 2019
Asked to drive to Ephrata to pick up a couple and take them to their ICE appointment, I didn't understand the mission, or know the couple. I didn't know Ephrata, but I knew Quincy, and have a friend in Quincy. I thought the two towns were close together, that's what I knew. Because I thought it was the following day, I declined. My son was visiting between his mountain and the farm, two places he lives, making his world. He was gone on Tuesday when our town's airport becomes the connecting point for ICE flights connecting immigrants from the detention center in Tacoma, and others in the country. Flights regularly come in from Phoenix. Buses are emptied and people, bound in chains, board the planes. The plane arrives from Phoenix, and the airline is always Swift Air.
When I talked with the woman where we meet to protest the flights behind the chain link fence where the plane and buses converge, who asked me if I might make the drive, she explained that that the couple's appointment was the following day, I agreed to do it. The woman is a friend. She didn't make the request lightly. We share four decades of accompaniment work. "This might be something you'd be interested in," she had said. She is a go-between, a correveidile. Her invitation had been received.
●
from THE ICE COUNSELER INTERVIEWS, 2019
Young women bringing in young women,
mostly. Some couples. An occasional man.
We're young women, too,
friendly, warm, bilingual.
No tengas miedo aquí,
coming into the system
at the ICE office
Toca el timbre sola una vez
Only ring the bell once
La proxima vez toca mi ventana
Three photos on the wall
Top down men, top down woman,
she's gone now, and I don't know
the man in the middle, la rubia,
ella se fue,
the link to us here
can't be seen, it's hardly noticed
it's good work and sad too
hay mucha tristeza, we try
and take away the fear, el miedo,
I think we're a good fit
what we do is almost a perfect fit
para ellas en la sombra, in shadows,
las braceletas, the bracelets
around the ankles fit tight
on the leg, and those plastic bags
they carry those replacement batteries,
it's abrasive, yes it is, it rubs the soul
and it's hard on us counselers
Those batteries must never
run out of power
as long as that battery is charged
and that bracelet is secure
on the ankle, you won't
have trouble and you're safe
And that's our job in a nutshell.
Jim Bodeen
17 October--26 October 2019
●
ICE FLIGHT #93, 29 DECEMBER, 2020
for Danielle, Mick, Mike, Pat
Flight’s back on, Email says,
a chance to say once more,
Thanks for counting, reporting for
asylum seekers, for waving
until I found you. Last one
this year. Last one, ever?
They piled some snow up here
in front of us. The legal pad
records 15 deportees
from two buses arriving
from Tacoma. Personal
belongings in plastic bags.
Shackles laid out on tarmac
with handcuffs. Behind the fence
with us, a photographer
from the paper, stabilizes
his camera with a mono-pod.
Jim
31 December 2020
●
Listening Session Table Conversations
Suggested Questions for conversation.
What are you hearing in your communities?
What are you / others you know feeling, concerned about?
How have you already been affected?
In your families, at work, at school etc?
What incidents have already happened to you or others?
What resources do you need?
Where do you get reliable information?
How do you feel supported?
Where do you feel safe?
This is immigration workshop day
Whatever standing in solidarity is about,
and accompaniment
This point of emphasis:
Most of our work has been done in churches
because they’re big, and mostly empty.
●
WE’RE NOT STARTING FROM SCRATCH--
SOME DAYS--
WE’RE STARTING FROM SCRATCH--
BEGIN AGAIN
SOME DAYS, CHRISTMAS EVE, 2019--
SOME DAYS
Today for instance,
I drive
around my town
stopping at lights
hoping
some
one
will see (and read)
the sticker
on my rear
window
saying,
CLOSE THE CAMPS
and when I drive away
as the light
turns
GREEN
the camps,
will
be
CLOSED
Christmas Eve, 2019
●
Here are some responses
Students are reluctant to stand out and participate in high school leadership groups, attend
conferences as heard from Migrant education at ESD 105, representing 26 School Districts
throughout the valley
Students are reluctant to speak in public the language used in their homes.
Fear of elimination of Dept of Education.
Employees fear repercussions at work, economic and social. Fear of billionaires.
Fear of family instability.
Fear of people’s perceptions, especially in the face of rise of criminal, abusive racist threats and
behavior directed toward people of color. Disgusting behavior modeled by incoming
administration of disgusting behavior, seems to give people permission to be abusive.
Feel safe on the reservation, any reservation in the US.
Discussed reservations as Sanctuaries and Sanctuary Cities.
Already the talk of defunding the cities--
●
JUST OUTSIDE CHAIN-LINK FENCE
AT YAKIMA'S MUNICIPAL AIRPORT, ALL SOULS DAY, 2019,
WATCHING AND LISTENING AS MICHAEL,
PHOTOGRAPHER OF DETAINEES AT ICE FLIGHTS,
PHOTOGRAPHER WHO PHOTOGRAPHS
EACH ONE, BETWEEN SWIFT AIR JET N531AU
AND TACOMA DETENTION CENTER BUSES,
AS HE INFORMS NEW WITNESS WHAT'S HAPPENING
for Michael Collins
They've been arrested for the crime
of seeking asylum
in the United States of America
All Souls Day, 2019
Yakima, Washington
●
Hearing a lot of anxiety, fear about what is going to happen
It’s happening.
Students and children fear parents disappearing
Students are not showing up to class.
People feel safe in Churches, Not in schools
Need Reliable information, Dependable new sources e.g Reuters
Thankful for YIRN, and Know Your Rights resources
Would like centralized information
Apps on Smart Phone
Safe Places: Churches, Schools, Shelters, Reputable Non-profits, Home, Zoom, Help Hotlines
Instead of creating more space, use already used sources to do outreach: Facebook, Radio, Free
Cable, Local Facebook Groups.
Uncertainty about what is going to happen, people divided and we are attacking our own, no
security and assurances, polarized community, need to understand power of voting and the ballot.
Fear of the Unpredictable Day to Day
Fear of Racial Profiling
Feel Safe at: Home, Shelter as meeting spaces, virtual meetings, library, hospitals, schools
Information: Reputable news sources, chats, Spanish speaking Radio
Fear of Immediate family deportation
●
Listening Session Table Conversations
Suggested Questions for conversation.
What are you hearing in your communities?
What are you / others you know feeling, concerned about?
How have you already been affected?
In your families, at work, at school etc?
What incidents have already happened to you or others?
What resources do you need?
Where do you get reliable information?
How do you feel supported?
Where do you feel safe?
This is immigration workshop day
Whatever standing in solidarity is about,
and accompaniment
This point of emphasis:
Most of our work has been done in churches--
they’re big, and mostly empty.
●
Students are reluctant to speak in public the language used in their homes.
Fear of elimination of Dept of Education.
Employees fear repercussions at work, economic and social. Fear of billionaires.
Fear of family instability.
Fear of people’s perceptions, especially in the face of rise of criminal, abusive racist threats and
behavior directed toward people of color. Disgusting behavior modeled by incoming
administration of disgusting behavior, seems to give people permission to be abusive.
Feel safe on the reservation, any reservation in the US.
Discussed reservations as Sanctuaries and Sanctuary Cities.
Already the talk of defunding the cities--
Fear of the Unpredictable Day to Day
Fear of Racial Profiling
Feel Safe at: Home, Shelter as meeting spaces, virtual meetings, library, hospitals, schools
Information: Reputable news sources, chats, Spanish speaking Radio
Fear of Immediate family deportation
24 January 2025
●
THOSE SUNDAY MORNINGS
Pulpits silent
as the church mice
Narthex after worship
all about cookies
Nobody recites the poems of William Blake
or the songs of Kris Kristofferson
To see a world in a grain of sand
and a heaven in a wild flower
hold infinity in the palm of your hand
and eternity in an hour
Coming of age in Panama
working with the medics
at the government hospital
in the Canal Zone—Gorgas
its name. GI. I learned how
to conjugate verbs
in high school Spanish
and some Panamanians
thought I was Castilian
right out of Madrid.
There weren’t many
and mostly they were
with Gis in bars
singing Guantanamera
Growing up in rural North Dakota
near the Canadian border,
Jesus on a flannel board
mounted on a tripod
in a boat on water
taking the fishermen
deeper than they were
comfortable going,
Jesus with David,
John the Baptist,
Abraham, Jacob, Joseph
the coat of many colors
I was down for that
all of them so good together
Just months before, fall of 65,
lost from Karen in New Orleans,
failing even with literature
when Hurricane Betsy hit
closing the university of Ponchartrain,
Dylan singing, Something is happening
and you don’t know what it is,
from Highway 61, walking away
from those classes,...do you, Mr. Jones?
How to become a soldier in New Orleans.
What must be done to get back to Karen.
The chaplain in Basic Training
who put me with the medics
telling me, We believe in this war.
Studying poetry
at the Canal Zone college
dressed in Class As,
wearing the cunt cap
walking into that room
full of 18-year old red lip-sticked
dependents of officers
who move away
when I sit down. We read
Prufrock,….would I be good?
And memorize gulping chunks
of immortality.
That’s some catch, that Catch-22,
Yosarian said. It’s the best there is,
agreed Doc Daneeka
After Prufrock, Sunday Morning
by Wallace Stevens and I memorized
great dizzying images, Complacencies
of the peignoir, and late coffee and oranges
in a sunny chair...learning how
to pronounce peignoir, to see
through sheer, the negligee itself
floating feathers, and the teacher,
whose name I do not know
to this day, showing how Sunday
worship’s become common place
next to Sunday morning--and more lines
from other poems, Call the roller
of big cigars, the muscular one,
and bid him pitch…
–the soldier could have stayed in Panama
and finished his tour—but—
being young—
I had to go to Viet Nam
to get back to Karen—again--
A career soldier, Tom Pendergrass,
West Texas Irish Baptist,
who loved Hemingway, became my guide.
We drove the Panama-American Highway
in his VW to San Antonio not knowing
about the war in Central America.
I saw Oaxaca for the first time
from the south.
A month with Karen
in Seattle, a buck sergeant now,
on my way to Viet Nam, supposedly
I knew all there was to know
about evacuation. This was
August, 1967.
The question I would ask
people for the rest of my life:
Where were you in 1968?
85th Evacuation Hospital, Qui Nhon.
When the Non Com said,
We’re going North, I told him
my orders were to stay in Cam Ranh Bay,
he says to me, Get your ass
on that fucking truck, soldier.
●
You might not believe this,
but I took my R&R and went skiing in Japan.
Took the luxury train out of Tokyo north
to the mountains close to where Bashō
walked, making his journey to the narrow north.
Hot springs, cotton robes, powder snow.
Flying back into Saigon,
Ho Chi Minh City today, the plane
couldn’t land. Tan San Nhut under
attack. Tet. 1968. Days later
when we got back to the 85th
it was non-stop triage for three months.
We evacuated 700 Gis a month
until Johnson stopped the bombing.
King is shot in April--on the 4th--
in my letter to Karen on the 9th
I’ve got the date wrong--while listening
to the black medics
saying, And this time
they’ll send us
back to the United States.
What did we know?
I came home in August, 1968.
Turned 23 in the Nam.
I’m renting violins in a music store
and two weeks later, enrolled
in an evening drama course
at the community college.
That first class
the drama teacher says,
Jim, let’s go outside for a minute.
I’m going to show you
how to walk into a room.
Karen and I get married in November.
The 23d. Kennedy, the president,
was killed on the 23d, right? 1963.
Right after Karen and I finish high school.
I’m back in school. Witth the GI Bill.
And the beer I had for breakfast
wasn’t bad, so I had one more for dessert.
Kris Kristofferson singing.
I’m older. The 18-year olds
ask me two questions,
Did I kill any babies?
Did I have any dope?
Back in the poetry room
Reading Wallace Stevens again.
Kristofferson had just written that song,
Sunday Morning Coming Down.
That’s what I’m listening to.
I’m in a master’s program now.
Blake and Wordsworth.
Robin Redbreast in a cage
Puts all Heaven in a rage.
I write my paper on those two
Sunday mornings--
Stevens’ and Kristofferson’s,
get all the way to Jesus
but the door doesn’t open,
that door to another existence.
It opens to the Black Church.
It goes through El Salvador.
It rides ICE flights.
Some of that
why I read these sermons.
When the elevator opens,
a man, emerging. And Sunday morning.
Sunday mornings will never be the same.
●
ALL THE CHILDREN
“This brings us to the main point. To be ready for God’s call means just this—to be prepared to live in the conviction that our life of earthly work with its cares and projects, its sorrows and joys, is not the ultimate reality. What then is the essence of God’s invitation? It is surely the call to a higher life, to a future life, to a life that lies beyond this world. It is the call to free ourselves from this world and to become centred in God’s world.”
Rudolf Bultmann This World and Beyond
June 22, 1941
“Then the house-holder in anger said to his servant, ‘Go out quickly to the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in the poor and maimed and blind and lame.’ And the servant said, ‘Sir, what you commanded has been done, and still there is room.’And the master said to the servant, ‘Go out to the highways and hedges, and compel people to come in, that my house may be filled.’”
St. Luke 14: 16-24
●
MY GRAND DAUGHTER CALLS FROM THE UNIVERSITY
For Katie, 19
You call from your dorm all fixed up
to thank me for the second-hand,
but leather-bound, New Testament
I sent you for your backpack,
scripture I pass along to you,
good to carry into any coffee shop.
You never know with words,
that’s part of how I hear you
on the phone—your meditation
and morning practice, getting ready
for the day. Your thank you turns
into the kind of conversation
always rare, always possible,
with ones like you, who pay attention.
You have the third ear for listening.
You have the third eye for seeing.
You speak more than one language.
When you walk into any classroom
people can see you’re down
from the Mountain. They might
not be able to say, Third Burroughs,
Fire Lookout. They’ve not seen you stretch.
They know someone new just walked into the room.
Give them some time to catch up.
Love, Grandpa
●
WHEN THE TUESDAY ICE DEPORTATION PLANE
LANDS IN YAKIMA TOMORROW
We can wave goodbye
for his wife and three children
from Fed Ex parking
●
A VALENTINE’S DAY POEM
AND A BOOK BEFORE VALENTINE’S DAY
Each two pages in this book,
Forgive Everybody Everything,*
has a different surprise,
but I don’t know
your inner lives well enough
to know which two pages
might be your two,
carrying a personal surprise
particular to you, for instance,
Joy, Gratefulness, Resilience,
maybe.
Maybe you combine different ones
together--
Love and Companionship. Jesus and Knucklehead.
Maybe Faith and Take Off.
You are, each of you, a Masterpiece,
and Masterpiece is in here
on page 24. And you’re all,
Beauty Full, too, and Beauty Full
is on page 40.
*Forgive Everybody Everything, by Father Gregg Boyle
●
SO MUCH MORE TO FIND OUT
Josh at 19
You’re coming by tomorrow
to tie Grandpa’s necktie
with that double Windsor
knot I could never learn.
Thanks, man. Like you said
last night, When do you need it?
You’re driving back
from the Klickitat--
How’s the fishing?
I ask.
No good, brown as dirt--
fish everywhere, they can’t see
my lures or smell my eggs.
That’s poetry! I say.
I said it the way I did--
on purpose, you say.
That’s more interesting to me
than your fishing, is what
I say. So much you’re learning
about yourself everyday.
You’ve got my ear, Josh--
Gpa’s listening!
Gpa Jim/Gma Karen
P.S. Love is still the most important.
●
SUMMER SOLSTICE SEVENTEEN
She comes by, Samantha does,
beautiful with that cocky smile,
carrying ice cream sundaes
in a bag for Grandma & Grandpa,
with spoons, indicating
we are to eat them before dinner.
Finished first, I ask her to load up
my spoon one time from Grandma’s dish.
She smiles, then she and Grandma drive
to the nursery to buy a plant.
She returns with a desert cactus palm
for her room. Small and expensive.
Size has no value in what we treasure.
Much of what we know, we know together.
Sammie looks at the red flag on the porch
with the poem in white letters
beginning, So much depends.
Grandma says to her
Grandpa made you memorize
the wheel barrow poem when you were a little girl.
Sammie looks at Grandma
and asks, When was that?
Grandpa
●
THE AMERICAN GOLDFINCH
--for D. P. at 17
is the songbird you fill the feeder
full of thistles for, Dee. This morning
you’re 17, and finches sing
Tsii, tsi, tsi, tsit, for you. Maybe
you’re making pizzas today,
working your shift at Mod Pizza,--
maybe right now, you’re getting ready
for work, maybe checking messages
on your phone from friends singing
for you. When they call, sing back.
Tell them you like thistles, dandelions,
small twigs. Tell them you like flowers,
lots of flowers, purple ones.
Purple ones with yellow centers.
You’re 17. Give this day to yourself.
Hey, this day to find out again, what it’s like!
Love you. Gpa
●
STEPPING OUT, A COMMENCING
--for K. P.
--Search into the inner-pattern of things:
Isn’t it joy?
Tu Fu*
You text me with news of fresh limes
in ice water wondering what you might
call it. You can’t know what joy
this gives a grandfather watching you
walk into this unexplored world,
discovering image by image, your eyes
opening to yourself, refreshed
and astonished. I’ve been given
these gifts, too! Katie, you are
all dance and dharma, water
colors and paintbrush. You,
the camera and the shutter speed.
Aperture and depth of field.
You with the voice of many talents--
Yes, you have, this is you,
brave one before yourself,
--Oh, my gosh!
Love Grandpa
*translation by David Hinton
●
EIGHT DECADES AFTER HIS MARBURG SERMONS, 1933-1950
FROM YAKIMA, WASHINGTON STATE, DURING FEBRUARY, 2025
“Our church has withheld a good deal
of criticism and scholarship from the laity
and must rapidly make up for what has been missed,
if it does not want to atone for this in a painful way.”
R.B. quoted in Rudolf Bultmann: A Biography, Hammann Konrad, p. 101
When I found this kernel of nourishment,
I photographed it, but in my haste,
did not record the source.
The sentence alone fed me.
It became the image on my post card.
poems were written and mailed. Quickly
I ran out of friends I could safely
send them to, and then there were those
who I found it difficult to speak to,
except--
when I had this to say to them.
This is more important today than before.
I relish this post card in the mail,
with short poems on the back,
using a special commemorative stamp
with each one. The final step
involves getting a hand cancellation
from the postal clerk before mailing.
I’m attaching a rare James Baldwin stamp
on your card, mailing it to the White House
in Washington, D.C.
Others,
well, for them, what Rilke said,
Professor Bultmann, Take a step out.
Love, Jim
●
PRIOR TO RETURNING YOUR SERMONS
TO INTER-LIBRARY LOAN
LAST POST CARD TO RUDOLF BULTMANN
This morning I carried your Marburg
sermons, This World and Beyond,
to coffee for my friend to see. He’s a poet,
outlaw Buddhist, He’s been following me
as I read. I show him descriptive passages
you worked with, and dates of the sermon.
He asks what I’ve done with them
in word and prayer. How does Bultmann
speak to you? Then, almost without pause,
How did he survive? Kind of off-balance
by his question, wondering, Have I told
this wrong? Silence in buying time.
Bultmann follows the word where
it tells him to go. His Christ-posture
modern, unyielding, that of a teacher,
asking like a teacher, faculty
and students alike, How
did we come up short, this time?
Look here. August, 1940,
how you say, We spoil our relationship
to God failing to confess! We have nothing
that you did not give us. Our lives
are without content apart from you.
Have I not shared this with my friend?
Do I not, then, carry you into my day?
It’s time to turn these sermons back
to the library. My friend thinks
I should have this book on my shelves.
It’s been in my care for six weeks.
I’ve carefully erased my pencil marks
made in the margins,
and the book’s as good as new.
Blessings, as you Lutheran pastors say, and thanks.
Jim
●
NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
I.
Shortly after the world was opening back up after the Covid epidemic, I asked Pastor Kathleen Anderson to sit with me in the small chapel under the cross in our church. I set up three chairs, one for her dog, Goldie. She listened to me for more than an hour as I talked about poetry and Christianity. My frustration with the poetry business is as great as it is with the Christian church is what I said.
My half-century journey with Rudolf Bultmann begins in 1975 at Seattle University in their Vatican II program for priests and nuns (SUMORE: Seattle University Masters of Religious Education) where I encountered Professor Stanley Marrow, S.J. who was the lead Christology Professor, Weston Jesuit School of Theology.
There are others. First, there is Harald Sigmar, pastor at our neighborhood Lutheran church. When I confronted him with the Black Church’s gospel that spoke to me in word and song, Pastor Sigmar gave me Abraham Herschel with Martin Luther King, Jr., and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Harlem. When I told Sigmar about Stanley Marrow he got in his car and drove to Seattle, attending the course with me. The Pastor talked his way into the program, too. Then he became an adjunct professor in the program in order to guide me through Paul Tillich’s Systematic Theology. This all taking place during the three academic summers in the program.
Pastor Ron Moen guided me into Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Cost of Discipleship, Life Together, and Letters from Prison.
Yakima Valley Regional Library was helpful through out my reading during my life with books I never could have obtained on my own through Inter library loan. They made it possible for me to read Bultmann’s work on John’s gospel and then, before it was fully available, an early version of Konrad Hammann’s biography.
I also found David W. Congdon’s work during the time of George W. Bush’s presidency, when knowledge of the German theologians became more crucial for me to understand. Again, however, I would not understand his full importance to me at that time.
Lowell Murphree, a Methodist pastor and poet from Ellensburg, Washington, where I finished school after returning from Viet Nam, offered a summer reading course on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship. During the summer of 2024, Pastor Lowell Murphree sent word on social media, that he was going to offer a 4-week course on Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship. My friend Steve Hill, a master gardener and activist in justice work, and community mental health rode with me, attended the class, and provided deep listening as well. Finally, Tripp Fuller offered an online class on Bonhoeffer during this time and I became aware of Christians competing for Bonhoeffer.
During the Covid years the Yakima Airport became a site for weekly deportation of immigrants. Buses from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrived weekly. Danielle Surkatty, leader of Yakima Immigration Response Network (YIRN), organized our witness of these flights, counting bodies, tracking and caring for the people as only a true witness can. February is African-History month.
II.
MY FRIEND STEVE HILL SENDS ME AN EMAIL
Grafitti on a fence in SE Yakima
by railroad tracks. Where does this come
from? I ask. Go down 6th Street
past my house, go north, cross
the railroad tracks and turn
towards First Avenue.
ALL THE CHILDREN MATTER
painted on boards, hand prints
of missing indigenous women,
and t-shirts, too, the size of fists,
I matter printed as though
they’re commercial products
for sale in store fronts.
Red Paint. Bold.
My camera gets up close--
100 images in minutes.
Visionary landscape large.
Find the name of this artist,
I say to Steve,
Grand children proud,
proud grandpa.
I want to know him--
one who knows the risk
when all children matter.
Jim Bodeen
25 February 2025
All images in this mss by jim bodeen
●
Rudolf Bultmann
Rudolf Bultmann, 20 August 1884-30 July 1976, was a German Lutheran theologian and professor of the New Testament at the University of Marburg. A critic of liberal theology, Bultmann instead argued for an existentialist interpretation of the New Testament. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Jim Bodeen
Jim Bodeen , 9 August 1945-, is a library patron, and card holder at the West Valley Branch of the Yakima Valley Regional Library, Yakima, Washington. He attends Central Lutheran Church in Yakima.
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