I’ve been thinking about a pencil. Specifically, the stolen pencil that is central in the novel James. In this book, Perceval Everett reimagines Mark Twain’s classic, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Using the pencil, Huck’s sidekick, the enslaved man Jim, tells his own story from his own perspective. “With my pencil,” James declares, “I wrote myself into being.” Enslaved people were, of course, forbidden to read and write. Yet James is a secret intellectual. He sneaks into libraries to devour books. In dreams and deliriums he carries on long conversations with philosophers like Voltaire. He uses an exaggerated slave dialect in front of white folks in order to disguise his real thoughts. 

Along his journey, James meets George, who agrees to steal the pencil from his own master so that James can write. James witnesses George being beaten for his crime and learns later that George was executed, though his identity as the thief was never proven. Cherishing the costly power of self-definition the pencil offers, James records his story in a partially blank book which, ironically, belongs to a composer of racist minstrel songs performed in blackface. Like the prophet Isaiah and John the Baptist, James is “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness.” His story cracks open the dominant narrative of white supremacy. It exposes how even well-meaning people collude with this reign of terror and how it continues to operate even in the present, in more subtle and hidden ways. And the story of James also proclaims that liberation is possible, that we can free ourselves from false narratives that keep us from being fully human together. 

 Beginning with the Roman emperor, Luke names no fewer than seven political and religious leaders, men whose power was close to absolute. The emperor in fact believed he was divine, called himself son of God, and claimed a virgin birth. Perhaps you can see what a bold and subversive move it was for the Gospel writers to ascribe these same characteristics to a Jewish peasant child, Jesus. The self-serving god of empire wielded coercive power—the power of fear, violence, and greed. Luke, however, declares that God is not in these power centers; God is not in the palace or even the temple. God is the voice of one crying out in the wilderness. God is in the pain, resistance and hope of those whose stories empire seeks to silence and suppress. God writes with a stolen pencil.

In chapter one of Luke, we learn that even though John’s father was a priest in Jerusalem, John himself was raised in the wilderness. Luke draws from a deep tradition in the Hebrew scriptures that portrays the wilderness as the place in which God authentically speaks and acts. The wilderness is where the people experienced liberation from slavery and, in later generations, the means by which they returned home from exile. The wilderness is a landscape of contrasts. As a space beyond human control, it is dislocating and uncomfortable, full of hunger and thirst, danger, fear and dissatisfaction. The wilderness is also a space of provision in which God supplies manna, enough nourishment of body and spirit for one day at a time. The wilderness is where we learn to allow God to guide us, with pillars of cloud and fire, on a newly made road that is flat, and wide, straight and safe. In the wilderness we come to understand that domination is a false god, that coercion is simply not in God’s nature, that divine power is instead relational, that it is up to us to freely choose whether or not to answer the call of God’s liberating love. 

John, formed and shaped by the God of the wilderness, proclaimed a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. In other words, he offered his community time and space in which to prepare themselves to receive God’s gift of a newborn world growing in the womb of a peasant girl. John’s baptism of repentance was like the highway-building Isaiah imagines in the desert wilderness. Repentance alters the whole landscape—not just individual people. Repentance, or metanoia, is a changed life. In the process of repentance, we address sin, which is the divide between ourselves and God, the gap between who we are as a community and who we are meant to be. Sin is the name for our collective inability to embody the truth that, as Julian of Norwich says, “our soul is united to unchangeable goodness.” Sin is a shared woundedness, a sort of mass deception.

The novel James artfully illustrates the sin of white supremacy as James teaches enslaved children how to lessen the risks involved in relating to white people.

“White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” I said. “The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us. Perhaps I should say ‘when they don’t feel superior.’ So, let’s pause to review some of the basics.” 

“Don’t make eye contact,” a boy said. “Right, Virgil.” 

“Never speak first,” a girl said. “That’s correct, February.”

In another scene, James reflects on how religion itself is sinful when used as a tool of oppression:

“There might be some higher power, children, but it’s not their white God. However, the more you talk about God and Jesus and heaven and hell, the better they feel.” The children said together, “And the better they feel, the safer we are.” 

“February, translate that.” 

“Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be.” 

“Nice.”

In yet another scene, the children are learning that if something is going wrong, they must not point it out.

“We must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble. And why is that?” I asked. February said, “Because they need to know everything before us. Because they need to name everything.”

John’s “baptism of repentance” was “for the forgiveness of sins.” The word “forgiveness” here carries the meaning of “release.” Again, this language affirms that God is a liberator. God, as unchangeable goodness, united to our souls, is always beckoning us to draw closer to who we really are. “All flesh shall see the salvation of God.” God is a salve, a healing ointment, for humanity. We can only experience this healing together. My liberation is bound up with yours. Salvation, like sin, is a systemic reality.  

The pencil, in James, is a small yet potent symbol of the subversive power of storytelling. In recent years, we’ve begun to call ourselves a storytelling church. And I think right now this is an important identity for us to lean into. In our common life as a nation, a few dominant stories are taking up all the airtime. We are politically divided, in a toxic, even violent way. We’re on one side or the other of a vast divide with no connecting ground and no empathy in between. Safety comes from high walls and big bank accounts. Corporations are incapable of doing justice or supporting the common good, so their CEOs will need to hire more and better security. We must inevitably increase our consumption of resources, deepen our exploitation of the earth, and widen the gaps between the haves and the have nots. If you’re struggling, your only hope is to beat down other struggling people.A lie is the same as the truth. Those who have the most power determine what is true.

Friends, we are going to need to sharpen our pencils. And we are going to need to tune our ears and our hearts to listen intently for the voices crying out in the wilderness, telling uncomfortable and landscape-altering stories that we need to hear. Because our God is a storyteller. And God’s stories crack open half-truths and false dichotomies. Divinely inspired stories reveal hidden diversity, buried pain, neglected possibility. They allow space for complexity and ambiguity. They lead to repentance and forgiveness. They make a way through desert lands.The stories of God release our souls into liberating love, and return us the unchanging goodness that is our true home. Stories are how all flesh will see together the salvation of our God. Amen.