Retiring professor Mark Theissen Nation reflects on his ‘unexpected vocation’

Mark Theissen Nation, professor of theology, concludes 16 years at Eastern Mennonite Seminary in May. EMU’s Board of Trustees announced the awarding of emeritus status to him on March 26.

On Tuesday, March 20, by invitation from colleagues Kevin Clark and Carmen Schrock-Hurst, he offered reflections during the seminary community’s bi-weekly chapel service titled ‘Consider Your Own Call … Not Many of You Were Wise: Reflections on an Unexpected Vocation’ with scripture Isaiah 55.8-9; Luke 10.25-37; 1 Corinthians 1.26-31.

It is reposted here with his permission. The podcast is also available.

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I had no idea at the time, but looking back it seems that the fall of 1971 contained hints of my future vocation — with glances back at what could have been.

I believe it was early October when I, at age 17, returned from the first attempt at my future vocation. In the summer, my friend Barry and I had bought a 1962 GMC school bus that had been converted into a camper. We travelled far enough away that we would feel somewhat separated from our home in Southern Illinois. In our case that meant five hours away in Wabash, Indiana. Though Wabash was not a large city, it seemed large compared to our very small hometown. Getting around town was difficult because the only vehicle we had was our bus and we had attached it to the sewer and water system at a trailer park in order to live in it. Thus it was effectively immobile. Nevertheless, we did manage to submit applications for various jobs around town. However, before we were employed, we were out of money. Therefore, for a short time we mooched off of Barry’s cousin, a single mother with two children living on welfare. Finally, we secured jobs at a sawmill that was within a reasonable walking distance of our stationary bus. Not more than a few months after beginning work, the weather began turning quite cool at night. Did I mention that we lived in a school bus? It had no insulation; our only source of heat when the engine was off was our cook stove. Oh, and did I mention that we were in Wabash to begin our new career as traveling evangelists. But we travelled only to Wabash. And not only did we never preach anywhere, we only attended church sporadically (because of the distance to the nearest church). I think we sang a duet once.

Toward the end of our failed evangelistic crusade, I decided I needed more education. Thus the decision to return home in October and begin college in a few months.

Not long after we returned home, one of my two best friends from high school died in a car accident. He and another friend of mine were driving home drunk one night and discovered that a tree was not very forgiving of a car crashing into it at 70 miles per hour. Had I not become a Christian a year earlier, it is quite possible that I would have been with these two friends that night.

Later that same month, when I turned 18, I had to register with the selective service system, which was still drafting men to serve in the Vietnam War. Two years earlier I had visited with recruiting officers with the Navy, thinking about volunteering to serve with the same branch of the military my father had served with in World War II. But now, as a Christian, as a Baptist who had been encouraged to read my Bible in the context of a loving congregation, I had learned a few things about the love of God. I learned that God loved everyone in the world. I learned that that love was so profound, so real that Jesus, the Son of God was willing to die as an expression of his love for the world. I also now knew that not only was I to love people who loved me, I was also, like God the Father, to love even people who didn’t love me — even enemies. Thus I registered as a conscientious objector, justifying my actions to the draft board through the submission of a paper on Matthew 5:43-48. Without much difficulty, I officially became the second person in my conservative home county to be granted conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War.

In retrospect, I think I became an evangelist in 1971 for one simple reason. I desperately wanted to testify to the transformation that had happened to me because of Jesus Christ. As the recent song has it: “How can we be silent?” But, before the year 1971 was out, I was beginning to grasp my central vocation, which was to be a Christian. My embodied life was no longer my own; it belonged to God. I really had little idea what this meant at age 18. But I knew my life and vision for the future were being dramatically changed. My days of getting drunk and stoned, of planning what girl I would have casual sex with, my days of believing it was fine to kill my personal or my country’s national enemies, the days of thinking of a future job mostly in terms of money or enjoyment — those days were over. Perhaps most difficult at the time was the realization that at least for a while, rock & roll music — which was an ever constant companion for me — was to be eradicated from my life. I gave away over 600 record albums.

The first major step in my newly found vocation was that I would begin attending Oakland City College, the General Baptist college about 1.5 hours away from my home town, in southern Indiana. There was nothing automatic about this. Certainly no one in my relatively poor, uneducated family expected me to attend university. I was licensed to the ministry within the General Baptist Church in 1971. But there was no expectation that this would necessarily include going to college. School up to the point of graduation from high school was for me primarily an opportunity for socializing with my friends, with the necessary evil of education being linked to this primary goal. I had never liked to read. In fact I had sometimes lied about books I was supposed to have read. My desire to go to college was quite singularly focused at this point: having grown up in a decidedly non-Christian home, I knew I was ignorant of the Christian faith. And thus I began a religious studies major at Oakland City College.

During my first year of college, I travelled back to my home town every weekend. I did this because The First General Baptist Church was at that time a dynamic church. I was still new to the Christian faith and I knew I needed the nurturing provided by this warm, lively congregation. And besides, this was the church within which I was converted to the Christian faith — in which I was powerfully transformed through an encounter with the living God known through Christ. It was also the place where I had seen other miracles happen. Mike, a veteran of the War in Vietnam and a major drug dealer in southern Illinois, immediately following his conversion not only stopped dealing drugs but was released from drug addiction and given life, when the doctors had told him he would likely die within a couple of years. Randy, who had sustained serious injuries to his back in a car accident that produced fatalities, was also instantaneously healed of his apparently paralyzing back injury. (Randy later became famous through the Toronto Blessing events and is still an internationally known faith healer.) In many ways, this life-giving congregation was responsible for the rich journey of discipleship I began in November of 1970.

Although I wrote my paper for the draft board on the “love your enemies” passage in the Sermon on the Mount, the text that probably spoke to me most deeply during the first few years of my Christian life was the passage on the double love command. I knew — knew deep in my soul — what God’s love was. For my life had been truly made new in Christ. I wanted to love God in return, seeing God as the center of my being. But I also knew that love of God was not genuine unless it gave rise to a life of faithfulness, including loving our neighbors as ourselves. Though the double love command is recorded in all three synoptic gospels, it was Luke’s version which was most challenging — most demanding because of expanding on the meaning of “love your neighbor as yourself” by giving the ever-fresh confrontational story of the Good Samaritan.

I had considered entitling my presentation “James Baldwin, Gandhi and Helen Keller Shattered My World.” Why? Because I well remember that during my almost two years at Oakland City College, I was haunted by the profound and far-reaching challenge to love my neighbors as myself. I think I recognized that I didn’t really know what this meant. But I knew I must have an openness to its implications. I think I realized that I could not understand the Christian call to embody love by simply borrowing meanings from popular culture (which was my instinctive approach). Therefore, I wrote a research paper on “love” for my freshman writing class. My main speech in my first year speech class was basically a summary of Erich Fromm’s popular book, The Art of Loving (not about romantic love, it should be said, but more or less a compelling Kantian call to love everyone equally). I also wrote a brief paper on war. I would write another research paper on love for a social psychology class during my last year, this time at a state university. All of this was important in its own way. But it was really three more specific challenges that “shattered assumptions from the world of my childhood” — and set me on a trajectory of realizing I would never be done with learning what it meant to love my neighbors as myself and to love even my enemies.

The first of these challenges was my encounter with the powerful prose of the black novelist, James Baldwin. Go Tell It on the Mountain and The Fire Next Time served to transform me in ways I never could have imagined. These novels opened up windows into the world of African Americans and helped me see the sinful deceptions of the racist world that had formed my totally white childhood. Baldwin served as a sort of John the Baptist, preparing the way for me to hear — and to be deeply moved by — the full-throated Christian challenges of John Perkins and Martin Luther King, Jr. when I read their writings. That I would later pastor a small church in Los Angeles that included several African American families, including a childhood friend of Rosa Parks — and that a black man in my congregation from Alabama named Ralph Ferguson would wash my feet and allow me to wash his — would simply solidify my hatred of racism. And that my good friend, Alton Trimble, an African American pastor in LA, would trust me enough to have honest conversations around the trial of O. J. Simpson reminded me that unlearning racism is not something that happens quickly.

Second, Mohandas Gandhi, through a powerful little collection of excerpts from his writings, conveyed to me the need for all of us living in the wealth of the U.S. to notice the poverty of others. “We should be ashamed of resting or having a square meal so long as there is one able-bodied man or woman without work or food,” said Gandhi. Or again: “To a people famishing and idle, the only acceptable form in which God can dare appear is work and promise of food as wages.”[1] I had never to that point heard a Christian say anything like this. Several years later, it was a gift that my very first academic course on nonviolence was taught by an Indian Hindu sociologist and that I would later host a discussion with a former Indian ambassador who marched with Gandhi in the 1940s.

It took a transfer to Baylor University to bring a third challenge and sensitivity into my life. One day I naively told a joke I had heard and repeated during my childhood and I assumed would be appreciated in 1974 in my friend’s dorm room. It was one of those grossly insensitive “Helen Keller” jokes that have made the rounds at various times. My friend’s friend in whose dorm room we were visiting was not amused. And he let me know it in very clear, scolding terms. It was one of those quite painful but extremely important clarifying — and appropriately embarrassing — moments. I consider it a great gift that I later had the privilege of working with children and adults with cerebral palsy and even later providing a group home for two adults with Down syndrome.

After one year at Baylor, I finished my undergraduate degree at what is now The University of Illinois at Springfield. Being surrounded again (as in the first 17 years of my life) mostly by non-Christians was a gift to me. I made a few close friendships, including with faculty. I met varied socialists and libertarians for whom their politics was their religion. It was a great learning environment in which to finish my first degree in religious studies and psychology.

So, to this point, in addition to undergoing education, I had expressed my vocation through being an evangelist in several settings — including once in a tent revival, with six other friends. I had also, by 1975, been a youth minister in three different churches in three states and three denominations. And I had worked with adults and children with cerebral palsy.

The decision to move to Louisville, Kentucky, in the fall of 1975 was on the surface simple. I was a Baptist minister; I wanted further training. The nearest Baptist seminary was The Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville. Later dubbed the murder capital of the U.S., Louisville was the first large city I had lived in. Little did I know that my four years there would be so stretching and life-giving — so truly re-defining — in unexpected ways.

In Springfield, Illinois, and Waco, Texas, I had attended several moderately liberal Southern Baptist churches. I began to do the same in Louisville. However, I knew only a few weeks in that the Baptist identity didn’t really fit who I was. Thus I quit attending Baptist churches, along with the seminary, after the first year. Living in a poor neighborhood comprised mostly of immigrants from the backwoods of Kentucky, I became a member of a church patterned after Church of the Savior in Washington, D.C. Our church was mostly comprised of former Southern Baptists and former Catholics. Our pastor led a Sunday school in which we studied God of the Oppressed by James Cone. Everyone within the congregation cared deeply about peace and social justice issues. Most of us subscribed to Sojourners and The Other Side magazines. Several key leaders within the church focused on spiritual formation. I was introduced to the writings of Henri Nouwen, Jean Vanier, Catherine Doherty, Carlo Coretto and Frederick Buechner, among others. We had retreats at the Abbey of Gethsemani, where Thomas Merton had lived.

For the first time, I met regularly with other Christian pacifists and became a peace and social justice activist — working to defeat the death penalty in Kentucky, protesting the build-up of nuclear weapons and co-founding and directing a small human rights organization. However, I also became a serious student of the writings of William Stringfellow and Jacques Ellul. Both of them helped me to see the truth in the important claim that ideology is the deliberate removal or squelching of nuance. For the rest of my life, I would see ideology as a recurrent temptation and enemy of truth that I would always need to challenge.

For most of the last two years of my time in Louisville, I would have one of the most intense educational experiences of my life by being a child protective services social worker. This introduced me to the worlds of social work as well as the justice system; I appeared regularly before judges in juvenile court. It also took me into the lives of people I would never have known otherwise. Some of my clients became friends; all of them taught me much — including the need for empathy with individuals often not liked much by others. This would include Sharon, the first transgender person I would know; Rita, a pole dancer in a strip club; Suzie, a prostitute with whom I had many meaningful conversations; and Rick, who showed me how a talented sociopath could make his wife look like the crazy one.

However, most important for ongoing discernment regarding my future vocation was the discovery, I believe in 1976, of the writings of John Howard Yoder, beginning with his book The Politics of Jesus. This book inaugurated my journey into becoming an Anabaptist. That identity would be solidified, as I came to see it, over the next ten years — not least by reading everything I could get my hands on written by Yoder.

In the fall of 1979, I moved with my wife and ten-month-old daughter to Elkhart, Indiana. We moved there for two reasons: to be a part of an extended household and an intentional Christian community in a racially mixed, relatively poor neighborhood. And for me to finish my first seminary degree — an MA in peace studies. I very much enjoyed worshipping with a mildly charismatic Mennonite Church, Fellowship of Hope. I also enjoyed learning much more about what it meant to be Anabaptist — not least by studying with John Howard Yoder. But also significant was researching and writing my master’s thesis on nonviolent forms of resistance by Christians within Nazi Germany — related to the war that was the backdrop for my generation, World War II. In doing this, I would also be bitten by the Bonhoeffer bug.

An unexpected gift while being a part of Fellowship of Hope was making connections with New Covenant Fellowship in Urbana, Illinois. This was a church that was an unusual combination of being mildly charismatic while also being as socially involved in the community as any church in the Twin Cities. The pastors promoted discipleship in all areas of life, including pacifism, but the church was not Mennonite. In my initial conversation with two of the pastors, they seemed very supportive of my starting an ecumenical, Christian peace and justice organization. In January 1981, my family moved to Urbana, living again in an extended household within walking distance of perhaps half of the members of our church. For the next six years, I would be the director of The Champaign-Urbana Peace Initiative, speaking in more than 150 churches throughout the area — from Assemblies of God to Unitarian churches — along with speaking in university classrooms to civic clubs and student bodies. I also preached about once per month for about five of these years in my own church. I organized monthly meetings and edited a bi-monthly newsletter. Though I often spoke on why, biblically and theologically, Christians should be peacemakers and pursue social justice in the world, I also spoke regularly on U.S. involvement in Latin America and the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. For about two years, I was on the state steering committee in Chicago for the Illinois branch of the Nuclear Freeze campaign. I also participated regularly in an ecumenical study group — beginning with a study of war taxes, followed by same-sex relationships.

I had received strong compliments on my teaching and preaching during my years in Champaign-Urbana. One friend, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, told me that he could see I was really cut out to be a professor. However, about the same time this was becoming clear, other things were not. To over-simplify, my wife and I pastored a General Conference Mennonite Church in Chicago for eight months in 1987. By the spring of 1988, my first marriage had ended and life would take new turns.

Between the spring of 1989 and the spring of 1991, I completed the work for an MDiv. degree from Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis. I pastored a small, rural Disciples of Christ Church while I was a student. Also, for the first time, I did very well academically. Two of the papers from my courses were published in 1991. I began editing a book with Stanley Hauerwas in the fall of 1989. Hauerwas’s writings, beginning in 1983, and his friendship, beginning in 1989, have deepened, solidified and complexified my Anabaptist identity over the years. What he really did was to open up to me rich intellectual and theological worlds — related to real, everyday life — in a way that no other single author has. It has been a distinct pleasure to edit three books and co-author articles with him.

Moving to Southern California in the fall of 1991 brought me into the rich academic world of doctoral studies at Fuller Theological Seminary, working mostly with Jim McClendon and Nancey Murphy — both of whom taught me much and allowed this older doctoral student considerable freedom within my program. What an added treat it was to meet each month in Jim and Nancey’s home, having serious theological discussions with a variety of interesting folk, including author Ched Myers. I served as a half-time pastor during my six years in Los Angeles. I was a research assistant for Miroslav Volf for one semester. I also taught my own course in Christian ethics twice while a student. I continued editing books with Hauerwas until the late 1990s.

I married Mary Thiessen in October 1995. Approximately eight months later, we were invited to apply to be directors of the London Mennonite Centre in London, England. Our time there began in early December 1996. Our work in England was wonderful in very many ways. I preached once a month in the small Mennonite church. We offered regular seminars on discipleship, urban mission and spirituality and church conflict at the Centre. We had opportunities to teach in a variety of settings. We made new friends. The life and ministries connected to the London Mennonite Centre were life-giving and a gift in so many ways. In late 2000, I applied for a teaching position at Eastern Mennonite Seminary, a position I learned about only two weeks before the deadline for applications. I was offered the position in early 2001. We were allowed to stay in England until 2002 so that the LMC could find a new director; thus I began teaching here in May 2002.

So, I have been teaching at Eastern Mennonite Seminary for 16 years. During that time I have taught 17 different courses. Five of those courses, I have co-taught with ten different colleagues. I am very grateful that I have been able annually to teach Systematic Theology (replace later by Living Theology), Christian Ethics and until about two years ago, Christian Tradition. And I have been able to regularly rotate teaching Anabaptism Today, Biblical Foundations for Justice and Peacemaking, The Sermon on the Mount, Human Sexuality in Theological Perspective, and Anabaptist History and Theology. All of these courses — in tandem with my broad background — have contributed to my passion to understand the gospel holistically. What does it mean to have our fundamental identity in Jesus Christ (and the body of people who gather in his name)? What does it mean to be “worthy citizens of the gospel of Jesus Christ,” as Philippians 1:27 has it? What does it mean not to be conformed to the world but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds, as Paul puts it in Romans 12:1-2? Or to go back to my beginning point: What does it mean to love God with the whole of our being — with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our strength and all our mind and to love our neighbor as ourselves?

Frederick Dale Bruner, in his commentary on Matthew, has clarified for me the temptation to emphasize only one side of this claim upon our lives. For many of us who are among the educated elite, it seems an ongoing temptation to forget that “God’s thoughts are not our thoughts” and “God’s ways are not our ways.” It is tempting to pit our spiritual life or theology proper against social concerns, personal righteousness against social justice, grace against truth and faithfulness. The temptations are a reminder that knowing what it means to be “worthy citizens of the gospel of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:27) does indeed require “working out [our] own salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12). Or to put it differently, the kingdom of God is simultaneously “righteousness and justice, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Romans 14:17).

These questions lie very close to the center of my driving passion for more than 20 years. Theologians and witnesses such as the seven people whose pictures have hung on my faculty wall during my years of teaching remind me of the immense challenges of being faithful. They also, in their varied ways, remind me of the joy of serving a living God who is with us as we travel this journey together — loving and serving in His name.

Not infrequently over the last 16 years, I would almost literally pinch myself as I would approach my faculty office. I am a professor of theology, ethics and Anabaptist studies!? I can’t believe it; this must be a dream. I can guarantee you that no one put as the prediction under my senior yearbook picture in high school: “future professor of theology in a seminary.” Each of the words — professor … theology … and seminary — would have seemed like nonsense attached to me. I was raised in a non-Christian home. I am from a relatively poor, uneducated family. I hated to read. Nothing would have predicted this. In other words, I existentially know the meaning of Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 1: “Consider your own call, brothers and sisters, not many of you were wise by human standards, not many of you were powerful, not many were of noble birth.” I was convinced in the early 1970s and continue to be convinced that my primary vocation — our primary vocation — is to be Christian, to know that our fundamental identity is being in Christ. Our embodied life belongs to the God known as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Then, in the context of a body of Christ seeking to honor God, we discern how that calling is to be expressed through our lives.

For me that has led in many directions. Early on it was quite understandable that I could not imagine that this would lead me to be a teacher — especially not a professor in a graduate program. But there were signals, hints, early on. I still remember, in 1972, that Dr. Virginia O’Leary, my speech teacher, wrote at the bottom of my outline for my speech on love: “You have quite a gift, Mr. Nation.” I am very grateful that at age 18 I instinctively knew that I needed both much more education and much more maturity in the faith before even considering teaching about the Christian faith as a vocation.

I have no regrets that my central vocation as a Christian has been expressed through many different occupations. I am grateful that God’s faithfulness has been apparent in very many ways. I give thanks for the many friends I have known, from my hometown to Harrisonburg, and many places in between. I feel gratitude for the wonderful congregations that have deeply nurtured my soul — including that wonderful group of disciples called Early Church, here in Harrisonburg. I am grateful for the varied and wondrous music that has framed my journey throughout my life. I am truly grateful for the constant love of my mother during her lifetime — including during those times when it required her to sacrifice her own desires out of love for her son. I am equally grateful for the deep and constant love for and from my two children — Christy and Michael — as they have been with me through much of this venture. And I am truly grateful for the faithful, committed love of my wife, Mary, as we are truly one in our desire to glorify and honor God with our embodied lives.

As I cast my eyes over the group gathered here today, my heart is full of gratitude — for so many wonderful students, fine colleagues, fellow church members, fellow travelers in varied ways and the gift of being able to live out this leg of my vocation here at EMS for these sixteen years. Thanks be to God. Thank you.

 

[1] Mohatma Gandhi, All Men Are Brothers, ed. Krishna Kripalani (NY: World without War Publications, 1958), 122, 123.