What I love about this book
I don’t consider myself a writer of book reviews but once in a while I get so carried away, I have to write something about a book. So I’m telling anyone who will listen what I love about United States of Grace by Rev. Lenny Duncan. As background, I loved Pastor Duncan’s Dear Church just as much, but in a different way. That first book, tagged “A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US” (Lutheranism…and here I always thought it was the Episcopal Church!) spoke to the heart of systemic racism in our treasured liberal-progressive mainline protestant churches. Since I read it in 2019, I’ve had this line pinned to the top of my Twitter account: “It is the church’s imperative to dismantle white supremacy in the twenty-first century; this is the way of the cross.”
Lenny Duncan’s first book introduced the world to Lenny Duncan, the writer, who is also Lenny Duncan, the preacher and prophet. United States of Grace is a generous-to-overflowing offering from Lenny Duncan the writer who is also Lenny Duncan the poet.
And this is the first thing I love about this book: the poetry. When it comes to connecting harsh realities with lyrical imagery, Lenny gives us a foaming cup that runneth over. He doesn’t mince words; he blends them, souffles them, and sings them. It’s heart-stopping and beautiful. Examples flow on every page. Here’s just one, where he moves from the experience of hitchhiking (who remembers hitchhiking?) to the transformation of the world in one paragraph:
Whatever didn’t feel like freedom, you walked away from. This was a sacred duty, and you would find others who honored this sacred place with you. Like two travelers huddling around a fire for warmth, the fire being mystery and the warmth being each other. Sometimes, if you were really lucky, you would meet others who wanted to see that fire spread and become a funeral pyre for the whole damn system. To watch the sparks become little flames that would spread over the kindling of the capitalist dystopia that was slowly lurching toward its death. As the flames licked at the edges of society, you would find those willing to cheer it on, or throw a concert at its edge, or form a community right in its damn center (p.68).
I love the stories. Every encounter of pain or fear or misplaced optimism is transformed into an encounter of hope, transformed usually by the story that comes next, and the story after that, and the story after that. Hope is the golden thread that draws us through this narrative like children in a dark tunnel.
I love Lenny’s take on 21st century Christianity. Who among us has not had this experience?
It was almost like a lot of pastors I ran into were reading a completely different Bible than the one I stole from their church. I mean, this book seemed subversive and full of ideas that would be enough to get you arrested for treason in most industrialized countries…If it was a more ‘progressive’ church, I would listen to pastors obtusely poke around issues of justice with the indifference of a five-year-old poking a jellyfish on the beach with a stick (p. 142).
Lenny’s relationship to the Church is similar to his relationship to the nation: prophetic love. Yes, most of us liberal progressive Christians have roots in colonialism and slaveholder religion. And yes, the gospel gives us both the mandate and the power to do better.
I love the way that radical hospitality weaves through the book. Most of the stories Lenny tells are stories of finding home where others wouldn’t. This is what radical hospitality does—provides welcome to unlikely people in unlikely places. There is radical hospitality in Lenny’s invitation to middle-aged white ladies like me—unlikely readers, perhaps—to engage the stories he tells as deeply as we can, and to go forth from the world of his words to the world which we share, to change it, tear down and rebuild, with hope.