Enfleshing Witness: Eric Barreto
The following is a lightly edited transcript and a video of Rev. Dr. Eric Barreto’s talk from our 2021 Enfleshing Witness gathering. Eric preaches because the God who called him is a God who creates and delights in the storytelling of diverse communities. In short, he preaches because the way of Jesus's faith is not a solitary path, but one in which we lean on and learn from the stories of others. Eric preaches to followers of Jesus yearning to connect their community's reading of scripture with God's active grace in everyday life. He preaches so that followers of Jesus might see how their faithfulness is bound up in the lives and experiences of their diverse neighbors.
If you didn't know, you will shortly know a very important unwritten rule. An unwritten rule that extends beyond ritual or tradition and taps into the yearnings of a people and a place.
You see, if you have ever flown to San Juan, Puerto Rico, the capital of the indisputably most beautiful island in the world, then you probably experienced this unwritten rule as the plane's wheels touched the ground and Puerto Ricans on the plane began to clap. Now, you have to understand that the clapping is not just an affirmation of the pilot's or crew's skills.
No matter the quality of the landing, we clap. It is the fact of the landing that we applaud. For so many of us, landing back on this island is not the beginning of a vacation, but an emotional return to a place we seek and yet cannot really find.
Home. There's something powerful in that small but meaningful word.
Home. There's also something sad, challenging, even forlorn for many of us.
For me, there's a certain bittersweetness in that Caribbean air and the taste of comida criolla, in the view of the Puerto Rican coast from the plane window that breaks the blue expanse of ocean.
Home is both promise and grief.
You see, imperial and colonial imaginations have made home complicated for some of us.
For Puerto Ricans, colonial rule has taken the resources of the land, and then spread many of us in a diaspora across the United States and the world. For other communities, the slave ships tore apart families and places and belonging. For others, it was warfare and privation that led to migration. For yet others, it was rejection at home, at school, at church, about whom God has made you to be.
That this home for many of us feels like it is somewhere else, but it's a somewhere else that lives largely in our hopes and imaginations, a somewhere else to which we cannot descend on a plane, even if we clap as the wheels touch the ground.
In Luke 4, we read about Jesus's return home to Nazareth. There is initial applause.
But that adulation quickly turns more dire. Jesus, you'll remember, reads from Isaiah at his home synagogue, announcing the ways God's grace is embodied in freedom for the imprisoned, liberation for the poor, wholeness for all those who lack. And at first his neighbors celebrate his prophetic voice, but then Jesus reminds them and us that God's grace falls upon those we don't think are worthy. And with that, applause turns to rage, and Jesus' neighbors seek to cast him from the nearest cliff.
You see, Empire has taught us that grace is a zero-sum game, that our thriving requires the suffering of others, that there simply isn't enough to go around, so we must desperately hold on to whatever we have.
Empire has lied to us. That grace for others means loss for us, and Jesus was trying to help his neighbors and to help us imagine something different. Yet returning home apparently was simply not possible for a prophet. And I wonder if Jesus took this lesson with him on the road to Jerusalem, on the road to a Roman cross.
In Luke 9:58, Jesus responds to a would-be disciple who perhaps impulsively declares that they would follow Jesus wherever he went. Perhaps you, like me, have uttered such foolishness to Jesus, forgetting to count the high cost of the Messiah's path. Jesus responds to them and to us:
“Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests. But the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”
Now, that's a word. And I think we miss the point if we narrow the scope of this verse to be an indication of Jesus' itinerant life, or merely a biographical point. No, I wonder if this is a way to think about life under the shadow of Empire, under the threat of the kind of imperial violence that will take Jesus' life. And which still stalks so many of us still today. Perhaps home is just not possible in the wake of Empire's violence.
My friends, I yearn to be on a plane again, heading to an island that makes me who I am, an island whose influence reverberates in the lives of those I love. I want to gaze expectantly to the horizon, waiting to see those green shores.
I can't wait for the first step on that jet bridge, that first whiff of Caribbean air. Can't wait to be home again. But I also know that feeling, that yearning for home, will remain unrequited. That home I yearn for no longer really exists, but what does exist is not the home I imagine. But the tangible, real home I've created here in this home, with this family, with these friends.
Home is a place, yes, but it's also a commitment, a demand that God's justice would unfurl here and now, a faith that expects to taste God's grace in the people and the places where God has planted us. Home is a feeling and a commitment. But it's also a sense of loss, an absence, an unfulfilled promise. And in all that, Jesus is our companion, and so also are all these marginalized folks yearning for home and finding it wherever we can.
In the end, home is tinged with grief for many of us. God's promise is that home can also be a recognition. Hard won to be sure, but a recognition of the immense grace that yet surrounds us. And maybe as we clap when we land, we grieve what we have lost, and yet treasure the many gifts that have kept us alive.
And in that space between grief and hope, loss and promise, life and death, we discover anew the shape of God's grace. And just maybe. Catch a glimpse of home right here and right now.
We are excited to announce a new chapter in the Enfleshing Witness movement: “Enfleshing Witness: Rewilding Otherwise Preaching.” Learn more about this new grant opportunity and sign-up to stay connected as the project unfolds.
Rev. Eric Bareto
Eric D. Barreto is the Weyerhaeuser Associate Professor of New Testament at Princeton Seminary. He holds a BA in religion from Oklahoma Baptist University, an MDiv from Princeton Seminary, and a PhD in New Testament from Emory University. Prior to coming to Princeton Seminary, he served as associate professor of New Testament at Luther Seminary, and also taught as an adjunct professor at the Candler School of Theology and McAfee School of Theology.
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