Albert (Pete) Pero: called to a world house.

Billman, Kathleen D.

Dr. Albert (Pete) Pero's dreams have always been big, so I was not surprised when his last sabbatical request (for a leave in Winter/Spring 2002) listed three major projects, which I suspect set the agenda not only for the limited time frame of that sabbatical leave but for the future adventures of his productive life. The working title of one of these projects, "Ecumenism: The Vocation of the Theologian/Minister within the World House," came to mind immediately when I was asked to give a title for this tribute. In particular, the phrase "world house" caught my attention.

Pete's theological imagination has been inspired in no small measure by the work of Martin Luther King, Jr., in whose company he struggled on behalf of God's dream of freedom and equality for all and whose theological legacy he continues to teach LSTC students. In his project proposal for "Ecumenism: The Vocation of the Theologian/Minister in the World House," Pete quoted from King's final major writing, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

We have inherited a large house, a great "world-house" in which we have
to live together--black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and
Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Hindu--a family unduly
separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never
again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in
peace. (1)

Taking the phrase "world house" from King as a description of the locale in which all theologies are ultimately situated and to whose good they are ultimately directed, Pete set a course heading for the culminating projects of his theological career. His agenda for what he referred to in his last faculty review as the "twilight of my ministry" is characteristic of the theological purpose he has articulated and embodied throughout his ministry as a teacher, pastor, and scholar--to articulate the African American Lutheran contribution to the world house, and to contend (not just intellectually, but with his very life) that African American Christianity has always had a "world house" dimension. In the words of Peter Paris, "the parenthood of God and the kinship of all peoples" has historically been at the core of the social teaching of Black churches amidst the suffering of slavery and enduring scars of racism in/on the United States--an affirmation which is simultaneously an act of resistance to all that negates the humanity and dignity of African Americans. (2)

In the short paragraphs of this tribute, however, I speak not as a reviewer of Pete's scholarly contributions to theology and the church, past, present, or future. That has been and is being done far more eloquently than I could ever hope to do through other essays in this and the preceding Currents issue. Instead, I focus my remarks on the impact of Pete's witness as a "theologian/minister within the world house" as I have personally experienced it at LSTC. Because of Pete's witness, I am challenged to wrestle more significantly with some mysteries of what it means to work together as colleagues in and on behalf of a "world house." This witness has many dimensions, but I'll focus on three ways Pete's voice will ring in my ears, urging me to remember not to put asunder what God has joined together.

World and house belong together

Several months ago a tragedy occurred in a particular house on the south side of Chicago. The story told by newspapers focused on the murder of certain family members by one of their own kin who had become terribly distraught. There are many such stories in newspapers published all over the world every day; the details vary, but the story is often told as if it is but one story, endlessly repeated. The story is particular, however, to the persons who experience it--to members of the suffering family, neighborhood, and congregation who feel the agony in their bodies, minds, and spirits; whose labor it is to wrest, discover, and/or receive meanings from such experiences of extremity.

I remember the day Pete interrupted a discussion of some sort going on at the seminary (it is telling that I remember the interruption more than the original subject of discussion!) by giving voice to this very ministry situation, with which he and Cheryl were personally involved at the time. I remember the silence in the room as he spoke; the palpable sense, for a few moments, that ministry has everything to do with the encounter between life and death, with what God is doing in us and among us in that interface.

Pete has taught generations of students that ministry is not just about keeping house but about engaging the brokenness of the world. In ministry the church seeks to embody, albeit in frail and limited ways, God's hope for the world and God's resistance to every power of destruction. We can't be the church if we don't get out of the church "house" into the world. We can't be Christ's church if the world for which Christ suffered to redeem does not inform how we understand the central activities that go on in the house among its family members, such as baptism, Eucharist, Word, prayer, song. When sanctuary and street, world and house are rent asunder, whatever ecclesiology is left after that is probably of the "noisy gong or clanging cymbal" kind. When things get too esoteric in seminary conversation, I think I'll see Pete begin to fidget and imagine his interrupting the conversation, in the kind of impatient tone his colleagues learned to recognize as a call to "break it down" and "get real."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Pastoral and prophetic belong together

Such tragedies as the one just alluded to are at once deeply personal and deeply corporate. They take place in a web of socioeconomic-political relationships as well as intimate relationships; thus, analyses and interventions that are limited to explorations of intrapsychic and interpersonal dynamics are insufficient for theologians/ministers in the world house. From my first months as a new professor of pastoral care and pastoral theology more than a decade ago, Pete, a systematic theologian who was deeply interested in the ministry of pastoral care and counseling, let me know in no uncertain terms that any pastoral theology that didn't take the impact of racism, sexism, and other dimensions of systemic oppression seriously in theologizing about human experience and pastoral response was not only going to be irrelevant but also damaging to persons, especially persons of color. In one of the post-retirement conversations I hope to have with Pete, I covet the opportunity to hear his reflections on some of the new developments in pastoral theology over the past decade, thanks in no small measure to the contributions of Homer Ashby, Archie Smith, Carroll Watkins Ali, Lee Butler, Edward Wimberly, and other African American pastoral theologians, whose work has had a tremendous theoretical impact on the field of pastoral theology, (3) especially in exploring the interface between personal and social transformation in pastoral ministry.

That there has been a deep divide in theological education and Christian ministry between the pastoral and the prophetic has been lamented by scholars in many disciplines who would agree with the pointed critique of Walter Brueggemann about the way much ministry is conducted: "To divide things up into the pastoral and the prophetic is to betray both." (4) But the move between the recognition of a corrosive division and learning to resist its familiar traps is a complicated one. If it were true that insight alone creates the conditions for all the change we need, lots more would be different from what it is. Pete, along with others, resisted a paradigm that separated personal and social transformation and sought to bring them together theoretically before it was fashionable to do so, and my generation of pastoral theologians is richer for that resistance. One of the first things Pete ever said to me was in response to an early effort of mine to explore the relationship between personal and public worlds in pastoral care and counseling: "Do you really believe this? Because if you do, it's radical." I hope I'll always hear the question--and wrestle with the implications.

Confrontation and consolation belong together

Making meaning amidst experiences of extremity is no easy task, especially when one is positioned amidst a storm rather than at a distance from it. Deeply concerned about the lack of progress in the recruitment and placement of a substantial number of African American Lutheran Ph.D. graduates to succeed his generation of seminary professors (there are fine candidates, but they are few in number), and keenly aware of the threats to the survival and flourishing of African Americans in the United States at the turn of the century, (5) Pete's voice has reflected on many occasions the fierceness of the concerns that need to be addressed and the frustration that we still have so very far to go.

Yet Pete's witness is a reminder that lament and hope are not opposites but rather presuppose each other. The disappointment of a great hope gives rise to the pain and protest of a great lament. As Colin Murray Parkes wrote of grief in the days when lingering grief was thought to be a sign of pathology, grief is not a disease; "it is perhaps the price we pay for love, the cost of commitment." (6)

I'm sure I will never know the cost of bearing all the hopes Pete brought to LSTC and to the Lutheran Church as a tribe within the world house. The pages of two editions of Currents in Theology and Mission spell out some of the impact of Pete's hopes, faithfulness, and achievements. I know that to live in this "house" on 55th and University with Pete has meant that confrontation was never detached from the healing and consoling power of laughter and friendship; Pete's frequent laughter and constant warmth and teasing were as constant as his challenges to us. These dimensions of his witness coexisted and perhaps made each other possible.

Grief and gratitude belong together

Perhaps it's right to conclude this tribute with a word about grief and gratitude. Dr. Albert (Pete) Pero's retirement marks, in a very real way for LSTC, the end of an era. Although we expect Pete to continue to teach courses, fill the halls of LSTC with laughter, and eat French fries in the refectory when Cheryl isn't looking, retirement is still a fork in the road. It isn't business as usual--new occasions teach new duties for us all. Pete occupied a large "space" in so many ways, and we won't be the same. But we will be the richer for life together. If Pete said anything about a hundred times in the years I've known him, it's that "God is a God of abundance."

Thank you, Pete, for being a witness to that abundance through our life together.

1. Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 167.

2. Peter J. Paris, The Social Teaching of the Black Churches (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985).

3. See especially Homer U. Ashby, Jr., Our Home Is Over Jordan: A Black Pastoral Theology (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2003); Carroll A. Watkins Ali, Survival and Liberation: Pastoral Theology in African American Context (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 1999); Archie Smith, Jr., Navigating the Deep River: Spirituality in African American Families (Cleveland: United Church Press, 1997); Lee H. Butler, Jr., A Loving Home: Caring for African American Marriage and Families (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2000); Edward Wimberly, Relational Refugees: Alienation and Reincorporation in African American Churches and Communities (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2000).

4. Walter Brueggemann, The Hopeful Imagination: Prophetic Voices in Exile (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986), 18.

5. See Homer U. Ashby, Jr., Our Home Is Over Jordan, especially pp. 1-8, for a powerful and troubling overview of the plight facing African Americans in the early twenty-first century.

6. Colin Murray Parkes, Bereavement, 2d ed. (Madison, Conn.: International Universities Press, Inc., 1987), 26.

Kathleen D. Billman

Dean

Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago