Jürgen, I bring you warmest wishes for your 90^th birthday from many persons in the United States and Canada, from students of your theology, academic and ecclesial colleagues, and a multitude of old friends.

My wife Blair and I met Jürgen and Elisabeth Moltmann (and Susanne, Anne Ruth, Esther, and Friederike) in August 1967 in Durham, N.C. where he was to be a visiting professor at Duke University for the 1967-68 fall term. The American edition of Theology of Hope had just been published. By the time he had reached the American shores there was much palpable excitement about what promised to be a revolutionary new theology. No theologian since Reinhold Niebuhr had appeared on the first page of the New York Times.

Landing in Raleigh-Durham, Jürgen peeped out the airplane window and saw nothing but forests surrounding the airport. His urbane soul prompted him to ask, Where have I come to? How can I live in Durham, North Carolina? Later he told me he also asked himself, How can I live in Tübingen? The answer: I can live in Tübingen by traveling.

One of the first things I learned about Prof. Moltmann is that he is a traveler. It is true that he stayed at his desk long enough to write a massive amount of theological literature – not quite as extensive as that of Karl Barth but much more interesting. That he has written so much makes it all the more surprising that Jürgen Moltmann is a man on the move, a homo viator, a peregrinus. But it must be said that as a man on the move he is a sojourner, not a wanderer. There is an important distinction. A wanderer has no place in particular to go and is dead set against settling down. A sojourner, on the other hand, looks in hope for home and yet puts down roots wherever he finds himself. A sojourner fully dwells in whatever place he is in, even if it is not yet fully home. Furthermore, the character of a sojourner is that he makes home for others. He practices hospitality by making others feel at home in their own estranged neighborhood.

If we compare Moltmann with other great travelers, we would have to say that he is not like Virgil’s Anneas because he does not think home is reached through conflict and conquering but through reconciliation. Nor is he like Don Quixote because he does not seek utopia but God’s dwelling in this earth and the community of embodied persons.  At least from an American point of view, I think, Moltmann is more like Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, the fully embodied traveler of the Mississippi River who is fascinated with the next adventure because it is new and different and yet repulsed by everything that diminishes life in the lived moment. Like Huckleberry Finn Moltmann is fascinated by the Mississippi River, that great metaphor for the inexorable flow of life, full of danger and the unexpected as well as life-giving replenishment. For Americans the Mississippi River is a little like Bremen, known for its freedom, attracting all who like the Bremen town musicians want to live without owners.  At least in America Jürgen is a traveling partner of Huckleberry Finn.

Huckleberry navigates the river with Jim the former slave, who yearns to live without an owner, the human being who fascinates in his difference, the human being who makes Huckleberry aware that the seductions of American culture create many forms of slavery. In America Moltmann sought out those who were different, the more different the more at home he was with them. Jesus commanded us to go into every neighborhood without a staff, without a purse, and, most importantly, to eat what is set before us. By following this command Jürgen has been at home in every community new to him in America, indeed on every continent. The American city Jürgen sojourned in the longest was Atlanta. Huckleberry Finn would have told the truth about Atlanta: Atlanta is too proud of its wealth and too inattentive to its poverty and racism. Jürgen hobnobbed with Jimmy Carter but he also developed a deep relationship with the Open Door Community that gives home to those excluded from home. Jürgen put down roots in this community of the excluded. At the Open door Community drug addicts, former prostitutes, and street people gathered around the lunch table and the Lord’s Table and together created a community that withstood the palpable forces of death in the city.

The Open Door Community especially identifies with the incarcerated. Through an Emory University theology professor Jürgen came to know Kelly Gissendaner who had been sentenced to death for murder but who had become converted in prison and had become an astute student of theology. The sojourner Moltmann put down roots in the death row of the prison as he befriended Kelly right up to her inhumane execution last year. There is certainly nothing uncouth in Jürgen Moltmann as there was in the quintessential American Huckleberry. Nevertheless, like Huckleberry, Jürgen in his own way unsettles every community he enters with the gospel of God’s justice. Like Huckleberry, Jürgen imagines the world the way it’s supposed to be from God’s vantage point and sees in people promises that they could not see in themselves. Such is the effect of living in the hope of the crucified risen one.

And so Jürgen Moltmann developed a lasting love-hate relation with America. He was fascinated with America, with its broad space, with Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, and the promises of freedom and justice for all. But, at the same time, he hated the political economy that oppresses in one way or another many of its people. In those days I mostly hated my country. We thought if we only have one more protest in Washington, the Vietnam War and racism would end. Then came the events of 1968, the watershed year after which nothing has been the same. On April 4^th was the martyrdom of Martin Luther King (which took place during a national conference at Duke on the “Theology of Hope”), the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in June, the Paris barricades in July, the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the violence of Democratic convention in August, and the election of Richard Nixon in November. In this season of despair Jürgen helped me see my country with hope and to see new possibilities when I had given up on it. The day after the assassination of Martin, African American students from Raleigh came to the Duke campus and with the Duke students formed many rows in the quad through which students danced. It was a sign of the indomitable spirit of Martin.

That brings me, finally, to another unmistakable likeness with Huckleberry in Jürgen’s playfulness, his delight in the humor that emerges when we own up to our pretensions before God. If the Ewigkeit of God’s righteousness is already dwelling among us, it is time for celebration and fest in everyday life. It is time for dancing. Blair and I came to Tübingen shortly after the tumults of 1968 and everything seemed new. The student revolt was just beginning. Among our fondest memories of our time in Tübingen were the fests in the Moltmanns’ home in Hauserstrasse. In one such fest was the unforgettable line dance led by someone, like Louis Armstrong, playing “When the Saints God Marching In.” Whenever Jürgen came to visit us in St. Louis, we would go down to the Mississippi for an evening on a riverboat. After a good steak, Jürgen’s favorite American meal, there would be dancing until the wee hours. Imagine Jürgen Moltmann, with a large cigar and scotch in hand leaning back and telling river tales and you will have in him a fine semblance of Mark Twain who was at one time himself a river boat captain.

Jürgen, our knees are not much good for dancing any more, but thankfully there is more than one way to dance to the music of God’s righteousness.

I close with a quote from your book The Living God. You meant these words for us, but now we mean them for you:

We acknowledge the gracious hand of God from which the gifts and powers of God come, and we grasp this open hand. There we feel ourselves to be in safe-keeping even when we fall, when the gifts are absent and when our powers fail us. We are led from the open hand of God to the heart of God, where there is glowing love.

Jürgen, our prayer is that you will know the glowing love of God. We thank God for your life, for your life in our lives, and for your traveling.

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90^th Birthday Celebration
Bremen
April 16, 2016
M. Douglas Meeks