Please read Part One here.
Now, what is giving rise to this rant of mine?
There are always several things happening at once. Some of those old-time preachers who I listen to are laying it on pretty thick when it comes to liberals, abortion rights, and some people who they’re not naming who are supposedly rewriting or ignoring the Bible. This got heavier to carry around election time. I continue to be quite moved as I watch the services at Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina and listen to Bishop William J. Barber, Jr., and Rev. Shyrl Hinnant Uzzell who are there. My heart sometimes aches because I can’t find a church near where I live that is anything like that.
Also, I recently read the book Raising Lazarus by Beth Macy and I remain caught up with some of the examples that she gave of people, many of them struggling with their own substance abuse recovery issues and getting almost no help from the institutional church, giving deep help to people with substance abuse issues, and sometimes having to do so in violation of the law. I’m questioning my own and other’s Christianity in light of our lack of faith in the resurrection of others from dope sickness and death right now, today. Are we really called to let hundreds of thousands of people die from substance abuse and deaths of despair?
But another one of the drivers on this rant is something that happened in church recently. There is a passing-through, filling-in minister there who seems to push pretty hard on fundraising. That doesn’t bother me so much, but I wonder how other folks hear this. Part of that congregation is doing okay, and the church bank accounts are full to overflowing, but some of the folks in the pews must be struggling like I am, or harder. The church is in a nice part of town. It does a little to assist people in the community but you don’t see many people in the church stepping up on anything controversial. Large numbers of Christians in the United States will do great charitable work, but we’re collectively resistant to taking on the people and conditions that make charity the necessary band-aid that it is.
They say that Sunday mornings are the most segregated times in the United States because people of color go to their churches and whites go to their churches. I have attended a few integrated churches over the years, but very few. These were Roman Catholic and Pentecostal Holiness churches. And since that saying about Sunday mornings became popular, masses of people have left or remained outside of the churches, adding another dimension to our discussion. I take the point that we’re dealing with forms of segregation, but this has many dimensions to it. People of color walk into white space and know if they’re welcome or not pretty quickly. No one has to say anything; it’s just there, and it’s real. Something like that can happen with working-class or poor people entering middle-class or wealthy church space; you feel that you’re walking into something that will not be yours, and that's real. I’ve seen Roman Catholic churches that didn't have this class differentiation built in, but those are exceptions. Sermons often tell us what that space holds. They describe in words what we sense in our hearts or heads.
It's tragic and a sin against God and ourselves that we have this segregation. I say “against ourselves” because we are missing some marks here by not trusting and loving one another in the images given to us by God. There are theologies specific to the experiences of working-class people and people of color that will overwhelm you, fill your heart and be a blessing to you, give you the reassurance that you need if you will open yourself to them. But you can’t very well open yourself to them if you can’t find the right church or if the experiences of working-class people and people of color or LGBTQIA+ people are marginalized.
The readings for the one recent Sunday that brought this to me were 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13 and Luke 21:5-19. There is a lot there to take up a long sermon: “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat,” Jesus’s prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem, deep social and political chaos and how believers process those, and repression and society falling apart and how believers deal with those in faith all come up as major themes and all of them have implications that affect how we live and structure our faith. But what we got was another fundraising pitch.
Segregation, churches accommodating to the system, the lack of prophetic action in the church, and the lack of social analysis in the churches are real scandals. But the common conservative complaints are about other things instead.
I remember several years ago on Easter Sunday hearing a minister at this church say that Jesus was dancing on the cross. And on one Christmas Eve a minister there gave a reassuring sermon that told us that all was well. Went I got in my car to head home I heard the news that there had been a massacre of Christians in Africa. The first sermon sets the conservative’s hair on fire. It has no basis in Scripture and could do some damage. It's a terrible image, I think. Perhaps the real harm being done with this kind of talk is that it takes away from the political nature of Christ’s crucifixion. He was not the first or last to die on the cross, and his death (and, in a deep sense, his resurrection) unites him (and should unite all believers) with everyone who has ever been persecuted and every person who has been on a death row and who has been executed. The second sermon was neither prophetic or analytical, and we need both badly. Let’s tell the truth: very little in the world is well, but people of faith are also people of resurrection and can make positive change.
Polemics around this are steps backward. I don't want any part of competitive tensions and criticism. The ways forward are through prayer, calling on the presence of the Holy Spirit, organizing, and (I think) eventually restructuring our relationships and our institutions. The minister doing the fundraising pitches is working within a system, and that system is driven by money and money exists now in order to ration things and maintain exploitation. We need to see that bigger picture.
I’m not aware of any Christian rewriting the Bible, as the conservatives claim. I did recently read a book by a fellow who pastors a large faith community and who wants us to put our Bibles away and find new revelations. It took me awhile to come to this, but I decided that his arguments are conservative but are dressed up to sound radical and counter-cultural. Throwing out the Bible would spark a huge conflict with no predictable end. The Bible guides us through the sorrows, struggles, and victories in this life and gives us a plans for collective salvation (liberation). Marx had it right. Religion “is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” And because that is true the Bible and religion are needed, and the visions of liberation that have been contained within the Bible, and often hidden from the people, must be brought into the light.
The accusation of rewriting the Bible may be aimed at churches and church leaders who are gay-friendly or who are trying to build diverse and inclusive churches. I imagine that this is usually the case, and it is unfair and inaccurate. There is a certain amount of privilege and hypocrisy involved if I’m right. Don’t go calling my hogs home if yours are still in the woods. People often take the Bible and its teachings to heart and put it in terms they can understand and teach with and that can be a beautiful and saving. I was once in a Bible study about Genesis 32:22-32 that turned into good discussions about pro wrestling, hip replacement surgery, and barbecuing and I’m an certain that most everyone present came away with a better sense of the text. Here is another great example:
People will fuss over our shepherds who are supposed to help us to be fruitful and multiply the numbers of the faithful. Jeremiah 23:1-6 comes to mind, and that stern first warning gives the conservatives an argument. But keep reading. Pretty soon the connection is made between the shepherds and social justice and liberation.
Let’s take this to the grassroots and go a step back to the people who have a testimony and who believe in their hearts that they are saved and another step back to believers who have a different approach.
The struggle and victory salvation stories that I most often hear sound something like this:
I was raised going to church and was saved as a child at a revival. The man that preached that night was a fiery Pentecostal preacher who preached hell, repentance, and salvation. I felt the conviction of the Spirit and went to the altar that night. That preacher said, “If you leave this world without Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior you will split hell wide open!" Those words from God's went straight to my heart. I thank God to this day that I had enough knowledge to know that I needed this man Jesus in my life.
Many tragic events pushed me very far from Jesus for many years, however. Through the years I have failed God. I have left Him more times than I wish to confess. I spent most my teenage life drinking, doing drugs and sleeping around. I let go of my first love for a life of being a slave to sin. A life of trouble, fear, uncertainty, dread, heartbreak. I was the lowest of sinners...you name it... I was quite the PARTIER and very promiscuous. I ran and ran from God, and at times the guilt was unbearable.
After moving around and countless failed relationships I returned back to my roots with my two children. I worked with a wonderful Christian woman who loved me unconditionally with no condemnation. She was a constant witness for Jesus. And one evening she took me to a Christian church for a women’s Bible study and as I drove out from the parking lot I was so overwhelmed by the Holy Spirit that I pulled off the road and I immediately began sobbing. These were cleansing tears. I asked God to forgive my sins, confessed I wanted Him to be Lord of my life, and joyfully proclaimed that I believed Jesus Christ was God's son who died on the cross for my sin, was buried and raised back to life then ascended and has gone on to Heaven to prepare an eternal home for me.
I lifted up my eyes from the filth I had found myself in and I knew that He was there with His arms open wide ready to hold me, protect me, heal me, love me. I can never repay Him for all He’s done for me. Even attempting to do that would be futile. I just want to spend the rest of my life doing whatever He has me to do. I’m on fire to spread my love of Jesus to others. He has used me, and He is still using me, for most of all just trying to spread His Love and Good News on a daily basis to a hurting world around me. So many people need to hear that hell is still burning, heaven is still waiting, salvation is still available and Jesus is still the same.
You can’t doubt the sincerity here or the strength of conviction. These are reasonable responses social conditions that individuals have limited control over. Jesus is being humanized to extent that He becomes a companion and presence in the lives of people who testify and confess their salvation in this way.
I can argue about hell and hellfire because I’m a universalist, but I won’t argue that the people who testify in this way are wrong when they say that they have experienced something of hell in their lives. Hell and heaven so often become stand-ins for what we experience in our lives. I remember attending a Black church on Maryland’s Eastern Shore many years ago and hearing a woman who had left her community there and had gone to Philadelphia and returned testifying for a very long time and talking about her precarious mental state. The transition and disorientation of her move had been too much of her and she was finding her cure in her community and church. Consider how masses of Black people who had migrated from the Black Belt South to Chicago were so receptive to the early mystical teachings of what became the Nation of Islam. From the standpoint of having made it to Chicago their lives in the segregated and violent South often seemed like hell on earth. Every substance abuser whose life is saved is another Lazarus, and most know that. It's not at all far out, I think, that people will feel God's presence by a river or in the woods or with their children or ageing older ones and know something of heaven from those encounters.
Now, not every Christian has the experience of being saved in a dramatic moment or period in their lives, but they are no less Christian for that. My experience as been that many rural and working-class people, and especially people in the coal fields and what gets called the “Rust Belt,” don’t feel that the well-reasoned and intellectual discourse in a middle-class church is for us or open to us while n economically a politically better-off segment will only hear a logical exposition. There is nothing wrong with well-reasoned and intellectual discourse, working out one’s doubts over time, and being one over by argument over a long stretch of time.
Our ideas of heaven and hell can be more sentimental, and more exclusive and vindictive, than they are Scriptural. I have friends who call this out whenever they hear it, and I have friends who respond with Bible verses laying out the exact opposites of sentimentality, exclusivity, and vindictiveness. The good side of this is that its helpful that whenever someone says something about the nature of qualities of God based on Scripture that they then provide chapter and verse showing the opposite as well. We need to use this kind of reasoning. But most of us are sentimental about heaven for the reasons that our lives have been hard and we want to be with those who loved and protected us and who have now passed on. My advice is that you not stick a pin in people's sentimental balloons unless you are committed to going through life with them and working with them every day to show them something better.
My sentimental idea of heaven now is something like a chain of undisturbed green mountains and valleys as far as I can see, a clean Tug Fork River full of fish, animals around living in peace, a Bluetick coonhound with me, the spirits of Del McCoury and Ralph Stanley and Yara Allen with me, and all of my family members and ancestors and friends and those I sinned against and who sinned against me together and happy and praising God. My less sentimental heaven is a democratic socialism that works, service to one another, constant daily efforts to build justice between people and between people and the environment and animals.
When people ask me if I’m saved or not, or if I have accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and God and Savior, I usually have two responses. One I took from a Wooden Pulpit Podcast done by the Primitive Baptist Universalists (look up "Holston--A Primitive Baptist Universalist Church" on Facebook). Someone on the podcast made the point that the common idea is that we pray for salvation, but it is closer to the truth to say that we pray because we have been saved. Think on that, and if you can see the truth in that then think about if you ever heard that in church. My other response builds on what I heard for years in Orthodox churches. I have been saved through baptism, I am being saved by faith and works, and with God’s grace I will be saved. This is not the absolute certainty of the people whose testimony is given above, and it isn’t prolonged middle-class doubts being resolved through intellectual engagement. Neither of these is fully sufficient because my answers focus on me and salvation is a collective experience. There is a spectrum of valid responses to questions about our salvation, and we shouldn’t let others pressure us into being in a particular camp.
But another one of the drivers on this rant is something that happened in church recently. There is a passing-through, filling-in minister there who seems to push pretty hard on fundraising. That doesn’t bother me so much, but I wonder how other folks hear this. Part of that congregation is doing okay, and the church bank accounts are full to overflowing, but some of the folks in the pews must be struggling like I am, or harder. The church is in a nice part of town. It does a little to assist people in the community but you don’t see many people in the church stepping up on anything controversial. Large numbers of Christians in the United States will do great charitable work, but we’re collectively resistant to taking on the people and conditions that make charity the necessary band-aid that it is.
They say that Sunday mornings are the most segregated times in the United States because people of color go to their churches and whites go to their churches. I have attended a few integrated churches over the years, but very few. These were Roman Catholic and Pentecostal Holiness churches. And since that saying about Sunday mornings became popular, masses of people have left or remained outside of the churches, adding another dimension to our discussion. I take the point that we’re dealing with forms of segregation, but this has many dimensions to it. People of color walk into white space and know if they’re welcome or not pretty quickly. No one has to say anything; it’s just there, and it’s real. Something like that can happen with working-class or poor people entering middle-class or wealthy church space; you feel that you’re walking into something that will not be yours, and that's real. I’ve seen Roman Catholic churches that didn't have this class differentiation built in, but those are exceptions. Sermons often tell us what that space holds. They describe in words what we sense in our hearts or heads.
It's tragic and a sin against God and ourselves that we have this segregation. I say “against ourselves” because we are missing some marks here by not trusting and loving one another in the images given to us by God. There are theologies specific to the experiences of working-class people and people of color that will overwhelm you, fill your heart and be a blessing to you, give you the reassurance that you need if you will open yourself to them. But you can’t very well open yourself to them if you can’t find the right church or if the experiences of working-class people and people of color or LGBTQIA+ people are marginalized.
The readings for the one recent Sunday that brought this to me were 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13 and Luke 21:5-19. There is a lot there to take up a long sermon: “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat,” Jesus’s prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem, deep social and political chaos and how believers process those, and repression and society falling apart and how believers deal with those in faith all come up as major themes and all of them have implications that affect how we live and structure our faith. But what we got was another fundraising pitch.
Segregation, churches accommodating to the system, the lack of prophetic action in the church, and the lack of social analysis in the churches are real scandals. But the common conservative complaints are about other things instead.
I remember several years ago on Easter Sunday hearing a minister at this church say that Jesus was dancing on the cross. And on one Christmas Eve a minister there gave a reassuring sermon that told us that all was well. Went I got in my car to head home I heard the news that there had been a massacre of Christians in Africa. The first sermon sets the conservative’s hair on fire. It has no basis in Scripture and could do some damage. It's a terrible image, I think. Perhaps the real harm being done with this kind of talk is that it takes away from the political nature of Christ’s crucifixion. He was not the first or last to die on the cross, and his death (and, in a deep sense, his resurrection) unites him (and should unite all believers) with everyone who has ever been persecuted and every person who has been on a death row and who has been executed. The second sermon was neither prophetic or analytical, and we need both badly. Let’s tell the truth: very little in the world is well, but people of faith are also people of resurrection and can make positive change.
Polemics around this are steps backward. I don't want any part of competitive tensions and criticism. The ways forward are through prayer, calling on the presence of the Holy Spirit, organizing, and (I think) eventually restructuring our relationships and our institutions. The minister doing the fundraising pitches is working within a system, and that system is driven by money and money exists now in order to ration things and maintain exploitation. We need to see that bigger picture.
I’m not aware of any Christian rewriting the Bible, as the conservatives claim. I did recently read a book by a fellow who pastors a large faith community and who wants us to put our Bibles away and find new revelations. It took me awhile to come to this, but I decided that his arguments are conservative but are dressed up to sound radical and counter-cultural. Throwing out the Bible would spark a huge conflict with no predictable end. The Bible guides us through the sorrows, struggles, and victories in this life and gives us a plans for collective salvation (liberation). Marx had it right. Religion “is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” And because that is true the Bible and religion are needed, and the visions of liberation that have been contained within the Bible, and often hidden from the people, must be brought into the light.
The accusation of rewriting the Bible may be aimed at churches and church leaders who are gay-friendly or who are trying to build diverse and inclusive churches. I imagine that this is usually the case, and it is unfair and inaccurate. There is a certain amount of privilege and hypocrisy involved if I’m right. Don’t go calling my hogs home if yours are still in the woods. People often take the Bible and its teachings to heart and put it in terms they can understand and teach with and that can be a beautiful and saving. I was once in a Bible study about Genesis 32:22-32 that turned into good discussions about pro wrestling, hip replacement surgery, and barbecuing and I’m an certain that most everyone present came away with a better sense of the text. Here is another great example:
God's Highway--The Stanley Brothers
I’m highlighting a few problems here that I see: the conservatism of so many of the preachers, pastors, ministers, and priests; our collective failure to fully appreciate and lift up the theologians and Spirit-filled people we have among the poor and in the working-class; the tendencies that Christians have to compete with one another rather than to serve the people by joining serving the people to serving God in prophetic ways that demand justice; the racial and class divisions that hold us prisoner; the fundraising that replaces prophetic witness; the weaknesses of liberal reassurances; and the false claims by conservatives and liberals. I don’t mind politicization in the pulpits and pews as a matter of principle, but if that’s going to happen then we need the correct politics and neither reactionary conservatism that supports the empire or weak liberalism make the grade. But, really, why can’t we put the drive into a politics of the Kingdom of God and that is in the first place about Biblical and ethical social justice?
That isn’t impossible, though it is extremely difficult. My faith journey is enlivened by what I see taking place at Greenleaf Christian Church, previously mentioned, and how the worship, preaching, and service there find the right balance between feeding the soul and heart and speaking to the head and mind. I have not heard anyone argue against what Bishop Barber and Rev. Shyrl Hinnant Uzzell are doing at Greenleaf. Perhaps those who oppose them think that ignoring them is prudent or the way of containing what is occurring at Greenleaf and through the Poor Peoples Campaign. My belief is that large numbers of the working-class faithful and large numbers of those who are outside of the church will both catch the holy fire if the hearing the preaching and see the resurrection taking place there. I'm impressed by what I read of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, the Catholic Worker movement, the Jubilee Baptist Church in Chapel Hill and some others are attempting. The question is not what’s going wrong or right with these efforts, but why your community doesn’t have churches like these.
That isn’t impossible, though it is extremely difficult. My faith journey is enlivened by what I see taking place at Greenleaf Christian Church, previously mentioned, and how the worship, preaching, and service there find the right balance between feeding the soul and heart and speaking to the head and mind. I have not heard anyone argue against what Bishop Barber and Rev. Shyrl Hinnant Uzzell are doing at Greenleaf. Perhaps those who oppose them think that ignoring them is prudent or the way of containing what is occurring at Greenleaf and through the Poor Peoples Campaign. My belief is that large numbers of the working-class faithful and large numbers of those who are outside of the church will both catch the holy fire if the hearing the preaching and see the resurrection taking place there. I'm impressed by what I read of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, the Catholic Worker movement, the Jubilee Baptist Church in Chapel Hill and some others are attempting. The question is not what’s going wrong or right with these efforts, but why your community doesn’t have churches like these.
People will fuss over our shepherds who are supposed to help us to be fruitful and multiply the numbers of the faithful. Jeremiah 23:1-6 comes to mind, and that stern first warning gives the conservatives an argument. But keep reading. Pretty soon the connection is made between the shepherds and social justice and liberation.
Let’s take this to the grassroots and go a step back to the people who have a testimony and who believe in their hearts that they are saved and another step back to believers who have a different approach.
The struggle and victory salvation stories that I most often hear sound something like this:
I was raised going to church and was saved as a child at a revival. The man that preached that night was a fiery Pentecostal preacher who preached hell, repentance, and salvation. I felt the conviction of the Spirit and went to the altar that night. That preacher said, “If you leave this world without Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior you will split hell wide open!" Those words from God's went straight to my heart. I thank God to this day that I had enough knowledge to know that I needed this man Jesus in my life.
Many tragic events pushed me very far from Jesus for many years, however. Through the years I have failed God. I have left Him more times than I wish to confess. I spent most my teenage life drinking, doing drugs and sleeping around. I let go of my first love for a life of being a slave to sin. A life of trouble, fear, uncertainty, dread, heartbreak. I was the lowest of sinners...you name it... I was quite the PARTIER and very promiscuous. I ran and ran from God, and at times the guilt was unbearable.
After moving around and countless failed relationships I returned back to my roots with my two children. I worked with a wonderful Christian woman who loved me unconditionally with no condemnation. She was a constant witness for Jesus. And one evening she took me to a Christian church for a women’s Bible study and as I drove out from the parking lot I was so overwhelmed by the Holy Spirit that I pulled off the road and I immediately began sobbing. These were cleansing tears. I asked God to forgive my sins, confessed I wanted Him to be Lord of my life, and joyfully proclaimed that I believed Jesus Christ was God's son who died on the cross for my sin, was buried and raised back to life then ascended and has gone on to Heaven to prepare an eternal home for me.
I lifted up my eyes from the filth I had found myself in and I knew that He was there with His arms open wide ready to hold me, protect me, heal me, love me. I can never repay Him for all He’s done for me. Even attempting to do that would be futile. I just want to spend the rest of my life doing whatever He has me to do. I’m on fire to spread my love of Jesus to others. He has used me, and He is still using me, for most of all just trying to spread His Love and Good News on a daily basis to a hurting world around me. So many people need to hear that hell is still burning, heaven is still waiting, salvation is still available and Jesus is still the same.
You can’t doubt the sincerity here or the strength of conviction. These are reasonable responses social conditions that individuals have limited control over. Jesus is being humanized to extent that He becomes a companion and presence in the lives of people who testify and confess their salvation in this way.
I can argue about hell and hellfire because I’m a universalist, but I won’t argue that the people who testify in this way are wrong when they say that they have experienced something of hell in their lives. Hell and heaven so often become stand-ins for what we experience in our lives. I remember attending a Black church on Maryland’s Eastern Shore many years ago and hearing a woman who had left her community there and had gone to Philadelphia and returned testifying for a very long time and talking about her precarious mental state. The transition and disorientation of her move had been too much of her and she was finding her cure in her community and church. Consider how masses of Black people who had migrated from the Black Belt South to Chicago were so receptive to the early mystical teachings of what became the Nation of Islam. From the standpoint of having made it to Chicago their lives in the segregated and violent South often seemed like hell on earth. Every substance abuser whose life is saved is another Lazarus, and most know that. It's not at all far out, I think, that people will feel God's presence by a river or in the woods or with their children or ageing older ones and know something of heaven from those encounters.
Now, not every Christian has the experience of being saved in a dramatic moment or period in their lives, but they are no less Christian for that. My experience as been that many rural and working-class people, and especially people in the coal fields and what gets called the “Rust Belt,” don’t feel that the well-reasoned and intellectual discourse in a middle-class church is for us or open to us while n economically a politically better-off segment will only hear a logical exposition. There is nothing wrong with well-reasoned and intellectual discourse, working out one’s doubts over time, and being one over by argument over a long stretch of time.
My sentimental idea of heaven now is something like a chain of undisturbed green mountains and valleys as far as I can see, a clean Tug Fork River full of fish, animals around living in peace, a Bluetick coonhound with me, the spirits of Del McCoury and Ralph Stanley and Yara Allen with me, and all of my family members and ancestors and friends and those I sinned against and who sinned against me together and happy and praising God. My less sentimental heaven is a democratic socialism that works, service to one another, constant daily efforts to build justice between people and between people and the environment and animals.
When people ask me if I’m saved or not, or if I have accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and God and Savior, I usually have two responses. One I took from a Wooden Pulpit Podcast done by the Primitive Baptist Universalists (look up "Holston--A Primitive Baptist Universalist Church" on Facebook). Someone on the podcast made the point that the common idea is that we pray for salvation, but it is closer to the truth to say that we pray because we have been saved. Think on that, and if you can see the truth in that then think about if you ever heard that in church. My other response builds on what I heard for years in Orthodox churches. I have been saved through baptism, I am being saved by faith and works, and with God’s grace I will be saved. This is not the absolute certainty of the people whose testimony is given above, and it isn’t prolonged middle-class doubts being resolved through intellectual engagement. Neither of these is fully sufficient because my answers focus on me and salvation is a collective experience. There is a spectrum of valid responses to questions about our salvation, and we shouldn’t let others pressure us into being in a particular camp.
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