Photograph from Lynne Myfanwy Jones
This has a little more drama and supposition to it than I would have liked, but I think that it's worth looking at and talking about. I don't know how you might tell a "Granny witch" from other knowledgeable women in Appalachia, and much that is described here existed in Pennsylvania's anthracite mining region until recently and involved men and women healers. I'm not all that happy with people talking about how we're going to survive impending disasters---I would rather we were talking about how to prevent them. But there is something helpful in recalling history and breaking down stereotypes.
Two of the drawbacks that I see in mainstream Christianity are the idea that human beings don't deserve God's grace and that we are saved by faith only. Some folks will go further and say that good works come out of faith, but most of them will still hold to the view that we don't deserve God's grace---it may be a free gift from God, but we still don't deserve that.
That doesn't seem logical to me, but it also doesn't seem fully consistent with some scripture. We read in 1 Corinthians 13:11-13 that
11. When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put aside childish things.
12. At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face. At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known.
13. So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Being the more important of the three, then, I have to learn how to love and how to work with that. And I think that it's pretty clear that working for justice is love in action if it's done in the right ways and for the right reasons. Maybe it's not that works are somehow better than faith, but that the two exist in tension with one another and help each other go forward and that love is the context and the transmission belt for that.
I'm no Biblical scholar, though, and folks smarter than me have been debating this for centuries. Whatever the right answer is, I'm going to keep trying to believe and to do the right things, I'm going to fail or fall short, and I'm going to keep trying. Where I am now is not where I will be one year from now. And, like Bishop Barber says, I'm going to keep trying to be someone who God will use.
I recently heard Bishop Barber call on people to repent for not not giving God all of their effort in prayer and at church. I think that he's talking about reconciliation, purification and repentance, and resolving to work hard for social justice alongside of others.
Anyway, I think that Islam has a good approach to this, or to half of the conundrum anyway. Read the article Allah Loves You Just For Trying by Omar Suleiman at About Islam and think about how that could apply to you and to Christianity if you're struggling with this. Something similar is said in St. John Chrysostom's Paschal Sermon, a wonderfully moving sermon that most Protestants and Catholics never experience and that Orthodox Christians only hear once a year.
I argue that all of the Abrahamic faiths pray to the same God and that each of the Abrahamic faiths have valuable insights that help all of us. In the Allah Loves You Just For Trying article we find the following encouraging words:
Now, there is something important to understand here: Allah loves you for trying; Allah loves you for being engaged in the state of purification; and Allah loves you for repenting…
But where is it that we actually fall short here? Some of us will repent sincerely for a sin and then insist that we will not return to the sin, yet still return to it. That does not disqualify you from the love of Allah nor does it open up all the previous times that you committed that sin, or nullify the repentance from those previous sins.
The type of insistence and returning to that could cause you to fall out of the love of Allah, out of this journey of attaining the love of Allah is when you insist upon those sins and disregard the sight of Allah and disregard the pursuit of Allah in returning to those sins.
So, that’s the difference between falling short again, getting weak again after you sincerely repent and not being sincere in your repentance in the first place.
The Jesus which God tells about in the Quran is quite different from the Gospel Jesus, although there are some similarities. Especially at Christmas time, when the depictions of Prophet Jesus are at their most florid, we need to remind people who Jesus really was. In the Quran we read what means:
Keep reading here.
And if you're Muslim or not Muslim, this is an opportunity to learn something:
Looking to learn about the Islamic month of Ramadan? ING provides great resources for your educational needs:
