A preacher posted the following on Facebook the other day:
While I am excited that our church is growing, I am heartbroken to hear what people are experiencing in other places. I had a lady tell me yesterday that she visited 4 churches before coming to our church and none of them where preaching the word of God. Please be kind with your comments, but is this what others are experiencing across the nation? When did the call to preach and teach begin to speak about everything but the word? Church this should sound an alarm in our hearts and we need to pray that God will bring our people back to his word.
Most of the responses were of the order of the following:
* (T)hat new word is often an old trick.
* Absolutely. Preach the word and don't sugar or water it down!!!! Keep preaching my brother in Christ.
* When was it this happened was your question. Judas started desiring the money, and the love of money is the root of all evil. Jesus is and was the Word. Either love all of Him, or the devil will come up with the silver for you to sell out Jesus.
* Everything that is not Christ is antichrist. Whatsoever is not of faith is of sin. Many like Jesus but few really love Him. Love your enemies. Take up your cross. Deny yourself. All of these and many many more are words Jesus taught. Today's lying messages are your best life now, and the carnal man loves that, but it is one of hundreds of doctrines of demons swallowed whole.
* Like chugging a camel, there is nothing there that survives Bible searching.
I think that you can see from these sample responses that there are people out there who have strong feelings about how the word of God is preached and what that means. I believe that everyone who responded is sincere. There are some subtle or emerging disagreements and contradictions expressed in the responses that I believe are healthy.
I wrote a lengthy response---more of a plea, actually---and it was quickly taken down. I believe that my comments were taken down because I challenged the premise of the pastor's questions. I did not save my response, and I don't want to engage in polemics, but my points came down to the following:
* Let's tread gently here. It may be that some of us are hearing something that we're not prepared for now in a particular church, but we may need that message later in life. It may be that we're filtering what we're hearing only through our experiences and how we analyze those expriences rather than through what the Holy Spirit is calling us to and hoew the Holy Spirit wants us to analyze our conditions. It may be that we're either being mislead by the so-called "prosperity gospel" or that the relative privileges we enjoy here in the U.S. condition us and bend us more towards Ceasar than Christ and that we're confusing the two. It may be that we have a trauma- or abuse-driven mechanism in our heads that pushes us to binary views of the world and of how we encounter Scripture.
* The real issue here may also be our hard-heartedness. Preaching the word of God may take many forms, and not everyone will grasp or feel good about how that happens in environments that they're not comfortable with. For instance, I have attended a church where the majoirity of the congregation were houseless, on various medications, self-medicating, and struggling with surviving on the streets and the mental and emotional challenges that come with that. That is a very different exprience than where Christians are better off and more comfortable. The word of God is necessarily communicated and shared and experienced differently across places, times, and social groups.
* The church has experienced the word of God differently since our earliest days. It isn't news that some Christians object to how the word of God is preached and lived in other churches. If you find yourself in a church where you don't think the preaching and the living out is consistent with how you understand the word of God, take some gentle time to discern where it is that you may belong and search and pray to land in that place. But please be open to the possibility that you may want to return to the place that you're now uncomfortable in some day and that the Holy Spirit may work in that place and lead it and give that place grace and blessings that you are not receiving.
* Matthew 10:14-15 does show that Jesus gave clear instructions to His disciples about how to respond to those who who reject the preaching of the word in the Spirit, but that was a commandment given to the disciples that came with other commandments regarding "the lost sheep of Israel," the radical message that "The kingdom of heaven is at hand," and curing the sick, raising the dead, cleansing lepers, and driving out demons without cost. We should set ourselves the tasks of healing the sick and raising the dead through social action, a necessary form of preaching the word of God. But so many Christians in the United States do something else. We judge ourselves and others when we're told not to judge. Please try to leave judging to God and be about the work of taking care of the hungry, the thirsty, the poor, the naked, and the imprisoned. We are quite busy shaking the dust from our feet because of what we think happened at another church---and folks at that church are doing the same after encountering us. And, meanwhile, creation is suffering and crying out in agony.
* Who do I know who preaches the word of God? I know a fellow in Southern West Virginia who is not a preacher in a conventional sense but who is gentle and soulful and cautions folks not to judge, and you can feel the Spirit moving in him. His life is a good sermon. I know a preacher in Southeast Kentucky who is part of the Primitive Baptist Universalist community who preaches a Biblically-based universalism and Preterism that most Christians around there can't yet accept, but they can't explain why and he has gotten run off from some churches. You might come into my church on a Sunday and not hear what you think is the word of God being preached, but my pastor's sermons have moved the mountains of my conscience. There is often "something in the air" in my church that assures us and heals us. When our pastor absolves us of our sins as a pastor I can feel that healing taking place. These are among the continuing miracles to be found in the churtch to this day. Bishop William Barber II and Repairers of the Breach preach the word of God and live the word of God. Why is their message sidelined or ignored by the church? You will need much more than proof texts to challenge these preachers if you don't believe that they're preaching the word of God.
* The idea that some pastors or churches are not preaching the word of God comes as part of a construct that seems to be saying that the word of God must come to us as harsh condemnation. From my universalist perspective, Scripture seems to say instead that the word of God is sweet ("sugarcoating"?) even when it calls us to repentence and correction. That construct also seems to be saying that it's a one-size-fits-all message, but God gave us diversity and gifts of the Spirit, and Scripture opens the door to many possibilities---and God is still speaking and creation still holds us despite our sins and errors. The preachers who I most often hear working within this conservative construct often pose as radicals. "I may get arrested or get in trouble for preaching this, but..." is often used. But, in fact, their message is not a dangerous one or out of step with the society we live in at all. The victimization being preached suits the Trump folks perfectly. It seems to me that "bring(ing) our people back to his word" (see above) at the present moment is very much about building new relationships with one another and doing this in ways that both weaken the conservative paradigm and builds God's kingdom from the kinds of people our Lord loved most deeply.
* At this very moment the scandal that we are trapped in is not about a moderrn church not hearing the true word of God being preached, I think. It's about how deeply the legacies of relative privilege and power, racism, sexism, militarism, and trauma have conditioned us. It's about our excesses while the world is suffering, and it's about our lack of sobriety and healthy relationships. It's about the church being silent as Israel carries out genocidal policies and about how complicit we are in that. It's about living in a world that can still be saved if we make God real in our prayers and in our lives and in our daily work, and it's about how so many of us opt for forms of death (addiction, oppression, injustice, violence) when God offers life.
Let's consider the cartoon below. It is apparently being circulated by Christian pastors and others who may be trying to make a point about declines in church membership and active participation and engagement. But from my universalist perspective there may be a counter-argument to be made here and a reasonable explanation as to why someone might find this cartoon offensive.
Let me say right now that I believe in joining and engaging with whatever religious or spiritual organization that you feel comfortable with after you have gone through time for discernment with God, taken some time with it, and your membership and participation have been determined to bless and benefit everyone in the circle. This is about faith, belief, and doctrine, to be sure, but it is also about how we view long-term commitment.
With commitment in mind, then, I want to lay out a few controversial points that I think the pastors and others passing this cartoon along will disagree with. Uniting oneself with a congregation or community will not work if you or that community come to the point of considering membership in a transactional way. If either side in this is thinking about some kind of exchange taking place, or in terms of a sale being made or a client-therapist-buyer-seller-sinner-preacher relationship being established, in order for things to progress then at some point someone will become dissatisfied and the relationship will suffer or end. We live in a world governed largely by competition, transactions, sales, profits and losses. Those in power often maintain their positions by encouraging dependency. People seeking the solace and strengthening that faith and faith communities can provide are often seeking an alternative to the harsh and cold world and the means of coping with and overcoming the violence that has been done to them in that world. We, all of us, need solidarity, not capitalist ethics and relationship dependencies in the pews.
Tithing has its roots in our communal religious and spiritual traditions and has come down to us as a form of fasting and as a form of generosity or charity ("solidarity lite"). But there are legitimate questions here about a proper Biblical approach to fasting in the first place. Is it Biblical to require the poor and the oppressed---the Lazaruses of our present day---to fast and to give? Is their life not already a story of fasting, faith and generosity? Yes, there are the accounts of the poor widow's offering and Christ's observations in the moment (Mark 12:41–44, Luke 21:1–4), but here I think the accent is on Christ condemning the wealthy and the powerful and not arguing that the poor must be squeezed.
We know that "people with means...are substantial givers. Middle-class Americans donate a little less. But the lower-income population surprises by giving more than the middle—and in some measures even more than the top. (As a percentage of available income, that is. In absolute dollars, those in higher income groups give much, much more money.)" The lower-income folks have an expansive definition of tithing, and one that I think is essentially correct, at least in terms of social practices. Someone may cover the mom in line at the supermarket who comes up short, or put up money for a son-in-law's tires so that he can look for work, or help someone make their rent. In my experience the people who are so generous do not often think of wat they are doing as charity, though they may not know the word "solidarity" or what it fully means or implies. Still, they model the concepts of solidarity by giving without the expectation of getting back and by giving in order to strengthen the social fabric that wraps around them as well. Instead of being transactional and talking about tithing, then, we should think about how we teach and model solidarity and where we find it in Scripture. The Bible is full of lessons on solidarity. The three that come readily to my mind are Hebrews 11, Acts 4: 32-5:11, and Christ's resurrection. Once solidarity is institutionalized and is communicated as an expectation and lived out daily, and once transactionalism is overcome, the tithing and sacrifices will likely come.
Well, it may be said, the folks in that cartoon are white and middle-class and seem to be squared away. I want to ask fellow Christians to seriously engage with the work of Marcus Borg and take up the project of doing economic analysis from a Christian perspective. The people in the pews may not be doing as well as fellow parishioners think they are. We live in a society that makes talk about things that matter and the struggles that we're going through uncomfortable and humiliating. Either people never talk about these hard truths of theirs or they abandon boundaries and go on as if theirs are the only and the most important problems and as if what they are suffering through is not the outcome of systemic inequities. So, in addition to not being transactional, engaging in solidarity, and doing economic analysis we also need to develop and teach healthy boundaries before we get deep into pushing church membership and tithing on folks.
I'm coming from a place here of thinking about joining and fully engaging with a religious or spiritual community in terms of relationships---a marriage, say. You know that if you get married thinking "Well, we can always get divorced if things don't work out" then your marriage will likely not work out. The same holds true when you consider joining a religious community. You had better go into your marriage knowing your partner's faults and shortcomings, and both of you need to bend and be vulnerable to the other. Something similar happens in religious communities. Your heart will break and be broken and both you and your community will need to be flexible and take the long view. You know that if you get married but still keep up with old partners or go around looking at others as potential partners then you're not being fully faithful to the person you promised faithfulness to. Something like this applies to you joining a religious community as well; it's either a monogamous relationship or it won't last. It's okay if you can't do that now, "dating" is fine. You know that if you get married and you're not sharing the household tasks and paying the bills together and budgeting together then your marriage won't last. Most divorces start with fights over money. Again, there is a corollary with joining a religious community: plan, work, struggle and share the burdens to make it work, even if it means smaller communities made up of the blessed poor that God so loves. You don't want to marry someone who talks only about themselves, who is struggling with alcoholism or drug abuse, who is always deep in drama, who can't manage basic living skills without trouble, who can't handle their own power or work with someone else's in rational ways or who abuses their power and your trust. You also don't want to join a religious community where people with such issues proliferate and hold the keys to heaven and hell. And if you have been through a bad marriage or two you're probably not in a hurry to jump into another marriage. The same is true of joining religious communities; let God speak to you and study on how to bring that into focus, be rational about it, take your time.
For most of us, I think, the good traits and the most difficult problems that we bring to marriages and other relationships will be much the same as what we bring to any organization or effort we engage in, religious and spiritual communities included. Most of us have to work very hard to deconstruct what is negative in us and this is a lifetime project for many more of us than want to admit it. The capitalist society that we live in makes us unnaturally competitive and unable to find balance and cooperative paths to power. Churches may look at these conditions as sinful, or they may honor this with a gospel of prosperity, but neither approach finds the needed understanding. Our practical challenge is to make deconstructing ourselves and rebuilding ourselves a radical and social act of partaking with one another in the divine nature, or theosis (See Psalm 81/82, 2nd Peter 1:4. See 1 Thessalonians 5:17 and Matthew 25: 37-40 as aids). Is your religious community a place for rebuilding and healing?
By this point I have probably lost the preachers and many readers. I'm going on too long and this is abstract. I do want to close with an additional point.
Many of the preachers who are circulating this cartoon and others like it claim in their sermons that they are swimming against the tide and say that they are risking their livelihoods and freedom by their strong teaching. I think that they are swimming very much with the tide by not taking on those in power who bring us a bit of hell (employers, banks, the prison-industrial complex, healthcare run for profit are examples), exaggerating their counter-cultural stance, and preaching an eternal hell because it is one way of preserving order in a society that jumps from crisis to crisis. Where is their attack on the systemic evils that oppress the people in the pews?
On the other hand, there are some pretty brave Christians out there who really are challenging the oppressive powers and are paying a price for doing that and aren't posing as being counter-cultural. A committee of Mennonites led a peaceful demonstration calling for a ceasefire in Palestine/Israel last week and about 150 people were arrested at that demonstration. Where is the church in talking accurately and with love and solidarity about Palestine and supporting those who were arrested? Fellow believers cry out for justice but we're not listening. Where is the church in supporting the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II and Repairers of the Breach when Bishop Barber says, "On March 2, our moral movement will be in Washington D.C. and at 30 statehouses across the country, launching a period of mass mobilization to the polls of the nation’s 85 million poor and low wealth voters leading up to the election in November. If mobilized around an agenda to address and end poverty and low wages, there is not a state where–if just 10 to 20 percent of poor and low-wage voters who did not vote in the last national election come to the polls this time around–they would not be able to swing the election and elect leaders who would vote for living wages, health care and voting rights."?
“He (Dr. King) was telling us when he died that the greatest fear of the southern aristocracy was the coming together of the poor masses, Black and white. Far too many people never heard that, so they stop at the March on Washington...It’s like turning civil rights into a museum. We don’t need museums, we need a movement. The only way you honor your prophets is when they fall, you pick up the baton and walk the next mile.”
Readers of this blog know that I have a special place in my heart for Greenleaf Christian Church. I know that the link says that you have to go to Youtube, but just click on it and you will be there. And please feel okay about skipping around the service. Everything there will move you, but you can find a spot for watching just for yourself.
Bishop William J. Barber, II was at St. Mary's Road United Methodist Church in Columbus, Georgia today and delivered a powerful message about voting and what's at stake in the runoff election now underway there. What he has to say here affects all of us and every state. What do we take into consideration when we think about politics and vote? Why is what happens in the South so important to the future of the United States?
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:
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.
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.
Just click on the link and you will see the video. This is fundamental to what is going on in the United States, and particularly in the South and in Black and poor and underserved communities, today.
Join the National Co-Chairs of The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, Bishop William J. Barber II & Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis this Thursday, November 3rd at 8:00PM ET for a National GOTV Virtual Rally. This event will air live at poorpeoplescampaign.org/livestream
This event will also air live on our Twitter, Facebook & YouTube pages and be crossposted to state campaign Facebook pages in an effort to reach thousands across the country.
During this gathering, we will celebrate the work that has been done for this national effort since June 18th, hear the stories of those impacted by the five interlocking injustices and rally to ensure that our neighbors, families and communities are all registered to vote and equipped with a voting plan.
Here’s how you can get involved:
Mark Your Calendars & Invite a friend to join you virtually on Thursday, November 3rd at 8:00PM ET. Visit vote.poorpeoplescampaign.org to create a voting plan and to sign up for our text bank initiative and help us get out the vote!
Let us know you’re tuning in by tagging us in a post that you’re watching and using #OurVotesAreDemands
This was recorded on September 22nd, 2022, when a diverse group of Faith Leaders from across the country gathered in Washington, DC for an urgent congressional briefing to make a moral demand that Congress act on living wages, voting rights, and the reinstatement and expansion of polices that research shows can immediately lift millions of families out of poverty. If we ever needed to vote for democracy and justice, we sure do need to vote now!
There is so much hear to learn from and to take joy in. You can see the Spirit moving at Greenleaf Christian Church and their ministries, but you see the Spirit moving there in ways that you cannot predict. Please take some time to savor this and let it sink in.
The entire service from Greenleaf Christian Church is important and worth watching, but if you don't have two hours and forty minutes to give to this please start around 45:11 or 58:00 and give it what you can. Bishop Barber's sermon will give you some needed life lessons, build your faith, and give you courage.
We disagree with Bishop Barber's brief and passing comment regarding Israel here, but we do believe that Bishop Barber is Spirit-filled and a great moral leader of our time. We thank God for his presence among us at this time in our history.
This is Bishop Barber's first sermon since the historic Poor People's Campaign reached Washington last week. Both the message today and the mass presence in D.C. last week are significant events in our history. Just click on this link and it will take you there.
