Showing posts with label Greenleaf Christian Church. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Greenleaf Christian Church. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 28, 2022
Monday, December 12, 2022
Worship at Greenleaf Christian Church With Rev. Dr. Threatt On 12/11/22
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.
Monday, December 5, 2022
A reflection on white conservative Christians and me
I posted a two-part article on this blog in November about preachers, priests, ministers, and pastors and how I relate or don't relate to churches and what I look for and hope for in religion and faith. I also mixed into those articles much about how some people in my circles have compelling personal testimonies. You can read those posts here and here.
Something of what I was talking about last month shows up in a post by Matt Tebbe that is making the rounds. Mr. Tebbe writes:
A convo I've had dozens of times:
White conservative Christian: "You're a liberal why do you hate Christians and the church so much."
Me: "I am a Christian; I've been in vocational church ministry for a quarter century."
WCC: "Well you sure do pick and choose how you interpret the Bible and you're really hard on Christians your exegesis is awful."
Me: "We all pick and choose. I try to choose what hasn't been picked very often in my experience."
WCC: "Well everything you talk about sounds marxist and you've abandoned the gospel for social justice."
Me: "Are you referring to the fact that I talk about women, racism, and money a lot?"
WCC: "The woke agenda yes."
Me: "'Woke' is an AAVE term (African American Vernacular English) used by Black people in a positive manner that was then appropriated by white people and turned into an insult, to cast aspersions on those seeking to redress the destructiveness of white supremacy. Reconsider using it as a slur for the sake of your neighbor."
WCC: "I see you've been brainwashed."
Me: "I'm attempting to conserve some Scripture teaching on wealth, property, debt, the human dignity and equality of all people, and the destructive impact of systemic partiality. Also: I think there's places to progress past an ancient ethic that held to the ontological inferiority of women, that slavery was a given, that women were basically property of their husbands/fathers, etc."
WCC: "You think that Scripture errs?"
Me: "Be curious about why you think dealing with systemic injustice, financial greed and inequality, racism, and misogyny are liberal issues. Why aren't they considered conservative issues?"
WCC: "I knew it you deny the authority of Scripture. And you're being divisive."
Me: "The truth will do that, divide and such. You seem to have no qualms about division when you accuse me of wrongdoing."
WCC: "I'll be praying for you."
Me: "May your justice increase so that your prayer would availeth much."
**it just never goes anywhere, beloved. But this Advent I again choose hope.**
That is a pretty limited conversation or encounter, or perhaps it's just reaching towards some name-calling. By the standards of current-day social media its calm, and perhaps it documents that most people will not say in one-on-one encounters what they will say on social media.
I steer away from these conversations and look for commonality or to hold the line and perhaps influence someone in the future. "Commonality" for me is founded on common experiences, a love for what is beautiful, sympathy. It is not founded on agreeing to disagree. I look for some understanding of solidarity at a time when the existence of society and the solidarity that is needed as society's underpinnings is so at risk. Many working-class conservatives (more about this below) where I come from understand that solidarity and support or embody it, something that I think often transcends politics and religion. It's about decency and humanity and my side does not have the corner on either anymore. Many get that, perhaps many more don't. For that matter, lots of liberal and progressive people who I know don't get it either.
When such conversations do occur, face-to-face or on social media, they can escalate rather quickly and can end on a bad note. I try to save something for the future with most people even when it means my holding something back. My bottom lines, I hope, are racism/anti-racism, sexism, and solidarity. Loving the people more than hating the oppressors.
Truth be told, this is less about right vs. left or progressive vs. reactionary. Over the past few weeks I've had some bitter encounters with others on the left, people who I considered comrades and a couple who I considered influences in my life. The depth of that bitterness has made my head spin. It feels as if we are drowning in arguments, whether its in our political or religious or social and family circles. There are too many paths open to nihilism. I find myself feeling as if I have to defend the concepts of society and social order and kindness and solidarity. Is it really raining despair and hatred? Is there any shelter in this storm?
Danny Bowling recently published the following on the Appalachian Americans Facebook page and I believe that it has some relevancy here because religion and the church have often served as shelters in a tough world.
Church used to be everyone come to the choir.
Now it’s a praise team.
People used to feel free to testify of the good things of God.
Now that's not in our plans.
People used to be faithful to church every service, Now they only come on Sunday morning.....
People would pack the Altar for prayer and cry out to God, Now the Altar is empty....
Preacher’s used to read, study and pray for the message.
Many today read the internet and study how to deliver someone else’s message.
Church music was part of the worship experience.
Now it’s so loud and has become the focal point.
Church used to pray for God to send them a pastor.
Now it’s a beauty contest. We know him and he would fit in nicely. Caring less if they even meet the biblical qualifications.
Church used to have the Holy Ghost leading the services.
Now we have emotions leading the church.
Let’s seek out the old paths and walk in them AGAIN !!!
CHURCH we need to be CHRIST centered and
following the leadership of the HOLY GHOST.
This reads as a poem to me, sad or angry or despairing or demanding. Many of the people who have read the post found a subtext in Mr. Bowling's words that (I think) validated their points of view, and this has been overwhelmingly conservative. For whatever its worth, I also feel what Mr. Bowling is saying if we just take his words at face value and without the heavy weight of conservative context. And because I feel this with some intensity I stay as connected as I can to Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina, the Poor Peoples Campaign, and a few other churches and religious communities that I consider to be Spirt-filled.
We have two sets of problems, two arguments being made that miss one another. Mr. Tebbe is taking on white conservative Christians and not getting very far. Mr. Bowling has a vision of what church could be and memories of what he has seen church be. There are fears and anger on all sides here and these are only going to deepen unless the contradictions between them are resolved. I hope that there will be a willingness to engage in ways that move us forward.
Mr. Tebbe's white conservative Christians have no identity beyond the labels he gives them. We don't know if they are female or male, what their economic situations are, what generations they come from, if their politics derive from their religion or if something else is going on, what sections of the country they come from. Mr. Bowling is somewhat sentimental about the forms that religion often took in Appalachia and about a time and place that has been ground down by deindustrialization, oppression and corruption, and, most recently, deliberate efforts to create widespread substance abuse. Mr. Tebbe enters his discussion able to debate about racism and anti-racism. Mr. Bowling and most of his supporters seem unable or unwilling to do so. Mr. Tebbe seems to assume a political equality between believers, and he and the people he is arguing with all seem to accept a "politicized" religion, for lack of a better word, though they take opposing political sides. Mr. Bowling seems to believe in an equality of all believers before God that is based on our fallen natures, God's grace, and the work of the Holy Spirit. This is worked out for him, I believe, in a Christian community that is Spirit-led but that rests on anointed leaders and people who feel a personal connection to Jesus Christ.
Mr. Tebbe may be sanding with the wrong kind of planer when he focuses on whites. White people often come to these arguments feeling that we have something to protect, and white middle-class conservatives have a Republican Party and its power behind them for validation and refuge and as their means of interpreting and spinning their experiences in ways that reinforce their power and excuse their faults. There are the legacies of slavery, racism, and the defeat of Reconstruction, and the denials of civil and human rights to contend with here, and few churches have been innocent bystanders or in opposition when it comes to the United States' racialized oppression. Saying this does not imply hatred of the U.S.
But it is my observation that as we move from the arguments with the middle-class white Christian conservative to talking with white working-class Christians and then with white working-class Christians who are union members that something helpful begins to surface. These white workers who have the experiences of unionization and the hope that it offers feel a greater commonality or shared interest with people of color, there are common reference points and more to talk about. This is especially true where people have the experience s of working in groups in which workers depend on one another, like mine workers or nurses. The conversation is still not one between people with equal standing before the law or with the same de facto political rights, but it begins to bend in that direction. Motivations shift. The arc of justice bends because we have so many people who know how to weld in the working-class. Sections of the Black Church have remained a part of working-class struggles. The president of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists is a minister. There are few white churches, and no white leaders who I know of, who can meet the Black Church and faith-inspired Black working-class leaders where they stand. Until that changes we will all suffer greatly---and separately. The salvation of the working-class majority in the U.S. is in Black and Brown hands now.
Truth be told, this is less about right vs. left or progressive vs. reactionary. Over the past few weeks I've had some bitter encounters with others on the left, people who I considered comrades and a couple who I considered influences in my life. The depth of that bitterness has made my head spin. It feels as if we are drowning in arguments, whether its in our political or religious or social and family circles. There are too many paths open to nihilism. I find myself feeling as if I have to defend the concepts of society and social order and kindness and solidarity. Is it really raining despair and hatred? Is there any shelter in this storm?
Danny Bowling recently published the following on the Appalachian Americans Facebook page and I believe that it has some relevancy here because religion and the church have often served as shelters in a tough world.
Church used to be everyone come to the choir.
Now it’s a praise team.
People used to feel free to testify of the good things of God.
Now that's not in our plans.
People used to be faithful to church every service, Now they only come on Sunday morning.....
People would pack the Altar for prayer and cry out to God, Now the Altar is empty....
Preacher’s used to read, study and pray for the message.
Many today read the internet and study how to deliver someone else’s message.
Church music was part of the worship experience.
Now it’s so loud and has become the focal point.
Church used to pray for God to send them a pastor.
Now it’s a beauty contest. We know him and he would fit in nicely. Caring less if they even meet the biblical qualifications.
Church used to have the Holy Ghost leading the services.
Now we have emotions leading the church.
Let’s seek out the old paths and walk in them AGAIN !!!
CHURCH we need to be CHRIST centered and
following the leadership of the HOLY GHOST.
This reads as a poem to me, sad or angry or despairing or demanding. Many of the people who have read the post found a subtext in Mr. Bowling's words that (I think) validated their points of view, and this has been overwhelmingly conservative. For whatever its worth, I also feel what Mr. Bowling is saying if we just take his words at face value and without the heavy weight of conservative context. And because I feel this with some intensity I stay as connected as I can to Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina, the Poor Peoples Campaign, and a few other churches and religious communities that I consider to be Spirt-filled.
We have two sets of problems, two arguments being made that miss one another. Mr. Tebbe is taking on white conservative Christians and not getting very far. Mr. Bowling has a vision of what church could be and memories of what he has seen church be. There are fears and anger on all sides here and these are only going to deepen unless the contradictions between them are resolved. I hope that there will be a willingness to engage in ways that move us forward.
Mr. Tebbe's white conservative Christians have no identity beyond the labels he gives them. We don't know if they are female or male, what their economic situations are, what generations they come from, if their politics derive from their religion or if something else is going on, what sections of the country they come from. Mr. Bowling is somewhat sentimental about the forms that religion often took in Appalachia and about a time and place that has been ground down by deindustrialization, oppression and corruption, and, most recently, deliberate efforts to create widespread substance abuse. Mr. Tebbe enters his discussion able to debate about racism and anti-racism. Mr. Bowling and most of his supporters seem unable or unwilling to do so. Mr. Tebbe seems to assume a political equality between believers, and he and the people he is arguing with all seem to accept a "politicized" religion, for lack of a better word, though they take opposing political sides. Mr. Bowling seems to believe in an equality of all believers before God that is based on our fallen natures, God's grace, and the work of the Holy Spirit. This is worked out for him, I believe, in a Christian community that is Spirit-led but that rests on anointed leaders and people who feel a personal connection to Jesus Christ.
Mr. Tebbe may be sanding with the wrong kind of planer when he focuses on whites. White people often come to these arguments feeling that we have something to protect, and white middle-class conservatives have a Republican Party and its power behind them for validation and refuge and as their means of interpreting and spinning their experiences in ways that reinforce their power and excuse their faults. There are the legacies of slavery, racism, and the defeat of Reconstruction, and the denials of civil and human rights to contend with here, and few churches have been innocent bystanders or in opposition when it comes to the United States' racialized oppression. Saying this does not imply hatred of the U.S.
But it is my observation that as we move from the arguments with the middle-class white Christian conservative to talking with white working-class Christians and then with white working-class Christians who are union members that something helpful begins to surface. These white workers who have the experiences of unionization and the hope that it offers feel a greater commonality or shared interest with people of color, there are common reference points and more to talk about. This is especially true where people have the experience s of working in groups in which workers depend on one another, like mine workers or nurses. The conversation is still not one between people with equal standing before the law or with the same de facto political rights, but it begins to bend in that direction. Motivations shift. The arc of justice bends because we have so many people who know how to weld in the working-class. Sections of the Black Church have remained a part of working-class struggles. The president of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists is a minister. There are few white churches, and no white leaders who I know of, who can meet the Black Church and faith-inspired Black working-class leaders where they stand. Until that changes we will all suffer greatly---and separately. The salvation of the working-class majority in the U.S. is in Black and Brown hands now.
Working-class conservatism and working-class liberalism or radicalism have their own dynamics apart from what Mr. Tebbe is up against. This makes it possible for working-class people to shoehorn political and theological radicalism in the old institutions and social structures. Our challenge is not to explain theology or to talk about white privilege when people of color and working-class whites encounter one another, but to find the means of identifying long-term self-interests and common interests and take those to church and into politics. Leadership is with and from Christ and the Holy Spirit, but we will have our Moseses and our prophets. Intercommunal survival, building leadership and capacity, and finding the right structures are our biggest immediate and so far unresolved problems. Perhaps the structures we're looking for are hiding in plain sight.
The church that Mr. Bowling is hoping for could be the church that a multiracial and self-aware working-class lands in with some adjustments made. A Christ-centered and Holy Ghost-led church filled with people of color and working-class whites who have made the connections between their personal relationships with Jesus Christ and communal salvation and who have experienced victories in their communities that bring everyone up will be a deeply politicized church, so deeply politicized that the very definitions of "politics" and "religion" will change. We're all going to be surprised when the Holy Spirit touches us, but I have this inescapable feeling that when the Holy Spirit touches white churches they're going to be taken to task for segregation and all that has kept them white that was in their control to fix. The falls under the heading of "some adjustments," I guess.
Mr. Bowling is opening one door, Mr. Tebbe another. The differences that they point to are real. And in a country that is as close to civil war as ours is, these differences can be magnified and taken to dangerous ends. The solution is not with dialogue and a search for some kind of center or middle point, but with a radical embrace of a liberating and Christ- and Bible-based theology and church. Take Mr. Tebbe's hope and Mr. Bowling's best observations and build on them. If that project succeeds, I think that the white Christian conservatives who Mr. Tebbe is arguing with can be converted.
The church that Mr. Bowling is hoping for could be the church that a multiracial and self-aware working-class lands in with some adjustments made. A Christ-centered and Holy Ghost-led church filled with people of color and working-class whites who have made the connections between their personal relationships with Jesus Christ and communal salvation and who have experienced victories in their communities that bring everyone up will be a deeply politicized church, so deeply politicized that the very definitions of "politics" and "religion" will change. We're all going to be surprised when the Holy Spirit touches us, but I have this inescapable feeling that when the Holy Spirit touches white churches they're going to be taken to task for segregation and all that has kept them white that was in their control to fix. The falls under the heading of "some adjustments," I guess.
Mr. Bowling is opening one door, Mr. Tebbe another. The differences that they point to are real. And in a country that is as close to civil war as ours is, these differences can be magnified and taken to dangerous ends. The solution is not with dialogue and a search for some kind of center or middle point, but with a radical embrace of a liberating and Christ- and Bible-based theology and church. Take Mr. Tebbe's hope and Mr. Bowling's best observations and build on them. If that project succeeds, I think that the white Christian conservatives who Mr. Tebbe is arguing with can be converted.
Sunday, November 20, 2022
Preachers, Priests, Ministers, And Pastors---Part Two
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.
Sunday, November 6, 2022
One of the most important videos to watch before you vote
Bishop William J. Barber II preaching, "It's Time For The Values Of The Valley To Vote"
Thursday, October 27, 2022
Does everything that we do matter?
The other day I read a reflection by a Christian church that would probably describe themselves as Preterist. Preterism is a major issue in my world just now. I won't take the space here to try to explain it or argue it one way or the other. but the reflection troubled me because it made the point that when Christians study the Hebrew Bible (The "Old Testament" or "Old Covenant") something is lost and taken from our study of the Christian Bible (The "New Testament" or "New Covenant"). This view derives from a "spiritualized" understanding of both texts. For my part, I find the Hebrew Bible important both for how it stands on its own and how it relates to other texts, and for the many calls to social justice within it. If we "spiritualize" the entire text and believe that God's Kingdom will be spiritual then we lose the social justice inherent and the role of historical development in faith that is carried in the text, I think. There is plenty of time for mysticism, and any good Jewish commentary will give you an introduction to that, but we're going to miss the mark by only living with the spiritual and mystical in any text.
This reading of the Torah and the reflection that goes with it by Rabbi Stacy Rigler is not intended to take up the matters that I'm raising, nor should they, but we will all be in a better place if we try to approach texts through the eyes of the people who crafted them long before we found them. The ReformJudaism.org is one of many websites that helps with this, although it also carries its own dear weight and messages. Rabbi Rigler writes:
This reading of the Torah and the reflection that goes with it by Rabbi Stacy Rigler is not intended to take up the matters that I'm raising, nor should they, but we will all be in a better place if we try to approach texts through the eyes of the people who crafted them long before we found them. The ReformJudaism.org is one of many websites that helps with this, although it also carries its own dear weight and messages. Rabbi Rigler writes:
The only measurement that we ought to take when trying to decide if our actions can help repair the world is to ask - will this bring me closer to another living being? This was the assurance that God gave to Noah, that during hopelessness, chaos, and distribution he would not be alone on the ark. Noah would not be there just with his family, Noah would be there with animals, each of whom contain the spirit of life. Each of us has the opportunity to seek out encounters that have the potential to remind us of this spirit, the chance to engage in tikkun olam.
The Rev. Shyrl Hinnant-Uzzell did an excellent sermon on Nehemiah last Sunday that better expresses my thoughts on how we should engage with the Hebrew Bible. That sermon comes from Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, NC and represents the kind of advanced theology being done in the Black Church. If you're serious about Bible study, or if you're trying to figure out how social justice and our daily lives fit into understanding the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible right now, please give Rev. Uzzell your attention.
The question that is at the heart of everything here is whether everything we do matters or not.
The Rev. Shyrl Hinnant-Uzzell did an excellent sermon on Nehemiah last Sunday that better expresses my thoughts on how we should engage with the Hebrew Bible. That sermon comes from Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, NC and represents the kind of advanced theology being done in the Black Church. If you're serious about Bible study, or if you're trying to figure out how social justice and our daily lives fit into understanding the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible right now, please give Rev. Uzzell your attention.
The question that is at the heart of everything here is whether everything we do matters or not.
Tuesday, August 30, 2022
"If We Ever Needed to Vote..." | A National Sermon by Bishop William J. Barber, II
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.
Monday, August 22, 2022
Bishop Barber: "Don't Forget Whose You Are And Where You Come From"
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.
Sunday, August 7, 2022
Sunday, July 24, 2022
Rev. Shyrl Uzzell preaching “Lost Can't Be The Last Word?” Luke 15:1-10
I try to say it every week: you can watch the entire
service from Greenleaf or you can skip ahead to the hymns or to the sermons,
but please give a look and a listen. Greenleaf is an exceptional church, and
the messages are inspiring and will give most people a spring in their step and
some good thoughts in their hearts and heads. This is the church most people need.
There are Black and women dimensions to the preaching and to the work being
done at Greenleaf that we don't see in many churches. People get affirmed here,
but our lives get examined as well---no shaming, but there is struggle and victory.
The Bible stories that we think that we know are brought into present time and
interpreted in ways that will surprise and enlighten and strengthen.
Thursday, July 21, 2022
Rev. Hanna R. Broome preaching a Special Sermon at Greenleaf Christian Church
Hardly a week goes by that we don't post something from Greenleaf Christian Church or from Bishop Barber, the Bishop and pastor at Greenleaf. I don't know how many people here pay attention to these posts, but I hope that many of you do. You can catch the hymns and praise and most of the service at Greenleaf or you can skip ahead to the sermons. I have never heard a sermon at Greenleaf that I didn't get much out of. Greenleaf is the kind of church that I'm looking for. I hope that someone reading this feels the same as I do. Reverend Broome gets it done this week. She hits it hard over and over again. I think that we badly need her voice and her testimony right now.
Sunday, July 10, 2022
Bishop Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II preaching, “Keep Going to Class, Keep Getting in The Boat, You Will Get It After While” Mark 4
Click on this and you will get there. It's as outstanding as always.
Sunday, June 26, 2022
Bishop Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II preaching, "Just When You Need Him Most..."
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.
Sunday, June 12, 2022
Hearing A Preached Word When You Go To Church
Listen to Bishop Barber, Rep. Ro Khanna, and the inspired congregation at Greenleaf Christian Church give you what you can't get in many other places. The clip says that you have to go to YouTube, but it will play if you click on it:
Listen to Brenda Ellis singing "We Shall Not Be Moved":
Sunday, May 22, 2022
Guest Speaker Dr. Glenda Glover with a Special Message and Join The Poor People's Campaign in D.C. on June 18
Just click on the link and you will get the recording.
Monday, May 16, 2022
Greenleaf Christian Church: Guest Pastor Rev. Dr. Threatt preaching "Who is On Your Ballot?" (Acts 15:19-41)
Greenleaf Christian Church does it right again and again. You can catch moving hymns and praying and see the life of a congregation that loves God, but if you're tuning in for inspired preaching, communion, soul and a sermon then hit it at around 59:00.
This link is NOT dead---click on it and it will work.
Tuesday, May 10, 2022
Our Obligation to the “Least of These”---A Necessary Word From Bishop William Barber
Dear Movement Family,
We live in the richest nation to ever exist since God created the earth, yet many in power use a false Christian narrative to blame poor people and abdicate responsibility for economic justice. But we know that their talk about scarcity and their justifications for serving rich corporations over poor communities are lies. The continuous feeding of the war economy, proliferation of weapons, and notions of peace through military strength give far too many a false sense of security, no matter what curious and twisted attempt at moral justification is tried. Too many politicians raise no question when it comes to funding war, tax cuts for greedy corporate interests, and pornographic sums of money to subvert democracy while at the same time using every excuse to block spending that would lift people out of poverty. This is one of the greatest moral contradictions of our time, and we must be clear that it threatens democracy and civilization itself.
In the Bible, Matthew’s Gospel tells us plain as day in Chapter 25 that a true nation under God must lead by caring for the vulnerable and welcoming strangers. “All the nations will be gathered before [God],” Matthew says, and God will “separate the people from one another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.” Who are the least of these today, and what are the public policies that must change to care for them?
In a nation plagued by hidden poverty, what makes us most vulnerable is the basic moral contradiction of poverty, which we have tried to ignore for the past 40 years. 140 million Americans– 43% of adults and 52% of children–are poor and low-wealth, suffering in plain sight. As pandemic relief programs like stimulus checks, expanded unemployment insurance, and expanded CTC payments have expired, we can expect these numbers to rise. In 2021, the Urban Institute estimated that without these programs, these numbers would have gone up to well over 150 million - nearly 50% of all adults. Yet we have watched billionaires make nearly $2 trillion during that same time.
As long as America ignores these realities and refuses to fully address them, we all live in an impoverished democracy. This requires a warning–not a one-day event, but a demonstration and declaration that the time to act is now. Why?
Because not ignoring the least of these today requires that we address the interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, the denial of health care, militarism and the war economy, and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism. It is time to heal the wounds of our society and declare a moral revival across the land.
Because our politics are trapped by the lies of scarcity. These politics turn us against each other and blame the poor for their poverty, even though we live in a time of abundance. We have the resources to meet the needs of everybody! The only thing our politicians lack is the moral conscience to lift the least of these and the political will to make it so.
Because for far too long poor people, people of color, Indigenous nations, immigrant families, women, children, the disabled, and LGBTQ communities have been under attack, pitted against each other and blamed for society’s problems. Please take 5 minutes today to consider the pain of poverty in America.
Because we must put a face and voice on the shameful conditions confronting this nation and for the least of these we must speak and nonviolently force the nation to hear the truth and to see the faces.
We must have a moral meeting in the public square that takes the social blinders off and puts a face on the realities that can and must be changed. We must become a nation that fulfills our moral obligation to care for the least of these. We must break through the lies that have hidden poverty in America. Poor and low-income people and low wage workers are determined to stand together on Pennsylvania Avenue, Saturday June 18th, gathering at 930am, to make the nation see and hear their pain. Together, we will lift a Third Reconstruction moral agenda for the healing of the nation that can end poverty and low wealth from the bottom up. We need everyone who can to stand together and join us.
In a sermon I once preached on Matthew 25, I said to the Christians sitting in the sanctuary:
So in this season we must say, “America, listen! Hear yourself in the voices of the least of these. Don’t turn away. Recognize that the hope of the nation is in how we treat the least of these.” Remember Rabbi Heschel. Let me paraphrase what he once said: “We as a nation forfeit the right to even worship God until we do right by the least of this nation.”
Brothers and Sisters, we won’t be silent or unheard anymore. In this season we are saying, “If you have been rejected, it’s time on moral authority to challenge policies that create social murder, and we must do it not as Democrats or Republicans but as human beings and moral agents.
It’s time to work together to save the soul of this democracy and the world. Together, we must show the nation that healing is in the very people who’ve been rejected leading a moral revival.
One scripture in the Bible says,
“God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power, and He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with Him.”--Acts 10:38
Those of us who believe in this Jesus have to help the poor and looked over, the left out and hurting, the harmed and broken, to get up! Looked over get up! This is God’s way. No wonder the hymn writer said:
If I can help somebody, as I pass along,
If I can cheer somebody, with a word or song,
If I can show somebody, how they're traveling wrong,
Then my living shall not be in vain.
If I can do my duty, as a good man ought,
If I can bring back beauty, to a world up wrought,
If I can spread love's message, as the Master taught,
Then my living shall not be in vain.
My living shall not be in vain,
Then my living shall not be in vain
If I can help somebody, as I pass along,
Then my living shall not be in vain.
Forward together,
William J. Barber, II
PS- In my update last week, I noted the moral contradiction of a Congress that can find money for more weapons to fight Russians in Ukraine but will still not invest in poor and low-income people here at home. Some people have misconstrued my words as an endorsement of continued military escalation in Ukraine. I want to be clear: nothing could be further from the truth. We need to do everything possible to get negotiated peace, not the death of more people. We also have to do even more on the front end, before war ever starts. All this death, killing one another, and blowing up cities will lead the human race to its own demise.
I’ve stood for 30 years with organizations that challenge the militarism of our war economy. I have had this position as a pastor in a military town, and members of my church who serve in the military have thanked me for my deep commitment to challenging all this war and the influence of the war economy in our world. The Poor People’s Campaign names the war economy as one of the interlocking injustices we must confront in order to have a Third Reconstruction. We must be determined to continue to work together toward a negotiation of peace in Ukraine and an end to policy violence here at home. Every day I pray and sing this hymn, and I quoted it to the nation when I was asked to deliver the inaugural sermon:
God of grace and God of glory,
On Thy people pour Thy power.
Crown Thine ancient church’s story,
Bring her bud to glorious flower.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
For the facing of this hour,
For the facing of this hour.
Lo! the hosts of evil ’round us,
Scorn Thy Christ, assail His ways.
From the fears that long have bound us,
Free our hearts to faith and praise.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
For the living of these days,
For the living of these days.
Cure Thy children’s warring madness,
Bend our pride to Thy control.
Shame our wanton selfish gladness,
Rich in things and poor in soul.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
Lest we miss Thy kingdom’s goal,
Lest we miss Thy kingdom’s goal.
Set our feet on lofty places,
Gird our lives that they may be,
Armored with all Christ-like graces,
In the fight to set men free.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
That we fail not man nor Thee,
That we fail not man nor Thee.
Save us from weak resignation,
To the evils we deplore.
Let the search for Thy salvation,
Be our glory evermore.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
Serving Thee whom we adore,
Serving Thee whom we adore.
Forward together, not one step back!
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II
President and Senior Lecturer
Repairers of the Breach
“The way to heal the soul of the nation is to pass policies that heal the body of the nation. It’s the just thing to do. That’s how we as a nation can together move forward.”
-Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II
We live in the richest nation to ever exist since God created the earth, yet many in power use a false Christian narrative to blame poor people and abdicate responsibility for economic justice. But we know that their talk about scarcity and their justifications for serving rich corporations over poor communities are lies. The continuous feeding of the war economy, proliferation of weapons, and notions of peace through military strength give far too many a false sense of security, no matter what curious and twisted attempt at moral justification is tried. Too many politicians raise no question when it comes to funding war, tax cuts for greedy corporate interests, and pornographic sums of money to subvert democracy while at the same time using every excuse to block spending that would lift people out of poverty. This is one of the greatest moral contradictions of our time, and we must be clear that it threatens democracy and civilization itself.
In the Bible, Matthew’s Gospel tells us plain as day in Chapter 25 that a true nation under God must lead by caring for the vulnerable and welcoming strangers. “All the nations will be gathered before [God],” Matthew says, and God will “separate the people from one another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.” Who are the least of these today, and what are the public policies that must change to care for them?
In a nation plagued by hidden poverty, what makes us most vulnerable is the basic moral contradiction of poverty, which we have tried to ignore for the past 40 years. 140 million Americans– 43% of adults and 52% of children–are poor and low-wealth, suffering in plain sight. As pandemic relief programs like stimulus checks, expanded unemployment insurance, and expanded CTC payments have expired, we can expect these numbers to rise. In 2021, the Urban Institute estimated that without these programs, these numbers would have gone up to well over 150 million - nearly 50% of all adults. Yet we have watched billionaires make nearly $2 trillion during that same time.
As long as America ignores these realities and refuses to fully address them, we all live in an impoverished democracy. This requires a warning–not a one-day event, but a demonstration and declaration that the time to act is now. Why?
Because not ignoring the least of these today requires that we address the interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, the denial of health care, militarism and the war economy, and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism. It is time to heal the wounds of our society and declare a moral revival across the land.
Because our politics are trapped by the lies of scarcity. These politics turn us against each other and blame the poor for their poverty, even though we live in a time of abundance. We have the resources to meet the needs of everybody! The only thing our politicians lack is the moral conscience to lift the least of these and the political will to make it so.
Because for far too long poor people, people of color, Indigenous nations, immigrant families, women, children, the disabled, and LGBTQ communities have been under attack, pitted against each other and blamed for society’s problems. Please take 5 minutes today to consider the pain of poverty in America.
Because we must put a face and voice on the shameful conditions confronting this nation and for the least of these we must speak and nonviolently force the nation to hear the truth and to see the faces.
We must have a moral meeting in the public square that takes the social blinders off and puts a face on the realities that can and must be changed. We must become a nation that fulfills our moral obligation to care for the least of these. We must break through the lies that have hidden poverty in America. Poor and low-income people and low wage workers are determined to stand together on Pennsylvania Avenue, Saturday June 18th, gathering at 930am, to make the nation see and hear their pain. Together, we will lift a Third Reconstruction moral agenda for the healing of the nation that can end poverty and low wealth from the bottom up. We need everyone who can to stand together and join us.
In a sermon I once preached on Matthew 25, I said to the Christians sitting in the sanctuary:
So in this season we must say, “America, listen! Hear yourself in the voices of the least of these. Don’t turn away. Recognize that the hope of the nation is in how we treat the least of these.” Remember Rabbi Heschel. Let me paraphrase what he once said: “We as a nation forfeit the right to even worship God until we do right by the least of this nation.”
Brothers and Sisters, we won’t be silent or unheard anymore. In this season we are saying, “If you have been rejected, it’s time on moral authority to challenge policies that create social murder, and we must do it not as Democrats or Republicans but as human beings and moral agents.
It’s time to work together to save the soul of this democracy and the world. Together, we must show the nation that healing is in the very people who’ve been rejected leading a moral revival.
One scripture in the Bible says,
“God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power, and He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with Him.”--Acts 10:38
Those of us who believe in this Jesus have to help the poor and looked over, the left out and hurting, the harmed and broken, to get up! Looked over get up! This is God’s way. No wonder the hymn writer said:
If I can help somebody, as I pass along,
If I can cheer somebody, with a word or song,
If I can show somebody, how they're traveling wrong,
Then my living shall not be in vain.
If I can do my duty, as a good man ought,
If I can bring back beauty, to a world up wrought,
If I can spread love's message, as the Master taught,
Then my living shall not be in vain.
My living shall not be in vain,
Then my living shall not be in vain
If I can help somebody, as I pass along,
Then my living shall not be in vain.
Forward together,
William J. Barber, II
PS- In my update last week, I noted the moral contradiction of a Congress that can find money for more weapons to fight Russians in Ukraine but will still not invest in poor and low-income people here at home. Some people have misconstrued my words as an endorsement of continued military escalation in Ukraine. I want to be clear: nothing could be further from the truth. We need to do everything possible to get negotiated peace, not the death of more people. We also have to do even more on the front end, before war ever starts. All this death, killing one another, and blowing up cities will lead the human race to its own demise.
I’ve stood for 30 years with organizations that challenge the militarism of our war economy. I have had this position as a pastor in a military town, and members of my church who serve in the military have thanked me for my deep commitment to challenging all this war and the influence of the war economy in our world. The Poor People’s Campaign names the war economy as one of the interlocking injustices we must confront in order to have a Third Reconstruction. We must be determined to continue to work together toward a negotiation of peace in Ukraine and an end to policy violence here at home. Every day I pray and sing this hymn, and I quoted it to the nation when I was asked to deliver the inaugural sermon:
God of grace and God of glory,
On Thy people pour Thy power.
Crown Thine ancient church’s story,
Bring her bud to glorious flower.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
For the facing of this hour,
For the facing of this hour.
Lo! the hosts of evil ’round us,
Scorn Thy Christ, assail His ways.
From the fears that long have bound us,
Free our hearts to faith and praise.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
For the living of these days,
For the living of these days.
Cure Thy children’s warring madness,
Bend our pride to Thy control.
Shame our wanton selfish gladness,
Rich in things and poor in soul.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
Lest we miss Thy kingdom’s goal,
Lest we miss Thy kingdom’s goal.
Set our feet on lofty places,
Gird our lives that they may be,
Armored with all Christ-like graces,
In the fight to set men free.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
That we fail not man nor Thee,
That we fail not man nor Thee.
Save us from weak resignation,
To the evils we deplore.
Let the search for Thy salvation,
Be our glory evermore.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
Serving Thee whom we adore,
Serving Thee whom we adore.
Forward together, not one step back!
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II
President and Senior Lecturer
Repairers of the Breach
“The way to heal the soul of the nation is to pass policies that heal the body of the nation. It’s the just thing to do. That’s how we as a nation can together move forward.”
-Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II
Sunday, April 24, 2022
Tuesday, April 12, 2022
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