Let Justice Roll Down: Evangelicals & Civil Rights

Retro cover. Forever sassy.

John Perkins’ autobiography is a glimpse into the black struggle for equality, opportunity and justice against the formidable social structures of oppression.  Set against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, it’s also the story of a black Christian caught between two churches polarized by color, and his devotion to the whole Gospel revolutionizing both.  Moreover, it is an account of the Gospel disarming the powers and authorities, making a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross (Col. 2:15).

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Soon after his conversion, the rumblings of conviction surfaced.  Perkins knew that his own plans for a “good” Christian life were not God’s good plan for his Christian life.  His life was no longer his own and God quickly issued a decree: Return to Mississippi with the whole Gospel for your people, those you know are “zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge” (Rom. 10:1-2).

So, John Perkins moved his family back to a very familiar place of segregation, hollowed out by injustice and blighted by oppression.  His goal was to use the Bible to teach to a church devoid of knowledge of God that same truth that captured his heart.  First, Perkins founded Bible classes at several local black high schools and a junior college, none of which had ever been exposed to the Scriptures.  In conjunction with this, he traveled around the county using a tent as a meeting place where the Bible could be expounded.  Throughout all of these endeavors, Perkins ministered to the problems of those who sat under his teaching.  After all, he and his family shared their same economic and political woes.

Perkins also knew that in order for the Gospel to take root in this community, it would have to become a visible truth.  The collection of believers with Bible knowledge would need to become a church, the body of Christ; a witness of Jesus Lordship fleshed out in social action.  This led to the organization of Voice of Calvary Bible Institute (VOC) and the creation of community development initiatives, such as: food and housing co-ops, voter registration, free healthcare, fair lending, and an effort to boost the quality of education.

Procuring the funds from both white and black churches in California to finance these projects proved to be a laborious effort.  Perkins laments the absence of the evangelicals during the civil rights movement:

“How sad that so few individuals equally committed to Jesus Christ ever became a part of [the civil rights] movement.  For what all that political activity needed–and lacked– was spiritual input.  Even now, I do not understand why so many evangelicals find a sense of commitment to civil rights and Jesus Christ an “either-or” proposition.

One of the greatest tragedies of the civil rights movement is that evangelicals surrendered their leadership in the movement by default to those with either a bankrupt theology or no theology at all, simply because the vast majority of Bible-believing Christians ignored a great and crucial opportunity in history for a genuine ethical action.  The evangelical church–whose basic theology is the same as mine–had not gone on to preach the whole gospel.”

This was the evangelical response to what was perceived to be a liberal movement.  Perkins’ interaction with black evangelicals reluctant to join the civil rights movement lays bear the true reason for evangelical precaution:  this was just a pretext to avoid personal involvement, to escape responsibility.  Christians invented this perception as an excuse for our inaction, to escape the gospel’s call to answer the question: What should the Church do?  What should I do? The stark reality of evil necessitated that Christians do more than sigh, sympathize, vote, or give money.  What was needed then–and is still needed today–is a life oriented around the self-donation of the cross.

Evangelicals continue to employ this tactic to elude the Lordship of Jesus Christ, to keep their lives rather than loose it for the sake of the gospel (Mark 8:35).  Are there things today that you and I, in a surreptitious attempt to maintain security and control, label as “liberal” to evade the truth that Jesus is Savior and Lord?  For me, it is an ongoing battle to surrender entitlement, no longer hiding behind theological quandary, to follow Jesus into the radical ordinariness of nitty-gritty, everyday living of loving my neighbor.

And to do this, maybe we must emulate God’s love  for us , who as Eugene Peterson puts it,  “became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood” (John 1:14).

At the very least I cannot shirk John Perkins’ pointed inquisition:

“Well, what are you doing to correct these bad things with your ‘good’ theology?”

Death for Life

Dionysius!

The doctrine of substitutionary atonement can often be an abstraction.  But the idea that Jesus intentionally and willingly took the sinner’s place of judgment on the cross is profound and quite practical.  Its not merely theoretical figment, but a theological reflection on the significance of a historical event.  In Jesus on the cross, we see the supreme act of God’s love to reconcile to himself those who are alienated enemies.  In Jesus’ self-donation, we are compelled to love God in return; we have the intellectual and the spiritual resources necessary to trust that God is good.  Furthermore, Jesus’ sacrifice is also the impetus for our loving action toward our neighbor.

The early church took to heart the conviction that Jesus’ suffered death in the sinner’s place so that he might live.  It was the very soil of out which grew the Christians response to the great epidemic that decimated Rome (251-270 A.D).  Dionysius, the bishop of Alexandria wrote this of the pagans (those who observed Roman polytheism):

“At the first onset of the disease, they pushed the sufferers away and fled from their dearest, throwing them into the roads before they were dead and treated uburied corpses as dirty, hoping thereby to avert the spread and contagion of the fatal disease.”

In contrast, Dionysius’ Easter letter is a tribute to the heroic nursing efforts of the local Christians, many of whom lost their lives while caring for others:

“Most of our Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another.  Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ, and with them departed this life serenely happy; for they were infected by others with the disease, drawing on themselves the sickness of their neighbors and cheerfully accepting their pains. Many, in nursing and curing others, transferred their death to themselves and died in their stead.“

Christ, in curing us, transferred our death to himself and died in our stead so that we might live.  That reality of God’s gracious love embedded itself so deeply in the hearts of Christians that they were willing to die for strangers–just as Christ died for them.  The cross is the vista by which God’s love confronts us, slowly reconfiguring the very structure of our hearts and minds, our worship and action.

[Quotes from "The Rise of Christianity" by Rodney Stark]

A Reflection on the Empty Tomb: Jesus and his Disciples

To say that Jesus suffered is an understatement.  He crumpled on the cross under the weight of cosmic affliction: the apocalypse of divine judgment and the loss of his most intimate love, God.  Yet on Resurrection Sunday, I was struck by the hardship Jesus endured before he was pinned up on Calvary.  Betrayal bereaved Jesus of his disciples and the friendship of those with whom he shared life.

We find a robust picture of Jesus’ lonesome journey to the cross even in Mark’s economical account of the Gospel story.  In Gethsemane, Jesus’ tribulation is inaugurated:

“he began to be deeply distressed and troubled.  ‘My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death!’”

The foretaste of Golgotha wrenched Jesus’ soul, but his closest companions lay asleep while he suffered in solitude.  Three times his dreaming disciples failed to engage with his agony.  Immediately, Jesus was double-crossed for a paltry sum of money by another in his trusted inner circle, Judas, who sealed his arrest with a kiss.

Next, his sleepy friends forsook with the sword all that Jesus had taught them.  The students had abandoned the teacher’s promise that his kingdom would come by way of the cross.   Then in an act of spontaneous determination, his followers fled.  From the prayer vigil that never was to the vigilante resistance that should have never been, desertion marked Jesus’ last hours with his disciples.

Jesus’ captors subjected him to an unjust trial where he was condemned to death by murderous lies.  Peter faced his own trial, but by his murderous lies, he disowned Jesus and exonerated himself.  Jesus’ sentence brought beatings, whippings and humiliation.  He was mocked, tortured and scorned.  He did all of this alone.  It was a stranger, not a friend, that helped Jesus carry his cross to Golgotha; neither were his disciples involved in the burial process.  Jesus cried out alone, and alone he died.

Yet, nothing deterred Jesus’ love for his disciples; betrayal could not squelch his compassion for his friends.  At the tomb, Jesus left an angel with a message for the women who found the empty tomb:

“But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee.  There you will see him just as he promised.”

Jesus message is concerned with one objective:  to make it crystal clear that his chosen disciples are still his chosen–especially Peter.  Jesus wants to teach his disciples a lesson.  He loves them so much that he cares about their feelings of  insecurity, failure, and shame.  In the angel’s message, we see the way Jesus relates to those who have failed him; we see Jesus intentionally protecting his friends from public scrutiny and taking initiative to quell any doubts that his friends might have about where they stand with him.

On the cross, Jesus forgave his enemies, but he also forgave his friends who treated him like an enemy.  Jesus’ absolution is unlike ours.  We forgive in a polite, legal, and customary fashion as we try mightily to restrain disdain.  Jesus’ pardon is generously heartfelt, bursting with compassion and sympathy.  He gushes joy and friendliness with a promiscuity that is uncomfortable for a betrayer to accept.  Jesus goes out of his way to not only forgive, but to affirm the betrayer’s unique place as God’s beloved.  He loves tragically disloyal followers with perfect fidelity.

If while we were his enemies, Christ died for us to bring us to God, how can we not also love our enemies at the cost of our own lives?  And if while we were still his betrayers, Jesus took special care to make it known that we are really forgiven and loved, then how can we not also reinstate our betrayers with that same earnest care.  After all, if Christ no longer counts their sin against them, how can we?

The Political Dilemma of Faith

Hauerwas asks, "What do I need, or what do we need, to be a community of friends that can not only tell one another the truth, but want to be told the truth?"

This appears to me to be one of the tenets of  “Hauerwasian” thought:

“The call to be part of the gospel is a joyful call to be adopted by an alien people, to join a countercultural phenomenon, a new polis called church…The challenge of Jesus is the political dilemma of how to be faithful to a strange community, which is shaped by a story of how God is with us.” Resident Aliens, Pg. 30

Our living is dictated by the way in which we frame the problem of faith.  What part of me is being confronted by faith?  God and his Gospel is demanding something of me, but what?

The locus of faith does not reside in right belief; it is not an intellectual problem, but a problem of trust.  The compulsion of the Gospel is not to believe a worldview or adopt a series of propositions, but a summon to entrust my whole self to a good God, a merciful Savior.  The challenge is not to believe the right thing, but to trust in the right person.  Let me be clear, it is precisely because faith it is not an issue of “what”, but a matter of “whom”, that it is imperative what we believe.

Hauerwas contends that while Christianity is not a system of belief, unbelief (atheism) is a problem.  He defines the problem not as intellectual unbelief, but socio-political unbelief.  In other words, the Christian faith is a matter of right living not right thinking. Therefore, atheism cannot be defined in the terms of wrong thinking; it must be defined as wrong living. The problem is not intellectual, but political. The Christian must act on the presupposition that he is a part of God’s people and his plan for history.

The Gospel, as a result, is an invitation to entrust my whole life to God.  Consequently, I now also trust that being adopted into his family (the Church) signifies a new allegiance and with it, a new dilemma: to be faithful to the promise that God is with us.  The moment I ask, “What does it look like to live with a trust that God is with his people in a special way?” faith becomes a sociopolitical predicament.   How do I arrange my life in fidelity to a God and his community to reflect who he is and that I believe in him?  Hauerwas, of course, suggests that to do this is to embrace the oddity of being a Christian.

The Sermon on the Mount is a call for the church to be faithful to who God is and to believe that he is with his people in a way that means something.  The Christian life should be noticeably odd if a person’s values are prioritized around the those Jesus marked in the beatitudes: “blessed are the poor, those who hunger, those who weep, those who are persecuted”.  Certainly, the command to “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you” and to “turn the other cheek” is a sociopolitical challenge.  Jesus says that the world loves those who love them, and the world worries about what they will eat, drink and wear; but this is not true of those who seek the kingdom first.  To seek the kingdom first requires odd living in the eyes of a society that believes each person has the right to make the most of his life.

I Pledge Allegiance?

Hauerwas' theology makes for an uncomfortable read.

Stanley Hauerwas’ classic work, “Resident Aliens,” explores the implications of the church as polis. That is, those who are called out by God are to embody a social alternative that the world cannot on its own terms know. What does it mean for the Christian to be a stranger, to live in community with other believers as an alien colony amidst society?

Is society fundamentally opposed to the church? In particular, is the American axiom, “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” antithetical to the Cross of Jesus Christ? Democracy is rooted in the belief of unalienable rights. Our society exists to serve the individual’s needs, wants and desires. Our supreme value is freedom: each person as the individual right to choose and to pursue whatever is wanted as long as she does not impede upon that same right in another. Consider the prophetic assessment of Hauerwas:

“The primary entity of democracy is the individual, the individual for whom society exists mainly to assist assertions of individuality. Society is formed to supply our needs, no matter the content of those needs…It has thus become our unquestioned assumption that every person has the “right” to develop his or her own potential to the greatest extent, limited only by the parallel rights of others.”

The primary entity of the Church is Jesus Christ, for whom the Church exists to mirror the very nature of God as revealed through Jesus Christ. The church was formed in and through an all encompassing act of self-donation: the cross.  And on the cross, Jesus forfeited his agenda, his rights, his health, his future, and even his own blood.  If we are a to be a witness, a carrier of our Savior’s costly cross, maybe Jesus’ exhortation to “deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34-38) is more than a privatized “spiritual” allegiance.  Perhaps this pledge constitutes a person’s whole life in such a way that he or she becomes very peculiar in society that values “freedom” above all else.

After all, the followers of Jesus relinquish EVERY personal right, and he calls them “blessed” (Matt. 5:3-10).

What consonance is there, then, between the life of the Christian and the rhythms of a society that presumes to be human is to have unalienable rights?

Authentically Christian Community

Founded in 1791, the initials UVM stand for the Latin words Universitas Viridis Montis, or University of the Green Mountains.

The following is an essay I submitted for entrance to Duke Divinity School:

In Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s delineation of Christian fellowship brought a theological framework to bear on two of my very different experiences in Christian community.  At a conservative Baptist college, I became disenchanted with Christian community.  The contemporary church culture seemed to value entertainment, proper intellectual assent, and growing numbers over and against the simple goal to love one another.  After graduation, I began work with the Navigators Campus Ministry at the University of Vermont (UVM).  There I encountered a different kind of community centered on loving one another; the challenge of fostering an authentically Christian community confronted my own jaded assumptions of faith and spiritual formation in community.

Our goal at UVM was to build healthy and spiritually mature people, not to build a campus ministry.  As our ministry team desired to nurture Christian community, Dietrich Bonhoeffer provided an articulate theology to guide us.  He states that the greatest threat to Christian fellowship is a visionary ideal for community because this “wish dream” demands that members meet its criteria.  This challenged us to rethink our interactions with those in the community whose relentless need and those whose regular disinterest burdened the ministry.  Did an ideal for spiritual formation motivate my decision to admonish a student who showed little change over the semester?  Am I allowing a student to exist as a completely free person, as God made them to be or am I fashioning them in the image that seems good to me?  Admitting that I might not know what is best for a person freed me to better love students.  It enabled me to release students from the pressures of performance and group expectation; it freed students to follow Jesus and develop into the Christian God created him/her to be.

The resulting community valued spiritual formation and in Bonhoeffer’s words worked to:  “meet one another as bringers of the message of salvation.”  In a culture of authenticity and collaboration, intentional relationships replaced gimmicky events and entertaining group meetings.  Instead of creating a movement, we engendered an environment of grace.  We experienced a community of trust where the message of salvation, the reality of Jesus, continually liberated us from self-justification and self-centeredness and spurred us on to love another in the manner of Christ.  In short, I want to be an experience of Christ for others in the same way these loving relationships rendered an experience of Christ for me.

Reflections of Self: Solidarity with the Homeless

The "Jesus Bus" is an inspiring sight to those in the margins of Atlanta.

“All of us have become like one who is unclean,
and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags;
we all shrivel up like a leaf,
and like the wind our sins sweep us away.”

Isaiah 64:6

The bus, brimming with body odor and plastic bags containing the various possessions of the homeless, lurched to a stop in front of a shelter. An old, ugly homeless woman sat sprawled out on a curb. Her dirty, straggly hair was matted in every direction. Her weathered face, leathery and wrinkled produced visible creases through the caked layers of makeup. Toothless, she gummed down a sloppy pile of baked beans from a styrofoam plate.
An old, ratty homeless man who sat behind me noticed the woman too. He croaked deeply dehumanizing sexual remarks. My mind processed his crude comments several times before their meaning stung my senses. His sinister language candidly disclosed his evil mind. He spoke with a sincerity that broke my heart.

And yet, are we to believe this man different from the rest of humanity? Am I to think of myself as one with a superior heart? I live within a world that packages evil with glamour and allure so that it is polished and palatable.

The bus, cloistered with leather briefcases and Blackberries, hisses to a stop in front of Star Bucks. A young, beautiful woman sits elegantly on a park bench. Her skirt hugs her upper thighs, as her silky legs shimmer in the sun’s light. She sips her venti-no-water-soy chai. Make-up accentuates her natural beauty and a plunging neck-line gently reveals her vitality.

A well-groomed twenty-something man dressed in business casual glances up from his Forbes magazine. He smiles and submits a tasteful innuendo to inform his colleague that he is fond of her beauty. The colleague agrees and the two discuss the hope that there will be several women at the bar tonight that look as sexually desirable as the Star Bucks chick.

Evil looks good. Dehumanization is sunny.

Behind the well-manicured edifice, a simple evil turns the cogs of society’s depravity. We play by its rules to satisfy our devouring desires. We masquerade in fine regalia and speak with lofty speech in order to consume pleasure and satisfaction from those we can exploit; we work to accumulate superiority and power over those we can rule. These are the rules by which the homeless man lives. These are the rules by which the middle class man lives.

Without society’s acknowledgment, the homeless are free from any social agents that might dictate behavior. The homeless man is neither seen by society nor can he see any hope in society. So, he lives with unbridled desire; speaking and acting in raw carnality. In light of neglect, he no longer abides in any form of a social contract. Those who live without a social identity, or at the very least a promise of social identity, know the true nature of a self: ugly and evil.

I see in myself the same destructive carnality that reigns over the homeless. He and I are no different, but I live within an environment that affords option and potential. I have options for a better sex partner. My own future potential deters me from indulging in any or every woman that would permit me to do so. I care what others think of me. It is my hope for something better that holds back self-destructive desires. I understand delayed-gratification. In other words, I know how to patiently manipulate under the operation of social constraints to gratify desire.

My carnality is wild, but my behavior is curbed by fear and pride. Everyone functions under these two powers. We cannot be found out; we must be accepted and so we are subject to the fear of rejection from those whom we desperately long for praise. We also decide what groups of those in society we will not be like. We are culturally imperialistic by default. We find those who we can measure to be inferior to us and then live to maintain our superiority. Most times we measure our superiority by things we can do well and by our own individuality. Such as: our music tastes, the part of the country in which we live, our religious views, our social concerns, the car we would never drive, the store from where we would never shop. Alas, we find ourselves battling an addiction no different from the drugs that are killing the homeless.

Innate depravity and spiritual poverty are realities that cannot be ignored by the disenfranchised. In the places of the city soaked in bloodshed, gripped with addiction, scarred by rape, saturated in exploitation and violence, the belief that man is good will invariably die. It takes the ignorance of privilege to believe otherwise.

I am the homeless man.

Reflections of Self: Despair in the Homeless

“The biggest danger, that of losing oneself, can pass off in the world as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, ect. is bound to be noticed.”

-Soren Kierkegaard

Each person has a self; that is, each person must build an identity in something. Kierkegaard states that “self-awareness” is the difference between man and animal. A man must find purpose, significance and meaning to his life; essentially, he must justify his own existence. This justification must come through an identity bestowed from an outside voice. A homeless person, no matter how hard he tries, cannot believe himself to be of value and purpose in a world that is constantly beating him down through neglect.

A gang member, who I met in an impoverished city park, told me that the homeless were already dead but still breathing. The person who builds his self in society is no different: dead but still breathing. In the midst of society’s current, a person is consumed by the need to build and maintain an existence that will reap acceptance, wealth, love, accomplishment, ect. The self built in the temporal cannot last an eternity. Society turns its head from those who sit and beg, refusing to allow an identity to be gratified by its glance .

After losing his wife, his family, his job, his money, and his place in society, the homeless man quickly discovers he has lost himself. His self did not erode away as his family and society banished him to an existence of nothingness in the streets; his self quietly and subtly passed off in the world unnoticed long ago. Any time one feels a sense of one’s own spiritual poverty, he covers it with pleasure or praise. However, he who now has nothing is painfully aware that he has always been nothing. Despair floods the individual who grapples with this reality: an existence of a self or an identity constructed apart from God is death.

The inexplicable joy and exorbitant hope possessed by many homeless overthrow the suburban ethos. Those who have are the ones who are to be satisfied, full, and even- blessed, not those who have not.

“Blessed are you who are poor,

for yours is the kingdom of God.

Blessed are you who hunger now,

for you will be satisfied.

Blessed are you who weep now,

for you will laugh.”

Herein the complexities of Jesus’ words lie chilling truth: those who have not are able to despair in a way that those who have cannot. The poor are forced to seek an identity in God because society will not allow citizenship in man’s kingdom. A homeless person intimately knows his own spiritual poverty; he believes himself to be nothing and weak- and unworthy of favor. Thus, the poor are enabled to drink more deeply from the riches of Christ’s saving blood. But, those who have will innately be inclined to cover any weakness, need, or poverty to retain a social identity.

Blessed are those who society keeps weak and vulnerable, for the kingdom of God is real to those who believe they need it.