What God Sees: Part 2
FROM THE RECTOR
Last week, I wrote about the ways that our experience of God’s love, when interpreted through the lens of Christianity, forces us to rethink what it means to belong to God and to be loved by God. Borrowing from what I learned at an interfaith conference and expanding upon a recent Bible study on Galatians, I suggested that God continually shows us that salvation is something we experience in ways that exceed our own faith tradition. This week, I want to look at other ways that God challenges our assumptions about faith when we encounter God’s grace in unexpected ways.
A few years ago, a colleague of mine told a story about his church’s partnership with a Black congregation that still haunts me. His parish was a mostly white, mostly liberal, mostly wealthy congregation in a southern university town. As a congregation, they were committed to the work of dismantling racism. After considerable study and reflection, they had determined that God was calling them to do the work of reparations.
As a faith community whose prosperity and status had been achieved, in part, through the historic marginalization of African Americans—as a congregation whose accumulation of wealth both as an organization and as a collection of individual households had been enabled by slavery and the subsequent consequences of human bondage—this church decided to give some of its annual budget to a local Black church, with whom they had begun to develop a relationship. That decision was not reached lightly or without controversy, but, once the commitment was made, the partnership deepened, and the fruits of their act of reparations were enjoyed by both communities of faith.
Not very long into that relationship, however, the subject of human sexuality came up. I do not recall my friend and colleague explaining how it became an issue, but I do remember how he described to me in shockingly stark terms that the entire project fell apart when his congregation realized that their financial resources were being given to a church that did not support the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ individuals. Whether because the theological foundation upon which those reparations were given had not been fully developed or because a few naysayers found a way to torpedo the whole project by leveraging another important issue, the partnership dissolved, and the theological divide between those two expressions of Christianity recalcified.
Although I believe that the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ individuals in the life of the church is faithful and vital and would reject any attempts to limit it, I think the Episcopal Church and other mostly white, mostly liberal, mostly wealthy mainline denominations have a lot to learn from historically Black expressions of Christianity. Our version of Christianity is, in many ways, the product of empire, colonialism, racism, misogyny, human trafficking, theft, violence, and greed. I do not think that we can blame Constantine for all our ills, but the association of the Way of Jesus with the Roman Empire and the explicitly Christian kingdoms that followed it fueled the transformation of our faith into something quite different from the religion that Jesus and his earliest followers knew.
The faith of Black Christians is also largely the product of that imperial version of Christianity, but, unlike that of the dominant majority, their faith is in many ways a reaction against and, thus, a reinterpretation of it. As James Cone wrote in God of the Oppressed,
Unlike white theologians, who spoke to and for the culture of the ruling class, black people’s religious ideas were shaped by the cultural and political existence of the victims in North America. Unlike Europeans who immigrated to this land to escape from tyranny, Africans came in chains to serve a nation of tyrants. It was the slave experience that shaped our idea of this land…What then is the form and content of black religious thought when viewed in the light of black peoples’ social situation? Briefly, the form of black religious thought is expressed in the style of story and its content is liberation. Black Theology, then, is the story of black people’s struggle for liberation in an extreme situation of oppression. (p. 49, emphasis in original)
I grew up in a church that articulated the Christian faith primarily as a relationship of sin and forgiveness. While not a “fire and brimstone” sort of church, the preachers and Sunday school teachers of my childhood placed great emphasis on my identity as a sinner in need of forgiveness. I still believe that to be true, and I think it is important to stress the reality of our sinfulness and the magnitude of God’s forgiveness and mercy, but there is more to our faith than that.
As we read in Luke 4:16-21, God sent Jesus Christ to proclaim release to the prisoners and freedom for the oppressed. In ways that other parts of the Christian tradition seem to celebrate more fully than ours, God’s salvation of the world is accomplished by the proclamation of the good news to the poor just as much as the offering of forgiveness to the sinful. When we expect God’s work of salvation to fit within our narrowly tailored expectations, we miss out on the ways that God’s salvation is already at work in the lives and experiences of others.
The vibrancy of the Black church is itself an expression of God’s surprising grace. That the descendants of enslaved people would celebrate a version of the faith introduced to them by their enslavers as a justification for their own human trafficking is a testament not only to the resilience and interpretive power of those descendants but also to the emptiness and falsehood with which white Christians held, and in many cases still hold, that faith.
When our theology is used in an attempt to limit God’s unconditional love and narrow our understanding of salvation, we perpetuate the emptiness and idolatry that our ancestors used to justify slavery. If we are not willing to learn from those whose faith is itself a correction of our mistaken theology, we in effect double-down on imperialism and further distance ourselves from the faith of Jesus.
In a week and a half, our congregation will again take part in Pride celebrations in this community. For some, after so many years, that participation feels automatic and natural, but we should not fail to recognize its significance. Think what the LGBTQ+ community has taught us about God and God’s plan of salvation. That the members of the queer community, whose marginalization was perpetuated by Christians who claimed to act in the name of the church, would welcome us and accept us as allies is yet another surprising experience of God’s grace. Their generosity of spirit reminds us that we must listen and learn from their experience of God so that our own understanding might grow.
When the apostle Paul wrote, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus,” he articulated a theological principle that he had encountered in his own conversion (Galatians 3:28). When he was met by the risen Christ, Paul discovered that the things which had previously set him apart were the very things standing in the way of God’s plan of salvation for all people. In this radical reorientation, Paul became the apostle to the Gentiles, using the same fervor for God, which originally had led him to become a persecutor of the church, to spread the good news of Jesus beyond ethnic divisions.
Although not fully manifest in his lifetime, during which he continued to advocate, at least in some situations, for the perpetuation of traditional gender roles and the continued enslavement of human beings, Paul’s theological claim was a seed of hope that sprouted and grew in subsequent generations. Only recently have we begun to accept that distinctions of gender, race, and economic status have no place in the Body of Christ not only in the eschaton but also here and now.
When God looks upon the people of the earth, God sees what we cannot yet see—that all are precious and beloved. God’s love for the world always exceeds our expectations. We read about that love in the pages of scripture, and we proclaim our faith in that love through the creeds and Baptismal Covenant that we say in worship, but it is our experience of God’s radical love that has the power to shape our hearts and minds.
Just when we think we have the magnitude of God’s love figured out, God surprises us with another experience of God’s grace. When we test those experiences against the authority of scripture and the tradition of the church, we discover that God’s love is even bigger than we expected, and our understanding of God’s grace grows a little bit larger. God’s infinite goodness, acceptance, and love never change, but our celebration of them gets bigger every day.
Yours faithfully,
Evan D. Garner