The room grows still as the preacher clad in their pristine blue suit and red tie arrives at the pulpit. The choir and praise team have done their work to sensitize the parishioners, visitors and onlookers with their renditions of sacred music, what was part rock concert, light show and an emotional high is now moving into a different moment. As the preacher moves into position, with their bible in one hand and a perfected smile on their face, they greet the crowd, “Praise the Lord” and the awaiting crowd responds in kind, “Praise the Lord”. The preacher, situated between two flags, a religious one to their left and the American Flag to their right, begins to share their sermon.
A well-thought out, thoroughly prayed over and patiently examined set of words provided to the person from God, by way of study, self-examination and with a few quotes from like-minded but likely dead writers, the preacher begins to couch their words in a musty but miraculous version of Christianity. One so musty that it’s hard to be in the presence of without holding one’s nose in disbelief, if you haven’t been baptized into the righteous anger of America! The words used on this Sunday morning are often void of grace and as the pastor moves into their subtle but muddled crescendo, the crowd is engaged in the action. “God aint for the gays” and he aint “woke”. Thunderous applause erupts from the room as those present feel the fire from the empty coals of this message.
The issues of being “woke” and conversations regarding sexuality and politics have always been intertwined in Christianity. However, toxic they have become, that was not the general expression of the Gospel. Jesus Christ of Nazareth shares that his explicit call is to explicate people from their disempowerment and to provide light into their personal darkness, in full view of the community[1]. Jesus’s actions were not to engage in comfortable conformity, but to radically challenge our assumptions of what love looks like, feels like, and is shared. You would be surprised to hear in a modern auditorium, nevertheless church, that Jesus moved the boundaries of cultural conformity by engaging in culture destroying activities. The Gospel of John is the only one of the gospel accounts which share this critical story, but one would believe this eyewitness reporting on Jesus’s whereabouts would be seen as credible, if not more so than the researched accounts recorded in Luke. Jesus’s talk with a Samaritan woman, alone at a well on a Samaritan hillside is as culturally inappropriate as it is politically dangerous[2]. Jesus as a figure was political and God in a sense of dimensions has operated even in the divine realm from a sociopolitical position of power. Providing grace at divine cost and aligning against religious power structures in support of those who are considered the least amongst us, those in the margins and those far too often forgotten was Jesus’s mode of operation.
This no-frills version of Christ is far too often left unengaged in the modern American pulpit. Possibly because Christ wasn’t engaged in capitalism, nor interested in spreading his name, but spreading a message of hope, love, care, compassion, and faith in God. The historical Christ would not sell many books or sell out stadiums today. Which has left me to wonder both internally and aloud,
Is the Christ we preach, the Christ we know, or the Christ we want?
As a black Christian, I have always had to balance the ignorance, not intentional but genuine unawareness that my white friends in Christ had concerning faith. Christ for me, as a black Christian was never much a of a giver. Sure, I know that Christ gives life and in my own testimony, it is more abundant life at the least. However, Christ lived an experience in which his acquaintances and intentional engagements with people whose lives were lived in the margins of society found hope in him, healing through him and then came to faith in God.
Their eyes have seen the glory.
Black Christianity at its core is a belief in and hope in a Christ who is able to extract us from the muck and mire of life; whose prophetic foretelling would read as our communal narrative.
He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, yet he opened not his mouth.[3]
Those words from the Prophet Isaiah, which are revealed in the life of Christ is also true to the collective experience of transplanted Africans in America. Our faith journey from the hush harbors of the antebellum south to boardrooms, classrooms and the halls of congress today have come over a way that with tears has been watered[4]. Langston Hughes in his poem, cogently titled, Mother to Son, aptly shares a powerfully possessive refrain, Life for me aint been no crystal stair.
To be black, Christian and American means to constantly wrestle with the internal measures of faith in a society which minimizes Christ’s teaching to a suggested reading section of our communal syllabus in exchange for a capitalistic Christ who wear opinions on his sleeves, is against gays, changes in culture, awareness of the neighbor, is anti-vaccine, anti-trans, anti-black and anti-reflective!
This Christ is foreign to me, however, I don’t take credit on my own for coming into this awareness of this disagreement with a commonly accepted Christ-less version of Christology, which we see and hear espoused on our television screens and radio waves. I know the Christ they preach isn’t Christ at all!
It’s a mirror image of the one people want. A Christ who is so irritated by the unhoused and unhealthy that he not only scoffs at their lack of willingness to take responsibility for themselves, but he would support our voting to minimize their impact on our lives. Their slums are too distracting to our eyes, their begging is too close to our marketplaces and their funk is too much for our bathrooms.
The American Christian is so preoccupied with minors and irrelevant issues that we are missing in action on the major issues of import in our society. How can we square the Christ of the Gospel with our public positions on issues relating to life? This double or even dare I say it, triple-mindedness on these issues of substance provide a glaring and almost irreducibly sane call of Hypocrisy.
But the Black Christian knows this, and to be fair, I sincerely believe that most Christians regardless of their race know that we aren’t living up to the call of Christ. Sadly, most of us are unwilling to extricate ourselves from the culture of conformity which calls us to, More, More, and More; in the words of the late Pastor of Cascade United Methodist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowry, Millions More for the War, but no more for the poor.
This double or in my words, triple-mindedness is why so many found Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wrights words so appalling. You would have believed that this famed and dedicated cleric of the American Christ -tee - ology must have uttered some blasphemous language or opted into some apostasy by the vitriol he got from an edited clip of his sermon, popularly played on the airwaves to combat the candidacy of then Sen. Barack H. Obama, “God Damn, America”.
Wright’s words were not only true in theology, but also instructive in wisdom. As he uses the microphone of Trinity United Church of Christ to speak truth to power, his frame bent from years of grassroots organizing, his voice in full tenor exclaims that God is against any group, nation or entity which does not comply with the words that Christ utters in Luke 4, echoed from Isaiah and demonstrated consistently in history and of course in the Bible. Micah 3:5-8, shares this discombobulation, but it is true that the prophetic witness of Black Christology is that we have frequently had to critique from the inside a faith which as displayed in the media and in popular culture oftentimes didn’t create space for us!
This is stressful, and mentally perplexing. It really doesnt matter how contorted you have to become, you cannot read the scriptures honestly, and aptly come down to a place where you are anti-everything.
What happened to the love ethic of Christ?
More importantly, why are Christians always so mad?
You’ve been able since the founding of our country to embed Christianity, the capitalist variety, into normative culture. You are not only writing laws to ensure that certain beliefs are respected, but you’ve been able to back the court, to pack the court and have fundamentally flawed views of the sanctity of life bifurcate blackness, life and liberty.
I digress – but yeah mine eyes have seen some stuff..
[1] Luke 4:14-19
[2] John 4:1-25
[3] Isaiah 53
[4] James Weldon Johnson, Lift Every Voice and Sing