“I grew up believing in a loving and kind
God, who made it clear through
these sacred pages that
He was on the side of the poorest of the poor,
the lowliest of the
lowly. I’d never heard anyone qualify God as a Conservative,
or a Liberal. He’s God,
for goodness sake! The Creator of worlds, defender
of the pure in heart,
father to the orphan and husband to the widow, and lover
of my very own soul.
He ordained laws so men
might understand how to live rightfully. He laid them
down in black and white.
But the law would eventually find its fulfillment
in the unequivocal sacrifice of His
Son, surely the most grand and loving of
Divine gestures. What
was black and white was finally renewed and fulfilled in
shades of a quite
luminous and translucent gray. Gray is the color of grace.
The Law becomes Love.
And you and I call Him Jesus Christ.
We know that grace is
not black and white because we no longer, after all, put
people to death for eating pork, or for
marrying outside their race, or for loving
someone of the same sex. This frustrates many
who prefer things to remain ‘black
and white,’ who simply do not operate easily
outside the borders of legalism.
But it is outside those
borders where grace reigns supreme, and where the wars
that rage on against fear are won or lost.
How then do we, the
Believers, those whom Jesus calls ‘Beloved,’ how is it
we come to rally
ourselves around the fear-mongrels, whose sole aim is to
squash and suppress the
desires and hopes of those they pejoratively call the
‘bleeding hearts.’ The bleeding heart
desires not only justice, equality, and
reason, but also
compassion, wisdom, and truth. I think it was Jesus’ bleeding
heart that bled most,
wasn’t it?
In this land that still
represents to the rest of the world the ‘last best hope,’
we contend with what we
like to call the ‘war on poverty.’ But this war has
little chance of
success when the poor are viewed only as those whose
poverty represents a
kind of laziness; an insufferable sense of entitlement.
This land of hard work
mixed with what used to be a large dose of kindness, is
filled with far too many today who
believe that indeed the class war exists, but
in reverse, that the
war is against the rich, those who’ve accomplished the great
American Dream, (mostly
all on their own, they will tell you). They have little
interest in showing
compassion toward those who haven’t achieved The Dream,
other than to allow
their good fortunes and their peculiar goodwill to
‘trickle down,’ like a labyrinthine
economic pinball machine; or a sewer.
Once we were a nation
of ‘receivers.’ Now we’ve become a nation of
‘achievers.’ We’ve become a people who believe
that entitlements are due
only to those who, by their own sweat, have
found favor in God’s sight,
a favor bestowed on
those who’ve accumulated the most toys.
We are fearful of the poor,
afraid they will take from us the things we believe
we’ve earned, mostly on
our own. We are fearful they will take power they don’t
deserve. Power, after
all, has a high price and must be paid for.
We want so much to
believe we are, or once were, a Christian nation. History is
selectively recounted,
and the past can be reshaped to aid our sense of security
in what we believe, as though what we believe
needs the approval of an entire
nation, and the power
of majority rule.
Would you still believe
what you believe, if you were the only one? If the road
we’re on is as narrow
as we’ve been told, then why in the world do we seek to
claim an entire nation
for it? Why do we seek to make our faith and trust in
God so strangely
synonymous with patriotism, democracy, capitalism, American
exceptionalism, and what we like to believe
were the pure hearts and minds of
the founding fathers?
We can, if we choose, transpose
these sacred pages to fit a more militant
Christianity, and create a more dispassionate
Christ. We can, if we so choose,
justify our
condescensions. We can, in our search to write our own Book of Life,
stand together, roll up
our sleeves, lower our collective shoulders, and shove the
camel through the eye of the needle.”
Portions of a speech given at Yale Divinity
September 22, 1982
(From the soon-to-be published book, 'Lamentations of a 20th Century Man,'
by Jeff Kidwell)
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