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No. 371 January 15th, 2012 this week
Bad Salesman
Lost In The Matrix
Family Plot
Insecurity: A Preacher's Confession |
Putting Our Socks On
How Deep The Rabbit Hole Goes
I learned absolutely nothing about God from the black church. From black people. I learned about God from the bible. I learned about the bible from white people. White teens, sixteen and eighteen years old, who sat with me on cold Adirondack evenings, while I scowled and hissed at them and called them names. I’d grown up in church, I knew what these kids were teaching could not possibly be true. Knowing God, becoming “saved,” required endless nights of crying out to God, hollering and rolling on the floor and weeping and working yourself into a frenzy. You had to speak in tongues as proof that God was in you. For weeks, these young people sat with me, bible in hand, making me read passages that said bizarre things like the evidence of knowing Jesus isn’t tongues—it’s love. That we are saved by grace and not by works. That the pastor is not a god to be served, upon whom we lavish gifts and unquestioned loyalty. The bible said the pastor is a servant. To be loved, to be trusted, but that he’s just a guy like everybody else. He puts his socks on one at a time the same way I do. I was immensely suspicious of their teaching, but they didn’t show me these verses in their bible—they showed them to me in mine, in the very bible I’d brought with me, the one my grandmother gave me when I was eight or nine. And there it was: the truth of God, and the fork in the road between the inbred tradition of the black church and the truth of God. These white people, up there in the mountains in all of that cold, thin air, yanked out the hoses and released the clamps and I tumbled out of The Matrix, discovering the deception of our traditional religious practice did not entirely meet the standard of God’s holy word. At age thirteen, I accepted the word of God, the truth of God, and was sent back to my world with a new sense of both that consistently conflicted with the warped and false brainwashing of our cherished African American Christian tradition; a beloved experience which nevertheless misses the mark of what Christianity is actually about. It is an experience which produces religious folk, Church Folk, who, as often as not, behave nothing at all like Christ, and a church that looks very little like Christ. This online ministry was born in July of 1974, a generation before there even was an Internet, on the porch of dilapidated wooden cabin near Schroon Lake in upstate New York, where I was ordained to speak the truth and invite my brothers and sisters to find Jesus instead of Pastor, to discover Truth instead of Tradition, Revelation instead of Religion, and to pull the plug on the fruitless deception of a mythologized Christianity. Having heard the truth to embrace that truth and, in so doing, to become more like Him, “Little Christs,” which is what the word “Christian” actually means. Without abandoning the flavor and joy of our unique African American experience, we should strive to sync that cultural accretion to the Word of God, freeing ourselves of bondage and coming to truly know God’s word rather than Pastor’s rhetoric. Knowing God for ourselves breaks the yoke of bondage, allowing us, finally, to escape from The Matrix.
|
US Navy Rescues Iranians From Pirates
NY TIMES |
Mae Jemison Named To Head Space Project
Alan Boyle
/ MSNBC |
No. 371 Jan 15, 2012
I beseech you therefore, brethren, by
the mercies of God, that ye present your
bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable
unto God, which is your reasonable service.
2 And be not conformed to this world: but be
ye transformed by the renewing of your mind,
that ye may prove what is that good, and
acceptable, and perfect,
will of God. —Romans 12:1-2
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The Mirror Universe Matrix
of White Christian Conservatives
I hesitate to mention former Senator Rick Santorum, the latest
of a series of footnotes to the Republican presidential
nomination scramble, other than to say that Santorum, in his own
way, represents the white conservative version of this Matrix we
are discussing this week: the intolerant, homophobically
obsessed wingnut fringe who, likewise, look nothing like Christ.
These people are the Christian equivalent of ultra reactionary
Shia or Sunni Muslims blowing each other up in a power struggle
over religious control of a civil government. The
ultra-conservatives believe America is a Christian nation, and
claim to seek smaller government and less government even as it
attempts to expand government’s reach into private behavior,
most especially any and all personal behavior related to sexual
activity (abortion, contraception, LGBT rights, etc.) Flying the
banner of Jesus Christ, they spit hatred at LGBT persons,
routinely spew racially intolerant and insensitive rhetoric, and
seek to repeal the tepid, half-a-loaf health care reform set to
kick in in 2013, thus denying affordable health care to the poor
while fattening the pockets of the out-of-control healthcare
industry robber barons. These praying, sacrificing, mostly white
people are not Christians. They are, as are most black Church
Folk, Lost In The Matrix. They claim Christ but hate is their
motivator. Their number one priority is not the relief of the
poor or even the welfare of the nation. Their number one
priority is to get Barack Obama out of the White House. It is an
irrational and personal hatred of this man, whose unassailably
and historically productive presidency has unquestionably
bettered American lives, that fuels the Stockholm Syndrome of
White Christian America coalescing around a northern liberal
Mormon whose universal healthcare and pro-choice stances mirror
Obama’s and whose religious beliefs not only deny Christ but
are, by definition, antichrist.
Observing the clown show across the political aisle, I cannot
help but be struck by the similarities between conservative
white Christians and black Church Folk. Both groups are, in
their own way, immersed in deception. Neither group resembles,
in any way, the personal example of Jesus Christ, the imitation
of which is much tougher to do than to claim to do. Santorum,
whose whack-job fringe “Christianity” included bringing the
corpse of his infant son home so his other children could hold
it, is simply the latest flash in the latest pan as conservative
White America moves grudgingly toward Romney, a man they do not
trust and do not want. Neither do they want to be anything at
all like Christ. They hate this man Obama so much that they’re
willing to sell out their own alleged beliefs in an effort to
oust him. Which misses the point that our beliefs only mean
anything when we actually, well, believe them.
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