In the summer of 1972, I was a graduate student in the Divinity School of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.The summer program included practical application of class work to local church settings in many rural and urban settings. That summer I was an intern in a relatively quiet, North Carolina, small town in which the town center was a police and fire department along with a United Methodist Church.
The appointed pastor of the church had assigned me the responsibility of summer youth ministry. And, as part of my getting on board with the congregation, he told me a story. It was this:
The pastor’s elementary age daughter had become best friends with a black girl in her class. The pastor’s daughter very much wanted to have her best friend come over to her house so that they could play together. She asked her dad permission for that to happen. He told me that his daughter’s request for permission to play with her best friend at their home was a most difficult one.
The church owned the parsonage. The prevailing attitude about social mixing of races was negative. But the pastor wanted his daughter to be able to play with her best friend. So, he went to every member of the congregation, or called them on the phone, explained that his daughter’s best friend was a black girl from school, and asked their permission to have her as a guest in the parsonage to play with his daughter.
Rural North Carolina, 1972. I could not understand what I perceived to be pastoral cowardice. Why would you ask permission for your daughter and her best friend to play together? How would you ever explain the possibility of a “no” vote to your child?
Well. I was the naïve one. That pastor’s actions, as abhorrent as I found them at the time, may very well have saved the life of that young girl had she come “unannounced” to the parsonage to play with his daughter. Because the pastor asked, the congregation did permit it. But the congregation cautioned that such activity would be restricted to the front yard and would not become a regular occurrence. Rural North Carolina, 1972.
In her most important book, “The Warmth of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson dealing with the Great American Migration of blacks to northern cities from 1915 – 1970 there is this paragraph.
(Eddie Earvin) had learned that fear (of whites in the Jim Crow South) when he was little and once passed the white people’s church. The kids came out of the church when they saw him. They threw rocks and bricks and called him the vilest names that could spring from a southern tongue. And he asked his grandparents, “What kind of god they got up inside that church?” (page 221).
This is an ancient question. What kind of god they got up inside that church, or temple or synagogue or tribal gathering? The question haunts and still divides us.
The Prophet Amos writing six centuries before the birth of Jesus (That is an awfully long time ago!!) railed at his “church” for conforming (in the words of the contemporary paraphrase by Dust and Ashes) to the prejudices, cultural behaviors and attitudes of its time this way:
“I hate and despise all your potlucks. Your solemn assemblies in church. Your prayers are as empty as deserts. Your hymns all noise, not a search. You eat of the calf, not the bull. You drink wine from bowls not in jiggers. You lie on beds of white ivory and sell the needy for shoes.
I want justice! Justice like free-flowing waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (Amos 6:4-7).
There has always been a great difference between organized religion and faith. The Bible knows this well. One cannot read the prophets and think otherwise. Indeed, organized religion, for all its good, is so often the primary source and hold-out for ancient prejudice and hate rather than for the power of love it preaches.
I think of such things when the Taliban bombs schoolgirls for the crime of getting an education. “What kind of god they got up inside that church?” I think of these things when the evangelical right offers their prayers of support for violence from the dais of the Speaker of the House in the US Capitol during an armed insurrection. I think of these things when churchgoers look the other way or too often advocate violence done to LGBTQ people. I think of such things when thinking of the long history of people burned at the stake, skinned alive, lynched all by church people defending their cultural bias, misogyny, defending their politics and racial hatred and crucifying the presence of love in their midst.
Well, where is the hope?
I think that hope lies where it always has been found. Hope is in those who choose to be the exception to the “teachings” of the institution. Hope is in those who spend time discerning the living, loving, eternal presence within them. It is not easy. And, the ever-present voices of religious, social, political, and self-righteous oppression are so damned maddening.
The lesson of the Bible (there are many) is that we will never change the world. There will be no perfection; only the pursuit of it. There will be no time that does not know conflict. Why? Because in the words of Ephesians 6:10-13, our ultimate enemy is not of flesh and blood, but of the rulers, authorities, and cosmic powers of an ever-present darkness. They are always hacking the spiritual internet connection of our lives.
We must strive to be a living exception to the rule of people doing dumb things, and hateful, hurtful things, by putting on the WHOLE armor of God and being in every chaotic instance, a remnant of love in action against all the odds.