(What follows are some thoughts that arise out of a relationship formed through the Advance Memphis family.)
“My friend was converted.” I could almost feel the skepticism from my audience as I described the new life my friend was experiencing. You see, my friend is black, poor, has spent time in jail, and a gang, and knows the demon of addiction firsthand. My audience is white, has lived a life of privilege and is conservative politically and religiously. The later two, being weaved so tight into their belief system, are indistinguishable.
There really is skepticism, in the church, toward the possibility of change. God bless us. We have spent too much time sitting through heady sermons meant more to squeeze out a compliment, better yet a raise, than real deep heart change. A resulting culture has been formed, bent more on seeming righteous than being righteous. This culture is much more passionate about discussing radical change than walking by faith toward it. James, Jesus’ brother, made it abundantly clear that the kind of religion God wants is centered on justice, mercy and compassion. True religion, so James tells us, looks after widows and orphans in their distress. Distressed about the weak, needy and cold, that is true religion that arises from a person that has been truly changed. Somehow we have moved off center. If the motto of North Carolina is “to be rather than to seem,” the church’s motto is more in line with, “to seem is to be.” The Word is failing to result in deed.
This friend called me last week and told me his heat was out all night. Temperatures that night dropped to 22. The walls of a housing project know more rodents than insulation. The windows are lucky to be pained at all, much less be double pained. Yet my friend called, not to complain, but to tell me what God told him. First, God impressed the little boy a few doors down upon his heart. The last time he saw the boy he had no socks. “I wanted to find him to make sure he was alright,” he told me. Second, he told me that God directed him to think about the homeless. “Richard, something I never told you is that I too was homeless for a time and this morning God told me to open a homeless shelter. I don’t want to charge for the shelter, not even $6, because God didn’t charge me anything for His grace and love, He just throws it on everybody.”
I came away skeptical too, not of my friend’s conversion, but my own. Has grace sunk that deep into my pores? Does my heart move toward others in the midst of personal distress? My friend is now my teacher. God’s work in him is getting all over me.
God taking on infant form? The Almighty wrapped in cloths and lying in a feed trough? That stuff, like the possibility of radical change, is hard to believe. Yet, from creation to incarnation to salvation, Christianity is about the real possibility of impossibilities. It may be more than that, but it is not less.
Richard Rieves
richard.rieves@gmail.com
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