Find
the Key
“...salvation
is not something that happens only at the end of a person's life.
Salvation happens every time someone with a key uses it to open a
door he could lock instead.”
Barbara
Brown Taylor (Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith)
It could be said without
fear of contradiction that I am going through a crisis of faith.
Barbara Brown Taylor wrote Leaving Church when she was going
through a similar crisis. She began to see how the message of Jesus,
which was simply to serve with love, had become tarnished by
institutions wanting power in the world. Right now, with the attorney
general of the United States quoting portions of Bible verses to
justify putting children in detention centers on our southern border,
most of us realize that the Christian church is broken, even if we
don't understand how to fix it. Let me say this—God has nothing to
do with this practice. This is strictly about power.
I have racked my brain
trying to figure out when we made this U-turn in terms of turning the
message of Jesus into its opposite and declaring that to be the
gospel. To be sure, bigotry has always been deeply ingrained in the
human psyche. It didn't start with slavery, and it certainly didn't
end with the civil rights movement. It seems to be an indelible stain
in the human heart; stored in the very deepest recesses of our dark
under-belly. Perhaps it's as old as humankind. Now the balance has
tipped, as it does from time to time, and we once again have an
opportunity to deal with it constructively. Will we pass the test?
It seems to me that each
time dark-hearted human cruelty surfaces in the world's
consciousness, we move a little closer to justice. Believe me, it
doesn't feel like it, but I believe it to be true. I believe there
are more of us who are outraged, and more light is being shown on the
truth of it than ever before. Everyone with a beating heart knows
this is wrong. And it's especially wrong to use the message of Jesus
to justify such cruelty.
Salvation is an old term,
and one I don't much like. We seem to think it came once and for all,
and that Jesus' death on the cross sealed the deal for the rest of
us. It didn't and it won't as long as we use our keys to lock doors
instead of open them. When we take hate and call it love and
patriotism and national pride, we have canceled whatever gains we may
have made toward the kingdom of God. We can look to our own souls,
and to the soul of this nation for answers—they are there, and they
are warm and generous.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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