A Gospel of Inclusion

No scripture today. I happened to catch a show on MSNBC called "To Hell and Back" about Carlton Pearson, an African-American Evangelical in Tulsa Oklahoma. I had originally heard the story on This American Life (www.thislife.org episode called Heretics) and had been thrilled by this story. A prominent preacher, a darling of the Evangelical fire-and-brimstone preaching-hell-to-get-people-saved movement, Carlton is pastor of a megachurch, a leader and a mover and a shaker. Watching a show on African refugees who are starving, seeing the distended bellies of their starving children, Carlton is moved by their plight. But everything he has been taught tells him that these non-Christians are condemned to hell because they have not accepted Jesus as their personal savior. In his internal reflections, he hears God saying to him, "Hell is not a place in the afterlife, but right here on earth. It is what human beings do to each other." He reshapes his thinking, becoming convinced that if Christ saved humanity on the cross, then he saved ALL humanity on the cross, and begins preaching the Gospel of Inclusion.

If he had known what was going to happen, he might have thought twice, but that is how the Holy Spirit works sometimes. He is viciously attacked, labeled a heretic by the movement that had praised him, his church attendance erodes until he is facing bankruptcy with a few stalwart followers. In the face of this massive failure, he is invited to begin anew at a local Episcopal church, and discovers the gift of the Spirit in what for him would have been unthinkable company: homosexuals, AIDS victims and others marginalized in his community. There he was, sitting with the sinners, just as Jesus did, and finding a resurgence of the Spirit in his life and in his mission.

I love this story, but what pushed me to write this blog on it wasn't just to relate the story. You can hear that better through the radio program, or the treatment on MSNBC. What urged me to respond was another interview on the MSNBC program, of one of the Evangelicals who condemned Pearson as a heretic. He says, "Why go to church if you're not trying to save people from hell?" If everybody's already saved, what's the point? he seemed to be saying. That question really roiled around my head and refused to lie still. This is how I answer it:

God, as Jesus, through the cross, has redeemed all humanity from sin, and called us all to be the beloved, cherished children of God that we were intended to be, but most people have no experience of this reality. Abuse, oppression, mistreatment, hardship, all of the sorts of experiences that humans heap on one another, convince most of us that we are bad, shameful, unworthy, worthless, in fact, that God couldn't possibly love us. And we operate out of that awareness, that vision of reality. "I am angry, depressed, hateful, hurtful; I don't matter, in fact, I am actively bad, making the world worse because of my presence." The kind of actions that come from that kind of identity-formation perpetuate the very horrors that created it in the first place. If everyone truly understands, knows at a deep level, actively experiences God's love, that has such a transformative power that it can stop generational abuse in its tracks. And I'm not talking about the way people often speak of parental love, "Oh, I know my parents love me" with the implication that it doesn't really count. I am talking about the love of God invading our hearts, pervading our entire bodies, our minds, the whole range of our experience, and becoming a truth as powerfully felt as that which says I am alive. If people can have that experience, can know and embrace the love that God offers, nothing is ever the same again. That's why I don't mind people like Joel Osteen, which some Christians object to for making the Gospel easy. Yeah, there's more to it, but that is the first step, and unless that profound love is actually and deeply experienced, nothing that comes after will have any meaning or any fruits. That, to me, is what the Gospel of Inclusion is about.

Prayer: Dear God, When I stop and breath, Your Love for me wells up in me and provides the antidote for everything that assails me. Help me to live my life in such a way that others come to know this truth for themselves, and become their own witnesses to Your Divine Power and Grace. And so on, and so on, in a neverending spiral of the outflowing power of Love. Amen.