The Clearing Gospel — No. 2

“Real preaching and authentic teaching is inextricably bound to real criminality. Christians of the modern West have never grasped our deep connection to the criminal mind, our mind.” (Willie James Jennings)¹

For eight years, I taught high school American literature and writing. During that time, there were two books that were annually and inescapably a part of the curriculum—The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby. Gatsby always went by far too quickly, leaving barely enough time to plumb the depths of its logic about American capitalism, the false self, and the new worlds we are forever trying to make on the backs of others. Huckleberry Finn, on the other hand, never could end fast enough. Set in the years prior to the American Civil War, it was undeniably brilliant but also had a tendency to ramble in a way that did neither my 16-year-old nor me any favors.

Yet, there was always one scene that I could never get enough of. It was the scene in which Huck, a poor white boy, decides to steal the enslaved man, Jim, back out of slavery. Huck and Jim had found themselves traveling the Mississippi River together as Jim fled his life of slavery and Huck fled his abusive father. But when Jim is recaptured, Huck faces a dilemma. He has been taught that Jim should be a slave and that aiding him would be wrong. He has been taught this, in part, as a theological idea from his Sunday school—people who are sympathetic to slaves go to “everlasting fire”—plain and simple. But Huck has also had the experience of knowing Jim as kind, honorable, and fully human in a way his own father had never been. As Huck struggles to decide whether he will aid in Jim’s return to slavery for good or, instead, in his liberation, he describes the extent of the dilemma: “It was a close place [...] I was a trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell.’ It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming.”²

Huck must decide between what civilization has taught him and what he discerns to be true in his own soul, namely that Jim has a right to liberation. He chooses between the status quo delivered to him on Sundays and the reality that he sees before his eyes. Ultimately, Huck decides to let go of what his society has told him is civilized and he takes up what the status quo considers wicked—the commitment to liberation. And Huck recognizes that the stakes of that decision are very real. He believes that he will certainly now go to hell and yet makes the choice anyway in service of emancipation. 

For those of us who desire to turn the world upside down toward the flourishing of all, we have to remember that losing our "civilized" souls is the first step—being willing to go to hell, as a social reality, economic reality, and perhaps even ultimate, existential reality. Generations of Black people who have protested segregated white churches that were considered the arbiters of salvation knew this willingness. Queer people who pursue their intuitive sense of gender and sexuality often know this willingness too. Ironically, to take up this willingness is often to take a path deeply in the way of Christ—a willingness to follow the path that seemingly leads to death while trusting beyond hope that resurrection will come. 

The call to speak treason and to follow that speaking with action was made clear to me a few years back on one of the most important days of my life. On the day of my ordination through the Baptist congregation that had nurtured me and the wider Baptist Convention of my city, there were two people who were to preach the service. One was the pastor who had faithfully encouraged and mentored me. The other was a person who had, from time to time, given me advice in seminary and generally served as a role model. It was that second person who did something that felt almost scandalous. He chose to preach on the story of the Syrophoenician woman’s encounter with Jesus and to preach it in a way that was faithful to the nearly heretical implications of the story. 

In it, Jesus encounters a Gentile woman who begs him to cast an unclean spirit out of her daughter. Jesus famously responds, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs under the table.” She then retorts, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” The story ends with Jesus seemingly off balance and ending the encounter by saying, “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.”⁵

As the preacher relayed the story during my ordination service, he pulled no punches. He posed the possibilities that Jesus was problematically ethnocentric and misogynist. While he was clear that Jesus learns from this woman-outsider, the preacher also exposed the prejudiced thinking that might have often been at play in first-century Palestine. My seminary professor spoke so plainly in order to make clear that any preacher must do the same. He spoke so plainly to insist that I was being ordained into a ministry of truth-telling that would at times be considered scandalous and even criminal. I remember feeling uncomfortable throughout that entire sermon. After all, I had been raised to be a good girl and his encouragement was the exact opposite of that—a firm invitation to get in trouble. 

Are you willing to go to hell, whatever that hell may be for you, in the pursuit of liberation for all?

Today, I do not read the story of the Syrophoenician woman the same way my professor did that day. But I can’t let go of the point that he was making. Learning to speak treason is and has always been a fundamental act within decolonial Christian theology and practice. As well, it is not lost on me that the scripture text he chose makes that same point. In Mark’s version of the story, the woman is not commended by Jesus for her faith. Instead, she is commended for her sass.⁶ Jesus says, “For saying that, you may go.” 

What is it that those of us committed to a decolonized Christianity need to say? What is it that you need to say from your own unique vantage point and life experience? Are you willing to go to hell, whatever that hell may be for you, in the pursuit of liberation for all? This is a question that I have to ask myself everyday, and, if I’m honest, my actions often answer differently than I would like. But every day, I know I must ask anew, hoping to live out a better answer on the edge of the new world.

¹ Acts by Willie James Jennings

² The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

³ Lynice Pinkard in the foreword to Liberating Church: A Twenty-First Century Hush Harbor Manifesto by edited by Brandon Wrencher and Venneikia Samantha Williams

⁴ Acts 4:13; 17:6

⁵ Mark 7:24-30

⁶ Womanist Sass and Talk Back: Social (In)Justice, Intersectionality, and Biblical Interpretation by Mitzi J. Smith