Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion

by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

But I’m a sucker for any little way we open ourselves to one another when the days grow shorter and, eventually, even the malls close their doors to honor the birth of the Savior of the world.

This is why Jesus said that the poor are blessed and the hungry will be satisfied and the merciful will be shown mercy. Not because God loves them any more than he loves the rest but because they know their need. They have a clear diagnosis. A hungry man knows he needs bread. A heart that’s been broken knows it wants mercy. And a soul that can see its own self-deception knows it needs good news, which is what the gospel is. A

God has a way of interrupting us—of laying open the wounds of our past in ways that touch us personally. This, too, is the gospel, which is why each chapter in the first half of this book also demonstrates how tearing down is central to the ministry of Jesus in all four Gospels of the New Testament. Whenever any of us come to the end of our rope, we face a personal crisis. Whenever all of us come to the end of our rope collectively, we face a social crisis. No one chooses the agony of times like these, but Jesus meets us here at the end of our rope.

Others were even more dismissive:

More and more I realize that reconstructing the gospel is, first and foremost, about knowing which Jesus we follow.

White supremacy doesn’t persist because racists scheme to privilege some while discriminating against others. It continues because, despite the fact that almost everyone believes it is wrong to be racist, the daily habits of our bodily existence continue to repeat the patterns of white supremacy at home, at school, at work, and at church. White supremacy is written into our racial habits. In short, it looks like normal life.

He joins her in her place, swapping stories. Not a big thing in one sense. Just two people together, talking. But Jesus says this is enough to alter the course of history: “The time is coming—it has, in fact, come—when what you’re called will not matter and where you go to worship will not matter.”

To be a disciple of Jesus and a son of Ann Atwater, she told me, is to be in a quarrel with the world. Yes, our greatest weapon is love. But when we love in public, it looks like a disruption.

We were, in fact, on holy ground, surrounded by saints we might have missed if we hadn’t stopped to pay attention.

“Born again,” the Greek scholar and Southern agitator Clarence Jordan used to say, might be better translated “re-sired from above.” That is, Jesus says to Nicodemus and every person ever born into America’s so-called white privilege, “You aren’t who your mama and daddy thought you were. You need to hear from heaven who you were made to be.”

This is not a song to make you famous, but a faith to sustain you when you go to jail, when the money runs out, when you are powerless and cold and alone.

At the church that day, Bob recalls Rosa Parks saying to him, “You can’t study a problem forever. When you see something that’s wrong, at some point you have to do something about it.”