Real Life Christianity

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If you don’t know who Jeremiah Wright is by now, you’ve had to be living in a vacuum over the last couple of months. Video recordings of some of his more controversial statements have been playing endlessly over the news for weeks. This is especially so with his controversial critiques of the United States. To be fair to him, the selected comments that were aired didn’t always provide the broader context of what he was saying. But absent the context or not, they were still controversial and offended a lot of people, and still others thought he was right in what he said.Before I get to my main point, I do want to make a brief observation. Whereas there has been significant discomfort in much of the white community over Dr. Wright’s statements, there was not significant disagreement, for the most part, in the black community. This dichotomy of world-views is even more notable in the different ways Wright’s comments were viewed in predominantly black and white churches across the country.In my conversations, this difference in perspectives, not surprisingly, is even reflected within the Seventh-day Adventist church. We don’t see things alike living in the same country, and even belonging to the same church. That’s okay, because we don’t have to. But we do have to work at understanding each other across racial lines, even within our Adventist Church family. The main thing is acknowledging disagreement and seeking understanding, and then affirming strongly our complete agreement with the great Biblical and Prophetic teachings our church espouses, because as an Adventist people, we too will have some things to say in these final days to the religious and secular world that will not be received.

Whether you think Jeremiah Wright was right or wrong in his comments is something each person will need to decide on their own. But we as a church, at least from a religious liberty perspective, must support his right to say it, even if we disagree. Because there is coming a time in our churches prophetic understanding of things, when we will be singled out for speaking “truth” in such a way that brings us into disfavor with the masses. We may even be categorized as unpatriotic. I predict that the media will play it over and over again—whipping the masses up into such a furor, that it will usher in, along with other events, a time of trouble such as has never been seen before.

Again, we don’t need to agree with Wright, we can even think he is dead wrong, but we do need to defend his right even to be wrong.
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Pastor Fredrick A. Russell is the Senior Pastor of the Miracle Temple Seventh-day Adventist Church located in Baltimore, Maryland.

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“I just told the professor that our error was about one centimeter,” my lab partner quietly informed me last Friday. “If he asks you, that’s what it was.”

She had scarcely finished her sentence before our professor appeared next to me, with coffee in hand. This was his usual tendency.

“Ginger tells me that your error was about a centimeter,” he said, stroking his salt and pepper beard. “Is that correct?”

“Yes, I think it was about a centimeter,” I concurred, following Ginger’s instructions.

This Physics lab had been the bane of our existence this semester, but as honors students, it was expected. Honors courses are almost always at 8 a.m. or 5 p.m….on Fridays.

According to our lab manual, if our error was off by more than a centimeter, we would have to repeat the entire experiment. On a Friday afternoon. After 5 p.m. In the basement of the Physics building when it was a balmy 76 degrees outside.

It was true that our error had been slightly more than one centimeter (as in, maybe two), but “around one centimeter” was a good enough explanation for me. I was eager to escape myself—having dinner plans at 7 p.m. and having just witnessed our professor tell the group next to us to start their experiment over when their result s failed.

What ensued, however, could hardly have been predicted by either Ginger or me.

Our professor is scrupulous about details and accuracy when it comes to Physics. He often reworks our calculations after we turn in reports and marks us down for errors of a tenth of a decimal place. He also “challenges” us to work a little harder than the other sections, assigning us differential equations for homework (this sounds innocuous enough, I guess, unless you’re just returning to school and haven’t taken Calculus in seven years!). His class is a model for the rigor and attention to detail I expect from “real” research projects, but this week surpassed my worst fears.

It started on Sunday, with an email he sent to the class asking us to propagate errors for the experiment. Ginger and I quickly divided the work and started exchanging emails. About four emails a day, that is, everyday for the rest of the week. There were partial differential equations to solve, reworking of certain equations, and arguments with our professor about what we were and were not asked to do in the experiment. The conclusion to our seven days of anguish was our professor authoring a Mathematica program to solve our equation for us and basically telling us that there had been a serious source of systematic error in our experiment.

Really? Because we were only off by “about a centimeter.” (sarcasm)

“I feel like this week was karma for that lie,” Ginger announced this morning in lecture.

“I know,” I agreed.

Her words were true, but her choice of words was stinging. It was a lie, no matter how we wanted to play it. Yes, it had seemed like a harmless lie at the time and yes, I was being influenced by my lab partner, my low blood sugar, and the sunshine calling to me from outside. But, in our haste to escape from a silly introductory physics lab thirty minutes early, we repaid that debt time six times over during the week.

Ginger called it karma, but 1 Corinthians 4:5 says, “He will bring to light what is hidden in the darkness and will expose the motives of men’s hearts.” Moreover, Ephesians 4:27 tells us not to give the devil even a “foothold.”

I like the analogy that God uses for his children as being sheep. Sometimes we follow blindly and rely on a sheep’s wisdom and leadership (that’s you, Ginger! Just kidding…) instead of consulting the word of God hidden within our heart (Psalm 119:11). How much easier and pleasing to God it would have been to just do things right in the first place! Something tells me that if we did, we might still have gotten out early.

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Just so you know, I don’t blame you for this. I mean, not really. I wanted to write this blog and the writer’s block induced stress was a consequence of the animal known as the written word, not you. Besides, I’ve known what’s been going on for years.

I think it was on my 23^rd birthday, actually, as I sat with foil highlights in my hair that my hairdresser perkily informed me,

“Oh, look! You’ve got a gray hair!”

Really, who says those kinds of things on someone’s birthday? Obviously my hairdresser hates me.

Having a single gray hair that’s easily concealed by Revlon No. 9 is one thing. The realization that gray hairs multiply and form small armies when unbridled is quite another. (And no, I don’t actually know what number my highlights are…they might be Matrix even…and no, you are not allowed to leave me comments about the ills of hair dying because I know you do it too).

It was only yesterday that I began to embrace the magnitude of the situation. As I gingerly parted my hair before class, yet another one boldly appeared–taunting me. Angered by its presence and the momentary absence of my tweezers, I resorted to sheer brute force against the enemy. I’ve played the cello for 14 years. I have amazing dexterity and precision of hand when necessary.

Sin is a lot like gray hair, though. It seems innocuous and even unnoticeable at first, but without intervention, it multiplies. Usually, we do our best to conceal it, but sometimes we don’t—satisfied that just a little bit of sin makes us more approachable or even attractive. I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve even justified sin as a witnessing tool, as being a little less clean had made me a lot more appealing in some crowds.

Unlike gray hair, though, sin is neither a “crown of glory” (Prov. 16:31) nor “splendor” (Prov. 20:29). The wages of sin are death—pure and simple (Romans 6:23). We are instructed to eschew sin in every form and Matthew 5:30 says to “cut it off and throw it away.”

This is, of course, the reason that I took a certain degree of pride in yanking that hair out yesterday. I might be noticeably thin on top the next time you see me, but at least you’ll know I’m not hiding anything in the tent.

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“Do you like me less now that you know I’m not Catholic?”

My classmate, an undergraduate student taking the same lab, was pulling on the stained white lab apron draped across her midsection and squinching her eyes nervously.

“Oh please, why would I like you less?,” I responded lightly.

From her more than casual associations with the Catholic Student Association, I had just assumed that she was one. Besides, from conversation, her knowledge of the operations of the Catholic church was more advanced than most.

“Well, I don’t know. Because I’m agnostic…?” she asked.

“No, I don’t like you less,” I reassured her.

“It’s not that I have a problem with God,” she continued, hovering close to me as I suspended a test tube over a hot sand bath, “It’s that I have a problem with Jesus.”

And, there it was. It was the very argument heard ad infinitum from the unbelievers in my life.

Just last month, as I sat in an evening service at Sligo SDA, a (non-Adventist) friend I once dated told me,

“I really like these [worship] songs. I actually know most of them because I accidentally found this radio station that I liked and it was playing all of them.”

I started smiling, in anticipation.

“But then when I realized they were singing about Jesus one time,” he continued, “I changed the station and stopped listening to it.”

This notion of Jesus, in fact, was the very reason that our relationship never progressed beyond serious. No matter how appealing the church, a loving God, or very obvious answers to prayers were, it was just too much to accept Jesus.

This week in our Sabbath School lesson, Roy Adams has been investigating the demise of the theological basis of Jesus’ existence. It was when humanism (“the optimistic belief in human capacity and progress”) started, he asserts, that the acceptance of Jesus as a mere historical figure did too.

Without the lens of faith, I can actually understand the reservations of my friends. (I’ve never seen an ordinary man born to a virgin and then transcended to heaven after dying, have you?) But with faith, the universality and specificity of the disbelief just seems a little too…crafted. After all, without an acceptance of Jesus, the notion of a loving God who would take such extreme measures to ensure salvation for His creations is unbelievable. Then, without a belief in a loving God, there’s no reason to hope for anything beyond this life. There’s no need for Christianity. Or, in the case of my lab mate, any religion at all.

The worst part is that because of this planted disbelief, blindness to the greatest love ever known ensues. Salvation is never understood, much less embraced, because this notion of Jesus is used as an overwhelming stumbling block.

So, what about you? Am I the only one with friends who don’t believe in Jesus? What do you tell people when they ask you about Jesus’ existence?

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