I was going to call this “Not meek and mild”, but when I think about the passage of scripture and the meta rhetoric of events like Ferguson that is the incorrect title. The passage is confrontational. And those who preach social justice above all, and a social gospel, are deeply heretical: Christ confronted those who talked about oppression: the oppression was real.
And some comforter Jesus is. Pilate, that tyrant, had killed a bunch of men who had gone to Jerusalem to do their religious duty. Did Jesus protest? Did he comfort the grieving? Did he demand that the soldiers were indicted?
No he did not. He did not preach comfort. Nor did he preach revolution. Instead he preached hellfire. Some comforter. I can hear the sisters in the back of the church muttering .’You cannot say that. It is inappropriate. YOu are supposed to comfort us in our grief, not confront us! We are victims, the oppressors need to repent, not us! Some pastor you are. What happened to ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild’ that my mother taught me the sing to?’
That ‘gentle Jesus’ never existed.
There were some present at that very time who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And he answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”
And he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard, and he came seeking fruit on it and found none. And he said to the vinedresser, ‘Look, for three years now I have come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and I find none. Cut it down. Why should it use up the ground?’ And he answered him, ‘Sir, let it alone this year also, until I dig around it and put on manure. Then if it should bear fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’”
(Luke 13:1-9 ESV)
Onto the first point: Jesus is Gentle, but Gentle means that one is strong, lethally so. You have the ability to hurt, maim and kill: but your violence is kept under check. You are disciplined in your wrath, as you are in your other desires. This is the discipline of the martial student, of the soldier. Jesus is meek, but the meek seek the will of God above all things and speak those truths that are uncomfortable. And calling Jesus mild is simply wrong.
But onto the oppressions of this time, from the institutionalization of race and class warfare, or the execution of those who do not fit neatly into our ideology, be it the Islamists mass killing Christians, Yezahdis, Jews, and the wrong kind of Muslims or the Social injustice wimps wishing that those who hurt their feelings did so, Christ calls us to account.
We are not responsible for those sins of the oppressors. We are responsible for our own. We are all damned, we are all guilty.
And this is why Al Sharpton, that bile filled preacher of racial division, is as heretical as the most rigid Afrikaaner Dutch Reformed who still preaches that the children of Noah’s last son should serve the first. There is no black and white in Christ, true. The police in America are getting to Roman Procuratal levels of oppression, true. But to preach that this makes us innocent, that the guilt is all upon the oppressor, is deepest heresy, and Al Sharpton better drop to his knees and preach differently.
The Afrikaaners repented. The move to unite the reformed churches in South Africa has been and no doubt will be painful: there are deep divisions between the multiple races there (and the Afrikaaners are as truly a tribe of the area as the Xhosa, Zulu, or the Cape people) and the churches had grown over time into different ways of doing things, in different languages. But there needs to be unity. And all need to repent.
Therefore, we reject any doctrine which absolutizes either natural diversity or the sinful separation of people in such a way that this absolutization hinders or breaks the visible and active unity of the church, or even leads to the establishment of a separate church formation; which professes that this spiritual unity is truly being maintained in the bond of peace while believers of the same confession are in effect alienated from one another for the sake of diversity and in despair of reconciliation; which denies that a refusal earnestly to pursue this visible unity as a priceless gift is sin; which explicitly or implicitly maintains that descent or any other human or social factor should be a consideration in determining membership of the church.
I am not seeing this in Ferguson. Instead I see division by race: I do not see this in much of America, where the historically black churches sit alongside the White. We have a similar problem in NZ, where the historically congregational (Tongan, Samoan and Rarotongan) congregations want to be apart. And this is wrong.
I grew up in a sink suburb. My father was an elder in the Presbyterian Kirk, and we had a large Pacific Island population, mainly from Rarotonga and Samoa. The elders from those groups wanted to separate. But this was not considered right, Instead, we had to incorporate some of the traditions they valued — including competitive choirs singing hymns they loved and we did not know — into our services. We had to deal with different assumptions on how families ran from the Scots/Ulster roots of the Pakeha (white) congregation.
We had to be gentle to each other. We had to confront at times, but we had to keep the unity. We did not want to shatter into small tribes by our skin colour. And when I visit my old man, who now worships with the Pentecostals, I grin widely. For standing next to us, will be a Samoan Family: an Indian family, a Chinese family: the church is now a family of faith, and our love of God overcomes our cultural differences
The social justice agenda is against the work of Christ. Let it not determine your theology. Preach repentance, oppressed, or (as in the second parable) during times of peace, when the hurts one has are trivial. For if we continue as our desires want us to, we will die.
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UPDATE
Within the church we are one, but for some jobs you have to qualify.
SJWs are opposed to meritocracy. Reviews shouldn't be based on merit, employment should be "fair", etc.
#GamerGate pic.twitter.com/4hrvG1Mx1z
— Trevor Trust (@TrustedTrevor) November 3, 2014
