I Preach Christ

To Those with a Heart to Hear:

How does one preach Christ to the hip-hop generation? I think the apostle Paul taught all Christians an important lesson when preaching to the Athenians and quoting poetry that was familiar to them: context matters. Although God’s truth in the gospel does not change, cultures will vary from community to community. Being able to place the gospel of Christ within a cultural framework that is relevant to your audience is an essential principle of evangelism. This may mean becoming familiar with the language and customs of a community in order to effectively communicate with its members.

Christian hip-hop music borrows its language and customs from the broader hip-hop culture while making the latter captive to the truth of Christ. Cultural metaphors and intricate rhyme schemes are still prevalent but the content has been transformed to bring listeners to the ultimate spiritual truth. A Christian emcee named Brothatone says, “I preach Christ cause it’s necessary, without Him homies is dying looking like Jay-Z fading to black.” The artist here has used the name and work of a prominent secular rapper to convey to the listener that without Christ, death is the final reality. He goes on to proclaim that he preaches “the true Messiah, who don’t hang from your necklace.” This shows him making a distinction between the truth about Jesus Christ and the glamorized or fabricated representations people may see in the media or history books. The listener is then allowed to decide whether or not to inquire further about God’s truth. I believe this is an effective method that creates a situation where the listener is inclined to ask questions, which in return can be answered with God’s Word.

While hip-hop culture inherently provides a medium for Christians to spread the gospel, there are also some inherent challenges that the culture presents in reaching out to members of the generation. One of the challenges is the antagonistic relationship with authority that has historically been a part of hip-hop’s appeal to young people. How does one preach submission to an Almighty God to a generation whose response to respecting earthly authorities is “F#&! the police”? Granted that Christian hip-hop in many ways parts with older traditions in the church, the notion of reverence for and obedience to Christ as supreme authority is never questioned. In order to be serious about preaching Christ to the hip-hop generation, one must work to debunk the myth that man is the ultimate authority to himself. In a culture and society that asserts “power to the people,” the Christian must firmly proclaim “Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.” May God's peace be with you.

Hand-Me-Downs

To Those with a Heart to Hear:

Back in the day, when I was young–I’m not a kid anymore and neither do I wish to be one again–you could find me wearing a maroon velvet zipper shirt, a pair of loose fitting cream jeans, and some black Timberlands. I was in the seventh grade at the time and with my Elvis Presley side burns (what you know about facial hair at 12), no one could tell me that I was not “the king.” The funny thing is that save for the Timbs, which my mother reluctantly purchased in an effort to indulge my social conformity, the clothes that I boasted were not even my own. The jeans and shirt that I faithfully rocked with pride once belonged to my friend Justin. I never gave much thought to my “hand-me-down” clothes other than the fact that Justin was two years older than me, and the big brother I never had, so anything that was cool enough for him was most definitely fresh enough for me. Then eleven years later I was introduced to a community of African-American women from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, and everything changed.

It was a cool afternoon last December in San Francisco. My mother and I were hanging out for the holidays and had made plans to visit the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. Mom has always been a fan of the arts (performing and fine), me not as much, but her passion often leads me to discover new interests and this experience followed suit. After some time exploring the traditional collections and exhibitions, we came to Mom’s highlight for the day, The Quilts of Gee’s Bend. The Quilts is a collection of handmade fabrics from over six generations of African-American women, spanning from Reconstruction until the present, living in an all-black rural community in Alabama (for more information click here). With a pre-recorded tour guide leading me through the museum’s audio headset, I entered into their world.

The artistic genius of the women responsible for The Quilts is self-evident upon walking into the exhibition. Each piece of fabric is woven together like the lives of characters in a story, with each quiltmaker writing the narrative from her own perspective. The website boasts that “critics worldwide have compared the quilts to the works of important artists such as Henri Matisse and Paul Klee”–both of whom I know little about–however, it is to our great disadvantage to interpret The Quilts solely for its artistic value. Of greater importance is the art that lies beneath the art: the art of survival.

During my tour of the exhibition, my audio guide shared behind-the-scenes information about the origins of many of the pieces. One in particular struck me as relevant to my relationship with hand-me-down clothes. In the early to mid-1900s, one of the quiltmakers received a shipment of used pants from a Connecticut woman, and she offered them to community members, many of whom were poor. However, people rejected the offer stating that the pants were “out of style.” She urged and pressed them but they still refused, so she turned the pants into quilts. The quilts from Gee’s Bend were often made from old articles of clothing, things that people did not want or could not wear anymore. The women who were quilting would then recycle the clothes into pieces of fabric that could provide warmth in the night, curtains for the windows, or covering for a kitchen table. The quilters even produced fabrics for major department stores, creating significant revenue streams for the entire community. Through the generations what they “handed down,” was not merely a pastime or a hobby, it was a strategy for survival.

Although my childhood connection to hand-me-downs was coated with superficial aspirations of trying to be the freshest kid in the class (though clearly my outfits must have been “out of style” as well), the reality is that it put clothes on my back and allowed my mom to focus finances on other areas of need. This culture of handing down undoubtedly helps countless families survive on a daily basis, even amidst the selfish and materialistic society that we live in.

Yet in still, the real value of hand-me-down culture stretches far beyond the physical and into the spiritual realm. If humanity is clever enough to find ways to survive by handing down material possessions in a world that is fading away, how much more should humans be seeking to hand down the strategy for eternal survival? How much more should we be like the quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend, who sat on porches with their sisters, daughters, nieces and anyone else game to listen, singing gospels that proclaimed their faith in Jesus Christ? They like Lois and Eunice before them, grandmother and mother to Timothy (2 Timothy 1:5), handed down to their family the means of soul survival. If we learn anything from these women it is that we should be concerned with the state of our souls and our means of survival after this life ends. For this life will end and justice will prevail in a world inhabited by unjust men and women.

See God has offered us a means of eternal survival and that means is Jesus Christ. “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). For those who do not believe but desire to know the means, seek God with all your heart, mind, and soul, and by grace come to faith in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. For those who do believe and trust in His name, the greatest gift you can give someone is to hand down to them your faith in Christ, the means to eternal life.

“Now if you saw your friend about to get hit by a car,
You would run and push them out of the way.
Because you love him, you would shove him,
To keep the taker from shoveling that brown dirt over his grave.
Now if you would go to great length’s to save a man’s life,
‘Cause you don’t want to see them die on the road.
Then tell me how much more should you tell him about the Lord
Because you care about the state of his soul?”
-Da’ T.R.U.T.H., Go, The Faith

May God's peace be with you.

A Divorce from Death

To Those with a Heart to Hear:

I write to you in response to and in support of an article written by a friend of mine named Jason Hendrickson. Jason’s article, “HE'S A NIGGER! LOOK! HE'S A NIGGER!”, was written in response to Michael Richard’s racial tirade and the ever-present debate on the use of the word. In regards to Richard’s remarks some have stated that it was not the use of the word nigger that was the real problem but the application of lynching imagery. Others say that it is not being called a nigger but being treated like one that is most dehumanizing. And there is always the lingering argument that the word can be re-appropriated by African-Americans and is acceptable in certain social contexts. Allow me to reintroduce myself…

Just as we cannot remove a word from its context, neither can we separate spoken language and imagery. Thus, historically speaking, lynching in the United States and the word nigger are forever intertwined. Nigger was intended as a verbal castration, a figurative lynching of sorts. An actual lynching is the physical manifestation of the hatred behind the word nigger. The term "pick-a-nigger" was used to describe social events where whites would literally pick a black person to lynch as they gathered on the grass socializing and eating food. Today we call this a picnic, save for the lynching. I hear the frustration over the use of lynching imagery but it is in vain if we do not understand that in a US context, lynching and the word nigger are like a set of conjoined twins who share the same heart. They were born out of the womb of hatred and bred in a house of slavery and oppression.

The phrase, "it's one thing to be called a nigger, but it's another to be treated like one," is a false analysis of what it means to be called a nigger and what it means to call yourself a nigger (as Jason pointed out there is no distinction between nigger, nigga, nigguh, or any other variation of the word). To be called a nigger means that the speaker believes it just for you to be lynched. Lynching in this context can be physical (murdered, castrated, hanging from a tree), social (barring people from affordable housing, good health care, proper education, etc.) or emotional/mental (lack of self-esteem, moral depravity). To be called a nigger means that the speaker believes it just for you to be killed, impoverished, homeless, uneducated, illiterate, sexually abused, and stricken with disease and disability. He or she believes it just for you to live in a dysfunctional family and lack equal opportunities. Therefore, there is no distinction between being called a nigger and being treated like one. If you believe it is alright to be called a nigger is it not a plausible inference that you also believe it is alright to be treated like one (consciously or subconsciously)?

Historically speaking in the United States, the speaker of the word nigger has commonly been someone of the European descent directing his or her hatred at someone of African descent. However, we see that even when an African in the Americas, or black person, is the speaker of the word it is not separated from its twin. Whites used to lynch blacks and still do, but the evidence lies in the fact that as the word nigger has proliferated among the vocabulary of African-Americans, so has black on black lynching. It is of no coincidence that, per capita, blacks kill each other more than any other race in the United States. As the word nigger has become more commonly accepted, so have black murder rates, black STD rates and black unemployment rates. You can argue for the re-appropriation of the word nigger all you want; the truth remains that by calling yourself by the word or by believing that it is alright for someone else to call you by the word, you agree to the terms of your own oppression, dehumanization and death.

A notorious and profuse speaker of the word for the last eight to ten years of my life, I vainly spent my time fighting injustice with lukewarm intensity. For by calling myself a nigger, I was inflicting the same oppression that I was trying to put an end to. So this past summer, I loosened the noose from around my neck, untied the knot, let myself down from the tree, and burned the rope. I’m done with the word. I have stopped saying nigger, save for the sake of this letter, in hopes that my healing and transformation will be able to help others. May God's peace be with you.

Hanging on to Our Faith

To Those with a Heart to Hear:

It has come to me that I should share my thoughts with you as God continues to transform me and renew my mind through my faith in His son Jesus Christ. As an African-American, I understand the pain and suffering associated with the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow in the United States. I smell the residue every morning as I drive to work and I hear the field hollers of my ancestors in the cries of America’s black and poor. I often have grieved with and for those–including myself–whose only music is that of Du Bois’s songs of sorrow. Recently, I have asked myself: is our plight a plight of eternal grief and sadness? Surely not! Still, it does not mean that the land of Martin Luther King’s “dreams” is emerging upon the horizon. It does not mean that mere humans, such as, Barak Obama, Tavis Smiley, and Michael Eric Dyson, will deliver us into some ethereal society of justice, equality, and humanitarian love. Therefore, I write to you in hope that you would place your hope, your faith, in Jesus Christ.

The struggles that we face in this world often compel us to believe that our enemies consist of fellow human beings, fellow flesh and blood. Whether, rich versus poor, white versus black, conservative versus liberal, man versus woman, we characterize our conflicts by contrasting ourselves against other tangible, human forces. However, the Word of God tells us that “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6:12).

The apostle Paul’s letter to the churches in Galatia reminds me of how Satan pits flesh against flesh in order to harden our hearts to God. In the letter, Paul writes that “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: ‘Cursed is everyone who hung on a tree’” (Galatians 3:13, Deuteronomy 21:22-23). As I read this, graphic images flashed in my mind of tortured black bodies swinging high and low from the branches of American maples and oaks. Bodies “cursed” by many white Americans out of racist hatred for their fellow flesh and blood. Many ask why God would allow these atrocities to take place? Why slavery? Why genocide? They ask whether God–the same God that these racist white lynch mobs claimed to believe in–really loves black people? Worse yet, they doubt His very existence. Do not be deceived, Satan rejoices in the doubting of the Lord. For the real consequence and spiritual fallout of Jim Crow and lynching is that they hardened people’s hearts to God. Not only did Satan exploit the malicious ignorance of these white Americans, but he also drove away blacks, in droves, from the God that they believed had delivered them (rightly so) from slavery.

Despite the hurdle of hatred and the obstacle of oppression, the beauty of the Gospel in Paul’s letter lies in the salvation and redemption of life through Jesus Christ. Paul’s words ring as true now as they did then when he says “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1). Therefore, one should strive for social justice and equality with the realization and belief that true emancipation and victory only come through Christ. He is “the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father [God] except through [Him]” (John 14:6). There are not many paths to God, there is only “one faith” and “one Lord” (Ephesians 4:4-6). I implore you to seek Him out. Of all the pressing social issues of the past, present, and future, the acceptance and confession of Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior (Romans 10:9-10) is the most urgent. May God’s peace be with you.