Saved by Grace, From a Lost World

Making a case for Jesus

(the “red letter quotes”)!

Are we too reliant on “saving grace” while the World “Goes to Hell in a hand basket?” Betting on a heavenly afterlife, while our blindness and deafness obscure pain and suffering in an ethically gutted fallen-world! Fifty-four percent (3.67 billion people in the Abrahamic, Monotheist Faiths) of the world’s population in their religions believe (at least, by doctrine for most) in a heavenly, paradisiacal, eternal-afterlife.

Recently, after a Salvation Army Board meeting, a friend asked to have a word with me: To begin, he commented favorably on a proposal I had just offered; however, as we sat face to face across the table, the conversation quickly turned to religion. My friend, a few years my senior with some health problems, commented, “Religion is a personal thing.” He was raised Methodist but beginning with his marriage of many years has attended a Baptist church with his wife. “My wife gives to the Baptist and I give likewise to the Methodist Church where I was reared,” he said. Thirty-two years earlier, this friend had invited me to become an advisory board member of the local Salvation Army (SA). He, like me, I believe, considers the SA his second church. Also, that our commitment to the William Booth Principle, “Man’s soul can’t be saved until his physical needs of food and personal cares are met,” is no less an integral, if not an overriding, law of Christianity. Jesus’ prescribed “social justice” is mandated throughout the scriptures. Jesus the greatest ethical teacher of all time, in fact, urgently demands it as a prerequisite to “salvation’s gateway.”

Sharing our thoughts with each other, I told my friend of a recent personal revelation: I discovered after reading a Memorial to my great granddaddy, how uncannily my Christian beliefs may be comparable to his, Micajah Cox, a Quaker (or Society of Friends). In this tribute, written after his death in 1914, Mathew 25 (a strong emphasis of my own, verses 34 and following) was referenced as justification for his Heavenly resting place: “After many trials, and we believe many triumphs, when the time came to hear the voice of his Master saying: “Come ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world,” Matt. 25:34, it found him at his post doing the work of his earthly home and serving his Heavenly Father. Without a moment’s warning the call came and he took his cross home to lay at his Master’s feet, and we doubt not he received a crown with many stars in it.”

Perhaps it was, in part, William Booth’s life, 1829–1912; his founding of the Salvation Army in 1865 that strongly influenced Micajah Cox’s life, 1847-1914, when in the 1880s there was a social gospel, a “social justice” movement which carried an enhanced importance to Jesus’ ethical teachings. I now realize this explicit “theological spirituality” by some vein must have descended to my personal religious belief.

There now seems to be a revival, resurgence, a new sense of urgency for Jesus’ social justice and ethical teachings. It is exemplified in ministries such as Rick Warren, Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo ---- and in theological studies, such as at Union Theological Seminary. Attesting to the homiletic values of such ministry is this succinct, manifold sermon (a table-discussion) on Faith and Social Justice. This discussion, lead by the ordained Baptist minister and scholar, Bill Moyers, is guaranteed to provoke your sensibilities to what went wrong in the current world financial debacle. It is a call for our ethical responsibility, to our nation, our world. Three theologians: Gary Dorrien and Serene Jones of Union Theological Seminary and Cornel West of Princeton University challenge us, in our shortcoming-Christianity that fails the populous of “a fallen world.”

Salvation by grace is easy: baptized at 13; made a Profession of Faith; saved forever! Or is it not so easy? For Jesus said, "The most important one (commandment) is this: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these." Is that so easy? “How deep is your love?” Cornel West begs to question. Serene Jones says, “Justice is nothing but love with legs.” Gary Dorrien says, “It's the love that, that's what holds you in the struggle, you know. Even if you're not succeeding!” (Listen for the “religious transformation/ reformation” that I wrote about in Has Anyone Seen God?)

These theologians remind us of our nature (forgetting ethics) to keep repeating our failures ---- as Harold Myerson puts straightforward in his Whiz Kids, Wall Street Division: comparing the whiz kids, Rumsfeld and McNamara, to Wall Street’s hubris: “like McNamara, of a system perfected by the best minds of his time, a system that should have worked but that failed catastrophically. (Robert) Rubin's repentance is a private matter, but the lessons that his protégés Larry Summers and Tim Geithner derive from the failure of deregulated hypercapitalism are of the utmost public concern. Whiz kids themselves, do they still believe in the capacity of their fellow whizzes to concoct financial devices so mathematically sound that strong regulation would be superfluous?”

In our human imperfections, our brokenness, our financial security/insecurity, our inebriated materiality, we too easily find justification to overlook the “deep truth” of LOVE --- Jesus’ love that demands the “legs of justice.” Tony Campolo in his book, “Red Letter Christians (You know those Bible ‘red letter’ words that Jesus spoke!),” refers to Charles Finney’s nineteenth-century evangelical preaching that won a group of firebrand followers who became a major force in the American anti-slavery movement. When his salvation-seeking listeners came down the aisle, Finney gave them the invitation to accept Christ, immediately asking them, if they were willing to become abolitionist (Love’s legs for justice!).

Could a “party in the afterlife” by unmerited “saving grace” make us happy, knowing we did nothing to alleviate a sickened world? Where’s the grace for those left here on earth we so dearly love? I would not discount grace for one moment, for I need it; everyone needs grace. “Unmerited grace for salvation” is scripturally derived doctrine. Even so, the Bible gives other different ways to Salvation, one according to Jesus’ “red letter words,” maybe, exclusive of unmerited grace. Rev. Samuel Gregory Jones, rector of St. Michael's Episcopal Church in Raleigh, NC says, “I am not primarily concerned with my eternal destination. As a Christian, I believe I should be primarily concerned with following Christ as one already made a citizen of the Kingdom, and should therefore seek to follow Christ in discipleship and mission. As Johnny Cash once sang, God is not calling us to be "so heavenly minded we're no earthly good." Winkler of Faith in Action, United Methodist Board of Church and Society writes: “We can focus on personal salvation and social justice. John Wesley and Jesus certainly did so. These are two sides of the same coin. In today’s world it is irresponsible to turn inward while God’s very creation is at risk.”

In Bottom Line Beliefs (a Sunday school lesson book we are now using in the Good News Class at Centenary UM), by Michael Brown (pastor of Marble Collegiate Church), he points to: “the Greek word for “salvation,” which is soteria and does not refer to doctrinal rigidity or even to one’s destination in afterlife, but simply means “to become whole.”

If unmerited “SALVATION by GRACE” becomes the “main theme” disguising Jesus’ other “red letter truth,” what good is that to lessen the pain and make safer an unjust and perilous world? We leave behind a world of grief, perishing humans, a world that spends 1.46 trillion dollars a year (In 2008, 42% [not included: intelligence gathering, nuclear weapon programs and homeland security] of that was spent by USA which has only 4.5% of the world’s population); a nuclear proliferation triggered to blow us to Kingdom Come. Do we not have a lot of work yet to do on this planet? I often wonder: How would Jesus’ teachings and parables read, if He was in today’s worldly experiences? The money changers in the temple would be a very mild irritation, compared to beyond-belief judgments He would surely have on greed, outrageous absurdities, hypocrisy, disparagements, denigrations, racism, healthcare inequities, legislative lobbyist; the political, economic, social, and the military complex of nations or the unsettling, much debated and questioned, climate issues.

The last stanza of my favorite, Hymn of Promise, expresses hope for salvation to eternal life: In our end is our beginning; in our time, infinity; in our doubt there is believing; in our life eternity. In our death, a resurrection; at last, a victory, unrevealed until its season, something God alone can see (Natalie Sleeth, 1986). In If Grace Is True, Gulley and Mulholland provide “abundant salvation” for all mankind. If that’s true, the comforting “words of salvation” for a deceased loved one extended to the bereaved is a prevenient grace.

A different longtime friend recently told me he believed very few people would enter Heaven. If we are to be honest, we don’t know about any of this; only God is the Omnipotent, All Knowing One; we only have our beliefs. However, we can be assured of one thing: Our honoring Jesus’ teaching for a life of ethical conduct and social justice is the only hope for those we leave behind to live in this world. Albert Nolan, in Jesus before Christianity, said orthopraxis (true practice of Jesus’ ethics) as opposed to orthodoxy (true doctrine) will lead us to the true essence of Jesus. Only by orthopraxis, can Jesus’ “love legs of Grace and Justice” permeate God’s infinite love, mercy, and goodwill to humankind, to become the “salvation for this world.” This is the noblest cause for our loved ones and for our eternal life, irrespective of what one believes about personal Salvation.

A Memorial to Micajah Cox

Printed 1915 by Nash Bros. Printers, Goldsboro, NC
Written by Daughter, Emma Cox Massey

This little memorial has been prepared and approved by Micajah Cox’s family, in memory of the noble, self-sacrificing life he lived. Hoping it may be a blessing to his children and grandchildren, and all who my chance to read it:

Micajah Cox was the son of William and Apsilla Cox, of Johnston County, North Carolina. He was born Fourth Month, 9th day, 1847, and died at his home, near the place of his birth, Second Month, 5th day, 1914, at the age of sixty-six years, nine months and twenty-six days.

He was a birthright member in the Society of Friends, his father being a minister in that denomination. His mother died when he was a small boy, his father married again and he never knew all the loving kindness and self-sacrifice of a mother’s love such as we, his children, have been blessed with. He bore many trials, even in his youth, his father being much away from home, he had many cares and much work for one so young and small of stature, and sometimes untrue reports were given the father. We have heard him relate experiences of his boyhood most pathetic, but he was going through a preparation, permitted by an all-wise Heavenly Father, for the trials and deep provings later on.

When the war between the states broke out, Friends suffered much and near the close of that bitter struggle some were forced into the army. For days and nights, our father with other young men, lay hid in the woods with no protection from the weather, and with very little to eat. The armies were overrunning the country and they hid to keep from being forced into a service which they could not perform. The last battle of that war was fought only a few miles from his home. The armies took away or destroyed almost everything and Friends, as well as others, knew hard times and much suffering. During the war Micajah was sent to New Garden Boarding School, partly to keep him from being forced into the army and also that he might get some useful education. But he did not stay long, the war left the country poor and devastated, food was scarce and much sickness and suffering followed. Father’s stories of those days have entertained we children many times, and he always told us he hoped we would never see anything like it. He loved peace in all things. He was married First Month, 10th day, 1867, to Mehetabel A. Jinnett, who was also a member of the Society of Friends. They lived happily together amid many trials and constant toil. They were ever devoted to each other and self-sacrificing one toward the other. The manner in which they lived, ever loving and considerate of each other and of others, should be a lasting inspiration to us their children.

The Master of Life saw fit to give them eight children, five sons and three daughters, and ours, though humble, was a happy home ruled by love. It required constant toil and economy on the part of both parents to support their family and keep a clean and comfortable home for themselves and Friends, who frequently came their way, and who were cheerfully entertained with the best their toil could provide.

Father was regular in his attendance of meetings, conscientiously concerned for the welfare of his family and the strengthening and up-building of the Society. He took his children with him to meetings and we have felt the sacredness of sitting under the shadow of the Almighty. The spirit of unrest, called progress, began to appear in the Society of Friends, and our dear father heard the call of his Lord to go forth in the ministry, with a warning against the rush into untried paths, and a plea for the truths as tried by the faithful ones of the Society in the years passed and gone.

Our dear mother well remembers the first time he spoke in meeting. It was given him to speak from the text,” Behold I say unto you, Lift up your eyes and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest,” as found in John 4:35 and “Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest that ye will send forth laborers into his harvest.” Matt. 9:38.

After the burden was lifted from his mind and he sat down, his father arose and quoted for Matt 17:5. “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him.” The time soon came when he needed all the fortitude that former trials had given him, for opposition and persecutions were his portion. Few were with him and many against him. As the years passed he bore his trials and persecutions patiently, ever trusting in the true and living God, who he endeavored to serve, but his persecutors kept in authority and the meeting never recognized his call. Through it all father was always loving and kind, never refusing help where he could render it, even to those who were most cruel to him. But oh! What he suffered none but an all seeing God can ever know. Some of us can remember waking in the night time, in our childhood and hearing his loved voice pleading with a merciful Father in Heaven for knowledge and strength to know and do His will. Though he suffered as few have suffered in his generation, yet he knew of the peace and safety of abiding with his Lord.

His devoted wife was ever his help and comfort, and her prayers mingled with his as they appealed to their one Friend who was ever ready to comfort and sustain. The years of severe toil and deep anguish of soul told on father’s strength and in the spring of 1896 he was critically ill for weeks, his life was but a brittle thread, then he rallied and though he never regained his strength, yet he was ever about his Master’s work, with his heart and his hands doing all the good he could.

During his sickness he told us of a most beautiful and wonderful experience through which he had gone. Said the Savior came to earth and went with him to the various meetings and sifted the congregations. He saw those who had accused and persecuted him in the sifter. Saw how few of all the multitudes were left when the chaff was sifted away, how few golden grains for the Master’s harvest. At the home meeting place a fire was kindled to burn up the chaff and father say some, even of his father’s household, so near the fire their clothes were scorched by the flames. The Savior took him to the courts of Heaven and showed him the glory thereof, the wonderful peace and beauty and happiness that is for those who are faithful, in this life, to the requirements of a Christian life, not for those who are great in their own estimation or who win the applause of men, but for the meek and humble, for all those who keep their lives and souls clean, their lights bright and shinning. Father requested that all he had told us be remembered, and we have often wished we had that experience all written down, but he was too weak at the time to do more than tell it to us. And in the years that followed he suffered much physical pain and never regained the strength it would have required of him.

The spirit of unrest and dissatisfaction in the meeting grew and admitted things which father could not support, and be true to the light that was given him, so he withdrew and a few years later, when the separation came, he joined the conservative or smaller body of Friend, who were trying to hold on to the principles which have sustained and protected true Friends since the foundation of the Society.

Father was feeble during all those latter years and did not attend meeting except in his own home, where for some time before his death the families of his family met for worship. In these family meetings he plead with us to be watchful and prayerful, remembering at all times that God is a spirit and they that worship Him, must worship Him in spirit and in truth. John 4:24.

After many trials, and we believe many triumphs, when the time came to hear the voice of his Master saying: “Come ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world,” Matt.25:34, it found him at his post doing the work of his earthly home and serving his Heavenly Father. Without a moment’s warning the call came and he took his cross home to lay at his Master’s feet, and we doubt not he received a crown with many stars in it.

His faithful wife, eight children and twelve grandchildren, mourned not for him, for well we know that our loss is his eternal gain, but for the desolation in our own lives do we mourn. Even in his weakness of body he has been a tower of strength to us. And now we would try to follow where he led, and our desire is that we may all be true and worthy to meet him in that happy home when our work too is finished, that we may be ready to hear the call to which our loved one responded.

“Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.”