It is easy to say unkind things about Evangelicals. I heard most of those when I was a little kid hanging out in Nazarene churches. Nazarenes used to dismiss what we now call “Evangelicals” by drawing attention to their “worldliness” and “hypocrisy.” They’d roll their eyes at the notion that all Christians sin daily “in word, thought, and deed.” They’d roll their eyes at the smokers standing outside of church doors, just before or just after a Sunday service. It seemed generally assumed that riches were obtained by unGodly means and that the holders of economic and political power in the world were miles away from the righteousness of the gospel.
How things have changed! Nazarenes are now largely indistinguishable from the various more photogenic Evangelicals I encountered in my 14 years as professor of theology as Azusa Pacific University, a very, very self-consciously generic-Evangelical university, a place where no distinction is made between Southern Baptists, United Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Nazarenes, Roman Catholics, Messianic Jews, or any other groups, so long as they are not significantly critical of Evangelical party lines, especially on sexual and gender issues.
There was so much wrong with now mostly bygone Nazarene visions of holiness! But there was quite a lot right with it, too. I have been especially struck by how much the notion of “entire sanctification” as “dying out to self” has had one after another opening for mic-dropping retort, above all in the last couple of decades. However, since the doctrine died sometime in the 80s, there have been just about nobody to voice them.
Perhaps it is not too late for Nazarenes and other Wesleyan-Holiness types to remember that, paraphrasing Bonhoeffer, when Jesus calls us to follow him, he bids us to come and die. And that means something way more important than a narrowly imagined “spiritual” death, the death of an abstract “willingness.” It means the death that visits us economically, politically, socially, culturally, in the way we regard national boundaries, political parties, private property rights, investment portfolios, marriage certificates, biochemistry, genetics, sexuality, family, blood, and soil.
Citizens
Jon Guerra
I have a heart full of questions
Quieting all my suggestions
What is the meaning of Christian
In this American life?
I'm feeling awfully foolish
Spending my life on a message
I look around and I wonder
Ever if I heard it right
Coming to you 'cause I'm confused
Coming to you 'cause I feel used
Coming to weep while I'm waiting
Tell me you won't make me go
I need to know there is justice
That it will roll in abundance
And that you're building a city
Where we arrive as immigrants
And you call us citizens
And you welcome us as children home
You were alone and rejected
Misunderstood and detested
You gave it all, didn't hold back
You even gave up your life
How can we call ourselves Christians
Saying that love is a tension
Between the call of the cross and
Between the old party line
Coming to you for the mothers
Who are all running for cover
There is a flood from their weeping
Tell me you won't make them go
I need to know there is justice
That it will roll in abundance
And that you're building a city
Where we arrive as immigrants
And you call us citizens
And you welcome us as children home
There is a man with a family
He has a wife and a baby
He broke the law just to save them
Working for three bucks an hour
Truly you said we were equal
Everyone's heart is deceitful
Everyone born is illegal
When love is the law of the land
Coming to you for the hungry
Eating the scraps of this country
Didn't you swear you would feed them
Tell me you won't make them go
I need to know there is justice
That it will roll in abundance
And that you're building a city
Where we arrive as immigrants
And you call us citizens
And you welcome us as children home
There is a wolf who is ranting
All of the sheep they are clapping
Promising power and protection
Claiming the Christ who was killed
Killed by a common consensus
Everyone screaming "Barabbas"
Trading their God for a hero
Forfeiting Heaven for Rome
Coming to you 'cause I'm angry
Coming to you 'cause I'm guilty
Coming to you 'cause you've promised
To leave the flock for the one
I need to know there is justice
That it will roll in abundance
And that you're building a city
Where we arrive as immigrants
And you call us citizens
And you welcome us as children home
Where we arrive as immigrants
And you call us citizens
And you welcome us as children home
Is there a way to love always?
Living in enemy hallways
Don't know my foes from my friends and
Don't know my friends anymore
Power has several prizes
Handcuffs can come in all sizes
Love has a million disguises
But winning is simply not one