As I read President Barack Obama’s book entitled “The Audacity of Hope“, I am thoroughly encouraged on how Jesus has shared His human faith with him. I am encouraged at how full of Good News, inclusive, human, spiritual and physical it all is! (it sounds a great deal like Dr. Baxter Kruger’s wonderful “A Note On Jesus Christ and The Church“.!
I thought that as one who may not as of yet looked into President Obama’s faith, you might want to read some of it for yourself in his section called “Faith”, on pp. 244-246.
Here is a small section of it (the rest is pretty awesome, too!):
“I have recorded in a previous book the ways in which my early work in Chicago helped me grow into my manhood-how my work with the pastors and laypeople there deepened my resolve to lead a public life, how they fortified my racial identity and confirmed my belief in the capacity of ordinary people to do extraordinary things.
But my experiences in Chicago also forced me to confront a dilemma that my mother never fully resolved in her own life: the fact that I had no community or shared traditions in which to ground my most deeply held beliefs. The Christians with whom I worked recognized themselves in me; they saw that I knew their Book and shared their values and sang their songs.
But they sensed that a part of me remained removed, detached, an observer among them. I came to realize that without a vessel for my beliefs, without an unequivocal commitment to a particular community of faith, I would be consigned at some level to always remain apart, free in the way that my mother was free, but also alone in the same ways she was ultimately alone.
There are worse things than such freedom. My mother would live happily as a citizen of the world, stitching together a community of friends wherever she found herself, satisfying her need for meaning in her work and in her children. In such a life I, too, might have contented myself had it not been for the particular attributes of the historically black church, attributes that helped me shed some of my skepticism and embrace the Christian faith.
For one thing, I was drawn to the power of the African American religious tradition to spur social change. Out of necessity, the black church had to minister to the whole person. Out of necessity, the black church rarely had the luxury of separating individual salvation from collective salvation. It had to serve as the center of the community’s political, economic, and social as well as spiritual life; it understood in an intimate way the biblical call to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and challenge powers and principalities.
In the history of these struggles, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death; rather, it was an active, palpable agent in the world. In the day-to-day work of the men and women I met in church each day, in their ability to “make a way out of no way” and maintain hope and dignity in the direst of circumstances, I could see the Word made manifest.
And perhaps it was out of this intimate knowledge of hardship, the grounding of faith in struggle, that the historically black church offered me a second insight: that faith doesn’t mean that you don’t have doubts, or that you relinquish your hold on this world.
Long before it became fashionable among television evangelists, the typical black sermon freely acknowledged that all Christians (including the pastors) could expect to still experience the same greed, resentment, lust, and anger that everyone else experienced. The gospel songs, the happy feet, and the tears and shouts all spoke of a release, an acknowledgment, and finally a channeling of those emotions.
In the black community, the lines between sinner and saved were more fluid; the sins of those who came to church were not so different from the sins of those who didn’t, and so were as likely to be talked about with humor as with condernnation. You needed to come to church precisely because you were of this world, not apart from it; rich, poor, sinner, saved, you needed to embrace Christ precisely because you had sins to wash away – because you were human I and needed an ally in your difficult journey, to make the peaks and valleys smooth and render all those crooked paths straight.
It was because of these newfound understandings that religious commitment did not require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic and social justice, or otherwise retreat from the world that I knew and loved-that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day and be baptized.
It came about as a choice and not an epiphany; the questions I had did not magically disappear. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side of Chicago, I felt God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering his truth.”
Did you catch President Obama’s thoughts in paragraph’s 4 & 5 that sound A LOT like the good discussion regarding the Church community that we had on my last blogpost?! Ha-Ha! That’s what I’m talkin about Mr. President! 
Posted by tjbrassell 
