It is rumored that upon receiving a piece of hate mail, President Harry Truman turned to his wife and said, “Bess, why do you suppose it is only sons of bitches know how to lick a stamp?”
Having worked in the news industry as long as I have, I can personally confirm that Mr. Truman was onto something.
I’ve gotten letters from grammarians who became suddenly passionate about monarch butterflies. I’ve gotten letters from people absolutely certain the government had installed a mind-control device in their left ear. I’ve gotten seven-page handwritten screeds calling me everything but a child of God — which, depending on the week, felt like the more accurate description anyway.
So when a hand-addressed envelope with an actual stamp on it showed up at The Georgia Sun last week, I did what any self-respecting small-town newspaper editor does: I poured a cup of coffee, sat down, and prepared to be entertained.
I was not disappointed.
Inside was a gospel tract — the little folded pamphlet that evangelical Christians leave at restaurants instead of tips, slip into library books, and apparently now mail to journalists. The implication, I gathered, was that I was a godless heathen, and the tract contained the information necessary to remedy that situation. I can only assume the sender attends an Independent Baptist Church where Pastor Billy Bob has informed the congregation that everyone in the media is a heathen on a hell-bound train, and someone decided to throw a rope.
Now, I want to be clear: I’m not offended. I actually find tracts kind of fascinating as a cultural artifact.
I went to a Christian concert in Conyers once for Memorial Day. As my wife and I were walking back from the concession stand, some terrified young man from what I can only assume was a college ministry literally tossed a tract at us, shouted “God loves you!” and sprinted away like he’d pulled a fire alarm. Now, we can have a whole separate conversation about the general futility of handing out tracts at a Christian concert — but looking for the lost among the saved is the definition of insanity and also, apparently, the preferred outreach method for a significant portion of the evangelical community. The poor kid was scared to death of actual human beings, which I understand, but at some point you have to ask whether a pamphlet tossed at a stranger’s feet is really closing the gap between man and the divine.
At least the person who mailed this one to me found a stamp and an envelope and a return address to leave off, which in this day and age represents a non-trivial level of commitment. I respect the effort even if I question the strategy.
But to the mysterious tract sender, I’d like to introduce myself, because I think we got off on the wrong foot.
I’m not a godless heathen. I’m a Christian — though apparently not the kind that mails tracts to journalists. I grew up Methodist, did a stint as a Baptist, and have landed somewhere in the theological vicinity of “I believe deeply and also have a lot more questions than answers.” I’ve read Josh McDowell and Rachel Held Evans. I’m a Calvinist who occasionally wanders into universalist territory and doesn’t lose sleep over the contradiction. I chair the board of a Christian nonprofit my wife and I started together.
I’ve been in the church most of my life, through seasons of feeling close to God and seasons where we weren’t exactly on speaking terms. If you know my story — the chronically ill wife, the infertility, the children we lost — you know that my faith isn’t inherited furniture sitting in a corner gathering dust. It’s been tested, refinished, and occasionally thrown down a flight of stairs. So whoever sent that tract would do well to know they didn’t accidentally stumble onto a heathen. They stumbled onto someone who has wrestled with God longer and harder than most, and hasn’t let go yet.
I say all of that not to brag, but to set up the obvious question: if we’re both Christians, why are we looking at each other like strangers?
I think it’s because we may be following two different versions of Jesus. And I say that with genuine humility, because I know I don’t have this all figured out either. But when I go back and read the actual text, here’s what I keep finding:
The Jesus in the Gospels didn’t seem particularly interested in keeping people out. He spent most of his time with the wrong people on purpose — fishermen, tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers, the ritually unclean, the politically compromised. His inner circle was not exactly a country club membership.
He saved his most colorful language for the religiously certain. “Brood of vipers.” “Sons of hell.” “Whitewashed tombs.” That wasn’t aimed at the sinners. That was aimed at the people who had God so figured out they had stopped being curious about him. I think about that more than is probably comfortable.
He healed people who weren’t supposed to be healed on the days they weren’t supposed to be healed. He fed crowds nobody asked him to feed. He forgave someone mid-crucifixion, which most reasonable people would agree is above and beyond.
He told a rich young man to give everything he had to the poor. When the man walked away sad, Jesus didn’t chase him and backtrack and try to get back in his good-graces just because he was wealthy and influential.
He said the hungry should be fed, the sick cared for, the foreigner welcomed, the prisoner shown mercy — and that how you treat the least of these is how you treat him. That’s not spin. That’s Matthew 25. It’s right there.
I’m not here to tell you I’ve got Jesus fully sorted. Nobody does. But the Jesus I find time and time again doesn’t look much like a partisan mascot. He looks like someone who was perpetually inconvenient to the powerful and perpetually present with the desperate.
That’s the one I keep stumbling after, imperfectly, with a lot of coffee and too much self-doubt.
Thomas Merton once famously said “I don’t know how to please you Lord, but I think the fact that I want to please you pleases you.”
If you’re so certain of who Jesus is that you’re sending out tracts to people you don’t know backhandedly condemning them to eternal damnation, I think you’re missing who he is.
So thank you for the tract. Genuinely. It gave me a column, which is more than most people’s correspondence does.
Want more of B.T. Clark’s observations? Buy the book!
