“You bet.”
The Reverend Doctor Hosiah Jackson donned his best robe of black silk, a gift handmade by the ladies of his congregation, the three stripes on the upper arms designating his academic rank. He was in Gerry Patterson’s study, and a nice one it was. Outside the white wooden door was his congregation, all of them well-dressed and fairly prosperous white folks, some of whom would be slightly uncomfortable with having a black minister talk to them—Jesus was white, after all (or Jewish, which was almost the same thing). This was a little different, though, because this day they were remembering the life of someone only Gerry Patterson had ever met, a Chinese Baptist named Yu Fa An, whom their minister had called Skip, and whose congregation they had supported and supported generously for years. And so to commemorate the life of a yellow minister, they would sit through the sermon of a black one while their own pastor preached the gospel in a black church. It was a fine gesture on Gerry’s part, Hosiah Jackson thought, hoping it wouldn’t get him into any trouble with this congregation. There’d be a few out there, their bigoted thoughts invisible behind their self-righteous faces, but, the Reverend Jackson admitted to himself, they’d be tortured souls because of it. Those times had passed. He remembered them better than white Mississippians did because he’d been the one walking in the streets—he’d been arrested seven times during his work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—and getting his parishioners registered to vote. That had been the real problem with the rednecks. Riding in a municipal bus was no big deal, but voting meant power, real civic power, the ability to elect the people who made the laws which would be enforced on black and white citizens alike, and the rednecks hadn’t liked that at all. But times had changed, and now they accepted the inevitable—after it had come to pass—and they’d learned to deal with it, and they’d also learned to vote Republican instead of Democrat, and the amusing part of that to Hosiah Jackson was that his own son Robert was more conservative than these well-dressed rednecks were, and he’d gone pretty far for the son of a colored preacherman in central Mississippi. But it was time. Patterson, like Jackson, had a large mirror on the back of the door so that he could check his appearance on the way out. Yes, he was ready. He looked solemn and authoritative, as the Voice of God was supposed to look.
The congregation was already singing. They had a fine organ here, a real hundred-horsepower one, not the electronic kind he had at his church, but the singing . . . they couldn’t help it. They sang white, and there was no getting around it. The singing had all the proper devotion, but not the exuberant passion that he was accustomed to … but he’d love to have that organ, Hosiah decided. The pulpit was finely appointed, with a bottle of ice water, and a microphone provided by the CNN crew, who were discreetly in both back corners of the church and not making any trouble, which was unusual for news crews, Reverend Jackson thought. His last thought before beginning was that the only other black man to stand in this pulpit before this moment was the man who’d painted the woodwork.
“Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. I am Hosiah Jackson. You all probably know where my church is. I am here today at the invitation of my good friend and colleague, your pastor, Gerry Patterson.
“Gerry has the advantage over me today, because, unlike me, and I gather unlike any person in the church, he actually knew the man whom we are here to remember.
“To me, Yu Fa An was just a pen pal. Some years ago, Gerry and I had occasion to talk about the ministry. We met in the chapel at the local hospital. It’d been a bad day for both of us. We’d both lost good people that day, at about the same time, and to the same disease, cancer, and both of us needed to sit in the hospital chapel. I guess we both needed to ask God the same question. It’s the question all of us have asked— why is there such cruelty in the world, why does a loving and merciful God permit it?
“Well, the answer to that question is found in Scripture, and in many places. Jesus Himself lamented the loss of innocent life, and one of his miracles was the raising of Lazarus from the dead, both to show that He was indeed the Son of God, and also to show His humanity, to show how much He cared about the loss of a good man.
“But Lazarus, like our two parishioners that day in the hospital, had died from disease, and when God made the world, He made it in such a way that there were, and there still are, things that need fixing. The Lord God told us to take dominion over the world, and part of that was God’s desire for us to cure disease, to fix all the broken parts and so to bring perfection to the world, even as, by following God’s Holy Word, we can bring perfection to ourselves.
“Gerry and I had a good talk that day, and that was the beginning of our friendship, as all ministers of the Gospel ought to be friends, because we preach the same Gospel from the same God.
“The next week we were talking again, and Gerry told me about his friend Skip. A man from the other side of the world, a man from a place where the religious traditions do not know Jesus. Well, Skip learned about all that at Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma, the same as many others, and he learned it so well that he thought long and hard and decided to join the ministry and preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ…”
“Skip’s skin was a different color than mine,” Gerry Patterson was saying in another pulpit less than two miles away. “But in God’s eyes, we are all the same, because the Lord Jesus looks through our skin into our hearts and our souls, and He always knows what’s in there.” “That’s right,” a man’s voice agreed in the congregation. “And so, Skip became a minister of the Gospel. Instead of returning to his native land, where freedom of religion is something their government protects, Skip decided to keep flying west, into communist
“China. Why there?” Patterson asked. “Why there indeed! The other China does not have freedom of religion. The other China refuses to admit that there is such a thing as God. The other China is like the Philistines of the Old Testament, the people who persecuted the Jews of Moses and Joshua, the enemies of God Himself. Why did Skip do this? Because he knew that no other place needed to hear the Word of God more than those people, and that Jesus wants us to preach to the heathen, to bring His Holy Word to those whose souls cry out for it, and this he did. No United States Marine storming the shores of Iwo Jima showed more courage than Skip did, carrying his Bible into Red China and starting to preach the Gospel in a land where religion is a crime.”
And we must not forget that there was another man there, a Catholic cardinal, an old unmarried man from a rich and important family who long ago decided on his own to join the clergy of his church,” Jackson reminded those before him. “His name was Renato, a name as foreign to us as Fa An, but despite that, he was a man of God who also took the Word of Jesus to the land of the heathen.
“When the government of that country found out about Reverend Yu, they took Skip’s job away. They hoped to starve him out, but the people who made that decision didn’t know Skip. They didn’t know Jesus, and they didn’t know about the faithful, did they?”
“Hell, no!” replied a white male voice from the pews, and that’s when Hosiah knew he had them.
“No, sir! That’s when your Pastor Gerry found out and that’s when you good people started sending help to Skip Yu, to support the man his godless government was trying to destroy, because they didn’t know that people of faith share a commitment to justice!”
Patterson’s arm shot out. “And Jesus pointed and said, see that woman there, she gives from her need, not from her riches. It takes more for a poor man or a poor woman to give than it does for a rich man to do it. That was when you good people began helping my congregation to support my friend Skip. And Jesus also said that which you do for the least of My brethren you do also unto Me. And so your church and my church helped this man, this lonely minister of the Gospel in the land of the pagans, those people who deny the Name and Word of God, those people who worship the corpse of a monster named Mao, who put his embalmed body on display as though it were the body of a saint! He was no saint. He was no man of God. He was hardly a man at all. He was a mass murderer worse than anything our country has ever seen. He was like the Hitler that our fathers fought to destroy sixty years ago. But to the people who run that country, that killer, that murderer, that destroyer of life and freedom is the new god. That ‘god’ is false,” Patterson told them, with passion entering his voice. “That ‘god’ is the voice of Satan. That ‘god’ is the mouthpiece for the fires of Hell. That ‘god’ was the incarnation of evil—and that ‘god’ is dead, and now he’s a stuffed animal, like the dead bird you might see over the bar in a saloon, or the deer head a lot of you have in your den—and they still worship him. They still honor his word, and they still revere his beliefs—the beliefs that killed millions of people just because their false god didn’t like them.” Patterson stood erect and brushed his hair back.