Chapter 22 Colin, the Preacher

Occasionally, Colin preached. He was a fiery orator. His sermons were exegetical–that is he expounded at length on a particular Bible passage. His tone was Calvinist. He strongly emphasized the sovereignty of God and the depravity of man. He did not hesitate to make very explicit applications of his preaching to social and political life.

Once, he preached on Isaiah’s vision regarding Babylon. According to the prophet, even though Babylon was a cruel and wicked nation, it was God’s chosen agent to punish Israel for their idolatry and apostasy. In the same way, Colin argued, God was using the evil Soviet Empire to rein in the pride and arrogance of the United States. Sure the Soviets were guilty of all kinds of evil. But the United States had its own deeply rooted sins. And without the opposition of the Soviet Union, there would be no check on American egotism, greed and self-confidence. Colin did not dispute the idea that God had raised up America. God raised up every nation that came to power. But if God raised us up, he could take us down. And the check on American power provided by the Soviet Union was clearly an act of God.

For someone reared in a church environment that emphasized individual choice and character, this notion of God’s involvement with the political and social order was a new concept. For someone who had grown up in the South, the idea that God was somehow involved positively with the godless Russians was a startling novelty. But I could see that Colin had not invented the Bible passages he was expounding. It was there in black and white.

I’m sure it was easier for Colin to imagine God checking American pride since he was British. It may have helped that he was preaching to a congregation comprised largely of people who were originally from the Carribean where American arrogance had repeatedly demonstrated itself over the last hundred years. The congregation also included Filipinos who would have remembered the brutal atrocities committed by American soldiers in the Filipino war for independence in the early 1900s.

In another sermon, Colin offered a withering critique of homosexuality based on his exegesis of the First Chapter of Romans. According to Paul (and thus according to God and in reality), same sex desire arose from the deliberate inner suppression of what a person knew of God. It was not that these people were ignorant of God and his will. They knew God or at least they knew about God. They had encountered God through his self-revelation in the Bible or, at the very least, through the more ambiguous testimony of nature. But being in possession of this revelation–and understanding it–they squelched its witness. They “pressed it down,” Colin quoted Paul as saying. They refused to acknowledge what they knew. They suppressed the knowledge God had given them. So God gave them over to depraved passions. And the most depraved passion was the introversion of normal sexual desire, the lust of women for women and men for men.

I didn’t know any homosexuals personally. All I knew about it was what I had picked up from casual reading and conversation. Well, and there were a couple of guys who had moved in next door to my parents’ house in Memphis a couple of years previously. They were nice enough neighbors. They had fixed up the house and yard until their place was the most attractive on the block. What I had seen of the inside looking in through the front door looked pretty fancy. That didn’t seem bad. But I had heard homosexual men did really weird stuff. And Colin’s preaching was persuasive.