What is Truth?: A Pentecostal Ethic

I was heading back home to Harrisburg, PA after a few good days in Montgomery Alabama. For those that travel enough now that flight delays are frequently accompanied by complete strangers bonding over their frustrations with their airline. It is a good custom that cuts time off your wait. I happened to strike up conversation with an interesting woman also coming from Montgomery and heading to Harrisburg International Airport. We both had layovers in Charlotte, and so we struck up conversation. I explained to her why I was in Montgomery the past couple days. I was there as part of a Red Letter Christians gathering which this year focused our attention, as Christians leaders, on the good work of Brian Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative. In response, I found out that she was a lawyer who had spent her entire life working on criminal justice reform, among other things. She was also a person of faith, initially growing up Quaker, and then moving around in various protestant denominations. Though she was an older white woman on the verge of retirement and I am a (not sure if 30s are still counted as young?) black male, we found common ground and shared some of our experience and stories.

As announcements that our flight was finally arriving started coming through the airport intercom, most people stood up and started gathering closer and closer to the gate, as if our presence would somehow speed up its arrival. Of course, it couldn’t change that timing and so my new friend and I resumed our conversation. We talked a little more about our faith background which enticed a new person to join in, clearly enticed by the conversation. This middle aged white man had been listening in for a while, and now he felt free enough to join our conversation. He was also on his way to Harrisburg. He was also a person of faith. He was Presbyterian. And so we had an interesting ecumenical moment there, even as a few other people listened in as we talked about our different traditions that have shaped us.

My original friend, the older white female lawyer, suddenly turned the conversation from religion to politics with a quick comment about some of Donald Trump’s cabinet choices and possibilities. I shared some of my concerns as well. Her main concern at the moment was environmental. Though both religion and politics are supposedly both taboo topics in the public square, it was the turn towards politics that obviously made our newest dialogue partner (the white middle aged man) a bit uncomfortable. He actually verbalized that he didn’t want to talk politics. So he briefly backed out, and the lawyer and I continued on. Of course, politics are an enticing topic nonetheless and so our third friend eventually slipped back into the conversation. The conversation was focused on global warming and the deregulations that my lawyer friend thought were going to be initiated that would cause irreversible harm to the earth.