Learning to have trust and confidence in God and one another is what faith is all about.  Such trust and confidence in God and one another develops in the hard work of living.  We grow in faith by encountering the challenges of life, realizing that we don’t have what we need to come to a fruitful and life-giving reality, and then trusting God to lead us into receiving transformation.  Christian community is meant to help us grow in faith. 

The Good News is that God meets us where we are and invites us to grow in trust and confidence (aka “faith”) in Him/Her through the challenges that we face on earth.  God redeems our suffering, making something that glorifies God’s self from the vulnerabilities of being human.  We are transformed in the process.  We become new because of God’s work in our lives.

This is what the Apostle Paul writes about in his first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 1:

²¹For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. ²²For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, ²³but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, ²⁴but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. ²⁵For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

We “proclaim Christ crucified” because in the cross we see God’s triumph over suffering and evil. 

The Rev. Dr. James Cone speaks about the significance of the cross for the black Christian community, especially over the last 350 years.  During the 60s, the supremacy of male euro-centric thought and ideals was being challenged in theology.  This was the decade in which theologians were looking at the Christian message from their unique perspectives: black, Latino, and female.  James Cone is considered the “father” of Black Liberation Theology, uniting his experience of being a black man in the US to his belief in the Christian story of Jesus’ saving acts for all people.   

“I found my voice in the social, political, religious and cultural context of the civil rights and black power movements in the 1960s.  The Newark and Detroit riots in July 1967 and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968 were the events that shook me out of my theological complacency, forcing me to realize the bankruptcy of any theology in America that did not engage the religious meaning of the African American struggle for justice.” [1]

For 50 years, Dr. Cone wrote and taught in a way that challenged all of those who listened to consider how we are formed in the crucible of faith.

[1] James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2011), xvi.

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