Keeping God at a Distance: Why Sanctified Believers should listen to Hip-Hop

(This was written a while ago and I somehow forgot to post it).
Ryan Fasani and Eric Paul-

[Entire Sanctification] is wrought by the baptism with the Holy Spirit, and comprehends in one experience the cleansing of the heart from sin and the abiding, indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, empowering the believer for life and service. - Article of Faith, Entire Sanctification as found in the Nazarene Manual

I (Ryan) am particularly interested in the “power” sanctified believers receive from the Holy Spirit. I recently read about the obliteration of mountaintops in the South East for the extraction of coal. That’s power! From the dynamite, to the massive trucks, to sheer mass of earth that is relocated—it’s all the result of power. But power is used for good or for ill; it is wielded by an agent to an end—to detonate, to destroy, to heal, or to build. The sanctified believer is empowered by the baptism of the Holy Spirit. But this empowerment personifies the love and grace of the Spirit of Christ, rather than the power of domination, oppression, and violence. The power imbued from the Spirit through sanctification works through human agents as participants in the coming Kingdom of God, which stands against the principalities and powers of this world. Thus, the power given by the Spirit is situated toward an end. Stated in a question: “To what end is a sanctified believer sanctified?”

We think that sanctification ought to teach us how to give up certain vestiges of power in order to put on the full righteousness (a word synonymous with justice in the Hebrew Scriptures) of God’s power. To better understand this process, we will critique the traditional process and progression of sanctification through the lens of Hip-Hop. Hip-Hop music has traditionally given expression and voice to the black experience of growing up in a racially charged, poverty-stricken society. We believe these voices are necessary to inform the merger between our material lives and spirituality, so that the two are indistinguishable.

Entire sanctification “comprehends in one experience the cleansing of the heart from sin and the abiding, indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, empowering the believer for life and service.” Sanctification is for (to the end of) life and service. The “holiness chronology” of a believer begins with regeneration then sanctification then glorification; these are distinct works of grace by the Holy Spirit.

Sanctification is “wrought by the baptism of the Holy Spirit,” but its purpose “to [empower] believers for life and service” is undeniably material. We’re sanctified at an altar, during worship, which are spiritual activities; we live life in our homes, at school, when we eat, which are material, bodily activities. Between the experience of entire sanctification and the experience of its practical import—“for life and service”—lays a wide chasm, one quite difficult to traverse.

Our (Nazarenes) concept of sanctification presupposes a widely accepted dichotomy: a wide chasm between the spiritual (experience of sanctification) and the material (result of being sanctified). From this dichotomy, pragmatic (and theological) tension emerges. Ministerial practitioners labor to find new and creative ways to encourage disciples to move from the altar to the world, from the sanctuary to culture, from sanctification to service. Service projects, mission trips, random acts of kindness, church grill-outs, shut-in visits: these are a few pragmatic catalysts to encourage the power inherent in sanctification to, well, do something!

There is a problem before us, though. Service is not the end (completion) of sanctification; rather, it’s the ends by which the means of the ever-renewing power of the Holy Spirit manifest itself in the ongoing life of the believer. In other words, the altar isn’t the only place the Spirit works to sanctify, nor is the act of serving the material conclusion of the Spirit’s work. There is a tension that emerges from our understanding of sanctification because no chasm should exist between the sanctifying baptism of the Spirit and service. Service is not the result, as if to finish it, but it’s a constitutive part of the perfected love of a disciple. This is why sanctification is “for life and service” (italics added), because life is where the “spirituality” of sanctification and the “materiality” of service meet. But also, life is not static. Sanctification is not a static state of power (as though such a thing exists), but it is daily moving toward the end of service in context—where and when a believer is. Entire sanctification is the bodily bent of believers toward serving others as fully devoted followers of Christ (Matt. 5:1-7:29).

For some, we are flirting with heresy; for others, this understanding of sanctification is affirming and perhaps refreshing. But to all of us who are privileged (likely everyone reading this article), we run the risk of never experiencing this sanctification. With our understanding of sanctification as an “act of God” separate from our material lives, our historical lives become of secondary importance. What happened before sanctification is a backdrop to the importance of our spiritual sanctity, and only then, the life and service that is to follow receives attention.

But isolating a spiritual experience like that of sanctification is a discipline of the privileged, which from a position of security and power posit a “holiness chronology.” In other words, those not fearing actual death isolate sanctification from lived experience. Because (historical, material) life is where sanctification and service meet, it is a necessary component of both. As Jon Sobrino states, “The intuition that has gradually forced itself upon our perceptions is that without historical, real life there can be no such thing as spiritual life” (Spirituality and Liberation, 4).

Privilege provides us power in a way that isolates spiritual experience, but the poor and oppressed remind us that life itself—and not just sanctification—is a powerful act of God. We exert our power over our poor neighbors, in its most benign shape, as a form of isolation. Rather than being empowered by the Spirit to love we tend to further entrench ourselves from the poor, and hence from the God that stands with and for the poor of the earth. This is why Jon Sobrino contends that some histories need to be opposed, namely the ones that serve their own power: “Christian holiness is nothing more nor less than likeness to Jesus, [which can be] in opposition to historical realities, in opposition to objective sin” (Spirituality and Liberation, 128-9). The impoverished majority have historical realities of oppression—powerlessness. Is our sanctification in jeopardy as we exert our power as distance between ourselves and the immanence of God with the poor?

We (the privileged) need the poor, not to receive our service, which ostensibly validates our sanctification; rather we need the poor because the poor teach us that a sanctified life requires a) access to actual life, and b) that we oppose oppressive histories. “Poverty is something more than material. Life is at stake—the life of my neighbor… the feeble, debilitated bodies of the poor [give] us access to the material world from within a spiritual perspective” (Spirituality and Liberation, 55). We need the poor because in the struggle for life, the poor collapse the chasm between the “spiritual” and “material,” which indicts our privilege (distance from them) and demands our power to be used to the end of opposing oppression (service).

My (Ryan) experience is that Hip-Hop music is a forum well suited to teach us this. Artists in this genre both expose the culprits of oppression and acknowledge that life is at once historical (material) and spiritual. Let us consider two songs, one that I recently heard playing on the radio and the other a faint memory from the 90’s. I will provide a sampling of the lyrics and then a brief comment on their importance to sanctified believers. (Disclaimer: we do not necessarily hold the same opinions as these artists, nor do we condone the use of profane and derogatory language that the following artists use. As we engage in the world in which we live, however, such songs as these express the culture, environment and setting in which the Gospel of Jesus Christ is lived out. The mission of the Center is to step into the brokenness of our world, which is brought to life through the following lyrics, to bring healing, justice and reconciliation from a loving and merciful God.)

“Soul Survivor,” by Young Jeezy (Featuring Akon)

Chorus:

If you lookin’ for me I’ll be on the block
With my thang cocked possibly sittin’ on a drop, now
‘Cause, I’m a rida, yeah
Yea I’ma soul survivor, yeah

‘Cause everybody know the game don’t stop
Tryin’ to make it to the top for you’re a*** get popped now
If you a rida, yeah
Yea I’ma soul survivor, yeah

Verse:

We let the doves do it for us
We don’t cry tears, that’s right
Real ****** don’t budge
When mail man got his time
He shot birds at the judge, yeah

I’m knee deep in the game
So when it’s time to re-up
I’m knee deep in the cane, ****
Real talk, look, I’m tellin’ you Mayne

If you get jammed up don’t mention my name, no
Forgive me Lord, I know I ain’t livin’ right
Gotta feed the block
****** starvin’, they got appetites, ayy

And this is everyday, it never gets old
Thought I was a juvenile stuck to the G-code
This ain’t a rap song, ***** this is my life
And if the hood was a battlefield then I earned stripes, yeah

Young Jeezy and Akon, in this song, assert what many have claimed before them: Hip-Hop is the lyrical outlet for a suffering generation of black Americans. The young, black, urban American experience is like war. Not unlike the lives of many young Americans, these men experience the spectrum of human emotions: anger, sadness, angst, pride. But for these men, the “hood” is where one fears for their life, where “cocked” guns are the norm, where survival is a complex milieu of hunger (“gotta feed the block”), violence (“with my thang cocked”), incarceration (“when mail man got his time”), macho-ism (“real ***** don’t budge), and drug dealing (“when it’s time to re-up”).

Strikingly, Young Jeezy and Akon don’t understand themselves as only surviving, as if surviving is the perpetuity of physical life. Instead, they are soul survivors; their struggle to stay alive is quite literally a “physio-spiritual” challenge. The conflation of “soul” and “survivor,” as self-identity (“I’m a soul survivor”) and as survival strategy (“letting the doves do it for us”), is a profound theological statement: the suffering of God’s children is at once a material and spiritual reality (Exodus 3:7). Consider the next song.

“Still I Rise” by 2Pac.

Dear Lord

As we down here, struggle for as long as we know
In search of a paradise to touch (my ***** Johnny J)
Dreams are dreams, and reality seems to be the only place to go
The only place for us
I know, try to make the best of bad situations
Seems to be my life’s story
Ain’t no glory in pain, a soldier’s story in vain
And can’t nobody live this life for me
It’s a ride y’all, a long hard ride

….

Pistol in my hand, this cruel world can do without me
How can I survive? Got me askin white Jesus
will a ***** live or die, cause the Lord can’t see us
in the deep dark clouds of the projects, ain’t no sunshine
No sunny days and we only playED sometimes
When everybody’s sleepin
I open my window jump to the streets and get to creepin
I can live or die, hope I get some money ‘fore I’m gone
I’m only 19, I’m tryin to hustle on my own
on the spot where everybody and they pops tryin to slang rocks
I’d rather go to college, but this is where the game stops
Don’t get it wrong cause it’s always on, from dusk to dawn
You can buy rocks glocks or a HEROINBONG
You can ask my man Ishmael Reed
Keep my nine heateR all the time this is how we grind
Meet up at the cemetary then get smoked out, pass the weed *****
That Hennessey’ll keep me keyed *****
Everywhere I go ****** holla at me, “Keep it real G”
And my reply tilL they kill me
Act up if you feel me, I was born not to make it but I did
The tribulations of a ghetto kid, still I rise

Here, again, we read (hear) many of the same cathartic language. 2Pac is in a war of survival, violently fending off enemies, wielding lethal weapons, and trying to meet his basic physical needs. This song more so emphasizes the role of illegal substances in the plight of young black men’s lives. The imagery suggests that the drugs and violence create such “deep dark clouds of the projects” that one has no vision of a different future, hopeless. The “ghetto” context is so oppressive and dark that the eyes of God are even without focus (“Lord can’t see us”), nor can the luminous power of sun penetrate the cloud of death (“ain’t no sunshine/no sunny days”).

But even in this hell-on-earth experience, where death is a better option than living (“this cruel world could do without me”) and he’s destined to fail (“I was born not to make it”), 2Pac’s material reality is shot through with the presence of God. 2Pac is isolated and likely depressed (“can’t nobody live this life for me”) but it’s the immanence of the divine that enables 2Pac to succeed (“still I rise”). This is most explicitly affirmed in the opening prayer. The struggle for life (“try to make the best of a bad situation / …a long hard ride”) begins by acknowledging that resistance of oppressive realities is beyond the material and finite work of human hands; God is necessary and therefore invoked (“Dear Lord / As we down here, struggle for as long as we know”). In 2Pac’s suffering the spiritual is physical and vice versa (“I search of a paradise to touch”).

It has become clear from these songs the struggle for life is a sanctified struggle because the power of the Holy Spirit is manifest in concrete historical realities—the manifest realities of daily bread and daily safety. There is no chasm between the spiritual and the physical. The “physical” is “spiritual” and yet it’s not promised; all power that is wielded is given by the Holy Spirit. Therefore, survival in the face of death is an act of God.

Hip-Hop and by extension the historical realities of the poor in urban America teach us that “it is impossible to live with spirit, unless that spirit becomes flesh” (Spirituality and Liberation, 4). Sanctification cannot be a spiritual “act of God” that ramifies in our subsequent material lives, as this denies that life and service are not “follow-ups” to sanctification but are constitutive parts of a life perfected in (the very acts of) love. Sanctification is “perfect love,” which is to say, the power of the Spirit in flesh—incarnational.

We need the message of our Hip-Hop brothers and sisters because they help us know to what end the sanctified believer is empowered. We’re empowered to be participants in the work of a new creation in which poverty and oppression do not exist. Therefore, we’re empowered now to live on behalf of the poor in the belief and hope of the resurrection—“Still I Rise.” To serve and live for the poor is to experience the power of the Spirit in sanctification. Serving the poor and therefore affirming the struggle for survival is non-negotiable, lest we not experience sanctification—God’s fullness of blessing (Romans 15:29).