We need to make sense of Sunday

"Come Sunday" is the story of a brave spirit or a tragedy on a religious tradition that offers its followers few tools to make sense of their faith?

Over the past 25 years or so, non-nominal evangelical Protestantism seems to have become the state religion of the American periphery and in many of these churches every pastor is a pope. They do not face educational requirements and their only responsibility comes when the basket of offers is exceeded. If it is full enough, then grace abounds. If a preacher rubs the faithful the wrong way, abuses their trust or simply tells them things they don't want to hear, they leave.

So what happens when one of those pastors becomes a prophet? What if he sincerely heard a message from God that challenges the certainties of his flock? This is the story told in the new original Netflix movie Come Sunday, a drama based on people and real life events. And, by the way, this film made me really grateful to belong to a church that has an authoritative teaching to interpret Scripture in the light of reason and tradition.

Carlton Pearson, the main character of Come Sunday, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor (Solomon Northrup in 12 years as a slave), was an African American megachurch superstar. Authorized to preach at the age of 15, he ended up at Oral Roberts University (ORU) and became a personal protégé of the school's televangelist founder. Shortly after graduating from ORU, he stayed in Tulsa and founded the larger church, a racially integrated and (obviously) non-named company that quickly grew to 5.000 members. His preaching and singing made him a national figure in the evangelical world. He went all over the country proclaiming the urgency of a reborn Christian experience.

So his 70-year-old uncle, who never came to Jesus, hanged himself in his prison cell. Not long after, Pearson woke up in the middle of the night, rocking her baby girl, when she saw a cable report on genocide, war and hunger in Central Africa. In the film, while images of African corpses fill the TV screen, Pearson's eyes fill with tears. He sits until late at night, crying, scrutinizing his Bible and praying.

In the next scene we see Pearson in front of his congregation the size of a Colosseum that tells what happened that night. He hadn't cried because innocent people were dying of cruel and unnecessary deaths. He cried because those people were going to the eternal torment of hell.

During that long night, says Pearson, God told him that all mankind had already been saved and would be welcomed in his presence. This news is welcomed by the widespread muttering and confusion between the congregation and total anger by higher-dimensional staff. Pearson spends the following week in seclusion at a local motel with his Bible, fasting and praying. Oral Roberts himself (played by Martin Sheen) even shows up to tell Pearson that he needs to meditate on Romans 10: 9, which says that to be saved, you must "confess the Lord Jesus with your mouth". Roberts promises to be from Pearson church the following Sunday to hear him retracted.

When Sunday arrives, Pearson takes the stage and, with Roberts watching, awkwardly grabs the words. He looks for Romans 10: 9 in his Bible and seems about to launch into his retraction, but instead turns into 1 John 2: 2: “. . . Jesus Christ . . . it is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world ".

As Pearson defends his new universalism, members of the congregation, including Roberts, start dating. During the following week, four white ministers from Pearson's staff come to tell him that they are about to leave to found their church. Finally, Pearson is summoned to a jury of African American Pentecostal bishops and declared a heretic.

Eventually we see Pearson move on to the second act of his life, giving a guest sermon in a Californian church led by an African American lesbian minister, and the text on the screen tells us that he still lives in Tulsa and ministers of the All Souls Unitarian Church.

Most audiences are likely taking Come Sunday as the story of a brave and independent spirit crushed by narrow-minded fundamentalists. But the major tragedy here is that Pearson's religious tradition has provided him with so few tools to make sense of his faith.

Pearson's initial intuition about God's mercy seems quite good and true. However, as he rushed from that intuition directly to the spotty position that there is no hell and everyone is saved, no matter what it is, I found myself begging him, “Read the Catholics; read the Catholics! "But obviously he never did.

If he did, he would find a teaching body that answers his questions without abandoning the Orthodox Christian belief. Hell is the eternal separation from God, and it must exist because if humans have free will they must also be free to reject God. Is there anyone in hell? Are all saved? Only God knows, but the church teaches us that all who are saved, "Christians" or not, are saved by Christ because Christ is somehow present to all people, at all times, in all their various circumstances.

The religious tradition of Carlton Pearson (and the one I grew up in) is that of Flannery O'Connor satirized as "the church of Christ without Christ". Instead of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist and in the apostolic succession, these Christians have only their Bible, a book which, on his face, says seemingly contradictory things on many important questions.

To have faith that makes sense, the authority to interpret that book must simply be based on something other than the ability to attract the largest crowd and the most complete collection basket.