From Chapter One of The Word: Imagining the Gospel in Modern America
BILLY GRAHAM REVIVAL, Tampa, FL
The Tampa Bay Stadium is surrounded by buses, most of them labeled with the name of the church they have come from. It’s not the lost sheep who come to hear Billy Graham. It’s people who already go to church.
The buzz in the stadium is that this is Billy’s last revival, and that he wanted to hold it here because this is where he went to Bible school. This is where he was converted, on a golf course where he’d gone for a long walk. He knelt on the 18th hole and said, “God, I know you are calling me, but you have to help. I can’t do it myself.”
Actually, as he tells the story, he says, “I cain’t do it myself.” It’s part of what makes him appealing, the odd juxtaposition of leonine profile and country-boy twang.
Behind me, a man is dissing his church Bible study. “It’s so academic,” he says, “and this is so real.”
Last night in my motel room I watched a TV news reporter interview a black man who’d come down onto the stadium floor to be saved on the first night of the crusade. Looking around tonight, I wonder cynically how hard they had to look to find him. It’s a sea of white faces.
We are being entertained with Christian light rock and slick videos and a really dynamite country fiddler, whose “I’ll Fly Away” gets even my reluctant toes tapping. “God sent us an angel today,” says one singer, asking us to stand, hold hands, and pray.
As the final run-up to Billy himself, his longtime lead entertainer, George Beverly Shea, gives us an emotion-filled rendition of “That Old Rugged Cross.” A group of teenagers across the aisle sniggers in embarrassment.
Billy Graham enters to a standing ovation.
He is an old man now, and he speaks more in sorrow than in anger of the broad road that leads to destruction, judgment, and hell, and of the narrow road that leads to heaven and paradise.
“Crucifixion is the most terrible of all deaths,” he says. “Jesus was beaten with leather thongs with metal pellets on them; he had a crown of thorns jammed onto his head and carded a heavy wooden cross. He was weakened by loss of blood, and the crowds were jeering at him. When they pulled his beard, his face bled. God laid upon him the punishment of the sins you and I have committed.”
I fell in love with Jesus in my teens, not so much for any religious reason that I could identify as because I was an emotional sucker for the self-sacrificing hero. Put a handsome young man in a cart on the way to the gallows, and I was in love. I was devoted to Sidney Carton, sap though I recognized he was; and I’m not sure to this day that I would have liked Tom Jones nearly so much if Albert Finney hadn’t had his moment of handcuffed nobility before he was carried off on Hugh Griffith’s horse to wedded bliss with Susannah York.
So no wonder I fell for Jesus, who willingly went to a torturous death that I read about over and over in Jim Bishop’s laboriously detailed The Day Christ Died. I must not have been alone, I realize now. That’s what Graham is tapping into: the pull of a noble self-sacrifice. His mellifluous baritone voice is throbbing with suppressed emotion. “There is hope for you,” he says. “It lies in Christ.”
It is a classic pattern, the one he’s following; Ignatius of Loyola used it in his spiritual exercises in the sixteenth century. Remind them what God has done for them; remind them of how much they have not done for God; remind them of God’s love and desire for them; and then ask them to make a choice.
But it only works if these are reminders, if there is a shared understanding of the way the universe works. It’s no wonder the people who come to hear Graham are already believers. If you walked into this stadium not knowing beforehand the story Graham has come to tell, what is going on would make no sense. All you would see would be an old man standing beneath the skull-and-crossbones logo of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, telling a huge group of admiring listeners that they are worthless scum.
That’s what he’s talking about now: sin. How truly terrible we are. “The Roman Empire failed because of sin,” he says. “There is a right and a wrong, and it’s not based on the laws of man but of God. If you break just one of the Ten Commandments you’re guilty of breaking all of them. The moment a baby is born, it’s a sinner, according to the Bible.”
He sounds deeply sorry to be giving us such bad news. “Sin affects our minds,” he says. “We want to quit but we can’t because we’re its slaves. We cry for freedom, but there is no escape. Sin gets on you softly. You don’t detect that you’re going down, and the more you do the easier it becomes. But there is a penalty. Christ says to the world, you are a sinner, you are going to judgment. Many of you will never know the things God has prepared for those that love him.
“If you never remember anything else,” he says now, “remember this one thing, that God loves you.” Outside the stadium, Seventh-Day Adventists are handing out a leaflet that addresses the logical conundrum Graham isn’t tackling: if God loves us, how come he has consigned so many of us to everlasting torment? Their answer is that he hasn’t; the unsaved simply cease to be. The Russian mystic Gurdjieff preached much the same thing: the unenlightened are, in his evocative and terrifying phrase, food for the moon.
But I doubt the Adventists are finding many takers here, because these people know the story. They recognize the scriptural allusions Graham throws into almost every sentence, because they have heard them again and again in sermons and on Christian talk radio. The sin of the world, the narrow road, hope in Christ. These phrases are passwords to a larger understanding of the biblical message that I imagine most of Graham’s listeners tonight have rarely questioned: we are sinners from our birth; God’s son died to save us from the eternal torment we deserve; and when we die, those who have accepted Christ will go to heaven and everyone else will go to hell.
We think of evangelists as out to change people’s beliefs. What Graham is addressing, though, is not belief, but the human experience of loss and complexity. He knows that he is addressing churchgoers, and he knows that religious fervor is a chancy thing. “Many of you tonight feel hopeless,” he says. “You feel that your life has been a failure, and you wonder which way to turn. You go to church; you read the Bible once in a while; you pray when you think about it or get in trouble; but does Christ live in your heart?”
And here is the promise. “Paul knew the cross guarantees a future life,” he says, quoting Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians: “In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself.” A woman in the bleachers across the way is yelling, “Amen! Alleluia!” Only inside the story that Graham and his listeners share can Paul’s passionate plea for reconciliation be taken as a guarantee of heaven.
“The book of Revelation says we are going to reign with Christ on this earth,” he says, then tells the story of a woman who died of starvation when she had a fortune hidden away. “When you think how she wasted away, you think, how foolish. But how much more a fool you would be to hear of God’s gift and not accept it.”
The solution, he tells us, is simple: Repent, receive Christ into your heart, and obey him. “Do you do that,” he asks, “and still don’t have total peace? Would you like to leave here knowing Jesus lives in you and that you are on the road to heaven? I’m going to ask you to make sure of that. Get up out of your seat right now and stand here.”
One of my early experiences of religious confusion came when Graham appeared at a stadium near our house. I was both curious and terrified at the thought of actually going (not that my rigorously skeptical parents would have allowed it). However hard I tried to convince myself Graham was an interesting object of study, in my heart I was convinced that at the altar call, I would leave my seat and come to my knees, sobbing, on the floor of the stadium. How could I not? How could I actually refuse God?
But what I’m watching now is nothing like that. If there are tears, I don’t see them; it looks like a picnic. People walk down in groups, chatting. There’s a man with a camera taking snapshots to bring home with him. Another man stops on the way to tie his little boy’s shoelace.
Graham sits on a stool, hunched over. There is a chilly wind, and someone has draped a trenchcoat over his shoulders. The choir is singing softly, “Just as I am, without one plea,” and scattered over the stadium floor are signs: Russian; Spanish; German. There were three thousand people down there the night before, Graham told us; it looks like there are going to be at least that many tonight.
He starts to speak softly, almost crooning. “If you’re here with friends, come down. They’ll wait on you. There’s still time to come. Wouldn’t it be terrible if one soul was missed? Come, bring a friend or relative with you. There’s time. Come not to Billy Graham. Come to the person of Jesus Christ who died for you and rose from the dead and lives forever in heaven. He wants to write your name in the Lamb’s book of life. Only those in the book are saved. Are you sure your name is there? It can be.”
Read the Bible daily, he says. “You say, but I won’t understand it ... but we’re giving you the easiest book in the Bible to take away with you.”
I’m expecting it to be the Gospel of Mark, and when he says the book of John, I bat my forehead in sheer bewilderment. John, with his thick helpings of mystical theology, his interminable speeches, his diatribes against the Jews? Even the wonderful stories in John—the woman at the well, the raising of Lazarus, Jesus’ washing of his disciples’ feet—are hardly simple.
The next day, the Graham organization stages a children’s matinee. Graham’s not there; his starring role is taken instead by a character named Psalty (short, I assume, for Psalter): a man in a book costume (complete with moving mouth) that covers him from head to hips. Judgment lite. “This is hard to tell,” says the book unctuously, “and it might make you sad. Jesus had to die. He took the punishment away.
“Children have incredible faith,” the book tells parents in the audience. “They believe anything you tell them, so you have to tell them the right thing.” Then he asks any child who wants Jesus to be his forever friend to come down in front of the stage. Huge numbers of kids begin moving. And why not? Who wouldn’t want a forever friend?
That night, Graham makes his pitch to teenagers. It’s youth night, and you can hear the Christian rock from blocks away. Kids are dancing on the stadium floor, and when Graham opens with a joke about the noise level, the audience cheers.
“I have in my hand a Bible,” he says, holding it up, “and I’ll start in the beginning.” But he turns not to the creation of the world, where Genesis actually starts, but to the Fall, two chapters on. “Adam and Eve denied God,” he says, “and they were lost, absolutely separated from God, hiding from God.” You know what it is to feel lost, he tells the kids, throwing out ET and Saving Private Ryan.
It’s the same message, for an audience that also knows the story, but the tag lines are different. He recites a long list of rock stars who died suddenly. “You never know when your time is coming. I will probably die before you, but you will join me. You have to decide tonight whether you’re going to follow Christ or go your own way.”
But he also seems to recognize that, to a teenager, heaven seems a long way off. “The men of Galilee were tough and strong and adventurous,” he tells them, “and Jesus could take their lives and energy and impulsiveness and use it for God’s glory. The Christian faith is for people ready to swim against the tide. Are you?”
When he asks the people on the stadium floor who aren’t ready to receive Christ to move back and make room for those who are, all I can think of is Jesus’ parable of the separation of the sheep and the goats. But if the reference has also occurred to Graham, he has the good taste to keep it to himself. I am surprised by the number of people who move away; it seems to me that tonight, anyhow, they are the ones who are swimming against the tide, and I admire their courage.
Again, Graham croons the hesitant out of their seats. “The Bible says one soul is worth the whole world. It’s worth waiting all night for one person.”
A few nights later, I told an old friend, a longtime parish priest, how bewildered I was by all those churchgoers feeling in need of conversion. Or is the altar call more like confession than the once-for-all experience I had imagined it—a quick fix of innocence, until it wears off and you need another?
“You have no idea,” he said, “how many people who go to church feel as if they have no relationship with God.”
Maybe that’s it. The story Graham’s hearers share about what the Bible says ties the promise of a relationship with God to another promise—one that can’t really be kept. Accept Christ, it says, and you will know, know for certain, that all will be well with you forever.
Early Christian converts knew better; they would delay baptism until their deathbed because they recognized that—once baptized, cleansed of sin, and saved—they would, if given the chance, sin again. If, as the early church taught, confession as well as baptism was a once-in-a-lifetime event, to confess your sins while you still had a lifetime to commit more was to recklessly court damnation.
It all depends on how you read the story.
Copyright © 2000 Ann Monroe. All rights reserved.