Party Faithful

CHAPTER 1 JESUS BUMPS AND GOD GAPS INTRODUCTIONIn the summer of 2004, my dad had a heart attack. My sister and I flew home to Michigan immediately, and because I didn't have to start a new job for another month, I stayed on to help my parents adjust to their new medication-filled and cheeseburger-free existence. It turned out that I was hardly necessary. Nothing showcases Midwestern pragmatism like a crisis, and our friends and neighbors rallied. Former colleagues drove my dad to cardiac rehabilitation appointments. Relatives came over with stacks of low-cal, low-fat, heart-healthy cookbooks, while the chef who lives next door whipped up a red-wine-and-portobello risotto for the rest of us. And the good folks at the First Baptist Church of Plymouth did what they do best -- they prayed.On Sunday morning, I drove down leafy, tree-lined Penniman Avenue to the Baptist church where I spent my childhood. I wanted to worship with the people who had been my second family. When it was time to share praises and prayer requests, I took the cordless microphone from the roving usher, thanked them all for their prayers, and reported that Dad was making good progress. "Amen!" came the response from around the sanctuary. Sitting back down in a cushioned pew that still bore the remnants of some Silly Putty that got away from me during a particularly dull sermon twenty-five years earlier, I let my mind drift while the pastor took to the pulpit.I grew up in this church, singing the rollicking tune "Happy Birthday, Baby Jesus" on Christmas mornings and learning my Bible stories from a Sunday school teacher who talked about getting "Jesus bumps" instead of goose bumps. At age ten, I walked up the aisle to the altar one morning at the end of a service and announced (although it came out as more of a squeak) my desire to be baptized. The event took place a few weeks later in the baptistery high above the choir loft, a dunking that was celebrated afterward with cake and orange sherbet in the church gym. I was a nerdy mess of orthodontics, peach plastic eyeglasses, and half-damp hair, but the congregation at First Baptist welcomed me with open arms as a child of God.Now, at the end of what had been a gut-wrenching week, in which I had been strong for everyone else, I needed to be wrapped in that faith again. I felt comforted in this church. I felt at home. I felt as if I were finally catching my breath. I tried to remember why it had been so long since I had visited. And then I tuned back into Pastor Mike's sermon just in time to hear him declare that it wasn't possible to be a good Christian and a Democrat.The pronouncement, and the matter-of-fact tone in which it was delivered, knocked the wind out of me. My liberal politics were, after all, due in large part to the Gospel lessons I had absorbed at First Baptist, over years of Sunday sermons, Wednesday-evening church clubs, youth retreats, and devotions. A painfully literal kid, I took seriously Jesus' instructions in Matthew 25 on how to be righteous: "For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in." At a young age, that meant constantly worrying that I wasn't doing enough for the "least of these," that I might inadvertently have snubbed Jesus-in-disguise by failing to share my fruit roll-ups with a classmate who forgot his lunch. Over time this impulse developed into a more concrete political conviction that citizens -- and governments -- had a moral obligation to take care of the poor, the sick, the marginalized.By the time I graduated from high school, however, those Gospel lessons had been subsumed by a different kind of politics at my church. An assistant pastor rebuked me for taking a course on Zen philosophy and the writings of Emerson ("The Bible says to beware of false religions"). Antiabortion messages found thSullivan, Amy is the author of 'Party Faithful', published 2008 under ISBN 9780743297868 and ISBN 0743297865.