The Film, Come Sunday shows what happens when a pentecostal preacher gets a message from Jesus about Hell and how the people refuse to take responsibility for their cynical response.
[This is a reflection on the church through the lens of the film Come Sunday. If you are not familiar with the story of Carlton Pearson or listened to his story on This American Life, then consider this a spoiler warning.]
What would you do if Jesus spoke to you and showed you that you were wrong? What if he showed you that you’ve been wrong a long time? And all of this you took for blessing wasn’t?
What would you do if Jesus showed you what hell really looks like — and you discover it in the faces of dying children?
That’s the first question asked of Bishop Carlton Pearson in Come Sunday, but it isn’t the only one.
Because this revelation comes in the middle of the week. And come Sunday, he’s got to preach.
The Pentecostal Heart of Come Sunday
As I watched Come Sunday, I remained eminently conscious of the context.
Pearson was trained by Oral Roberts in the pentecostal tradition, a wide stream of Christianity which gives greater priority to spiritual revelation than older traditions do. They are also evangelical, so there is a big emphasis on the authority of scripture and on personal conversion.
And of course, I already knew the story from This American Life.
It was this pentecostal context the film vividly displayed, but failed to orient for the viewer. The wider Christian context was only glimpsed in a brief scene in which the Pearsons are watching an ecumenical roundtable discussion about him on TV.
Missing Voices
We only get one voice from that table, and that’s of United Church of Christ pastor Yvette Flunder:
“The theology doesn’t surprise me. Why would it? We’ve been preaching this kind of inclusion for over a decade. The only surprise is who’s preaching it. Bishop Pearson is just articulating what a lot of people in the church really think.”
This is, of course, true. But it limits our understanding of the context to us and them or hell-believers and hell-deniers. What it doesn’t reveal is the basic truth: the Christian world Pearson was struggling inside of isn’t all of Christianity. It’s pentecostalism. One corner of a much bigger sandbox.
And it isn’t just that a lot of people really think something different. It’s that the long arc of Christian tradition has taught many of us something different.
Without this bigger context, our tendency to orient everything into the Left/Right sort may make it hard to see the two complementary truths embedded in the story:
- It is hard for a person to keep preaching a dogma that stops making sense.
- It is much harder for the institution to deal with being wrong.
Context Matters
When Pearson steps into the pulpit that first Sunday after hearing Jesus speak to him, after diving into the Bible for answers, after praying and weeping, he steps into a pentecostal pulpit as a pentecostal preacher to proclaim a message of divine inspiration. This part of Come Sunday might be too easily missed. Because we see him study and wrestle with our own eyes, but his detractors accuse him of not doing it.
Such is the complicated relationship between many Christians and scripture.
But this moment is different. It’s not about the Bible only. And this isn’t just any old pulpit.
This isn’t a meeting of the local GOP.
This isn’t the Southern Baptist Convention gathering in a national assembly.
We aren’t talking about a local Roman Catholic or Episcopal congregation or any number of Protestant denominational gatherings of Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, American Baptists, United Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ, etc.
This is a Pentecostal moment and the preacher is revealing that Jesus spoke to him. So if anyone is going to believe him, it should be these people in this place at this moment.
If they believe in inspiration, then the inspired Word is there with them.
This isn’t Left/Right or about doctrine or tradition. Not really. Or I should say not exclusively. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? It’s easier to make this about any of those other things. Or to brush it off as Satan speaking or any other ridiculous excuse.
This is a Pentecostal church and the Spirit spoke to their pastor. All he did was preach the gospel revealed to him. A gospel which happens to be consistent with other streams of Christian teaching. That’s half of the story.
The other half is that more than 3/4 of this congregation refused to hear it. The Spirit spoke to them through their pastor and they walked out, shouted at him, shunned him. His “brother” condemned him on TV and his colleagues pressured him to take it back. And then he’s labeled a heretic by the Joint College of African-American Pentecostal Bishops.
This revelation isn’t about Carlton Pearson at all. It’s about God and what we do with the love of God.
The Shunning of Two Sons
The undercurrent of the story, and one Come Sunday subtly but explicitly makes is the relationships Oral Roberts has to his actual son, Richard, and Pearson, the young man he treats like his own “black son”.
In Richard Roberts, the father only sees wasted opportunity — the sort of “what could’ve been” example of failure and its necessary consequence of a father’s withheld love.
For Oral Roberts, the young Pearson was a true son he never had. Roberts puts them into a reverse prodigal son story. That’s why this transgression is like a knife in the heart.
But this vision we receive of a father disappointed by both sons, capricious and cunning, is as revealing of what Roberts believes about God as anything he preached.
This God of his is full of disappointment and the enforcement of rigid rules and tradition. He demands we impose a framework of disappointment upon our own children. Calling them to find ways to please him. Show me your love and I might show you mine!
How Oral Roberts treats these two sons is a brilliant living parable of the vision of God revealed to Pearson through the hell he could see on earth. The hell he could experience in the church.
Come Sunday could easily make Pearson into a Christ figure, but instead its narrative keeps redirecting us to who God really is. It shows us how all of these people keep creating this angry God that just doesn’t match the love revealed to Pearson. And the one we all long to hear about.
“What if you’re wrong?”
Oral Roberts isn’t the antagonist in Pearson’s story or in Come Sunday. There were several antagonists embodied in different ways. But the antagonist is really pentecostalism itself. The kind that would embody a terrifying vision of God rather than risk being wrong.
And the vision of pentecostalism we receive in the film is afraid of revelation from the Holy Spirit, distrustful of “new” revelations, and prone to shunning those with whom they disagree.
The best example in the film of this fear is embodied by Henry (played by Jason Segel). He comes to Pearson’s home to tell him he’s leaving and starting a new church. In the conversation, he’ll say that it was quite something that they built a multiracial church, then in the end, he’ll take most of the white people with him.
He pleads with Pearson to see it his way — telling him how selfish he’s being, how he’s not thinking about them. Here the film’s opening scene comes back to mind. With Pearson on a plane, helping convert a woman — a moment which turns out to be a sermon illustration.
He’s saving her soul from damnation— trying to help her see the truth of Jesus.
Now Henry pleads with Pearson:
“You want me to trust you. You want me to go out and tell people it doesn’t matter if they accept Christ. It doesn’t matter if they go out there and sin. Well what if it turns out that you are wrong and there is a hell? And we are responsible?
“Even if I thought you might be right, and I don’t, it’s not a chance I’d be willing to take.”
This as Henry is taking the risk of shunning. Pearson is inviting him to see his own words and he is refusing the revelation. What if Henry’s selfishness is the risk and he is responsible? What if God is working through Pearson to save him from judgment and separation from God?
“It’s not us.”
He continues
Henry: “You went ahead with this…without any thought about me or us or anyone else.”
Pearson: “That’s all I’ve been thinking about. Night and day. Don’t leave me.”
Henry – “It’s not us that’s leaving. It’s you. You turned your back on us. And for 20 years I’ve put your needs ahead of my needs. And I’ve put Gina’s ahead of Maggie’s and your kids ahead of my kids. I gave you 20 years, so just remember that it’s not me whose turning my back on you. It’s the other way around.”
The flashbacks, these very words bring back memories, stories, experiences for me.
Memories of people literally walking out of church saying “I’m not walking out, you’re walking out” and never showing up again.
“You made me do this.”
“You’re dividing the church!” they scream and then refuse to come into church, holding court in the parking lot.
People physically leaving and saying they’re not. The person staying put is really walking away. The person standing still is the one turning around. An open hand is really a closed fist to the face.
Bishops, churches, dioceses, whole churches passive aggressively condemning with rage and hatred.
It’s called gaslighting.
But this line of argument is different. It isn’t reason. It’s not just hypocritical, it’s manipulative. This is gaslighting.
“And I think that you should take a long, hard look and ask yourself why God…why God would want that.”
And with that, Henry doesn’t take a long, hard look or ask himself why God would want him to leave. He leaves, feeling self-righteous and justified.
Real Consequences
There are very real consequences to the preacher’s prophetic speaking from the pulpit; I don’t want to dismiss those. Come Sunday puts this conflict front and center. It shows Pearson knew as he stepped up there that he was going to say something hard to hear.
He said it to help them, with the same foundation in preaching he had a week earlier — a foundation of saving souls and proclaiming the good news of the risen Christ. It just takes on new meaning.
Pearson’s message remained consistent; it now reflects God’s invitation to keep learning about what God really wants. To keep going past this communion moment and find greater communion with a God of love.
Certainly there are more practical ways one could go about this. But to even make that argument dismisses the responsibility of the congregation. Many of whom have been going there for years.
This, then, is the crux of belief.
That same belief in a God who calls people also invites us to imagine ways God calls people that aren’t our ways. Belief in a Jesus of salvation revealed in Scripture means we have to deal with a lot of junk we don’t want to see.
In one of Come Sunday’s pivotal scenes, when Oral Roberts has encouraged Pearson to recant and preach on Romans 10:9, Pearson instead uses 1 John. He argues for multiple voices and contradictions in scripture; he reads from 1 Timothy and says “its in Corinthians, it’s in Timothy, Peter,” and quotes 1 Corinthians 15.
And more people walk out.
He invites people to see the complexity in Scripture, the challenge of finding its truth, and the life-long pursuit of finding true communion with Christ. He’s preaching the good news, opening the Scriptures to the people, and sharing what the Holy Spirit has revealed to him as a pentecostal to all these pentecostal people.
And hundreds of people reject him.
The viewer is being shown how many places Scripture speaks of a God of love and compassion. A God who brings salvation to all people. It even shows an inconsistency in the writing of Paul!
And many viewers will keep saying “But what about Romans 10:9?” and continue to reject him.
Taking Responsibility
The context within pentecostalism makes this particularly galling and revealing. But similar moments of division have struck all the other streams of the faith, including anglican, protestant, and catholic. And we can use the same litmus test in most other churches and get a similar response.
The idea that people would rather Pearson lie than share the truth, reject rather than talk, ignore rather than wrestle, is disgusting.
I’ve been encouraged to lie, explicitly and implicitly. Not because I was wrong, but because “the people couldn’t handle it” or “just say what they want to hear.” Lying to protect ignorance; station; preserving the opportunity to keep serving the church.
What Do We Do On Sunday?
Come Sunday is a biopic about a real pastor and it focuses on his personal experience. But it’s also a movie about the church. It’s a movie about how God is revealed to us and what we do to one another.
The protagonist could be any of us. And so could any of its antagonists. But it reveals what happens when we actually wrestle with what we believe and have to talk about it. When we have to put words to God’s act of recreation.
Unlike everyone else, Pearson had to turn around and preach.
Then every Sunday, he gets closer to his family while he gets closer to God and closer to the gospel truth.
But so few have the patience to see it.
Self-Examination Is Hard.
It’s easy to criticize the man transformed by Christ to preach a new message; maybe he should have field-tested it late Saturday night, I guess.
But the harder act is to turn the mirror around on ourselves.
To see ourselves and examine our hearts and our actions. To see how little responsibility we take for the reflection of Christ we’re offering. As we watch children dying in poverty in our communities or the other side of the world; the refugees we refuse and the immigrants we deport; we’d rather look for other distractions.
It’s hard to look at all these people, all somebody’s children, and see their suffering. Do we imagine them burning in hell and think that’s just too bad?
And then when the preacher’s finally looked at himself in the mirror and seen the monster looking back and gotten up the courage to share that with us? When we’ve heard what Jesus has revealed to him and what scripture is moving him to preach, what’s our response?
Don’t we do what they did? I see it. We walk out. Why does he have to be so political? and blame him for making us think. We leave, grumbling like the Hebrews in the desert. Maybe we post some stuff about him on Facebook. Talk about him behind his back.
Sorry about your hell!