Politicians to preachers know the addictive thrill of fear mongering.  Hell sells!  American nationalism, which urges us to war with the threat of annihilation by terrorists, is the same strategy by which religion often compels us to seek salvation.  When confronted by an angry and vindictive God who threatens us with eternal punishment many of us do as we're told.

As a result, countless ears and hearts become deadened against the Gospel's Good News of boundless and never-ending compassion.  Hell may sell, yet when God breaks into our midst in the visions of the prophets like Isaiah, and in the preaching of John the Baptist, and finally in the person of Jesus, the message is different.  And we get our first glimpse of the difference when we notice who hears the words of Isaiah, and John, and then Jesus as good news.  It's not the conquering Babylonians, but the Hebrew people who've been sent into exile, who hear Isaiah's proclamation that when God comes "Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain."  It's good news precisely for a people who're not on the mountain heights of conquest, but in the valley of despair of the conquered.  It's good news not for those whose lives are "smooth going," but for those being knocked around and shaken as life takes them on a journey through rough times.

 This is why, I've come to believe, that so many people journeyed miles and miles of wilderness and challenging terrain to hear John the Baptist-the wild man who resembled the prophetic figure of Isaiah. People living in dangerous and hopeless times are willing to make a dangerous trip hoping for a word of encouragement and good news. People of exiled hearts long for the one who "will feed his flock like a shepherd," who " will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep."

Mark's initiates our Advent journey proclaiming that, "The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God" was to be heard in "the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.'"  And so, Mark writes, "John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins."

Advent begins with repentance, cleaning up the idols of the past, turning away from that which rules by fear towards the arms of God longing to take us in. The life and ministry of Bishop Carlton Pearson is a dramatic parable of repentance, turning from fear towards love.  His story reminds us that when we do, however, the people around us who rule and are ruled by fear take our betrayal of their cause no better than did the religious and political power-brokers of Jesus' day.

Bishop Pearson attended Oral Roberts University, and was mentored by Oral Roberts himself.  Licensed and ordained in the Church of God in Christ, Pearson founded his own church, Higher Dimensions, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  During the 1990s it grew to an attendance of over 5,000 and in 1997 Pearson was ordained a bishop.

Then Pearson had an epiphany, a vision from God, and repented.  That's when his trouble began.  For his vision, following a television program showing the wretched conditions of people dying in Rwanda was that his church's teaching about non-Christians being destined for hell was simply ... wrong.  His new understanding of the Good News of Jesus Christ took the form of what he called the Gospel of Inclusion.  He refused to continue to presume to know better than God who God favored.  And he refused to continue to grow his congregation and base his popularity on a gospel of fear of those who were ‘different' and those he didn't understand. 

The immediate result was that many in his congregation began to leave.  Finally in 2004 the Joint College of African-American Pentecostal Bishops declared the Gospel of Inclusion to be heresy.  Over the next four years his influence dwindled, as did his congregation's membership.  This past September his former 5,000-member church closed its doors for good.