Megachurch pastor Church Bryan Loritts twists the scripture in order to advance the goals of Critical Race theory, preaching from Hosea 3 that Gomer was sex-trafficked and then drawing a direct connection to the failure of the church to practice ethnic diversity.
Loritts, who is a controversial pastor at Southern Baptist President J.D. Greear’s Summit Church, explained at a CCCU conference in 2019 that if a church isn’t willing to give all they have to the cause, and won’t pay their black speakers like him enough money to coach and teach them about the sins of whiteness, then they aren’t loving.
In modern parlance, Gomer is being sex trafficked. She’s incarcerated. Hang in there with me, I promise you I’m coming to your neighborhood. She’s sex trafficked. She’s on the auction block. The going rate to emancipate a woman in Gomer’s predicament was 30 shekels of silver. But verse 2, he doesn’t say “I bought her for 30 shekels of silver. I bought her,” watch the detail, “for 15 shekels and a homer and a lethek of barley.”
Commentators say the devil is in the details. The great hermeneutical question is: why doesn’t he say, “I bought her for 30 shekels”? Why does he say, “I bought it for 15 and a homer and a lethek of barley”? Answer: he didn’t have 30 shekels. I could see him now, rummaging through his home, looking under his bed, digging between the cushions of his sofa, trying to come up with all he can. Going to the bank account, all he can come up with is 15 shekels, and he takes it to the auctioneer, and the auctioneer says, “No no, I got to have 30 shekels,” and then he, “What if I add a homer and the lethek of barley to that?” He goes, “Let me check out my supervisor first, okay? We’ll take that.”
Watch it now. To emancipate the one who cheated on him cost him everything he had, and I think that’s the point, friends. If you ain’t paying a cost, you ain’t loving. Now, my flight leaves at 2 o’clock. I go here in love. If you say you’re serious about diversity but your institution is not making costly moves that do violence to the cultural norms, you ain’t loving. If I gotta beg you to put people of color on your syllabus, you ain’t loving. If I gotta beg you to hire people of color, you ain’t loving. Love hurts. There’s a cost.
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve coached institutions and churches and all this other stuff and give me a nice little check. I get on a plane, come back home, my wife checks on me: “How did it go?” I’m like, “Well, you know, they ain’t gonna change, coz they don’t have the courage to pay the cost.”
But this isn’t a one-way street. People of color, we’ve got to pay the cost and, in some sense, it’s us just showing up to work. It’s paying a cost, us having to endure questions about our hair, us having to beg you, “let’s have some different worship on a day other than MLK Day.” So the frustrating thing you need to understand is when, on your campus, you have one group paying a cost.
Naturally, those in the combox know exactly what’s up.
h/t to @wokepreachertv for the video and transcript
