This came out of two books I've been reading — Howard Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited and Cole Arthur Riley's This Here Flesh. The thinking is theirs as much as mine.

It's good and well that a rich white man finds Jesus and walks with him, but the scriptures weren't made for him. I'm not saying he can't find Jesus, even though scripture says it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. And I still think it will turn out alright for the rich white man — it always does, anyways.

That's not God's doing; that's the world's.

The world clears a path for the camel.

But he doesn't need to trouble himself with it — scripture. It was wrote for and by the oppressed, the marginalized, the poor. I'm sure the rich white man could taste its grace, especially if he came from not much of anything. And it reaches him too anyways; that's the scandal of grace — it leaves nobody out. But if he tasted it true, he wouldn't leave it alone. He'd let it cost him something.

Scripture doesn’t tell the rich man to set it aside and walk off; it tells him what he'd have to put down first. Sell what you have. That eye of the needle isn’t a locked door; it's a measure of how much has to come off before a man that wide squeezes through.

Scripture was meant to lift up, not beat down. Too many not-so-rich white men and women have swallowed the beat-down gospel and left the lift-up gospel on the table. They handed the gospel to the rich white man — who don't care much for the not-so-rich white man or woman at all, but believes he can control you if he hands you the bat to beat those you imagine to be below you.