CCBlogs thinking critically, living faithfully

Christianity has a heavy presence in the United States. You can feel the weight of it like a quilted cloak draped over the people, bending their heads forward and pressing on their shoulders. The air is thick with Christian words. Bible phrases fill our literature and are baptized into our culture, peppering our speech with feeble reminders of a lost faith.

- She’s the salt of the earth.

- He has the patience of Job.

- It’s only a drop in the bucket.

The Christian Church in America is so symbiotically enmeshed with our culture that their hearts beat as one, and some people hardly know the difference between the two. The words of faith and religion have burrowed deep into the flesh of our language. They rise to the surface like shards of glass from a festering wound, reborn as oaths, obscenities, and vulgar expressions.

- Jesus Christ!

- God damn it!

- Oh my God!

Are the people who say these things praying?

When your holy names are born again into the rarified order of words used to express rage and anger, you know you’re deep into the culture. Down in the cultural unconscious, right on the edge of the place where myths are born. And these quasi-religious phrases may well outlast the American Church. Words and phrases are notoriously long-lived, surviving for generations after all remembrance of their original meaning is gone.

And that would be fitting, since words will likely be our undoing. Much of American Christianity is all about words. Hollow words of theology that have all the depth and meaning of political slogans. Words delivered with a smile by ministers who dance behind their pulpits. Words that create false gods of hope and fear. Words that build up straw men and beat them down, while gently excusing the listeners from anything that remotely resembles radical living. Christianity has become a word factory, churning out half-baked ideas and spewing them across the bobbing heads of people who are looking for easy answers. The Church is Constantine reborn in our time. She mouths words of salvation and shakes her baptismal waters over the people who are marched beneath her arched weapons.

But good words must have good living beneath and behind them, or they will ultimately come to nothing. Words without living are just marketing, which has its place if you’re selling hamburgers or shoes, but not if you’re seeking the meaning of life.

I know about the danger of words, for I am a word man myself. I am a writer and a preacher, which means my words end up on paper and in the air, which means they hardly exist at all. Remember: even if my words touch your heart, having said them or written them gives me no special credits in heaven. My life is what matters, as is yours.

It should not have been this way, my brothers and sisters of nature, science, and the world. Christianity should have soared like a bird on the winds of real living. Christianity should have been a heavenly choice, a chosen path, the way of a pilgrim. You should have been warned of the difficulty of the Christian journey perhaps, but never lied to and never coerced. Those who seek to follow in the way of Christ should have taken up a rule of living like monks of old and never laid that rule on the shoulders of anyone who did not freely ask for it. Instead of demanding respect and threatening with fires of hell, we should have been the humble servants of all who crossed our paths.

I speak these words of criticism as a committed insider in the American Church. I speak them with love, but more importantly with great hope, for I always have been a dreamer. When it comes to the Church, you have to be able to see what she might have been and might still become. And strangely enough, you have to see this and believe in it, though you know the Church will never live up to it.

I have been discouraged by the Church many times. And I have even wondered if being a minister was the right choice for me. Thankfully, the Church as a whole is not my responsibility. I am a part of one small community, meeting in a little stone building in San Antonio. We have words to say, of course, various affirmations of faith and statements that we write. But our lives will either speak for us or not. And that is a bit scary, considering how imperfect we are. We try to represent the spirit of Christ. We try and often fail. Sometimes we love the people who come to us seeking solace, and sometimes we have failed to love them as well as we should. We stand before a fireplace on Sunday mornings, singing and speaking, sometimes making a mess of the words, not to mention the living that should stand behind them.

We are waiting to be redeemed. We are waiting for the gift of redemption. And while we are waiting we stand ready to bring whatever goodness we have into the world, as if we might prime some heavenly pump that might start some larger process and things might begin to become what they ought to have been.

rlp

NOTE: This blog entry originally appeared at Real Live Preacher. The author has agreed to respond to comments at CCblogs. You are encouraged to leave comments and begin a conversation.

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