Of What Is, and What Should Never Be

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all of creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord.

-Romans 8: 38-39

Every day I read many things.  And I'm not going to cite them or link them here, because I don't want to pick a fight with any of them.  In fact, I will stipulate at the outset: many of these things that I read contain thoughtful commentary and helpful suggestions.  Some of them are written with passion and conviction, others just seem cynical and hopeless, some of them I agree with and some of them make my blood boil a little.  What they amount to, in this age of the interweb, is the internal dialogue of our church and our culture, and I fear that we are becoming a bit schizophrenic, and I mean that in the most clinical sense possible, because I don't want to disparage people suffering with mental illness. For a good Explanation of Schizophrenia go here.

One of the interesting things pointed out by the above article is the fact that many people with schizophrenia do not seem to be odd, until you find out what is really going on in their head, and then, if you have an ounce of compassion, you will understand why they find it hard to deal with what we call reality.

The amount of paranoia and distrust that wracks our culture is worthy of a entry in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, I know it's not a good acronym, don't be so OCD).  And it afflicts right and left alike, in fact there seems to be more time dedicated to bashing the opposition than there does to actually solving problems, and that, friends and neighbors, is a HUGE problem.

Honestly though, I don't know what to do about the fact that Ann Coulter and Rachel Maddow are probably never going to come to an understanding, so I'm going to talk to my church peeps.  Because while I cannot really appeal to the Apostle Paul on any rational secular grounds, I'm going to have to retreat to a place where the letter to Rome has some weight.  And what I'm going to say from that place is just freaking stop it already, stop with the bickering, stop with the endless prophecies of doom AND the polyanna-ish proclamations that everything's gonna be alright.  Can we please deal with reality?

Christianity ain't what it used to be, but given that what it used to be was pretty twisted, maybe that's okay.  No business strategies masquerading as evangelism are going to bring back our hegemony, and I would argue that we shouldn't actually even want it back, it was essentially like a boil on the backside of the church in the first place, it actually made us less likely to be conformed to the image of Christ, and it's actually a miracle that we ever held on to anything like the Good News through all of that.

As long as we keep taking a worldly approach we are damned.  We can make our worship new and exciting and some people will come and like it, but some people will wonder what happened to our old favorite hymns and liturgical tradition.  We can be fired up about evangelism, preaching and teaching and getting out there in the world and being involved in all sorts of do-gooding, and some people will think that's awesome and other people will think it's annoying.  We can speak up for social justice, and some people will applaud our efforts, others will call us liberal sell outs, still others will be upset because we don't go far enough.

We can focus on the young.

We can focus on the old.

We can build a new building, we can sell off the one we have, we can meet at Starbucks or in the back room of a bar.  We can have long sermons, short sermons, video, no video, we can advertise, or not.  Our website and our Facebook page might be great, not so great or non-existent.

We can try to live out or faith or live into our faith, we can be doctrinally rigid or we can bend over backwards to be inclusive, we can be biblical (whatever that happens to mean to you at the moment), we can get on our knees and pray, we can handle poisonous snakes for that matter, but...

IT

WILL

NOT

HELP.

That is the hard reality.  At this point there is no way for the Church to be all things to all people, and it's not our fault, the world is crazy, and it's making us crazy too.

We have to be sane.

The good news is that we can be.

We've done it before when things were falling apart.

We can, not because we're good enough or righteous enough or somehow immune to the insanity, but because we're rooted in the love of God in Christ.  That's what will survive, everything else is negotiable and perishable.  Be at peace with that, it's really okay.

What's not okay, and in fact, sort of insane is trying to hold on to things that don't make sense.  Trying to sync up faith in Jesus Christ with worldly empires, trying to enforce "Christian" values in a world that does not call Jesus Lord, trying to use fear to get people to obey a god that you swear, honestly, really does love them enough to condemn them to eternal torment, trying to pretend that if people don't say the right words or attend the right church, then their Creator is just going to give up on them once and for all... that stuff is pretty schizophrenic.

Remember, Paul's letters were all written to people who had already signed on for the whole Jesus is Lord experience, they were meant to encourage and build up, not convince.  He was writing to a church living in a world that, contrary to some of our silliest notions, was not less messed up than the one we currently inhabit.  And he tells them nothing can separate them from the love of God in Jesus Christ.  Two thousand years later that's still true.