Meet Me at Camera Three...

Jon Stewart does this thing on the Daily Show where he mimics the gravitas that theoretically happens the camera cuts to a different shot.  He turns and switches tone and persona, it's a 60 Minutes sort of move: now over here, we're really going to cut to the chase.  I generally don't like to tell people what to think on these little blogs, or even in sermons, I would much rather pose what I consider to be interesting questions, express my opinions or sometimes just sit and lament about how generally screwy things are.  There are a few things that I would like to get off of my chest though, so I'm not going to hedge and walk you through my thought processes, I'm just going to say it, straight up, with a list.  These are things I think the American Christian Church needs to hear:
1. You are not persecuted.  There are places in the world where Christians have to be willing to die for their faith, the US of A is not one of them.  "Forcing" you to accept marriage equality legislation or taking the ten commandments out of the courthouse is not persecution, and calling it that is insulting to those who actually are persecuted.
2. You do not need to have a certain political affiliation or a particular approach to Scriptural interpretation to be a "Real Christian."  All you need to do is follow Jesus, in whatever way makes the most sense to you, but please, discipleship is hard so get into a church and be a part of a community because:
3. Faith is not a private matter between you and God.  If you make it that, you're eventually going to be dangerous, maybe not now and maybe not tomorrow but soon and for the rest of your life.  Churches can be dysfunctional and dangerous; in the worst cases it's because there is someone (or several someones) there who thinks they can manipulate God and other people to get what they want, but in most cases it's just because they're full of sinners who are stumbling around and bumping into each other.  If you suspect the former run away, but try and be sure it's not just a case of the latter, because you're never going to find a community where that's not true.
4. A little bit of stumbling is par for the course, but that's okay because of grace. You need to know that God is forgiving, and that God's forgiveness is really, really big.  Big enough for you and your sin, and big enough for everyone else's as well.  A church that treats sin as avoidable is just as bad as a church that doesn't talk about sin at all, but sin doesn't get the final word.
5. God is bigger than the bogey man.  Whatever your favorite bogey man happens to be, God is bigger than that.
6. God is big enough to use broken people, whether they believe in him or not.  There's a popular quote attributed to Neil DeGrasse Tyson, heir apparent to Carl Sagan as ruler of the kingdom of science: "Science is true whether or not you believe in it."  Actually the same thing is true of God, only pagan deities rely solely on the devotion of their followers, so stop acting like you're the only one who really "gets" God.  That attitude makes you dangerously pagan.
7. Final point, stop telling God who to love, and accept that God loves everyone, prodigals and faithful alike.  Even thought that may be unpopular, God is not running for student council.  If you live with that you will find it much harder to hate other people, and it will start to be possible to do that love thing that Jesus was always going on about.