Christians! What's Wrong with Them?

“So I'm gonna hold my nose and vote for Romney,” said a self-identified Christian caller on the DennisMiller radio show. Miller immediately reacted to the caller and suggested he didn't represent what he, as a non-Christian, understood to be a Christian attitude. I agree. I am ashamed of the public face that many presumed believers put out there for people to see and hear.

First of all, God gave his children no authority to condemn whatsoever. Confronting error is not a matter of publicly declaring oneself right and another wrong. Our task is to be redemptive, not judicial, and public condemnation is exercising God's prerogative and is at least as shameful as many of the matters being condemned.  Too often, such remarks are nothing but a bit of self-aggrandizement.

Secondly, God has not given authority to rule unbelievers to the Church. While I may agree that the Mormon religion is in error, as is many a Christian denomination, “holding one's nose” is not corrective; it is dismissive, rejecting the man because of his beliefs. Given Christ's commands to love neighbors, brothers, and even enemies, I don't see how one is entitled to dismiss anyone either.  How does a Christian justify disrespect toward a person God has called him to love?

Thirdly, I am sick to death of shallow Christians. After seminary, when I first served as a pastor, I had folks complain that I used too many multiple syllable words. Seriously! I have never sought to be pretentious; I have always tried to use words to clarify, not mystify. I was preaching on prophetic themes, and I used the word eschatology, which means the study of end times, essentially. In other words, when I use words that may be unknown or unfamiliar, I explain them. Actually, when I use words that are presumed to be known and familiar, I explain them, because common understanding may well not jibe with Biblical teaching.

Somewhere in the history of the American Church, believers began to scorn knowledge and the process of learning that it requires. As a result, over time, many Christian have become simple-minded. In what was promoted as removing a barrier to authentic spirituality, people gained something that was neither authentic nor spiritual. While God assured that the most basic themes of truth were clear, he did not take complex ideas and simplify them into nonsense! “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures” (I Corinthians 15:3) is simple and direct but hard to exhaust as we ponder its meaning. “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved” (Acts 16:32) is unambiguous; yet it is also rich with meaning to consider. One of my favorites from John 18:31-32, “To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, 'If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples.  Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.'” Perhaps the most startlingly clear, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35) makes his priority crystal clear.

Here's the irony. Such plain, direct teaching gets intellectually mauled in order to dampen it, while the deep thinking, analysis built on the study and writing of those who've gone before is considered a waste of time, by many. As a result, today's church doesn't know how to speak to an increasingly skeptical culture and often wavers in the face of direct confrontation. We've drifted so far from the substantive thinking of the American founders and of the Protestant Reformers who preceded them.

When the time was right, and the faith had spread with its commitment to life created in God's own image and the value and dignity of the individual, including slaves, prisoners, the orphaned, and sick, Christians took on the issue of slavery and ended it, despite reluctance on the part of some. Women often treated as chattel grew to be treated as fully human, equal with men, though different. How sad that today Christians don't seem to know how to make the same quality of argument in defense of the unborn. How sad that the Church falters over the issue of homosexuality, unable to argue civilly within the Church, often settling for leaving struggling people rejected and unloved. Outside the Body, we have no substantive argument against a position largely based on the promiscuous assumptions of the “make love not war” generation (my own).  Indeed, much of the Church seems to be hovering on the threshold of accepting promiscuity and recreational sex, from which it is impossible to make a rational argument for Biblical sexuality.

As with the opening quote, too many of us settle for an easy, shallow position. One friend says he has come to doubt much of what people say in church...and he is a Christian! We've become citizens of this comparatively rich world more than citizens of the kingdom of God. Rather than speaking truth to power, we have embraced the power as we listen to its siren song. Far from leading the debate, as Christians who changed the world once did, we let the world set the issues in the debate. Worse, while unbelievers and anti-theists would reject an oversimplified version of our beliefs; we turn around an offer the world and each other pablum, worse than baby food, junk food!

My friend says he doesn't believe what people say about their experience as Christians, and I'm inclined to agree. Christian experience—such an odd phrase at that—should arise out of a life lived on the edge, not in comfort, especially when everyone is comfortable. In a era when some will take their own lives to destroy the lives of others in the name of their religion, in a world where some Christians risk their very lives to be Christians, what is it we think we have in our relatively safe, prosperous, often compromised lives?

Then there is politics. Do Christians really believe themselves to be speaking for Christ when they make a public statement as the above? I cannot quite imagine Jesus speaking like that. Does he care about an election? Some would say that politics is too dirty for a Christian to participate, but isn't that exactly where Christians should be, bringing salt and light. Is there a truly prophetic word to be spoken? If so, I would direct it at those who dare to use the Word for their own agenda (One such is the current President).

Back when Ronald Reagan ran in the 1980 election, up against the openly Christian Jimmy Carter, I remember thinking I preferred the one who lived his faith over the one who talked about it, the one who seemed to believe people should have the chance to decide for themselves over the one who, as now, felt it was government's job to act the Christian. I don't see God speaking to governments except to those individuals who exercise government's power, warning them against oppressing the weak. Our Founders were wise in limiting government's power and vesting it in the people, but so many believe themselves to be wiser.

What of Romney, the Morman? How is he different that an Episcopalian (A priest friend of mine—an Episcopal priest!—called them “closet Christians”). I recall when it was a Catholic who became President, and I don't recall any directive from the Pope changing the country during JFK's time. I look for honesty, integrity, ability, and perhaps the influence of faith, just as our first President advised. I will look for the one that shows the least faith in government's power, perhaps because he believes in a greater power, perhaps because he believes more in the people.

What I won't do is “hold my nose” if the choices do not suit my preferences. I won't stay home and passively yield to the poorer candidate to make a point. I will use my vote, however insignificant it may be, to move the country in the direction of freedom and faith, those being my political values. I'm not looking for a theocracy; the mingling of secular and spiritual government has been tried and always fails because the lure of power is too great, the seeds of corruption too virile, and the poison of wealth too close. Besides, government is not where Christians have the greatest opportunity to achieve God's purposes. The greatest opportunity is in the community, the neighborhood, and the block where we live.

Of course, we have largely abdicated the latter opportunity, reserving our faith expressions to Sunday mornings in enclaves often isolated from their communities.  Rather than a living, active fellowship of believers 24/7, many of us drives miles across town or to another town to sit anonymously in a crowd.  We neither live in community nor influence the community where we live.  Without the vital experiences that living lives shared with other believers, we try to create a "meaningful" experience of faith, what we get, I'm afraid, isn't much and often isn't real, as my friend suggests.

Is there a cure for this predicament?  It probably isn't that difficult, as prescriptions go.  We just need to stop living on the margins, stop being largely secular with an occasional taste of the spirit, and start realizing that God's blessing is not to give us comfort without responsibility.  We might perhaps take our brains out of mothballs and our Bibles off the shelf; perhaps we could pick up a thoughtful book and read it, engage in a substantive conversation about how grace or forgiveness might bless our co-worker or neighbor, or even reach out to someone who needs the love of Jesus Christ that they will experience only through you.

 

God didn't command us to separate the wheat from the chaff or to prove our legitimacy by condemning others.  He did command us to mercy, compassion, forgiveness, kindness, and love, and to treat others like he has dealt with us.  He says we are the salt to season and preserve the best of culture; we are the light to illuminate where others struggle in darkness.  I breaks my heart to look around and see the darkness spreading, but I don't blame the lost.  We who have the Word and the Spirit have largely withdrawn from the field and allowed the darkness to spread its misery unopposed.  Rather than shine the light, we "hold our noses."  And the darkness remains...

P.S.  I've not provided all Bible references.  I may edit them in, later.  If you have read and want to know those references, let me know in a comment, and I will provide them.