When the answer is “hell no”
Ever since I first remember reading Romans 14, I have had difficulty using language, entertainment, and real estate as the means to create a sub culture for Christendom. Christian coffeehouses, Christian music, and words that only Christians understand get used up to create this distance between the one who has trusted Christ, and the billions of other people in the world around us.
In fact, I think building a subculture of Christian stuff is probably one of the worst ideas in human history, outside of Nero burning down his own city, of course.
If one uses the Bible as her guide, what she notices is that God had his chosen people, the Israelites, to be a light in a dark world. To show the rest of the world that there is a better way, when that way comes from the God who created everything. And Israel did okay for a while. Even King David, the most famous of all of Israel’s leaders (with apologies to Moses), messed up a time or three, yet he was still known as a man after God’s own heart. So it wasn’t necessarily the sin that tore up Israel’s relationship with God, but there was something deeper than just their outward failure to comply to God’s laws.
So God showed forgiveness and mercy in a huge way over hundreds of years of them turning their back on Him. But then eventually He sends the Messiah, Jesus Christ, into the world. Why then? So by that time, Israel’s religion had come to a different place, away from what was really intended. They had come to believe that they were different then everyone else just because they were Israelites. As we know today, no group of people is more special than another group of people just because of their race, gender, or religion. What makes anyone different from anyone else always comes from inside us and never from outside of us.
Then Jesus ultimately dies a cruel death on a tree, and pays a price that I was not willing to pay, eventually rising again to life and to the Father. But He came into a world not only to die, but also to show us how to be a light in a very dark world. And then what do we do in response to this fabulous act of kindness?
We create segregated churches and keep stale churches alive longer than they should. We eat our potlucks in the church mess hall and go on our weekend retreats. We buy our books from Christian bookstores and learn the necessary 8 syllable words that no one understands unless they’ve gone through 20 years of Christian school like I did. We listen to our Christian music and reprimand anyone who dares to listen to “secular music” (or regular music as I prefer to call it, just like what I call music with Christ at the center). In reality, we block ourselves in so we’re not tainted by the rest of the world. Then we say to said world that thinks were crazy (not because we’re being light, mind you, but because we’re not), “Come, be a part of my thing.”
And for the most part, their response is, “Hell no.”
But what if we told them that to surrender to God, you don’t need to be like me or do my thing, but you just have to…well, surrender to God, and put your faith in the person of Jesus Christ who paved a way for them to do that? And sometimes that means you should stop doing things that take you away from that goal, and sometimes that means you should probably start doing some things that move you towards that goal, like getting involved in Christian community.
That community might include me, or it might not, but it certainly is not about me – of that I am certain.
And what if we made our churches agents of push rather than leeches of pull, sucking the life out of everything that walks into its dark doors?
Wow…that sort of thing would take humility, sacrifice, and a change of mind and heart.
