Oh!

For my whole Christian life, I've been bugged by the discrepancy between the wild, crazy, revolutionary, turn-your-world-upside-down words in the Bible, and the staid complacent traditionalism of so many of the Christians around me. Even well-meaning, sincerely nice Christians can seem much more interested in preserving their own way of looking at things than in seeing something new that God might be doing or leading us toward. For some it's that they've got such a comfortable prison cell, they don't really want the "truth that sets you free" that Jesus promised; a life of tolerable denials and cover-ups wins out. For others it is just a blind trust in stale ministry formulas, an adherence to dated terminology, or that insipid insistence that Christianity is 100% compatible with the Republican party (because God stands for oil, torture, war-mongering, xenophobia, and low taxes for the rich). The particular brand doesn't matter; the result is the same: trading the wildness of our faith for human comfort.

The worst of all to me is the complete myth that because we are "saved," Christians should be happy all the time (confusing Christianity with the "American dream," and bastardizing the whole "pursuit of happiness" idea anyway...). The shiny, happy Christian concept, for those who subscribe to it, inspires deep emotional dishonesty among Christians. Bad day? You must be sinning, because God would make you happy if you were with Him. Bah.

My point: When are we Christians going to stop trying to make our faith serve to justify our own opinions, biases, and comforts? Isn't it possible that, despite already being "saved," God might have something new to teach us, about our world or ourselves??? Is it possible that all this organization in our "organized religion" is actually hurting the cause, and that the problems and conflicts that "threaten" our churches left and right are actually God at work, trying to get our attention?

I think it is possible. I think God has a lot of cards up that big old sleeve of his.

My big problem is I let this get to me. I let the volume on my so-called Church go up (the knob is apparently broken), and the volume on My God slip down. I hear all the stuck thinking and the grappling over petty issues, and I start to wonder if I'm reading the same Bible as everyone else. If the God I believe in and love is the same one they claim. And I let myself forget who My God is: his Wildness, his Power, his Love So Deep and Visceral we can barely understand it. And His Grace. It is big enough to cover my frustration, and other people's errors too. For that's the story: we all make mistakes. And if we wanted to, we could come together and celebrate the simple clean fact that those mistakes do not define us anymore.

This morning I was thinking about my recurrent frustration with the Church (as it were), then I started reading The Message. I opened up randomly to Romans, and I stopped when I hit the end of Romans 9:

"How can we sum this up? All those people who didn't seem interested in what God was doing ['gentiles'/non-believers] actually embraced what God was doing when he straightened out their lives. And Israel [aka 'the established Church'], who seemed so interested in reading and talking about what God was doing missed it. How could they miss it? Because instead of trusting God, they took over. They were absorbed in what they themselves were doing. They were so absorbed in their 'God projects' that they didn't notice God right in front of them, like a huge rock in the middle of the road. And so they stumbled into him and went sprawling. Isaiah (again!) gives us the metaphor for pulling this together:

Careful! I've put a huge stone on the road to Mount Zion,
a stone you can't get around.
But the stone is me! If you're looking for me,
you'll find me on the way, not in the way."

(c) 2009, A.C.H. All rights reserved by the author. Quotation from The Message.