we're being a sold a line of crap. there, i've said it.
it is a well-known obsession of mine to listen to radio preachers and tv preachers and, more often than not, yell at them in my car or from my couch in my living room (to be fair i also listen to myself on iTunes and shake my head too).
but this morning took the cake and will form the hub around which this final installment on grace will be built.
the man was lamenting the "secularization" of the u.s. since the 1960's (a common theme in many older preachers: "remember when this country was great and godly, like in the 1950's? remember when family values stood at the forefront?" that sort of thing. i always like to add "and wasn't it great when black and white people had different drinking fountains and schools? yeah, that was a real golden period!" idiot.) and how the hippies (or "radical leftists"...terms these guys use fairly interchangeably) ruined everything by bringing politics into every realm of life. he said that in the 1950's no one cared much about politics (tell that to the people on McCarthy's list) and life was pretty sweet and simple. do you remember when...blah, blah, blah. now the populace is political and the political system is too concerned with the people. honestly, i am not making this up, that is what he said...that politics are too invested in the national culture! i wonder what he thinks politics are for...but that is for another time.
and then, to cite an example, he mentioned abortion. he talked about how for all of history abortion was a moral and spiritual issue and then government came along and said it was okay, so now america is a hell-bound nation...apparently getting to hell in some kind of hand-basket.
ignore for a moment the unchartable arrogance of the direct quote "and then government came along" as if to say that before the u.s. there was nothing known as "government" (stupid greeks, romans, egyptians, persians, syrians, hittites, jews, germans, slovaks, british, irish, scottish, welsh, french, russian, prusssian, dutch, japanes, chinese, canadians...etc. you had no government, you were just following stupid men organized into collectives that decided the fate of the populaces of their designated geographical location, but you did not have a government) because his next point is the one upon which i will conclude because it has to do with grace.
he then went on to mention the early church as setting the proper precedence for what we should be doing (another popular pasttime of these guys) by telling how, when someone in the early church had an abortion, they were excommunicated with no hope of ever returning. he mentioned that it would be a glorious thing to return to those days of moral fortitude and conviction.
now, i do not know if that permanent excommunication is true or not, it may well be, but a deeper issue creeps into a statement like that. the notion that somethings are simply unforgivable and whatever one's own opinion on abortion (or homosexuality, feminism or atheism...other frequent guests on the "how evil is our country" show) i am deeply, deeply offended by this so-called christian's terribly disrespectful view of jesus; more specifically jesus' death on the cross. to afix one group of people as "unforgivable" or deserving of permanent excommunication in essence says that the death (and resurrection) of jesus--the one they profess to be god--was somehow insufficient to reach all the way to some poor girl who got in over her head and made an impossible decision. yeah, jesus will forgive the enron guys who consciously destroyed the lives of countless people but not some high schooler who got caught in a moment of passion and had to pay a horrific toll for it. yeah, that's my god, i'm so proud.
crap. total crap. and that is what i mean when i say that grace, real grace, is scandalous because it means that god extends forgiveness to the very people you believe don't deserve it. god extends grace to the poor girl who has had an abortion, frankly i can think of few people that need grace more. but god also extends grace to the abusive men who would see it as a good thing to lock someone like that out of christian fellowship with no hope of return. the sickening part for me is in realizing that god even extends grace to the enron jerks. and it is that feeling in my stomach that lets me know that if jesus were around today, pushing me and convicting me to love others, more likely than not, i would want to kill him. not just kill him, but watch him die horribly. grace showed me why jesus died.
you don't kill a man for healing people or teaching about love. you may dismiss him as a fritucake or an affront to god (a moniker, i am proud to say, that i have received from an irrate congregant) but you don't have to kill him. you can ignore him. the problem with jesus is that his love extended to the most undesirable people. jesus loved "them" and he spent time with "those people" (and we all have a "them" and a "those people" in our own lives) and, worse, told people that god loves "them". that starts to explain why jesus died so horribly, he let the establishment down by not furthering their aims but by furthering god's. and nothing makes a holy person angrier then telling them they've got god wrong. jesus died because he was not what we, in the religious circles, thought he should be. he was so much more. we wanted vindication for our positions, he told us to love our enemies. we wanted our holy places to be honoured, he said he could rebuild the temple in three days. we wanted our holiness recognized, he told us to pray in private. we wanted our rules validated, he screamed at us that we burden people unnecessarily and don't lift even one finger to help them. we wanted to be on god's "in" list, he told us that whores, crooks and theives were closer to heaven because they got it better than we did. that kind of man has to die. we knew it...but the real kicker is that so did he.
to conclude, despite the preacher's (he recently died and i believe is in heaven because he tried to serve god and god does extend grace to all his little screwed up kiddies...that doesn't mean i am going to talk to him at the banquet when i get there!) notion that we christians must swim against the tide and be more righteous while this nation goes "flush" down the moral sewer i challenge that to truly swim against the tide would to be even more forgiving and even more loving. i challenge that grace is much harder than condmenation. forgiveness causes us to lose our political ground (and for all their rhetoric opposing politics these guys LOVE being elbow deep in it), mercy and inclusion result in the death of our little homogenous churches where everyone thinks, talks, acts and--apparently most importantly--dresses the same. but we are given the gift of a community of people who know what it means to be forgiven. we are given the gift of a messy spirituality that gives us room to breathe and move and explore god witout fear of reprisal or a ruler across the knuckles if we "step out of line." in short, grace lets us live with a vision of faith that is more like a field or a forest to explore rather than a tightrope that we must walk with careful precision. that does not mean we who wander in the forest of faith do not screw up...in fact the total opposite is true: we acknowledge our inability to walk in faith without screwing up. but the greatest thing at that moment of moral/spiritual failure is that we know our god loves so profoundly and so recklessly that all we need do is acknowledge that error and he dusts us off and starts walking through the woods with us all over again. if he can die for us, can he not also forgive us? if he cannot forgive then why did he die?
in the early church abortion was an issue. prostitutes would become pregnant, give birth and then throw the babies outside the walls of the city for the animals to "dispose of". some early christians heard about this and decided to change things. they did not picket, they did not preach hell and damnation outside the brothels. they waited outside the city walls. they caught the discarded babies and raised them as their own. and the church grew in leaps and bounds, i wonder why? they did this day after day. they literally deprived the wolves of human flesh. i can think of nothing more fitting as the picture of lowly christians standing for hours in a dump just waiting to see if there is some defenseless person that they can save that day. it makes me cry because that is the stuff that changes the world and i would love to hear that on the radio one day. i would love to stand up from my couch or pull off to the side of the road and cry buckets of thankful tears because i had just heard a story of true grace. that, my dear friends, is truly going against the flow. that, brothers and sisters is grace. but, most imoprtantly, i long to be the kind of person that doesn't simply talk (or write) about grace in action but someone who actually lives a grace-filled life in community with other people trying to do the same. because, one of grace's coolest attributes seems the be the more time you spend in it the more time it spends in you. grace begets grace, and what a world it could be if we all decided to grow a little more grace. thanks be to god.
thanks for all your kind words and patience reading these long posts. i will keep them shorter in the future.
it is a well-known obsession of mine to listen to radio preachers and tv preachers and, more often than not, yell at them in my car or from my couch in my living room (to be fair i also listen to myself on iTunes and shake my head too).
but this morning took the cake and will form the hub around which this final installment on grace will be built.
the man was lamenting the "secularization" of the u.s. since the 1960's (a common theme in many older preachers: "remember when this country was great and godly, like in the 1950's? remember when family values stood at the forefront?" that sort of thing. i always like to add "and wasn't it great when black and white people had different drinking fountains and schools? yeah, that was a real golden period!" idiot.) and how the hippies (or "radical leftists"...terms these guys use fairly interchangeably) ruined everything by bringing politics into every realm of life. he said that in the 1950's no one cared much about politics (tell that to the people on McCarthy's list) and life was pretty sweet and simple. do you remember when...blah, blah, blah. now the populace is political and the political system is too concerned with the people. honestly, i am not making this up, that is what he said...that politics are too invested in the national culture! i wonder what he thinks politics are for...but that is for another time.
and then, to cite an example, he mentioned abortion. he talked about how for all of history abortion was a moral and spiritual issue and then government came along and said it was okay, so now america is a hell-bound nation...apparently getting to hell in some kind of hand-basket.
ignore for a moment the unchartable arrogance of the direct quote "and then government came along" as if to say that before the u.s. there was nothing known as "government" (stupid greeks, romans, egyptians, persians, syrians, hittites, jews, germans, slovaks, british, irish, scottish, welsh, french, russian, prusssian, dutch, japanes, chinese, canadians...etc. you had no government, you were just following stupid men organized into collectives that decided the fate of the populaces of their designated geographical location, but you did not have a government) because his next point is the one upon which i will conclude because it has to do with grace.
he then went on to mention the early church as setting the proper precedence for what we should be doing (another popular pasttime of these guys) by telling how, when someone in the early church had an abortion, they were excommunicated with no hope of ever returning. he mentioned that it would be a glorious thing to return to those days of moral fortitude and conviction.
now, i do not know if that permanent excommunication is true or not, it may well be, but a deeper issue creeps into a statement like that. the notion that somethings are simply unforgivable and whatever one's own opinion on abortion (or homosexuality, feminism or atheism...other frequent guests on the "how evil is our country" show) i am deeply, deeply offended by this so-called christian's terribly disrespectful view of jesus; more specifically jesus' death on the cross. to afix one group of people as "unforgivable" or deserving of permanent excommunication in essence says that the death (and resurrection) of jesus--the one they profess to be god--was somehow insufficient to reach all the way to some poor girl who got in over her head and made an impossible decision. yeah, jesus will forgive the enron guys who consciously destroyed the lives of countless people but not some high schooler who got caught in a moment of passion and had to pay a horrific toll for it. yeah, that's my god, i'm so proud.
crap. total crap. and that is what i mean when i say that grace, real grace, is scandalous because it means that god extends forgiveness to the very people you believe don't deserve it. god extends grace to the poor girl who has had an abortion, frankly i can think of few people that need grace more. but god also extends grace to the abusive men who would see it as a good thing to lock someone like that out of christian fellowship with no hope of return. the sickening part for me is in realizing that god even extends grace to the enron jerks. and it is that feeling in my stomach that lets me know that if jesus were around today, pushing me and convicting me to love others, more likely than not, i would want to kill him. not just kill him, but watch him die horribly. grace showed me why jesus died.
you don't kill a man for healing people or teaching about love. you may dismiss him as a fritucake or an affront to god (a moniker, i am proud to say, that i have received from an irrate congregant) but you don't have to kill him. you can ignore him. the problem with jesus is that his love extended to the most undesirable people. jesus loved "them" and he spent time with "those people" (and we all have a "them" and a "those people" in our own lives) and, worse, told people that god loves "them". that starts to explain why jesus died so horribly, he let the establishment down by not furthering their aims but by furthering god's. and nothing makes a holy person angrier then telling them they've got god wrong. jesus died because he was not what we, in the religious circles, thought he should be. he was so much more. we wanted vindication for our positions, he told us to love our enemies. we wanted our holy places to be honoured, he said he could rebuild the temple in three days. we wanted our holiness recognized, he told us to pray in private. we wanted our rules validated, he screamed at us that we burden people unnecessarily and don't lift even one finger to help them. we wanted to be on god's "in" list, he told us that whores, crooks and theives were closer to heaven because they got it better than we did. that kind of man has to die. we knew it...but the real kicker is that so did he.
to conclude, despite the preacher's (he recently died and i believe is in heaven because he tried to serve god and god does extend grace to all his little screwed up kiddies...that doesn't mean i am going to talk to him at the banquet when i get there!) notion that we christians must swim against the tide and be more righteous while this nation goes "flush" down the moral sewer i challenge that to truly swim against the tide would to be even more forgiving and even more loving. i challenge that grace is much harder than condmenation. forgiveness causes us to lose our political ground (and for all their rhetoric opposing politics these guys LOVE being elbow deep in it), mercy and inclusion result in the death of our little homogenous churches where everyone thinks, talks, acts and--apparently most importantly--dresses the same. but we are given the gift of a community of people who know what it means to be forgiven. we are given the gift of a messy spirituality that gives us room to breathe and move and explore god witout fear of reprisal or a ruler across the knuckles if we "step out of line." in short, grace lets us live with a vision of faith that is more like a field or a forest to explore rather than a tightrope that we must walk with careful precision. that does not mean we who wander in the forest of faith do not screw up...in fact the total opposite is true: we acknowledge our inability to walk in faith without screwing up. but the greatest thing at that moment of moral/spiritual failure is that we know our god loves so profoundly and so recklessly that all we need do is acknowledge that error and he dusts us off and starts walking through the woods with us all over again. if he can die for us, can he not also forgive us? if he cannot forgive then why did he die?
in the early church abortion was an issue. prostitutes would become pregnant, give birth and then throw the babies outside the walls of the city for the animals to "dispose of". some early christians heard about this and decided to change things. they did not picket, they did not preach hell and damnation outside the brothels. they waited outside the city walls. they caught the discarded babies and raised them as their own. and the church grew in leaps and bounds, i wonder why? they did this day after day. they literally deprived the wolves of human flesh. i can think of nothing more fitting as the picture of lowly christians standing for hours in a dump just waiting to see if there is some defenseless person that they can save that day. it makes me cry because that is the stuff that changes the world and i would love to hear that on the radio one day. i would love to stand up from my couch or pull off to the side of the road and cry buckets of thankful tears because i had just heard a story of true grace. that, my dear friends, is truly going against the flow. that, brothers and sisters is grace. but, most imoprtantly, i long to be the kind of person that doesn't simply talk (or write) about grace in action but someone who actually lives a grace-filled life in community with other people trying to do the same. because, one of grace's coolest attributes seems the be the more time you spend in it the more time it spends in you. grace begets grace, and what a world it could be if we all decided to grow a little more grace. thanks be to god.
thanks for all your kind words and patience reading these long posts. i will keep them shorter in the future.
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