A Meditation on a the Prophets

I wrote this a few years ago as a meditation shared in the liturgy, during Advent, I believe. Just found it in some papers:

The world I live in is old and very weary.
Its canyons and highways and cities barely ripple
when good news hurries through like a shy breeze.
Can I say anything that has not been said before?
Can any new idea save us from our grief or greed or anxious thoughts?
Can nature itself be born again, with crystal-bright air
and every creature loved and thriving?
Can our worst memories be made into anything but what they are?
Can our governments and banks and workplaces and neighborhoods
truly experience a fresh, new day?
Do we dare believe in hope?
The prophets were--let's be honest--wild and incomprehensible.
The dreams they had! The audacity they encouraged!
What troubling, confusing prophesies are these:
that a new thing will happen,
that joy will burst every boundary,
that families will live long and be blessed,
that the universe will pulse with a tranquil heart.
What foolishness is this: to hope and build our courage.
How dangerous to entertain visions of holiness, justice, a good, lovely earth.
If we listen and believe, what might we do?
What songs might we compose,
and what stunning kindnesses might we accomplish?
What sort of uncontrollable, odd people might we become
if we take to heart the words God breathed into Isaiah?
Certainly the prophet knew that what he described was absurd.
Maybe he thought he was going out of his mind,
even to possess such thoughts:
No more weeping? Wolves at peace with lambs?
No wonder he had so few friends.
And yet, he spoke those wild words. He waited for the faith to believe them.
And he waited for us, so that we could believe them, too,
to create a history of people who believe.

VH Wright, December 2013

Why Are Christians So Afraid, or, Why Do Christians Keep Striving after Power?

Please note: I speak in generalities on purpose, to make broad points. Of course I know that many Christians in this country do not fit this profile.

 

So, where did the American church slip off the rails, anyway? Of course I don’t refer to every Christian in the United States, but there’s a trend manifesting in a substantial segment of that population. Scared Christians. I mean, really scared. Afraid of threats on multiple fronts. You can feel the fear in their online posts; you can certainly hear it in their voices on TV and social media. There’s a tone of panic that is unmistakable.

They are afraid that the institution of marriage might fall apart. They are afraid that the government will meddle too much. Take away their rights. Take away their guns (guns? Really? Christians stockpiling weapons?). Take away their ability to pray.

They are afraid of terrorists. They are afraid of other religions. They are afraid of people outside the country coming into it. They are afraid of actual Americans who are different from them, who don’t agree with them on doctrinal points or moral codes.

They are afraid that people will stop believing that the Bible is God’s Word.

They are afraid that people will refuse to live according to God’s Word.

I don’t understand this. To be a Christian is to follow the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, known to us as the Christ, the savior. And you can’t get through much text about Jesus—particularly text in which he is speaking directly—without confronting some important facts. One, he said many times that we should not be afraid. “Be not afraid” is sprinkled throughout the Gospels. Two, he told people to expect to live outside the norm, to be hated by the world, and to understand that God’s kingdom was within them, lived out in their community and not manifested through governments or military forces. The faith community was an entity unto itself: the Body of Christ. And this body would go through a lot of trouble and pain because Jesus took on trouble and pain. His way of living runs counter to popular modes of getting by. We should not expect to be popular, to get our way in the world outside the faith community.

Furthermore, we should welcome people to God’s grace and the message of the Gospel, not try to coerce them into acting the way we, as believers, are instructed to act. We live a certain way because Christ within us gives us the ability to do this. The Holy Spirit powers our faith, our love, our ability to forgive and to endure suffering. We have no reason to expect people outside the faith to swear allegiance to the standards we believers try to live out.

Christianity is a faith, a way of being in the world. It is not a system of government. It’s not really a philosophy of life, either. It’s the Way. It’s weird. It can get us into trouble if we truly seek to forgive, to help those who need help the most, to welcome the outcast and stranger.

In light of all this, I do not understand why so many Christ followers are afraid of things Jesus already warned us would be normal life for those who follow him. Have we backtracked on our commitment? Have we now decided that anyone can live as we strive to live—even those who claim no connection to the empowering Holy Spirit? Have we lost faith in the Holy Spirit to transform lives, and so now we rely on governments and SWAT teams to protect us and to get other people in line? Have we rejected the life of welcome, charity, and generosity Jesus demands and decided that it’s better just to keep out anyone who might threaten us?

I cannot, for the life of me, connect my Christian faith to the kind of fear that crackles throughout this country like a brush fire.

·         If I am unafraid, I don’t have to live on the defensive all the time.
·         If I am unafraid, I am free to help others and to give to them generously.
·         If I am unafraid, then terrorists become, to me, just another aspect of a world struggling to be free and to find what it needs.
·         If I am unafraid, I will not need to strike out at others to make myself more secure.

As a Christian, I choose not to be afraid. It’s not easy sometimes, and I do fail at this. But I am determined not to live in fear. It’s not what Jesus did, and it’s not what he wants from me.

A more pointed question might be, not Why are Christians so afraid? But What are they so afraid of losing? Most fear has to do with security, with the dread of loss. So let’s look at some popular Christian fears and trace them to the specific powers that are threatened.

The biblical institution of marriage is under threat. No, it’s not. Christian marriage is a covenant between two people in the presence of God and the faith community. Unless the faith community starts attacking married people and trying to cause trouble for their marriages, biblical marriage is not under threat. What people outside the faith community do has no impact on God-ordained marriage. A government license to marry is not the same thing as the faith community’s blessing of a union. Unfortunately, our government has given preachers and other religious figures government authority to make a union legal in the eyes of the state. This simply confuses the issue. A legal marriage does not equal Christian marriage.

Rather than worry about how certain government licenses (for example, to gay couples) might ruin the biblical institution of marriage, Christians should give their energy to supporting marriage and helping people in the faith community discern wisely—which they aren’t doing presently, as indicated by our divorce rate, nearly identical to that in the culture at large. I’ve known some so-called Christian marriages that were not two people brought together by God. They came together out of lust or guilt or pressure from parents or their own immaturity and dysfunction. The Christian church needs to attend to marriage within the community and stop obsessing about people who seek mere legal status as married citizens.

 People will stop believing God’s Word and will refuse to live according to it. Belief comes through faith, and faith is a gift from God—we can’t just muster it up. And we can’t pressure other people to have that faith. Jesus never coerced people—never. He accepted that some people would believe him and others wouldn’t. So why do we insist that people outside our faith use our Bible and our faith norms as their bible and faith norms? When has that ever worked?

Why are we so concerned that the Ten Commandments might be removed from public buildings? What purpose do they serve there? By simply being public, do they force a change in people? By simply being public, do they make Christianity the norm? No on both counts. Words engraved and displayed have no magic power over people. And even if they did, we would be gravely mistaken to try to work magic on people so that they behaved as we believed they should. Free will and the power of choice did not originate in our constitution; God gave us free choice before we even knew what it was. God continues to allow people to make choices.

We are afraid that our children will no longer be able to pray in school. No laws prevent anyone from private prayer in a public place. But that’s not what the fearful Christians are thinking of; they believe that public, communal prayer should be happening in our schools. Which prayers? Christian? Jewish? Hindu? Islamic? Would we appreciate our Christian children having to mouth the words to Muslim prayers if we lived in a country that was predominantly Muslim? Why is it okay for us to force prayer upon groups of children?

Also, why would we want our children to be saying rote, public prayers anyway? Isn’t that what Jesus warned us against? And wouldn’t we rather our children’s prayers be meaningful and personal? The idea that not having prayer in school is a threat to our children’s well-being doesn’t even make sense.

I believe that much of the Christian fear in this country is really a fear of losing power. It’s a fear that we won’t be able to control how other people act. It’s a fear that our way will no longer be the ruling way.

We’re accustomed to having power in the United States because Christianity was the primary religion here for so long. Also, we were, to some extent, culturally Christian. But we’re not the grand majority we used to be. So we must shift the way we do religion in the public square. We must respect the rights of others, the beliefs of others.

And we must remind ourselves that Jesus never meant for Christians to rule over others. That’s right. He didn’t. He said that we would serve others. That we would love others. That we would care for the least of these.

He said we would be persecuted. We would be hated. We would have to be as wary as serpents—but as harmless as doves. And we would not win any battles with weapons but with the Holy Spirit.

But Christians have bought into the cultural norms of dominance, ego, bigotry, and violence. None of these qualities have anything to do with the Christian faith. Yet we act out of those qualities when we rage against laws that no longer favor us. Jesus never promised that we would have the protection of any laws. He assured us of the opposite.

A lot of church historians will agree that one of the worst things to happen to Christianity was its adoption by Constantine as the state religion, back in the 300s. Yes, it meant that we didn’t get fed to the lions anymore. And we could share the faith freely. But it also meant that we got cozy with power and with all the un-Jesus-like characteristics of power, such as coercion and intolerance and corruption. The monastic movement began because Christians could see that the state church was corrupting the Body of Christ. They had to get away and pray, and establish among smaller, more intentional communities the realities of prayer, service, and discernment.

 Now is the time for prayer, service and discernment. It is not the time to skew every law and powerful will toward our preferences. It is not a time to insist that our way be established as the public way. Real faith never worked that way. Christians who are trying to force everyone to live by their way are doing untold damage to God’s kingdom by repelling people—by hurting and angering them. And who wouldn’t be hurt and angered when their rights are usurped by even well-meaning power?

Finally, Christians are afraid of terrorists. Which is understandable. The whole world fears the horror being played out constantly by terrorists. Jesus did not speak directly about terrorists, but he’d spent his life under Roman occupation, and his people knew terror. But Jesus didn’t really talk about that. He talked about faith, hope, and love. He talked about helping those who suffered—whether under terrorism or something else. Jesus said bluntly that a person should not fear the one who could only harm the body. Even in horrible situations, the goal is that we walk forward in faith, in prayer, and in generosity toward others.

If a Christian is living in fear, then she or he needs to return to the Gospels and listen to Jesus for awhile.

If a Christian is afraid of losing power, then she or he needs to return to the Gospels and listen to Jesus for awhile.

Please. Before more damage is caused in the name of the One who bears no resemblance to our petty, hateful, grasping, cultural-christian American God.