Posted: Jun 14, 08 11:38pm
Being christian does not mean being an idiot.
No, being a Christian In the world's eyes means exactly being an idiot. Look, Christians *are* idiots. Morons, in fact. Goobs, rubes and social hayseeds. We're hopelessly out of date and out of fashion, reactionary, we require a God crutch because we can't face reality. We're famous world-wide for being judgmental, cruel, hypocritical, greedy, neurotic, and responsible for some of the worst atrocities committed in our poor history: Lynchings of blacks in the US, the Crusades where believing soldiers bragged about riding through "blood up the a horses' bridle," book burnings, criminal evangelists, pederast priests, white supremacist pastors. As proxy we have signed God's name to centuries-long religious civil wars in the UK pitting Catholic against Protestant and sect against sect.
Ask anyone--I dare you--outside of a church what the word "Christian" means to them and you'll probably get answer along some of the lines above.
So.
We are idiots. Why change now?
Because the world sees us at our worst. Our best is often camouflaged, written off as coincidence or admirable self-denial. Yet like icebergs, there is more to Christians than what the world sees. We are more than the sum of our sins. We--at our best, and I stress "at our best"--accept people unconditionally. We don't make them sign contracts or post performance bonds before we decide to love them. We don't keep track of wrongs done to us. We don't lie to people, we don't cheat them or steal from them, we don't sleep with anyone else's spouses, we don't gossip or backbite or withhold material goods from the poor, the hungry, the naked. We don't murder and we confess our sins, we hope for the best at all times and we tell the truth, we're brave despite our fears, we encourage each other in our walks with God, counting each other as more important than ourselves. We're honest in all things. We lay down our lives for each other every day in millions of little acts of service and kindness and in occasional big acts of heroism. At our best, for those few moments, this is how the world should see us.
We believe in a God no one can see, touch, taste, smell or hear. We claim He's all-powerful, all-knowing, all-benevolent, yet somehow evil still exists in our world. We claim He sent His son to die for all of us, taking the death penalty of our sins upon Himself, a claim that must be accepted on faith because it cannot be proven. We believe God loves us all, even (or especially)...those people. You know...them, over there. The ones who don't measure up to our standards for how "the right people" look, like, live, drive, wear, eat or drink or screw. Yeah, those people; the detestable, perverse, uncomfortable to be around, or, worse, the ones that look like us...even though we'd die before admitting it.
We believe in forgiving our enemies, not just once or twice, but according to the words of the man whom we believe to be the Son of God, an identity never to be duplicated then or since, "...seventy times seven." In effect, perpetually. What? Surely only an idiot would believe that
Over and over and over in the New Testament, God makes it clear Christians are not to conform themselves to the value system of this fallen world. We are not to confuse our own personal with God's. Our likes and dislikes are not ever to be seen as holy writ and Jesus seems to think His likes and dislikes ought to be ours for the most part.
What is important to the world: Image, achievement, acquisition, power, glorification of appetites, hostility to the things of God--are either as nothing or anathema to us. The world does not see this as wisdom. To them, it is pure idiocy.
God demands--loudly, pointedly--for us to die to ourselves, yet the paradoxical consequence of said dying is we will live eternally.
Speaking of paradoxes, we are to love our enemies, do good to them that hate us. To the world, this is behavior beyond foolish, it's idiotic in the extreme. Merely contemplating it should be grounds for protective incarceration.
So, being a Christian mean being an idiot. It means holding beliefs and committing actions the mainstream of every society will deem ludicrous or offensive. Being a Christian means feeding someone who hates you. Being a Christian means praying for the well-being of someone who hates you. Being a Christian means loving that hateful person in spite of their hate, and not returning that hate to them. Being a Christian means telling the truth even when it's disadvantageous or uncomfortable. Being a Christian means you seek the expression of Jesus in those around you, even though they may never be aware they have any of it. Being a Christian means accepting people as you find them and not demanding they adhere to your personal agenda.
Christians love. Everything our God and Savior asks of us boils down to that. Yet love doesn't mean being a doormat or a yes-man. Sometimes love must make very difficult decisions, endure terrible consequences, pay agonizingly high prices. Sometimes, love must ask someone else to pay that price as well. Love loves enough to say "no" when appropriate. Love always, always looks out for the best interests of its subject. Love minimizes the differences and seeks to bring out the expression of Christ in every person it encounters.
I'm 46, I've been a Christian since 1977, and I'm still learning about love. Frankly, I suck at it. If love were a job, I'd be fired instantly and blackballed so I'd never get a job in it again. I've said very unloving things to people in real life and on Internet message boards and felt wonderfully self-righteous doing so.
I remember once complaining to my magic teacher about the difficulty of a routine, how much it demanded of my hand, and he said, "If it were easy, everyone would be doing it."
So, too, for the Christian life. If it were easy, everyone would do it. Instead, Jesus said, "Narrow is the way and few find it." The few that find it and continue on it look like fools to all the others outside that narrow road.
A quote from Flannery O'Connor's powerful short story, "Revelation," is appropriate here:
"A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward Heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those, who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away."
May our idiocy be the last thing that burns.
