Why Haven't We Changed the World?

Here’s my Question: Why haven’t we changed the world? “We,” meaning “We Christians.” We’ve had 2,000 years to get the job done. The usual answer is “original sin, dying world, vale of tears.” Perfection waits in heaven. Excuses. Every day is a new day. We act and world either changes or stays the same.
My theory is much simpler: bad philosophy. Or you might say, bad theology. What’s theology but philosophy with God added to the mix? And if philosophy is worth anything, it’s not about ideas but how we live.
Ask anyone—especially those who might once have called themselves Christian, but ask anyone: practicing Christians, media, what it means to live Christian and you’d most often hear the three-point plan: keep your pants up, your shoulder to the wheel, and do what you’re told. Let’s face it, that plan isn’t going to change the world. There’s nothing wrong with keeping your pants up, most of the time anyway, or with keeping your shoulder to the wheel, but they don’t come close to what we need.
The worst problem is in point three: “do what you’re told.” Those doing the telling--seen in the plan as having God’s authority--have a pretty poor track record. They’ve never needed to change the world because for them the world looks pretty good “as is.” We can and should demand better leadership--as futile as that may seem--challenging our world on a political level as Jesus did. But along with his political message Jesus promised that “the kingdom of heaven” is possible on earth. We’ve lost faith in that possibility. You won’t find it in the three-point plan. You have to look up to find it, not down. When we do, we’ll start to understand how to change the world.

Bush War Machine Betrays Christian Values

In an American administration elected with support from large sections of the Christian community there appears to be no voice for Christian values when it comes to war and peace. The New York Times reported today that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is prepared to lead the nation closer to violent confrontation with Iran, “to pacify, for awhile, administration hawks who are pushing for possible military action.” This, of course, includes discredited Vice President Dick Cheney.
The anticipated actions would label the main wing of the Iranian military as a terrorist organization. Jesus, those of us still care may recall, suggested we take the log out of our own eye before we attempt to remove the splinter from our neighbor’s. Is it any wonder the Bush administration is so blind to what they are doing? Is it any wonder their reckless military adventures have left hundreds of thousands dead and driven millions into refugee status? Where are the voices of those who follow the “Prince of Peace”? Of course, Bush and his gang hold constitutional power and with a compliant congress can do what they wish, but they should be forced to disassociate themselves from the name of Christ before that name means nothing at all.
It’s either sad or humorous--depending on how far you’ve been beaten down by the Bush media machine--that the leaders of the two Middle Eastern nations we now occupy are working for peace with the Iranians and calling them brothers. While the Christians push for the violence, the Islamists press for peace. Go figure.
Some Christians will call this position naive and foolish. To them I say, “where is your courage, where is your heart?” Or maybe the question is, “where is your stomach?” Thank God Jesus wasn’t so gutless when he faced off against the domination system of his day in the name of justice and compassion.

So That's What Christian Means

In Daytona Beach Florida Sunday a nine-member family from Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka Kansas interrupts their vacation to protest outside Daytona’s largest Baptist church, proclaiming divine punishment in the death of American soldiers and in the Minnesota bridge tragedy. Why? Because sodomy—that is anal sex—has been decriminalized in the United States. Also Sunday, In Neosho Missouri a pastor and two church deacons are gunned down in cold blood. And over the weekend in Arlington Texas a large evangelical congregation calls off the funeral service of a navy war vet when they learn at the last minute that he was gay. God must be saying, “With friends like these, who needs enemies.”
The bizarre thing about Sunday’s protest in Daytona Beach is that this is no liberal vs. conservative showdown. The church these protectors of God’s values chose to picket is none other than First Baptist, pastored by Bobby Welch, who until a year ago served as national president of the Southern Baptist Convention. To the best of my knowledge, the SBC is no friend of sodomy, which to be clear, in this case means sex between men. No one has been promoting homosexuality from the pulpit at Daytona First Baptist—to say the least!
The motive for the murders in Missouri has not yet been revealed, but the public will remember it happened in church and that the pastor and two “deacons” were the ones killed. The gunman even took time to allow the children to escape. The small church, which was borrowing another congregation’s sanctuary, served a community of Micronesians--Pacific islanders. The killer was part of that community. This wasn’t a random act.
As for High Point Church in Arlington Texas, there’s only one word for what they did: pathetic. OK, two words: pathetic and despicable. And it’s no stretch to see the link between High Point’s judgment against a gay sailor and the no-class protesters in Daytona Beach. They agree in principle, the Texas church just has slightly better manners.
For those of us who practice the Christian faith, this all looks like a sad embarrassment. To those who have long ago given up on “the church” this confirms their view of what “being Christian” is all about. When we sing “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love,” they have good cause to laugh cynically and say, “Yeah right!”

Time to Dump Counterfeit Christians

You may have heard the phrase “The Emerging Church” tossed around. It’s the latest thing, the new buzz, though its roots likely go back to Christian writers of the mid-20th century like Paul Tillich. It is a way of being Christian that is at the same time more spiritual and more thoughtful than what passes as Christianity in America today.
Marcus Borg, a professor at Oregon State University and a leader in the emerging church movement, likes to talk in terms of paradigms. A paradigm is simply a basic way of seeing things, a matrix from which understanding comes. For example, in the world of astronomy before Copernicus and Galileo, a paradigm prevailed that said the earth was at the center of the universe with the sun and stars revolving around. It was completely wrong but it worked. Sailors studied the “movement” of the sun and stars, charted the patterns and sailed their ships by what they saw. Even though the original assumption was incorrect, ships got where they were going.
The church and Christianity over the centuries have created their own paradigms. In the first, what started out as a counter-culture movement was sucked into complicity with secular society. A good example would be the Holy Roman Empire. Another would be the way in recent years that the conservative church has intertwined its interests with those of America’s conservative leaders.
As an adjunct to this, the church, and I include mainline Protestants in this, has exchanged Jesus’ dynamic spiritualism and radical politics for a system of beliefs that converts Christianity from a heart faith to a head faith. The head is happy with knowledge while the heart wants wisdom. Better to keep the heart out of it and stick to simple formulas the head can handle. So, what makes one a Christian? Well, do you believe that Jesus is the only son of God, died for our sins, rose from the dead, ascended into heaven and will come again? If so, eternity is yours. Believing is more important than being. Faith means accepting these facts rather than living as if we believe in our hearts that God intended us for a life of compassion, justice and mercy. Entering the “kingdom of God” is put off until after we die.
If we Christians had not lived with this counterfeit paradigm for the past 2,000 years the world might be a very different place. But it was never likely to happen. Few have the stomach for what Jesus asks of us. For those who do, the kingdom can be now.

Texas Church Betrayed by Sexual Fascination

The story of a Texas megachurch canceling the funeral service of their janitor’s brother when they learned he was gay (the deceased brother, not the janitor), reminds me of an old joke about a son who comes home from school and asks his Dad to clarify a science lesson on the difference between fact and theory. Since the joke is sexual in nature I won’t tell it here, but the punch line ends with the word “whores.” You may have heard it.
No one is a whore in the Arlington, Texas incident involving High Point Church and its pastor Gary Simons. But there’s much confusion between fact and theory when it comes to understanding what it means to follow Jesus. The church’s theory, according to Simon, was that because the dead man was a homosexual, he was a sinner and therefore not worthy of a Christian burial: “… not based on hatred, not based on discrimination, but based on principle,” Pastor Simon explained. Well, the fact is, according to universally accepted Christian teaching, we’re all sinners unable to redeem ourselves and therefore in need of God’s grace. If High Point uniformly applied that fact to its theory, the Arlington church could do away with funerals in their entirety. I also wonder if the church would have acted as it did if the dead man’s brother had been their leading contributor rather than their janitor. But I’ll let that one go since it risks making me as petty as they are.
Why the American church has chosen to focus its attention so exclusively on sexual matters is a mystery to me, but my leading theories are male sexual insecurity, augmented by a desperate desire to avoid the real issues Jesus described, which unfortunately, are more difficult to address and would call more “respectable” Christians to task.
When the religious professionals of Jesus’ day demanded his take on one of the little “principles” they deemed important, Jesus shook his head with great sadness and replied, “you obviously know nothing of God or the scriptures.” I’m not sure whether it’s ironic or predictable that those today who belie Jesus and his teachings, who so clearly “know nothing of God or the scriptures,” are the same ones who so proudly claim his name.