BLOG 3/20/16. I’M FOR A RADICALLY THIS-WORLDLY CHRISTIAN FAITH

That’s right. I’ve about ‘had it’ with detached, other-worldly expressions of the Christian faith that don’t take this world as the object of Christ’s re-creative love seriously. I look at so much of the church’s hymnody that I have grown up with, and find it more like escape from Christ’s calling to discipleship, than anything that smacks of: “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” It sounds so ‘spiritual’ to sing: “When all my labors and trials are o’er, and I am safe on that beautiful shore,” … but Jesus came right into this brokenness, this rebellion, this human tragedy … into the ‘stink and stuff’ of this very real and immediate human scene as the incarnation of Gods to reconcile it all unto God. We are not call to be, or allowed to be escapists, but as the incarnation of God’s New Creation.

At the threshold of this 2016 Holy Week we need to be reminded of this. Jesus walked right into the conspiracy of religious and political principalities and powers, took their worst, gave his life, and inaugurated a radical New Creation right into the ‘here and now’ of this human scene. His calling to those who embrace who he is and what he came to be and do, is: “As the Father has sent me, even so am I sending you” (John 20:20). And into what is he sending us? He is sending us into the realities of where each one of us is right now—from heart-warming and commendable, to frightening and discouraging and destructive. In one part of the world it may be into the midst of such a hostile culture that to be Christ’s follower one must live a very clandestine / ‘underground’ life of Christian love and faithfulness. In another setting it may be in the context of all kinds of aberrations, or quasi-Christian expressions that distort Christ’s message in order to use it to shore-up their own prejudices. The contexts are infinitely diverse and go from encouraging to wicked.

I am one of the only one of my Christian associates (that I know of) whose favorite magazine is the UTNE Reader, which is an alternative press publication that makes no pretense of being religious. It is a product of culture that is a-religious in a sense, but realistic about spiritual hungerings. But it also takes this world and its realities very seriously, and it reprints articles about environmental issues, emotional issues, cultural realities, etc. that I don’t find in the ostensible Christian magazines. I read it to keep myself in touch with a world that is beyond my immediate experience, but in which dwell a whole generation of real persons with ill-defined and subtle spiritual longings for which they are always trying to find solutions, … seeking to fill Pascal’s “God-shaped vacuum” is ways that never get there. But the journal deals with issues that people grapple with in their daily lives, and with issues that I seldom hear mentioned in other-worldly worship services.

Jesus’ calling in the Sermon on the Mount is that his people are to be those who identify with the poor, who are peacemakers, who are merciful and hospitable, who are willing to be persecuted and verbally assaulted, to mourn with those who mourn … so that outsiders should see their New Creation lives and get a clue that God is behind them (cf. Matthew 5:1-16).

My own state legislature (Georgia) has just passed a ‘religious liberty’ bill that it says is an attempt to keep the culture from being secularized.( Lotsa luck!) Yet it ultimately legitimates discrimination against lifestyles that it finds distasteful. What these zealous and ostensible Christian legislators miss is that Jesus sends us to this very secular, ‘this-worldly’ messed-up culture to be the sons and daughters of light, to love those real persons who are still captive to all kinds of emptiness and brokenness. We are called to be a very this-worldly expression of God’s radical love. Jesus became flesh and blood and lived in the midst of the daily realities of of human brokenness, what with all of its poignant, tragic, often brutal dimensions—indifference, prejudice, shallowness, greed, hatred, … loves, good works, and and spiritual longings. To this this-worldly context he also calls us to be his present incarnation. Heaven is our hope, but our calling is to the here and now persons and realities of our own lives. Blessings on you.