Submitted by rlp on Tue, 06/03/2008 - 15:14.
Christianity has a heavy presence in the United States. You can feel the weight of it like a quilted cloak draped over the people, bending their heads forward and pressing on their shoulders. The air is thick with Christian words. Bible phrases fill our literature and are baptized into our culture, peppering our speech with feeble reminders of a lost faith.
- She’s the salt of the earth.
- He has the patience of Job.
- It’s only a drop in the bucket.
The Christian Church in America is so symbiotically enmeshed with our culture that their hearts beat as one, and some people hardly know the difference between the two. The words of faith and religion have burrowed deep into the flesh of our language. They rise to the surface like shards of glass from a festering wound, reborn as oaths, obscenities, and vulgar expressions.
- Jesus Christ!
- God damn it!
- Oh my God!
Are the people who say these things praying?
When your holy names are born again into the rarified order of words used to express rage and anger, you know you’re deep into the culture. Down in the cultural unconscious, right on the edge of the place where myths are born. And these quasi-religious phrases may well outlast the American Church. Words and phrases are notoriously long-lived, surviving for generations after all remembrance of their original meaning is gone.
And that would be fitting, since words will likely be our undoing. Much of American Christianity is all about words. Hollow words of theology that have all the depth and meaning of political slogans. Words delivered with a smile by ministers who dance behind their pulpits. Words that create false gods of hope and fear. Words that build up straw men and beat them down, while gently excusing the listeners from anything that remotely resembles radical living. Christianity has become a word factory, churning out half-baked ideas and spewing them across the bobbing heads of people who are looking for easy answers. The Church is Constantine reborn in our time. She mouths words of salvation and shakes her baptismal waters over the people who are marched beneath her arched weapons.
But good words must have good living beneath and behind them, or they will ultimately come to nothing. Words without living are just marketing, which has its place if you’re selling hamburgers or shoes, but not if you’re seeking the meaning of life.
I know about the danger of words, for I am a word man myself. I am a writer and a preacher, which means my words end up on paper and in the air, which means they hardly exist at all. Remember: even if my words touch your heart, having said them or written them gives me no special credits in heaven. My life is what matters, as is yours.
It should not have been this way, my brothers and sisters of nature, science, and the world. Christianity should have soared like a bird on the winds of real living. Christianity should have been a heavenly choice, a chosen path, the way of a pilgrim. You should have been warned of the difficulty of the Christian journey perhaps, but never lied to and never coerced. Those who seek to follow in the way of Christ should have taken up a rule of living like monks of old and never laid that rule on the shoulders of anyone who did not freely ask for it. Instead of demanding respect and threatening with fires of hell, we should have been the humble servants of all who crossed our paths.
I speak these words of criticism as a committed insider in the American Church. I speak them with love, but more importantly with great hope, for I always have been a dreamer. When it comes to the Church, you have to be able to see what she might have been and might still become. And strangely enough, you have to see this and believe in it, though you know the Church will never live up to it.
I have been discouraged by the Church many times. And I have even wondered if being a minister was the right choice for me. Thankfully, the Church as a whole is not my responsibility. I am a part of one small community, meeting in a little stone building in San Antonio. We have words to say, of course, various affirmations of faith and statements that we write. But our lives will either speak for us or not. And that is a bit scary, considering how imperfect we are. We try to represent the spirit of Christ. We try and often fail. Sometimes we love the people who come to us seeking solace, and sometimes we have failed to love them as well as we should. We stand before a fireplace on Sunday mornings, singing and speaking, sometimes making a mess of the words, not to mention the living that should stand behind them.
We are waiting to be redeemed. We are waiting for the gift of redemption. And while we are waiting we stand ready to bring whatever goodness we have into the world, as if we might prime some heavenly pump that might start some larger process and things might begin to become what they ought to have been.
rlp
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I am Waiting
Your last words remind me of Ferlinghetti's I am Waiting.
Once again, another stunning piece. I always look forward to the little (1) next to the rlp RSS feed. Your congregation is lucky to have you. I wish we had a RLP preaching at a church near me, I'd actually go to church.
Awesome
Wow. That's sensational. This line: "Words without living are just marketing, which has its place if you’re selling hamburgers or shoes, but not if you’re seeking the meaning of life." If I ever wrote just ONE great sentence like that, I'd quit writing and consider myself a success.
But that entire piece is full of meaningful, relevant images. Nice.
More Than Words
Words fail me, but this is the second stirring piece I've run across today by people who I respect that speak of a wearing of one's faith; being the required thing, not just words and phrases. So, maybe there is hope yet for this thing we call Church.
Thank you for reminding me my life is my word, and it is my choice to bring good or ill with it- it seems I'm often forgetting.
Yes, I'm sure you're
Yes, I'm sure you're bemoaning the fact that xianity has only stuck to the realm of words lately. I don't care if you revive the inquisition, you will never convert me! I would rather burn in hell for all eternity than spend a nanosecond worshipping the monster that is your god, fundie!
Goliath,
Goliath,
It's been a log time. As I mentioned years ago when you used to come and leave these kinds of comments, I've never made a single attempt to convert you to anything. And I don't think you are going to burn in hell. Not that my opinion on these matters has any eternal significance.
Are you still trolling around, leaving inflammatory comments? Not found anything better to do?
Just leave this guy alone everyone. Responding to the content of his comments just eggs him on. Goliath, in the old days I didn't have the ability to block your access or delete your comments. I can do that now. So you get one of these. If you start leaving more, I can delete them with a single click. I can also ban your IP address. So don't waste your time here.
Or worse, I could edit your comments to make you sound nice. I could make you gush over my writing, fawning and falling all over yourself with words of praise and saying, "What must I do to be saved." Don't make me "sweetify" you. I will do it. ;-)
Honest truth: I wish you would send me an email. I'd love to know what led you to become this angry. And if you were willing to put your thoughts about the meaning of life and the non-existence of God into serious written form, I'd even consider posting that here with you as a guest blogger. Seriously, take the time to tell use what you think/believe and why. It would probably spark some interesting conversation.
Or you can just keep dropping into sites and leaving comments designed to piss people off. Your call.
Trolls are like stray cats.
Trolls are like stray cats. Feed them and they just keep coming back.
You remember me? I guess I
***comment removed by rlp***
I think you are precisely 12
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Ummmm....12 stupid? What
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I was wrong. Make it 14.
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Nope, I'm not 14 years old,
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You're a generous,
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English-language usage humor goes lost on angry post-adolescent
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I am deeply touched by your
I am deeply touched by your words, as always. You have the most amazing ability, and I'm so glad you chose to share it on the web so others can partake of it. If I ever happen to make it to your part of the world I would love to go to your church just to hear you speak.
Words
rlp,
You have a way with words. I can relate to this; sometimes I feel like I'm just mouthing the words and not living Christianity. I sometimes get the grandiose idea the God wants me to do some huge thing, which maybe She does, but for now, all I am called to do is love Her, love myself and love others. I have a hard enough time with just doing that, nevermind anything more grandiose! Thanks for the reminder to keep trying.
Enjoy your retreat this weekend! I couldn't make it, but you will all be in my thoughts and prayers.
Brenda
RLP, Have you ever
RLP,
Have you ever considered printing some of your sermons for us to read? Or recording them for us to hear? Many people on here have said that they would love to come hear you speak at your church, but because of distance cannot. Not that you would become a sermon marketer or packager. No, maybe we could just hear some "Real Live Preaching" once in awhile.
Who knows, your words in sermons might actually help us live out the way of Christ more fully. Just a thought.
Anyway, thanks for another nice and challenging piece.
First, thanks for the kind
First, thanks for the kind words about my words.
Sermons online. Yeah.....uh....I've always resisted that. Some things I do or do not do for my own health. I don't know. I said I would never do any kind of video bible study or anything, and then this one person asked me so I did a series on how to read the Bible. I mean, it just seemed right in that moment.
Sermons...Here are the problems:
1. We're pretty simple at Covenant. I have no good way of recording them. I used to do that with a digital recorder, just for my own purposes. But that broke. You know, if I hauled my Macbook in there and set it up it would be rather distracting.
2. Maybe sermons ought to be kept to the community. I don't know. I truly don't. I keep avoiding doing this for some reason.
3. I don't know...feels sort of wrong. I'm already promoting myself at about 150% of my comfort level just to be posting things and to have worked at a publishing relationship with Christian Century. Can't seem to find the energy for any more.
4. Time. Just getting them recorded and everything and figuring out how to post them. I just can't get to it.
I never count anything out. Who knows.
Fair enough. Maybe you're
Fair enough.
Maybe you're right. Perhaps it is best to leave preaching in the community. Maybe "real live preaching" needs the context of community to be genuine. Like you, I don't know.
But I respect your struggle with this and concerns.
Who knows, maybe next year I just need to jump on a plane and come to the Fransican Retreat and then stick around for the service at Covenant. That might be nice.
I want the videos with the
I want the videos with the post-sermon color commentary.
Well, you'll be here in a
Well, you'll be here in a few weeks, right? You staying for Sunday? You can tape me surreptitiously and sneak it onto YouTube. Quite a scandal.
I suppose given that scenario, you could provide the color commentary.
lol
You are coming?
I hadn't asked who was coming to the retreats. I will be glad to meet you.
Got my ticket today! Looking
Got my ticket today! Looking forward to meeting you, too.
Redemption is a key word
Redemption is a key word and
coerced is another
Did God ever coerce? Isn't coercion a form of manipulation? And does the church even know when it is manipulating people's emotions, thoughts, money, words and deeds?
Redemption is the church even ready for it?
becky
Reminded of Kierkegaard
"Because faith, hope, and love, because God and Jesus Christ are talked about in church in a solemn voice (whether this is the more or less artistic or the inartistic deep bass voice of a revivalist), it is still by no means follows that this is a godly address." (Concluding Unscientific Postscript)
"I do not think that without exaggeration one can say that Christianity in our time has been completely abolished. No, Christianity still exists and in its truth, but as a teaching, as doctrine. What has been abolished and forgotten (and this can be said without exaggeration), however, is being a Christian, what it means to be a Christian; or what has been lost, what seems to exist no longer, is the ideal picture of being a Christian." (Armed Neutrality)
dew drop inn
Huh. I had never thought of 'drop in the bucket' as being biblical. Okay. Isaiah 40: 15-17. I'm sure it was a time-worn expression by the time it was codified. Interesting. Huh.
Michael Macrone (San Francisco's Grace Cathedral) gives a little interesting insight into the phrase here.
http://www.gracecathedral.org/enrichment/brush_excerpts/brush_20060314.s...
Words - can't live with em, can't live without them
RLP
Great insight.
We have far too many words these days between blogs and newspapers and the Internet and TV and radio. Maybe a vow of silence would be in order --- for all of us. A national day of silence!
I've often wondered about communication without words. What if we were mute -- kind of like jackrabbits -- trying to operate in this world. How would we communicate the timeless truths of God? How could we communicate affection. How could we tell people we are in love, or angry or hurt?
Despite the drawbacks to words, I'll take these letters and try to make something of them.
I was watching Terry Jones
I was watching Terry Jones history of the crusades. It was probably the most disturbing history lesson I'd ever heard. I mean, seriously raiding Muslim villages and eating the children as an act of penitence?
It makes us laugh to hear modern Christians talk about peace and love and holiness, and all the while you can hear the hate and the violence behind their tongues.
I mean it's not their fault, we're all animals, but love, Love, is just a handy fiction.
A Arab of the time responded to the Crusades saying, "The Jews, and the Christians, and the Muslims have it all wrong, the world is populated by only two kinds of people, those with intelligence and no faith, and those cursed with faith, and no intelligence"
he Crusades? You do know
The Crusades? You do know that was half a millennium ago, right? What connection should I feel with people who claimed to be doing evil in the name of Christ? Why should I answer for them at all?
Can you imagine a world where people were forever held responsible for acts done by ANYONE who claimed to be doing them in the name of an organization or worldview?
Look, I'm all for owning up to past wrongs done by institutions, etc. But we are individuals who are seeking a spiritual path. It would be foolish for me to abandon a thing because someone once did some bad things in its name.
I assure you there have been athiests, agnostics and people of every worldview who have been evil and shown little intelligence. What label do you claim? And do you stand ready to answer for everything ever done by anyone who ever claimed membership in your group?
Your closing statement is laughable. The absurdity of its sweeping generalization is comical. People with faith are stupid. People without aren't. I mean, even you don't believe that. You wrote it but you don't really believe it.
At least I hope you don't. Because if you do you are WAY out of touch with reality.
But I assume you don't. In that case it was simply an inflammatory remark. I hope you enjoyed snickering to yourself after you left it, saying, "Boy I really told those Christians a thing or two."
Eating babies. Do you really
Eating babies.
Do you really think a man who would be disturbed by the idea of children being eaten, could really take any pleasure in rubbing someones face in that fact? It would be vulgar.
You know what religious group has killed the least throughout history? Probably the satanists. That does not say much for idealism.
And I think that is what I was trying to say. It is our faith that allows us to perpetrate horrors. Faith in god. Faith in the non-existence of god. Faith in ourselves. It is faith itself that gives an individual the courage to do an injustice, and not even realize it.
And I think that is the message of the quote I included as well, though perhaps that is a matter of interpretation.
--
Ironically, there seems to be a lot of hatred and violence in your response to my intentionally sombre comment.
Hello Sir, I think you make
Hello Sir,
I think you make a valid point, but hasnt faith also influenced people to do good things in the name of justice?
People like Mother Teresa, or Ghandi, Malcolm X, or MLK? They where all people guided by religious faiths of different kinds, and they all did good things.
Keeping that in mind we cant really say that faith is purley a bad thing.
Hmm... If you really were
Hmm...
If you really were being serious and thoughtful, then I misread you. I that case I apologize.
You present an interesting thought about faith. So let me as you something, and this is a serious inquiry.
What discipline or philosophy or pursuit of human knowledge does not require faith? Everything we think and believe is backed by faith of one kind or another. Science itself must be taken with faith. I posted something recently about a machine that fires a single proton of light. Says who? The man who made it? Those within the discipline whose knowledge makes such a thing possible?
I'll admit that some kinds of faith seem absurd. Faith in superstition or some kind of insane faith that, I don't know, the microwave is a god or something. But it's all a matter of degree, isn't it?
If we all were able to admit that we have faith in things, perhaps we would be humble enough not to do harm in their name.
Nihilism claims to be
Nihilism claims to be faithless. If there is some religion that is faithless, I would say it is Buddhism. Some Buddhism asserts re-incarnation, karma, or Nirvana, but the heart of Buddhism is the understanding that desire is the source of all suffering. In order to avoid suffering, one has to give up all desires and aspirations. One has to become supremely apathetic, which I would say, is the opposite of faith, of hope.
Certainly there is an inherent level of faithfulness in our way of thinking about the world, we operate on an instinctual level, and religion is a sort of pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, and truth, through instinct.
Just because, as laymen, you or I don't understand the operation of a photon gun, does not mean that the designer of the technology didn't, or that we can't. The argument that there are aspects of the universe science cannot explain does not prove the supernatural. I recently read c.s. lewis' "Mere Christianity". In the beginning, he reasons that because we all have an inherent sense of morality there must be some force broadcasting it. At the time that may have been a salient argument, but today science has studied human morality, and can explain its presence, and its relation to our biology, and evolutionary development. So certainly there are mysteries out there, but science has been explaining them at a great rate. I'm not advocating one methodology over another here, I'm just saying, science illuminates more than religion or philosophy ever did. As an ideology science is magnificently adroit. And just like any ideology it can justify butchery, which, we ought to always be aware of.
In general it feels like the time of faith has come to an end. Over the past century religion has sat comfortably along science, but as science dissects and explains more and more of the phenomena we used to consider ineffable, I think faith will be less relevant. You can see the uprising beginning, with the Muslim world rebelling, and end of days believers trying to help along the biblical prophecies. Who knows what will come of it all.
I don't know if faith promotes humbleness particularly. We'd have to sit down and look at psychology and animal behavior studies to find what inputs exert the emotional effect of humility. Faith tends to make people sure, and when they are sure, they become willing to be more extreme.
1. Nihilism faithless? It's
1. Nihilism faithless? It's a worldview. It takes a LOT of faith to make the claim that life has no meaning.
2. Every doctrinal thing you said about Buddhism (reincarnation, etc) requires faith.
3. I agree that the person who made the gun knows what he or she was doing, but you have to trust that person, right? Faith and trust are the same word in the New Testament. You must have faith in this person.
4. "It feels like faith is coming to an end." That's a faith statement. And for me to accept it would be another one.
Now it sounds like you and I have very different ideas, but rather than argue back and forth, I can see what is happening. We have different ideas about the meaning of the word faith. You know what happens when terms on not explained. We argue forever, becoming more entrenched and certain the other person is crazy.
It sounds like when you say "faith," you mean the mindless, robotic acceptance of religious doctrine and authority over against individual thinking and the passionate and very objective claims of science. Ie a person who won't go see a doctor because his pastor told him God would heal his child.
Yeah, well I don't blame you for that. I don't like the sound of that either. And I think indeed more and more people in the world are leaving that behind, though at present HUGE numbers of humans are still there.
For me faith is like art. It is an embracing of the mystery that lies beyond us. It is me giving thanks to an intelligent creator even though I can't know the creator's nature. And honestly, if you look at human thought and development, at human myth and worship, we are rather wired to fall in love with mystery. Scientists more than most, oddly enough. You know that feeling you get when you look at the stars and realize how big things are. Or perhaps how little you can understand how big things are.
That's a religious impulse, by my way of understanding religious impulses. And a thankful look at the heavens with a nod JUST IN CASE someone out there planned all this, well that's worship and faith. I've committed myself to the practice of it, and I do so without anger for anyone who doesn't agree, without feeling there is a penalty for those who do not agree, and without any need to convince those who do not agree. And I do so while retaining great love and admiration for empirical searches for physical truths and all that has brought us.
But the kinds of questions science answers are not questions of meaning, purpose, and ethics. Science can probe those areas, but the best that comes out of it are statements like this: "Well, we think we may have found an evolutionary reason for love. And perhaps an evolutionary reason for belief in a god."
And trusting in the way of science to bring you ALL the truth you need is a pretty big faith statement itself.
Well, while you work on that (And truly - blessings on brother and sister scientist), some of us continue worshiping and serving in honor of the mystery of what lies beyond us. And we've let go of a lot of strident doctrinal things that work against human freedom. But yes, we still claim that life has meaning and there is an intelligent creator.
Your thoughts in this essay
Your thoughts in this essay have been rolling around in my head, creating havoc with my complacency. Then yesterday NBC Nightly News had an bit about South Carolina specialty license plates with a cross, stain glass window and the words "I Believe". The synchronicity of reading you and then seeing a state putting words on a license plate struck me.
I appreciate your thoughts, both in this essay and in all of your blog. You use words, but you also live them. I'm thankful for you.
"Can you imagine a world
"Can you imagine a world where people were forever held responsible for acts done by ANYONE who claimed to be doing them in the name of an organization or worldview?"
are we not all supposed to be burdened with the acts of everyone who has preceded us? i thought that was the whole point of having a qualified redeemer. correct me if this is just a misunderstanding on my part. by the way, i don't expect you to answer for the inquisition ;)
National Religion
I found this in a Blog by a gentleman named Wayne Madsen.
"America has become an ugly place. It is anti-foreign in almost every aspect. There is no time for any religion other than a fundamentalist and uniquely American-created notion of Judeo-Christianity rooted in the belief that a white-bearded European God sent a fair haired and blue-eyed Aryan named Jesus Christ (not a black, curly haired, Aramaic, and probably, Greek-speaking Essene Jew named Yeshua ben Yosef haDavid) to Earth to die for the sins of a chosen few Southern white bigots, rich Republicans, and Christian crusaders wearing American military uniforms and private contractor fatigues."
I'm not sure he is that far off. Which is why I did not take great offense at Rev. Jeremiah Wrights "God Damn America comments. We sing God Bless America not as a prayer, but rather as a jingoistic national anthem or perhaps a fight song. We see God's blessing as our entitlement rather than the grace and mercy that it is. If we are blessed, it is certainly not because we have earned or deserve it...
"If we are blessed, it is
"If we are blessed, it is certainly not because we have earned or deserved it..."
Duly noted.
Words and Actions
My trouble is that I've always been a bookworm and love studying theology, but have a really hard time putting down my books and getting into actually ministry. I read, I write but I find it hard to get out of my shell for real evangelism and service. Fortunately, I'm married and have kids, so I can't be a hermit! Life in the church pulls me out and as I engage in ministry I find myself becoming more enthustiastic about it, and generally don't regret the time away from books and blog.
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