Opinion

What if we sought to take an exhaustive accounting of everything we do as a faith community: from worship to potlucks to Sunday school socials, and asked, not “Does this bring ME joy?,” but something a bit more meaningful, even Christian.

Instead of flailing and screaming against the powers of darkness, we could allow God to transform them into opportunities to trust and grow. When our enemy’s face comes to mind, we could pray for her by name and ask God to bless her. When some controversy hovers over our church family, we could ask what new thing the Spirit is teaching us. 

I wept because I knew where this kind of religion led Jesus and where it led Clarence Jordan, and where it led Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and where, in the fullness of time, it might lead me.

Too many states in our union, and even our nation itself, have cut funding for public education to the point of instability. This is neither wise nor fiscally conservative. It is, instead, selfish. There is a difference between fiscal conservativism and selfishness, by the way.

Not unlike King’s assassination, in killing Jesus, many religious leaders of the day believed they were silencing someone who challenged their power and character.

If Baptist churches decry the scourge of gun violence, speak boldly against unjust travel bans, stand with immigrants against thinly-veiled bigoted rhetoric from the highest levels of power, but have nothing to say of the more than 650,000 girls and boys created by God with divine purpose who, each year, see their lives cut short in the womb, our ethic is blown wide open for a watching world to see.

I’m surprised to be at the Comedy Cellar because — and I know how this sounds — I’m a minister. Saying that you’re a minister shuts down conversations with barbers, waitresses and the person sitting next to you on the plane. That last one is helpful.  

If Christianity is to be a force for good in the world by helping to heal our deep psychic, personal brokenness, to restore estranged relationships often marked by betrayal and contempt, to transform us into more loving, compassionate persons who care for others, then Western Christianity, and American Christianity in particular, must undergo a new reformation.

For those who have ears to hear, God is speaking — not in the wind, with an earthquake, or by fire, not in the halls of power, either, but through the voices of school children, the survivors, whose mourning has turned to marching.

I’ve been pondering the cost of being a leader who has the courage and tenacity to tell the truth. We can all agree that we need leaders who do, but how exactly do we sell the vocation of truth-telling when our own human story makes it pretty likely that if you tell a hard truth long enough you will lose your life?

Our final chapters have been written. On that great gettin’ up morning, we will see Jesus, and we will be like him, having been freed from death. We know how the story ends, but we do not know how we get there. The middle chapters are missing.