The Practicing Progressive

Issue 5
January 8, 2007

Recently there was a report of a Christian encounter that caught my eye. Actually, it was an encounter between Christians, Christian monks, as a matter of fact. These monks became so passionate about their religious authority they were willing to forego their religion’s teaching for the chance of punching one another’s lights out.

The brouhaha was born out of an ancient disagreement over which order of monks controlled a monastery on Mt. Athos in Greece. The latest engagement involved crowbars, sledgehammers and fire extinguishers. Seven monks were hospitalized. The abbot of one of the warring factions claimed, “We were attacked and we had to respond.”

So much for turning the other cheek.

Actually, anyone who has been involved in a church for any length of time can probably recount similar, if not so physical, battles. Indeed, some of the nastiest fights between folk can trace their lineage back to congregational life.

Why, one wonders, would an organization founded on principles of peace and compassion so often degenerate into one that gives rise to such war and hatred?

I’ll submit that part of the reason, perhaps even the primary reason, is the culture of deceit that has been perpetuated throughout much of Christianity. By this I mean an unwillingness to honestly engage in the complexities of being a Christian in the modern world. An organization that continues to employ archaic metaphors as if they were contemporary realities invites a communal mindset of pretense and make-believe.

I have a sneaky hunch that most folk don’t really believe that heaven is “up there” and the devil deep below us. They don’t really believe Mary managed to give birth without benefit of Joseph or the resurrected Jesus shot up like a spaceship heading toward Mars. They don’t really believe that eating bread or drinking wine has us swallowing flesh and blood…and yet, week after week, we continue to employ such imagery.

The result is obvious and disastrous. Christianity becomes a church of wink-wink and nod-nod. We don’t really buy all this ancient tomfoolery but we’ll act like we do for an hour a week. For an hour, we’ll re-enter an ancient time and pretend it still matters today and when time is up we’ll go back to the real world to live out our lives.

Sadly, the eternal truths of Jesus get caught up in the church’s chicanery and inevitably we leave his teachings on peace, justice, compassion, hospitality and more, back at the door with Church’s pretenses. The message OF Jesus gets lost in Christianity’s often muddled message ABOUT Jesus. All of Christianity, the good and the bad, the helpful and the hurtful become intertwined in a concoction that is easily dismissed as irrelevant and superfluous.

Such a reality allows for churches to blissfully pretend that all is well when it is decidedly not. The sex-scandal among the priesthood is a good if sad example of what happens in a culture of deceit. If what we say we believe about our religion is based on pretense then why not base our religious lives on pretense as well? Why are we shocked when pastors have affairs or steal from the coffers or sexually abuse others? When we’re all engaged in deception around our faith, what’s the matter with a little deception around our lives?

Everything, of course.

Authentic Christian discipleship is centered, it seems to me, on a life of integration, of melding the timeless truths with the modern age. We can assist that process if the language we use and the songs that we sing reflect the genuine tensions and triumphs that following Jesus brings.