Telling the Truth For Once
I’m going to tell you the truth. I’m just warning you up front. Just in case you’re happy living in your cozy little world and don’t want to upset it, I’m warning you. Christianity isn’t what you think it is. If you’re a Christian, this might really piss you off, (yes, even more so than me using the word, ‘piss’ did.) and if you’re an atheist, agnostic, or just not interested in this whole “God thing,” I just want you to hear the truth. For once. Then you can do with it what you will. But this is it. The best I can tell it, this is it.
There is a God, and God became flesh and made his home among us in Jesus. He took our sin, offering us his perfection in return. He was raised from the dead, defeating death, so that we could live eternally. Let’s just get that out of the way to begin with. That’s the foundation from which I’m coming. That’s what I believe to be true. There is a God. We have just forgotten his face.
I know a lot of good people that call themselves Christians. I do. I also know many a fuckadoo who goes to church every time the doors are opened with very little else but self-righteousness, anger and a big black bible. The thing is, good, bad… it doesn’t mean much when you’re wrong. Being good don’t get you jack in God’s economy.
Religion has become about espousing certain sociological ideas that are intrinsically cultural in nature. It’s all about fitting into a certain, pre-fashioned mold. It’s about how we look and act. We all start with ‘Jesus is God’, but that’s just about where any similarity to what Jesus intended ends.
The basic problem as I see it is that we’re trying to live the impossible. We’ve been sold the lie that we’re supposed to be perfect, so we try, and when we can’t… well, just thank goodness, the church just happens to have a behavioral code that looks, smells and wears just like perfection. And that so doesn’t work. Listen: IT. DOESN’T. WORK.
This thing’s about love and sacrifice. At its heart, our faith is a romance with the God of the universe. He’s the one that moves us on to perfection; he’s the one that brings about good things in us. And those are only the symptoms of the love-sickness, the side-effects of what being with him does to us mere mortals. It’s about relationship. We’ve managed to skip that part.
Somewhere along the way we forgot that. God’s beloved ones, Adam and Eve, were separated from him, and he moved heaven and earth for two thousand years to bring his precious children back to him by sacrificing himself on a cross. The disciples got that (eventually) and the early church (for the most part) got that. But, human as we are, sinful as we are, we lost that truth. We, like children sent to the store to simply buy milk, eggs and a loaf of bread have come back filthy, sweaty with pockets full of candy.
As a friend of mine said recently, we’re living a “photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy,” of the real thing! We’re frustrated Christians with no story to tell because we’ve never stepped into the narrative ourselves. We’ve just been relying on what someone told someone told someone about God.
Is it wrong to question the status quo? Is it being a Pharisee about Pharisees to call a lie a lie? Too many of us think that it is, and as a friend of mine pointed out recently, that’s relativism—the idea that all points of views are equally valid. No. There is truth and untruth. All I’m saying is that untruth must be stood against because of the love we have with THE Truth. My friend went on to say, "What I am saying, and what a growing number of brothers and sisters seem to have no problem at all understanding that I'm saying, because they've been saying it themselves, is that to persist in something that is radically unloving is Satanic, and to allow a bother, sister, or ministry to persist unchecked or at least unchallenged, is radically unloving, and in fact, Satanic in itself."
Some of my friends have read my words in the past and believed that I’m going through some stage or that I’m simply venting. That’s just not true (for the most part). I can just no longer be quiet and “proper.” Our problem, I believe, is that we want so desperately to be nice and not offend that we even withhold the truth from those who most need to hear it. I’m all about love; in fact I believe that’s what Christianity boils down to when lived, but I think love sometimes has to resemble like a sword. It has to cut through the crap.
If I said the church needed to change and didn’t give a tinker’s dam about the church, that’d be different. But, it is love that compels me to turn the lectern on its side, release the captives and kick over a few pews. Because it has to change so that we may again be true followers of Christ. We must let go of our traditions, which keep us at arms length from God, and step into his glory and mystery. We must lay down the burdens that have been laid on our shoulders and search hard after the Cosmic Lover of our souls.
11:43:02 PM 
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