Thursday, March 25, 2004
(5:07 AM) | Anonymous:
Will Work For Grace
New Official motto for the church. I demand it. It's time we start being honest at least.Seriously..when did everything about grace leave the church? You know..Blessed are the merciful, the meek, the poor, the hungry? Or basically that whole sermon. Or basically every word ever spoken by Christ.
When Christ spoke, he went completely against conventional wisdom, he brought something completely new and refused to be held down by rules, refused to be held down by the traditional way of thinking. Instead he invited everyone to come to Him and gain a different perspective. To gain a perspective from the cross, one that sees those who are poor, broken, hurting and dying. It more than sees, it becomes part of them. This rejection of traditional ways of thinking is central to the person of Christ. Christ wasn't harsh because they were hypocrites in the sense that they said one thing and did another. They DID every single thing they said they'd do. There is perhaps never a more "holy" grouping of people. But they had become so inculcated in their conventional wisdom that they failed to see that it is necessary, by the very nature of claiming to be a people of God, to work against traditional ways of thinking, to bring a perspective centered around love for others.
Could the church get any more inculcated than we are today? Is there any seperation from the modern world? NO I DO NOT mean is the church as a body not drinking, not smoking, not dancing, not engaging in homosexual activity and everything else. I mean, is the church, are Christian people endeavouring to live with the invitation of Christ to a new view of the world, a new wisdom seperate from that that we find around us. Are we Christians doing anything like loving the loveless, reaching out to the hopeless, becoming one with the fatherless, the alien and the widow? More so, even, than programs that provide food and clothing, though God knows those are glorious, but are we embodying this different worldview which should define us?
I have my doubts about it. I have my doubts about myself, but dangit, at least I'm trying. The idea of grace, the idea of love, the idea of forgiveness and sacrifice and everything else for the church is exactly the same as that of the world. Grace is offered freely - to those who are willing to work their butt off for it. Once you come miles past whatever demons you struggle with, working your butt off to get there, than okay, maybe we'll come out and meet you. Why aren't we busting off the porch to forgive those who have gone astray? At what point do we realize that Christ was delivering a message which called us not to living within the constructs set up by the world, but to a radically different point of view. That's the whole point of the cross.
Yet all we can do is talk about what we've earned. About others "earning" grace, having to phrase everything in such a way as to ALWAYS put the burden on the other person, rather then holding ourselves up to the massively challenging call to seek grace for all to whatever capability we have, in whatever way we can. Isn't that hard enough? Why do we have to add to it the job of making sure everyone else is earning their keep? What does that have to do with the gospel? AT ALL?
Maybe one day I'll join the rest of the weblog in belief that God is dead (though, of course, I don't think they really believe that), but for now, it certainly seems like the Church as an active and moving body representing the path of Christ to the cross is pretty sickly, if not dead itself.
Sorry, I'm a little frustrated at the moment after several notes from Olivet's Academy list server (political science discussion), besides, I thought that title was the greatest thing ever, and was deserving of a rant to go with it.
