Sometimes I wonder if I’m inept at interacting with non-Christians. I like to think I have it all down. I shake my head at those sugary, over-the-top evangelistic efforts that just make people squirm. I know better than that. But I don’t have much of an alternative. I can stand on the sidelines and scoff, but what am I really doing? I’ve immersed myself in Christian culture for so long I’m practically unable to venture out.

High school and a few jobs I’ve had since have been my most intensive interactions with people other than Christians. College, my first job, my current work, and 98 percent of my hang out time are all with Christians.

It’s kind of sad, really. I have this great faith I say I want to share with everyone, but I only interact with people who are in the club. I think this is an attitude we propagate as well. After attending a Christian school, how many people end up in Christian businesses? I don’t mean to slam Christian businesses or colleges, I’m just wondering. It seems incredibly important for us to get out of ghettos sometimes, to brave the public schools and universities, to teach in the public schools, to write for the mainstream magazines, to walk the halls of the biggest and smallest corporations in the world.

I know lots of Christians who are doing it, most of my friends in fact, I’m just wondering about me. What’s my role?

This weekend I had a conversation with an older adult about the attendance of twentysomethings like myself at our church. I expressed a sentiment that not many twentysomethings attend church, based more on experience and intuition than anything. Here’s the facts to back that up, and it’s rather sobering:

80% of twentysomethings said religious faith is very important in their life.
75% of twentysomethings said they prayed to God in the past week.
57% of twentysomethings claim to have made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that is still important to them.
31% of twentysomethings attend church in a typical week, compared with 42 percent of thirtysomethings and 49 percent of those 40 and older.
8,000,000 twentysomethings who actively attended church as teenagers will no longer be active in a church by age 30.

(Source: Barna Research Group)

“There’s an old Hindu proverb that goes something like this…

“Three blind men stumble upon an elephant. The first blind man finds the trunk of the elephant. He feels the long, smooth trunk and thinks it’s a snake. The second man grabs one of the legs of the elephant. It’s rough, textured and really thick. He thinks it’s the trunk of a giant tree. The third blind man grabs the tail of the elephant. He assumes it is a rope.

“The moral of this story is that we all perceive things differently. Many people would tell you this story shows us that nothing is real, that no one’s perception is more valid than anyone else’s, that everyone’s view is “true.”

“But there’s one problem with this interpretation of the story. The blind men were, in fact, holding an elephant. That was the truth. It wasn’t a snake or a tree or a rope. It was an elephant.” (from “Our Friend Pete” by Wes Halula, taken from passageway.org)

The funny thing about relativism is that we have to live with it. Some Christians get all up tight about relativism, the idea that your morality depends on what you believe, the idea that all religions are true, however you want to phrase it, some Christians get all worked up about this idea and really want to emphasize that no matter what you think it is, it’s really an elephant. The truth is the truth, no matter how you think you see it.

That’s all well and good, but the problem is we don’t know who’s seeing what. While we decry the “well that’s true for you,” response, we fail to recognize that there are a lot of things about Christianity that don’t exactly jive. There are things about the faith that vary depending on who you talk to, the “truth” changes depending on which brand of Christianity you’re dealing with.

I get the feeling a lot of Christians ignore this perplexing aspect of our faith, choosing instead to think that we have all the right answers, we have the correct version of the truth, we know we’re touching an elephant. When all along the brother in the church next door thinks it’s a rhino, not an elephant, which is a different version of the truth, and a different right answer.

There’s a funky contradiction that exists, and somehow God deals with that. Perhaps one of the Christian denominations has it right and all the others are wrong, but we never really think about that. I guess sometimes I think we just need to admit that we don’t have a monopoly on truth. We need to admit that it’s possible we might not know everything about the Bible, we might have screwed a few things up. It doesn’t mean the foundation of our faith is whack, it doesn’t mean our entire belief structure is going to come crumbling down. I think contradictions exist, and God has no problem with them. I don’t know how that works, but I know it does. I know I’m not right about everything (I’ve probably screwed my logic up right here), and that’s OK.

Modernism vs. post-modernism is a big debate a lot of cutting edge churchy people like to get into, and while I hate trying to define that sort of thing, this is one of things that fits neatly in the modern/post-modern debate. Modernity is about always being right. Post-modernity somehow finds a way around that and is just fine with being wrong. Of course these are simply different ways of interacting with your world and neither of them is necessarily better than the other, but that OK with being messed up idea seems to gel with my concept of grace — I’m all screwed up, but it’s all good.

One evening last week I attended an abruptly called meeting at my church to discuss our feelings and reactions to the decisions made at the Episcopal General Convention. More than anything, it was a chance for the leadership of our church to hear how everyone felt. We weren’t making any decisions, voting on anything, or implementing any grand scheme. We were just talking.

The evening basically oscillated between those urging us to stick to the truth of the Bible and make a stand, and those urging us to stand in unity, despite our disagreements. The sanctuary was as packed as a Sunday morning, but the tension was something new.

Throughout the evening I felt torn. I agree with the need for biblical truth, but felt frustrated at the refusal to acknowledge equally committed, equally orthodox, yet completely contradictory views of the Bible. Sometimes they think it’s a simple as reading the black and white text, and sadly it’s not. If that’s the case the Episcopal Church never would have approved the ordination of women. If that were the case, I wonder if Christians would have stood up to oppose slavery. And all this bickering over scripture seems odd considering the Episcopal Church was founded by a guy who wanted to divorce his wife and the Catholic Church wouldn’t let him.

I yearned for unity within the body that night, wondering how many times Christ’s church would fracture and split. How many denominations can we really have?

As I pulled away in my car, alone after the ninety minutes of passion, these words echoed over the radio:

I believe in the Kingdom Come
Then all the colours will bleed into one
But yes, I’m still running.

You broke the bonds
And you loosed the chains
Carried the cross of my shame
Oh my shame, you know I believe it.

But I still haven’t found
What I’m looking for.
But I still haven’t found
What I’m looking for.
(“I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” by U2 from The Joshua Tree.)

Open your heart. I’ve been grinding my teeth a lot lately about this whole Ten Commandments debate and the entire church and state issue. I stayed up past 2 a.m. on Friday relishing a debate with a friend on the subject. The sermon this morning focused on opening your heart and getting past the tradition and selfishness of seeing things your way.

Initially I took much of the sermon to be backing me up. I feel like I’ve done that a lot lately, heard what I wanted to hear in a sermon. That’s a dangerous way to approach God. And while much of the sermon did seem to back up my point (especially the text, Mark 7:1-23 where Jesus rips into the Pharisees for honoring human tradition over God’s law: “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me,” [Mark 7:6, NRSV]), I may have missed something.

The focus of the sermon was how our Associate Priest had been so worked up over unfair dealings at his other job that it was causing him stress-related health problems. When he simply let things go, he found that it wasn’t that bad. The lesson here is that I probably need to calm down a bit. It’s not that I’m having stress-related health problems, but I am so eager to dive into this issue that it’s a bit fanatical. It’s an important issue and worth debating, but not to the point that I should relish finding faults I can jump on. Now I’m reminded of the sermon I heard two weeks ago, which extolled the virtues of unity, despite how intensely we may disagree. Focus on the Family may have blacklisted me, and we may completely disagree on a number of issues, but God still calls us to unity. I’m being just as much the Pharisee, if not more so, when I point out and triumph over the flaws of others.

Pictures like that aren’t very encouraging (thanks to Nick Ciske). It only highlights the division in the worldwide church. Since I attend an Episcopal church, this hits close to home. If you’ve been reading these thoughts lately, you know I’ve been struggling with how to respond to homosexuality.

Yesterday at church the sermon directly confronted this issue. In the past few weeks it seems like homosexuality has been hinted at and talked around, but never directly mentioned. It’s always the “situation” or the “decisions” or simply the “aftermath of General Convention.” It reminds me of the “mistakes were made” political statement that every writing teacher uses as an example of passive voice — hiding who is at fault.

Ernie Ashcroft gave the sermon, a former rector at my church, and coincidentally, the husband of one of my writing professors from college. As a visiting speaker, he made the bold move of potentially disturbing the congregation. But before he began, he made the statement that sermons are intended to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comforted. The only trick is to figure out which one you are.

Ernie began by plainly stating the decisions of the Episcopal church at General Convention that dealt with homosexuality (as well as another that the media never reported – the 2020 project, an attempt to double Sunday morning attendance in Episcopal congregations by the year 2020). He went on to explain why Paul would be upset about these decisions, which was surprisingly not about homosexuality. He then tackled the varying interpretations of Paul’s stance on homosexuality, concluding that either interpretation is potentially biblically valid, but that homosexuality was not one of Paul’s main points. One of his main points was the unity of the church, which is what Paul would have been upset about.

“Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.” (Ephesians 4:3 NIV)

This was Ernie’s main point. Despite all the disagreements, sin, and infighting in the early church, Paul valued unity over all things. Ernie used the Galatian and Corinthian churches of the New Testament as an example. The Corinthians had all sorts of problems. Fighting and division was rampant. But Paul didn’t suggest that each faction should go their separate ways. He encouraged them to live in the contradictions and be united. That is what the church is all about. It’s not a community of like-minded people. It’s a community of people who don’t always get along, who don’t always see things the same way, and yet somehow they have to deal with each other anyway.

Ernie told a story about Charles Spurgeon, who was approached by a woman searching for the right church. Spurgeon interrupted the woman and told her that she would never find the perfect church, and if she did, he encouraged her not to join it because she’d ruin it.

That is what Christianity is all about. We are a broken people. The church is a broken institution. It is only through the grace of Christ that we amount to anything. This confirmed a suspicion I’ve long had that pulling up stakes and leaving a church is not the solution we think it is.

Individualism, which America is founded on, leads us to church shop. We look for the church service that appeals to everything we want, never mind what we need or the fact that church is more than a service. I’ve given in to this as well.

But rather than seeking like minded folks to agree with us, we should simply be seeking fellow broken vessels, people yearning for God’s healing. We can disagree over everything as long as we come together over Christ’s salvation. That is why the church is such a radical idea, and that’s why it’s not working so well today. Social clubs are great, but they don’t change the world.

The church is supposed to be the place where liberals and conservatives sit down together. After the sermon, I realized the importance of liturgy and communion comes because I have to say the same words and share the same food with people I don’t agree with. We say aloud, together, the words that we do agree upon.

(I apologize for recapitulating Ernie’s sermon. The original does a much better job supporting the argument, and I’m merely trying to reiterate what I took away from the sermon. If you’d like to request a copy of the sermon, I’m sure the church staff can help you out.)

“I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks long a strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it any minute. This is the beginning of wisdom.” (Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm, as quoted in Deeper Walk Vol. 1)

Bono on the church’s recent response to AIDS: “I didn’t have a very good impression of the church up to that point, in the sense of their ability to sort of wake the sleeping giant and put it to work for the world’s most vulnerable,” he admitted to ChristianityToday.com. “I kind of thought the church was asleep and it turned into a ‘holy, bless me club’ or whatever you want to call it, [but] I’m glad to say I was wrong. Particularly evangelicals who seemed very judgmental to me over the years turned out to be incredibly generous in their time and their support of this effort. I’ve really had my view of the church turned upside down, but I will be honest … it’s ruined things for me now. People are asking ‘why aren’t I at mass?’ It’s a [challenge], but it’s [also] given me great faith.”

Sometimes I think we get Jesus all wrong. His first miracle was to keep a party going. He made alcohol out of agua, and didn’t bother to lecture the drunkards. We never know what to do with that miracle. If we were in charge, it would have been the other way around: turning all the wine into water so no one could get smashed.

Jesus hung out with the hookers, the IRS agents, the AIDS victims, the handicapped. When he chose his disciples he didn’t pick Billy Graham, Charles Swindoll, Greg Laurie, Luis Palua, Ron Luce or any of the big names in Christianity. He didn’t pick Pope John. He would have told James Dobson that anyone who does not hate his family cannot be a disciple (Luke 14:26–how does Focus on the Family feel about that verse?). Instead he picked a bunch of regular Joes.

He still would have hung out with the Billy Grahams and the James Dobsons. As much as I like to think of Jesus as joining my side in an us against them war, he didn’t do that. He still ate with the Pharisees like he ate with the tax collectors. Tension hung in the air in both places.

When I applaud Jesus’ anti-materialistic ways, his urging us not to worry about clothes or provision, when I think eating PB&J is more righteous than Subway because I’m saving a buck or two–Jesus is commending the woman for pouring literally thousands of dollars worth of perfume on his head. What’s going on? I thought Jesus was the Savior for the lower class? But that kind of penny pinching and cost cutting is what Judas complained about. Suddenly I’m in the same league as Judas for worrying about how expensive a church roof looks.

Some people think Jesus gets mad about blasphemy, profanity, abortion, adultery. And maybe he does. But when Jesus got really pissed, it was when people misused the church. He saved his harshest words for the Billy Grahams and James Dobsons. He showed compassion to the woman caught with her pants down, but he ripped into the Pharisees who were concerned about power and status. He rebuked the demons and cast them out, but he didn’t go ballistic on them. He certainly didn’t picket anyone, but he did tell his disciples to shake the dust off their feet in any town that refused to listen.

What would Jesus think about something like this? Goofball pictures of an action figure Jesus with tongue in cheek captions. Would he huff and puff and smite somebody? The only time that happened in the New Testament was when a couple didn’t tell the whole truth. They didn’t even outright lie. They gave the church a whole bunch of money, but it wasn’t all their money–so they got zapped. Ouch. Would Jesus bust out a whip and tear down the computer? Or would he chuckle and add a comment of his own?

Sometimes Jesus is more mysterious than we think. ‘What would Jesus do?’ isn’t a question to answer lightly, or quickly.