2 September 2005

This week ends with a last piece from "On Being Christian in America" in A Better Hope by Stanley Hauerwas.

I believe...Christians can do nothing more significant in America than to be a people capable of worshiping a God who is to be found in the cross and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The worship of such a God will not be good for any society that desires a god made in the image of the bureaucrat. A people formed by the worship of a crucified God, however, might just be complex enough to engage in the hard work of working out agreements and disagreements with others one small step at a time.

Christians in our country are slowly selling ourselves out to superficial answers to life's many questions. Look at the agenda of the church as it is seen on television and in the newspapers. We look like cultural extremist - not because we have brought great thought and deliberation into world that is divided in many ways. Rather it is because we are not capable of dialogue that engages the world and one another with something more than what I would call religious "hocus pocus" or wave of the wand answers and make everything turn out like we want it. The cross takes us into the very depths of human life...it does not try to remove us from it. We are to face the difficult issues and situation of the day with a determination to listen and possibly move from where we are to a new place. We don't need a religious climate in this country in which we simply go along with what one side of the aisle or the other wants. As said earlier in the week, that makes for a good whore or gigolo but not for the church that follows Jesus. To worship the crucified God we face the day not knowing how the day will end but we will be there in the middle of the work that is needed to move us along the way of healing and wholeness and another day in which we will seriously do the same always with a sense of hopefulness.

Connection: Banner type gods work wonders on television. I heard some of the people who spoke on Justice Sunday II - it was cheap and it lacked the vision of life through the cross. We must consider so much more when we enter into who we will be as followers of Jesus through the mire that can be this day.

In a world filled with the traumas of hurricanes and poverty, we need your Spirit, O God, to lift us up so that we will walk out into today contemplating and acting on the welfare of all people even as we are taken out of the way we would rather go. Amen.