September 11 2016
WHAT IS JESUS DOING IN A NATION THAT CALLS ITSELF CHRISTIAN?
In a general sense America is a Christian country just as Saudi Arabia is an Islam nation and Israel a Jewish state. Yet, being a Christian country does not make it Christian. That 85 to 90 percent of the people in the US say that they believe in God is commendable, but whether it also indicates that they love God remains to be seen. Loving God means loving creation above all, and one’s neighbor as oneself. Harold Bloom calls the USA a “dangerously religion-soaked, even a religious-mad country”. In that regard it is easily compared to Saudi Arabia which as a Muslim nation deserves the same description: it uses its petroleum piggybank to spread radical Islam without compromise.
In Germany and Sweden, both nominally Lutheran, very few people go to church, whereas America has a church building on almost every corner. Yet I maintain that these European countries are more Christian than the Christian USA. These North European countries show compassion for the poor people in the Middle East and have taken in and are taking in millions of ‘refugees’, people displaced by war in the Middle East, a war caused, by the way, by the USA when it invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. Starting these epoch-defining wars have unleashed conflicts which defy solutions.
Canada too is less nominally Christian than the USA. Where Canada, population 35 million, has welcomed some 35,000 displaced persons, the USA with 350 million people has trouble absorbing 10,000 refugees, a matter most vehemently opposed by the most ‘Christian’ states such as Kansas and Texas. Coincidently there are the states where Creationism is taught, the belief that the earth is some 6000 years old. There they also deny Climate Change and fervently adhere to RAPTURE, and vote for TRUMP because he – so they believe- will appoint a far-right Supreme Court judge who will ban abortion. It also happens that pollution in these two states is high. Recent research has uncovered that pollution has severe impacts on health, including degenerative brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s, mental illness and reduced intelligence.
Reduced intelligence? That makes me say Hmmm.
Trump, that man with his phony hair aiming to become the USA president, perfectly fits in, as his ignorance of matters in general is on par with the Christian electorate which faithfully goes to church but fails to know the most basic facts of the Bible. “One of the most religious countries on earth,” Stephen Prothero says in his book RELIGIOUS LITERACY, referring to the U.S., “is also a nation of Religious illiterates.” Only half of American Christians can name the four Gospels, only 41 percent are familiar with Job, and barely half of American Catholics understand Catholic teaching about the Eucharist. Most Americans suspect that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife, just to name some striking examples. To Trump’s great delight the USA has generated a nation of anti-intellectuals, who are proud of their ignorance.
Are sermons effective?
Many of these people have gone to church all their lives, so what good are sermons? Learning does not come from what we hear for 20 minutes on a Sunday morning: learning comes from what we do ourselves. The best way to fathom the Bible and its message of salvation is for church members to be challenged to bring the message themselves right there on the pulpit, just as these 12 uneducated fishermen who accompanied Jesus were trained to bring the gospel. That’s how people learn.
WHAT IS JESUS DOING IN A NATION THAT CALLS ITSELF CHRISTIAN?
We must remember that Jesus did not found a religion. The later church did, just as the Scribes and Pharisees founded the Jewish religion of Jesus’ days. We can’t blame Jesus for the state of the Christian Religion. We know about Jesus from the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, all written decades after Jesus died. There he comes through as quite liberal, so liberal, in fact, that the church of his day killed him, calling him a glutton and a wine-bibber. He had immense compassion for the poor and the despised, such as the tax collectors, the prostitutes and the Samaritans hated by the rest of the Jewish nation. This aspect is totally lacking in ‘religious’ USA. We can compare the Samaritans then to Muslims today.
Jesus, in no uncertain terms, condemned the church officials of his days: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you devour widows’ houses, and for a pretense you make long prayers; therefore you will receive greater condemnation. (Matthew 23). No wonder they could not tolerate him.
The unconventional Jesus.
Yes, Jesus was different. He started his mission of a mere three years as an itinerant speaker/healer by making wine at a wedding. In that he foreshadowed the place of the constant wedding feast, the New Creation, which became the main focus in all his parables, wherein the KINGDOM always featured prominently. Just as he began his journey with making and drinking(!)wine, he ended it with it too. At the LAST SUPPER Matthew 26: 29 tells us that Jesus said: “I tell you I will not drink of this fruit of the wine from now on – emptying his wineglass – until that day when I drink it anew with you in the Father’s Kingdom”.
That silly rule to have grape juice at the Lord’s Supper instead of real wine is treating church members as small children, as if a sip of wine will turn them into alcoholics. It is a relic stemming from the Prohibition and the Temperance movement. In the NEW Creation we ALL will drink wine of a quality akin to what Jesus made at the wedding in Cana, his first miracle.
But I digress.
Still the question lingers:
WHAT IS JESUS DOING IN A NATION THAT CALLS ITSELF CHRISTIAN?
Jesus, in the prayer he left with us known as THE LORD’S PRAYER, starts with the two matters he regards the most important: (1) HALLOWED BE YOUR NAME and (2) YOUR KINGDOM COME. Both point to CREATION, the old and the new.
The first phrase demands us to keep Creation holy, to maintain the earth in a pure state, as God’s name, his very own signature, is evident in every creature great and small. Your Kingdom Come, the second line in that prayer, asks us to fervently pray each day for Jesus’ return when he brings with him the NEW CREATION.
And this finally brings me to answer the question:
WHAT IS JESUS DOING IN A NATION THAT CALLS ITSELF CHRISTIAN?
But first three other questions:
“HAS THE ENLIGHTENMENT SWITCH BEEN TURNED OFF?” Is there still a Christian religion? Have we entered the DARK AGES?
ENLIGHTENMENT is defined as “That European intellectual movement of the late 17th and 18th centuries emphasizing reason and individualism rather than tradition”.
I love Luther, the monk who was so turned on by the Bible, that he challenged the religious monopoly of his day by going public with his objections 499 years ago on October 31 1517. His defiance of the Roman Catholic Church and its religious thinking opened the door to different ways of life. The breaking away from the then all-powerful church unleashed a tremendous amount of creativity, evident in such great spirits as Shakespeare and the Flemish and Dutch painters and cultivated new approaches to music and science, philosophy and literature. The Enlightenment gave people the courage to act differently and entertain new and even revolutionary ideas.
That spirit of free thinking, of new thinking, of daring thinking, seems to have stopped today. Today when so much is changing and almost everything is up for grabs, many are too distracted, too confused, too afraid, too ignorant to entertain new ideas.
How often haven’t I hammered on the ‘heaven heresy’ showing by bible texts and explanations, by the APOSTLES CREED (I believe in the resurrection of the body) that we are of the earth, which formed us and feeds us and whose ultimate cleansing will provide our eternal abode, but people still cling to the heaven notion.
The same is true for Climate Change. Both are intimately related. To believe in Climate Change means to say farewell to the AMERICAN DREAM, which means a nice bungalow in the suburbs, a double or triple garage and an infinite supply of fossil fuel that miraculous substance that once Made America Great.
Believe it or not, but believing in heaven has the same foundation: we can despoil nature (even though we sing “This is my Father’s World) at our hearts’ content because we go to heaven anyway. To believe in the coming New Earth also means that we must say farewell to The American Dream because it means a totally different approach to life.
So here we see a total divide in the USA. Reason, arguments based on facts, illustrations showing proof are discarded. Enlightenment is dead. The Middle East has long ago bid farewell to this notion. We, the so-called enlightened West often chide Islam for being unenlightened. Now we are moving in that same direction. The Western world resembles the cultural divide between Shiites and Sunnis in the Middle East, irreconcilable even though the theological differences are minute. And there they are not the only ones at loggerheads. There too are the Iranians versus the Saudis, the Israelis versus the Palestinians, the Turks versus the Kurds, all unwilling to compromise, so they keep on attacking each other, as if violence will solve the differences.
And Jesus?
It is not that he has abandoned us, no we have let go of him, so, sorry, Jesus is no longer in control: we live in a world where God has hidden his face. We live –see 1 John 5: 19 – where the Evil One calls the tune. That’s why we are entering THE DARK AGES, where en-LIGHT -tenment has ceased and anti-intellectualism has taken over. We are in a situation where the nations are so divided that healing is no longer possible.
The lack of ‘wisdom’ also shows in the denial of Climate change. No scientific proof can convince people. The same is true in politics: the most outrageous statements by TRUMP are simply seen as ‘telling it like it is’. His untruthfulness, his obsession with himself, his boasting and arrogance is accepted and welcomed, revealing an astonishing lack of discernment by some 40 percent of the American electorate. In the USA it looks that Hillary will be the next president. Expect lots of trouble after November 8 when the final tally is in. Already Trump is tooting that the results have been rigged. His ego simply cannot tolerate that he could be a loser; he simply cannot accept that he now will receive the Pink Slip and is FIRED.
Expect Civil War in the USA. With 300 million guns and the military and the police refusing to intervene – a good portion is pro-Trump – better be prepared for extremely unenlightened behavior.
The USA maybe a Christian nation, but that is a far cry from a nation that is Christian. It seems that, by and large, Christianity has disappeared, at least the version proclaimed by Jesus.
So where is Jesus and what is Jesus doing?
The answer is found in John 17. There Jesus takes leave of this world and prays to his father and asks: “protect them from the evil one” (verse 15) because Christ believers do not belong to a world that is ruled by the Satan, now all too evident.
Fortunately Jesus keeps on praying for us all the time to keep us from harm because we live in a world where God has been eliminated, something that is becoming more obvious by the day.
Our life should be dominated by the old adage: Ora et Labora, Pray and Work. Our world may be nominally Christian, but Christianity itself has ceased to be of any influence. Where Jesus preached a radical gospel: “Seek first the Kingdom and trust that all other matters will fall into place”, we by and large have lost sight of the real meaning of THE KINGDOM, have lost THE TRUE LIGHT.
Pray and work because the DARK AGES are upon us.