Recently, I have been feeling like the Christian faith is under siege. Not from those who choose to not engage at all, or even those who follow faiths different to our own, but from something far more insidious, and damaging. Slowly, but surely, we are eroding from within, as we tie ourselves into knots that we have no chance of easily untying and focus on robust defenses of ‘issues’ rather than the very real work of reaching out to a world crying out in pain on many fronts. The internet has recently been ignited by a lengthy treatise by Kelsey Munger where she speaks of being tired of being a Christian. You can read the full piece, published in the Huffington Post here:
www.huffingtonpost.com/kelsey-l-munger/im-tired-of-being-a-christian_b_10285128.html?
What struck me about the writer’s lengthy, brutally honest
essay is that she did not say she was tired of loving Jesus, or being stirred
by the Holy Spirit or being protected by God. What she was tired of was
what it meant to be a Christian today. The thing is, like it or not, Christians
are increasingly being defined by what we are purportedly against and what we
are meant to despise. From the arguments for and against women ordination and
the levels of service they can play (bishops/ deacons/ welcome greeters at the
front of the church / lurid exemplum of the Jezebel Spirit – delete as
necessary), to attitudes to the LGBT community, right through to the hardy
perennials such as the Pro-Life/Pro=Choice debate, Do-Or-Don’t-Do IVF and a
whole lot more in between. Being a Christian, for the most part, if the media
headlines are to be believed is about beating your drum against a whole swathe
of modern and not so modern ills. It’s about placards and protests and intense
bible verse heavy quoting trolling. As a life=long believer this makes me sad,
as what is often absent from the knee-jerk reactions, the clamour to condemn, the
judgment and the proclamations is the very thing that made Jesus so compelling
and marked him out: his inexhaustible capacity for compassion and love.
Compassion is so absent in our world, and it can feel
especially acute in a church. These spaces are meant to be spiritual hospitals
open to all, where Jesus says: ‘Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you
rest” (Matt11:28)
and means it. If we who claim to know and love Jesus are not showing the same
love and compassion, then somewhere along the way we have gotten lost and we need to
find that track, the one dotted with grace and mercy and kindness and
gentleness, and return to it, pronto. We need to take a moment as Jesus so
often did to walk a nanosecond in the other person’s shoes. Jesus never had
children, but look how he was so quick to perform miracles for parents who had
lost theirs (Mark5:35-42 and Luke7:11-17).
As a man, the monthly menses would have been a theoretic concept, but look how
he sorted out the poor woman with the perpetual period lasting 12 years (Mark5:25-34). He never got married, but
see how he ensured the wedding reception at Cana wasn’t a wash out and provided
the best vintage for all (John2:1-11).
These miracles weren’t big show off events, they were not about Jesus pointing
out how much better he was than the rest of us, it was about him expressing empathy, loving
people and meeting them at their point of need.
I truly hope and pray that Kelsey stops feeling tired of
being a Christian, but hers and many others like hers’ plights are down to the
thoughts and efforts of the rest of us: the silent majority who love Jesus but
don’t trawl the internet looking for people who don’t share our beliefs to
lambast. It is up to us, who may witness off-colour comments and attitudes
gaining ground in our parishes or prayer groups and fellowships and choose not
to challenge them for fear of upsetting the applecart. Yes, it is scary, but think
how scary 1st Century evangelism as seen in the Book of Acts must
have been? And the Apostles still got on with it. We are the only ones who can save
our faith, a faith which at its centre is love from being besieged by haters. We are
the only one who can protect our flock both inside and outside from feeling
condemned. We are the only ones who can trust that God in his grace and goodness
will assist us in this greatest of challenges.
