One bread, one body, one Lord of all.

"I am a Christian, but…"

Most of my non-seminary friends are not Christian.  The circles I inhabit when I'm not flirting with different denominations of the church are often filled with atheists, people who are spiritual but not religious, former Catholics, and people who are rightly very suspicious of the church and its motives.  So often when I admit my religious leanings to folks, I immediately find myself doing damage control.

"I'm a Christian, but in the most open way."
"I'm a Christian, but not the kind that thinks you're going to hell if you're not."
"I'm a Christian, but I clearly don't hate anyone who's not heterosexual."
"I'm a Christian, but I'm not one of THOSE Christians."

One of my classes this semester is about looking at Christianity in America and how it has influenced and been influenced by historical and social movements, combined with the complicated relationship between church and state in this country.  This has been the main class that has been constantly challenging my deeply held beliefs about church and politics and whether true exegesis is even possible (hint: I think it's not).  It is also one of my most uncomfortable classes, in that it makes us deal with ways that Christian scriptures, thought, and teaching have been used to justify hate, exclusion, murder, indifference, slavery… the list goes on and on, into today.

The gutwrenching thing about studying these theologies is that we can see how they reached their conclusions.  We can track their Biblical arguments.  We can understand how people within their context would think that this was the proper interpretation of God's Word.  And the terrifying thing is, while it's easy to look back and see how wrong they were, we realize that we could be just as misguided.  The first thing I learned in undergrad was that you cannot escape your own originality.  You cannot approach a text as a blank state.  You ALWAYS carry your own set of assumptions and opinions and interpretations, and there is no such thing as neutrality.  (see earlier hint that I don't think true exegesis is possible)  So how do we acknowledge that when we are called upon to deal with this text?  Are we always twisting it for our own purposes?

Like many of us, I am angry about the current state of our government.  Primarily, I am angry about the people that have been furloughed.  I am angry about services that the shutdown has suddenly halted.  I am angry about the fact that my friend's brother can't get epilepsy medication that he depends on for survival because of the government shutdown.  I am angry because of how this may affect WIC and therefore people's ability to eat.  I am angry because of the effect that this can have on the economy which will likely further the gap between the rich and the poor, making it more and more impossible for people to rise out of poverty.

Mostly, I am furious because almost 400 members of the House of Representatives identify as Christians, and while I agree with the separation of church and state in legislature, it is inconceivable to me that anyone who calls themselves a Christian would even consider the reckless toying with human lives for political gain that Congress is currently engaged in.

And as I fumed about how "those other Christians who certainly aren't like most of the Christians I know and love" get it all wrong and how tired I am of constantly having to combat the reputation that Christians are all homophobic, materialistic and exclusionary, if not downright violent… it hit me like a ton of bricks.

We are one body.

In Christianity, when we speak of the Church (which I'm capitalizing to mean the Church as an institution, as opposed to the uncapitalized church building that you pass on your way to work), we speak of it as "the Church universal" or "the catholic Church" (where catholic means not Roman Catholicism, but the whole Church, universal, again).  We also speak of the Church as a body (specifically, the Church is the body of Christ in the world), with many parts that serve many different purposes in different ways.  While we have different denominations (Methodist, Presbyterian, Catholic, Episcopal, Baptist, Pentecostal, etc), we don't consider those different religions, but different branches of the same religion.  We are all members of the same family, and yes, we have plenty arguments, but even then, we create a wide and diverse religion.  We often use the sacrament of communion (where we eat bread and drink wine/grape juice, depending on where you are, in remembrance of Christ's sacrifice) as a reminder of our unity in Christ.  The Methodist communion liturgy says, "Because there is one loaf, we, though we be many, are one body."  Or, as said in the communion hymn: "one bread, one body, one Lord of all, one cup of blessing which we bless, and we, though many throughout the Earth, we are one body in this one Lord."

And I realized that I cannot separate myself from the Christians who I (and many many others) disagree with, who have done reprehensible things in the name of God.  I can't separate myself from the Crusaders, from the Inquisition, from the southern theologians who argued that slavery was a divine mandate or the northern theologians who skirted the issue, from fundamentalists who think that closing Planned Parenthoods is working to scourge the devil from this land.  I cannot draw a line between myself and the pastor whose fire-and-brimstone sermon about the dangers of homosexuality lead a young gay teen to run away from church and home, or the Christian congressperson who thinks that the hurt the shutdown will do to the poor is necessary collateral damage.  We don't get to do that, not when our religion, for thousands of years, has been based in community and diversity, in unity without uniformity.  We are called to live as members together in the body of Christ, and that means that one of us does, we all do.

Why is this important?  What purpose does this serve other than making us feel terrible about ourselves?  It is important because we are really good at skirting around and blaming the uncomfortable parts of Christianity on other people.  It wasn't us, it was those people calling themselves Christian over there.  It was those folks who got it wrong.  It was the people from that other seminary.  Not here.  Not us.  We didn't do anything wrong.  It is not our responsibility.

Friends, it is our responsibility.  If anyone in the Church has done it, we have done it.  If one member of a physical body is broken, the other parts have to compensate until it is healed… and let's be honest, the problem with the body of the Church is less that individual parts are broken and more that there are sicknesses invading the entire system, and while the symptoms might show up more in some parts of the body than in others, the sickness is a problem for the whole.  And if we are to have any hope of survival, we have some serious repenting to do. In Hebrew, there are two words that are used for repentance: נָחַם (nacham), which is usually translated as "to be sorry" and שׁוּב (shuv), which means "to return".  We as a Church have to own up to the crimes we have committed.  We believe in confessions, in the self-awareness and recognition that comes from the discipline of saying what we have done wrong and we believe in the grace that follows.  And then we must return to the path we were called to walk, the path that leads to life--not death, not hate, not exclusion, not division.

It is time to stop shifting the blame, and to start taking responsibility for what we the church have done.  And my suspicion is that, if we do this, we will become better at recognizing when it is our own individual direct actions that are the problems in the Church.  (that wording is important: not if… when.  We all fall short of the glory of God, especially when we think we are the ones doing it "right", like I so often think.)



These thoughts did not immediately form themselves into a blog post.  I plunged into a good bout of despair and tears.  To be fair, the past couple weeks have been a mess in the current event realm, with the shutdown and debt ceiling, and in seminary we've been talking about conquest narratives ("God wants us to kill all of you and take your land"), pro-slavery theology, massive early church arguments about very fine points of doctrine that usually ended up with someone excommunicated, the Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow laws and other systemic injustices in response to the freedom of the slaves, how the country has always depended on a system of servitude for its workforce and economy (and still does), Christian dominionism, and the traumatic effect of "Stop and Frisk" laws.  It has been a lot of awful, important things that have left me wondering why God bothers with us at all.  My first thoughts came in the form of prayer and song, which I've now refined into a confession, and I'm working on a hymn with this kind of tone.  So, here it is.  I understand that some of these words are too strong to use in many churches.  I also know that strong language is in the Bible.

We, your Church, come before you this day, confessing that we have turned from the path you have intended for us.

We have barricaded ourselves in our churches so we can ignore your people as they cry out in the street.
We have stolen food from the hungry by denying them the opportunity to earn a living wage and the aid to make up the difference.
We have slaughtered the sick by condemning them to live without the hope of care.
We have persecuted victims instead of offering compassion and support.
We have locked the doors of opportunity against our neighbors through our systemic suspicion and fear of different skin tones, cultures, genders, and sexualities.
We have taught our children to treat others as objects instead of people.
We have worn our privilege like armor, and have fashioned our power into swords to be wielded against those who we have labeled "undeserving".

Because of us, many associate your name with violence, hatred, discrimination and exclusion, instead of loving-kindness, gentleness, mercy and peace.

If you are the way and the truth and the life, then we are on the path to death, for we denied you in the least of these.  Yet despite our best efforts to castrate your grace, you still live and work in the world.  We rejoice that your love is greater than our failure to live as you have called us to live.  Heal the hurt that we have inflicted in your name, and turn us back to your way of abundant life for all--even your undeserving Church.