Holy Week

Today I very sincerely told Matt that we need to have more fun, religiously, not to be confused with have more religious fun, but he could not resist the suggestion that we play a round of Bible Trivia and do felt-boards. I laughed to tears at the thought of felt-boards. Those were some good clean fun for Baptist kids with no televisions. (Enter stage right: Joseph and his coat of many colors. Stage left: his pimp.)

Anyway! As we move through Holy Week I will indulge in the appropriate amount of blasphemy that can be expected from a Baptist turned Something-Else-Not-Very-Observant. Don’t get me wrong, I’m jealous of those born into high-religion. I long for beautiful and meaningful rituals. But alas, I have none. So blasphemy it is.

Predictably, I have heard the same sermon at 2 different churches as we approach Good Friday. These sermons were based on the passage in Mark where Jesus’ disciples fall asleep waiting for him to finish praying in the garden. At the Super-Cool church that we frequent, the majority of the sermon was aimed at battling other social groups that have displaced evangelicals in the center of social life – The Usual – but eventually the speaker brought it back to the story to give his point a Holy Punch. The other church felt no need to go toe-to-toe with Gays and Liberals by way of Gethsemane. They approached this story with good-old-fashion substitutionary atonement theology - wrathful God sent Jesus, the substitute, to atone for human sin by having the savages beat him to death – and a sufficient amount of guilt tossed in to keep it real and motivate the listener to service. (At least they do some good with the guilt they are collecting.)

Now, I’m no theologian but I’m gonna go ahead and fake it for a hot-second. As I sat listening to these sermons I realized something. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe this is what’s going on in The Story – wrathful God uses fire to fight fire – it seems like a bastardization of some essential goodness in Jesus’ life and message. But that left me wondering, what then do I believe? Well, I haven’t got it all worked out but I suspect that when I understand the passion of the Christ’s service to others I’ll find myself following him before I know it, and not from guilt of an unpaid debt to a God who made a strangely violent decision in all of his otherwise creative imagination.

I’m on the Emerging Theologies Team that suggest we need to send Substitutionary Atonement to the geriatric ward along with the dying age of Modernity if we are to pass our faith on to yet one more generation. Phyllis Tickle wrote a book that I really should finish reading since it is only the size of a paper I once wrote. In The Great Emergence she makes the convincing case that Christianity is on the cusp of a Reformation-sized transformation yet again. She says that today’s Christianity has taken so many unrecoverable blows in our Modern era that it actually must re-imagine itself if it is to survive the emerging era.

For now, I am holding onto faith when belief escapes me. I was told that belief was all that mattered; that’s how we know who’s in and who’s out. But these days when I don’t understand God or the mission of Jesus I fall back on my deep trust in the goodness of the Divine and then I try to put some life into Jesus’ words. That’s all I’ve got for now.