Gnats, Camels, Gospel

When the Church acts out its institutional anxiety, hypocrisy and self pity, embarrassed people switch off. Turn it onto Jesus, immerse ourselves in his spoken and lived teaching, and ears prick up. It also leads people to expect we will be genuinely aligned. I increasingly think I need to be a “Red Letter” Christian. My college tutors were horrified by red letter bibles’ apparent certainty about who was speaking when, but the principle increasingly makes sense to me. 


If the Church prioritizes being a delivery vehicle for the Kingdom it cannot take itself too seriously, and will stay clear of fruitless culture wars about semi-irrelevancies. 
The only credible strategy has to be II Corinthians 4:

We preach not ourselves but Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake.

If it's any comfort II Timothy 2:23 shows that the early Church faced exactly the same challenges. We need to stay watchful and focussed on the things that Jesus cared about. And, as professional gardians of the sacred, we need to remember that his harshest words were reserved for people in our job. We have the greatest need to stay watchful, because it's easy to deceive ourselves that our business is automatically God's business, which it isn't always quite.  Thus, Richard Rohr's daily email today strikes a resonant note for me:

In recent elections one would have thought that homosexuality and abortion were the new litmus tests of Christianity. Where did this come from? They never were the criteria of proper membership for the first 2000 years, but reflect very recent culture wars instead—and largely from people who think of themselves as “traditionalists”! The fundamentals were already resolved in the early Apostles’ Creed and Nicene Creed. Note that none of the core beliefs are about morality at all. The Creeds are more mystical, cosmological, and about aligning our lives inside of a huge sacred story. When you lose the mystical level, you always become moralistic as a cheap substitute.Jesus is clearly much more concerned about issues of pride, injustice, hypocrisy, blindness, and what I have often called “The Three Ps” of power, prestige, and possessions, which are probably 95% of Jesus’ written teaching. We conveniently ignore this 95% to concentrate on a morality that usually has to do with human embodiment. That’s where people get righteous, judgmental, and upset, for some reason. The body seems to be where we carry our sense of shame and inferiority, and early-stage religion has never gotten much beyond these “pelvic” issues. As Jesus put it, “You ignore the weightier matters of the law—justice, mercy, and good faith . . . and instead you strain out gnats and swallow camels” (Matthew 23:23-24). We worry about what people are doing in bed much more than making sure everybody has a bed to begin with. There certainly is a need for a life-giving sexual morality, but one could question whether Christian nations have found it yet. Christianity will regain its moral authority when it starts emphasizing social sin in equal measure with individual (read “body-based”) sin and weaves them both into a seamless garment of love and truth.