All posts tagged Christianity

I stumbled across Anne Rice’s decision to “give up” on christianity through the PatrolMag.com posting. She had originally made the declaration on her Facebook Fan Page. After reading her statement, I felt compelled to write the below letter:

Dear Anne,

I am sure that this post is one among many responding to your announcement that you are disassociating yourself from Christianity. You wrote that your disgust with “this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group” has led you to the conclusion that you “simply cannot belong” to us.

I feel you, Anne. I really do. I’ve had similar thoughts and even expressed them publicly. I don’t mind at all the desire or even the need to stand at some distance from the label of christianity. It may well have been worn through. But I take issue with the notion that you must disassociate yourself from ‘christian’ people. I mean sure, we’re a motley lot. Belonging to this family can often feel like you’ve adopted a few thousand drunk uncles. It’s incredibly embarrassing at times and frustrating at least as often. I get it. But I also read that you’re making your move “in the name of Christ” and that presents a rather perplexing dilemma for someone who wants to quit on people. You see, Christ hasn’t quit on us and if you choose to align yourself with Him, then neither can you.

Aligning yourself with Christ means aligning yourself with Someone who not only declared his love for all God’s children (believer or not), but suffered and died in order to establish and maintain a relationship with those children. It is this redemptive sacrifice that defines His love as characteristically His. Having chosen to follow His example, it seems that at least part of the redemptive sacrifice you are being challenged to make is to associate and identify yourself with this shabby batch of miscreants who are often quite bad at practicing the religion you love. It comes at the cost of your ego and likely some book sales. But that’s the nature of sacrifice; it costs you. It will cost you if people see you as being family to those “anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-artificial birth, anti-Democrat, anti-secular humanism, anti-science” types among us. Just as it costs Jesus to be seen as their Savior and Lord. Just as it cost him to be seen with prostitutes and whatnot. It is the same social role-play with a different set of cultural lenses on. All your statement does is trade in “bigots” for “whores” when the heart of Christ is that they’re both beloved of the Father.

It’s simply reasonable that if you set yourself against people who set themselves against people you are only adding to the friction. If part of your issue with christianity is it’s exclusivity, you aren’t helping by only including those who “get it” the way you do. True christian inclusivity means embracing the homosexual and the gay-basher in the same embrace; working for the release of the oppressed while praying and working for the redemption of their oppressor; loving the beautiful game of baseball and yet, somehow, also loving the Yankees. It means loving the Lord with all of yourself and also loving those who grossly misrepresent Him.

I think you’re smart, Anne. I think you’ll hear some thoughtful feedback and realize you stepped across a line and might have to retract your statement. You will also likely have to speak directly with Christ about the way you roughly labeled and dismissed the ones He’s drawn to himself and suffered to love. Lucky for you, lucky for all of us, He’s incredibly forgiving and eternally patient.

In the name of Christ,
Justin McRoberts

657 days ago / Tagged: Anne Rice, Christianity, Family, Vampires Are Played Out 134

Why I Am Not A Christian… if that’s what it means (part 2)

Yeah, yeah.. I know it’s easy to write off the “prosperity gospel” as an extreme. But the importance of knowing just how distorted this brand of christianity is stems not only from our ability to write it off where it is concentrated. For example.. in the places to which we’ve exported it at the great expense of peoples’ livelihood and development…

It is equally important to recognize the cancer in its smaller, sneakier forms.

Sure, the most of us don’t buy the notion that the Lord is going to “buy me a Cadillac” or what have you.. but the subtle battle of divine expectations is constant and heavy. For many of us, the experience of a life “in Christ” has been something dramatically different than advertised: Our jobs still get pulled out from beneath our feet, our relationships are still compromised by the worst parts of our nature, our children still die from genetic disorders they were born with and suffer from for no fault of their own… the happenings and circumstances of our lives often remain much the same if not exactly the same in life “with God” as life “without Him” which can lead one to wonder just how much of a difference there is between the two.

NOTHING in all of scripture, much less the long, difficult history of God’s people in relationship with Him proposes that He removes from us these daily burdens. In fact, among Joy, Gentleness, Peace and the lot, Longsuffering is listed as a fruit of God’s spirit in the lives of those who follow Jesus.

Furthermore, I might even suggest that while Joy and Peace are characteristics one would expect from a person indwelt with the heart of Jesus, Longsuffering is where the rubber meets the road. When things are brutal.. when dreams and expectations fail… when God disappoints… do I still call God “good”? When what is “good” to God seems “evil” to me; when God’s hand does not move to alleviate suffering and bring light where darkness has claimed preeminence.. can I submit my will to His and say “not my will, but yours.. not my idea of good but Yours; though it confounds and perplexes and even angers me… You are King and I will trust You despite myself.”

So, while I don’t always click with John Piper, I couldn’t agree more with him in this:

938 days ago / Tagged: Africa, Christianity, john piper, Religion 3

Why I’m Not A Christian.. if that’s what it means (Part 1)

Beginning with Bertrand Russell’s essay “Why I Am Not A Christian,” I have made a point to seek out the voices of those most vehemently anti-christian or anti-religious. This is not because I want to ‘know my enemy.’ Instead, I read these works because I regularly find so much commonality with the men and women who write them. Bertrand Russell’s essay challenged some of the foundational misunderstandings I had regarding the practice of my own faith. His criticism was an instrument that freed me to see more clearly that there were things about “being a christian” that don’t really have anything to do with actually being a christian; and that, if ‘being a christian’ meant holding to those external things, then I must be something else. I suppose it’s fair to say I see the work of God in and through these men and their work. Their challenge chips away at what is very often superfluous in religion; a theme that runs through the album Deconstruction.

I really believe that atheism, agnosticism and deism are pieces in a conversation much larger than any one of those platforms of belief alone. For this reason, I’m looking forward to seeing Collision. From what I can tell from previews and whatnot, it seems to be a pretty well balanced (fair and balanced? lol.. hehe.. ahem…) take on this piece of that conversation:

http://www.collisionmovie.com/

945 days ago / Tagged: Agnosticism, Atheism, Christianity, Religion 5

Worship Fail

A few years ago I was invited to lead music at a conference in Santa Cruz, CA. I learned a bit about about the group and what kind of music they were used to so that I could prepare a song-list they’d find familiar and singable. Upon arrival, I noticed the poster advertising both the speaker and myself. The poster read “The Reverend Speaker VonSpeakenstein (not his real name) will be delivering the Word and Justin McRoberts will bring the worship.”

Read the entire post at Soul-Audio.

955 days ago / Tagged: Christianity, worship 1

Billboards for Islam

Driving home from the studio last night I noted that there is a new billboard on the side of the freeway, advertising Islam. The design was overall boring but got the point across: “Islam” it read “the message of Mohammed, Abraham and Jesus” or something along those lines. After glancing at it I thought someone should make a pair of phone calls. The first call should probably go to Jesus cuz I’m pretty sure He’d want to know he was a Muslim or at least a supporter. The second phone call could come from any slew of Christian congregations or organizations and ought to be placed to the Muslim group who erected the sign. The Christians should let the Muslims know that we’ve tried this kind of thing before with rather poor results.

I mean, advertising religion with a billboard will likely attract a certain kind of person to your religion, much as shouting from the sunroof of ones car at the opposite sex will attract a certain kind of date (I’d suggest that, in the latter case, it’d likely not be the kind of person you’d want to spend the rest of your life with… though that might not be what you’re after) So, in either case, perhaps it all depends on the kind of audience or clientele or follower you’re after..

Then again,..

part of what I’d like the Christian advertisers to tell the Muslim advertisers is that the seats of our churches are often filled with the butts of folks who responded to our advertising but, unfortunately, could never move past it. People who saw the ads, intentional and subliminal, for a faith that was comfortable and safe, driven by God’s deep, deep like of us and His faithful commitment to preserve our way of life and have been reeling ever since at the divergence between the sales pitch and the Person of Jesus they run into periodically at these meetings. And now we can’t seem to get the most of them to help so much as stack chairs after our services, much less commit to a life of service reflective of the life we were hoping to see grow in them once we’d suckered them in.

We’re trying to re-work our communication to avoid such things in the future and it’s proving to be a rather difficult process. As it turns out, the reality of the thing we’re advertising is what is known as a “crappy product.” It seldom seems to work the way we tell folks it’s going to and generally ends up costing quite a bit more than most folks are normally willing to pay. If we were being honest, our billboards would read something like:

“Join us on Sunday (plus every other day besides) and prepare to give your time/energy/money/life to people you don’t understand for the sake of a God you can’t really grasp very well either.”

See? That’s just not gonna bring the masses… but.. maybe the masses aren’t what we’re looking to gather after all?

968 days ago / Tagged: Advertising, Christianity, Islam, Religion and Spirituality 6

“David Bazan’s Black Cloud” or “It Is Through Songs I Was First Undone”

If you knew what would happen and made us just the same,
You, My Lord, can take the blame.

So the evening began in song with David Bazan; the same way that my engagement with his work has always been. His challenge to the “assumed goodness” of God pushing me to search my own heart for similar untested assumptions, contradictory premises, doubts, frustrations… his courage in doing so freeing me to find the darker corners of my own mind with less fear and, in that way, greater faith.

Bazan was in Grand Rapids (as was I) to participate in the Festival of Faith and Music (of which I will write a bit more in the near future). Along with playing a set on Thursday night, Bazan talked with NPR’s Jessica Hopper about… well… faith and music. He reflected on his own history as a songwriter as well as the music he’s listened to over the years. He continued to point at moments in songs or albums that unsettled him in relationship to christianity.

Between times and during late nights, I had the pleasure of finally talking with him quite a bit about his new record, house shows, his Pedro days, christian bumper stickers and festivals we’d never play again. Those conversations only made the songs from his next release “Curse Your Branches” (August 09) more intriguing to me. He is calling “Branches” his first truly autobiographical piece. It’s an autobiography I’ve been hoping to hear for a while as it is specifically focused on his distancing from christianity.

The title track is highlighted by this masterful chorus…

..falling leaves should curse their branches
For not letting them decide where they should fall
And not letting them refuse to fall at all

While he has always been comfortable in a critical posture towards christianity for it’s … well.. being all “christian” and stuff, Bazan, in song and in conversation, does not seem at all settled on the distance between himself and God. He directs his discontent back toward the space God previously occupied, singing:

In my throat, there swells a darkness
It fills my mouth, and coats my lips
And even as the threat of Hell is disappearing,
The threat of losing you is blowing up..

For those of us who have been listeners of Bazan’s since early Pedro the Lion, this tension he creates by directing his frustration and confusion at a God whose character is awfully confusing, a God he is not sure exists and is the root of his frustrations to begin with is exactly why we love his music; because for many of us, this has been at least part of our experience of faith. For many of us, christian art, whose songs of doubt are generally tamed with an overly obvious and predictable happy ending of unwavering assurance or whose stories of tragedy are most often girded with the glaring undertone that “everything is going to be just fine in the end,” not only misrepresents our experience thus far, but leaves us with a sense that something is very wrong with our own weak faith.

Similar to writers like Frederick Buechner, David Bazan provides a place for skeptics, poets and the religiously frustrated to find some normality. A place where doubt is not a disease or a phase that needs to be medicated, grown out of or explained away but actively wrestled with; a place where frustration with God and confusion at who He is becomes part of the journey itself; where the decision to continue engaging, even if it’s only to shout into the dark space we thought God had been living all this time, is an act that is full of faith.

In William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying,” he uses one of his character’s voices to critique the religious compromise we make with doubt, writing

“…sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forgot the words.”

Bazan’s life and work have given shape to Sin and Love and Fear for many of us who could find few if any fleshly, mortal connections with these realities in the artistic expressions of faith offered by popular religious culture. The art he’s produced in the throes of doubt, alcoholism and folly have served as the tragedy that some of us have lacked the vitality to suffer for ourselves; in the light of which art, our own process of redemption or restoration has fuller meaning rather than being the half-lived half-truth that is the result of the half-thinking compromise we strike with our often half-conceived idea of God.

The following night after Bazan’s show, Cornell West highlighted the role of death in christian life; particularly the death of ideas, prejudices and suppositions. That same night in the middle of a conversation about the history of either losing or letting go of things he had previously thought necessary for life and faith, Bazan listed a few of the influences that had been his guides along the way; just about all of them being songwriters. He paused for a moment and then said “I guess it is through songs that I was first undone.”

1136 days ago / Tagged: Christianity, David Bazan, doubt, Frederick Buechner, Pedro the Lion, William Faulkner 5

Letter From 2011 (part 1)

For any of y’all that missed it, a prominent figure in christian leadership recently wrote a vision of the future four years into Obama’s presidency. It is a bleak picture. As I read the letter, the word “hopeless” came to mind several times. Now, I will seldom begrudge anyone their political opinions, even though I may strongly disagree. That said, I do begrudge the use fear to influence behavior.

In the preface to the original letter, the Apostle Paul is referenced, which led me to seek the words of Paul, myself. Reading some of the most quoted words the apostle ever wrote (1 Corinthians 13:1-15), I was struck by a kind of newness (as often happens with Holy Text).

“For we know in part and we prophesy in part,.. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”

A vision of the future is hardly a vision of clarity as it is possibility. Now, the original writer does preface his dark vision, saying “This letter is not “predicting” that all of the imaginative future “events” named in this letter will happen. But it is saying that each one of these changes could happen” But that leads me to the last bit of Paul’s instruction in this area:

“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

While the greatest of the three remaining principles or ideas is love, hope, nonetheless remains. Hopelessness is not a characteristic of the christian life; nor a christian vision of the future.

There is quite a bit to the letter, so I will post in in parts.

This is part 1:
——–

Dear friend,

I just got back from singing the National Anthem at the ball-game. Boy, the A’s look really good this year. Trading Chavez looks like the best move Beane has made since picking up Holiday a few years ago.

I get tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat every time I sing that song, particularly seeing the way citizens over the past few years have really grown into being “the home of the brave”… taking more and more ownership of their families, communities, neighborhoods and cities; becoming less dependent on political or even religious machinery.

That is perhaps the most striking change since the ’08 election: the level of citizen involvement. Specifically the involvement of large segments of the populace who had previously thought themselves unwanted by or excluded from the process. I’m not just talking about minorities, although that’s a story by itself. What has moved me has been the sheer numbers of young people; college, high-school and even younger, who have committed themselves to social and cultural renewal both globally and locally,… man, it’s hard to paint a picture anywhere near as striking as reality.

Of course, the Dems wants to claim this energy for its own but it had roots far deeper than Obama and the DNC. Admittedly, Obama’s presidency has continued to be a driving force behind public involvement. After the election, Hope In Action clusters formed all over the US, mainly made up of and led by folks who had volunteered on the Obama campaign originally. The service programs Obama’s office offered gave some structure and direction to the energized masses, but the heart to serve had been shaped by much more than peoples’ political orientation.

Same Sex “Marriage”
After the uproar in California over proposition 8, there grew a greater and more tragic divide between the homosexual community and the Church, or at least much of the Church. Court case after court case, protest after protest, the violence (sometimes physical) was embarrassing and damaging to the image of the people of God and to the health of our nation. Much of the same activity continues to make headlines. Even this week, a protest outside one neighborhood church turned ugly. Now, depending on the news source, the story of who started the fighting differs. What is certain is that this was one more example of a method which soon must pass.

There is still so much healing to be done, but we are seeing pockets all over where this healing is starting. The question many started asking from within the Body was “Is there a more compelling way to make the case for marriage? Why does this have to look different than the case we make for any other facet of the christian life?”

The fears of some among us that same-sex marriage would “unravel the fabric of our nation” have gone rather conspicuously unmet to date. Now, while multiple court cases in multiple states have yet to be settled and I am rather certain that this conversation/argument will go on, yet we’ve seen very little evidence that the doomsday scenarios will play out, particularly in public ed, where educators have resisted any suggestion that redefinition of “family” or “marriage” is ever going to be part of the curriculum.

Ultimately, the hope on both “sides” has become the same; that the government would get out of the business of marrying people and dole out “unions” only. I used to think this was only a matter of semantics, but I’ve learned that words carry deep meaning both culturally and spiritually.

One of the harder aspects of the turn America has taken in this area has been the deep disillusionment among christians regarding the State’s concern for religious matters. Few recognized how deeply seeded the nationalist sentiment was in the heart of our faith; how closely we had drawn the parallel identity of “American” with “Christian” and how confused our allegiances had become. It has been painful for many to have that seed removed and among them there are those who have abandoned the faith overall. That said, many have called it an “awakening” of sorts. I tend to agree.

1268 days ago / Tagged: Barack Obama, Christianity, James Dobson, Prophecy 10