Lenten Daily Reflection 2021-03-24
You can listen to the reading and reflection by clicking here.
Romans 10:14-21
But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him? And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent? As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!’ But not all have obeyed the good news;* for Isaiah says, ‘Lord, who has believed our message?’ So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ.*
But I ask, have they not heard? Indeed they have; for
‘Their voice has gone out to all the earth,
and their words to the ends of the world.’
Again I ask, did Israel not understand? First Moses says,
‘I will make you jealous of those who are not a nation;
with a foolish nation I will make you angry.’
Then Isaiah is so bold as to say,
‘I have been found by those who did not seek me;
I have shown myself to those who did not ask for me.’
But of Israel he says, ‘All day long I have held out my hands to a disobedient and contrary people.’
I have gone back and forth with these verses for about a week now, feeling both overwhelmed with things to say and unsure of how to put them. I grew up very religious in a fundamentalist Christian church, but I really only think of my current spiritual development as starting a year and a half ago, when I started attending Holy Apostles with my family. It has been a process of both learning what I truly believe about God and Christ, as well as identifying and unlearning harmful ideas I carried with me from my earliest church experiences.
This process has also been very difficult to explain, both to myself and my friends. I cannot really enunciate why I wanted to come back to Christianity, and many of my friends who have traumatic memories of their own associated with Christianity have been perplexed and, sometimes, hurt. And I can’t help but think, when I find scriptures difficult to understand or infuriating, and when prayer isn’t doing anything, that things might be a lot easier if I just didn’t think about this stuff, like I did for so many years.
In the poet and theologian Christian Wiman’s memoir of faith, My Bright Abyss, he writes:
If God is a salve applied to unbearable psychic wounds, or a dream figure conjured out of memory and mortal terror, or an escape from a life that has become either too appalling or too banal to bear, then I have to admit: it is not working for me.
I laughed out loud reading this, because in the purely instrumental sense Christianity is not working for me. I am not necessarily happier, I am not more at peace. I feel as broken and anxious as I did two years ago, now I am just anxious about this.
With this in mind, I don’t know how to explain why I am a Christian, much less how to proclaim Christ, and in a world where mainstream white Christianity has hurt so many people - when the motivations behind a recent mass shooting have been characterized, offhand, as inspired by the murderer’s “Christian faith,” when Christianity in the public space is characterized by inequality and war and injustice, and when every year we must become more aware of the past atrocities that have used Christianity as justification - it feels impossible.
When I was a kid, I was told that everyone who did not belong to our incredibly tiny sect of Christianity was bound for an eternity of suffering. This horrified me beyond words. I couldn’t sleep at night; thinking about billions of people in pain forever while I would hypothetically be in heaven with my co-congregants, who I didn’t even like, made me feel sick, and it caused me to recoil from the people at my church who didn’t seem bothered by this prospect but actively enjoyed it. I don’t believe this anymore - I can’t - but if I can’t promise any benefit in this life or salvation in the next, what good news am I sharing?
But maybe, for me at least, that isn’t the point. Just existing in our society, I am constantly bombarded by messages about all of the different things I can do to make myself “better” - thinner, calmer, more effective - from standing desks to the pomodoro method psychedelic therapy. Maybe God is not a new meditation app for me to use to fix myself. Maybe being a Christian isn’t a magic wand but a calling, something I will struggle with every day but which will structure my life.
And maybe being honest about this - that I can be depressed and feel broken and be totally infuriated by the Bible and alienated in prayer - is a proclamation of Christ I can make. I can share the things that I love about my church community and the things I love about the Bible and even the things I struggle with in the Bible, with my friends within the church and outside of it. Maybe that can be beautiful news in and of itself.