Monday, April 25, 2011

Easter Monday

Today is Easter Monday. The day after the greatest feast in Christendom, Easter, the sign of everlasting imperishable hope for billions of people throughout the world. Here in the United States, in the areas of affluence and the suburbs, people in their new Easter finery trekked to churches for celebrations of various sorts. Easter is also a day when people in their hundreds of thousands who don't ever darken the door of a church otherwise also go to church. Habit, gesture, tradition? I guess. I could never really figure it out. It certainly has nothing to do with the Gospel.

The whole exercise of Christianity, at least the kind of exercise and Christianity I'm familiar with, misses the entire point of the gospels. Or so it seems to me. There is nothing plainer in the gospels than the fact that Jesus would doubtless take a dim view of the kind of self-congratulatory, pablum-based, feel-good, judgmental, and sometimes downright silly religions, practices, and beliefs that have been formed around his name and life.

It's for dead certain that you don't hear this kind of thing from the pulpits of America's Christian churches: "Jesus was a working man, a carpenter, who advocated for the underclass, the powerless, and those country clubs would exclude." If this kind of dead-on gospel does get preached, you can be sure it's couched in enough provisos and qualifications to allow anybody listening to wriggle off the hook, to not be challenged by the radical equality of everyone that Jesus recognized, preached, and most of all, lived. No, we prefer our gospel comfortable and toothless. And we certainly don't want it to have anything to do with equality.

So the Risen Lord is forced to wonder once again just what these people who claim to follow him are actually doing. That is, aside from everything he preached against and despite his many examples to the contrary.

7 comments:

Montag said...

He also condemned Divorce.
A lot of our problems stem from our lives being in direct variance to our beliefs... a dissonance that drives us crazy.

Why the hubbub about Sharia Law? We'd just ignore it anyway. If we can ignore what our God says, we can ignore anything.

Unknown said...

I think it was Chesterton who said: "Christianity has not failed, it's just never been tried."

karen lindsey said...

i swear i wrote here earlier today, but maybe i forgot to hit the right key [as you see, i'm reading your blogs bit by bit, and enjoying them much.

anyway, it's just that i think your quote in from g.b. shaw, not chesterton. or at least, i heard it was shaw's. shaw was among my teen heroes, as chesterton was, later in my life. one because he expressed a contempt for umbrellas, which i've always had, and 2, father brown!!!! have you seen the magazine Gilbert? very conservative, but some nice stuff re GK.....

Unknown said...

I have always heard Chesterton . . . but it could have easily been either one. Happy you're reading my stuff. Not many do. :-)

karen lindsey said...

i'm very glad i came across your blog. i enjoy the fact that blogspot has those random 'other blogs' on its stat pages. it's a fascinating media form, with so very much variation in topics, tone, reason to exist, etc. yours is one of the really consistently interesting ones to me.

Unknown said...

I've fallen way behind the power curve this week. I beat myself up for not putting something on the blog every day. I've got to give talks to Civil War Round Tables in Chicago and Milwaukee next week, and so I've been jammed up on getting ready for that.

Thanks very much for your vote of confidence. I'm just an old guy who pretty much constantly wonders how in the name of all that's holy did we come to our present mess. That's pretty much what the blog is about pretty much all the time.

karen lindsey said...

i checked out your chesterton quote and it turns out we're both part right and part wrong....
chesterton--the christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.' [in 'on christianity'

shaw--christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it.'

they were friends--not sruprising that, from their opposite beleifs, would end up saying pretty much the same thing