Faith, Status Quo, and Facebook Jesus

One of the great threats to faith - I speak as a Christian but assume this is true for other faiths - is its tendency to be co-opted by the status quo. Regardless of the actual, core teachings of the faith, it will be invoked to support whatever a particular culture supports. Jesus may have been a trouble-making radical who preached non-violence and love of enemies, who sided with the poor and spoke against wealth, but in the short history of the US, he has lent his support to slavery, a strong military, the right to bear arms, and the prosperity gospel, to name just a few. Jesus even morphs into those who claim him as seen as this picture of Jesus on Facebook today. (I assume it's meant to be Jesus, but to me it looks like a member of a southern, country-rock band.)

The status quo, any status quo, begins with an assumption that it is correct. And so any faith connected to the status quo will get enlisted to serve this assumption. Yet I've never known anyone who would claim that the kingdom has arrived, that God's will is being done on earth as it is in heaven, as Jesus taught us to pray. That would imply that any status quo falls short and needs to be transformed. But status quos are never very big on change.

This same problem also operates on a more personal level. People often approach faith as one more item to improve their lives. In this sense the Facebook post about Jesus functions much like the one saying, "25 Ways Apple Cider Vinegar Will Change Your Life."Click on either and things will get better. (I passed on both.)

But the Jesus we meet in the Bible doesn't arrive as one more option for improving our lives. He comes to call us to an entirely new sort of life. So too Jesus doesn't come to support the way things are but to transform them. The status quo invariably supports those at its top, but Jesus is invariably found with those at its bottom. (See today's gospel for one, small example.)


Today's devotion by Richard Rohr ended with this. "Hateful people will find hateful verses to confirm their love of death. Loving people will find loving verses to call them into an even greater love of life. And both kinds of verses are in the Bible!" I think it safe to expand this to say, "Hateful people will use the faith to confirm their love of death. Loving people..." And so the problem rests with the disposition of the heart. Is the heart inclined toward death or life? Is the heart expansive or constricted? More to the point, does our faith draw us toward the expansive, grace, love and mercy of God? Or does what we call faith start with me and mine, and then ask what God can do to make things better for us?

As a Christian pastor, I worry about the faith sometimes. I so often see it trivialized and twisted to serve personal and political ends with little connection to the actual words of Jesus. I see it get turned into a spiritual consumer good to be added to the shopping cart, one more item to make people's lives a little better. Can anything like the faith Jesus models survive in such an environment?

But then I remember the biblical story. The situation that so troubles me is nothing new. The faith has long been distorted by the powers that be, by the religious apparatus that grows up around it, by those who seek to employ it for their good rather than being employ by it, and so on. And so when I see some politicians' smarmy versions of faith, or when I see Christian denominations and congregations worried more about their own goods and survival than about the gospel, I remember that faith has always operated and thrived on the margins. It did when Old Testament prophets called kings and priests to task. It did when Jesus acted in similar fashion. (Is it any surprise that a pope from a third world country, from the international margins, has made the Church resemble Jesus a bit more?)

And so I trust in the power of faith to make all things new. Short of Christ's return, such work will rarely be the work of the majority. Such faith is rarely popular. We celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. today, but during his lifetime he suffered all manner of abuse. And no small amount of the hateful speech aimed at him emanated from Christian pulpits. But the power of the gospel was with King, and not with the status quo Christianity that stood in his way.

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In honor of today's exploits by Alabama's chief justice, Roy Moore, I'm going to bestow the nickname, Alabama Jesus to the picture I found on Facebook. No slight to Alabama intended, though I feel less charitable toward Moore. The picture simply reminds me of someone from that state, and the post itself reminds me of how we twist Jesus to do our will.

But if not even a cross could stop the hope of the gospel, the promise that God's new community is emerging here and there in acts of radical love and obedience, then surely the gospel can survive the challenge of American consumerism and partisan foolishness.

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