Fearless Faith

No pressure to decide

 

March 17, 2021



Sometimes it is nice to set aside guilt and allow someone else or some other circumstances to dictate a course of action. When a trip home from northern Utah was negatively impacted with unprecedented snow and road closures across Wyoming, there was simply little to be done about it but to watch the weather reports with everyone else. While of great interest, the reports themselves were neither vexing nor particularly irritating. They simply conveyed objective information that enabled us to make rational decisions in postponing some work and travel plans in favor of safety. What an advantage over the early settlers of this country.

It was not our choice (or anyone else’s) to end up with a fractured week, but neither were we unprepared in altering plans to suit exigent circumstance. If we have learned anything the past fifteen months, I hope that it has included significant measures of adaption, perseverance, common sense and some higher degrees of faith. Peering into a post-pandemic future will ultimately illuminate many past decisions and efforts in insightful ways. Will the church’s many roles produce vindication or indictment? There are as many shameful narratives as there are heroic ones. Where do our own particular faith groups land in that regard?

Much focus has centered on gathering the religious masses to once more congregate freely beyond the confines of the pandemic. This is an admirable perhaps necessary step, but it remains incomplete. The pandemic has irrevocably changed the nature of faith and has drawn it further into the secular world than ever before, a move that many theology scholars have suggested is long overdue. Like a self-admiration club for notables and status quo seekers, it is time for the church to set aside its ego and focus outward in fearless and stirring ways.

That is hard to do when many of us have grown up in traditional churches without hearing uttered a single challenge to the theology that surrounds them. Are there no questions remaining to be entertained? How remiss we are to assume Christianity an exclusive club that grants conditional entry based on willingness to parrot back a creed or two? Why the eagerness to conform to a script that reinforces a loving God who rains vengeance and wrath down upon most everyone but us? It’s a little inconsistent to say the least. How self-important do we imagine ourselves to be?

We are a durable world culture, Christian and non-Christian, that is able to extract extraordinary meaning from lessons of life and death in order to formulate responses of the highest order. It’s tough to acknowledge the worth of others when the church has reinforced inequities spanning generations. And yet there is still time to discover sacredness in the profane as well as the profane in the sacred. If that makes you uncomfortable, then welcome to the world of first century Galilee. It wasn’t easy for Jesus and it will not be for us.

The course of action that results will say a lot about who we are as self-described members of the faith. Some suggest that our course is already charted. I am hopeful it is not. Bring on the road closures and inclement weather. A pause one direction or another might be good for us to consider. Some of the best decisions result when the pressures of deciding are set aside for a day or two.

 

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