Final Words or Parting Shot?
Writing a last will and testament should be, and can be, a spiritual exercise.
Frederick W. Schmidt, Sr.
1925-2012
in pace requiescat
Frederick W. Schmidt, Sr.
1925-2012
in pace requiescat
Facebook prophets are not a voice crying in the wilderness, they are shouting with the crowds:
To any rap tune of your choosing:
I want to say,
There’s a big payday
For the ones who say
There’s just no way
That Moses, Jesus, and Martin
Pissed on religion
But there’s just no way
To make a case for that vision
Yet another ill-informed commentator with a camera, a really great leather jacket, and a nice make up job has declared his preference for living down and dirty with the outcasts, choosing Jesus over religion. It’s a great piece and really compelling.
Too bad he doesn’t know much about history, the Gospels, or Jesus for that matter:
There’s not the slightest suggestion in the Gospels that Jesus distinguished between himself and Judaism, or the shape of his spirituality and his commitment to religious practice. In fact, the distinction between spirituality and religion would have been unintelligible to him.
What the slick video would have done well to rap on was a distinction made by Gordon Allport over sixty years ago now, but is as old as human behavior itself: the difference between mature and immature religious outlooks. Writing in The Individual and His Religion, Allport points out that three things distinguish someone who is mature in their religious convictions from those who are immature.
They possess:
Arguably Allport’s categories apply imperfectly to Christianity, or to any other religion, for that matter. They are, after all, a modern attempt to identify a phenomenon that has ancient roots that doesn’t yield easily to a one-size-fits-all analysis. But at a minimum, Allport points us to the real problem: It is not religion, but the way in which we appropriate it, that subverts the virtues of the religious life.
You can call that failure the product of immature religious sensibilities (as Allport does), you can describe it as immaturity pure and simple, or you can describe it as hypocrisy. But it’s simplistic, misleading, and even a bit immature to describe the problem as the difference between religion and Jesus.
When it surfaces, I don’t like hypocrisy any better than the video’s rapper. I’m an Episcopal priest. I have years’ worth of reasons for wanting to walk out on religion, as does anyone who has ever spent time in the church — any church. But as Karl Rahner points out, “sinners still belong to the church.” To offer the self-righteous criticism that the church fails us masks the fact that we fail Jesus as well.
One could argue, of course, as the rapper implies, that he doesn’t compound his failure by trying to be religious. The answer to which is, “No, he makes a video trumpeting the presumption that he is too righteous to be religious.” In other words, he does precisely what we cannot do, because none of us can claim to be without sin.
By all means, we should be critical of the church. That kind of criticism, like the criticism that Jesus offered of the Temple leadership in his own day, is a necessary (though not the only) piece of what it means to listen to God. But we cannot be spiritual alone and, to coin a phrase, no one is a self-righteous island.
It feels good to visit that place. I’ve always enjoyed trips there. But Allport and Rahner are both right. It’s an immature and spiritually dangerous place to live.
A prescription for a peace-filled celebration….
http://www.patheos.com/Resources/Additional-Resources/Forced-Family-Fun-Frederick-Schmidt-12-19-2011.html
Some thoughts on a subject that isn’t often discussed: Men and the Church.
And some interesting responses….
Life in the church has become like life elsewhere in America: “Issues are us.” But isn’t God bigger than the issue of the moment?
And my response to Barbara Wheeler’s criticisms of last spring’s column: