Grace—That's So Sick
The church seems to be an embarrassment to everyone except its Lord.
Mark Galli | posted 7/26/2007 08:27AM
One
afternoon during my undergraduate years, I was sitting by the college
library reading when two students walked by talking about the
crucifixion of Christ. Naturally, my ears perked up. They were deeply
critical of the whole idea. One of them summed up the nature of their
complaint by exclaiming: "Dying on a cross for the sins of the
world—that is so sick!"
...In the 1970s, "the
establishment" was under fierce attack at all American universities,
and Christianity, an upstanding member of that establishment, took its
share of lumps...
We Christians on campus
spent a fair bit of time and energy trying to show our fellow students
that Christians were not as stupid, moribund, irrelevant, and
hypercritical as everyone had been led to believe. I've discovered all
that damage control was for naught: After living another 35 years as a
Christian, I've come to see that like my fellow believers, I really am
stupid, moribund, irrelevant, and hypercritical, and that Jesus' death
on a cross for sin is just one of many "sick" things I believe.
Both
a recent conversation and a book resurrected those college memories....The book was Unchristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity
(Baker, October 2007) by David Kinnaman. The book's opening line is
"Christianity has an image problem," and it proceeds to describe the
many problems secular "busters and mosaics" (also known as generations
X and Y) have with the faith....
Unchristian's
motive is praiseworthy—the author implores us to take these
generations' critiques seriously as we try to call them to follow
Jesus. And the book's central assumption seems reasonable enough: If we
could just get Christians to act like Christians, more people would be
attracted to Jesus.
But the problem with the book,
and with those who eschew the Christian label, is that they fail to
take the sinfulness of the church seriously enough. They also fail to
recognize how far the scandal of the Cross reaches. Simply put, Jesus
not only died for but also chooses to associate with sheltered,
judgmental, proselytizing hypocrites who have put their faith in him.
In fact, he's willing to let them muck up his "brand," willing to let
each collection of potential televangelists and crusaders be known as a
"church of Jesus Christ."
Part of the
scandal of the Cross is the scandal of grace. And part of the scandal
of grace is that I am part and parcel of the company of the graced.
My
being a Christian means I am a member of a brotherhood of sinners, some
of the most embarrassing sort. Even worse, to be a Christian is to
acknowledge that I have been, at heart, a televangelist, a crusader, a
sheltered, judgmental, proselytizing hypocrite.
...When we invite
people to follow Jesus, we're inviting them into the desperately sinful
church that Jesus, for some odd reason, loves. To be a Christian—or
whatever term you'd prefer—is to identify not just with Jesus or with
the healthy church of our imagination, but also with the tragically
dysfunctional church, which is mercifully embraced, if not by us, then
certainly by the One who was a scandal in his own day.
Mark Galli is senior managing editor of Christianity Today. He is author of Jesus Mean and Wild: The Unexpected Love of an Untamable God
(Baker).