The week was spent preparing a sermon on Ephesians 4:1-16. Two verses in particular from the text just kept jumping out at me all week, to the point of almost preventing a sermon from happening. Check out verses 14-15, here as in the Common English Bible:
As a result, we aren't supposed to be infants any longer who can be tossed and blown around by every wind that comes from teaching with deceitful scheming and the tricks people play to mislead others. Instead, by speaking the truth with love, let's grow in every way into Christ...
It doesn't take a whole lot of effort to find in your average batch of weekly headlines a slew of examples of folks who present themselves as "Christians," for whom the scare quotes seem especially necessary when viewed in the light of this passage (or, say, Philippians 4:8, or 1 Corinthians 13, or Galatians 5:22-23, or most anything about Jesus in any of the gospels). There isn't a whole lot of good witness in the behavior of such leaders as the pastor who threatened to throw out anyone wearing a mask in *his* church (emphasis on his).
It is, in short, childish - a childishness made all the worse by its continued insistence on posturing as "masculine" or "manly" or some such business. It is whining posturing as leadership. It is those who "teach with deceitful scheming" preying upon infants who can be tossed and blown around by all the wind. And frankly, it is gross.
I suppose the confluence of headlines and lectionary scripture have pushed this one forward in my mind, but it checks out nonetheless. The "Christianity" that preys upon our headlines and draws attention to itself (as opposed to, oh, I don't know, Jesus?) is a culturally shaped "Christianity" that has no spiritual maturity about it, that demands benefits and privileges for itself and its chosen few, with the rest of the world either ignored or actively vilified.
I have in the past argued that the word "Christian" should be abolished as an adjective. Four years later, I'm more convinced of this than ever. What I'm seeing more and more is how much of this usage of the word seems to be deeply bogged down in a rampant spiritual childishness laced with heavy doses of fear, fear of "the other," fear of losing one's status and privilege and power, fear of anything that challenges our comfort and splendid isolation and imagined benevolence toward the lesser people around "us" (this one got totally ramped up by the pandemic).
The aforementioned 1 Corinthians 13 contains, besides all the description and exaltation of love, this telling bit in verse 11:
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a adult, I put an end to childish ways.
It's telling indeed, and yet how many have not put aside such childish ways? What might be some "childish" ways that need to be put aside? Things like selfishness ("if you have enough, then I can't have everything I want" is a pretty good summary), name-calling (have you had enough of the word "socialism" these days?), projection (accusing others of that of which you are guilty - every sibling has experienced that even if they don't realize it), avoiding responsibility ("it's not my fault if those people are [something they are actually not]"); it's a long list, and an awful lot of public-facing self-identified "Christians" indulge these and too many other traits of childishness with little pushback from, well, anybody.
The title of the sermon that eventually resulted from the week's wrestling with these verses was "Grow Up." You'll see an amusing illustration with it (also reproduced it here - if anyone knows who created it I'd love to give them credit and maybe buy them dinner, even if it might be slightly unfair to a lot of adolescents I know). The illustration isn't limited to the church, to be sure, but boy howdy does it apply here.
Of course, part of being able to avoid being tossed and blown around by the deceivers is being well-rooted enough to spot deception when you hear or see it. Being grounded in scripture would be a good start, but how many adults at your church have any tolerance for doing Sunday school? In addition, I'm going to list a few books at the end of this blog for getting acquainted with how the deceivers among the church get traction; two of them lay out in stark detail how powergrabbers replace genuine Christlike teaching with deeply unchristlike cultural norms prettied up with a thin veneer of churchy talk, while the third helps demonstrate how those norms-disguised-as-faith get spread around so profusely. The mainline church of which I am a part has a tall task ahead of undoing the damage done, but the task can't be avoided or brushed off no matter how much such churches seek to do justice and practice righteousness. The childish church is eventually going to have to be named and called out, no matter how unpleasant it will be, or else God's gonna have to tear it all up, roots and everything, and plant anew.
Or maybe that's already happening.
Suggested reading:
Du Mez, Kristin Kobes. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.
Barr, Beth Allison. The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth.
Vaca, Daniel. Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America.
