This isn't really the post I had been thinking about, but since reading this article, I can't get it out of my mind. There aren't really words to talk about the feelings that I have had. Trust me, I have tried desperately, clinging to all the English words I know, searching through my vocabulary to think of the word for this feeling that I have been having about this article. Maybe I will just try to explain.
I picked up a Birmignham Weekly the other day as I was leaving the gym- it's a free publication that I'm trying to support by reading, ever since they supported us by talking about SpeakFirst- and on the cover it said, "The Jesus Mirage". Me, being someone who dosen't really think that Jesus is a mirage, was very intregued by what this was about.
The man has been on a spiritual journey. He is a journalist, and as a writer he has declaired to the public- I am searching out this God thing to see what I think. It is something that most people do not do- go about this serch so methodically and publically. So he visited several pentecostal churches and had varied experiences. He finally looked up a few on the internet and decided to visit a famous one in Flordia. During the service he bacame very put out by what was being said, and in the midst of the thousands of mega-church attenders, he did the unthinkable....he walked out. This is how it continues,
"I listened to the rest of the sermon in my car — it was carried live, on the town’s one radio station — and by the time the message ended and the preacher invited everyone to line up for prayer and healing I was sitting in the motel parking lot drinking a chocolate milkshake and trying hard to tamp down the completely un-spiritual anger that kept rising in my throat as if someone had literally slapped me in the face.
In subsequent weeks I would try, twice more, dropping in on random congregations to see if the Florida experience had been an anomaly. While neither sermon was quite as bile-laden as that one, the same general message came through.
Though the words “Jesus” and “Christ” were everywhere in their signage and their publicity, I discovered that once I showed up in person I had been the sucker in a bait-and-switch routine. The Sermon on the Mount was nowhere to be found, in this dark new dispensation. No mention, whatever, of the unconditional love Jesus showed to criminals and harlots and outcasts of all kinds. No mention of the difficulties of rich men reaching heaven. Not a word.
The entire New Testament, in fact, had become a virtual non-starter in the pulpit. The quoted verses came almost exclusively from the Old, and usually dealt with God judging or smiting someone. If Jesus was in the services at all, he was merely a mirage. Window dressing, for a wholly other enterprise.
I was moved to write an op-ed piece for a local daily paper, wondering out loud why the teachings of Jesus seemed to have disappeared from most churches: chief of all, his adjurations that we should love even our enemies as God loved us, and share our worldly goods with the poor. The burst of e-mails I received in response showed me the error of my ways. Several even had identical wording: “Jesus was not a Socialist,” they said.
My reasoning faculties told me that this transformation had not taken place overnight, through some dark conspiracy, but it certainly seemed that way. I half-heartedly asked and e-mailed around for recommendations of charismatic churches that steered entirely clear of the madness of current politics, but the responses were not encouraging.
When I gradually arose from the mental swamp of moping over what undeniably felt like a personal betrayal and an insult to my human conscience, it was clear to me that my spiritual search required a very sharp turn from the path I had been on. I could even find direct justification for it in the New Testament, a verse in Matthew that I remembered from childhood: “And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when you depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet.”
Whatever the next leg of the journey, I knew I would be taking it solo."
This is where the emotion stepped in. I was so.... so... hurt? Discouraged? desponant? that this was what he experienced. That he felt he had to go it alone, because he could not find the true gospel message, and even when he questioned it, he was racked across the coals.
And we wonder why people are not coming into our churches
And we wonder why people do not want to be associted with our message.
Do we really need to wonder?
