Note: Now the 2024 US Presidential Election is behind us. We are left with the immortal words of our greatest President, Mr. Lincoln, who said this about elections:
Elections belong to the people. It’d their decision. If they decide to turn their backs on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on the blisters.
Reoice, politically minded (and blistered) friends. Midterms are only only two years away.
Now to our subject
You remember, I hope, we started this series explaining my concern that no one seems to talk about Jesus in church these days. My presupposition is Jesus is our primary subject. To ignore the subject of our Faith/Knowledge seems to me certain to render the Church meaningless.
So, I began to try and explain Jesus, the Christ, to people who might read this series and, so, fall in love with the Idea?Person of the Christ, Jesus.
One of my friends told me I was “trying to save the world again” with my incessant insistence on Jesus. I agree with his sentiment. I want to ask church people to insist their ministers present Jesus and I want to beg ministers to present Jesus with clarity and force.
Osanta Simplicitiatas! We live in a strange simplification in our culture. Religion without God, Church without the Bible, Sermons without Jesus. Thus, we make everything around us easy, clear and simple. Houses of worship empty out nicely, Satan might say, when we first empty out the message.
Our ignorance as Neitchze has it enables us to live out an almost inconceivable freedom. North American cultural freedom these days (our cultural crisis) is the liberty of license. Nothing is unthinkable so long as it meets the popular narrative. A fetus is a cluster of cells, a baby is a parasite, a man is a woman and a woman a man, if only someone wants it be so. Confrontation is discrespect, disrespect is violence, democracy is white supremacy on the one side and national disgrace on the other, all of which leads to bitter division bordering on civil war.
I hold we will not reconcile these matters politically, At least, not with the kind of politics limnited to a ballot box.
In the Current Crisis, ignorance is not only unknowing, it is the love of error. There can be no nuance where there is no debate and the present ignorance refuses debate. The ignorant, simplistic error flatly states a conclusion, then demands all hearers bend to the (uninspected) conclusion.
The Church, meanwhile, leaves off its greater subject in order to appeal to the lesser argument. A Cross is offensive. Replace it with a pile of salt, a loaf of bread or a jug of wine. Jesus used those images but the images themselves lack, well, personhood, authority, novelty and divinity.
Is it possible Jesus is despised (yes, I use that word instead of ignored) because His word is Truth? Truth hurts; real Truth, objective Truth, Truth with a Big T on the front will simply not allow the petty subjects on which our existence grinds thought to dust. The Christian Truth does not need to be protected, only proclaimed, but it cannot be ignored.
We Have Heard the Joyful Sound!
Jesus Saves! Jesus Saves!
Spread the tidings all around!
Jesus saves! Jesus saves!
Jesus is our greatest subject. We should talk about Him more.
This is greatness!