Thoughts on Christianity and Culture
[With increasing civil unrest, yet again, this edited sermon from August 2017 seems fitting:]
“For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.” (Romans 11:32)
Years ago I heard a story that probably isn’t true, but should be.
Supposedly there was a planned KKK rally in 1974 on the Boston Common in response to the court mandated desegregation of the Boston public school system by means of forced busing. Continue reading “Radical Chic”
In 1994, five years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, I traveled to Hungary, Poland, and the newly formed Czech Republic. Then, life in these countries was at a crossroads, with all the attendant contradictions born of any emerging society.
In one of Prague’s quirkily futuristic subway stations, for example, I saw a massive and altogether bizarre wall mosaic, a cultural icon just dripping with Cold War sensibilities.
Built by the Soviets who, for reasons not entirely clear, knew how to build clean, efficient subways (in contradistinction to the rest of their architectural efforts), the mosaic celebrated the idealized workers’ paradise, complete with heroic farmers and industrial workers linked arm-in-arm. Continue reading “An Innocent Abroad”
[This is an edited sermon originally preached in September 2014.]
A few years ago, while visiting a church here on the Cape, I heard a sermon with which I mostly disagreed, yet I was impressed with the thoughtful and effective way it was presented.
The message had to do with the anniversary of 9/11 and what the Christian response to it should be. The preacher argued, in effect, for a pacifist position, even going so far as to say that the U.S. decision to go to war in its aftermath was based solely on the desire for vengeance and retribution.
Now I would be the last person to deny that human motivations are rarely if ever pure, or that the sinful desire for revenge was entirely absent in the days following 9/11. I’m not even saying that the decision to go to war was the right one. In that I believe reasonable and faithful people can disagree. Nevertheless, there was one important word that I found missing in that sermon: justice. Continue reading “War and Peace”
While growing up, and on several counts, I found my parents’ way of doing things impossibly annoying. Perhaps especially, I, along with my three siblings, objected to the Sunday afternoon Bible sessions.
Every week, that is, we’d have our big meal at noon, right after church. It was always spaghetti with homemade meat sauce from the local deli. It’s the best sauce I’ve ever had. So we always looked forward to it.
It’s what happened afterward that generated our collective ire. While we were still at table, now staring at our empty plates and longing to be anywhere else, my father would begin the non-optional Bible reading. Each of us would be forced to read aloud various passages. Continue reading “Two Kinds of Community”
There are, as I’ve said, two major problems with contemporary American culture, both of which the church, if it were smart, would key in on. One is the absence of deeper meaning in our culture. The shallow explanations offered by our secular world regarding the serious issues of life surely fail to convince or assure.
But another big issue is community. We seem starved for a genuine version of it, rather than the pale abstractions that define our nondescript, theoretical, modernist sense of community today.
With the advent of the large administrative state, citizens have been freed from the responsibilities that ought to go with the freedoms our culture provides. Viktor Frankl, the famed holocaust survivor, neurologist, psychiatrist, and author even suggested that we erect a “Statue of Responsibility” on the West Coast as a corollary (and antidote) to the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. Continue reading “Sharks and Community”