The Way and the American Way

I am a naïve seminarian who lacks wisdom and experience. However, I have two eyes and a heart, two eyes that see and a heart that feels. I wanted to write this blog before I accrued too much American common sense and ingenuity.

While reflecting before actually writing this blog, I nearly wept thinking about these things. We in America have done the very thing the prophets warned about. We have built temples for ourselves declaring them to be in worship of God (Yahweh). Helping ourselves get away with murder, we have conveniently spiritualized Yahweh’s wishes for justice and peace. Instead of seeking to be a community of tangible justice, we have sought to be a well-ordered corporation with peaceful “souls.” The community of saints has devolved into a pseudo-saintly institution – this sentence is pregnant with sorrow. Jesus’ teachings have been spiritualized, and consequently righteousness is understood as something intangible, something “spiritual.” Since being made intangible, righteousness need not be enacted by the Christian community, for “righteousness is nothing more than what Jesus transfuses to us.” Jesus may have done such a thing, but is not the community to live righteously? And what does this mean? Is it righteous for the Christian community to spend millions of dollars on its temples and to give fifty cents to those in need? Is it righteous for our American dreams to trample the marginalized? This seems more akin to worship of mammon than of Yahweh.

Things must change in American churches, if American churches wish not to slip into irrelevance and hypocrisy, which it seems already to have done. This change will not happen overnight. It will take the extreme effort of many people over a period of time. But change must happen nonetheless. This change must be theological and practical.

American churches must do the truly “spiritual” thing and seek righteousness, living according to the Way. American churches might takes notes from some of the early Christians and some of our contemporary Christian brothers and sisters in other parts of the world. Perhaps, some might say that we have evolved since the early church. To that, I must say that, though the early churches were not free of problems, we seemed to have devolved and shame on us.

American churches must be what the church was called to be, and with a prophetic voice, the church must speak out against the injustices so common in our society, so common that we have grown accustom to them and render them as simply “part of the ways things are.” But we are not called to be a community that walks along the path of the way things are. We are called to be a cruciform community that revolts against the way things are.

Shall we continue to be a corporation that walks down the path of the American way or shall we be a resurrection community that walks up the path of our master, Jesus the righteous?