All week, I've been thinking about something I wrote in my last reflection for Church History. Here was the question:
"For the third part, a little background: Archbishop Desmond Tutu (Anglican, South Africa) has said that he father would tell him, "Don't raise your voice; improve your argument." A number of you have commented about how dispiriting it can be to read about the endless debates, the power plays and politics, the intolerance and bigotry and violence that populates so much of the landscape of history -- and church history is not, sadly, an exception. Hopefully, though, you have also gotten plenty of glimpses of the faithful, the sacrificial, the courageous, and the heroic -- often on the part of ordinary believers and rank-and-file faithful with little or no power or status, in their vast numbers. With that in mind, come back to Tutu's remark, and look ahead a little bit. Where might be a place where the Christian enterprise would serve its mission, not by "raising the voice" but by "improving the argument" and how?"Here's the part of my response that my brain keeps coming back to:
I think that Christianity can “improve the argument” by moving away from our more common message of sin and unworthiness, and moving to a message of the inherent goodness of all creation, the creation that God proclaims “good and very good” (Genesis 1: 31, NIV). So please join me in worship at the First Pelagius Lutheran Church where we will have a Mimosa Mass every Sunday at 11:00 a.m. and a Creative Arts Worship experience every Wednesday at both 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. (this last sentence is just a dream at this point, but if you should find such a church, I’d love to know about it—and so would lots of other people, I’d be willing to bet).
I've spent much of summer wondering how Christianity would be different if we focused on the Christmas aspect, the wonder of incarnation, God with us, instead of the crucifixion aspect, the God sacrificed for our sake. It probably wouldn't be worse.
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