My dear Twitter friend and brother-from-another-mother Jason Huffman is back with another great guest post. I suggest you strap in and hang on. Just treading this post is dangerous!
I’ve been enjoying my friend Carl’s series of posts
hashtagged #DangerDays as he and others have shared stories about trusting God
in the face of adversity. Lately it seems that we as a people, American
Christians that is, are all living in #DangerDays.
In America, we are proud of our God and our religious
freedom. When I was growing up, the three most spiritual days of the year were
Christmas, Easter, and July 4th. Ok, so I am exaggerating a little, but not
much. Sitting under the banner of the old red, white, and blue, I could be
thankful that I lived in a country where I had religious freedom to worship how
and where I wanted. After all, I was endowed by my Creator with certain
inalienable rights…right? The Spirit of God had been personally ushered into my
zip code when the Republic of Texas was annexed into the United States in 1845,
thus giving me and other Texans those Creator-endowed inalienable rights. It’s
a pretty swanky set-up if you ask me. It is good to live in a Christian country
where our buildings, our pledge, and even our money acknowledges a higher
power, even if they leave the specifics of who that higher power is up to us.
We are not the first “Christian society”. The first attempt
at a Christian society came with the conversion of Roman Emperor Constantine in
the fourth century, who subsequently decided he would make Christianity the
official religion of Rome. It was from this political maneuver that we got the
Nicaene Creed and the Roman Catholic Church became the institution it was
(pretty much the only church around) for the next 1100 years or so…not too
shabby for one guy. At that time Christianity was an understood cultural norm
and remained so up through the Reformation and even later into the colonization
of America. After that, our colonies broke from British rule and established
their own government on Christian principles continuing this tradition of a
Christian society-what many of us call “Christendom”. (For a great read on
living in a post-Christendom culture, I recommend “Resident Aliens” by Stanley
Hauerwas and Will Willimon.) America remained a fairly Christian culture until
somewhere in the mid twentieth century when attending church on Sundays was no
longer an expected practice. Stores and restaurants began to open on Sunday.
Little league sports and other programs began having practices, games, and
meetings on Sundays. And church was no longer the center of our lives, but only
a part.
But the greatest “threat” to our faith wasn’t Sunday ball
games, or the lifting of Blue Laws. In the late twentieth century there was
some discussion of making our country more inclusive. Rumors spread that
certain courts wanted to take “under God” out of the Pledge of Allegiance. The
Ten Commandments being posted on a courthouse was considered to be potentially
offensive to those who may not believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
High schools were reprimanded for having prayers before football games and
“moments of silence” became the norm. Some schools decided they could pray as
long as they did not end with “in Jesus name” while others gave the powers that
be a piece of their mind by advertising and publicizing the public prayer as an
act of defiance to the godless government. And thus, American Christians found
themselves living in #DangerDays. Just like the children of Israel who had been
captured and carried off to Babylon, we were prisoners in our own land. We hung
our harps on the poplars as our captors chided us saying, “Sing us a song of
Zion”. But how could we sing the Lord’s songs in this strange, foreign, godless
land where our religious freedom had gone from freedom of religion to freedom
“from” religion? It really was depressing. Not only was somebody was going to take “God” out of the pledge of allegiance
but to top it all off, there was an increase in violence, drugs, abuse,
divorce, cycles of poverty, suicide, and all sorts of other crime. How could
this be?
Well, I want to bring you some encouragement. On the
surface, it looks like as soon as we got more open-minded about the wording of
some of our sacred documents and about the role of prayer in our schools, all
this other bad stuff began happening. But I want to submit to you an
alternative view. Maybe “taking God out of the USA” was a symptom of the problem,
not the cause. But the timeline is pretty close, right? As soon as the
government lost its affinity for the divine, all this other junk started
happening. But what about this? What if the spirit of God was here before our
government made it a thing? Before the first explorers and the first colonists
came attempting to establish a Christian society, what if God was here? And
what if the spirit of God is still here regardless of what happens in our
government? I mean seriously. To know what sin is and the capacity our human
hearts have for evil and to know the strong bonds of abuse, poverty, addiction,
and violence in our culture, are we seriously naïve enough to believe that if
some suits in Washington fall on their knees and seek God’s face, sign some papers
making it cool to pray in public, that our godless culture is automatically
going to become a Christian nation again? I hate to be doom and gloom, but I
don’t think so.
We need to quit letting Washington DC have access to the
shut-off valve to the movement on God in the USA. Some legislators make some
motions. So what? The ACLU comes down on a school for praying or a courthouse
for having a nativity scene? Big deal. THE GOVERNMENT AND OTHER MAN MADE
ORGANIZATIONS ARE NOT BIGGER THAN GOD! Do you want to know what is more
powerful that the US government? Do you want to know what’s stronger than any
suit-clad government lobby group? Do you want to know what is stronger than the
US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence? Get ready for it…..The church!
How do you like them apples? The church has been around since about 30AD- about
1984 years-yet we let the decisions of a 238 year old government dictate what
we think and believe about God!
Folks, we are living in #DangerDays. The enemy is alive and
well in America. There are cycles of sin and oppression that exist and we truly
are living in a foreign land. But let’s give credit where credit is due. Sin,
oppression and violence didn’t get in through Washington DC. It wasn’t some
elected officials that left the door open, exposing our country to godlessness.
Likewise, God didn’t come in through Washington, either. God didn’t wait until
1776 to show up in the good ol’ USA. He was here before, and will continue to
be here until his return. As believers, we need to quit letting the government
determine what we think, believe, and understand about God and keep doing what
Jesus called us to do by being his witnesses in Judea, Samaria, and to the ends
of the earth (that’s us). Let government be government. What is God doing in
your community that isn’t posted on a building or spoken over a PA at a
sporting event? Where is God at work? What are you and others doing to break
cycles of violence and oppression besides getting upset that there is no prayer
over the intercom each morning at your son’s middle school? As we live in
#DangerDays, it’s up to us to be the church, not the government.
Editor's Note: I don't usually comment on a guest post before I publish it, but...AMEN & AMEN!!!
