All You Have To Lose Is The Emptiness In Your Life

I recently read one of those quotes that grabs your mind and makes you sit down for awhile to ponder it.

“It’s startling to discover how many people there are who heartily dislike and despise Christianity without having the faintest notion what it is. If you tell them, they cannot believe … that anything so interesting, so exciting and so dramatic can be the orthodox creed of the church.” Classicist Dorothy Sayers wrote that in the 1940s.

In the 1940s there was still a Judeo-Christian moral consensus among the people, but America’s pace setters had already swallowed huge doses of humanism, enough to make them think that faith in God had gotten us nowhere and it was time for a new, progressive way of thinking.

We wanted to find out what America would look like without God. Now we know.

Fifty years later, we find ourselves in a post-Christian era that has yet to prepare us for what has been happening in the nation’s capital. The president’s scandal ushered in a new day in America, all right. But as we got up and squinted in the mirror, it looked and felt more like the morning after.

How do you explain such news reports to children? What does a child think when he hears, “It doesn’t matter if the president has affairs, as long as he does his job.”

Really? What if Daddy did that to Mommy? Would it matter to them? Damn right it would!

If the polls are to be believed and half of this country doesn’t care if the president cheats on his wife and subjects his daughter to humiliating infamies, then we are all the more to be pitied. For we are the people who turned our heads away and stuck them up our wallets.

One woman truthfully proclaimed she could care less if Clinton slept with a hundred women because she had a job and economic times are good.

“It’s all about me.” she said.

If that woman isn’t in your mirror this morning, she’s outside your window. Yet something won’t let me believe the media’s caricature of us. Most men I know love their wives and children. Every wife I know would be crushed if she found out her husband even thought lustfully about only one other woman.

Every child I know needs the security of a mother and father who are faithful to each other and would never tear their home apart.

Children don’t use words like “tolerance” and terms like “open mindedness” when it comes to adultery. Sin still scares children and it used to scare us.

Now, before you set off your anti-right-wing, conservative-Christian heat-seeking missiles, consider this:

Drug-addicted prostitutes are plagued by a mass murderer; the government is handing out clean needles to help poor addicts, while drug use fuels terrifying crime; teen pregnancies increase despite all the condoms we hand out; and we can’t afford to let our aging parents move in with us while the Social Security system goes bankrupt.

Add to this the fact that we spend more than half of our state money on education so kids can read in the 30th percentile.

And we think our biggest problem is Christian conservatives?

So, lower those missiles, my fellow Americans. Can we get past the hypocritical neighbor, the old, snooty Sunday School teacher or the minister who told you to marry the girl you later divorced?

Sayers is right. It’s time to assess whether our attitude about God and the Bible is more a result of stiff-necked dedication to sin, what we heard on the late night talk shows or time spent reading the Bible. And I don’t mean what someone else said about the Bible.

Adultery does matter. Truth isn’t less true just because you or the president of the United States refuse to acknowledge it.

I sin, we sin, our nation sins and all our rationalizing humor and hard-heartedness won’t deflect the effects of sin on us as individuals and as a people. For the sake of our children, I pray we fall to our knees in response to the president’s scandal, not to judge him, but to confess our own sinful condition, repent and admit we need a saviour.

We baby boomers would like to think the world ends with us. We’re so hot that when we’re gone, the world won’t be able to carry on. But, it will and history will judge us as a generation and a just God will judge us as individuals. I pray for clergy who’ll have the courage in this hour to call us to repentance.

We delude ourselves if we think the problem is “them,” those liberals, conservatives, Democrats, Republicans, etc. The problem is “us.”

We’re beyond needing a revival. We’re in need of a reformation, a Copernican revolution of the soul that finds us face-to-face with the God of the Messiah.

Even when the media sophisticates go home at night, they find it can be lonely in an empty soul. But they’ll never tell you what America once knew. There’s room and hope at the cross for us all.

xxxx