THE MISUSE OF WORDS (PART II)

In one of my last posts, I suggested that the most foulsome way we may spend words is telling the truth very badly. I stick to this.

My whole life, I've been surrounded by a "church community" – one where everyone is either nominally Christian, goes to Church regularly, or is assumed to be Christian by the community at large. At the same time, I am often friends, students, or employees with people who have been bored to death by the dos and don'ts of the church and entirely uninspired by its real story. The most frustrating part is the most recent trend: friends who are too cool or peace-loving to adhere to anything with a title and a church too cowardly to offer more than a watered down gospel – an "all you need is love" ballad with "Jesus" slipped into the bridge.

You know what I think? I think we don't believe God is compelling enough for people on his own. Like we somehow have to explain away those Old Testament-type rules and actions, like we have to apologize for his glory because we don't get it. We are blinded by the words we use to box in and conceptualize a God we can never fathom. So when we try evangelism, we try the buddy-buddy approach: make a connection, show 'em that you are basically want the same things (peace and love), mention grace, don't speak of the cardinal scare words–Sin, Jesus, Death–until you are BFFs–and back off if they push back too hard. We end up failing people worse than ever trying to explain away the pain of the world or of their lives. Cowards that we are, we talk about Christianity as just another positive world movement, something that deservers a few Facebook pages. Why this one? If it sounds like all the others, why put my trust or allegiance there? Who needs another murky place to put their faith these days?

This doesn't sound like faith at all. God has proved himself faithful again and again to mysteriously fill voids in ways we could never expect. He is a pillar of fire, a light for the journey, a prince of peace, the lion of Judah, a mother, a father, a sustainer, a thirst-quencher, an affirmer, a whisper, a rumbling mountain, a strong right arm. Why can't we just trust God to be all that anyone ever needs him to be if we only speak his name?

The world is murky enough as it is. People don't need us to cloud the waters with our mud-caked words.

God has given us all the Word we will ever need to tell people about himself/herself. We have also been given a facility of language and imagination that we are often too afraid to employ. I wonder if we are so like the servant with one talent, hoarding and keeping safe until the Master returns, only to discover that he wanted us to take big steps and risk so much more than we dared.

We spill the same quips and overused phrases from pulpits and pamphlets and in the fellowship hall and we say so little. We talk so much and our words remain few and small. Where is Life in that?

Maybe all we need is an injection of imagination, a release of well spent words, into everyone we've ever turned away by quashing the life of the gospel while trying to tell it right. Maybe, what we really need to do, is tell the Word with all the life and passion we have and trust God to figure out the reception and receptors.