Meyers - Saving jesus from the church: how to stop worshiping christ and start following jesus

A PREACHERS NIGHTMARE: AM I A CHRISTIAN?

A m I a Christian? What a strange question for an ordained minister of the gospel to ask. Born a ministers son and raised in a parsonage, I spent my childhood in the conservative Church of Christ, where no musical instruments are allowed in worship. As a college student, I discovered the Congregational Church and the liberal United Church of Christ, which I was warned to avoid, and then never looked back. The UCC has been my home ever since, a brave and messy denomination that has been speaking truth to power for a long time and insisting that we make more room at the table for those who are forgotten.

Try as I might to be a normal kid (as a teenager I once hid copies of Playboy in plain sight, lest I be mistaken for a saint), I was a member of a generation that got its marching orders from Bob Dylan and Martin Luther King Jr. When I was at the tender age of sixteen, two of my heroes were gunned down just weeks apart, one on a hotel balcony in Memphis, the other in a hotel ballroom in California. The faint smell of tear gas hung over many college campuses in those days, and the New York Times reported that God was dead. The last thing I wanted to grow up to be was a preacher.

As fate would have it, or destiny (if I could figure out the difference between the two), the seeds of the ministry had already been planted in me. A double PK (preachers kid and professors kid), I had been invited at age fourteen to offer my first public prayer at the Communion table of the Riverside Church of Christ in Wichita, Kansas. Chances are it was awful. But the dear souls there told me it was wonderful. One woman even went so far as to say, Robin, that prayer surely found its way straight into Gods ear, and you will be a preacher like your father someday.

Now, forty years later, twenty-five of them spent as a UCC minister in my native Oklahoma, I came home one cold January afternoon after serving Communion to my beloved flock and took a nap, which is my Sunday ritual. Parish ministry is tiring in ways most people do not understand, and a Sunday afternoon nap is as sacred to a middle-aged clergyman as the Psalms. Rising before dawn and still fooling with the sermon (or finishing it), many of us preachers are obsessive-compulsive types who believe that no matter how many times we have done this before, this time we will get it right. Preaching is, after all, an audacious and dangerous act.

After the service, we stand in line, listening to Good sermon, Reverend a hundred times (all of which can be erased if just one person says, Good morning, Reverend), come home, wash off the aftershave and perfume residue from all those handshakes and hugs, sit down to eat, and then lie down to sleep. Its a ritual as old as the priesthood, but there is also something subversive about it. Sleeping at odd times of the day can open the heart to strange dreams, when the ego stands down and the id and superego collide without a mediator. This day was no different, except for the dream. I woke up wondering if I was a Christian.

I had folded myself into a fetal position and drawn the covers over my head. From the other room, I heard the talking heads of TV yelling at one another, arguing over what to do now that we were mired in this hopeless war in Iraq and creating terrorists faster than we were killing them. The morning paper brought the same news we hear every morninganother suicide bomber had done what is unthinkable to those of us who consider our lives worth living. As I drifted off to sleep, I tried to imagine it: a place where human heads roll down the street like apples scattered from a fruit stand, and wailing mothers search for the remains of their children, only to find a shoe and one hand. In my dream I saw a woman holding that hand, grape-colored and dusty like a glove with entrails. If we have become numb to this, then what have we become?

It is not a good idea to think of such things before falling asleep, of course, but this is the world we live in; this is the soundtrack of our lives. We shop frantically while flag-draped coffins bearing the remains of our dead soldiers (babies, as Kurt Vonnegut called them) get off-loaded in the dead of night like so many burned or broken biscuits from the ovens of war. We hear the droning script of patriotismmembers of Congress, all wearing those standard-issue American flag lapel pins, urge other peoples children to be brave and defend our freedom. War is now outsourced like everything else, and then we spin the results to hide the reality of a demonic chaos. If Dante came back, his new vision of hell would surely include the Baghdad morgue.

Meanwhile, the music in my dream was provided by right-wing talk-show hosts, crooning like backup singers in a concert of death. TV preachers did the drumming, slicing the world in half with the rhetoric of entitlement. The judgment is coming, they were saying, but instead of sheep and goats, one axis is Gods chosen, the other, Gods despised. We love Jesus, so we are entitled to kill for the cause; the others are crazy infidels whose resistance to the crusade is inexplicably evil. A preacher smiles and says, They just want those seventy virgins.

The moment I opened my eyes, with the dream still fresh and vivid, I wondered about the future of the church to which I have given my life. Is it toxic now beyond redemption? Should it be allowed to die, so that something else can take its place, or should we go in search of Jesus one more time? It was as if an animal had curled up on my chest while I slept, bringing with it an urgent message from somewhere east of decency: if this is Christianity and these are Christians, I must not be one.

In the dream I had a flashback to Saddam Husseins execution by American proxies. Rome never does its work without co-conspirators. I saw his neck snapped and torn open, his eyes bulging in death. Someone captured it on a cell phone and in the Bible Belt, where I live, e-mails started circulating that praised God for this righteous act of vengeance. It was as if we had melted the wicked witch of the West with help from an awesome God. Finally we had an out-of-the-closet Christian in the White House, but what came out of the closet instead was torture. Winking and water boarding, and yet who can be surprised? Mel Gibson had just made a frightfully successful movie in which the One who tortures is God.