IT’S NOT EASY BEING UNORTHODOX

Good news sells. Yet we all seem to have a fascination with bad news, perhaps because there is always good news in the bad news. The good news is that as bad as we may have it in our personal lives, someone else has it worse. I’m personally convinced people get addicted to soap operas because the characters portrayed therein, “beautiful people” that they are, all seem to be in messes of their own making that are worse than we could ever imagine for ourselves. It’s sort of vicarious suffering or something like that.

   There is a lot of really bad news out there, and it’s no soap opera: the war in Iraq, the lack of health care for millions, the poverty that surrounds us even if it is unseen and unacknowledged, a nation seemingly and perhaps deliberately divided over political expediencies of all kinds, civil wars: the list is endless. We would like to avoid this bad news; but since we cannot, we look for good news of any kind.

   We do not have to look very far or for very long to find it, either. Purveyors of purportedly good news can be found simply by surfing the cable channels or perusing the shelves of Barnes and Noble. The television evangelists sell easy salvation and cheap grace for those who think the world is on its way to hell in a handcart. The Left Behind writers sell certain salvation for those who believe they are on God’s side and paint horrifying pictures of what will happen to those who are not.

   But they lie. They may think they are telling us like it is, but they are not telling us the truth. For the truth is that, yes, the world is indeed in a mess but there is not an easy solution to avoid or escape it. We can only work our way through it trying to help clean up some of the mess in our very small part of the world. The operative word here is “work”. It takes hard work and an “unorthodox” faith, in the words of John Updike, to be a Christian in today’s world. I quote from More Matter: Essays and Criticism:

   “The Christian faith has given me comfort in my life and, I would like to think, courage in my work. For it tells us that truth is holy, and truth-telling a noble and useful profession; that the reality around us is created and worth celebrating; that men and women are radically imperfect and radically valuable…. Although, as St. Paul as well as Luther and Kierkegaard knew, some intellectual inconvenience and strain attends the maintenance of our faith, at the same time we are freed from certain secular illusions and monochromatic tyrannies of hopeful thought. The bad news can be told full out, for it is not the only news…. To be a Christian in this day and age, as in the time of imperial Rome , is to be unorthodox, and readers should look elsewhere for the consolations of conventional sentiment and the popular, necessary religion of optimism.”

   Jesus came into this world, was born into this world of ours, to change it. He showed us how by the way he lived his life. He died in the effort but he died trying. He expects those of us who follow him to do no less: die trying, living our lives to the moment of our deaths trying to make this world what it was created by God to be but, perhaps, has never been – a world of mercy, justice, love and peace for all. That’s the good news because that’s the Good News of the Gospel, unorthodox as it is to so many.                                                    WJP