I’m currently teaching a Sunday School class using Donald Miller‘s “Blue Like Jazz” as the text. (There’s a quote from the book in an earlier post.) Chris had been trying to get me to read the book for some time, and he finally sent me a link to an excerpt of the book at the Christianity Today web site.
You really need to read the excerpt, but since some of you won’t, it — like much of “Blue Like Jazz” — concerns Miller’s experience with a group of Christians on the campus of Reed College in Portland, Ore., which has been described as one of the most irreligious in the nation. The campus has an annual Renaissance Fair, the scene of a lot of hedonistic, destructive behavior. One of Miller’s friends came up with the idea of opening a confession booth — but when revelers came inside, they were startled that it was the representative “Christian” inside who began confessing to them. He explains the idea this way:
We are going to confess that, as followers of Jesus, we have not been very loving; we have been bitter, and for that we are sorry. We will apologize for the Crusades, we will apologize for televangelists, we will apologize for neglecting the poor and the lonely, we will ask them to forgive us, and we will tell them that in our selfishness, we have misrepresented Jesus on this campus. We will tell people who come into the booth that Jesus loves them.
As a Christian, I am constantly embarrassed by stupid and even evil things that are done in the name of Christ. I grieve over the Inquisition and various other holy wars and atrocities that have been committed over the years by people who claimed to be Christians. (By the same token, a lot of revisionist modern-day critics conveniently ignore the hospitals and universities, symphonies and paintings produced in Jesus’ name over the centuries.)
Tonight on “The Daily Show,” Rob Corddry was doing the “This Week In God” segment when he made a joking reference to Buddhists being “such [wussies] that they don’t even believe in killing in the name of their religion” or something like that.
How do I, as a Christian, reconcile my faith with the evil things that have been done in its name? There have been evil things done in the name of science, evil things done in the name of freedom, evil things done in the name of love. That doesn’t mean that science, or freedom, or love are evil; it means they are powerful and can be distorted or perverted into things that bear no real relationship to the original ideals.
Even so, perhaps I need to worry more about the ways in which I personally embarrass the name of Christ. Donald Miller and his friends apologized not only for televangelists but for the ways in which they, themselves, had sometimes fallen short of Christ’s example.
The awareness of my own sinfulness is a key to letting God find me in the first place; the continued awareness of it may be a key to humility, and — as Donald and his friends discovered — humility can be a key to opening a dialogue with people about the faith.
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