A Cross, Not a Scepter

When I was a kid, all the stores in Buford closed at 3:00 on Wednesdays. All of them. That was because the owners and employees and even the customers needed to get home for an early dinner so that they could go to prayer meeting that night. In those days, everybody went to Wednesday night church.

I played little league ball, but we never practiced on Wednesdays and never played on Sunday. In fact, on Sunday, every store and nearly every restaurant was closed. You didn’t mow your lawn or fish or play golf – or if you did you had to sneak to do it. Sunday was the Lord’s Day and that’s all it was.

We prayed at the beginning of every school day and our prayers were always offered in Jesus’ name to no one’s objection. We prayed at every football and basketball game, every meeting of the PTA, and every town council. They even prayed before meetings of the Lion’s Club.

In December, nobody posted signs saying that Jesus is the reason for the season because nobody, other than those of us in the Church of Christ, thought otherwise. And even our objection, though it seemed odd to everybody else, was based on a widely accepted notion that the Bible was the authority in all things.

Speaking of the Bible, back in those days biblical literacy was ubiquitous. Most folks could rattle off seven of the Ten Commandments and at least 8 of the twelve apostles. We knew that there were 66 books in the Bible, 39 in the Old, 27 in the New. Back then, if you dropped a biblical reference into a conversation, everyone understood it. You could say something like, “There’s a new boss down at the plant who knoweth not Joseph.” Anybody who heard you would know that you meant the new boss was changing things and that the old arrangements, based as they were on tradition or long-standing relationships, were no longer operative.

We knew that East of Eden was something other than the title of a Steinbeck novel; that “go the extra mile,” wasn’t from a book on customer service; and that the “patience of Job,” referred to bearing up faithfully under intense suffering.

When I was a kid, there was a wind at your back when it came to living your faith. A cultural wind. The movies you paid to see, the television shows you watched at home, the songs you heard on the radio, were generally supportive of Christian values. And even if they weren’t supportive, they weren’t subversive.

I’m not about to suggest that before the ‘60’s, everything about America was Christian. It wasn’t. Racial injustice was not only accepted but embraced and, often, propped up by the church. Discrimination against women was institutional. And in our own religious tribe, a sectarian spirit dominated.

But the prevailing winds of culture blew in the direction of Christian values. You could not become a Christian just by being born into the culture, but there was little in the culture that threw up a barrier to prevent it, and much that encouraged it.

It’s not that way now. The wind is no longer at your back. It is in your face. Now, you have to lean into the culture just to hold your ground, because everything about it seems to undermine your faith and subvert the values that express it.

I think we need to acknowledge that. We need to recognize that something important and good has been lost. Values once widely shared are rejected. Beliefs that were once mainstream, now exist at the margins. You and those who share your values feel like a minority.

And once we have acknowledged that loss, we need to guard against two dangers; idolatry and despair.

Like many of my friends, I lament the erosion of values that I think made America a great nation. I was saddened (and angered) by a recent news story of a young woman who wore to her Home Depot job a baseball cap bearing the words, “America Has Never Been Great.” I’ll be the first to admit that America has never been perfect – far from it. But over the weekend, I attended a high school graduation in a part of the country that is as rural, Southern and socially conservative as it gets. The first speaker, the student body president, addressed his classmates like he was speaking from the Oval Office; “My fellow Americans.” Ten years ago, he moved from a war-torn Middle Eastern country with what was left of his family to this American backwater. He thinks the U.S.A. is awesome.

So do I. There’s a reason people from all over the world are trying to get here. But as much as I love this country, as grateful as I am for those who have served to protect and defend us, America does not, cannot hold my highest allegiance. That belongs to God. If I’m not careful, my nostalgia for how things used to be can become idolatry. I begin to value citizenship in a kingdom of this world more than my citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven. The line between patriotism and faithfulness gets blurred. My heart is more stirred by Katherine Lee Bates’ America The Beautiful than by Michael Gungor’s Beautiful Things.

The other danger is despair. My sense is that our culture is in for a long, hard slog. I do not mean to convey a lack of faith in what God can do. But honestly, things these days feel a lot more like Romans 1 (where God gave them over to the sinful desires of their hearts) than Acts 2 (where a miraculous outpouring of the Spirit changed thousands in one day). What I’m saying is that America as we know it (and as we knew it) may not survive the seismic changes we are witnessing. And that’s okay. Because the Kingdom of God will.

Earthly empires come and go. But Jesus said his Kingdom was not of this world. Historically, the Christian faith made the greatest impact when it was the most marginalized. More than that, God’s greatest victory came not through a scepter, but a cross. I’m not celebrating the slow slide of our culture. But I’m not despairing over it, either. The darker it gets, the brighter the Gospel will shine.