Simply Embarrassed

"Christ arrives right on time to make this happen. He didn’t, and doesn’t, wait for us to get ready. He presented himself for this sacrificial death when we were far too weak and rebellious to do anything to get ourselves ready. And even if we hadn’t been so weak, we wouldn’t have known what to do anyway. We can understand someone dying for a person worth dying for, and we can understand how someone good and noble could inspire us to selfless sacrifice. But God put his love on the line for us by offering his Son in sacrificial death while we were of no use whatever to him."

―Romans 5: 6-8 (The Message)

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Dear Kate,

Somebody deserves hell and it is not me.

We all fight for justice of some sort, about something, for someone.  We can't quite agree on everything, sometimes wondering if anything at all, and more than often to the point to fight each other.

Yet one thing we can all agree on: Somebody deserves hell and it is not me.

I have friends still telling me the most repugnant aspect of Christianity is that it sends people to hell, and I would answer, "What the hell are you talking about?"

Like literally, and honestly, when was the last time you hear any Christian talking about hell?  I don't.  You don't.  If there has been a hellraising time in Christian history, we have long since repented of our insensitive, prosaic perversion of poetic language, and built an updated, user-friendly interface for everyone to access divine energy.  Some gave our makeover a name ("Moralistic Therapeutic Deism"), but we prefer to say we are sticking to the "simple gospel."

So what is this "simple gospel" in a world that is anything but?

For example, it gets not so simple, doesn't it, when Christians have to fight each other?  In the past year, actually way before that, the political unrest in Hong Kong, where I came from, has caused many once respected and trusted Christian leaders to fall from grace, and once they've been categorically certified as standing for "the other side" it didn't take long for their self-declared and self-styled justice-fighting Christian "opponents" to send them to eternal damnation.  The very worst I've read on social media against Christians has been spoken by their fellow believers.

Meanwhile Jesus is still hanging there high and dry on the cross, and by whom we wonder.

"Come the hell down already," we say to Him, "and do some good for us, set the world right as you said you would."  We are embarrassed by the grotesque display of powerlessness, inaction, indifference to facts and truths.  "We need to take matter into our own hands, with or without you!"  Doing social justice, taking a selfie, often we do simultaneously, shaming Jesus for shaming us.

The most repugnant aspect of Christianity has always been that forgiveness and reconciliation are available to all.  Good News to our ears?  Hardly, if we are hellbent on sending someone to hell.  What we don't like is when people use religion to say we are that someone, but as to the reality of hell itself, none of us actually questions the necessity of it.  "Clampdown on hate," we say, a casket-closing action but not on mine.

"It’s news I’m most proud to proclaim, this extraordinary Message of God’s powerful plan to rescue everyone who trusts him, starting with Jews and then right on to everyone else! God’s way of putting people right shows up in the acts of faith, confirming what Scripture has said all along: “The person in right standing before God by trusting him really lives.”"

How can one be proud of something that doesn't actually work, let alone trusting it?

Yours, Alex