The Shadow-gloom and Weight of the Sacred

Here's an interesting difference in perspective: In a conversation that only marginally included a discussion of politics, a Christian woman in Vienna (I think she was associated with the Mennonite tradition) told me that she just didn't understand how a person could be both a Christian and a Republican.

Ha!

Anyone expecting resolution to my complaining and whining will be disappointed with this post. I'm sure I'll calm down from these intense feelings of frustration and anger after a little time passes, but as I've said, I think the critique is fair. Maybe it's my presentation of the critique that will calm down.

I get stressed at church because it has so little to do with reality. Using the language of theology: the world is fallen from its original intention of the Creator due to sin (though the word "sin" isn't used in the Adam and Eve account, which leads me to think we should think of this instance as something that is perhaps different than, for example, lying, but that's a tangent upon which I need to think more). The church should then be the place where the fallenness of the world is reversed. The church is the place where, as theologian Mark Love says, God's future reality breaks into the present. This is not simply a collection of pious people. It is the dissolution of social and class boundaries, the eradication of poverty, embrace and acceptance towards the widow, the orphan, the alien. These are the real problems of the real world, but they are (at best) on the periphery of the church's identity. These are the problems Jesus came to address (see The Sermon on the Mount, the Nazareth Pericope) and, in his stead, left the church to continue what he began: the reconciliation of a fallen creation with its creator.

Most of the stuff that does on at church, I don't have any idea what it has to do with salvation. As far as I can tell, church is the place you go to boast about your latest plasma television purchase. There's so much opportunity for good and positive things, but our time is used to reinforce the status quo, and it is the status quo that, as I said in a previous post, is simply an academic exercise. In my hypersensitive state of reverse culture stress (at least that's what I'm blaming it on), I've lost a lot of patience for this. I used to be able to participate in it. I could at the very least pretend. I can't quite reassert myself to that place any longer. I can no longer seem to reach that comfortably numb state.