I once heard someone end a prayer that way--"in the strong name of Jesus Christ our Lord." God knows where I first heard it, but now, in my own public prayer improvisation, I tend to end all my prayers this way.
Strong name. I listened to an excellent political commentary on This American Life this week calling Democrats to account, not for their politics but for their refusal to let their message be a strong one. Their lunch gets eaten by bully Republicans, who then call them names and make rude comments about their mothers. The Democrats don't exactly turn the other cheek, a posture which requires a defiant sense of integrity--instead, the apologize. So, Democrats have been "shellacked" in the election, in Obama's phrase that has now entered the long media echo chamber, even though their policies are potentially far more popular with most Americans and have spared us what could have been a far worse economic crisis.
I am struck, not for the first time, that we Christians have a similar problem. We tend toward an apologizing Christianity, when we ought to be an apologetic Christianity. We fear offending others, when we ought to respond to our truly offensive culture. We have words and ideas and relationships that can heal the world, but we allow our culture to beat back our voice. Fundamentalist Christians clearly do not share our issue, as they proclaim their violent and half-baked gospel. Worried and scared, we find their confidence frightening and a further reason to shut our mouths--if that's what being confident sounds like, we fearfully mutter to ourselves, perhaps we should just give them our lunch money and language about God and start over somewhere else.
The need for us to be strong, precisely because Jesus is still strong, is starting to sink home with mainstream Christianity. Well, it's sinking in a little, anyway, and rumor and religious sites carry to us news of great strength--emergent churches, rule-of-life communities, whole mainline churches reborn as mission-minded communities supported, rather than hindered, by their establishment history. I do notice that for most of us, the strong messages of Jesus Christ always seem to happen somewhere else--in the rural areas for urbanites and vice versa, up the road, in Africa, and so on, and many places of hope seem dogged by personality issues.
What makes it all more complicated, of course, is that the culture war is also an internal war, and we Christians--even excluding the fundamentalist ones--are having our own quiet war about the best way to speak Jesus' name and ministry in this particular era. Some think the best way is to give up historic theology and remythologize ourselves; others believe we should reclaim different ideas from our history for this one; still others believe we should simply restate our claims with more confidence; and still even others believe we should abandon current institutions and go underground. And of course, even more alternatives present themselves, from withdrawing from society to covering our ears and pretending nothing has changed, which continues to be the posture of many. And, weirdly, the successes that happen elsewhere also undermine us when, because their context is so different from ours, those successes make it seem like speaking the strong name of Jesus is impossible in this context.
So how do we speak the strong name of Jesus in this time, in this place? Today, I'm not sure--but I do sense that if we don't work it out, something terribly important is being lost.
