The Craziness of Christianity

Lately, church has become a habit with me--a good habit, like exercise, or eating well, or spending time with people who you love--but a habit nonetheless.  It is easy for habits to become routine, even to become chores.  After all, church is a regular, mundane thing.  My parents did it, my grandparents did it, my great-grandparents did it, and so on and so on.  It is nothing extraordinary to belong to a church.  Then, I read something like this:

“Being a Christian should just scare the hell out of us. It’s like on Sunday we need to rush together for protection. “Oh, I’m not crazy.” That we believe that God was in Christ reconciling the world is craziness. It’s going to make your life really weird. And you just need to get together on Sunday to be pulled back into the reality of God’s kingdom.” Stanley Hauerwas

Suddenly, I remember the days before I walked through those red doors of my church.  I remember the longing, the desire to find a spiritual home, and the anxiety about what I would find there. Becoming a Christian really did scare the hell out of me.  As much as I wanted to, when I came face to face with the salvific mystery of Christ, I couldn’t quite believe it all.  That’s why I had to go to church, to see if it was for real.  There was something compelling and absolutely crazy about Christianity. I longed for it, but I couldn't quite buy it.

It all started with the books, especially Robert Farrar Capon.  Capon’s explanation of pure, catholic, unearned grace was inspiring and unbelievable.  When he described Christ as “the light of the world, not the lighting company”, my mind lit up.  The story of the catholic, eternal grace of God in Christ blew me away.  God, the creator of the universe, the ultimate ground of all being, had also been a part of man since the beginning of time.  This part of God came into reality as an incarnated, flesh and blood person.  That holy God-made-man lived with and loved humans, so much that he lay down his life to save us.  He lay down his life to be the saving sacrament of grace, which had been in the world since the beginning, but became real in order to teach us, to save us, to shock us into accepting grace. God, in Christ, gave up his incredible power in order to show us a way of love and surrender.  That is an absolutely CRAZY idea.

I lived with this crazy thought on my own for many months--as long as I could stand it.  I read and reread the gospels, and religious books, I downloaded hymns on my Ipod, I prayed the Lord’s Prayer.  Capon and the other writers made Christianity sound like a big party, and I so longed to join it.  But, it was crazy, wasn’t it?  How could it truly be real?  Wasn't church where people went to "be good people" and to make sure they go to heaven?  Wasn't it just an old-fashioned social club with some bread and wine thrown in there?  Did people there  REALLY live in the mystery of Christ?  Did people REALLY find “the love in which we live and move and have our being” at the feet of the cross?  My curiosity and loneliness got the best of me and I went to church one day.  To my surprise and relief, I was not alone in my weirdness, rather I found an entire community to embrace, support, and challenge me.

Every Sunday, I worship with other people who believe this same craziness.  They, too, have felt the reconciling and redemptive power of God in their lives.  They, too, know the love, greater than all our sin, love without end, love without condition.  They, too, worship a God whose biggest and most important act was lying down and dying, an act so powerful in its sacrifice that it broke death itself.  They believe in loving their enemies, in serving the least and lowliest, not the most powerful, in giving up their own lives to save them.  Who in their right mind would do those crazy things in this post-post-modern society?

We lose the power of our Christian faith when it becomes commonplace, when we stop marveling at the audacity of it, when we no longer regard the love and grace in our lives with shock and awe.  No matter how habitual worship becomes, we must remember the craziness, the weirdness of the glory of Christ.