Saving Christianity

It's sad when I seem to get more information about things happening stateside by reading bloggers in England than I do looking at my own local news.

This just in from the brilliant and witty blog, Of Course, I Could Be Wrong:
  
Scores of Maine churches will pass the collection plate a second time at Sunday services on Father's Day to kick off a fundraising campaign for the lead opposition group to November's ballot question asking voters to legalize same-sex marriages. Between 150 and 200 churches are expected to raise money for the Protect Marriage Maine political action committee, said Carroll Conley Jr., executive director of the Christian Civic League of Maine an evangelical organization and a member of the PAC. Conley is also trying to drum up support for the Maine campaign from religious leaders from around the country.

Such direct fundraising efforts on behalf of a political campaign should result in those churches losing their tax-exempt status.  But, then again, it seems we have entered into a new error era of politics in the United States where we say that corporations are people and political Super PACs can form overnight and run near-libelous ads with impunity.   And money, especially in the church collection plate, I suppose, could be considered "speech."

I responded to Mad Priest's post by, among other things, noting that it is the job of those Christians who do support marriage equality to become as loud, as present, as "out there" with their support as any fundamentalist "christian" church.  But MP raised another point:  should we consider starting a new name for our religious beliefs so we don't have to keep distancing ourselves from those who are perverting the name of Christ for hatred and greed?

Hmmm... maybe we could go back to calling ourselves the followers of "The Way."   After all, that's what we, who believe in the God that is Love, are all about: living into The Way.   That Way is the way of light, truth, love.  That Way is the path that Jesus so carefully and consciously taught to his disciples and anyone who would follow.  It is that Way that was supposed to be passed down from one generation to the next.  And that Way does NOT separate and divide, nor does it use the pulpit as a means to pulverize people.

I agree with MP that it is getting tiresome to always counter the angry hateful people who regularly give Christianity a bad name.   Their screaming and swinging Bibles like bats into everybody's head have made it hard for the rest of us to proclaim a belief in God as Christ when the image that conjures up for most of the "unchurched" is a face twisted into a fist to punch at gay people and pull money away from the needy.

And yet, I press on with calling myself a Christian, and not shying away from my belief in Jesus Christ as the Son of God.  Christ doesn't need me to be some kind of defense lawyer to make his case.  Christ needs me, the queer, and all kinds of people to live and be the better representation of the Love that is The Way.

Here I am, Lord.  Send me.