In our church house Sunday morning
Set a man unwelcome there.
Judged by men and not by Jesus,
He lifted up his voice in prayer.
That’s how the first verse of this decades-old song goes, and that’s how the American church goes, even today. There’s a huge, seemingly-unbridgeable gulf between clubby, comfortable church culture and Jesus’s warm, ready embrace of everyone that middle-class, socially-conservative Christians of all ethnicities shun. (Wouldn’t this be easy if it were just a white folks problem?)
The theology of the lyrics falls apart as the cold, hard church folk are saved via deus ex machina in the third verse. Jesus said the world would know that Christians like me were really who we said we were if we got busy and did the loving ourselves, even as He acknowledged that we’d probably screw it up.
Looks like we need some of that deus ex machina after all. Or maybe we just need to ask (and mean it), like The Stanley Brothers and the social leper in the song, “Let Me Walk, Lord, By Your Side”.
Set a man unwelcome there.
Judged by men and not by Jesus,
He lifted up his voice in prayer.
That’s how the first verse of this decades-old song goes, and that’s how the American church goes, even today. There’s a huge, seemingly-unbridgeable gulf between clubby, comfortable church culture and Jesus’s warm, ready embrace of everyone that middle-class, socially-conservative Christians of all ethnicities shun. (Wouldn’t this be easy if it were just a white folks problem?)
The theology of the lyrics falls apart as the cold, hard church folk are saved via deus ex machina in the third verse. Jesus said the world would know that Christians like me were really who we said we were if we got busy and did the loving ourselves, even as He acknowledged that we’d probably screw it up.
Looks like we need some of that deus ex machina after all. Or maybe we just need to ask (and mean it), like The Stanley Brothers and the social leper in the song, “Let Me Walk, Lord, By Your Side”.
No comments:
Post a Comment