THE FOUR SIRITUAL FLAWS: WHY CHRISTIANITY DIED IN AMERICA

Spiritual Flaw #1: We’ve Never Known the Real Jesus

The American Jesus looks something like this:

Jesus as a 1^st century Middle Eastern peasant probably looked something like this:

American Christianity forgets that Jesus is a Jew through and through. He cannot be understood apart from that Jewishness. To forget this and to try and read Jesus as an American is to misunderstand the New Testament almost completely.

Americans also forget that Jesus is cross-eyed. He sees everything from the perspective of the cross which turns everything in our prudential calculating way of living for ourselves, by ourselves, and by our own strength on its head. His upside-down, out-of-the-box, round peg in a square hole, a question-wrapped-in-a-riddle-surrounded-by-an-enigma life calls all that into question.

Any hope we have as Americans in understanding Jesus is to see as black. Unless we see him as one enslaved throughout his life, one on whom the authorities unleashed the dogs and water hoses and murdered on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, was killed for walking unarmed down the street by the police and kneeled with NFL players during the -playing of the National Anthem we’ve got no chance of getting Jesus right. And if you don’t have any idea why that’s the case, I recommend you read Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a white, well off, aristocratic, Westerner who learned why on the streets of Harlem during his time here in the early 1930’s and learned to understand the Savior as “black Jesus.”

Spiritual Flaw #2: We’ve Never Heard the Genuine Gospel

The gospel we have heard in America runs something like this: we are sinners, separated from God. But God has a plan to rescue us that involves Jesus dying on the cross for us for the forgiveness of our sins. We accept this in faith and experience peace with God and life with God forever in heaven.

Problem is this is not the gospel! It’s about the benefits of the gospel. The gospel is the glad announcement that in Jesus Christ God has won the victory over the powers of sin, evil, and death.

His death and resurrection inaugurated new creation, reconciles the world to God, and enables his people to live as the prototype of this new creation that is the world’s destiny.

The gospel we have heard here focuses on individuals and their life in another world - The biblical gospel focuses on the community of faith and its life in this world.

Spiritual Flaw #3: We’ve Never Really Read the Bible

The Bible is not a book of history, a moral or doctrinal guidebook, or a daily devotional reader. It has elements of all these in it but to read it just for them is to miss the purpose and misread the content of the Bible.

The Bible story told much in the fashion of a piece of stained glass art. Its story telling is shaped by literary style, worship, and the images and ideas of its cultural setting.

Therefore, the Bible is written for us but not to us. To hear its message we must listen to it as it comes to us not as we would like it to be.

The Bible tells the story of God’s pursuit of his eternal purpose to be with his people in fellowship and love, Jesus Christ’s central role in that, and our finding our identity and vocation in that story. It’s a matter of our finding our lives in God’s story rather than trying to find God within the confines of our story.

Spiritual Flaw #4: We’ve Never Truly Experienced the Church

There’s little doubt the church as we have known it (the Euro-tribal church) is dying out. It’s impact on public life is mostly negligible and largely negative now.

The chief aliment of the church has been believing there is something Christianly important about America. So important that the church here signed on to be the chaplain of the good ship America.

We’ve forgotten that since the resurrection and Pentecost God has no nation he calls his own. He’s the Lord of all nations. But God’s people, the New Testament analogy to Israel, is the church.

Transnational, multiethnic, beholden to no geopolitical entity or ideology, the church lives in every country implementing and extending the victory of Jesus as God’s subversive, counter-revolutionary movement.

Cross-eyed Jesus requires a cross-eyed church not shills for America. Especially not Donald Trump’s America!

The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus’ family values. To live out these family values will make us subversive of the American Creed – to live for myself, by myself, and by my own power. We will live, on the contrary, for Christ and the church, with the community of faith, and by the gifts and graces of others.

To live and order our lives according to the gospel is to be a counter-revolutionary movement. Counter the revolution away from God in sin and attitudes, actions, patterns, and systems sin has inscribed in a fallen world.

To live as if being Christian and American basically overlap and a good American and a good Christian are the same thing is a blasphemous heresy!

We’ve never known the real Jesus, or heard the genuine Gospel, or read the Bible rightly, or truly experienced the church as God intended – these four spiritual flaws are why the church in America has died.