Songs of Mass Destruction

Good Morning,

I find myself looking for the right words. I don’t want to be blindly optimistic. I don’t want to be naïve. But, I think I see God letting a few people start to run the race. A young man that I prayed with about a month a go was baptized last week at a sister church down the road a few miles. And another came to me last night asking what it meant to repent.

I know a lot of people who would think the job is over now but I understand that it has only just begun. Standing at the starting line doesn’t mean you’ll cross the finished line. It doesn’t even mean your running the race. I’m not trying to imply that one could lose their salvation, not at all. Rather, what I am saying is that I can’t see people’s hearts. I only know what I’ve been told and seen with my eyes. The secret things belong to God and the condition of everyone’s heart is a secret to me. Some days even my own heart is a secret to me.

One of the difficulties of being a pastor is being human, being finite – guessing what people’s actions and words really mean. I used to take them at face value but I’ve come to understand that relationships are so much more complicated than that. The young man last night has been so abused by the church, that for him to even be speaking to me is a big deal, a big risk on his part. What if I’m just like every other minister he’s ever known?

This guy knows the word but it hasn’t been allowed to go below the surface. It hasn’t been allowed to transform him, much like the rest of the church in our times: Words without power. But he needs the power badly. He needs to be changed. He needs to be healed and he knows it, but he also knows the church has played a big part in making him like he is. He is stepping lightly to say the least.

I picked up Annie Lennox’s album from 2007 the other day at the library. It’s called Songs of Mass Destruction. I haven’t had much time to listen to it until yesterday. For the most part it is an album of honest lostness (at least on the surface). She writes: Maybe I’m still searchin’ but I don’t know what it means. All the fires of destruction are still burning in my dreams. There’s no water that can wash away this longing to come clean. I can’t find no joy within my soul. It’s just sadness taken hold. I wanna come in from the cold. It takes strength to live this way; the same old madness every day. I wanna kick these blues away. I want to learn to live again. It’s a dark road and a dark way that leads to my house. And the word says you’re never going to find me there oh, no.

I’m afraid there are many who go to church every time the doors are opened that refuse to be so honest. Was it Marx that said religion is the opiate of the masses? Whoever it was I’m beginning to believe they were right. In my own experience it is church that keeps many people from coming to Christ. Part of that is that the church (at least the ones I’ve known) isn’t filled with Christ it is, to use a Flannery O’Connor term, haunted by Christ. We are filled with words, powerless words of a time gone by. When the Father, Son and Holy Ghost took the last train for the coast we let form take their place. We substituted words for power, words for healing, words for salvation, words for anything but reality.

We did these things because we couldn’t manufacture power, we couldn’t save anybody when the Spirit left so we changed the meaning of salvation so it couldn’t be measured. We turned to intellectual concepts that made us feel better about ourselves. We were forgiven, so we said, and that was what it was all about. We couldn’t prove we were forgiven and no one had the guts enough to say ‘arise take up your bed and walk’, unless of course they paid somebody 20 bucks before the service started and gave them a pair of crutches.

Maybe you think I’m cynical. Maybe I am cynical but I really think I’m finally able to be realistic about the condition of the church. People aren’t getting saved because they can get the crap we call salvation just about anywhere these days. Liquor stops the pain of life a whole lot better than empty haunted words.

So, given all of that, I have a man stand before me last night asking about repentance and I want to just scream for joy, but I restrain myself. Here is a man who knows the powerlessness of words better than most. He is broken, wounded, mourning –desperate. He holds out empty hands and basically says: 'Save me'. And I find myself begging God for power beyond words to heal his broken heart, to save him from the church. I find myself pleading with God to let me quit singing songs of mass destruction and simply feed and water, weed and nurture the man before me and pray that God would keep his word and cause growth.

That is our only hope now, isn’t it?

Grace and Peace,

Brad