Recommended: Slacktivist
Sep. 22nd, 2009 11:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coraaIf you don't read Slacktivist, you probably should. In addition to a wonderful, thoughtful, and occasionally hilarious page-by-page takedown of the Left Behind series -- which is worth reading from the beginning in the archives, and what drew me to Slacktivist in the first place -- Fred Clark occasionally writes luminous pieces like this one:
Our Trespasses.
It's about immigration, and health care, and the Lord's Prayer, and grace, and fear, and forgiveness, and obligation. Quote:
(Fred Clark is one of those people who gives me hope: he was raised Evangelical, is still Christian, and speaks of the issues of mainstream Christianity with intelligence, compassion, and justice. He tackles the hypocrisies and excesses of modern mainstream Christianity without losing his understanding and sympathy for the individual people involved -- and yet without softening what he has to say -- and he's smart and articulate while he does so.)
Our Trespasses.
It's about immigration, and health care, and the Lord's Prayer, and grace, and fear, and forgiveness, and obligation. Quote:
There's this prayer we Christians say in church, at every service, whenever we get together. We recite it in unison, usually, and we've all got it memorized. We call it "The Lord's Prayer," because Jesus himself taught it to us and told us to pray it. Sometimes we call it the "Our Father," since that's how it starts.
Most of this prayer is comforting and reassuring, like the 23rd Psalm. "Give us this day our daily bread," we pray. "And deliver us from evil." Daily bread and deliverance, that's nice.
But then there's this other phrase which, when we listen to ourselves saying it, is the scariest part of any given Sunday. "Forgive us our trespasses," we pray, "as we forgive those who trespass against us."
That's disturbingly conditional. It's almost contractual. The conditions laid out there are crystal clear and explicit, but we tend to recoil from them. We pray this one prayer more than any other, but every other prayer omits this quid pro quo. "Forgive us according to thy infinite mercy," we pray, or "according to your boundless grace," or "for Jesus' sake," or "in Jesus' name." Straight-up, unconditional, one-way forgiveness is what we ask for in every other prayer. Apart from our recitation of that one prayer, you'll rarely ever hear us ask that this be conditional -- "Forgive us as we forgive others."
(Fred Clark is one of those people who gives me hope: he was raised Evangelical, is still Christian, and speaks of the issues of mainstream Christianity with intelligence, compassion, and justice. He tackles the hypocrisies and excesses of modern mainstream Christianity without losing his understanding and sympathy for the individual people involved -- and yet without softening what he has to say -- and he's smart and articulate while he does so.)
