Continued from (March 3: A Word to the Wise – Christening)

A college friend of mine had a particular repetitive fondness for the jocular quip, “You and I have a strange and wonderful relationship (dramatic pause): You’re kind of strange and I’m kind of wonderful.” Batta-bing-Batta boom. I have a similar relationship these days with the word Christian—if not a strange and wonderful one then certainly a conflicted relationship. Although I have felt this way for years—instigated first for me in the 1980’s when an obscenity emerged in America called “the prosperity gospel”—my discomfort has flowered recently like a bad rash triggered by something I ate called the United States Republican Presidential Debates in 2016. As a Christian in a pluralistic nation and culturally diverse world, I am saddened, offended, and concerned that the word Christian has become little more than a plaything in the hands of “adult” politicians acting like children kneading play dough into shapes of their own choosing and self-interest. Continually these same politicians claiming to be leaders and Christians exhibit behavior that would be an insult to young people if I were to call it juvenile let alone Christian. More disturbing still is how seemingly undisturbed so many who call themselves Christian seem to be about this.

I am torn about the word Christian because it has been so coopted by the dominant American culture largely through the indifference, weakness, and culpability of those who choose this term to identify their religious tradition. In the West, certainly in the United States, the word Christian has been so diluted, distorted, or degraded (take your pick) as to make one wonder what it has to do with Jesus of Nazareth who came both as a disturber of the peace (Pax Romana) and as the peasant prince of peace (Pax Christi) who absorbed the vulgarity of human ignominy and reconciled all things and all creatures to God through non-violent love. I sometimes wonder if the word is damaged goods and beyond– pardon the pun– redemption. I know the word itself is not the problem. The problem is that the word Christian, being an identification, suffers guilt by association whenever anyone claiming it as their own acts in a way that seems to violate and mock the vision, teaching, and life of Jesus. The ailment, to recast a line from Rabbi Abraham Heschel, is not the separation of church and state but rather the separation of church and God, or in this case, the separation of Christians from the message and way of Jesus.

I’m not sure when it began to happen, but I found myself typing Christ-one in my writings some time ago in place of the word Christian. I noticed using it in my talks as well, at least to Christian assemblies, in an effort to wake us up a bit when we so cavalierly speak or mumble the word Christian. It’s hard for me to say of myself, “I am a Christ-one,” and yet, that is exactly who I am. That is exactly what being a Christ-ian means. One can hardly say it without immediately feeling exposed as a fraud and indicted. Yet say it we must if only as an impetus to our words becoming flesh. I find even if I say “I am a Christ-one” silently to myself as I go about my day, it ups the ante a bit and I hear it as a reminder, a summons, a charge, a misnomer, an overreach, a blessing, a prayer of protection or courage or companionship. Christe eleison.

In the West the word Christian has lost its audacity. Not arrogance—audacity. Everything about it has been sanded smooth. There are no sharp edges. Bumping against it in the dark at night hardly wakes us up, evokes no exclamation. It has become little more than what grammarians call a weak adjective: “Oh, Claire! She’s such a lovely, Christian woman and her peach cobbler is to die for. ,” or “Yes, Sean’s a wonderful Christian man, a fine woodworker and a nine handicapper to boot.” That offense is nothing compared to when it is so casually placed as an adjective before the word values followed by little if any serious, honest study to see what exactly Jesus valued, what were and are the values of the reign of God.

In the decades after the death of Jesus, before the term was accepted as a self-chosen moniker by his friends and followers, Christian was a designation or description that came from others outside their circle and usually intended as a slur.

In the first centuries of Christianity what was required in order to become and call oneself a Christian was baptism by water, accompanied by the Trinitarian pronouncement by the presider: “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” With women on one side of a curtain, men on the other, those to be baptized stripped naked just as St. Francis stripped naked before his wealthy father and the townspeople of Assisi as a sign of his new identity, new life, new loyalty, new way of being in the world. Like Francis, those drowned and raised up in baptism shed the clothes of one identity and clothed themselves in Christ (Gal. 3:27). It was a bold but humbling pledge, “I am on Christ’s side. And I stand with whomever Jesus stands.”

We recall that agreeing to enter into this simple ritual action was a clandestine, counter-cultural, and dangerous move prior to the legalization of Christianity by Constantine in 313 CE. It was entered into at the risk of imprisonment, torture, and death. Westerners who identify themselves as Christians should remember the underground beginnings[1] of our tradition and the precarious nature of aligning oneself with Jesus, the man with and for others who lived and died for the love of Love. Sadly, and too often since the time of Constantine, the institutional church has acted the part of a jealous lover by drawing attention to itself instead of being a sign pointing to the core message and embodied truths of the Christ-life. Until recently, in some circles, the word Catholic, meaning universal, became so closely associated with “the church” rather than with the person and work of Christ, that some confused Catholics when asked, “Are you a Christian?” often responded, “No, I’m a Catholic,” as if they were antagonists rather than synonyms.

To be a Christian in those early days was to be part of an underground resistance movement. And what they were resisting was the gospel of the dominant culture, the gospel that was good news for the powerful few and bad news for the disempowered many. The values of the dominant culture were what the satan came peddling to Jesus when Jesus was making his forty-day retreat in the wilderness. They rarely change. They tend to be the same values espoused by the presiders and beneficiaries of all dominant cultures: power, prestige, and possessions. Their progeny are self-interest, entitlement, insecurity, the need for control, fear of difference or the stranger, and exclusion. So the gospel of self-interest, of what will serve me, mine, ours is an anti-gospel and unworthy of the name Christian.

The late American poet, prophet, activist, and priest Daniel Berrigan once told a predominantly Catholic audience in the United States that the question was “Are we Catholics who happen to be American or Americans who happen to be Catholic?” Knowing Dan Berrigan, had it been an ecumenical audience he would have said Christian. One is an American by virtue of good fortune, by “happening” to be born in the United States or, if not, by seeking citizenship. No one is a Christian by “happening” to be one. It’s not like happening to be born in Poughkeepsie or Liverpool or Sligo. One who identifies him or herself as a Christian, one who can only imagine the extravagance of grace and sense the full implications of being Christened, one who has tasted its delight and danger, never “just happens” to be one. I am a Catholic Christian who happens to be an American. My Christian identity and allegiance trump devotion to any political party and national loyalty.

Phil Berrigan, Dan’s brother in peace and brother by mother, once described himself as a Catholic trying to become a Christian. He didn’t mean he was trying to muster up the nerve to pronounce the formulaic “I accept Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior – Chuh-ching! I’m in! He meant he was striving to strip himself of everything that was not Christ, of everything that kept him from siding with Jesus and those with whom Jesus stood, sat, walked, ate, suffered, and died. He was inferring the difficulty and radical call of the gospel, of submitting oneself to the process of Christening, of aligning oneself to Jesus and the core values of the reign of God. In the graced effort to become a Christian, Phil Berrigan served the disenfranchised, urban poor, especially in the African-American community, exposing and resisting the intimate and nefarious connection between the members of the unholy trinity– war, racism, and poverty. A decorated American soldier in WWII, seeing up close the horror and depravity of war, he was moved to commit himself to a lifetime accompanying Jesus the peacemaker, serving nearly 11 years throughout his life in jails and prisons for protesting American militarism and nuclear weapons.

I am a Catholic, a Christ-one in training. The fact that I am becoming a Christian is not an excuse for not being one or a protective device lest someone call me a hypocrite. It is more a desire wrapped in a confession. It is a confession in both senses of the word: as an acknowledgement of my sinfulness, my discrepancy, my failure to be Christ-like and as a pledge of fealty and an act of praise. To say I am a Christ-one becoming a Christ-one is simultaneously to acknowledge the grace of God and that I am on a journey home to who I already am in God. It is also to recommit myself to the vision and intentional involvement in the paschal pattern of Jesus’ life which calls me to side with those anawim with whom Jesus was most deeply concerned.[2]

The “radical restructuring of the center of one’s being”— to use James Fenhagen’s phrase,[3] is a comprehensive, ontological, existential, spiritual, and graceful reality. Christening is what God has done, is doing, and will continue to do within us. But it is important not to lose sight of the fact that being Christened is necessarily an incarnational reality as well. While non-coercive and a respecter of persons, God desires our cooperation. Neither an out-of-body experience nor an out-of-this-world experience, being Christened calls for and requires our free participation and involvement in our own transformation and in the transformation of the world.[4]

So, on the Divine side, Christening refers to our inner transformation by God in Christ. But on the human side, it invites and requires collaboration and incarnation on our part. Christ-consciousness and the Christ-life are made visible in the vision, teachings, and life of Jesus. They now await being made visible and tangible in and through us.

In his classic Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis writes that if we let God have God’s way with us, we can share in the life of Christ and insists the whole purpose of becoming a Christian is “to become little Christs.” I claim the word Christian for myself as God in Christ has claimed me. I do so with a healthy dose of humility, a shot of audacity, and an awareness of what the Christ-life does and doesn’t look and sound like. In the end, of course, it is not about the word but rather the reality to which the word points: a way of being in the world, a way of revering others and treating them with kindness, a way of loving the earth that sustains us, a way of working for justice grounded in deep sympathy for the most vulnerable, a way of cultivating intimacy with God, and a way of leaning into Divine Mercy and the prodigality of Divine Love. The only thing that can save the word Christian from ongoing derision, understandable contempt, complete irrelevancy, and justifiable extinction is for persons to participate in the sacred drama and graced work of Christ-ening, and to have the gall of God and the heart’s desire to become little Christs. Doing so will protect Christian from being just a word and increase the chances of it being considered a just word that points to a just life.⊕

[1] The first Christians were reported to have gathered together in protective darkness of the catacombs.

[2] Anawim is the Hebrew word meaning “bowed down.” It referred to the most vulnerable among any group—the needy, lowly, oppressed who were dependent upon God’s mercy. Most likely Jesus used the Aramaic word inwetan which was a counterpart to the Hebrew anawim.

[3] James Fenhagen, Invitation to Holiness, p. 9.

[4] In Jewish spirituality, these complementary movements are referred to as tikkun ha nephesh (repair of the soul) and tikkun ha olam (repair of the world).