Sunday School Answers are for Punks

When did it happen? When did Christianity become boring? When you look back to the early apostles their life was nothing near boring - traveling from church to church, house to house avoiding the Roman authorities who were looking to squash any threat to the government of Cesar. Most of them are killed boring ways like upside-down crucifixes and "death by sword." That doesn't sound boring to me.

Take John the Baptist. He lived a boring life of calling out the Jewish and Roman leaders to repent and turn from their sins, all the while living in the wilderness, eating locust and honey and wearing animal skins. Eventually he directly calls out Herod Antipas, a Roman leader, for marrying his brother's wife and is beheaded for his comments.

The list goes on: the early Celtic monks, St. Patrick, Francis of Assisi, Martin Luther, Dietrich Bonhoeffer they all rocked the boat. At no point was their life boring, nor did they ever believe God wanted their life to be boring. Excitement and uncertainty was a daily part of their lives.

Christian Anarchist. Most don't believe that those two words go together. How about Christian Pacifist Anarchist? Wasn't that Christ himself? Didn't He rock the very foundations of our world? If we took the gospel literally wouldn't we turn everything on it's head and create total and complete anarchy? Selling your possessions and giving to the poor? What are you kidding me - that isn't literal, right? Offering up your right cheek when your enemy smacks you on the left one? First being last, last being first. What the heck is He talking about? None of it makes sense to our well groomed, mainstream, boring Christian society. I don't believe it is supposed to be this way, I believe God wants us to be wild, to be trouble makers, far from boring.

French Christian Anarchist Jacques Ellul once said: "Christians should be troublemakers, creators of uncertainty, agents of a dimension incompatible with society."

If I spend what I usually do this Christmas, I'm not incompatible with society. If I give my extra change once a year to the lady ringing the bell back and forth when I walk out of the grocery store, I'm not incompatible with society. If I sit back and veg out to American Idol, or buy Coke because they tell me to, or vote for "insert name of any politician in the U.S." I'm not incompatible with society. We have surrounded ourselves with so much routine that incompatibility and uncertainty are the last two words out of our mouths.

We forget about God from Monday morning through Saturday night because we view Christ as a real nice guy. We missed the point. When we view Christ as a real nice guy, we view Christianity as boring. We try to have all the Sunday School answers for our non-Christian friends, when what most people are looking for is what Christianity really is - exciting, uncertain, wild, and appealing. Christ was radical, an extremist, an "agent of a dimension incompatible with society." Maybe we should start taking His words literally and the majority of non-Christians (and Christians) will really start to live as Christ desired - as "creators of uncertainty," we will all become Christian Anarchists.