OK, so we all know what holiday we’re going to celebrate, and I hope we all, will, indeed, celebrate it, because it deserves celebration. We need, crucially need days of Thanksgiving, particularly as we, culturally, become more and more pagan. I don’t say secular – because secular implies value-neutral, which has always been a myth but it was a myth with an aura of credibility. But we’re not moving into hyper secularity, rather our culture is moving into out-and-out paganism.
And several pieces of news pointed out how we’re becoming an incoherent and pagan society and how this points us to our need for Thanksgiving that’s robust and meaningful. What I mean to say is that Thanksgivings that are all saccharine sweetness, and a trite counting of blessings without actually taking stock of life as it stands is nothing more than psycho-spiritual denial. A faith that can’t reckon with what’s wrong isn’t a faith worth having.
What do I mean by this?
What I mean is that Thanksgiving in America has become another day of living in denial of the realities that confront our churches, our culture, and our society. We live in political chaos; our churches are dwindling; our culture is burning itself down – as are our cities; we have people screaming that everything is racist; we have people forcing little boys to say that they’re little girls and we have people who have taken the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm who are mutilating the genitals of these children as a sacrament to their pagan gods of death and destruction; young people are riddle with despair; the elderly are riddled with despair; and the middle-aged in the middle are living in the constant existential anxiety that their lives are meaningless and that they have no real value and so narcotize this stress with consumer goods, television, gluttony, alcoholism, narcotics, and porn. We’re a nation that can only be described in the immortal words of Yeats:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Indeed, the center cannot hold. What is happening cannot continue to happen without some critical change, because we all have the feeling that it can’t keep on like this. In the far less poetic words of Frank Sinatra: Something’s gotta give.
But I ask my Christian brothers and sisters, when we come and worship in our churches – do we cry out to God and beg Him to change our culture and society by bringing power and vindication to the Saints and confounding and cursing the work of the hands of the Godless? Do we sing hymns and psalms of lament, confessing our sin and crying out to God to deliver us from evil? Or is it all “the fourth, the fifth The minor fall, the major lift”? Are the songs we sing honest? Does the music of our churches actually, worshipfully express our heart to God, or is it just a bunch of repeating hopeful notes and confidently asserting things that deep down we wonder about?
You see, brothers and sisters, the Evangelical church has decided that Laments are out of step with the needs of seekers and that, frankly, they’re depressing, and we don’t want to do them any more. Almost a decade ago, Michael Gungor had this to say:
Approximately 70 percent of the Psalms are laments. Approximately 0 percent of the top 150 CCLI songs (songs sung most in churches) are laments.
Now let’s think about this for a second. Because that is both true and disturbing. If the Psalm breakdown is 70/30 in favor of Laments; and there’s a whole book of the Bible called Lamentations, and many of the prophets included Laments, and Paul commands us to weep with those who weep, then shouldn’t we sometimes, perhaps, maybe sing some Laments as part of our worship?
Look, I believe in the Atonement as much as the next handsome genius, but does that mean that we cannot, that we ought not EVER lament over our own sin. Does the cross mean that we never should engage in a day of humiliation and confession and reckoning with our own sin? Because some of history’s greatest saints have said, “yes…yes we should”. People like Jonathan Edwards, who most certainly believed in full atonement through Christ and was not a works-righteousness dude, said it was important for them to think on their sin and their mortality and to do so OFTEN!
But, I know, I know, thinking on our sin is puritanical and not what good little Evangelicals are supposed to do. It’s not “affirming”. I know that we don’t sing laments and we don’t have public confession and days of humiliation because that isn’t what lifts people-up. I know that there’s this general belief that if Church ever makes you sad that it’s failed in its mission to deliver the good life to the people who attend.
And I know that that’s utter and complete trash. The idea that churches are supposed to make people happy and uplifted has turned churches into nothing more nor less than Spiritual drug dealers. We’re not dealing with the Spiritual and Emotional and Practical crises that people face – we’re just trying to force them to put on a happy face and grin through their grimace and suffer with a smile. There’s a word for this mentality – it’s abuse. Forcing people to live out an emotional experience that is untrue is abusive. Now, certainly, a person’s emotions can be wrong. Sometimes a person can be angry when they have no right to be. But saying that occasionally people experience emotions that are not rooted in reality is very different than saying that it’s wrong to ever be mad or sad or anything but glad!
I find it fascinating that so many people complain that churches are full of hypocrites – and so many in church leadership bloviate about the needs for authenticity, when simultaneously every element of worship is designed to make people behave inauthentically. We complain about the “masks” and the need to feel like, as women are wont to say, “we’ve got it all put together” and yet nobody seems to notice that spending the majority of any church service singing about how happy you are might actually be contributing to the mixed messaging?
And speaking of mixed messaging – what about the cognitive dissonance when a pastor spends his whole sermon (which Heaven forbid takes longer than 20 minutes – because God knows that there’s no possible way anyone who truly loves Christ with all their heart, soul, mind and strength would need anything longer that an episode of the office of Netflix once a week to be rightly instructed and discipled in the faith) – what about that cognitive dissonance when a pastor spends his whole sermon trying to get people to think deeply on the condition of their souls and that gets followed up by a rousing rendition of some happy-clappy, pop song designed to not make you think critically or deeply about anything and to merely be swept away by the emotional tone imposed upon you by the chords and the often vapid lyrics? What about that?
Now, look, I’m not against happy music, per se. Happy music is good. Praise is good. But praise is not limited to happy songs. Praises can be and are laments. Worship is lament – and biblically speaking, the OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of musical worship is Lament. Sad songs are good. Sad songs are necessary. And ignoring the sad songs only reinforces the hypocrisy of contemporary Evangelicalism.
I know all the hep cats are talkin’ about how they’re “hot messes” on their twitterboxes and book-faces, but do they actually lament their failings? Or are they using their emotionally uninvested confession of being a “hot mess” as a stalking horse for not coming to terms with the deeper realities of their spiritual conditions which may very well be that they are shallow, vapid, unserious people who are squandering their lives in the vain attempt to serve two or more masters? Because when I look at contemporary Evangelicalism I see, frankly, a LOT of public figures who are saying nothing but shallow, vapid, unserious motivational pabulum which, if taken as gospel advice, will lead their acolytes to live shallow, vapid, unserious and squandered lives. And the fact of the matter is that all of us to some extent or another ARE shallow, vapid, unserious human beings who squander the gifts God has given us and that is a tragedy. And it’s a tragedy that ought to be lamented!
But whither away shall we confront our condition? Where can we go to come to terms with the fact that we do fail to live up to the high calling of God in Christ Jesus? Church, the place where we are to regularly be discipled and disciple our brothers and sisters, is really, not a safe-space anymore. You cannot be honest at church anymore, because the entire format of “church” is designed to prevent you from acknowledging your own Spiritual and Existential despair.
But we have a diagnostic problem in Christianity today. We have a problem which as long as it persists will prevent us from moving forwards. You see, the whole logic behind all the happiness – the logic behind not having public sharing of struggles and prayer concerns, the logic behind not having public confession of sin, the logic behind never preaching about sin or advocating repentance and public humiliation, the logic behind never singing a sad song or lament is that people don’t want it. But I think people DO want it. I think people want it because sadness and lamentation affirm the humanness of people who are sad and lament. Constantly trying to shove a smile down someone’s throat doesn’t affirm their lived experience – it denies the authenticity of their life, it forces them into hypocrisy, and frankly, lotsa people hate that. It’s bad anthropology, it’s bad ecclesiology, it’s bad Christianity. But see, nobody wants to reckon with that reality. We keep thinking that the problem is the cure. We keep doubling down on the happy and pushing the sad further and further out of orbit. And it’s making church and Christianity increasingly irrelevant.
But I want to be completely clear – sadness is ok. And more than that; sadness is good. It’s good to feel sad. It’s good to feel sad about a lot of things. It’s good to feel sad about sin. It’s good to feel sad about sickness and death. It’s good to feel sad about injustice. It’s good to feel sad about poverty. It’s good to feel sad about people’s marriages breaking up, and kids becoming estranged, and people being persecuted and hated at work and by their families. This world is a sad place and it’s ok to feel sad.
Indeed, it’s a sin to not feel sad. Jesus says, “blessed are those who mourn”! Again, Paul commands us to weep! James commands sinners to weep and wail. Expressions of sadness, particularly public expressions of sadness are not only good, but commanded by God.
One of the reasons I became a Christian was because the Bible was the only thing I’d ever read that actually dealt with human nature as it really is. I became a Christian because Christ and Christianity actually deal with the human condition in a meaningful way that will actually solve our problems. But for some reason the church is running from this. We’re running from our greatest asset.
But the world isn’t! The wildly popular show: The Good Place has a scene where a character explains that being human means always being a little bit sad because of our recognition of our own mortality. And I think that’s true, so far as it goes. There’re more reasons that we’re always a little bit sad, but that’s certainly part of it. My point is not that The Good Place is full of good theology – largely it isn’t. But my point is that the non-Christian, and even the antichristian world are being more honest about the nature of human nature than we are – and their art and culture is at least trying to honor humanity as it is and reckon with our problems – but Christianity isn’t.
There’s a word for the condition that American Evangelicalism has fallen into. The word is “decadence”. And history has shown us what happens to decadent churches.
In fact, let me give you one of the earliest examples of a decadent church:
“To the angel of the church in Laodicea write:
These are the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God’s creation. I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see.
Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest and repent. Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.
To the one who is victorious, I will give the right to sit with me on my throne, just as I was victorious and sat down with my Father on his throne. Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches.”
I’m all for praising God for the good things he’s done. Thanksgiving is good. But a Thanksgiving where we don’t lament what needs lamentation isn’t really a thanksgiving; it’s triumphalism. It’s decadent. It needs to stop.
The world knows this. The world knows how to lament. The title of this essay is The Kids Aren’t Alright; it’s a reference to a song title by The Offspring. It’s very worth watching the video and reading the lyrics. But the most poignant line in the whole song is the end of the bridge:
What the hell is going on
The cruelest dream, reality
The Offspring are writing and singing from a perspective that’s being as honest as it can. They aren’t Christians so they can’t point to the solution to the problems of society, but they certainly can address them and lament them! And the church used to know this. Christian artists used to know that. And Christian pastors used to know that. We need to relearn the old lesson of lamentation.
We used to know that just drowning our sadness and our sorrow and the pain that we live in, in a bunch of happy-clappy songs and a bunch of false joy is not spiritual — it’s pathological. We used to know this. I don’t know we know that anymore. I don’t think we know how to lament, because I don’t think we know how to be authentically human. But we need to learn how to lament; we need to learn how to be authentically human — because until we can do that we can’t really become like Christ.