The Christian Smart Ass (or, Why Nobody Wants to Sit by Me in Heaven)

This post was originally published on June 30, 2006. It is all, sadly, still true.

I used to belong to a book group at my old church. We read books of all sorts, and discussed how they did (or didn’t) relate to our Christian faith. One night - I don’t remember what book we were discussing - the author introduced the topic: do we love Jesus?

Presbyterians are a frosty bunch. We jokingly call ourselves God’s frozen people. When you start talking about feelings, and then make those feelings about God, you can see neck muscles clench. The fingernails gouge into the pews. Awkward silence takes on a new meaning.

So we hesitantly stumbled through this discussion, hemming and hawing about loving Jesus. It’s not that we don’t, it’s just that the language of it sounds presumptuous. And one of the women there, a vivacious Caribbean woman (Bahamian? Jamaican? I don’t remember) became flustered by our hesitance and gave us an exasperated pep talk on loving Jesus. It was a thorough, sisterly rebuke, full of things like “How can you say that? Don’t you understand…” We had very little to say for ourselves afterwards.

The woman later returned to her home country to care for her sick father. She married while she was there, and then returned to the States. We invited her back to book group, and she declined.

Because she had converted to Islam.

And everyone in the group mourned her loss to the faith, discussed her (unexplained) reasons for converting, and generally felt bad, but wished her well.

I wanted to call her up and ask if she still loved Jesus.

I frequently feel like a misfit in church circles. I don’t mean over theological issues, though that happens too, but over cultural ones. Christian women, at least evangelicals, tend to be earnest and kind and devoid of all sarcasm. Irony is not appreciated. Sometimes I feel like the only smart ass in the room. One of the nicest things about blogging is finding more of my kind.

Another example. For college I attended a small evangelical college and the chapel services were sometimes painful. Sentimental and moving to those who appreciate Precious Moments and Touched by an Angel, but occasionally mortifying to the rare student who preferred the satire of Steve Taylor to the sentimental musings of women published by Zondervan.

For example, we once had a chapel led by a student group from South Africa. They were kids full of good will, an interracial group who visited churches and schools and told folks that God wanted them to love everybody. Not a bad message. For our service they decided to perform a version of the Passion narrative set to Carman’s song “This Blood Is for You.”

Maybe you’ve never heard of Carman. He is a Christian performer who reinvents himself every few years. His songs are not really sung - usually read. They are always melodramatic. They are the antithesis of irony. And if your first thought when you saw the title of this particular song was some connection to the beer commercial “This Bud’s for you,” you are completely wrong, but a lot like me.

Anyway, this song is a description of the crucifixion told from the point of view of a spectator, with metaphors that make me choke a little. “Like razors through a sheep” is not the most communicative line. Pictoral, sure, but more distracting than helpful.

So this goup of lovely, well-meaning teenagers acted out the story of Jesus’s death, accompanied by this song. A young woman played Jesus, and a scene came when they pretended to nail her to a cross. In a musical crescendo, she opened her nailed fists, and red streamers fell from them and dangled from her fingers. She then walked around the stage draping the ribbons on people. She pulled them over their heads. Ribbons trailing everywhere, through the other performers’ hair, over their shoulders, and so on, as lyrics described the Atonement. I started to feel a little queasy.

Okay. The Atonement is a powerful doctrine. I believe in it. Jesus as a sacrifice whose blood washed away my sin - that gets me up in the morning. I understand why everyone in the audience was moved. But as I looked around at all those moved people, I wanted to ask, doesn’t this performance seem a tad, um, graphic? “Covered in his blood” is a metaphor; it does not involve actual drippy red hemoglobin being smeared on me. As the performers were taking this to an uncomfortable degree of literalness, earnestly and devoutly, I cringed and suppressed hysterical giggles. I was thinking things like, “Why settle for ribbons? Why not try ketchup packets next time? Or that theatrical red syrup? I mean, since we’re being so literal.”

I could say nothing to my fellow-students. Stoning has fallen out of favor, but it could be revived.

Maybe I am just too much a creature of my time. The sarcastic outsider is a staple of the wider culture. Maybe it’s an inevitable symptom of being overeducated. I do find as I get older, I am kinder and better able to suppress my tendency toward humor at another person’s well-meaning earnestness. I still laugh, but I do it internally or out of earshot.

So apologies to you if you are offended by that mommy in your church who covers a smirk with her hand and coughs, when your pastor leads the church in a rousing chorus of:

And one was a soldier, and one was a priest,
and one was slain by a fierce wild beast;
and there’s not any reason, no, not the least,
why I shouldn’t be one too.

But if you find yourself laughing, almost involuntarily, come sit by me.

P.S. And I snickered when the little girl in church sang the last line of the Gloria Patri as “world without men. Amen, amen.” Sorry.

***************

And for those of you who do not know who Carman is: