Why Am I a Christian?

The following is my talk this morning in a series we are doing, entitled Why Am I a Christian?:

Why am I a Christian? Really, I have no idea. I will say that I don’t always claim to be one. In fact, most of the time I don’t even bother. It’s just easier that way. It’s easier than trying to explain myself as to why I am the way I am. To put it lightly, I’ve been through a lot as far as my Christianity is concerned. I come from a place where everything, even really complicated things, can be explained away in a scripture verse or two. I come from a place where people dance during worship services, arms waiving in the air, tears streaming down their faces, and speaking the prayer languages they were lavishly given from above. I come from a place where prophetic words, particularly over my life and what I would do with it, were simply the way things were. Life was this big destined-by-God event that we had the privilege of living out.

I guess you could say, I have a lot of God issues.

Actually, most days I wake up and wonder what the heck just happened to me. How could this angry, recovering charismatic and fundamentalist now be…living in a church? I feel like one of those rappers whose music only tries to reconcile the extreme disconnect of his poverty to his excess, surviving in the ghettos to the lavish lifestyle he now lives in Beverly Hills. It’s the rapper we still hear about on the news, participating in those high-class drive-by shootings. He doesn’t know exactly how to move away from his past life, leaving it just where it belongs: in the past.

I’m scared to admit that this might possibly be exactly why I am a Christian; I just can’t leave my past well enough alone.

Most days, my mind tells me there’s nothing more supreme than what’s right in front of me. In short, if you were to ask me if I believe in God on those days, I’d say, “I really want to.” But then, every now and then, something will touch me in way that reaches through my hardened heart. Most recently, it was big Taize gathering here at Shelter50, or The Well, or my home, or whatever you want to call it. Something touched me in the way the singing surrounded me that night. Like a warm blanket on a winter’s night, that experience shielded me from my own inclinations that there really isn’t anything out there other than what I can see, touch, taste, smell, or feel. This doesn’t happen often, but when it does, I know I must believe in something.

At work, no one knows about me. I joke about drinking too much. I swear too much. I believe in equality of all people. I can easily entertain people who talk about psychic readings and auras and offer my own experience into the conversation.  I can talk with people like my brother and cousins about how science and how it is simply “the way of things.”

“Wait a minute,” someone somewhere along the line will eventually stop my whole charade and say, “you live in a church?”

“Yeah,” I’ll say. “But it’s really more of a commune than a church.” I say this as my way of protecting myself from a conversation I can’t reconcile with myself, let alone another person.

“But you just said you’re a music pastor,” he or she will reply.

“To the city government, I am,” I’ll say.

Then we’ll get launched into the conversations that I dread having if the person is a professed Christian. Yet if the person isn’t, it is still a conversation that I feel stupid being in. I had one guy say to me, “C’mon, you’re more than halfway there [meaning, toward full atheism]. You’re just to chicken shit to jump in all the way.”

“I know,” I’ll respond, because he is right. But in all fairness, I am also too chicken to delve fully back into the way of my upbringing either.

Some would say that I’m stuck in this perpetual state of paralysis. I would just say it’s honest, then pretend like it doesn’t fill me with a crazy amount of conflict to sing a few Christian songs on Sundays.

Where am I going with all this, you might ask? The thing is I don’t know. I don’t know if tomorrow I’ll be a Christian, just the same as today I don’t know if I even am. I won’t presume to know what I’ll be 10 years from now, and I’m relatively okay with that. Relatively.

I know I’m jumping around a lot, but stick with me. At least now you know why I avoid these conversations and why I avoid calling myself a Christian. Life’s conversations just move along smoother when I do.

I guess you could say that I view Christianity in much of the same way that I do music. Music, I believe, is spiritual. Even if you just sing along to it because it’s a fun. It’s spiritual because it makes you happy. If the song makes you sad, it’s spiritual. If it makes you angry, it’s spiritual. If it makes you confused, hurt, relaxed, or energized, it’s spiritual. In other words, emotions, whatever those may be, I believe are spiritual experiences. And if something like music provokes those emotions, it’s a spiritual event.

Christianity, for me, provokes all kinds of emotions. And I do mean all kinds. Christianity, perhaps even chiefly because of my upbringing, provokes so much emotion in me that I can’t deny that there is something about it that draws me to it. Christianity, I’m convinced, will haunt me forever. And it’s not about what Christianity is technically defined as that haunts me; it’s what Christianity represents. Christianity represents my life in a way that only points to my brokenness, you know, the deepest parts of my life that I can’t reconcile. If Christianity represented all the ways I could reconcile my life, I would have jumped ship by now, but it’s because I can’t reconcile it that I believe there’s something to it. I’m like that rapper that can’t get away from his past so it follows him to his new life.

You may think that I mean to paint my Christian experience and negative, and truthfully, parts of it are, but that’s not all they are. The fact that I can’t get away from it is at the very least honest and it points to my brokenness, which I think is intensely spiritual. Christianity in my life is a catalyst for all things spiritual. It is what provokes me to ask the big questions about God and life. It’s what makes me search for something outside of myself, or maybe inside myself. (Wow, I really am conflicted.)

So, in closing, all I can tell you is that I don’t know why I am a Christian. The truth is I’m probably not, but yet what Christianity provokes in me is something I can’t ignore. Like my philosophy of music being a catalyst for spirituality, so too are many elements of Christianity for me. Christianity haunts me, and I’m quite sure that it always will. So maybe I’m not a Christian at all, but at least I’m honest.