Christianity: The Religion of the Weak

There's an image that has haunted me since my teenage years. If I were a prophet, I'd call it a vision; but I'm not the sort to get invited out for coffee with the Almighty, so I'll call it an abstract projection in the moodiest wrist-slashing recess of my mind. The image is difficult to put into words, because the lines are hazily drawn, but I think the lack of definite shapes has always been the key to its meaning.

Picture a boy. Thin and weary. Dressed in rags and a sort of shawl or cloak to shield his face from the wind. In every version of this story, he is walking against the wind, and he is traveling alone along a shadowy path in a warped and ruined wilderness. Sometimes, he is older than a boy. Sometimes, older than a man. But most often, he is a boy. Small and shivering and lost. Eyes dull from having witnessed more horrors than any child should have to bear; yet glowing with s stubborn fleck of life that, by all counts, should not exist.

This is apocalypse. The kind you've seen in movies a hundred times: the sleek, smooth lines of the modern skyline crushed like a child's Erector Set and reduced to smoldering heaps of trash. The new Babel has been tested and found hollow. The best and the brightest, the strongest and the richest, could not stop God's heavenly messengers from breaking the Seventh Seal. And now this boy, the least of all people, creeps like an insect from shadow to shadow. A thousand dangers lie before him, and a thousand more behind him. He is weakness incarnate, a punchline of some cruel sadistic joke, a faint echo in the depths of a yawning black abyss that hasn't yet noticed his existence.

But the boy does exist. And that's the most surprising thing of all. What makes the story so compelling is that the he survived where the mighty perished. The boy isn't weak, and he never was, but it took the breaking of the Seals to prove his endurance, his strength, and his willingness to press on to the final destination.

This boy, I've come to see, is the church - that ragtag assembly of misfits that should have been obliterated two thousand years ago, but somehow survived the brutal execution of its God, outlived Rome and Constantinople, outmaneuvered Nietzsche's death blow, and still has not, as many predicted, been rendered obsolete by modern technology. The rumors of our death, as the saying goes, have been greatly exaggerated.

Today, many Christians are expressing fear and outrage over the disintegrating moral fabric of society, and they worry that their rights are being violated by those who wish to bar them from political and economic power. While our newly elected president openly endorses the pro-abortion cause, our religious leaders give their blessing to homosexual relationships.

But I propose that this fear is misguided.

If you want to know why, look to China, where the church is spreading faster than a California wildfire, despite an atheistic regime determined to crush our "western" religion. The apostles would have felt more comfortable in a Chinese house-church than any Bible Belt congregation, because they knew about persecution. Real persecution. The kind that serves up your head on a platter. They expected to be attacked. They welcomed their accusers. And they warned their struggling brethren that God refines his church through fire.

Should we recuse ourselves from politics and let the world burn? Absolutely not. But the strength of Christ's church is not wealth and position. We are greater than those things. Jesus told Pilate his kingdom was not of this world, and the church has been unraveling the meaning of that riddle ever since. He made himself weak before human kings, because he was stronger than those kings. The might of Rome is now a memory and her emperors eaten by worms, but Christ has his crown, and the church lives on, and the meek inherit the earth. Those who put their faith in the visible world have no answer for the evils that throw our best efforts into chaos and uncertainty. But the church thrives in that uncertainty, revealing its hope in the certain world beyond, gathering sheep and sending them joyfully to the arena of martyrdom.

That is our business: gathering sheep and giving them hope when life seems hopeless. But that doesn't mean we have failed when the sheep are few. Our glory is not in numbers, but in He who is above all numbers. Compared to his kingdom, all other worries seem so vacuous and petty. We don't march bitterly to our deaths, crying that our rights are being infringed upon; but smiling, seeing heaven, and praying our killers will see it too.