Don’t Just

Don’t just do something.

Sit here.

 

Uh, Christians? Do not put that kind of thing on the wall of your church. Because then, when I drive past your church and see it, I’ll do a double take and nearly miss my turn.

There’s a reason those sentences are usually arranged a little differently. Don’t just sit there; do something! Make a difference! Change the world for the better! Flipping it is clever, if you want to talk semantics, but when you stop to think it through it’s the old Faith v. Works debate again. I think that’s a pretty dumb debate. If your theology says faith gets you saved and works are irrelevent… well, theoretically, I shouldn’t care at all about the faith-and-works argument. I don’t go in for the Heaven stuff anyway. What other people believe doesn’t affect me; what I’m interested in is how they act.

And it seems to me that in the real world, which doesn’t care at all about theories without anything to back them up, people who say faith is enough live lives of faith and not much to supplement it. It’s related to the problem I have with Lent: give up chocolate for a few weeks, and then go back to slacking off on the virtue the rest of the time because you’ve done your time. You have your faith, so you don’t need to go help out the folks at the clothing drive or down at the beach near the oil spill. Or, on a smaller scale, helping the local twelve-year-old with some math won’t get you extra graces.

I want to give this credit for “don’t just do something,” which implies that the reader should attend church in addition to all the other Jesus-y things they’re (supposedly) doing, but that’s not the part of the sentence that jumps out. The message sent is, “Come in. Don’t go out and help people; come in here, sit in our pews, listen to our sermons. That‘s the good and courageous thing.”

No. It’s not.

Posted by emilyperson on February 25, 2012

http://from1angle.wordpress.com/2012/02/25/dont-just/