Christmas on July 4th

 

 This, I must say, is artful preaching. Pastor Kent Christmas puts on one heck of a show.[1] It is, however, all show. There is not a bit of Christian Gospel in it. Not a smidgen. All the pastor’s rhetorical arts are directed to raising a state of excitement and agitation in his congregation. This excitement centers on the most primitive form of wish fulfillment: the infantile illusion of omnipotence. In this mood Eve ate the apple. Kent Christmas does not promise humility, poverty of spirit or a contrite heart. He does not counsel service of the poor or the difficult struggle for reconciliation and peace. He announces glory, triumph and war. He promises God will win so much that Christians will be sick of winning. God is power, that is his prime attribute, and that power will manifest itself in thunderous rebukes to sinners in high places, in earthquakes, fires, and astounding reversals of every kind. According to Pastor Christmas secular music and art will be destroyed. Godless professors (and Pastor Christmas has a bee in his bonnet about those) will be rebuked and shamed. Schoolchildren will prophesy before their astonished teachers and even homosexuals will break out in psalms! All this, moreover, will happen by the 4th of July. This latter bit is thrown in to heighten the mood of anticipation as, of course, no one will care one bit if the 4th of July passes without incident. All this will happen ‘soon’ (however soon may be defined) for in eternity it has happened already.  For the ecstatic communicant, I suppose, the when hardly matters for he is present at the throne of God in the spirit and before that throne all is shouting and celebration and chortling over the fallen foe. The date, symbolically chosen but (for that very reason) easily discarded, is simply a peg on which to hang the intensity of the moment. In this moment, in the now, the shouting courts of heaven saturate earth and the entranced listener is in the eternal present, the nunc stans, with God. This preaching, so vividly oriented to the awesome future, is just as much about the now.  

As for this all powerful spirit it is not the spirit of love to put it mildly. Flush with victory, ecstatic at having always already won, the listener is in no mood to be magnanimous (as I know from contact with him!). He is belligerent, boastful in the power of the Lord. He blusters, threatens judgment with all the swagger and insolence of a common troll. Of course, his desire to convert sinners is at war with his deeper desire to see the enemy smashed and confounded and the demonic democrats and liberal professors hurled from their high thrones into an abyss of wailing and gnashing of teeth. He wants to see God’s power manifest, true, but in the form of someone else's humiliation! I have no doubt there are many worldly frustrations this holy-ghost-bullying compensates for. From a spiritual point of view, though, it inspires the emptiest and dullest preaching imaginable. But of course, this is not preaching as I or any of my likely readers would understand it. It is performance and what is being performed is the simplest kind of slave morality (sometimes Nietzsche IS spot on). The listener merges with, communes with, the power of revenge against evils real or imagined (and that distinction is not vital for this state of mind). He becomes the avenging Lord whose scoffing triumph is, by a miracle of transubstantiation, now his own.      

   

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