Lift High the Gospels. Be the Faithful Remnant.

These past few years have exposed a lot of things we never wanted to see, and many of us didn’t think were true. 

We’ve seen the sheer stupidity of a lot of people, how easily they are duped. People we love, people we’ve looked up to and trusted, have demonstrated that they are at best easily deluded fools, and at worst, hypocritical phonies. They either don’t believe a lot of the things they have said they believe, or their discernment and judgement are seriously flawed. 

At the same time, our religious leaders, whose discernment and judgement we have been taught to trust without questioning, have demonstrated a callous disregard for the plain teachings of the Scriptures that they claim they represent. This disregard of the Gospels is such an absolute display of faithlessness that it is both breathtaking in its arrogance and faith-challenging for those of us who trusted these men and their leadership. 

This deliberate and uncaring abnegation of the teaching authority of the Gospels and, indeed, of the teaching authority of Christ Himself, coming as it does from bishops, high-profile priests, and “star” preachers, gnaws through the ecclesiastical underpinnings of our faith. It destroys the beliefs we had that our religious leaders were trustworthy interpreters of the Gospels who could, due to the authenticity of their personal commitment to Christ and the holiness of their calling, show us the way to the Way. 

When they abandon the Way of the Cross for cheap demagoguery and a place on the dais with men of power, when they kiss Caesar’s ring and take Caesar’s money in exchange for crude political selling out, we are left bereft. We become sheep without shepherds in a real and present way in this time of pandemic, culture implosion and mass self-destructiveness. 

Our friends who we saw as examples of Christian fidelity; people we looked up to and wanted to emulate, have become fools and liars.

I never knew before how the German people could claim that they “didn’t know” what Hitler was doing. How did they overlook what he wrote in his books, said in his speeches, testified to in his 1924 trial? How could they pretend that Kristallnacht didn’t happen, that their friends and neighbors weren’t disappearing, that large numbers of people weren’t being rounded up and loaded into box cars, never to return? 

Didn’t the German people notice that everyone who supported democracy just … vanished? What did they think when they read the pamphlets about “worthless eaters?” How did they square the circle of the fact that all the people in institutions for mental challenges suddenly died off en masse? 

Didn’t they notice when they moved into their friends’ and neighbors’ empty houses and took over their businesses? Didn’t the people who lived near the camps smell the filth and rot, the burning flesh? Didn’t they see the clouds of ash? Didn’t they hear the trains, whistling in the night?

I never understood. I couldn’t fathom how such denial of what really couldn’t be denied could have happened. Now I have a better idea of how it came about. 

They lied. 

If you asked them, “Don’t you see that synagogue, burning over there?” They would say, “No I don’t. There is no synagogue.” Or, if they were an American who was trying to be nice, they would say “You believe that there’s a synagogue burning over there. I don’t. Let’s just agree to disagree.” 

We have seen a lot of things we never wanted to see. We have seen  that many of our religious leaders aren’t even Christian. 

We have seen that our friends are racists. We have seen that rape and sexual assault and abusing women don’t matter to them. They lie and say they “don’t believe” these things are happening. But the truth is, they believe it. They just disregard it.

The temptation to say that they don’t care and they don’t have any morals runs strong. But it’s more complex than that for most of them. You can’t consider that deeply religious people are confusing this banal evil with following Christ without also looking at the religious leadership they are receiving.

They have been deliberately misled, bullied and lied to by the religious leaders that they trust over a long period of time. They’re still responsible for what they’re doing. But a lot of the guilt belongs to religious leaders. Theirs is by far the greater sin.

I have seen things I never thought I would see, coming from people I didn’t think were capable of doing them. 

These years have shown me things I never wanted to see, taught me things I never wanted to know, and left me with a greater challenge to my faith in my Church than I ever thought I would face.

The situation in which we find ourselves is that those of us who are willing to say that yes, we see the burning synagogue, are, whether we want to be or not, the faithful remnant. 

Those of us who will say that Christ is Lord, that the Ten Commandments are meant to be obeyed, that Jesus is God and He taught the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes and that we are required to follow them, we are the faithful remnant. 

I don’t know about you, but I find that a shaky proposition. Nobody’s weaker than me. The idea that this sickly old Granny should be part of the faithful remnant seems preposterous. 

But it’s how things have come down. 

We have seen things we didn’t believe were true and never wanted to see.

Pick up the Gospels of Christ my friends. Lift them high. And do that which you are called by this time in history to do. 

Be the faithful remnant to Christ that you already are.