I can do serpent

I know myself too well to bring some sanitized version of who I am to God

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“Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves. Be ye therefore wise as serpents and harmless as doves.

Matthew 10:6

My baptism is coming up on Sunday, and it’s never out of my thoughts lately.

I asked my pastor if there was anything I needed to do to prepare, and he responded, “You’ve been preparing your whole life.”

Well, then. Does that include vandalizing houses as an eight-year-old, having an exploitative view of females as an adolescent, pumping myself full of substances for years, making weighty decisions impulsively and being riddled with regret as a result?

I guess I still haven’t shaken the sense that I have to clean up before I present myself to God.

Here’s the thing. As the share of Christians among the post-American populace continues to shrink, more and more of them are what we might call legacy Christians. They have been raised in the faith and familiarized with the basics of doctrine. They may have drifted away at some point, but generally not too far. Secular and agnostic moderns aren’t gravitating to the faith in droves.

Now, there is the other extreme. The Christian world has an abundance of people who found the faith at the depths of addiction and self-abasement. They are covered in tattoos they couldn’t remove in a lifetime. Although tats can be seen as a badge of survival, a way of showing that one has really been through the mill. It lends credibility in certain circles.

No tats on me. My fondness for material balms comes from an earlier era. I chose my poisons because I’d bought into the notion that they offered glimpses of life’s mystical essence, that they could equip us self-important Boomers to, you know, change the world, usher in a new age of communal binding of humanity.

(The closest I ever came to risking it all for some feel-good powder was doing some cocaine, but after burning through some serious money, I realized it was indeed a snare and I backed off.)

And I did attend church as a kid, but I’ve written several times about how it just didn’t stick. It was a mainline Protestant congregation and most folks exited the sanctuary at noon on Sunday only to engage the world with the same bundle of foibles with which they’d engaged it the previous week, month, year, decade.

As a deacon at my current church, I’m called upon to have something of an ambassadorial vibe, to evangelize.

This is also something I’ve written about with some frequency. It’s said that in sharing the Gospel, one has to meet people where they are. But are we really good at that?

I have done some jail ministry, and I can see that it can change lives. Again, it is most effective in the cases of those who have reached depths inconceivable to most of us. But even then, there are instances where it doesn’t stick. I know of one guy who wrote a letter to the editor of his local paper lauding the sheriff and jail staff for being supportive of the weekend and his readiness to say yes to Christ. A couple of years later, I found out he’d gone in an entirely different direction, and was involved with some kind of occult stuff.

And here we get to another aspect of modern evangelizing that doesn’t work for me at all: contemporary praise music. It’s what the house bands at those jail weekends play. It’s emotive and vapid, utterly lacking in theological depth. I’m not the only one who feels this way. Articles have been written about it, and I often see observation to that effect at social media sites such as Substack Notes.

This is no small thing. I realize my perspective may be due in some part to my being a musician, but trivializing the role of music in human life is a pet issue of mine.

A couple of years ago, I was having one of my occasional crackups (which, I’m pleased to report, are far less frequent now) and sharing in a text thread with the others in my Sunday school class, and one lady said I ought to turn off the news and tune into a Christian music radio station.

It was as disheartening as any bit of advice could have been, although I didn’t say so. I think most people in my current circle of fellow believers find that stuff uplifting and comforting. Again, these are generally people who were raised in environments of commitment and family reinforcement. Maybe it lands differently with them.

But that in itself is concerning. To lift our voices in utter devotion to our Creator is a fine thing, an important point of growth in our lives as God’s children. But if all one ever hears or sings is warmed-over pop chord progressions and insipid lyrics repeated endlessly, I don’t see how one becomes equipped to meet a lot of people where they are.

There is a huge world of actual music out there, and it’s perfectly fine with God for us to listen to it.

The same goes for literature. I seriously doubt that Christian versions of genres such as romance or mystery are having an impact on those dipping their toes in the water, considering a closer look at this faith that informs us. (Although G.K. Chesterton could deftly handle the detective genre.)

Christian fiction ought to have some meat on its bones. It ought to acknowledge the full panoply of the human condition. This is what we get from Dostoevsky, Flannery O’Connor, Milton.

When Christ admonishes us, per the quote from Matthew above, to be wise as serpents, it seems to me he’s saying we ought to acknowledge the stinkiness, the grittiness, that is our common bond as human beings. We have to know what lurks inside us before we can lay it at the foot of the cross.

Real faith brings forth the fullness of our humanity. We ought not to be afraid of what we’ve been, as it has shown us what we can slide into if we have no lodestar.

Saying yes to Jesus doesn’t mean becoming gooey. God elevated us from the primordial swamp by virtue of his grace, but we need to see how hard-won such a realization usually is. It doesn’t lend itself to easy formulas. It genereally involves coming face to face with the fact that there’s only one way out of the incompleteness with which our lives are otherwise saddled.

I guess I’m coming back to a point I’ve made here with some frequency. We need to recover our sense of being astounded by the Gospel message. Really astounded. While I’m not a big fan of those “he gets us” commercials, that really is true.

And that means that you can bring anything to Him.

I’ve been quite the hedonist in my day. I’ve been quite the hypocrite, the phony, the self-deceiver. So I have some acquaintance of how these things affect a life.

I really don’t mind that I’m a late-comer to all this. I understand skirting moral corners, even going off the rails, and I’m not afraid of seeing it in others. Increasingly, it means I don’t love anyone any less because they’re riddled with foibles.

What Christ says in that Matthew passage can look like a challenging balancing act, but it’s not really. If we grasp the full scope of what being human is all about, we’re being, in the popular parlance, authentic. We ought to be willing to show God the beautiful and horrible creatures that we are.

This is by no means a fully worked out thought process. I’ll no doubt have more to say on the subject.

But in the meantime, dear Lord, save me from gooiness.