September 2010

Dear Family of faith,

Having just returned from a wonderful tour of Central Europe and the chance to see the world-famous Passion Play in Oberammergau, Germany; the sights of the Alpine villages are still fresh in my mind. Overall, it was the Austrians who most impressed me with their faith and love of life. It didn’t matter how small the village was, there was always a beautiful church in the middle of it. Even those burgs that had but a few hundred people hosted a magnificent edifice, usually overflowing with stucco, gold, and marble inside. The majority religion in Austria is, by far, Roman Catholic. Our Austrian guide could not, on one occasion, even think of a Protestant Church to visit. But as beautiful as the cathedrals and abbeys were, the common buildings most impressed upon me the fervor of the faithful. Shops and businesses, even homes and schools, had murals of religious scenes or statues and crucifixes affixed to their facades. In most hamlets you could turn your head in any direction from the public square and see the creative marking of a Christian presence in paint, stucco, or metal. Many off-the-beaten-path homes of a humble nature had a Virgin Mary shrine or crucifixion scene. Yes, you couldn’t go anywhere in the country without knowing that the Christian faith was important to those people.

We live in an increasingly secularized society in which many are hesitant to display symbols of their faith. Indeed, court rulings have rightly upheld the Constitution’s neutrality on religion in public life. Unfortunately what has happened, however, is that this neutrality has often been interpreted as a ban on religious symbols and affiliation. There is no law against a business owner or a homeowner displaying their faith on personal property. Would anyone walking up to your home know that you are a Christian? Would anyone entering your home know that you follow Jesus? Do the places you do business make it known that they follow an ethic higher than civil law?

Certainly many of us have become “gun shy” about such overt displays of faith because those who do so often come from conservative, often legalistic, groups. Perhaps we have forfeited too much. Yet exterior symbols of the faith can also be symbols of hypocrisy. That was so in Jesus’ day as evidenced in his criticism of the Pharisees, whom he called “whitewashed tombs” because they looked nice on the outside but were dead on the inside.

Even so, Christians are called to witness publicly to their faith. In the Book of Revelation God stamps the faithful with a seal on their foreheads. This is symbolic language to indicate that a Christian’s faith should be visible to all—just as if it were painted on our foreheads. Crosses around our necks, shrines in the front yard, murals on the walls—these are all fine and good; but what God really wants of us is a faith that is know by the way we live and act. People are supposed to know about the God we love by the way we treat creation and other people made in the image of God. Others should recognize us as people of faith by the words we speak and the attitudes we have, by how we spend our money and time.

I encourage each of you to think about this question: Outside of the church, do others know anything about my faith? If not, why not? May the hospitality you show, the encouragement you give, the sacrifices you make for others, and the respect you have for God’s world be your “symbols” of faith, so that the world may know that you belong to Jesus.
With affection,

Pastor Carlan