ANDREW RICHDALE
Staff Writer
It was another day at Calvary Christian Academy. I was the 12-year-old middle school student wearing a white, CCA-monogrammed polo, who sat through the monotony of chapel on an overcast Thursday morning. The predictable three-point sermon was given, the one where we realized just how bad we were. The fires of hell were scared into us, just enough so that when the run-of-the-mill altar call to rededicate your life to Christ came, the front of the sanctuary was filled with students ranging from first to 12th grades wanting to secure their spots in eternal paradise. A couple of us, bored at the message we had already heard more than three dozen times, sat toward the back squirting invisible ink. The principal, who happened to witness the incident, scolded us.
We returned to class after chapel. I had seventh grade math with Vicki Cassidy. Cassidy was a middle-aged, formerly scrawny cheerleader, who had teased her hair since the 80s so high that she had to duck under doorways. She laced every lesson with moral fibers that encouraged us to be loyal soldiers on the frontlines for Jesus. She was well intentioned in her advice, but for a math teacher, her reasoning skills were pretty far off.
Today, I could tell something was really eating away at Cassidy. She had a giant burden to get off her chest. She very simply stated, “Guys, I don’t think you’re gonna make it.”
“Make it where, Mrs. Cassidy?” we questioned.
“To heaven,” she said, as her eyes became pregnant with tears. “I’ve judged you by your fruits, and I don’t think you all are going to make it.”
I noticed her eyes dart at me and a couple of others. A thick cloud of tension condensed. Even the walls and desks were sweating bullets. The class pets sat in the front, attentive, shaking their heads in agreement and concern for us lost sheep. Cassidy patted her over-active tear ducts with a Kleenex, picked up the broken chalk dispenser and proceeded to try and fix it, as she did every day. She opened her lesson plan and taught us metric conversions as we let her sweeping statements sink in. She probably figured her chances were better at fixing us than the chalk dispenser.
I look back at the absurdity of Calvary Christian Academy and wonder if my memory is only a forgotten tale of the Pharisees who didn’t make it into canonized Scripture. Whose place was it to judge my morality, the goodness of my heart, my proximity to God’s spirit?
I understand that we should all be shining lights of God to the world. Faith without works is dead. But what works are considered in our rubric for “salvation?”
The recent church has been more overly concerned with legalistic values and accountability to unrealistic standards than it has been with the heart of the message of Christ. We are here to serve God by serving others. We are too busy judging one another’s outer purity to have an impact on anyone.
Today’s Christianity has reduced religion to a set of imprisoning actions. Have I prayed enough today? Have I attended the quota of Sunday morning services to receive this week’s golden star? Have I saved enough souls to put a down payment on my celestial real estate?
Donald Miller, in his book “Blue Like Jazz,” draws parallels between Christianity and an unlikely companion, jazz.
“The first generation out of slavery invented jazz music. It is a music birthed out of freedom. And that is the closest thing I know to Christian spirituality.”
And I agree. Christianity is a way of life that is focused on freedom. It is a message that is centered on freeing others. It is a message about understanding the human condition, understanding imperfection and loving others in spite of their shortcomings. It is about lifting each other’s chains. It is about changing a hurt and jaded world.
If Cassidy is still out there, I would ask her one thing. At the end of the day, who has had the greater impact on God’s Kingdom? The one who has made his or her life focus on the cleansing of all evil in the motivation of making it to heaven, or the one who has found even a bit of heaven on Earth by developing a love for other people and encouraging them to spread that love to others?
People are hurting enough trying to cope with the pain of broken relationships, the burden of an unbalanced checkbook and the everyday stresses of life. There are enough inherent frustrations in the life of the average American to add a spiritual weight to their over worked, exhausted shoulders. There is a slough of millions across the world who are in need of a message of redemption, not of slavery. They wonder if they are going to make it.
Instead of judging the fruits of the lost sheep to your right, the one with sin X, understand the condition of humanity and give that sheep a chance. The tune of the journey out of slavery was one embodying freedom. Jazz was a salvation of sorts — a remembrance of where a generation had been and where it was going. Christian salvation is the same. It is found in developing a love for imperfection because imperfection is humanity. It is the acceptance of who we were, who we are and hope for who we can become.
11-03-2005