Evangelization and Profanity, Part I

I've been thinking a lot the past few months about this post by Sam Rocha.  The funny thing is, it's turned into something different in my mind as I've mulled it over, and when I went back to it the other day it wasn't what I'd remembered.  Funny how that works sometimes.

Rocha writes,

"Jesus was crazy. 

In many ways, I think he was crazier than his cousin, John the Baptist. When someone dresses crazy and lives a wild, secluded life, there is no surprise in their madness. These people are supposed to be crazy. The only question is how much.
I doubt John the Baptist would’ve ever been invited to a dinner party. (Unless you count the time he made his appearance as a head on a platter.)

But Jesus was different. He showed up the learned in the Temple as a boy, people called him “Rabbi,” he gave public sermons and got invited to an uptight, classy person’s house for supper. The kind of person it’s considered an honor to dine with. People like this are, by strict definition, not supposed to be crazy.

You don’t act out at dinner parties, but especially not these ones. You just don’t. No matter what.

Jesus did. He told off the host, the owner of the house and founder of the feast. Jesus called him a fool. There is some thing rude about that, but there is also something supremely honest, authentic, and real about it too. Jesus called out the Pharisee for being shallow, superficial, and using his external piety to hide a deeper lie and infidelity.
Church folks often seem to think that kindness and being nice and piety and good manners will restore the Church. They’re dead wrong. We need rude people. People like Jesus. People who treat Pharisees with contempt and prostitutes with generosity.
As I’ve said before: the New Evangelization needs profanity."

The notion that the New Evangelization needs  profanity is something that intrigues me.

Rocha continues,

"There is nothing edgy about being edgy anymore.The edge that cuts nowadays is actually a form of life that has its feet on the ground, in the shit and the mud, with it’s soul swinging for the heavens with reckless, crazy abandon.

Go to daily mass. Talk about it. That is VERY profane these days. Light up a cigarette and tell someone the story of how Jesus told off the Pharisee, and how crazy that was."

I agree that people are bored with edgy.  Edgy is a cliche these days that often stops being edgy and just ends up being ugly.

The problem is that people are habituated to edgy.  Edgy is boring and cliched and ugly, and no one trusts sincerity.  You start by telling someone that you go to daily Mass, and their assumption ends up being that you're sanctimonious, that you're posturing.  People think that faith is just another form of insincerity.

In order for a New Evanglization to happen, it has to be discovered again that what the Church offers is something universal.  It isn't just a posture or an attitude or another way of being insincere.  It has to be revealed that

"underneath it all, beneath the pain and suffering, there lies a deeper magic, a deeper reality, a beauty ever ancient and ever new, a love Divine whom we can cling to, in hope.

To minister in times like these, we have to show that this is not a joke. Not a mere formality. And it is surely not participatory democracy. The theodrama of salvation history is tragic and profane, leading to redemption and the sacred. When heaven and earth meet, sparks fly."

Our faith isn't a joke or a formality or a democracy or a posture, but these are all things that it can become when we're taking ourselves more seriously than we take Christ, when we're looking to ourselves for meaning for our lives.

What does this mean?  It's tempting for a Christian to define himself in terms of a negative relation to the world around him.  It's tempting for a Christian to say to himself, "The world is full of sin, of profanity, of promiscuity, of violence, and I will not participate in that.  I will live a holy life and be different."  Then he lives that way and is satisfied.  He thinks it's enough, but it isn't because he derives his compass and his understanding of his life from the very culture he rejects.  Its North may be his South, but he's still working with the same compass, still the same context for understanding life.  

In using the same context for understanding his life, he is merely taking a position on life.  By rejecting the thing that he sees as bad in society, he fails to recognize his own commonality with the larger society.  He fails to recognize his own commonality with people who don't share his values.  He divides the world up into "us" and "them," and forgets 1.) that he himself is a part of the society he rejects and 2.) that the Church is universal - there is no "us" and "them," only people in need of God.

Rocha concludes,

"We’ve allowed ourselves to be painted as Pharisees and there is no reason to deny the truth: we are Pharisees. Read our blogs. Pharisees, everywhere. Read this post, for God’s sake! I’m a total fraud. “Kyrie eleison” But the present situation still remains: some people cannot evangelize because they lack the religious testicular fortitude to read Rolling Stone, without fear. Other cannot evangelize because they only read that and it’s other cheap equivalents."

He indicates that there are two dangers for Christians.  On the one hand, we may be unable to evangelize because we are defined by our society.  We may consider ourselves to be Christian, but allow ourselves to be immersed in pop culture and flow with that current.  On the other hand, we may still define ourselves in terms of the culture by rejecting it.  In this case, we really aren't free from the general culture because it constantly threatens us.  We have to constantly exert ourselves to beat back the cultural influences we feel are dangerous, and in the process create within ourselves an attitude towards other people that is neither charitable nor evangelical.

The New Evangelization depends upon Christians allowing themselves to be defined by Christ and not by the culture. This means asking the question, "What does it mean to be defined by Christ?" and letting the answer to that question unfold over time.  It is by living with that question that we may actually begin to attract others, because secular as well as religious people want to know what defines them.  Living with the same questions as everyone else is evangelization because where the culture currently asserts that there is no answer to the question of what defines them, that there is no meaning to our lives, Christianity affirms that there is meaning, that there is something that defines us apart from our mistakes and successes and ideas about ourselves.  We live with the question of who we are, but we have hope that there is an answer, and that that answer lies in a Person who loves us.