Week 2: The Puppet's Message

"For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory..."

-The Lord's Prayer

"Love, love me do.  You know I love you."

-The Beatles

The Beatles are on the radio again.  I’m driving to church, and I realize that the famous Beatles lyric doesn’t really make sense.  Sounds good, though. 

My second outing in the churchgoing atheist project takes me to a Reformed Church.  The Reformed Church is the Dutch equivalent of the Scottish Presbyterian Church that I knew growing up, so once again this week’s service is familiar.  I’ll broaden my horizons as the project continues.

Familiar it is, but looking at the ritual with fresh atheist eyes still yields a great deal to write about.  The best part of the service is the children’s sermon.  There is a puppet theater standing at the front of the sanctuary, a tall wooden box with a window and curtain.  The children walk up front (there are a handful of children at this church) and the puppet show begins.  It consists of a single Sesame-Street-looking puppet saying The Lord’s Prayer.  But as she begins, “Our father,” the voice of God responds over the sanctuary’s PA system: “Yes?”  And in the conversation that ensues, God explains to little Suzie what the prayer means.

Little Suzie doesn’t want to hear it.  She tells God that she just says her prayers because it’s routine.  She doesn’t know what it means, and it doesn’t matter.  It makes her feel good just to say the words, even if they don’t mean anything.  God explains to Suzie that it’s important to think about the words in prayer and to actually mean them when you say them.  And God has hit the nail on the head. 

I don’t believe most Christians listen to the words of the prayers in church.  Now we can never know for sure what’s in other people’s heads, so maybe I’m just assuming that because I spent years not listening to those words myself.  But I’m pretty confident in this belief, partly because the words of those prayers are pretty bizarre when you do actually think about them.  Consider the prayer of confession that is printed in this week’s bulletin: “We confess that we have not bowed before Jesus and are slow to acknowledge his rule.  We give allegiance to the powers of this world and fail to be governed by justice and love…”  If people actually listen to this, they will realize it promotes Jesus as a ruler in this world.  It is not a metaphor; it explicitly says that Jesus should be crowned ruler in place of the governments of this world.  It ends with the idea that people should “obey the commands of our Lord Jesus Christ.”  If people actually obeyed those words, they would invite the poor and the blind to feasts (Luke 14), or if they really obeyed, they would sell everything they have and give it to the poor (Luke 18).  I’ll resist the urge to pursue this line of thought further at this time.

Returning to my belief that Christians don’t actually listen to the words of prayers in church, I need only look to this children’s message for proof.  The church leadership is aware that people—children, at least—don’t think about what they say.  I would extrapolate this to the bulk of the people.  They read the prayers like automatons, performing the weekly, mindless ritual of recitation without reflection.

The lesson from little Suzie isn’t over yet.  God has some moral teaching for the little ones.  He explains each line of The Lord’s Prayer, and when he gets to “lead us not into temptation,” he must explain to Suzie that he’s aware she sometimes tells lies.  Sometimes she watches things on TV that she shouldn’t.  She has friends at school that do bad things.  And God explains that Suzie shouldn’t put herself in situations that will make her do bad things.  God will “deliver us from evil” if we do not put ourselves in positions to be tempted.  While on its face this is good moral advice to give to young people, it is a logically twisted explanation that is typical of Christian attempts to explain religious beliefs.  If it is our responsibility to avoid evil, then what are we asking God for?  I’m sure this fits into the whole “free will” thing—it would be too easy for God to just deliver us from evil, so he puts evil temptation in the world and puts the onus on people to avoid it.  If they do, chalk it up to God’s guidance.  If they don’t, chalk it up to individuals’ weaknesses.  This is a nonsensical explanation to give to children under the guise of logical moral advice.  It’s provided by a voice in the sky (the PA system), which also gives children the bogus idea that God listens to their prayers and responds in personal ways.  Anyone who really believes this is sadly misled.

Although the structure of the service looks exactly like the Presbyterian services I’m used to, there’s one unusual addition.  Early on is an “Exhortation to Self-Examination.”  I’ve never seen this before.  It’s self-explanatory, though: it was simply a call to the congregation to think critically about their own behavior.  This is consistent with God’s message to Suzie in the children’s lesson.  It’s ironic that the service seems to emphasize this need for people to actually think critically about their religious lives.  I appreciate that idea, but I find that that kind of reflection about religion only leads away from the groundless superstitions of church.

Having written way more about the children’s lesson than I’d intended, I’ll keep the rest short.  The sermon was given by a guest pastor.  It was about the kingdom to come, in recognition of the last Sunday of the liturgical year.  The speaker attempted to reconcile Jesus’s statements that the kingdom was at hand with the obvious fact that it is not here, even 2000 years later.  I’ve read and heard many attempts to explain the “kingdom” that Jesus refers to.  The bottom line is that nobody knows what the kingdom means, and there is a wild variety of interpretations of it.  This particular speaker argued that we continue to wait for the kingdom, and that we must avoid the “secular despair” that we are tempted into by its absence. He claims that we can’t even imagine how God’s kingdom is going to be when it happens, and all we can do is “bear witness” as we wait for it.  We must create pieces of that kingdom in Christian communities here on earth, so that what God has promised will be visible.  This will make it so that people will not be justified in their disbelief.  We won’t know when or how God’s kingdom will come, but we are assured that it will.

If people indeed think critically about this, they will realize it is a devious trick.  It is a logical trap.  The pastor argues that it is impossible to know when or how God’s kingdom will come, or what it will look like when it comes.  If these are necessary components of the definition of God’s kingdom, then Christian communities are tricked into forever waiting in ignorance.  Theologians have gotten away with this cruel game of blind anticipation for 2000 years.  I do wish the parishioners and leadership of this church would listen to the puppet’s lesson, because the advice to actually think about what churches say is the most intelligent thing I heard in this building.  

"Love Me Do" doesn't make any sense.  It sounds good and means nothing, just like today's sermon.  The difference is that the Beatles don't claim any special insight into God's plan.