Real Live Preacher on modern culture

Oh Yes! The Real Live Preacher does it again! This is a blog and collection of essays I have been reading for a while now, but this TV show review just hit the spot! It is about a show in the US which has just aired, about a minister and his gay son, drug using daughter, mafia connections and gay bishop. Wow!

RLP cans the show pretty thoroughly, but not for the reasons you might expect. In the process he makes some very insightful comments about modern Christianity and modern culture which bear repeating (edited for lenth):

Good God, I'm a Baptist preacher and even I was shouting, "OK, he's gay. Leave him alone, you heartless bastards!"

And then, of course, there's Jesus, who drops in now and again to see how the reverend is handling things, and all he does is hand out Life Savers and say things like, "Life is hard, but that's why there's a nice reward at the end." That's no Jesus I ever heard of. Jesus was nice and all, but he was a straight-up ass kicker. Believe it.

Yo, brothers and sisters in Christ. They weren't making fun of you. It's much worse than that. The folks at NBC don't care about you enough to make fun of you. They want to make money, that's all. They're not hypocrites; they're capitalists.

Stop taking things so personally. You're giving the rest of us Christians a bad name. Learn to laugh at yourself, or do what I did. Just turn off your TV, look at the person next to you, and say, "Well, that sucked!"

But I think all the uproar from Christians is symptomatic of a more disturbing trend. More and more Christians seem to think that affirmation from our culture is where they will find their power. Since when do religions need affirmation from television stations? What we should be doing is practicing our devotion and letting our changed lives speak for themselves. And I've got news for you, Christian. If your faith isn't changing your life enough to make a difference in the world, you've got bigger problems than NBC.

Oh, there is something a little ironic that I want to mention. The first six chapters of the actual book of Daniel -- the one in the Bible -- are about a young man named Daniel and some of his friends who are trying to live out their faith in a very hostile foreign land. Trust me, the Babylonians were much worse than NBC. Daniel's solution was to doggedly worship God in their own way, and let their lives be a quiet and steady witness of their faith.

Their devotion produced a living and real goodness that even won the heart of the King in the end. And all of this happened because they were not foolish enough to try to change Babylon, but rather changed themselves.

This is great stuff - I wish I had written it! I so often think that being a Christian should be about changing myself and through that, changing the world by meeting people where they are. Not about criticizing the world for where it is.

Which of course leads me to wonder: could someone tell that I am Christian by looking at my life with the sound off?