Barnacles On The Cross

During our breakfast and conversation session this week, my friend Wes and I focused mainly on family and work-related problems. But we also touched on the subject of Christian accretions.

Accretions, like barnacles on the hull of a ship, stick to the main body (of which they are no part) and grow thicker and thicker till they slow everything down and sometimes take over entirely.

These parasites cling tenaciously.

They distort the shape and destroy the function making the original surface unrecognizable; like barnacles, oysters and Toledo worms eat away at a on a dock piling till the once-solid post assumes an hour-glass figure and eventually falls into the mud.

There are accretions to Christianity that do exactly that.

Yet, sometimes these accretions appear to be the main thing. They assume such a large place in our Christian thinking that we defend them as though the salvation of souls depended on believing the accretion rather than the Gospel.

When I first became a Christian, the church I began attending assigned me a mentor, a mature gentleman who undertook to show me the ropes of my new-found faith.

Boy was he happy.

He had found himself a listener and he intended to make the most of it.

Now, please understand that he was a good man, a sincere Christian, but he’d allowed some accretions to overgrow his basic faith until …

First, he told me that no one can be a Christian and smoke a pipe. Being a pipesmoker, I found this doctrine difficult but I complied at the time. He said that Christians never play cards; I’d never learned how to play anyhow, so that was easy for me. Then he revealed that no Christian ever goes to movies because attendance at a movie supported the ungodly lifestyle of Hollywood. OK. I hardly ever went to movies anyhow, I watched them at home on tv, so I could go along with him on that.

Next he said that no Christian ever drank tap water because tap water is fluoridated and that process is a Communist plot to over throw America.

So I’m supposed to give up tap water. No problem, I’m a Pepsi man myself.

Then he said that Christians never eat white bread because all the nutrients are leeched out. “Real Christians only eat whole wheat bread,” he said.

Screw that!

Merita Bread sponsors The Lone Ranger on the radio!

The Lone Ranger was my childhood cowboy hero. No way is the Lone Ranger a Communist! Communists don’t give out silver bullets like he did at the end of every story.

I balked.

I decided that I’d never make the grade as a Real Christian. I decided that instead of being a Real Christian, I’d just follow Jesus from a distance.

Only years later did I realize that my mentor relished accretions that have not one thing to do with following Jesus Christ. I also realized that my mentor was typical of a certain mindset which outsiders mistake for Christianity because that’s what they see.

Accretions obscure Christ.

Yet accretions abound in religious circles.

Wes told me about a preacher who insisted that the Bible teaches that e-mail addresses, product bar codes and ATM PINs relate to the Mark Of The Beast in the Book Of Revelation.

I assure you that the terms e-mail, bar code and ATM never appear anywhere in the pages of Scripture.

Neither do the terms rapture, millennium, abortion, Republican Party, school prayer, ban the bomb, In God We Trust, tobacco, movies, fluoride, nor whole wheat bread.

Beliefs about such things are accretions on the Gospel. Such issues are barnacles on the cross.

It is much easier to get excited about accretion issues than solid Christianity; none of these things involve following a living Lord. It’s much easier to follow causes than Christ.

Accretions demand less of us.

They can be managed.

Yet their proponents proclaim them loudly as essential to the Christian faith. Sometimes to the exclusion of that faith per se.

While the accretions make many believers miserable as we try to fit in with man-made, traditions and impossible rules, these accretions also muddy the water for many nonbelievers. People who are not Christians yet see and hear the accretions and mistake those for faith; thus they feel that all Christians believe the ridiculous.

So, when we scrap away accretions, the barnacles, what’s left?

What is the real rock substance of Christianity?

The Scripture says, “If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved”.

That confession with thy mouth may be as simple as, “Oh Wow. I never realized that before!” It’s a realization that comes from exposure to Jesus. It is realizing His worthiness and value. It’s acknowledging Him as who He is, your Lord. It’s linked to realizing that He is not a system of doctrine but a Living Person.

Believing in your heart means acting like it.

As many as believe the Gospel should live as becomes the Gospel.

As the Prophet said, “He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God”.

That’s easier — and harder — than it looks.

The very nature of turning to Christ involves turning away from something less than Christ. That something less may be our own feeling that we are always right, or our own feeling that we are doing wrong.

The important thing is not what we turn from — that’s something different for each of us — but Who we turn toward.

Jesus Christ is either living Lord or just another loser, dead as a doornail.

Risen or rotten.

Nothing in between.

What about all those accretions?

Some are nonsense. Some are evil. Some are worth keeping.

Whichever, they should never be mistaken for the real underlying faith.

I have an entrenched idea that a Christian gentleman will always stand up and give a lady his seat on the bus. This in spite of the fact that buses are no where mentioned in Scripture. That is just one of my personal scruples, an accretion that has nothing to do with root faith.

But, I still eat white bread.

That ain’t in the Gospels, but it’s good enough for me and the Lone Ranger.