The Sacred and The Profane

Put on your dancing shoes, shake loose your tambourine, we survived December 21, 2012, and now it’s time to celebrate. Somehow we avoided the end of the world. No meteors collided with our little blue planet, no aliens showed up unannounced, nobody sprouted a third eye, nor was the whole of mankind magically transformed into kinder gentler versions of themselves.

Yes! We avoided annihilation in spite of the fact that a bunch of guys in loincloths a few thousand years ago ran out of rock while chiseling their calendar. If you can’t trust the Mayans, I guess you can’t trust anybody anymore. Hey, weren’t they the guys who cut the beating hearts out of people’s chests, decapitated folk to appease weather gods, and other gruesome things that weren’t very Christ like?

Only I know the amount of e-mails I’ve gotten concerning this singular topic over the past few months, and from men and women whom I would have considered mature in the faith. Each – in their unique and roundabout way – wanted to know the same thing, that is, what I thought would happen on December 21, 2012.

At first I would jokingly write back something pithy, since I am known for my pith, but then I started getting annoyed and even somewhat perturbed, because these were after all professing Christians, who were taking a myth from a culture that had no tangential relationship with Christ Jesus, and running with it as though their hair was on fire.

It has become very easy and even somewhat of a frequent occurrence for our generation of believers to mix the sacred and the profane as though they belonged together under the same umbrella of general philosophy or belief structure.

Rather than submit to the authority of God’s word, we are quick to borrow from the godless and the heathen to uphold our preconceived notions and suppositions. Even though the Bible may hold the contrarian view to what we’ve adopted as our pet doctrine, we will site some long extinct tribe whose shaman once read the selfsame thing we assert in the intestines of a freshly slaughtered bovine as our reason for believing what we believe.

We will go out of our way, bend ourselves into pretzels, and butcher the word of God beyond recognition just to make it say what we want it to say, but we will take some guys whose notion of a good time was speed decapitations at their word.

The world was supposed to end, but it didn’t. We’re still here, still breathing the same air, still having to deal with the neighbor who thinks the hallway is the new dumpster. In case you got distracted by this distraction, until the next distraction, if it wouldn’t be too much of a bother could you possible lend a hand, perhaps put your shoulder into it a tad, and help those of us who never stopped laboring to further the kingdom of God?

No, I’m not asking for money, just for professing Christians to start preaching Christ with sincerity of heart, and the same feverish fervor they preached the Mayan End of Days.

Some of us have grown past holding our breaths from one date to another, and keep working through the frenzy, all the way through the big letdown, without rest or respite. Once in a while it would be nice to know we have some company along the way since safety in numbers is a proven truism.

There will always be a date, whether in the distant or not too distant future toward which men look with anticipation. Whether from men setting dates for the catching away, Mayans getting bored with chiseling into rock and giving up the project, or an ancient Swahili legend about an old lady who counted 2014 pebbles into a jar after which it spontaneously combusted (fear not, I made the last one up) there’s always some date to which we look as the definitive day when everything will change.

As I said, the world did not end this morning. This, however, does not mean that the world will never end, or that the approaching darkness is not a real and present reality. When it does happen, it will happen on God’s time, the One God, the only God, the God who spoke the universe into being, and due to whose good pleasure this rock we call home still spins.

If we do not stop trying to blend the sacred and the profane, to borrow what we like from a dozen different cultures while marginalizing the word of God, we will find ourselves shackled and silenced before we realize what’s happening.

While believers of all levels of maturity were having a hissy fit over the Mayan calendar and what it meant, real things have been happening in the world…troubling, dangerous things which will have dire consequences.

With love in Christ,
Michael Boldea Jr.