Real is the cross: the cross of life in our fallen, broken, corrupted, and dying world, as well as the cross of Jesus Christ, the world’s only hope and the one thing in this life that is truly real in the sense of carrying us to salvation and everlasting life.
Sometimes I think our plastic and narcissistic culture has placed us into a kind of delusional “matrix” along the lines of the film of that name. The job of the Church and her ministers is to rouse people from their slumber, from their contentment to medicate and play and entertain their way out of facing the reality that the wages of sin is death—so that we can then lead them to Christ, who is the real solution to the real problem. We are dealing with people who no longer understand what is real and what is not real, a culture that presumes that posed people from stock photos are real, while considering that which is truly real, life under the cross of Jesus, to be somehow unreal. Once people understand the eternal reality of our fallen world and the reality of the incarnation, atonement, and the eternal kingdom of our Lord, it is much harder to fall back into the lie, the satanic delusion that all is well.… To be real in this day and age is to be countercultural, to stand out against the dull hum of phony conformity and soul-numbing mediocrity.
The one real Person who is making a real difference is Christ.
Sometimes I think our plastic and narcissistic culture has placed us into a kind of delusional “matrix” along the lines of the film of that name. The job of the Church and her ministers is to rouse people from their slumber, from their contentment to medicate and play and entertain their way out of facing the reality that the wages of sin is death—so that we can then lead them to Christ, who is the real solution to the real problem. We are dealing with people who no longer understand what is real and what is not real, a culture that presumes that posed people from stock photos are real, while considering that which is truly real, life under the cross of Jesus, to be somehow unreal. Once people understand the eternal reality of our fallen world and the reality of the incarnation, atonement, and the eternal kingdom of our Lord, it is much harder to fall back into the lie, the satanic delusion that all is well.… To be real in this day and age is to be countercultural, to stand out against the dull hum of phony conformity and soul-numbing mediocrity.
The one real Person who is making a real difference is Christ.
Larry Beane, Gottesdienst, Vol. 22.4
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