Christians Schooled By an MTV Icon

When I started posting regularly here again, I was kind of going for a "theme of the day" thing during each week.

Sundays would be sex day.
Mondays would be music day.
Tuesdays would be Christians and politics day.

Wednesdays, of course, would be days for personal testimony or for me to share my personal struggles.

Thursdays would be family day.
Fridays would be church day.
Saturdays would be my day off.

This week, I got sidetracked because I'm still getting used to Jessica's new college schedule (which is a difficult maneuver when you have an 18 month-old son) and because I was, quite simply, focusing on other things (like making sure my rent for the coming month gets paid). I'll get back on track Sunday (I hope), but in the meantime, here's a topic that fits all 6 categories: Madonna's now-famous "booing" incident in Romania.

Madonna, who was one of the musicians I listened to for most of my adult life, got on stage in Romania and basically told an audience of thousands that their attitudes toward the Gypsies make her "sad." I found the example she set to be riveting. How does a singer who represents--not only in her music but her lifestyle--beliefs that are hostile to Christ manage to school not only believing Christians in the West but also believing Christians in Eastern Europe on the issue of racism? How is it that she managed to have the courage to speak in the face of a regional prejudice that most of us Christians in the United States cannot seem to bring ourselves to acknowledge?

The issue here isn't the Roma. I know nothing about the Roma people and have never (to my knowledge) actually met one.

The issue here is racism, and the failure of Christians to combat it whenever it raises its brass-knuckled fists. You see, Christianity has far too often been the HOME of attitudes like the kind that Madonna was combatting, and I wonder if perhaps God finally decided that He had to shame us by using a celebrity whose spirituality is steeped in witchcraft and paganism to confront a terrible injustice. As I read the news article on Yahoo! about Madonna and about the discriminatory attitudes against gypsies in Romania, I could not help but think about the millions of African Americans in our country who have faced challenges similar to those the Roma apparently face in Eastern Europe every day. A lot of what I read in that article sounded like the kind of evil that used to happen openly in our coutry during the decades immediately following the end of Jim Crow, and like African Americans, Roma face a double standard, honored as celiebrity entertainers but pushed away from the same access to basic opportunities that other Eastern Europeans have.

The shame here is that in our country, Christians finally did start speaking out about the injustice of the Jim Crow laws, and the Civil Rights Movement that resulted was largely a Christian movement. However, in Romania, a country where there are also a lot of Christians, there seems to be no voice, no Martin Luther King Jr., to challenge the way things are. Also, there does not seem to be much of an outcry here in the United States (or in other Western countries) about that, in the same way that there was (and should have been) an outcry about segregation and Apartheid.

My question is this: Where's Christinaity's heart these days?

Is it all about building up churches and building up numbers, or does love (the Love of God) require us to take a stand, even when the issue has nothing specifically to do with Salvation, prayer, or family values?

Personally, I think the Jesus whose body was broken for a Kingdom where there is neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, male nor female--the same Jesus who told the story of the good Samaritan--calls us to do His bidding and love our brethren, ESPECIALLY when our society wants us to view them as enemies or animals. Maybe that sounds political to you, but ladies and gentlemen, if you have an ounce of the Love that Christ birthed in you, why WOULDN'T you do whatever is necessary to make other people's lives a little better? Taking a stand for Jesus doesn't always mean holding a prayer service in front of your school. Maybe it means rolling up your sleeves and doing something to help the downtrodden and oppressed in your community, even if you have to face down bigger, meaner, and cleverer men and women to do it. Living in the Kingdom involves risk, because our King calls us to walk straight into the lion's dens of this world and snatch hungry, thirsty, and naked souls from the jaws of animal teeth, but Jesus is always there to help us take that risk, just as He was for Moses and David and Esther.

Maybe it's time we stopped letting the Madonnas of the world take that risk and started doing it ourselves.