Well That's Weird | Why We Do What We Do

Christians do a lot of weird stuff. Sometimes it’s hard to notice that when you’re immersed in church culture. But, think about it… We eat a ritual meal that we call the flesh and blood of Jesus. We read ancient manuscripts of letters that have been preserved over two millennia and we assume that somehow it has something to do with us. We sing songs together - often with a hot cup of coffee in hand and a tear rolling down one cheek. That’s weird. Where else do we sing all together other than “take me out to the ballgame,” or the dreaded birthday dirge, bane of introverts everywhere.

Why do we do weird stuff?

One reason is that spirituality is necessarily weird. It has to be distinct in order to be observed. Like sound and silence, the simultaneous experience of both is what gives rise to the phenomenon we call music. Similarly, the material and the mystical give rise to the phenomenon we call spirituality. You have the normal with Starbucks and In-N-Out, and the spiritual with wine and flatbread. It’s not that grapes and wheat are particularly magical, but they are indicators that we have turned our attention from the material to the mystical. Our mystical and religious experiences are like the uncomfortable silences between songs on a playlist, noticeable intrusions into the drone of life to point out what we hope could be obvious - we are all God’s beloved children, enjoying a shared gift called life.

Why should we talk about it?

For two reasons, really… 

First, it is far too easy to take our sacred acts for granted; but, all of the spiritual practices that Christians have adopted over the centuries have come from painstaking trial and error by our predecessors. From the ancient Jewish traditions, to the Jesus movement, and even into the modern age, very few of the sacred acts we (present day, western Christians) practice were actually prescribed in the Bible. Many of them were practices that seemed helpful to the people who initiated them, and the ones that worked stuck.

Second, people who are experiencing Christianity for the first time, can identify the weirdness of our religion like a wooden nickel, and, out of context, it can be rather. So, for all our sakes, let’s talk about why we do what we do.

Follow along as we release a series of blogs about the peculiar things that Christians do as part of our expression of faith.