Does it imply something about my politics? Does it tell you what sort of a car I drive? Is it a label sewn into my clothes, like the once-celebrated label of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union from this 1981 ad campaign? Yes, I confess I used dress like that. In fact, I used to know all the words to that hokey song. Does that confession tell you anything about my Christianity?

The famous author of vampire novels turned "Christian author" Anne Rice has apparently grown tired of being labeled a Christian. Here's the statement she released via Facebook:

I quit being a Christian. I'm out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.

In a discussion about her statement on First Things, Rice added this comment:

It is possible for a well informed, well educated and well intentioned Catholic, after considerable reflection, to walk away from the church. It does happen. ... Whatever my faults, and I have countless faults, I am committed to Christ and I do have good intentions. I have endeavored to be honest with myself and others about my lifelong spiritual quest.

I believe Rice has had a sincere encounter with Jesus Christ, and I take her at her word that she does not intend to reject Christ so much as all that she has come to associate with that word Christianity. Rice is an articulate and talented writer who understands the meaning of the words she is using. She may not fully understand the problems with her new intention to "walk away from the church," but she is certainly expressing sentiments that are shared by many who have grown frustrated with the church and how Christianity has been hijacked by political operatives of both the left and the right.

(If you are interested, I favorably reviewed Anne Rice's first novel on the life of Jesus here.)

Jeff Dunn, who writes for The Internet Monk, had some good things to say about this whole issue of what it means to be called a Christian. I'm going to quote from him extensively because he says it better than I could:

The first time we find the word "Christian" in the scriptures is in Acts 11:26 where we read that "in Antioch the Lord's followers were first called Christians." I'm not sure that it was a compliment then. The "Lord's followers" were being called "little Christs" as the way they lived caused them to resemble Jesus the Christ. And that, in those days, was not a good thing. It branded one as a rebel, an outcast in the Jewish religious system. It was not, apparently, a name these followers adopted for themselves, but one that was put upon them by observers of their way of life. In a short time, to be known as a Christian meant your life and the life of your family was in danger. Saul — before he became Paul the Apostle — went from house to house, dragging men and women off to jail just for being known as Christians. ...

Over the centuries, the name Christian has gotten farther and farther away from its original meaning: "little Christ." Today in our Western culture, we use it as an adjective to describe the forms of entertainment we are comfortable with (Christian music, Christian movies, Christian fiction), the style of clothing we wear (Christian t-shirts), the kinds of businesses we deal with (Christian doctor, Christian hair dresser, etc.). We hear it used as a verb to describe one's actions ("That wasn't a very Christian thing to say"). And we use it as a noun to label what we believe. "I'm a Christian."

It is this label that is in question today. Just what allows one to be called a Christian? Is it by subscribing to a set of beliefs? By the act of baptism in infancy? Does one earn the right to the name for repeating a certain vow or confessing a specific creed? The answer to each of these questions is both "yes" and "no." ...

The name Christian has accumulated so much baggage over the years it is now very weighty to carry. When I say I am a Christian, people may automatically assume I am against gay marriage, against national health care, against President Obama, against taxes, against the Democratic party agenda. The first thing that comes to their minds is not how I reflect Jesus in my life, but the cultural and political things I am against. — What's in a name, Jeff Dunn

That last sentence is, I think, what has driven Anne Rice to say what she has said. Let me repeat what Dunn observes: "[When someone learns that I am a Christian,] the first thing that comes to their minds is not how I reflect Jesus in my life, but the cultural and political things I am against."

Is that what Jesus intended?

In the redemptive ministry of Jesus, God has engaged in a radical inclusivity in which all are invited to participate. Christianity is the ultimate big tent. In Jesus' parable of the banquet in Luke 14:16-24, after the host has been snubbed by many of the invited guests, he orders his servant to go out into the streets to bring as many as will come.

After the servant had done this, he reported, "There is still room for more." So his master said, "Go out into the country lanes and behind the hedges and urge anyone you find to come, so that the house will be full." — Luke 14:22-23, NLT

The Christian church has at times had a very unfortunate — and un-Christian — tendency to shut its doors against some whom God would include in the gift of the cross. We have this human flaw, this pride, that makes us want to be exclusive. We limit the guest list, where God seems to want his house to be full.

By rejecting the label "Christian" and Christ's church, Anne Rice has made a serious mistake. Ironically, in her frustration with those who would draw the circle of inclusivity narrowly, she has herself made the circle too small, excluding those with political and doctrinal views she does not agree with.

Politics is the means by which we organize a civil society. Christians must be engaged, which means that we have to take a serious interest in politics. But many of the political questions of our day are questions without clear biblical answers, even though they almost always involve the application of Christian principles. For instance, God commands governments to act justly and to treat citizens with fairness and compassion. He has nothing much to say, in Scripture at least, about universal health care.

Christianity makes for strange bedfellows. If we are Christians, and if that label means that we live our lives as "little Christs," we will be known as a people who love "tax collectors and other disreputable sinners" (Matthew 9:10). Democrats, Republicans, Greens, Tea-partiers, Socialists, Fascists, all are invited to kneel before the cross of Christ. Together. In a group hug. Smiling, even.

It's a good thing we have eternity to work these things out.

Photo credit: tomrue.net

[G]radually [the young soldier] ... found that he could look back upon the brass and bombast of his earlier gospels and see them truly. He was gleeful when he discovered that he now despised them. ... He felt a quiet manhood, non-assertive but of sturdy and strong blood. He knew that he would no more quail before his guides wherever they should point. He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man. — The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane, 1895.

There comes a moment in every life when we are tested by some particular crisis. Our assumptions and beliefs are put on the line; we discover what we are really made of and where the truest commitments of our hearts reside.

If we fail the test, we must thereafter doubt the sincerity of those core beliefs, or else, we must wonder if we have inside of us the courage to stand by our convictions.

Yet, if we fail, and many of us do, life may provide us a second chance, an opportunity to redeem a battered reputation. We may re-examine untested or naïve beliefs and adopt a more carefully-considered code. Or, we may discover that the fault lies not in the values we hold dear, but in a hesitation to lay our lives at the feet of those values.

In Stephen Crane's classic novel The Red Badge of Courage, a young man full of youthful bravado joins his friends to fight in the American Civil War. He is all untested courage and prideful certainty about how he will conduct himself on the battlefield. His green regiment is eager to join the fight, bragging lustily that they will cut through the enemy like a scythe.

But when the young soldiers are tested in their first battle, he and many of his compatriots give in to their fear of death. He drops his rifle and runs, deserting his regiment and the cause he claims to believe in.

Stephen Crane was a struggling young writer and New York Tribune journalist in 1895, barely able to keep himself fed on his literary income, when The Red Badge of Courage became an object of international acclaim. Crane was just 24 years old. Veteran soldiers praised the book's battlefield accuracy — quite an accomplishment considering Crane had never been to war. Crane's vivid, realistic style kicked off a new era in literature that had many imitators. The British writer H.G. Wells called Crane "beyond dispute, the best writer of our generation." Crane's "untimely death [before reaching the age of 29] was an irreparable loss to our literature."

After fleeing deep into the woods, Henry Fleming, the young protagonist of Crane's novel, congratulates himself on having the good sense to save his own hide. Certain that his regiment will be decimated, he wanders away from the gunfire until he stumbles on a sorrowful parade of the wounded heading to the rear.

He joins them, hoping to sneak away. A wounded soldier tries to befriend him and cautiously inquires about the nature of the younger man's wound. Fleming angrily evades his questions and begins to battle inside himself with guilt, scorn and wounded pride.

His self-serving justifications are challenged when he meets a wounded friend from his old unit and realizes that his friend is dying. Henry tries to help the man, but can do little more than stand by in horror as he dies alone beside the dusty road.

Grief stricken and furious — both with himself and the war — Fleming turns back and wanders to the front, drawn without realizing it by duty, a growing courage, and a need to vindicate his friend's death. He rejoins his regiment, and soon rejoins the fight.

His fears now seem to melt away before a fiery, newfound courage. By putting himself back into harm's way, the young man regains his sense of honor and discovers within himself the strength and courage that had earlier abandoned him.

When their battle is won and his comrades are celebrating victory, Fleming feels no joy. He can only think of his earlier betrayal. He has faced his fears, done his duty, but the guilt of his earlier sin torments him, and he worries that it may eat at him forever.

"Yet gradually he mustered force to put the sin at a distance," Crane writes. That "place of blood and wrath" heals the young soldier's broken soul, redeeming him from the shame of his failure. He walks away feeling transformed, set free. As the battle-weary men march to the rear for some rest, a gentle rain begins to fall, cleansing young Henry Fleming on the outside as surely as the bloody fight has cleansed his heart.

Christians will recognize the significance of the blood and the water as symbols of our redemption.

It can be difficult to forgive ourselves for our failures. Despite the lavish forgiveness Christ has poured out for us on the cross, some of us find it hard to let go of those terrible failures, hurts and betrayals that we have been guilty of. Our sins accuse us, mock us and constantly remind us of our weakness.

But God does not accuse us. He forgives. Our sins are lovingly blotted out at the cross by the blood of Jesus, and we are healed. We can rightly "put the sin at a distance" and move on.

We worship a God who generously grants us second chances. Life was not intended to be defined by our failures. We can live, instead, under grace; we can walk through life with courage.

Photo credit: Mathew Brady

The ancients were afraid that if they went to the end of the earth, they would fall off and be consumed by dragons. But once we understand that Christianity is true to what is there, true to the ultimate environment — the infinite, personal God who is really there — then our minds are freed. We can pursue any question and can be sure that we will not fall off the end of the earth. — Art and the Bible, Francis Schaeffer

The great scientific discoveries of Albert Einstein — quantum theory, general relativity, a theory of gravity that proved Isaac Newton wrong — were all made possible by his willingness to consider unorthodox answers to questions that had been studied for centuries. Today, we would say that Einstein was good at thinking outside of the box. In the best of worlds, that is exactly what science should do.

I'm continuing to read about the life of Albert Einstein in Walter Isaacson's excellent and well-researched biography: Einstein: His life and universe.

Scientists are human, and humans like the comforts of orthodoxy, of conformance to the accepted wisdom of our day. We prefer standing on solid ground instead of shifting sands. Though we play up this romantic, heroic image of scientists pushing back against the accepted wisdom, it is often true that scientists can get too comfortable too quickly with agreeable theories of how the world works.

So, for instance, at a time when the accepted model of the universe was that it was limitless and unchanging, Einstein postulated a finite universe that curved back on itself, as if the stars were arrayed on the skin of a balloon. It was not an intuitive idea and it met with a good deal of resistance among his colleagues. But it created certain explanations that fit the evidence, and over time Einstein's model has become the new orthodoxy.

The difficulty about the tension between orthodoxy and non-conformity is that much of what counts for accepted wisdom is probably true. The Earth appears flat but really is round, despite the tongue-in-cheek protestations of the Flat Earth Society. Parallel railroad tracks appear to meet in the distance, but we know that our eyes play tricks on us. Appearances can be deceiving.

From the perspective of Christianity, the orthodoxy of modern science and the Enlightenment often seem to argue against the Christian faith.

Was the historical figure known as Jesus Christ merely another great moral teacher, or was he God taking on the life of a human being?

Did Jesus rise again from the grave after the Romans executed him, or did his body return to the dust of the earth as ours will?

Is there life after death, or is this all there is?

To accept the orthodox Christian answers to these questions is to reject the comfortable orthodoxy of our post-modern age. Christian faith requires a certain Einsteinian rebelliousness against conformity, a willingness not only to think outside of the box, but actually make one's home there.

You'll notice, too, that the articles of faith of Christian orthodoxy cannot be tested by any modern scientific experiment. If they are true, they cannot be known in the same way that we know that the Earth is a sphere. They have to be accepted on faith, which is to say that we choose to believe them because we come to see them as more likely to be true than the alternatives.

Einstein claimed to enjoy the explosive debates that his unorthodox theories incited. On a few occasions, however, those criticisms got under his skin and he lashed out angrily. It's difficult and lonely, pitching one's tent on the outside of the camp. Embracing Christian orthodoxy means leaving behind the comfortable orthodoxy of the accepted wisdom of our time. It has been known to drive a wedge between friends and loved ones. Unorthodox faith in an infinite God will cost you something.

But that isn't the same as saying that unorthodoxy is irrational. It is not. As Einstein demonstrated, thinking outside of the box is one of the highest traditions of good science. Thanks to Einstein, we now know that the universe, like our spherical planet, is different than it appears.

By all appearances, we are alone in the universe, and this material life is all there is. That is the accepted orthodoxy of our time.

If that orthodoxy is wrong, if God exists and Jesus rose from the grave, then nothing is as it appears. The question for each of us, therefore, is whether we will live in comfortable conformity to the accepted orthodoxy of our age, or will dare to think, and live, outside of the box.

As if it isn't enough that oil is flooding the Gulf of Mexico and volcanoes are erupting in Iceland, it now appears that the sun is on the fritz. Yes, the sun. Which begs the question, if the sun blinks out and Earth turns to a ball of ice, will Democrats blame George W Bush?

Before you grab those survival biscuits and head for the basement, let me assure you that the sun is not quitting anytime soon. It's just developed a glitch, kind of a rebooting problem, like the solar equivalent of Microsoft's blue screen of death.

Unfortunately, we're way, way, way beyond warranty coverage here.

Here's the deal. Every 11 years, the sun takes a nap. This is known as the "solar minimum." Sun spot activity and solar storms quiet down significantly during this period. After a year of quiescence, sun spots and solar storms crank up again and everything goes back to normal.

During these quiet times, the sun produces a little less solar radiation, which makes the earth a bit cooler. During one very long and quiet period known as the Maunder minimum (1645-1715), Europe actually experienced a mini-ice age.

In this most recent cycle, the sun went to sleep in 2007 and should have started waking up again in 2008.

[C]omputer models predicted that when the spots did return, they would do so in force. ... The first sign that the prediction was wrong came when 2008 turned out to be even calmer than expected. That year, the sun was spot-free 73 per cent of the time, an extreme dip even for a solar minimum. Only the minimum of 1913 was more pronounced, with 85 per cent of that year clear. ... As 2009 arrived, solar physicists looked for some action. They didn't get it. The sun continued to languish until mid-December, when the largest group of sunspots to emerge for several years appeared. Finally, a return to normal? Not really.

Even with the solar cycle finally under way again, the number of sunspots has so far been well below expectations. Something appears to have changed inside the sun, something the models did not predict. —What's wrong with the sun?, The New Scientist, 14 June 2010

As if that news isn't bad enough, it also appears that the sun is shrinking. Carl Sagan once said, "We live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe." Now, change that word "humdrum" to "puny" and you can imagine the global inferiority complex that might set in!

Given all this cheery news, you may want to book that trip to the south of France sooner rather than later.

What's really happening, of course, is that the sun is behaving differently than the computer models would predict. Which means, established theories about the mechanisms that power our sun may need revising. Which means, things we were certain were true in 2007 may be questionable just 3 years later. We're always learning how little we really know about creation.

All this reminds me that I rarely thank God for the sun. Maybe this would be a good time to start?

It is the LORD who provides the sun to light the day and the moon and stars to light the night... — Jeremiah 31:35, NLT

Image credit: NASA, Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO)

Operation Overlord, the code name for the Allied invasion of Europe, began on D-Day, June 6, 1944, with a combined assault on the coast of Normandy by paratroopers, Navy gunners and 175,000 foot soldiers attacking from the beaches. Most of the invasion force consisted of young men who had never strayed far from their home towns. They crossed the Atlantic with a combination of youthful bravado and apprehension, and on D-Day they took their first steps on the European mainland.

Taking those steps meant leaping from small landing craft and struggling through the pounding surf while dodging machine gun and mortar fire. They bravely fought their way up steep embankments at places code-named Omaha, Sword, Utah, Gold and Juno, while Army Rangers assaulted the Nazi cliff-top fortress at Pointe du Hoc.

10,000 Allied soldiers were killed or wounded on that day, along with some 9,000 Germans. Many from both sides are buried in the green fields of Normandy, with the American Cemetery sited on the windswept heights above Omaha beach, near Colleville-sur-Mer, on the very land where Americans gained their first bloody victory in the long battle for European liberation.

The history of Europe was forever changed by those heroic young men whose sacrifice has been appropriately immortalized at the American Cemetery. There they are forever at rest from war beneath rank after rank of white marble crosses and stars of David planted in a sloping field of lush, green grass.

The history of America was forever changed, as well, by a generation who survived the horrors of war and came back different from when they left, and by the loss of thousands whose young minds and hearts would never return from their long journey across the ocean.

Wherever I have traveled in France, I've found memorials to those who have died fighting for her freedom. Stone crosses and monuments stand here and there along the highways. Great cities and small towns have raised soaring statues in the most public of places to honor those who fell trying to protect France from her enemies.

I think it's interesting, and quite fitting, that these memorials have not been relegated to hidden corners of a local cemetery. They are appropriately front and center in the country's many squares and parks, and in her consciousness, a very public reminder of the hefty price France has paid for her freedom.

Whatever political differences exist between our two nations today, the French people continue to be generous in their praise for the immeasurable Allied sacrifice that liberated Europe from the Nazis.

I was touched, too, by the remarkable grace France has shown Germany in situating a cemetery for German war dead just a dozen kilometers from Omaha beach, near the historic city of Bayeux. It is a stark and somber place, with huddled groups of heavy, black crosses, the individual graves marked by simple square tablets. Walking there was deeply troubling; I couldn't help wonder how so many bright, young men could have been caught up in Hitler's madness.

The world has not yet learned how to live in peace. Islamic extremism may be more disorganized than Hitler's Third Reich, but it is every bit as dedicated to forcible conquest, and every bit as willing to shed innocent blood to achieve its ends.

American men and women are still being asked to lay down their lives in far off lands in order to safeguard our freedom and security. Politics has created doubts and divisions about the value of their mission, but it cannot diminish the honor they bring to themselves by the sacrifice they make for their country, and their comrades in arms.

For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to harvest. A time to kill and a time to heal. A time to tear down and a time to build up. A time to cry and a time to laugh. A time to grieve and a time to dance. A time to scatter stones and a time to gather stones. A time to embrace and a time to turn away. A time to search and a time to quit searching. A time to keep and a time to throw away. A time to tear and a time to mend. A time to be quiet and a time to speak. A time to love and a time to hate. A time for war and a time for peace. — Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, NLT

May the Lord soon bring us to that long-awaited time of peace.