One of my favorite comic strips is Peanuts. Linus, Lucy, Snoopy are always full of insights and smiles. Ah, but then there’s “Good ol’ Charlie Brown.” Not many things seem to go right for Charlie Brown. He misses kicking the football every fall. He can’t get up enough nerve to speak to the little red-haired girl. And the meaning of Christmas eludes him every year until Linus reminds him what it’s all about. He is said to be wishy-washy—he can’t make up his mind about things. But in fairness to him, he is almost always trying to not make anybody mad or unhappy, which is why he can’t seem to land on one side of the fence or the other.
I was thinking of this characteristic for believers in Christianity the other day. We try so hard sometimes to not get people mad at us. We struggle at being “politically correct” these days and end up being lukewarm in our professing of what we really believe. If you ever listened to what we recite on Sunday mornings in either the Apostles or Nicene Creeds, you would hear anything BUT fence sitting. These statements show the world who we are AND what we profess to believe. And no matter how rote they become they are still a public declaration of the faith we follow. So this Sunday when we stand and say whatever creed we are saying, let’s really think about our belief, our faith and the God that we stand alongside. I ask you to really and truly pay attention to the words we utter so cavalierlay and then tell me, are we still on the fence?
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