If Jesus Came Back . . . He’d Throw Up Continually

“There is the slow poisoning of what we call ‘the environment’ of all things, as if with that antiseptic term we can conceal from ourselves that what we are really poisoning is our home. It is no wonder that the books and newspapers we read, the movies and TV we watch, are obssessed with the dark and the demonic, are full of death and violence. It is as if the reason we wallow in them is that they keep our minds off the real death, the real violence. And God knows the Christian faith has its darkness and demons too, so discredited by religious crooks and phonies, so distorted for political purposes, and in thousands of respectable pulpits proclaimed so blandly and shallowly and without passion, that you wonder sometimes not only if it will survive but even if it deserves to survive. As a character in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters puts it, ‘If Jesus came back and saw what was going on in his name, he’d never stop throwing up.'”

Frederick Buechner





Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *


six + = 11