Crafting areas of belonging- What would Jesus truly do?
When looking at how we, as followers of Jesus, ought to behave we have no greater example than the man we follow. The issue of crafting areas where people can belong is one I’ve addressed here before. But something I haven’t really talked about is how far from the ideal of Jesus’ behaviors we’ve truly fallen. To demonstrate this point, I’ll talk about a few different groups of people that are close to my heart.
- The punks, the goths, the scattered remnants of culture on the edge of society: I can’t just point to one youth movement and say “that one”, there are too many. So whether it’s the guy getting high in the alleyway or the tattooed beauty throwing down dance moves in the club- where do they belong in relation to us? How do we get close enough to share God’s heart with them? We can’t say, “come to us, all who are thirsty,” and just wait for them to show up on a Sunday morning… especially since if they showed up looking like they do on Friday night, we’d just throw them out.
- The single parents and couples choosing to live together without marrying: They don’t have relationships like the Good Christian Standard, and they are painfully aware of it. Talking about their kids or their partners means talking about how very much they’ve fallen short of what is expected, should they become Christian. They may miss the faith of their youth or just know there is something missing from their life… but trying to build a relationship with the church is full of discomfort and feeling judged and found wanting. One might argue that this is part of how God “convicts” them and shows them their need for him… but do you think God really wants to convict them right out of ever even trying to worship him? How can we show them his love?
- Gay people. Do I even need to say more?
Jesus ministered to people in three major ways: He went to where they were (by eating in their homes), he went to places where they had easy access to him (by preaching on hillsides, at the docks, or in the marketplace), and he performed miracles for the desperately needy. All of these ways of ministering were revolutionary. A good priest would not eat at a tax collectors home, most certainly not in the company of drunkards and other sinners, as Jesus did (Matthew 9, Mark 2, Luke 5) as this would make them unclean. A good priest spoke from a place of authority- such as the temple or the city gates. Going out into public arenas that were the province of farmers and tradesman would have been an act of lowering onesself- but these were the arenas in which Jesus gained all of his power. Why? Because the people flocked to him. Because they were welcomed by him. The dichotomy of Jesus versus the religious leaders sees no greater example than this, as women and children were not even allowed into the temple proper, and thus could never be taught in the way men were. But the Bible shows so often that women and children were also welcomed into Jesus’ world, never more clearly than in Luke 18 when Jesus so famously says, “let the children come to me… The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these.”
Then, of course, there are the miracles. People like the Man born blind (John 9) whom people saw as recieving his judgment through his blindness, and thus avoided. Or the woman who was subject to an issue of blood (Matthew 9) who touched Jesus’ cloak- an act which could have been seen as horribly offensive. A woman who was bleeding was not to leave her home or to touch a man, as this was unclean. But yet this woman had faith that Jesus would pity her, she thought, “I will only touch his cloak”, and he turns to her and says, “take heart.”
That must have blown her world apart.
So Jesus created three arenas in which the people belonged with him (or he belonged to them, as one might see it)- in their homes, in their public world, and through meeting their immediate needs and taking pity on them. How can we, as Christians, do the same? Are we brave enough to dine at the home of a gay couple? To pass out water at the door of the blue-haired girl’s favorite bar or club? To give diapers to the teenage mother, or groceries to the couple living “in sin”?
Are we brave enough to take off the WWJD? bumper sticker and really ask ourselves what our Father is doing?
Life is Erratic
And, thusly, posting is erratic. Shortly after committing to posting week-daily again, my computer went kaput. This is coupled with daily life issues such as starting a new business venture and not knowing how long my husband’s job will last. So I apologize, as I seem to be doing a lot lately, for being such an inconsistent blogger. Hopefully we can get this whole thing figured out soon, because I really *miss* being present.
How SLC Punk made me go to church.
My call back to the church came through an interesting fulcrum: the movie SLC Punk.
I’d been reading my Bible. I’d been finding comfort in music, in art, in writing. I’d been feeling stronger and stronger day by day. But it was SLC Punk that made me want to leave the valley of my discontent for good. For those who don’t know the story, SLC Punk is about a group of anarchists who are looking for, um, something. The main character is the son of a banker (or lawyer, or some kind of glorified white collar grunt) who drives a nice car and eats at fancy restaurants and is adamant that he didn’t “sell out” but instead “bought in” to a bigger dream. At the end of the movie you see the main character walking down the street in a fancy suit, saying that it’s easier to dismantle the machine from the inside. I’d watched the movie several times before and never been as struck by that imagery as I was on one balmy summer night. I was laying on the couch fanning myself to stay cool, hating the heat and humidity and pretty much everything about life. I heard that line, and something inside my head clicked. It was like a cool breeze suddenly blew through the window. Everything was more bearable.
I’d been content, until that point, to stick to my group of likeminded friends and complain. We’d all had similar scars and experiences, we all fed into each other’s dissatisfaction and bitterness. We talked about wanting to fight the powers, but we never fought anything. We never affected anything. I’m not saying that there wasn’t tremendous value in what we did for each other: we needed each other. We were a balm for each other. Our unity helped us to heal. But as long as we stayed content to lick each other’s wounds, we’d never help anyone else. If I wanted to see the empire change, I’d have to put on my fancy suit and get inside it.
If I wanted a relevant youth ministry, I had to minister. If I wanted a worship song without ad-lib lyrics, I’d have to write it. If I wanted a sermon from a different part of the Bible I’d have to preach it. If I wanted traditional leadership to be challenged, I’d have to sound the alarm. And that wasn’t going to happen as long as I was laying on my couch watching Fight Club every Sunday morning instead of biting the bullet and reinserting myself into the Christian lifestyle.
(To be continued…)
There if not but for the grace of God, go I.
Otherwise known as: we all sin. Don’t we?
My dad has a great philosophy about judgment. He says that judgment is any time a person looks at another person’s choices and says “if I were given the same set of circumstances, I’d do better.” It’s easy to judge in that kind of way when you know you’d never have the same sort of circumstances. Actually, it’s easy even when you’ve got the same set of circumstances and you make the same bad choices. I can’t count the amount of times that I, as a mother of toddlers, have winced when I witness a mom going through a store ignoring her child’s tantrum when I myself have been that mother a week before. When given the choice between leaving (and not getting the groceries I need to make that night’s meal) or taking my child into the bathroom to calm down (knowing that they will just start screaming for cookies again) or just ignoring the behavior and hoping that at some point they wise up to the fact that it’s not effective, I choose option C. Not because I’m a bad mother, but because of the fact that at some point I had to accept the fact that no matter how well I do my job, my kids are still free to make their own bad choices. And sometimes kids behave badly.
Don’t we all? I may not be two anymore, but there are still times where I figuratively see the cookies, know there’s not the money for the cookies, still want the cookies, and have to whine “but I wanted COOKIES” all the way home. Truthfully in my case it’s usually not really cookies but the strawberries and blueberries I want to plant, or the new clothes I could really use, or the extravagant meal I want to cook, or just the success that other people seem to have that I crave no matter how successful I am in my own ventures. Let’s be honest, dear readers: no matter how much older we get, in some ways we never grow. I look at my daughter looking at the other child screaming in the cart, I see the glint in her eyes and I know what she’s going to say. “Mom,” she says, “why can’t he just stop screaming? He’s loud. It’s rude.” I have to keep my smirk to myself as I quietly remind her that last week she was the loud child, and sometimes when we’re tired and hungry we make poor choices.
And then I go to church the next Sunday, and I think about all the times I’ve seen people ready to throw some poor soul out because of the bad choices they’ve made, and I wonder when we’ll all learn. We’ve all thrown tantrums. We’ve all disobeyed out of selfishness and silly motivations. We’ve all had our moments where we didn’t care that we were sinning because we felt it was our right, or it would hurt too hard to quit. We all want sympathy for our own failings, grace and compassion, understanding and temperance. But when it comes to the failings of others we’re all too quick to stamp “failure” on their foreheads and send them away.
There if not for the grace of God, right?
I think we hear that saying and we miss the real meaning. We look at it as proof of God’s devotion to ourselves, because we’re the ones that got the grace. But that’s not the point. We need to fully realize our own responsibility to pay out the grace we’ve been given, to live it out in full. Grace offered is grace lost if we don’t give it away.
So don’t keep it for yourself.
I’m moving!
Not the blog, but in real life!
We’re getting a proper house! No more apartment that charges more than a mortgage payment, no more hearing people stomping around above our heads at night (unless the kids get out of bed, of course) no more sharing a yard unless we want to!
Of course, this means the most articulated thoughts I can manage read mostly like “OMG BUNNIES I FORGOT TO SORT THROUGH THE KIDS CLOTHES FOR WHAT WE NEED TO YARD SALE WHERE ARE THOSE BOXES?”
So forgive the lack of blog posting. Just imagine something that basically reads, “compassion = good, judgment = bad, Christianity = conflicted, let’s work this out!” and you’ll have the basic gist of what I’d write anyway.
Wish me luck!
We’ll be all moved in the 25th, so I should be thinking sanely by the second week in May.
My Easter Message.
So… Easter always puts me in an odd mood. Note that it has taken four days for me to talk myself down out of stated mood enough to write a post about it. When I mention this fact to other Christians, I get asked questions like, “What? Don’t you want to celebrate your salvation?” Or possibly just a wide-eyed slightly terrifying victory call of, “HE IS RISEN!” To which I must bite my tongue in order to stop myself from replying, “yes. I’ve known that since before I ever gave my life to him. Getting so fanatically excited about that fact makes about as much sense to me as choosing a single day of the year to celebrate loving your spouse. Do it ALL THE TIME. They are ALWAYS there, you don’t need an EXCUSE to get excited about it. Only having one day of the year that you DO celebrate them makes it seem more like obligation and peer pressure than genuine desire.”
But I hold my tongue, at least for the remainder of the day, because it seems rude to do otherwise.
Then I talk myself down out of my fugue, and I’ve got to ask myself why I got so far up into it in the first place. Here’s the thing: Yes, He is Risen. He is Risen Indeed. But what does that really mean to us? Now, I’m going to sum up years of NT Wright’s finest work in a few short paragraphs. Please note that while NT Wright has explained to me far more about what I’ve always believed than I could have ever understood on my own, this is not solely my scholarly work or opinion. Vast tomes have been written on the subject, and you should buy them. (Link)
In the Beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth. Creation fell away from it’s original glory. Not just Male and Female, but all creation. There came a separation, a disconnect. All things were bent from their purpose. The ground, the fields, the male and female- they were all cursed. And from that moment, the Biblical narrative tells the story of a God that will stop at nothing to see all things redeemed. Please, note here that I am not saying you and I only- I am emphatically stating that ALL things need redemption. Creation itself is calling out to its creator.
Just look at this:
We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. (Romans 8:22)
There’s a big emotional impact to saying, “Jesus suffered all of this for YOU!” One cannot discount the awe and wonder invoked when a preschool lesson ends with, “and who is the person who God did all of this for? Let’s look!” to the unveiling of a mirror, and the knowledge that we all matter intensely to God. But I think that as powerful (and true) as such dramatic statements are, they discount an aspect of our faith that is accutely necessary.
All of creation has been groaning.
On the first day, God created.
On the sixth day, Jesus died.
The seventh day there is silence…
Then comes a new day, a risen Christ, the redemption of creation.
But what does it mean?
See, this is what I want Easter to be about. Not about me, and my needs, and my salvation, and the sinner’s prayer. I want it to be about the Kingdom of God. About us being the hands and feet of the body. About our work to continue what the early church started. Spreading redemption. Not through pamphlets and the sinner’s prayer and passion plays, but through real, quantifiable actions. Through feeding the hungry, clothing the needy, holding up the heads of the oppressed, fighting injustice, spreading equality.
Salvation is NOT simply about eternity. It is about living out the new creation in our own lives. Being “born again”, being changed beings. And if we do not see the fruits of that change in our lives we judge ourselves lacking. Judge the vine by what it produces. If I am redeemed, I will leave the fingerprints of God’s work in my life on every single thing I do. My art will breathe life. My work will breathe life. My writing will breathe life. If this is not the case for all of us, there are serious questions to ask.
And, in my mind, what better time to ask them than on Easter?
Celebrate your salvation every single day. And when the time comes to build a monument to it, to be reminded of it, what better thing to do than to issue a call to return to our higher purpose? To be the creation that God intended us to be?
Breathe life.
Sorry For the Absence
I deeply apoloize for my dropping off the face of the earth for a little bit, there. As most of you know, in my Real Life I’m a stay at home mom. Time to work has to be strictly scheduled. It’s been my custom to get up at the crack of dawn to write, but the last few weeks there’s been a lot of illness in my family and my son hasn’t been sleeping well. (He may be teething, too, it’s so hard to tell with him.) So since my Boy has been unable to sleep unless physically connected to me, I haven’t been able to get out of bed and get myself dressed, groomed and ready for the day without him attached to me, and that makes it really hard to get in the right spirit to write.
I’m really trying to find a way around this little issue, but so far none has presented itself. So as soon as I can get my home life back in functioning order I promise to resume posting. Until then I’ll just keep posting whenever I can manage to swindle time away from home. (Which, as the last week has shown, is intermitent and not dependable.)
In other news, I’ll also be gone the entire week of Christmas.
Sicky-poo
No post today, as I got the “24 hour stomach bug” and it’s been hanging around for four days.
Must go rest.
Honest Conversation: yet another excerpt
I don’t have time to write a post today, so I’ll just plug my book some more!
The following is a conversation between Zoe (the associate pastor) and Kyle, with Kyle’s boyfriend Evan chiming in from time to time.
“When I first started feeling like I was really gay, I told my mom.” He said, “and she flipped out. She sat me down and she told me all about how good boys don’t become gay, how it’s something that only happens to evil people. And she told me I needed to repent and find the sin that made me gay and change it.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said, not knowing what else to say. I wasn’t taking his name in vain, I was honestly trying to invoke his presence.
“And I tried to. I really tried to. For a year, I tried to. I prayed and prayed and begged and begged and I did everything I knew how to, to be good. And I tried dating a girl. I tried kissing her. I tried to make myself love her. And the whole time I felt like what I was doing was so wrong. I hated myself, for trying to be someone I wasn’t. I used to be able to feel God in things, so long ago. I used to be able to tell that I was making God happy. But no matter how hard I tried to make God happy that year all I felt was this resounding emptiness.”
“A Godshaped hole,” I said with all of the irony of a girl who spent years in Sunday school talking about the hole that only Jesus Christ could fill.
“Then I met this boy, Milo.” Kyle smiled, “and the first time he smiled at me, I felt desperately sick. I wanted him so badly it scared the crap out of me.”
Evan chuckled.
“Laugh all you want,” Kyle said, “but I think I literally crapped my pants.”
I suddenly felt a million pinpricks in my heart. Never had I felt what he was talking about. Rarely had I even wanted to. “And then what?” I asked.
“And then I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t stand hating myself. I couldn’t stand trying to win my way back into God’s graces. I couldn’t stand being in a church every Sunday where I knew that all the other parishioners thought that I was going to burn in Hell for a sin I wasn’t aware of having committed. They treated me like the plague, because if I was attracted to other boys that meant God had cursed me. And you know what?”
“What?” Evan and I said in unison.
“Every time I read the Bible the only people I see God cursing are the hypocrites.” Kyle choked back tears again, “and I wasn’t a hypocrite. I was a scared little kid that only wanted to please everyone else and never even thought of what he wanted, until I wanted Milo. And if I had to choose between a God that cursed me and a boy that looked like a god, well, what do you think a sixteen year old kid would choose?”
“A hamburger?” I said jokingly.
Evan laughed and Kyle shook his head. “In any case,” Kyle said, “I swore off religion. And I kept my word for a long, long time. And then a few months ago my mom died, and I went to the funeral and felt so out of place. Everyone else there was so sure of God, so sure of Heaven, so sure that my mom had finally found peace… and there I was, ten years later, totally empty. And still wishing I could make God happy.”
“So why our church?”“My sister said, ‘just accept that God loves you and wants what’s best for you’. And then I saw that one billboard, the one that says, ‘God made you freckles and all’. And I thought, ‘maybe God made me gay and all.’ But I guess that wasn’t the message I was supposed to get.” Kyle laughed bitterly.
I could feel the remnants of my mochas wreaking havoc on my insides, but I swallowed that thought and motioned for us to get back onto the furniture. I sat down on the love seat and Evan and Kyle sat beside each other on the couch. “I don’t know who God made you to be,” I said to Kyle, “but I’m absolutely certain He loves you, which is all that matters. We are called to love as God loves, and God loves you, so we are beholden to love you as well. And maybe that means sometimes telling you when we think you’re doing something that could hurt you, but I see the way you and Evan look at each other and I think, ‘of all the things that could lead to death, a love like that is certainly not one of them.’ So, I won’t tell you to leave your lover. I will tell you to try to accept the fact that God loves you, though, because I think you need that. You need to know that God doesn’t want you to be destroyed.”
Remember, you can get it through CafePress, or by emailing me (linkees@gmail.com)
It is written!
The Novella is completed.
It will be up for sale sometime this coming weekend if all goes well.
That means that starting Monday, this blog will return to it’s regularly scheduled programming.
As fun as the throes of creation are, I’m going to be very happy to pull up the covers on this one and settle back into regular blogging.
I’ve missed blogging!
