Individual Entry: Jesus and us losers
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December 10, 2008

Books , Faith : Jesus and us losers

This post is in large part a reaction to reading Yaconelli’s “Messy Spirituality” – a short, must-read book which managed to get me crying on several occasions. But rather than do a book review, I thought I’d do my own short exploration of the same theme.

Christianity has in too many ways embraced the drive for excellence from the surrounding culture. Church has become a place where seemingly perfect people come into seemingly perfect buildings and hear seemingly perfect musical performances and seemingly perfect lectures on seemingly perfect doctrine. God is perfect and holy, and so we should all be perfect and holy when we come unto His presence. Those who aren’t perfect (or at least can’t fake it well enough) should wait outside until they get their act together.

I remember being admonished at one church to think about how I would dress and behave if I was ushered into the presence of President of the United States or the Queen of England, and that I should look at coming to church like that because I was coming into God’s presence. In theory it sounds rational.

The good news is that Christianity, at least Real Christianity, is messy. We should know that from looking as Jesus’ life. He was a devout Jew who hung out with Roman collaborators, prostitutes and notorious sinners. When it came to picking the “inner circle” of those who followed him he picked salty fishermen, terrorists, and shady businessmen – most of whom never really understood what Jesus was saying until after He died. What a bunch of losers – but that’s who Jesus liked to surround Himself with.

The people who “had their act together” never cared much for the Jesus, and Jesus only paid attention to them when they got in between God and the messed up people God loved.

It was the messed up people who understood their need, and in that understanding were interested what Jesus was saying about getting closer to God. Their trajectories then became towards God. Some had quite a distance to go; but that never seemed to bother Jesus as long as they were headed in the right direction. Those who “had their act together” were quite content to orbit God, going in circles – perhaps close circles - but never ever getting any closer to Him.

That is much of what is wrong with the church these days. It has become a place for people to pretend to be good, while it should be a place for messed up people to draw closer to God and to each other. That’s why I liked Yaconelli’s book – it is largely a collection of stories about losers who understood that what matters is showing God’s love to the world in whatever imperfect way they can manage. Like I said, I cried though parts of it.

I read another “messy” book recently, Rick McKinley’s “This Beautiful Mess”. In it he talked about how Christianity in its quest for “right doctrine” has dissected our faith, putting all of the pieces in nicely labeled jars of formaldehyde. The only problem is that dissected bodies are dead. Real living bodies are messy and move around too much to understand in that way. He argues in part that we need to learn to be a little less concerned about getting all our doctrines right and more about bringing people into relationship with God. The result is a rather “messy” form of Christianity; but it is one that is alive.

Let’s hear it for God’s losers!
Let’s get messy for Jesus!

Posted by Steven at December 10, 2008 05:00 AM

Comments

Posted by: janbergs at December 10, 2008 09:51 AM

Posted by: Steven at December 10, 2008 06:46 PM

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