Angels Should Wear ID

Keep on loving one another as brothers and sisters.  Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it. (Hebrews 13:1-2)

 This verse has some really scary implications. If I read the verse correctly, they might show up anywhere and we won’t recognize them. What if they’ve got brown skin and cross the Rio Grande at night because that’s how they like to travel? What if they’re black, look 85 years old, haven’t had a drivers license for twenty years and they show up to vote like they have for years, and you turn them away because you changed the law?

What if they lived in Baghdad and you bombed them because, well you could. Or were living among the poor of Haiti and you went on TV and said the earthquake was God’s judgment on that country? Or they were ministering to the poor in New Orleans during hurricane Katrina and you laid that God’s judgment thing on them again?

Worse yet, what if that panhandler who asked me for two bucks a while back, and I turned him down even though I had it because I knew he’d just spend it on booze, what if he was an angel and had just misplaced his ID? Really, I hate that verse, not because I don’t agree with it, but because I’m so damn bad at it.

Who's Your Jesus?

Do You Know Jesus? You know, Jesus, Son of God, Water Walker, Dead Raiser, Feeder of Multitudes with little more than a snack tray, Stamped Ticket to heaven? That’s right, the Sunday School Jesus. If you do, and that’s how you know Him, then praise God, don’t let anyone tell you your knowledge of Jesus is inadequate.

Every once in a while someone comes along with an epiphany and a book contract, and now we gotta deal with a whole new side of Jesus, although really, how new could it be if they’re citing scripture to support this stunning new insight into the nature of Jesus?

I suppose it’s all right, after all, do you really believe that your understanding of Jesus is THE definitive understanding of an infinite Jesus? In John 21:25 the disciple wrote “Jesus also did many other things. If they were all written down, I suppose the whole world could not contain the books that would be written.” So there’s one of my favorite Jesus, the Mysterious One.

I’m also quite infatuated with the Anonymous Jesus. Remember the lame man by the pool? When he went back to his village the elders asked him “Who healed you?” and he didn’t know. It’s almost like Jesus enjoyed pranking people. BOOM, you’re healed, now you figure it out. I love that Jesus.

And how about the, I Just Showed You How, For Crying Out Loud Jesus? One day Jesus is confronted with thousands of hungry people and the disciples don’t know what to do, so Jesus grabs a kid with a snack tray consisting of a few fish and a couple of loaves of bread, has the disciples distribute it and they feed everyone and have baskets of food left over. So far so good. A while later they are facing the same scenario, thousands of hungry folks and a kid with a snack tray. What do the disciples say? How are we going to feed this crowd? They’re lucky Jesus didn’t feed THEM to the crowd. 

So anyway, that’s how my mind works. I wonder what Jesus you like……..

Psssssst, Republicans. Listen Up.

Lately a bunch of you, Senator Lindsay Graham, Jeb Bush, Condoleeza Rice, and many others have called for a change in tone on the part of the Republican Party in order to attract more women, young people, and minorities. In fact a lot of you seem to feel that the survival of the GOP hangs in the balance.

Well I got news for you, it's not your tone, it's your policies.

You might want to read your just recently adopted platform. You see it's OK when you adopt a statement of principle along with a call to action. That's your right. But when the very constituencies you're trying to attract are appalled at your belief system there's not a lot you can do. Either change your policies or accept growing irrelevance.

Get back to me on that soon.

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The "Nones"

There has been a great deal of attention paid recently to the exodus from traditional churches by young adults. We are told that we are losing our future to a generation uninterested in the churches and denominations of their parents. Nones they’re called. Probably Christian but certainly not religious.

There are going to be books, conferences, consultants consulting, all in an effort to stem the erosion and lure those leaving back to the sanctuary, some of which might actually be effective. Those that believe the traditional church is no longer relevant are simply wrong. Traditional church as we know it isn’t going to die, but will probably continue to be a shrinking part of the spiritual life of our country for the foreseeable future.

Which still leaves us with the problem. Young people are fleeing organized religion and we don’t know what to do, worse yet, nothing we are trying is working. So do we just give up and join ranks around a shrinking institution, do we redouble our efforts, devise new tactics? Or maybe we can redefine the “problem”?

What are these “Nones” really saying? For many of them their disillusion is with the church, not Jesus. So really we have an enormous common ground with them. We all think Jesus is cool, so why argue with them about their feelings about religion when what we should be doing is to encourage them to form their own faith communities, better yet we should be reaching them where they’re at.

We all need to be among a community of believers, but worship is not a one size fits all deal, and that segment of the population that believes that church IS irrelevant needs to be addressed in ways that traditional churches can’t. It will be in ways that discard the hierarchical structure of churches, that gives real responsibility to laypeople and new believers, that regards Christian service to the community as more important than sermons and songs.

Who, after all, decided that the only acceptable worship is that worship that takes place inside the walls of a sanctuary?

A Jesus Without Hoops

One of my favorite verses in scripture is John 21:25. In it John writes that there simply isn’t enough room in the world for all the books that we’d need if he had been able to record everything Jesus did. You see I tend to think of the Gospels as the definitive description of the life of Jesus when really what they are is an incomplete representation of His life, miracles, parables, and instructions. Now that is a truly mind boggling thought. Which for a guy like me leads me to wonder if what made it into the Gospels is there for a reason? 

Maybe the miracles that were recorded are there because in addition to being really cool, they illustrate a point about the nature of Jesus.

Let’s suppose you’ve got something I want or need, and you’re willing to let me have it but first there are certain conditions I must meet in order to get it. Conditions by themselves are morally neutral, they can be reasonable, or they may amount to hoops you’re jumping me through simply because you can. But they are a fact of life. Husbands impose them on wives, parents on children, employers on employees. The list goes on and on. Without them it’s unlikely civil society could survive.

But Jesus apparently didn’t impose conditions or jump people through hoops in order to receive His mercy. Take the adulteress about to be stoned to death by a self-righteous mob. Jesus didn’t lay down any conditions for stopping the mob. He didn’t say accept Me as your savior, He didn’t demand that she renounce her sinful behaviors. He simply saved her life.  Even more remarkable is the healing of the lame man by the pool, Jesus not only healed him without condition, He didn’t even tell the lame man who He was. Who does that? I’m always looking for a little credit for my good deeds.

So maybe one of the lessons I’m supposed to take away from the miracles of Jesus is all about conditions. Jesus didn’t just command us to help the poor and downtrodden, He showed us by example how He wanted it done. No conditions, no artificial hoops for them to jump through in order to receive help. And occasionally they just might ask “Why do you help me this way?” 

“Why? Because Jesus loves you.”

So Your Excuse Is “Mikey Does It Too?”

I think the next time someone defends inexcusable behavior from a member of their tribe, clan, sect, denomination, gender, race political party, or any other demographic group with the rationalization that others do it too, they should have their noses rubbed in their own excrement much as you would a puppy you are trying to housetrain.

Take Rush Limbaugh. Please. Take him far, far away. But before you do, what’s with the line from the Rushheads that liberals do it too? Leaving aside for a moment that , no, liberals don’t call a young woman slut and prostitute for appearing before congress, why would that make a difference? Pre-schoolers do that. Caught with their hands in the cookie jar, the first words out of their mouth is, “Mikey does it too!”

Let’s see if I can make this simple. It doesn’t matter who else calls her slut and prostitute, you shouldn’t. There is simply no way to put lipstick on that pig. And any words in an apology that follow the word “but” are dung, and you should probably have your nose rubbed in it.