Posts Tagged: jesus

faith / general — 4 Comments
16
Nov 10

go to hell

I wish the church would just go to hell.

Into the deepest depths of hell, in fact. Not just the surface level, but down into the white hot flames, the most painful, excruciating places.

Where the suffering is intense. Where people come to curse the Lord with as much fervor that could otherwise be mistaken for worship.

Where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Where death is reality. Where darkness rules.

Church: one of the few entities on earth that has a core message potentially worth living and dying for. Light of the world. Salt of the earth. Unconditional love.  That is when it doesn’t get bogged down with selfishness, superiority, or cynicism.

We should be convinced that life is not about acquisition – that living generously is a better way to live. Giving food to the hungry or resourcing the poor is not an obligation or a chore or a bullet point on a job description. Our intended trajectory away from greed and self-centeredness is counter-cultural and inspiring.

Rob Bell, in Velvet Elvis, says that one of the worst things to have happened to the Christian faith is the movement towards heaven and hell being some distant places – separated from our day to day experience.  It leads to us wanting to escape this planet that must be void of God, in this scenario.  Our trajectory becomes about saving our souls from eventual damnations and more about ME spending forever in bliss and satisfaction.

Instead, heaven and hell are present realities.  Eternity started on day one. Hell is right here right now.  It’s the mother who can’t feed her children.  It’s the pain of loss.  It’s disease.  It’s ridicule and bullying and genocide.

You want to get to heaven…. bring it.

Jesus didn’t leave some mystical land to come to our neutral ground to persuade people to be good so they can ride the salvation express to heaven.  He came, himself, and brought heaven with him – by healing and feeding, by turning people’s hearts in a different direction, and by turning water into wine.

I want the church to go to hell, too.  I want people to see the comparison – to consider the alternative.

I want people to understand that heaven isn’t about walking streets of gold and wearing sparkling white robes.

Heaven is about the tears and pain and the bruises that come before restoration.  It’s about hard-core, unabashed love that doesn’t ask questions or require any thing besides your being.  It’s about getting rid of the darkness by shining in s spark of light – not about pointing out how dark hell is.

Heaven is what moves in when hell is pushed out.

But you can’t push hell out of the picture from the sidelines.  You can’t feed hungry people if you don’t go where the hungry people are.  You can’t build relationships by sitting on your couch.

What a hellish perspective then to celebrate “some glad morning” when we all will “fly away.”  For those who think that trying to live like Jesus is the best way to live, it seems counter intuitive that God would have his people fleeing the scene.  Who’s left to advocate for those with no voice?  To feed those with no food?  To visit those with no friends?  To give hope to those who have nothing to look forward to?

So, I’m done with the halo envy.

I’m done with looking forward to my mansion and streets of gold and diamond harp.

If there’s no more hope or love or happiness today than there was yesterday then we’re all missing something.  If we’re living as if this place is doomed, then we’ve screwed up big time.  If you’re not concerned about replacing hell here and now with heaven here and now, then we are diluting the redemptive message that Jesus was supposed to be all about.

Jesus example, if we believe it, says that being concerned that someone’s stomach isn’t full is at least as important as the state of their soul.  It shows that aiming towards emotional maturity is at least as important as aiming towards spiritual maturity.  He tries to convince us tax collectors, and prostitutes aren’t the wrong crowd.

Jesus didn’t seem to think that going to hell was such a bad idea.

In fact, it was probably the most important thing He ever did.

faith — 5 Comments
30
Sep 10

bar

The church needs to get back to it’s roots.

Back before evangelicals, and reformation, at crusades, and popes, there was the book of Acts.  These guys knew what “church” was all about.  They invented it.  They ate together.  They hung out. They sang.  They talked about God as if it was OK not to know every little detail.

And, best of all, they lowered the bar.

They lowered the bar so we could all walk across together.  At some point they realized that their expectations were too high.  People were interested in getting involved but couldn’t live up to the standard that had been set.  These people knew that there was something altogether different about this Jesus guy they had heard about and wanted to try to live like him because they thought it was a better way to do life.

Of course, now that he had been crucified and was long gone from the scene, the people left over were those who had encountered him, or encountered people who encountered him.  This first group of insiders, then, were Jews.  There were thousands of years of history and tradition and ritual that came along with that – there were time-honored traditions that became as much a part of their faith and practice as God himself.  You may remember that part of what God wanted the Israelites to do was for the males to undergo a little surgical procedure as a sign.

I know, I know.  That’s a whole other story.

It’s not even like these people were “converting” to Christianity.  They were inventing it.  With all of their baggage and history and tradition, they were figuring out with other people who encountered Jesus (again, all raised within the Jewish tradition).  They understood that Jesus was a Jew.  They understood that he was a Rabbi and so he acted in certain ways, and reasoned in certain ways, and did things that religious Jewish men did.  He ate kosher.  He studied the Torah.  Everything they had seen Jesus do had been in the context of Jewish life.

So what about when people who weren’t Jewish, who had no idea what it meant to be Jewish, who loved red meat, came and wanted to know more about this Jesus guy?

The people who were already in had a couple of choices.  The first was to simply say, “Sorry, you don’t qualify.  You’re not a Jew, Jesus was a Jew, unless you’re willing to become intimately familiar with Jewish law, practice, ritual, and nuance, you’re out.”

But that’s not what they did.

Instead they sat down, and they tried to figure out that if Jesus story was in fact for everyone then what they had was a situation where a lot of the rituals and nuances that grew out of living life as a Jewish individual may not apply to non Jews…. you may know them as Gentiles.  What they came up with was this:

“…we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God.”

It goes on to say that they didn’t want to burden the Gentiles with any rigid requirements.

They “lowered the bar” so that more people could learn to figure out Jesus without having to worry about how many grains of wheat could be picked on the Sabbath, what songs to sing at what time of day, or how they were going to pay for that surgical procedure with no health insurance.

Now, contrast that with today.

We’ve got churches who figure that they’ve got it all figure out.  You can’t be a member here unless you wear this, or pay this, or believe this.  Another tragic turn from our roots of inclusiveness, tolerance, love, acceptance.  We add condition upon condition, barring access to Jesus like we’re the oafish doorman outside the trendy nightclub.  We had a good thing going there for a while, but then we let our power get in the way.  At some point, we switched from the desire to have more people come live this life to the desire to have them meet our expectations.  Nevermind that half of these “doctrines” are at least irrelevant to how I live my life, and perhaps even as far as counter productive to what Jesus wanted to do.

It makes me angry that people who honestly just want to see Jesus to figure out if he’s the real deal, if what he said in his day was worth living for, have to go through the bureaucratic mumbo jumbo that we’ve added to the process.  He doesn’t care what you look like or what you do.  He doesn’t want you to figure it out first, and then come talk to His people.  Half of what we say is heresy anyway.

I say “Lower the bar, Church.”  We’ll all be more like Jesus.