Jesus, Save Us from Your Followers

Every time I think the culture is giving us a bad rap (a reverse judgmental spirit), I hear another horror story about our very un-salty behavior.  After Harvard Professor Kay Redfield Jamison courageously described her struggle with mental illness, she received thousands of letters.  Most of the disturbing letters came from “fundamentalist Christians” berating her for turning her back on God.  According to Jamison, “Others thought my illness just deserts for not having truly accepted Jesus Christ into my heart, or for not having prayed sincerely enough.  I had left my heart open to Satan, and he had entered in.  Madness and despair were precisely what I deserved and would have in this world and the next … One woman, who included a prayer card with excerpts from the Bible, wrote that it was a good thing I hadn’t had children as I had at lead ‘spared the world of one more crazy manic-depressive.  (See Kay Redfield Jamison, Nothing Was the Same, pages 43-44).

If we get persecuted for this kind of behavior, we deserve it.  This is just plain stupid, and so unlike Jesus.  Jesus was without sin and yet sinners flocked to him.  He even called sinners to repent – not exactly a church growth strategy – but broken people felt his compassion, not terror.  As my friend and author Denis Haack notes, “Our message is the Gospel of Christ, and since he is attractive, shouldn’t our proclamation (and our lives!) be attractive as well?” (See ransomfellowship.org).

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The Beauty and Power of “thereness”

There’s a stray line from a novel called The Book Thief. One of the main characters, Hans Hubermann, is sitting with his foster daughter after she’s just arrived at Hans’ house.  The narrator says, “The first couple of times (Hans) simply stayed – a stranger to kill the aloneness … Trust was accumulated quickly, due primarily to the brute strength of the man’s gentleness, his thereness.”

I love that phrase: “the brute strength of the man’s gentleness, his thereness.”  Sometimes I’m saddened by the ways I’ve practiced somewhere-else-ness or someone-else-ness.  Of course regrets don’t help me practice thereness.  So here’s my goal these days: to practice thereness, to be fully present to God and others, to have the real me show up and pay attention to the real you.  Jesus, help me to be there.

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Weeping at the movies: A Scene from Crash

There’s a scene in the movie Crash in which a disgruntled store owner tracks down a repairman.  The store owner follows the repairman to his home and accosts him in the driveway.  He waves a gun in the air as he screams his displeasure.  Meanwhile the repairman’s daughter sees her daddy in the driveway and she runs out the front door to greet him.  The store owner shoots wildly and accidentally hits the little girl, dropping her to the ground, dead.

Recently my oldest son and his wife were watching that scene and I knew what was coming.  I watched the store owner wave the gun and the repairman beg for mercy.  I saw the little girl run out the door and … I couldn’t watch it.  Instead, I bolted out of the room, ran upstairs, sat on the kitchen floor, alone, in the dark, and wept.

Honestly, I don’t know why I wept.  I’ve seen the movie three times.  I know it’s just a movie with a fictitious script and paid actors.  So why did I run out of the room and weep?  Did I weep for all the racism and hatred on this sad planet?  Did I weep for all the regrets and wounds in my own life?  Did I weep for all the little girls who will drop dead tonight or be abused or tormented or raped?  Did I weep for all the disappointments and betrayals that I can’t heal or fix?

I really don’t know.  Maybe, just maybe, I wept because Jesus is in me.  Maybe Jesus and I know a little secret: Little girls should run to their daddies and kiss their necks.  They shouldn’t drop dead, but they do.  Ethnic groups shouldn’t hate and kill each other, but they do.  Ah, the resurrection will come, but it isn’t here yet.  Not in fullness.  So we wait and we groan and we weep.  Jesus weeps too.  And sometimes all I can do is sit beside him at my kitchen table and cry with him over this broken world.  At least I’m not numb anymore.  I’m slowly learning to feel with Jesus, weeping with Jesus and working with Jesus until little girls don’t get shot in their daddy’s arms.

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Loving Redemption Stories – Parts 2 and 3

Redemption Stories – Part 2: A bad middle

I love redemption stories (see Part 1 in the previous blog) – and they are everywhere.  They start with a good beginning, but unfortunately life has a way of unraveling doesn’t it?   The plot suddenly swells with tension.  Stuff happens – bad stuff, evil stuff, mean stuff.  In The Lord of the Rings the ring of power starts to corrupt everyone who touches it.  In The Wizard of Oz Dorothy gets whacked on the head and then those creepy flying monkeys descend on Toto.  In The Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne, a mild mannered accountant, acts rashly and winds up serving two consecutive life terms.

At times the bad stuff is our fault.  We betray someone, or perhaps a bunch of people.  We allow sin to fester in our lives.  We thought it would be our private sin party, but it leaks out and hurts others.  We battle an addiction and lose.  We botch a business deal or a job or a relationship.  The victimized achieve freedom, grab power and then become the next wave of oppressors.

Sometimes the bad stuff just happens: cancer, pain, betrayal, injustice, shattered dreams, church splits.  It could be a quick turn of events or a slow and deadening despair, like weeds taking over a garden.

In the Book of Ruth, Elimilech’s daring plan to save his family and start a new life unravels.  He drops dead and then their two sons kick the bucket.  This isn’t just trouble; this is a tragedy, a devastation, a freaking train wreck – and the shards of twisted steel pierce Naomi’s chest.

Stuff happens.  Wow, does it ever!  Some people get hammered by life, but eventually everyone gets something.  Bob Dylan once sang, “We’ve got to get back to the garden,” but that’s the problem: we can’t; there’s two angels with flaming swords guarding the path.  .

We try to minimize and blunt the pain by mouthing stupid clichés like “It could be worse.”  Okay, maybe, but it still hurts.  That’s one reason why I love the Bible: it’s so refreshingly honest.  Someone betrays the psalmist and he asks God to smack the guy in the teeth.  Jesus comes to the grave of his friend – definitely a bad middle for Lazarus and his sisters – and he wails like a newborn baby.

But a redemption story doesn’t just give permission for brutal honesty; like a deep and strong river, it also sweeps us along toward a happy ending.

Redemption Stories – Part 3: A happy ending

Happy endings make redemption stories irresistible.  They take us on a journey, through danger and sadness, but they lead us back home or to a better home.  Dorothy clicks her heels and wakes up in Kansas again.  Homer boots out his wife’s suitors and reclaims her heart.  A beauty loves the beast, the spell breaks and the beast becomes a kind and humane prince.  Andy Dufresne comes fully alive and then outwits the evil warden, escaping through a sewer to freedom.  Bilbo Baggins encounters unwanted adventures and near death but he finally returns home.  Boaz redeems Ruth and Naomi and the story ends with a fat little grandson sitting on Naomi’s lap.

That’s why the Bible is the best, grandest and most daring redemption story anywhere.  From Genesis, to Isaiah and right through Jesus and Revelation, the Bible declares the most outlandish and outrageous promises of restoration.  In Christ painful relationships will heal.  Addictions will be overcome.  Brokenness – even in our bodies – will become whole.  Injustice, poverty and racism are all vanquished.  Emptiness leads to fullness.  God wipes every tear from our eye.  All things are restored.

It’s almost too good to be true … and it would be if we didn’t have a Storyteller-Redeemer who can actually make redemption happen.  One of the deepest biblical miracles is that the Triune God lived his own redemption story.  As the eternal Son of God, Jesus had the best beginning.  But then for us and our salvation he plunged into his own bad middle, identifying with and absorbing all of our bad middles.  God took our failures, our wounds, our betrayals, our injustices, our sins and our addictions; he left out nothing, he ignored nothing, he judged everything; but in Christ and through Christ and with Christ, God turned all of these dark moments into facets of the bright and happy ending.  Somehow God will knit these sharp and dangerous fragments into His cosmic redemption story.

I have a hunch that we love redemption stories because God loves them too.  And maybe God sprinkles enough redemption stories into every culture – through fairy tales and films and novels and sacred texts – so that we’ll hunger for and quest after the Jesus story, the truest, deepest, most beautiful redemption story of all.

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Why We Love Redemption Stories – Part 1

Flash Quiz: What do the following have in common – Lord of the Rings, Homer’s Odyssey, Shawshank Redemption, The Wizard of Oz, Beauty and the Beast, the Exodus, Cinderella and Jesus?

Correct Answer: They’re all redemption stories.

Redemption stories are everywhere.  I could rattle off dozens of redemption stories – even if you had a gun to my head and made me hop on one foot … barefoot in a puddle of hot vegetable oil.  I think you get the point: I love them.  But I have a hunch that everyone loves redemption stories, which is why we (i.e. every culture, not just Americans) keep telling old ones and making up new ones.

Every redemption stories has three basic movements:

1. A good beginning
2. A bad middle
3. A hopeful ending.

For a good beginning, think of Dorothy in Kansas surrounded by loving relatives and her doggie Toto.  Or think of the first lines of The Hobbit: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.  Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell … it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”  Ah, yes, sweet comfort.  Home.

Of course the Bible opens with one wallop of a good beginning – Adam and Eve in paradise.  But the Bible also contains smaller good beginnings, like the Book of Ruth.  There’s a famine in the land, but Elimelech decides to move his family to Moab. It’s a daring, dangerous move, but he’s going to make life work.  So with his wife and his two sons he treks to Moab.

God knows that we need some good beginnings.  A child’s birth, a little girl dreaming, a college grad ready for his first real job, a wedding dance, a new house, a move, a church plant – we need to receive and celebrate good beginnings.  They’re just flat-out good stories and I’m convinced that God loves them too.  Of course the only problem is that they never last … which leads to part 2.

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