I've been a Christian for thirteen years and wrapped up in the traveling circus of ministry for close to ten years of my life and still I cannot get over how absolutely insane my faith seems to myself, much less how it must be viewed by those on the outside looking in at me.
Everything in my heart, in my mind...in my soul comes back to this horror show moment of a Rabbi being mutilated and nailed to a tree. How does one get from this gruesome display to such endless expectation and hope that these physical world is only a mere shade of the true spectrum of reality?
It's not like I just woke up one day and decided to dedicate myself to the endless quest of hunting for the meaning of life and being endlessly distressed over the existential questions of life. I was just a little kid reading J.R.R. Tolkien and playing Super Nintendo RPG's when I had this first transcendental experience that crossed time and space...and somehow...and in someway I felt the horror of my own sins and the endless love of the resurrected Christ.
I'm of the strong stance that a person cannot be born a Christian like it was some sort of political identity or ideology. Christ cannot be found in the systems of government or the institutions of Christendom. The text of the Bible points to Him but ultimately it is this experience of your soul being touched by the eternal.
For some people it is a long series of events with no one particular moment of the light bulb coming on...but for me I have a distinct memory of the first major experience that was followed by an event four years later when Jesus asked me to not just stand in my small church boat of faith but to take His hand and follow into this world.
What does this even mean?
This is the single most important thing in my life but I can never find the words for it...I, full of hubris and overwrought words, am struck and humbled by love. Love by an infinite God who refuses to bow to me or let me define Him in my terms.
At the end of the day my true desire isn't to make a long list of converts, have a paycheck, kiss babies or make everyone happy...I just want to know what it means to love Jesus and love everyone.
Why can't it be that simple?
I have tried to run from both church and ministry in order to 'find myself' but ultimately I realize the problem is in myself, not the people.
The solution is in the macabre and incredibly awkward display of the cross.
The general picture of Jesus is this mystic hippie, Aryan with the blue eyes and blond hair, this soft spoken teacher who just talked about love and had no backbone. The actual teachings of Jesus, much less the cross, makes people incredibly awkward because action is demanded.
It's sort of like what C.S. Lewis said:
"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg- or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the son of God: or else a madman or something worse.
You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
Quite honestly I sometimes think I must be mad, that everyone of those I love that professes similar beliefs must be in on this worldwide joke...but no.
I have looked those people in the eyes and see the same fire lit inside of them.
Not the fire of political reformation.
Not the fire to sell a product.
Not a fire to judge those of other religions, creeds, race or practices.
Not the fire found in useless platitudes.
But love.
Love that demands we sacrifice all we hold dear in order that we might find life and then give it to others.
I firmly believe that we Christians are either onto the truth or the greatest danger this world has ever witnessed. I'm not a fundamentalist wanting an excuse to kill someone but I want to have the love of Christ burn so passionately in me that I no longer care about political borders and would give my life to showing real love at any cost.
A true martyr is one who by giving up their life is a witness to this love, this impossible personal divine love that somehow points back to this bloody cross.
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"From then on Jesus began to tell his disciples plainly that it was necessary for him to go to Jerusalem, and that he would suffer many terrible things at the hands of the elders, the leading priests, and the teachers of religious law. He would be killed, but on the third day he would be raised from the dead.
But Peter took him aside and began to reprimand him for saying such things. “Heaven forbid, Lord,” he said. “This will never happen to you!”
Jesus turned to Peter and said, “Get away from me, Satan! You are a dangerous trap to me. You are seeing things merely from a human point of view, not from God’s.”
Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If any of you wants to be my follower, you must turn from your selfish ways, take up your cross, and follow me. If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it.""
-Matthew 16:21-25
But why a cross?
Why is suffering the way to life?
Anyone with any sense of reality can see how screwed up this world is.
It's an oversimplification to simply blame it on sin but that is the closest word I can find to even attempt to explain the horror, the heartbreak, the disease and the proverbial Hell surrounding our comfortable middle class bubbles.
For all the talk about it, the Bible seems to be rarely read in a way that attempts to view it in its proper context...but it is a love story of humanity screwing things up and God reaching out in love to us. It's complicated, messy, confusing and not the neat little package we would want...because it involves humans and a God who is all at once impossibly far away but oh so intimately near.
The Cross is God painting a picture of how horrible our personal and collective sins truly are, how grotesque our abuses of each other are and the radical steps needed for us to begin to be reunited to God and each other.
The Cross is not about guilt for its own sake.
The Cross is not a symbol of power.
If God wanted to destroy, purge or remove us He could.
Life isn't some cosmic chess game with the moves predetermined as much as a bizarre opportunity to learn how to begin to walk in eternity while on this side of things.
The Cross is God's ultimate trump card against our 'can do' attitudes, our attempts to redeem our lives with the material and the abuses against our bodies.
The Cross is the coup de grâce of all religion.
Systems cannot redeem the world, only love in service can.
I have never seen Christianity as anything but a means for learning how to be a failure in the eyes of the world. It is not only taking the 'path less traveled' but burning all the bridges on your way down. It is an all or nothing proposition, a one sided gamble of throwing my life into the only thing that has ever made a shred of sense while simultaneously being so beyond my understanding.
Every lesson of The Cross is counterintuitive:
-If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.
-And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.
-Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.
-And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men.
-No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.
-Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes?
It almost seems silly to have a single day devoted to talking about, thinking about and dwelling on the cross, the resurrection of Jesus and the forgiveness of sins.
Every morning, every day, every moment of life is this connection that goes back to the cross at Golgotha.
The only hope I have is in this Jesus of Nazareth being the Son of a God that is passionately and hopelessly in love with his broken creation.
We are broken, so hurt, so twisted...we hurt each other and know it is evil but still we do it...but we do not care.
Justice would be our destruction but The Cross is God taking on human flesh and bearing all of our failures, all of our weaknesses and sins so we might finally begin to see what Love is.
This is all I know.
It's what I so desperately hope my fleeting life and poor writings point towards.
Christ is all I have.
"In the soundless awe and wonder,
words fall short to hope again.
How beautiful,
how vast Your love is,
new forever,
world without an end."
"Christ arrives right on time to make this happen. He didn't, and doesn't, wait for us to get ready. He presented himself for this sacrificial death when we were far too weak and rebellious to do anything to get ourselves ready. And even if we hadn't been so weak, we wouldn't have known what to do anyway. We can understand someone dying for a person worth dying for, and we can understand how someone good and noble could inspire us to selfless sacrifice. But God put his love on the line for us by offering his Son in sacrificial death while we were of no use whatever to him."
-Romans 5:6-8
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