Pointless

I was joking with a friend recently who told me she had a weak mind. She said she would read a book, like one she had just finished about an impending terrorist attack on the shores of a slumbering America, and be filled with wild notions influenced by the text.

"You weak-minded fool. He's using an old Jedi mind trick!"

I am not at all unlike this. I don't think anyone is very different. After all, Don Quixote read book upon book, filled with chivalry and fanciful notions, and so brooded and brooded until his brains dried up. In my case, I entertained the notion that all religions have the same stories. Seeking an answer for this, I returned to a person of interest I had heard of years before: Joseph Campbell. The man is brilliant. I plunged into comparative mythology. It was genius! I read further on the compelling claims of atheists ("unintelligent design" being the most memorable argument I read). They made good points!! I don't know how near I came, but I was on the verge of embracing the notion that everyone WAS right. We all had our own take on the universal, cosmic ideal. And it was precisely at this point that I noticed something.

No prayer.
All my reading excluded the Bible.

As Father Zossima relates in "Brothers Karamazov," "I carried (the Bible) ever with me, indeed I was afraid to go out without it, but I never read it. I did not know then that I had it, 'For the day, for the hour; for the month, for the season.'"

And so I entered "The Year of the Raisin." I wasn't sure in January why I titled my journal this. I emblazoned the cover with a raisin looking up at a grapevine, with the severed end of a vine in hand, saying, "Fancy that." Was the year of the raisin to be my return from shriveled life without Jesus? I hoped it would, and so I endeavored to journal daily, reading my Bible and praying.

My atrophy started years ago. There were moral lapses. There were lapses in judgment. There were new thoughts swirling in my head. I remember thinking of a scene in "Tommy Boy." He's trying to sell auto parts, and when people refused he politely, happily replied, "Super!" and bounced on his way. I was like that with Jesus. I didn't want to talk to people about Jesus. I didn't care if they said no. I didn't want to push him. I didn't want to be a salesman, peddling Christ.

This notion, one becoming more and more prevalent in Christian circles, is a nice and friendly idea. It sounds noble to not want to force Jesus on people. It sounds noble to live in peace and harmony with all people, regardless of class, color or creed. What am I saying, "It sounds..."? IT IS!! That's the trick: the ideas aren't bad. But what happens when the tension is lost?

I just had a vision of my son's bike chain slipping off the gears. Without tension in the chain, the bike goes nowhere, regardless how hard or fast you pedal. I'm sorry if that sounds like a cheesy sermon illustration, but it literally just came in my head as I was typing that last bit. What I had intended to move on to was the passage in Ecclesiastes where it says, "Don't be super wicked, but don't be super righteous either. The righteous avoid extremes". The biggest issue in all of life is balance. The Chinese got it right when they thought about yin/yang. Balance is central to life. What always occurs when extremes are taken is that a counterpoint will be raised with equal or greater vehemence, perpetuating further extremes. The issue I'm referring to above became prominent in church history at the turn of the 20th century. The Social Gospel people thought that most Christians were a bunch of lazy, good-for-nothings sitting around and waiting for the rapture. So they basically said, "Get up off your duff and do something!" What they did was good: seeking to eliminate poverty and injustice. Now the establishment reacted to this by claiming a lot of heresy (a lot was based on the pre-millenial/post-millenial debate) and saying, "Don't do too much! You have to hold to sound doctrine. Study and wait upon the Lord." Good things!! But pretty soon battle lines were drawn. Pretty soon each side thought the other side was composed of idiot heretics and would have nothing to do with each other. The gap widened. The extremes were more polarized. Along came WWI, and the New Deal. Social Gospel people said, "Let's get on board with FDR! He's got a good thing going." Establishment Christians watched and prayed, and served in the church.

The parallels between then and our current situation should not be subtle. The similarities between a century-old battle and a present-day discussion should be obvious. We didn't really learn our lesson, and so, forgetting, we repeat it. The issues today have more to do with tolerance, with global connectivity, but things are pretty close. Today, ideas like the one I mentioned, like the salesman pitching Christ, are gaining momentum. They are not original ideas. They are responsive ideas. Previously, within my own lifetime, we handed out tracts, we memorized the four spiritual laws (though now I can only remember, "God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life." Talk about sales pitch!) and we made the hard sell ("If you were to die tonight, where would you go? Are you ready to accept Jesus NOW?"). There are some obvious drawbacks to such an approach.

So the response is swinging to the side of leaving people alone. The idea is to love people without an agenda. The idea is to let people approach the ideals of Jesus in whatever context they choose. If they live out the message of Jesus, regardless of beliefs, they serve God, the Lord Jesus Christ. The biblical approach is to look at all the places where Jesus hung out with the drunks, sinners, the culturally diverse, the foreigners and "pagans" and admire how he loved them without pushing anything on them. Some nice ideas are tucked away there. It's not wrong to love people just to love them.

But recently I have been unable to leave it here. My "current events" reading is now overshadowed by the weight of what I find in the Bible. I've been reading only Luke. Looking at the life of Jesus. Trying to find what he was really all about. All Luke. Only Luke. Looking for Jesus. Ready for the shocker?

Jesus had an agenda.

I don't say he loved people to slip in his agenda. But he did have one. Take one beautiful example: Jesus is hanging out with messed up people, and the "religious" didn't like it. He was loving people and wasn't making them convert, or turn to him for salvation, and the religious leaders were pissed because they wanted them to give up Draco and Caesar and Shiva, etc. PLUS kick the booze, the pot, the whoring, etc. Only that's a modern day understanding. Yes, he hung out with people because he loved them, but he never stopped saying ONE thing:

Repent.

Ol' Uncle Bucky used to talk about the confusion of many seminarians asked to define the Gospel. Most launch into Jesus, Christ crucified, raised, your belief, etc. Nope. Repent. That's what Jesus wanted people to know about the Kingdom of Heaven. Check it out for yourself. That's what he says over and over: "Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is here."

So back to the example. The religious people are mad. They complain. So in Luke 15, Jesus drops some knowledge on them. Far be if from me to put words into the mouth of Jesus, but it's as if he's saying, "I want you to get this. I'm going to tell you 3 stories. They all say the same thing. This is what Heaven (the heart of God) is all about. Now, don't miss it." You'll see that the 3 stories are the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son. What does Jesus care about? What is on the heart and mind of God? Some people are lost. He want them to return home to him. The found ones don't factor in as much, because they're found. It's not about them anymore. So, real simple like, here it is: Lost, God wants them, Found aren't the main thing.

Now we could play games with what being lost and found looks like. "You could be a lost Buddhist who acts like a jerk but when you stop acting like a jerk and act like a real Buddhist, you're found." If we look at Jesus, he says, "Repent. Come home." If we explore repentance and being found by Jesus, it's hard to come to that conclusion. Many are doing it, so it's not impossible, but it's hard.

So finally I get to the point of "Pointless." We don't love people because it's the right thing to do. We don't love people because it feels good. We don't love people because it gives us (and them) meaning and comfort. All great things. But we love people because God loves people. It's not about us anymore. If people matter to God, they ought to matter to us. If you remove God's love for a person from the equation, if you take away the "agenda" of Jesus seeking the lost and calling for repentance, you swing to a frivolous extreme. I know it sounds bad to say loving people just to love them is frivolous, but neither can we say that Jesus loved people without agenda. Repentance was all he talked about. We must live in the balance, the tension between extremes. We must love people AND we must allow people to meet Jesus--the one from whom they're missing. If Jesus isn't all that important, we shouldn't follow him. If he's not absolutely essential--but, gee, his ideas are fantastic--then live up to the ideas and drop him. To live in a world with Jesus and not care, not act, not love is pointless. To live in a world, loving and caring and act, but going without Jesus, is pointless.