The church can often feel uncomfortable about its own reputation. In our craven desire to be contemporary, we can easily give up the eternal gift we have to give in the name of the Lord for a pot of lentil soup.
Controversial Lutheran minister, Nadia Bolz-Weber says, “You have to be really deeply rooted in tradition in order to innovate with integrity.” Did you hear Bolz-Weber there?
Two things in tension: tradition with innovation. Tradition without innovation seems tired, and we know that not all church traditions are healthy traditions. So traditions need to be challenged. And innovation without tradition seems tacky and plastic. People see right through it. Rachel Held Evans (1981–2019) herself said, when talking about how inauthentic consumerism is in the church, and how much of a turn-off it really is, “... we have very finely tuned BS meters, right? ... We are not looking for a hipper Christianity; we are looking for a truer Christianity.”
Our faith must lead us to what Barbara Brown Taylor would say, “a certainty with great big cracks in it.” The ignorance must continue to fall away in all of us. The only viable certainty is truth, and that quest is inevitably elusive unless, by intention, we look relentlessly for where we’re wrong. Only when we are open to the lies we covet ourselves, within the cloak of pride that keeps us insulated from the coldness of the truth, will Jesus open our mind’s eye to the truth. Anything less is not good enough for Jesus. Gee, doesn’t that sound like legalism? But note this: it is not legalism if it’s about moral doing versus just doing. Jesus seeks to transform us morally; to make us vessels where the living God inhabits, purging us from being mere activity creatures. There is no piety in activity, but only in asceticism — quite literally activity’s opposite. And yet we cannot build God’s kingdom without some highly focused activity. We will find we are doing the work of building God’s kingdom through the very things that Jesus transforms us through.
We will meet and encounter the authentic Jesus where two or three are gathered in his name, where we serve the least of these, where we congregate with the maimed and depressed, with those who genuinely comprise the ripe fields for the plucking; those who know they need Jesus. They are out there! We were.
Let us trust Jesus as we embark on a journey into our world that suffers for the lack of Jesus, who, would only prosper for the gentle touch of his Spirit through those of us who would embody him within our skin. All we need to remember is that we touch lives in Jesus name one life at a time. Let us reject every thought that we need to build massive churches. To be part of one miracle in one’s lifetime is enough, and yet do we think that God will stop at just one miracle? No, God will give us many more opportunities, if only it isn’t a massive church or Twitter following we’re seeking to build, or books to author, or doctorates achieved, or litany of speaking engagements and other accomplishments that we have done. We must all learn to embody the life of John the Baptist, who strived to become lesser so Jesus could be greater.
Let’s become lesser together, so Jesus can be greater in our midst. Let’s become unknown so Jesus can be famous. And let’s not get hung up on extraneous issues that lead people away from the Kingdom and not into it.
Transformation awaits even as we’re tempted to settle for a faker faith that will only set us apart from God’s work. It’s one or the other. We cannot have both.
Transformation awaits those of us who are open and more fully engaged in following Jesus. There is a chasm between those who believe in Jesus and those who follow Jesus. Those who follow Jesus are not afraid to lose what they cannot keep in order to gain what they cannot lose, to use the famed Jim Eliot (1927–1956) phrase. We must learn to spend our lives for the sake of Jesus alone.
Photo by Aziz Acharki on Unsplash
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