True Jesus
Image courtesy of Jim Burklo
I loved Jesus for the first time when I was sixteen years old, and heard someone read aloud this passage from his Sermon on the Mount: "Love your enemies..." A person who could love his enemies was supremely worth loving himself.
And my love for him has endured ever since... both despite and because of my changes of theological perspective.
I was one of the "Jesus People" of the late 1960s in Santa Cruz, Calif. Long-haired young people with faraway looks in their eyes, drawn to Jesus as a fellow counter-cultural character. At first, we more or less fit in with the peace and love crowd. But then, the true colors of the Jesus People's leadership began to show through. They weren't about peace and love at all. They were about dogma and power and control. "God at the beach" slowly morphed into fundamentalism in suburbia. Not my scene.
Still full of love for Jesus, I felt homeless as a Christian until I drifted into seminary. There I found another way to love and follow him. I discovered the contemplative spirituality of the faith - practices modeled by Jesus himself. Practices that are the foundation of a way of life of compassion and commitment to making peace and justice real in the world.
I've written here a number of times about the serious consequences for politics – and for the survival of democracy – that result from progressives' failure to display the US flag and other symbols of patriotism. I get why so many folks squirm when they see me waving the red, white, and blue. I was waving it at a pro-choice rally recently and somebody said "I thought you were with the other people until I saw your sign under your flag!" The flag has been "occupied" by people who are striving against the very values it ought to represent. The solution is not for progressives to recoil from the flag. The solution is for progressives to "occupy" it back. And with gusto! It's our flag, representing our values and aspirations. It does not represent the dark eras of our history: it represents our commitment to righting our nation's wrongs through the exercise of democracy. We abandon this symbol at everyone's peril.
Something similar is at play among progressive Christians. A lot of us are afraid to be too "Jesus-ey" for fear of being identified with the folks who have "occupied" his identity, making him the figurehead for a hyper-conservative social and political agenda. Some of us have lost focus on Jesus entirely as a consequence.
But, for the love of Jesus and his church, we must let him "occupy" our hearts once again. Because the person of Jesus is the magic of Christianity. Each world religion has its gift to offer humanity. Christianity's is the embodiment of divine love in Jesus of Nazareth.
To give the gift of Jesus to the world again, in the context of faith freshly interpreted for our time, I wrote "Tenderly Calling: An Invitation to the Way of Jesus", my latest book. It aims to share the spirituality of Jesus, not religious beliefs about him. Writing this book brought me full-circle, back to that moment as a teenager when my heart burst open with love from him and for him.
I invite you to dare to do the same. Go ahead and open your heart to this human being who lived so long ago, and whose love for others – even those who ended up killing him – can move us to compassion and service today.