BLOG 9/6/15. CHRISTIAN FAITH: SET FREE FOR RIOTOUS LAUGHTER

BLOG 9/6/15. CHRISTIAN FAITH: SET FREE FOR RIOTOUS LAUGHTER

Years ago friends gave me a framed painting, which hangs over my desk and looks down on me every day. The painting is entitled by the artist: The Laughing Jesus. So, I admit it is not scripture, however it does portray something of the reality that wherever Jesus went he seems to have brought something that was freeing, and rejoicing. Think of the woman at the well, who seems to have found in her accidental encounter with him that which she had always longed for. Or the very fact that he was chided by his religious critics of hanging out with publicans and sinners, or winebibbers and gluttons. He came declaring that in following him, and responding to his teachings, that men and women would be set free, and if he made the free then they would be really free.

The irony of this freedom is that the very first requirement in realizing it is to confess that we are real sinners, that we have really screwed-up by missing the point of God’s wonderful design and meaning for our lives, that we have made gods of all the wrong things, . . . and especially that we have taken on a self-sufficiency, or made a god of own desires, created designer gods to our own liking, or don’t need to be dependent on anybody else’s God. A brash young college student once protested something of this in an actual conversation with a wise and crusty old Christian teacher, when he said: “I don’t need your God. I am my own God.” The humorous and somewhat mischievous teacher, took a drag on his pipe, and asked him to repeat what he had just said. When the young man repeated his self-deification, the old teacher responded: “Well, son, all I can say is that you’ve got one helluva poor one.”

Yes. We are not very good at playing God, or being our own source of meaning and hope.

So where does one begin to find the freedom that Jesus promised? We begin at the beginning. The very first thing we do is to appropriate the great all-democratizing principle of the Christian community, namely that we are all incorrigible sinners–sinners in many diverse ways. “If any person says that he/she is without sin, he deceives himself and the truth is not in him, but if he comes clean that he is a sinner, God also forgives us begins the process of cleansing us . . .” It is the beginning of being set free in order to enter into the joyous new relationship with God, to be made free, to engage in the riotous laughter of God’s New Creation.

But we also begin as little children. We begin by discerning very clearly what it is that God came to do for us by Christ and in Christ. We begin by ingesting the Word of Christ, and as we appropriate it, and begin to do it, we begin to grow into maturity in Christ, and to have his divine image created in us by that very knowledge. “His divine power has granted us all things that pertain to life and godliness according to his power at work in us” (II Peter 1:2-4).

And a part of that maturity is to be immersed in this very broken and distorted human community, what with all of its false gospels, it’s difficult and broken persons, its false values, . . . and to do so as an authentic incarnation of the very same grace that Jesus displayed in his love for those despised by the religious establishment. No grim-faced self-righteousness, but rather authentic and genuine grace and love for those whom Jesus came to seek and to save. Jesus came to give us laughter not so much stimulated by alcohol or coarse humor, or our own achievements, but by a freedom to know what our lives are really about, and to have an intimate relationship with the God who created us. Love, joy, peace, compassion, gentleness, goodness—the divine nature—and the capacity of laugh the laughter of freedom. We are to be those out of whose innermost being come springs of Living Water . . . and holy laughter.

About rthenderson

Sixty years a pastor-teacher within the Presbyterian Church. Author of several books, the latest of which are a trilogy on missional ecclesiology: ENCHANTED COMMUNITY: JOURNEY INTO THE MYSTERY OF THE CHURCH, then, REFOUNDING THE CHURCH FROM THE UNDERSIDE, then THE CHURCH AND THE RELENTLESS DARKNESS. Previous to this trilogy was A DOOR OF HOPE: SPIRITUAL CONFLICT IN PASTORAL MINISTRY, and SUBVERSIVE JESUS, RADICAL FAITH. I am a native of West Palm Beach, Florida, a graduate of Davidson College, then of Columbia and Westminster Theological Seminaries.
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