BLOG 4/6/16. RECONCEIVING (AND MAYBE REINVENTING) WHO WE ARE AS CHRISTIANS AND AS NEIGHBORS.
Mercy! A guy can have all kinds of sympathy for the confusion that the folk in our North American society must have when the media, and so much of the popular conception that is abroad, have when one speaks of ‘Christians’ … given all of the weird things that go on under that rubric. So incredibly much of the claim to be ‘Christian’ is so foreign to the life and teachings of Jesus.
For starts, there is a vast confusion inside of the ostensible Christian community about the conception that so many have about what it means to be a Christian, or what is the purpose in identifying as a follower of Christ, … what is the telos of Christian faith. My experience has been that all too many folk inside all of the ‘church’ never even ask the basic questions. They never want to look at anything that resembles a contract of what is expected by way of discipline, or obedience, or knowledge if one decides to follow Christ and identify as his disciple.
Take, for-instance, the teaching that spells out God’s plan for his people though their faith in Jesus as the One in whom and by whom and for whom all things exist. It says that those who are to be a part of Christ’s design for the church are ultimately called to be “conformed to the image of God’s Son” (Romans 8: 29 in loc.). Hello! What does that mean? Well, scouting it out in other teachings it would indicate that those called (note: the word church means a called-out people) are to incarnations o the image of God’s Son in the way they think, in the way they behave, and in their intimacy with the Triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Or, in the classical theological language of the church: in knowledge, true righteousness, and holiness. Did you even come to grips with that?
There is not to be fuzziness in our sense of calling to new life in Christ. It is a calling into a whole New Creation that becomes our formative motivation, our telos, i.e., where our heart/gut is. And that is modeled and taught by God’s Son himself. Paul, the early missionary, would tell his respondents: “Be imitators of me even as I also am of Christ” (I Corinthian 11:1). Don’t rush past that. Those who declare themselves to be those who are followers of Christ are to be the veritable incarnations of that New Humanity, that community formed in the image of Christ, that is the visible demonstration of the life and love of God in Christ. This means that we are to be more than prejudiced religious question marks, or sanctimonious and negative voices in the neighborhood, but rather those agents of God’s reconciling love right in the midst of the often grim political, economic, moral, and existential tragedies of our present scene.
When Jesus teaches his people that they are to be those who love their neighbors as they love themselves, he also redefines our neighbors as those very real others with whom we come into daily association, … and this can contain some difficult and broken and purposeless and contentious folk (or maybe some really cool ones!). But, … when we know who we are, and to what purpose we have been called by Christ, then we will always be seeking ways to engage in those relationships that display the same love and caring and warmth that defined Jesus’ relationships as he displayed God’s love for the world. This is not about clergy and church meetings, but about intentional living out the image of God in the streets and neighborhoods and cultural realities that are our daily marketplace. May God give to us the grace to be those models of Jesus who un-confuse those around us, and cause them to see Christ alive in way we think and behave and in the mystery of that which has seized our hearts, … and maybe whet their appetite for Him.
Maybe a good place to start is to continually marinate in the life and teachings of Jesus, … or maybe (to use a more rustic and colorful word) to ruminate his teachings and those of his apostles until they become incarnate in us. Peace!
