BLOG 11/19/16. “ … TOO WILD AND FREE FOR THE TIMID.”
A generation ago, novelist Madeline L’Engle was asked if she shared her Christian faith with here literary colleagues in New York. She whimsically responded (in her book: Walking on Water) that she did not because “Christianity is too wild and free for the timid.” I think that we need to stop and remind ourselves, from time to time, that being a follower of Jesus Christ is not for the faint of heart, … nor is our participation in the Christian community, if we have any integrity of understanding of what that community is to incarnate. There was that time when Jesus reminded those inquirers after him that “unless a man forsake all that he has, he cannot be my disciple.” Or on another occasion when Jesus intervened in a dispute among his curious audience by saying: “… unless you eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. … Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day …”
Result? Many who had been his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. Yes: too wild and free for the timid. This account does not provide some polite liturgical metaphor for our partaking of the bread and wine of the Eucharist. It is rather that we identify with the radical design of his New Creation, and the whole counter-cultural calling to have his own life incarnated in ours as those persons who are dynamically transformed by his New Humanity. Or, maybe, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it: “When Jesus calls a man, he bids him come and die.” Or (one of my favorites from The Chronicles of Narnia) as Mrs. Beaver responded when the Pevensie children inquired about this mysterious lion, Aslan, as to whether he was ‘safe’ or not: “Safe?” said Mrs. Beaver …”Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.” Yet, it is a perennial temptation for those of us who form the community of Christ’s followers to want to create a ‘safe’ and aesthetically pleasing ‘church experience’ in which we hang-out with nice churchy people, and do religious stuff … rather than ingest Jesus’ teachings about the Kingdom of God, and to always be seeking obedience to such. We want a ‘Christian nation’ and the societal assurances of our freedom to exercise our religious Christianity in tax-exempt Christian institutions that somehow have never “eaten of his flesh and drunk of his blood,” i.e., have never come to grips with the fact that: “If the world hates you, know that it hated me before it hated you.” The Kingdom of God is, as Donald Kraybill entitled it: The Upside-Down Kingdom—radical stuff. It has a price. Jesus never downplayed this fact. It is not comfort-zone religion. It is entered only through the narrow gate of repentance and faith, which means we are willing to engage in whatever eating his flesh and drinking his blood implies, having his divine image formed in us.
If this recent election in the United States has taught us anything, it has taught us how superficially and mindlessly many who profess to be followers of Jesus Christ really are, how radically different is our DNA, how international and free from hatred and selfishness and prejudice. We are a servant people. We are rather to be the “sweet aroma of Christ” right in the midst of the stink and stuff of daily realities. We are those who embrace his counter-cultural life, and are certainly not those intimidated by all of the wild and free implications of true faith in the Lamb of God.
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