Tag: following Jesus

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Faith Like a Dollar General Knockoff

She goes to church, loves her parents and Jesus, posts appreciative Instagrams about the latest homily she heard from the pulpit.

She sings about Bad Romance, twerks onstage in skimpy outfits, performs anthems celebrating the LGBT spectrum and identifies as bisexual.

To her fans, especially the religiously inclined, she’s an icon of “provocative faith.”  To me she seems pretty anodyne, even white-bread normal.

I have nothing against Lady Gaga and don’t presume to judge her inmost heart, or the heart of the writer of this piece in the Washington Post.  It’s not my purpose to dump on anybody, only to address a few misperceptions.  The article is about this year’s Super Bowl halftime headliner and how she exemplifies an open-hearted brand of Christianity not so far removed from that of Jesus himself. A lot of the content is not surprising: “She prays to an affirming God with expansive love, no a narrow-minded magician in the sky who damns nonbelievers to eternal conscious torment.”  Her audience resembles “the group of outcasts and misfits who flocked to Jesus.”  And finally, “She champions Christian values not of exclusion and discrimination but of empowerment, grace, and self-acceptance.”

Let’s unpack those values as they are understood in the culture at large.

Empowerment – I’m the one who knows me best and knows what’s best for me.  So shut up and mind your own business.

Grace – That’s all.  Just grace.  Got a problem with that?

Self-acceptance – Of course!  I mean, if you can’t accept yourself, who can you accept?  And God accepts everybody, except for those who don’t accept everybody because they’re too busy not accepting to be accepted by God.

That’s what I’m picking up from the zeitgeist. The article says “Lady Gaga’s faith confounds a popular narrative of religion in America.”  Um, don’t think so.  Her faith is pretty much the most popular brand going. It’s flying off the shelves.

Christian faith as Jesus taught it was never popular, not even in goody-goody Victorian times or witch-burning Puritan times, much less today.  Here’s a capsule version of it: Then he said to them all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23).   To unpack again:

Deny yourself – Don’t listen to your heart because it’s deceptive.  Don’t assume that your deepest self is your best self because you’re inclined to rebellion.  Look at me.  Listen to me.  Obey me.

Take up your cross – The life of self-denial is a struggle because you keep bumping up against your worst self.  It can get discouraging, and sometimes not much fun.

Follow me – It’s a narrow road marked with bloody footprints.  I know because I walked it first.

Grace – Yes, just grace.  But if you knew what it cost me you might not be so glib.

Self-denial . . . Liberals don’t like it.  Conservatives don’t like it.  Mainstream Presbyterians don’t like it, nor Fundies either.  What’s more, I don’t like it.  And neither do you.

‘Cause baby, we’re born that way.

But that’s why Jesus came.  And if it makes you feel any better, he denied himself first.

Because every self is different, self-denial won’t look the same in everybody. For the pious evangelical, as well as the progressive, it might mean giving up the checklist that makes you feel superior (they look very different, but they’re still checklists).  For the exhibitionist, it could mean putting on some clothes and for the fundamentalist it may mean taking a few clothes off.  For the conservative it could mean separating Christianity from Americanism and for the liberal, reconnecting God’s law to man’s law.  For the ambitious writer (like me) it often means settling aside certain projects because I’m called to do something else.  And much, much more.

But it’s worth it–because he is.

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What’s in It for Me?

Now great crowds accompanied him, and he turned and said to them, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.  Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.”  Luke 14:25-37

On the road again, and “great crowds” go along with him.  Where did they sleep?  What did they eat? Obviously he wasn’t multiplying loaves and fishes at every stop.  It must have been a shifting crowd, like a great amoeba breaking off parts of itself and growing new parts, as people join up for the excitement and drop out when they get thirsty or tired or not much appears to be happening.  There’s a rumor going around: he’s headed to Jerusalem.  I’ll bet that’s where it starts.  Going to be crowned there.  Going to call down fire on the Roman garrison and the stuck-up political-priestly class.

He doesn’t seem to be going anywhere directly, though.  If Jerusalem is the goal, why follow this zig-zaggy trail of one dusty insignificant village after another: west, then east, then northwest, and southwest . . . .  What’s up with that?  All it does is give more deadbeats and sinners an opportunity to join the parade.  But look, he’s stopping.  He’s speaking!  Let’s hurry and catch what he has to say.

Messiah’s face appears stern, but also sad, especially when his eyes dwell on individuals.  When they restnarrow-road on you, you can’t help but feel a little uncomfortable—well, a lot uncomfortable, as though he were peeling you like a grape and uncovering motivations hidden even to yourself.  Or like he is seeing into your future, and it isn’t pretty.  You reach him at mid-sentence:

“. . . only for a day?  Or a week?  Do any of you think you’ll follow to the end?  Let me ask, are you willing to give up your father and mother, son and daughter, wife or husband?  Are those who are dearest to you so distant in relation to me that you may as well hate them?

“In other words, what am I worth to you?

“You’d better not pledge to follow me until you know where I’m going.

“You’d better not promise me everything you have until you’ve heard everything ask.

“You’d better not build this tower or call up that army until you’ve counted the cost and calculated the risk.

“Because the building lot isn’t yours, neither the fight.  You don’t build on me, or recruit me—I build, I recruit.”

Are we still listening?  Because he’s still speaking.  And the one thing we must never, never ask him is, What’s in this for me?  The only question you should ask is,

Who is ‘me’?

For the first post in this series, go here.

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Turning Point

When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. And he sent messengers ahead of him, who went and entered a village of the Samaritans . . . But the people did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem.  Luke 9:51-53

“How long must I put up with you?”

The literal answer is, not very.  The days are coming to an end, rounding off to a period.  He sets his face (ESV) toward Jerusalem.  The NKJV adds “steadfastly.”  NIV: “resolutely set out.”  HCSB: “determined to journey.”  The sense of the Hebrew is something like “stiffened his face,” as if pushing against the force of a hurricane.  From now on, the narrative will be about this journey to Jerusalem and what happened there: a wandering teacher and his little band of disciples on their way to . .  . not change the world, but realign it.

road-to-Jerusalem

The world responds as it always does, in two basic ways.  First, outright opposition, as demonstrated in Samaria.  We don’t like you and we don’t like where you’re going; all Jerusalem-bound pilgrims need to choose another route.  Bible commentators comment on the socio-political backstory of the hostility between Jews and Samaritans, but there’s always a backstory.  My mama was a Christian fanatic, my dad was a drunk, my wife stole everything I had, God dealt me a rotten hand and I don’t need your Jesus.  Or perhaps: my life has been a dazzling success and I have everything anyone could want, so I don’t need your Jesus.  Go away.

He goes away, brushing aside the generous offer of the sons of Zebedee to call down fire on the transgressors.  That fire will be for next time—this isn’t the Judgment.

Then there are those who are attracted to him, but not enough.  They find something else that needs to be done first, whether family obligations, social duties, work or play.  They don’t get it—all those things can be accommodated if one first takes up residence in the Kingdom.  But half-baked plans to move there sometime won’t do.  All in, or all out.  That’s what he demands, and that’s what he is.  He has set his face, and will not look back until . . . Well, not ever.  Not. Ever.

(Neither will the twelve, though they don’t know it yet.  They don’t know they will scatter like sheep and despair of life itself, but they are all in because he called them, and he will see this through.)

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For the original post in this series, go here.

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