I Knew Jesus before He Was a Christian . . .

            I’ve just completed a book you might want to read. Its title is I Knew Jesus before He Was a Christian . . . and I Liked Him Better Then. Yes, the title is meant to get your attention. But it is also meant to be a very serious statement.

            The Jesus one meets in the Gospels is humble and appealing, engaging and life-transforming. He is God among us who rescues, heals, and empowers. But something happened in the fourth century that changed everything. The Roman Emperor Constantine took control of the church and morphed the Body of Christ into a hierarchical institution that looked more like a government or a business.

            From that time forward, people have had to form their opinions of a warm and generous Jesus through their experiences of an often-imperious church. Thus it has come about that the greatest single cause of atheism in the world is a church that has been at various times materialistic, acquisitive, racist, predatory, sexist, homophobic, and otherwise incongruous in character to its founder.

            Contrary to the advice of one cynic who cried “If you love Jesus, burn the church!”, my appeal is for the church to find ways to connect with Jesus. Identify with Jesus. Reform itself into Jesus’ image. Become what it was at first.

            The Christian religion simply is not serving the spiritual lives of people very well these days. If you doubt that claim, perhaps you should know that the fastest-growing segment of religious affiliation these days is neither Catholic, Protestant, Jew, nor Muslim but “None.” The report was titled “American Nones: The Profile of the No Religion Population.” Yet only 7% say they are atheists.

            My hunch is that some – if not most of these no-religion people – are anything but men and women running away from God but persons who see church as too bland, too tame, too unlike their titular founder. They are looking for a challenge to their faith that is worthy of being associated with Jesus Christ.

            My fear is that what we have come to call Christianity has blurred our vision of Jesus. If that is true, we need to dig beneath the debris of religious rituals and conventions that have accumulated over centuries to reclaim and live the vibrant gospel that turned the world upside down – and could do so yet again.

            I knew Jesus before he was a (post-Constantine, big-shot, uppity, privileged, hypercritical, disparaging, dismissive) Christian. It was back in the days that he was a servant to servants and said we could find God in that sort of simplicity. It was when he stepped between rock-throwers and guilty-as-sin people about to be stoned by them. It was in the times that he laughed, went to parties, held babies, touched blind people, hung out with outcasts, and otherwise showed humans the true nature of God. That God is love. That God is decent and holy, without being priggish about it. And I liked him better then!

            If you get a chance to read the book, I would welcome your feedback.

To purchase the book click here.

Living in God’s Story

            The Bible is not a safe book. Even if you begin reading it for the sake of the children’s version of Noah’s ark, Joseph’s coat, or Jesus’ kindness to little children, it still can get to you. It is the narrative account of God’s purpose to rescue sinful-but-dearly-loved humans through his grace made known in Jesus.

            People who overhear that story somehow get pulled into the narrative and begin to follow Jesus through their own personal engagement with The Story.

            Your story is my story is ultimately the story of every human life. And our personal and collective stories make sense only in relation to God’s Story as we learn it through Jesus. The gospel is not a series of doctrinal affirmations over which we fight in our different denominations. It is the unfolding story of God’s good purposes for the creatures he has made in his own image and likeness.

            In its simplest form, then, evangelism is inviting people into the story of Jesus. It is challenging people to see themselves and all the events and relationships of their lives in the light of Jesus as their Way, Truth, and Life. The task of evangelism is to share the gospel so as to invite people to channel the streams and tributaries of their human experience into the ocean vastness of God’s love for them in Christ. It is to call them to find meaning, identity, and purpose for their lives in knowing and following him.

            The world’s culture offers the option of shutting out God, pursuing a self-willed agenda, and suffering the tragic consequences. The church is called out of the world to be an alternative culture whose identity is shaped by God’s nature, whose activities reflect his redemptive love, and where authentic joy reigns.

            Our neighbors won’t get caught up in the story of Jesus until they see us genuinely engaged with it. The heart of evangelism is not bumper stickers, T-shirts, and tracts; it is bona fide imitation of Jesus. Only when our churches are cultural alternatives to the world’s racism and sexism, jealousy and rivalry, selfishness and materialism can we be light in a dark world.

            It isn’t just your church’s reputation but you as a neighbor, worker, classmate, or friend to the person who does not know Christ. You are called to be a person who keeps promises, lives with integrity, cares about others, and demonstrates an appealing, joyous way of life. Then a neighbor just may want to know more about what you believe and how you live. She will be open to talking with you about Jesus, attending church events with you, or joining your Bible study group.

            In the process of interacting with the people of God, people hear the music of the gospel and begin to move to its rhythm. They see how The Story engages their personal stories. They encounter the Holy Spirit and are changed.

            The unsafe-but-inviting story told in Scripture still engages and enlists hearts. Our task is to model it. Paint the picture. Make the music. God sees to the result.

Garth Pleasant: Tribute to a Friend

 

            Once in a great while these days, you hear about or see from a distance a man or woman who gives you hope for the human race. Maybe we’re not all selfish or hiding deep character flaws with phony PR or working the system while pretending to serve others. Maybe faith really works and the Spirit of God truly lives in human hearts. Sometimes you actually get to know one of those people.

            Garth Pleasant is one of those rare people, and I have been blessed to get to know him. Work with him. Be his friend. Find him to be a man in whom there is no guile. See him do things at great expense to himself for the simple reason that he believed someone would be encouraged. And watch him deflect compliments and praise to others for the simple reason that his humility won’t let him believe he is as special as those of us who know him best know him to be.

            For more than three decades, Garth Pleasant has coached basketball at Rochester College. Only two of his teams had losing records, and12 competed in the final four of national tournaments. He and his team cut down the nets as national small-college champions four times – in 1989, 1994, 2004, and 2005.

            In 1989, the Basketball Coaches Association of Michigan (BCAM) named Garth Pleasant its Coach of the Year – the same year the University of Michigan blew through their March tournament to win the NCAA National Championship. Garth was inducted into the BCAM Hall of Fame two years ago. He has been paid tribute by the likes of Joe Dumars, Tom Izzo, and Don Meyer. These greats in the coaching field know they have a peer in Garth Pleasant.

            You’d think a track record such as this would have earned Garth Pleasant a head coaching job at a big school, a Division-I NCAA school, and a salary multiple times what Rochester College could pay him. It did! But he turned down those offers time and time again to stay with his ministry to young men.

            Garth’s “Aw Shucks” attitude toward all his achievements is a genuine humility born of his sincere faith. He has always told me his work is his kingdom service to a gracious God. Like the God he serves, he has shown grace to recruit players whose high school coaches and teachers warned him to avoid. Not all those risks had happy endings. Enough have that he is a life-changer for more young men than I can name. While teaching basketball, he taught character.

            Carlee Barackman captured Garth’s legacy well with a headline in the college’s student publication – “It Was Never About the Wins, Championships, or Halls of Fame.” In Garth’s words: “I try to tell my players that I will know how good a team we were in 15 years when I am able to see how good of a husband, father, and member of society they are. Then I will know how good we were.”

            He’s hanging up his whistle, but his investment in young souls lives forever.

Everybody’s Doing It

 

            All of us know the term “peer pressure.” It’s what our mothers used to counter when their daughters wanted to dress like street-walkers or their sons reeked of the smell of cigarette – or, a generation later, pot – smoke. The kid would say, “But, Mom, everybody’s doing it.” Then she would say, “So if everybody was going to jump off a bridge, would you do that too?”

            If you didn’t hear that line from your mother at some point about your choice of wardrobe, vocabulary, lifestyle, refusal to shower, distaste for school, grades, or a dozen or more other things, I’m sorry. You either didn’t have a mother, or you had one who didn’t care enough about the immature things kids do.

            For all that, however, there is also a positive side to peer pressure. Better to hang out with Boy Scouts, Rotarians, or fitness buffs than Skinheads, child pornographers, or maximum-security prisoners! We tend to be influenced in either positive or negative directions by those with whom we spend time. The more time spent, the greater the influence. That’s why your mom was always so pleased to have you hang around with the kids who didn’t have criminal records and who got good grades. It helped her believe the best about you.

            A recent book by Tina Rosenberg, Join the Club, makes this point. She writes about “the social cure” that comes about when organizations and leaders tap the power of group dynamics to help people learn new skills, improve their lives, and make a difference in their world.

            “The best-known example of the social cure is Alcoholics Anonymous,” writes Ms. Rosenberg, “which works by regularly gathering a small number of people with the common goal of sobriety.” She is not the first to notice the phenomenon.

            It’s why some college students choose to attend a Christian college. It explains why people join service clubs, participate in Habitat builds, or attend church. They believe their better impulses are more likely to produce fruit when nurtured and translated into action in company with others who are like-minded.

            The rugged individualism of one brave soul standing against the tide still makes a stirring story and sometimes reflects reality. But most of us are better served by the reinforcement that comes of standing with others who share a common goal. That, by the way, is why forced participation tends to backfire. One has to want a positive outcome. Then you find people who share the desire. You talk the talk and walk the walk together. Each makes it easier for the other.

            In selecting your friends, you are making the choice of your own destiny.

The Fuss over Hell

            Time magazine’s current issue carries a cover story about hell. A hot-selling book by Rob Bell seems to have precipitated it. Preachers are weighing in for their congregations on whether Bell is a heretic for his views. To say the least, Bell is light years away from Dante’s Inferno and screaming evangelists.

            On that last point. Good! The notion of hell as a pit of writhing agony over which God presides with some sort of sadistic satisfaction is – well – downright un-Godly. The biblical text makes it clear that the God who revealed himself in Jesus of Nazareth takes no delight in the downfall or suffering of any human being. He doesn’t want anyone to perish but wills instead that all come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9). Dante’s gory images have inspired more of the fear-based and nightmare-inducing images of hell than anything found in Scripture.

            On the other hand, if a popular pastor or dismissive unbeliever holds that there are no eternal consequences for unrepented human evil, that doesn’t square with the biblical text either. Against a materialist world-view that holds this life is all there is and that death just means “everything goes black,” Christian Scripture declares not only that there is life after this one but that the status of people in their future existence depends on decisions made in this one.

            It doesn’t do justice to the biblical materials to say we create our own little hells here and now by stupidity, malice, and greed. Neither is it a solution to insist that multiple tries will be offered each of us until we finally get it right. The biblical message is that this life really matters. And eternity actually is in the balance.

            So is hell a bubbling lake of molten sulfur? That is a word picture for a place nobody wants to be – just as a city with gold streets and constant light is a word picture for the ideal environment anyone would enjoy. But a “word picture” of what? The Bible doesn’t indulge our curiosity about such things. It simply states the real fact that here and now settles there and then.

            And what would make heaven heavenly? Not gold streets or pearl gates. Not diamonds, constant sunshine, and breathtaking landscapes. History has lots of tales of the rich and famous who have had all those things but were miserable. They had no healthy relationships, no safe family or friends, and no genuine love.

            Whatever the word pictures of heaven are designed to say, they surely mean that people there know God, are secure in his presence, and experience the pure love that defines his very nature. Every positive and loving experience you can imagine is distilled to perfection and experienced without interruption or end.

            Hell must be the exact opposite. It is a place and experience where God is not. Rejecting him and choosing to live this life apart from him, no one will have God forced on him in the life to come. So even if that soul walked on gold, slept on silk, and dined on delicacies, the experience would be hell. It would have no secure relationships. No safe places. No love. That some people live versions of this experience now makes it clear how horrible and dreadful hell must be.

            Could the most literal depiction of hell in the Bible be this: “separated from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might”? (2 Thessalonians 1:9).

            Enough said. Whatever and wherever that is, I want no part in it! That God is at work to rescue all of us from such a fate is grace. Amazing, wonderful grace.

Riding Out Life’s Tsunamis

 

            It has been over a month now since a powerful magnitude-9.0 earthquake and tsunami devastated Japan. The confirmed death toll is over 13,000 and continues to rise. In the midst of all the horror stories are occasional heroic tales of survival and rescue. One of the most fascinating is that of Susumu Sugawara.

            The 64-year-old Sugawara is the owner-operator of a small boat named “Sunflower.” After the massive earthquake and in view of the tsunami warnings being broadcast, he had to make a quick decision. Should he head for high ground on his island of Oshima? Should he put his boat to sea and try to ride out the fury? His chose to launch his boat and head for deep water offshore.

            “I knew if I didn’t save my boat,” he told a CNN reporter, “my island would be isolated and in trouble.” So he ran to his 42-year-old craft that can hold about 20 people at a time and went full-throttle toward the deadly waves that would kill people whose names and faces he knew. Then he saw the wall of water.

            Accustomed to waves ten to twelve feet high, this one was fully 50 to 60 feet high. Sugawara knew that he and his boat could easily wind up at the bottom of the sea. He drove straight for it – “climbing the wave like a mountain,” as he put it. And the mountain seemed only to grow bigger and bigger. There was a huge crash of water over him. Only then could he see the horizon. He had survived!

            Sugawara made his way back to his now-devastated Oshima. For the month since, he has been a lifeline by making hourly trips to the mainland to ferry people and supplies. If people can help pay for gasoline, he accepts money. If they have lost everything and can pay nothing, he still welcomes them aboard.

            I’m no sailor or boat captain. I don’t know if the Japanese captain made the reasonable and right decision on that fateful day. I can only report and rejoice at the outcome. He lived through the ordeal and is helping others with a sense of sensitivity to their suffering the rest of us can only admire from a distance.

            Here is the lesson from this story for me: Against my hesitation and fear, it makes more sense to ride into the teeth of life’s challenges than to run away.

            There is a cash-flow crisis. There is an unexpected problem with a product. A major supplier has failed, or a major customer has bailed. Some executives kick into denial mode or ball up in a fetal position. Their companies fail. Leaders steer right into the problem and act with integrity to name and face the problem.

            Or maybe the problem is far more serious. A spouse says the marriage is over. The police or hospital calls with a parent’s worst nightmare about an arrest or accident. Maybe you get a diagnosis that sounds like a death sentence. Do you run and hide? Self-medicate with drugs or alcohol? Or do you steer into the teeth of the storm and pray for courage you have never had to display before?

            “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you stop to look fear in the face,” said Eleanor Roosevelt. “You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next one that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” 

People Who Burn the Quran

 

            Christians of all stripes and varieties have expressed dismay over the failure of some Muslim clerics to decry and condemn terrorism. From the World Trade Center to the bombings in Delhi to suicide bombings in multiple locations, there are extremists associated with Islam who cause some people to fear all Muslims of all backgrounds. That is unfair to Muslims. But outsiders to Islam have wanted to hear its leaders speak clearly about the fanatics.

            Muslims have a similar reasonable expectation of Christians. They have the right to listen expectantly for us to decry and condemn bigoted extremists who claim to represent Christianity. When the pastor of the World Dove Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, burned a Quran recently, he was both morally wrong and spiritually misguided. His action sparked days of deadly rioting in Afghanistan and gave credibility to the anti-Christian rhetoric of Muslim terrorists.

            Have you noticed how many people dismiss Jesus, curse Christianity, and resent churches? Ever wonder why? The answer lies in the behavior of pedophile priests, huckster televangelists, Fred Phelps’ protests at the funerals of fallen American soldiers, and Terry Jones’ repulsive Quran-burning.

            The issue here isn’t the compatibility of Christianity and Islam. They are quite distinctive in their views of Trinity, the deity of Jesus of Nazareth, human redemption, and what to regard as Sacred Literature. Although cousins because of Abraham, the two religions are notable for their differences. As a Christian, I affirm the unique and exclusive role of Jesus as Savior. But I also affirm the obligation of his followers to treat Muslims, Buddhists, or atheists with respect.

            Jesus made the right-wing religionists of his era unhappy because his heart was big enough to reach not only to Jews of other parties but to Samaritans and Gentiles as well. He was smarter than some of his followers. He knew he could not even talk with those he wanted to win to himself by insulting them and demeaning the things they valued or held sacred.

            Christian Scripture says this: “The Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone” (2 Timothy 2:24). “Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an account of the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence” (1 Peter 3:15-16).

            People who think they are honoring God by burning the Quran – thereby confirming the worst of prejudices toward Christians, closing the door to fruitful dialogue, and precipitating riots – only make Christianity look hateful, bigoted, and boorish. Don’t talk about motive here. Think instead of obvious outcomes.

            Jesus’ would-be representatives are making him look bad again.