Why Jesus?

There are a few things about me that are pretty consistent. I drink a lot of Pepsi, I frequently forget not to cuss in front of other peoples’ children (sorry other people and your children!), I hate reality TV (unless there are ghosts in it, then I think it’s hilarious), stuff like that. One of the things that are pretty consistent is a question I frequently ask, which is “Why Jesus?”

Let me start by saying that I believe in Jesus. I believe he did all the stuff people say he did, up to and including the dying thing. The difference is that I don’t believe in him the way most people do. In my head it’s really easy for me to accept that Jesus is also God and God is also Jesus (and the holy spirit fits in somewhere as well) so there’s no huge need in my mind to differentiate between one and the other. When I say “Hey God, would you >insert request here<?” I know I’m talking to all three of them. Jesus/God knows I’m thankful, and Holy Spirit/God knows they’re invited to come hang out with me. I don’t feel the need to make the distinction, or place him on a pedestal, or worship him exclusively with pictures and love songs and whatever else. Once I heard someone say “Jesus prayed to God, we pray to Jesus.” I thought it was all the same, so I was a little boggled.

Anyway, stuff like that makes me ask “Why Jesus” and it wasn’t until recently that I think maybe I might have found an answer for that.

Let me explain. No. . .there is too much. Let me sum up.

What the Faith: Only stealing from the best since 2011.

A couple of weeks ago, my phone was stolen by someone I thought was my friend. This was a person that, while I wouldn’t say I was “tight” with, I had gone out of my way to be cool towards. I had really thought that there was some sort of mutual feeling of friendship and community. Imagine my surprise when five minutes after this particular person left my house I reached for my phone and found it gone.

Little bit of background story here, I live in a very poor and very ethnic section of my city and have felt very strongly called to love these people and to fight to shine light on the good things about the community in which I live since I moved into it.  Then again, maybe “called” is the wrong word. To say I was “called” implies that the feeling somehow came from outside of me. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that I have oddly, but strongly, felt love for these people and, that I’ve oddly but strongly had a compulsion to fight to shine light on the good things they bring. So some time ago I began building bridges with my neighbors, who are as different from me as .  .two really different things.

Some of them are barely older than teenagers, others have children older than me. It didn’t matter. We were all piled up on my tiny porch, hanging out, drinking, eating, laughing or whatever. Color, age, sexuality, creed, ceased to matter in the little world we created, so perhaps it isn’t surprising when it started to grow from my neighbors to my neighbors’ family and friends, and sometimes just a random person walking by. I guess they saw something happening on my porch that they wanted to be a part of. I don’t know.

I’ll be honest, I loved it. I’m not very good at loving, or maybe I’m not very good at letting myself be loved, but when you’re in “the hood”, and all the hood homies tell you that you’ve been adopted, and you’re fam now even though you’re one of two white families in the whole neighborhood and the ONLY one on the block. . .

. . .not everyone gets that.

I felt special. I felt loved. I loved them back. That’s not why I started building the bridges, but it was a pretty cool by-product of it.

As opposed to the UN-cool side effect of bridge building – a boom in the troll population.

So when all other possibilities as to my phone’s location had been exhausted and I had no choice but to accuse this person who I had let come into my house, who I had fed, and bought bottles for, and given rides to. . . I was pissed. I didn’t want to think he would do it, but when I couldn’t deny it any longer, I was furious. I was so enraged that I saw black. I was ready to end his life and throw mine away over a cell phone. Granted, it was a new cell phone, less than 3 weeks old, and worth $500, but unless I missed the point of everything here, $500 does not equal the value of a life. I feel like maybe that reaction was disproportionate.

Anyway, that’s not the story. The story is that I felt amazingly betrayed. Here I am, learning to love and be loved by strangers, which if you’ve followed this blog at all you know I’m terrible at, and the thanks I get for trying to learn these things is getting robbed!

So perhaps understandably, I sat on my porch fuming dangerously, fantasizing about all the ways I was going to hurt, injure, maim, murder or otherwise teach this shiesty little bastard a lesson in respecting other people’s property. I was about to go full on hood on his little ass.

I’m not proud of this, but for a while I was lost in it, drowning in a sea of black.

Those of you who know me know I’m prone to outbursts which are loud and angry but which quickly dissipate. If you know me well enough you know that those outbursts are relatively harmless. This was different. This was a cold, calculated anger, and it was scary. Scarier was how easy it was for me to be there.

I didn’t think of any of this while this was happening. While it was happening I was sitting on my porch fantasizing about hurting a teenager for the theft of a phone. It never occurred to me that any of this might be wrong, and I might have been lost there forever, but as I was sitting there, full of hate and murderous intent, a thought occurred to me that changed everything and broke through the tempest of my thoughts and mood like light cutting through the clouds after a storm.

The thought was, “What if I were Jesus?”

If you re-read the beginning of this post, you’ll understand why the “W.W.J.D.” was so alien to me that it couldn’t possibly have come from me. It was so strange that it startled me out of my black and violent thoughts and cut through the hateful ink I was floating in like a scalpel. Immediately, my brain tried to answer that question, deflating all my rage with one fell swoop and taking away all the wind from my sails. I wasn’t ready to not be enraged, and in a blink, instead of enraged I found myself sad. I’d seen this kid a handful of times, and I don’t think I’d ever seen him wearing a different outfit. What kind of place must he be in, what kind of deep seated hurts must there be in him that would make him steal, not from some random person, but from someone who’d been nothing but loving and friendly to him, someone who had fed him for nothing, who’d given him things asking nothing in return? My heart broke for him and I knew in the deepest part of me that if I were Jesus, that I would track him down and say, “Hey, you left so fast with that phone I gave you, that you forgot the charger and headphones I was going to give you with it.” I cried for him a little bit. Admittedly, I cried for me a little bit too.

Pete called it “The Les Mis Moment” and it broke me.

If I had to rate my weeping, I’d say it fell somewhere between “I Dreamed a Dream” and “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables.”

I thought about this uneducated high school drop-out, who at 17 is already so hopeless that he thinks the only way he can ever come up in this world is to go banging around with his clique and stealing from people who only wanted to love him. He didn’t even sell the phone for drug money, like some (I) might have thought. He was using it, making calls and texts and leaving a paper trail a mile wide if I wanted to press charges on him. He even offered to sell it on Facebook. . . where I have him friended. Clearly these are the actions of a master thief, right? Somehow, these stupid decisions broke my heart even more. This isn’t a strung out druggie, or a rabid kleptomaniac, this is a desperate kid who wanted to be able to have the status of having a new S3 and thought the only way he could ever get one was to take it.

My friends and neighbors don’t understand my reaction to this. They don’t understand my decision to not go after him despite the fact that he’s sort of handed himself to me on a silver platter. They don’t understand why I should care about what happens to the life of the kid who wouldn’t spare a second thought for what happened to mine. They don’t understand it, and it’s led to questions that have led to conversations that always lead back to God. These conversations have led to more questions, which have led to these boys coming over with their Bibles, opening them, and asking me questions about stuff they’ve read inside of them. These conversations never could have happened if I had reacted the way I wanted to, the way any of them would’ve, the way their life and background demands that they do. They wouldn’t have been angry at me for tagging their friend with a felony for stealing my phone. In their mind that was a reasonable response to his action and he brought it upon himself. They would have continued coming over and hanging out with me, but we couldn’t be growing together as friends, and searching together for what the Truth looks like.

I’ve already replaced that phone, It cost me my deductible and a few days. I still haven’t pressed the person who stole from me. If I saw him today, I would invite him over to my porch and ask him if he wanted to share a cigarette with me. I might talk some shit about him walking off with my phone, but maybe I wouldn’t. I’m not sure. I know that I wouldn’t shut him out, for sure. While I might not let him back in my house, I feel like it’s important that I keep loving him despite the thing he did to me, and that I show him that, not so that he thinks its ok to steal but so that he knows I see the person he is beyond what he did, and that he is loved.

And, I think, this is “why Jesus”. Whatever else there might be, without Jesus we would have a book that illustrated an all-powerful God constantly smiting us for getting it consistently wrong. The Bible without Jesus would be a book about how God acts. Jesus shows us how we should act, even when it’s hard, even when it sucks, and even when we’d rather be furiously fantasizing about maiming and murder.

Jesus fills the gap between “I believe in God” and “I’m a person that other people see God in”.

This experience was an emotional roller coaster, and I’m exhausted from dealing with it. But I’d do it again for the realization that I really can emulate Jesus, and even if I never see that kid again, the bridges that have been built between me and my neighbors and his friends because of it have been worth every moment.

Well, worth ALMOST every moment. . . . goddamn trolls. . . .

That’s fishy. . .

Faith life can be weird, right? I often feel like as a follower of Jesus I am living between extremes that look totally off-putting, yet when I’m doing a good job of it there are these incredible rewards.

One example of where I try to live in the tension is around God intervening in my life. On one extreme there are those who have some kind of faith but believe God doesn’t ever touch reality now that He has set it in motion. That’s not me; I believe God acts in the world. That said, I generally like people who adopt this view, and I don’t find it difficult to relate to… if I hadn’t had my personal experiences with God, I’d be in this camp.

You know, miracles. Like that one time I found my keys.

On the other extreme are the folks who experience God intervening in every decision of their lives, thanking God for getting out of speeding tickets, for good parking places, for Vikings victories, for the McDonald’s employee giving them an extra large helping of french fries, etc. I appreciate thankfulness, and I’ll thank God for anything good, but I’ve watched people thank God for coincidences as if God designed those coincidences specifically to bless that person… like “Thanks God, you know I needed Adrian Peterson to rush for 180 yards to win my fantasy football game this week, I appreciate your effort on my behalf.” That kind of prayer is harder for me to identify with.

So here I sit, trying to live between the poles (or, you could argue, setting up a false dichotomy…). I believe firmly that once upon a time, as I set off to kill myself, God intervened, saved my life, and changed me forever. I also believe that I’m likely to find the best parking space out of 100 about… 1% of the time. When I do, I’m grateful, but I don’t experience it as an intervention from On High designed to make my day better. A little skepticism not only never hurt anybody, sometimes it keeps you from being an idiot.

I have a saying that I pull out when something happens that seems extremely coincidental, to the point where I might reasonably attribute it to God. I say “Hm… that’s fishy.” A good number of people in my life know that’s one way I say that God might have intervened at this point.

“Dude. I’m calling shenanigans, right here and now.”

This last week I was at the Vineyard national conference in Anaheim. The Vineyard is the church movement I’m a part of, and I was apprehensive about the conference this year. I was concerned about some meetings I had set up, concerned with my place in my church movement, and generally just feeling anxious.

The night I got there two very nice middle aged ladies I’d never met asked to pray for me. Out of the blue they began to pray words that spoke directly and completely toward my apprehension and anxieties. They spoke powerful words of encouragement and of God’s presence in my conflict (which, mind you, I hadn’t told them I was having… they knew nothing about me other than the fact that my hand had been in the air).

When they were done I felt gladness, a lifting of anxiety/apprehension, and great peace. I thought… “That’s fishy.” It seemed like an act of God.

Over the next three days, people randomly prayed for me three times. All three times they walked up to me cold, prayed words that perfectly fit my situation, and wandered off oblivious to what was, for me, becoming simultaneously a surreal experience and a growing confidence that God is with me and genuinely loves me. No one prayed a single word for me that didn’t fit. No one had any details or knowledge of my life. Everything they prayed gave me greater peace and joy.

It was, in short, one of the fishiest experiences I’ve ever had. I ended up having a number of amazing meetings, and a couple challenging ones. I’m so grateful that before the latter took place, I had received tremendous encouragement and security through either the most absurd coincidences I can imagine… or God had intervened in my life for no purpose other than to bless me.

It was pretty fishy, and I’m pretty grateful. I’ve been thanking God a lot this week, and I’ll be doing so for awhile.

I’m also more grateful than ever to be part of a faith community. The challenges of life (anxieties and apprehensions about people, for example) are a given. Crazy fishy intervention by God seems to happen a lot more often when people are praying around me. It’s almost like God speaks to us through one another, or even loves us through one another 😉

Try to leave some room for the Holy Spirit, guys.

On to the questions!

1. Do you ever see God in the coincidences of your life? How often, and how would you know?

2. Have you ever had a supernatural experience (or extreme fishiness, if you prefer!) while someone else was praying for you?

3. What do you think of my story… do you have any stories (positive or negative) that are brought to mind as you read?

Agreeing to Disagree – A guest post by Rev. Peter Benedict

I’ve spent a good chunk of my life convinced that being right and knowing the truth are important. I’ve also often thought I was right about just about everything. Those two sentences would have seemed unrelated to me for a good 20 years, but reading them now I’m stunned at their silliness.

My passion for finding the truth has led to some good stuff in my life. I was the guy in college who’d stay up all night talking with people about anything I cared about, and even if I tried to convince you I was right and even if I knew I you were wrong, I enjoyed hearing other perspectives. I’m glad I’ve always been after the truth, even if I was sure I already had it.

My passion for truth has led to some less good stuff too, especially when it’s been paired with surety in my own perspective. As a teen, for example, I got put in private Christian schools because I was suicidally unhappy in my public school (a story for another day!). While there I was exposed to all kinds of “theology,” and when I became convinced, I felt justified in being a jerk about it… because after all, I was right! I did some terrible stuff, like telling my future sister-in-law that God didn’t want her speaking in church (which I didn’t believe was good, or right, but it was in the Bible and I wanted to be argumentative).

“Oh, for the love of me. . .”

Now I’m 42 years old, or as my teen self would have thought: Nearly dead. And I find myself much less sure, much less concerned with being right, but still passionate about truth. But the truth is different now. Jesus has rolled stuff out in my life, rather than giving me some giant ball of truth-wax in one big glob. I discover over time that I’ve been wrong and that God’s calling me to a new way, and this has happened so many times that I’m now pretty sure of some different truths than I used to believe.

I’m pretty sure that right now I’ve got wrong beliefs about something. I’m pretty sure I have no idea what it is, so I might as well be humble about what I believe.

I’m pretty sure that when I disagree with someone, how we treat each other is more important than who’s right.

“Admit it! Admit that Calvinism is theologically unsound!”

I’m pretty sure that how I treat people is important even if the other person is doing something terrible, like spitting at me or nailing me to a cross or, even worse… JUDGING ME! I used to put being judgmental on its own special plane in Dante’s Inferno, but now I figure I’ve been sure and judgmental often enough that I should probably just be graceful in the face of it. I’ll probably be judgmental again someday, and when that happens I’d love to be able to say “I’m sorry… could you give me some grace on this one, like you’ve seen me give to others?”

Once upon a time, if I’d started a blog it would have been my goal to tell you, dear reader, what’s right and true. Now I’m writing for a blog because I want to learn from you. When we disagree, I’ll still believe what I believe in the moment… but disagreement is OK, and I hope we do a lot of it here. I hope we do it well.

“I respectfully disagree with your position, vis a vis Calvinism!”

On that front… on to the questions!

1. How sure are you of the truth (or The Truth, if you prefer)?

2. How have you treated people when you disagree? How have people treated you?

3. Is there any truth that you’re passionate about? Is there any truth you’ve been so passionate about that you’ve been less kind than you’d hope?

4. Is judgment some kind of special wrong? Is it OK to treat judgmental people badly?

5. Do you have any questions for me, or anything to say that I would benefit from hearing?

Thanks in advance to all who respond. You’re the reason I’m writing, and I hope I learn good things from you.

The Awe of God – A Guest Post by Brant Skogrand

Dan’s Preamble

Wow, have we been guest-blogger-posting fools lately, or what? One of the great things about running a tiny li’l blog like this one is meeting other bloggers. Brant Skogrand is a fine fellow who attends River Heights Vineyard with me, and he has a little something to say. Brant normally blogs here. If you like his post here, why not check out the rest of his stuff?

End Preamble

 

*          *          *

Six years ago, inspired by the awesome experience of hearing God audibly speak to me, I started a blog. Called The Awe of God, I set out to capture and document instances of God speaking to people.

Here’s what I have learned along the way.

1. God connects with each of us uniquely. For some of us, God speaks audibly. For others, it’s through scripture. Visions have been reported. In numerous instances, God speaks through the people around us. Other times, it’s a still small voice inside.
2. God has a plan for our lives. Whether it’s showing a woman that she has breast cancer in order to educate others or saving a man from suicide, God will speak to us in order ensure that His will be fulfilled.
3. By following God, things could happen that we never would have imagined. Like Alfonso Fernandez, who followed God to become the Spanish radio voice of the Minnesota Vikings. Or Jennifer Henderson, who left her $100,000-a-year job at a Toyota plant to open a Christian bookstore.
4. While many people may be reluctant to admit it, they have heard God’s voice. Sometimes people don’t want to disclose that God talked to them for fear of appearing haughty (especially here in Minnesota) or seeming too religious. However, covered by the anonymity of a survey, 20 percent of Americans admitted to USA Today that they had heard the voice of God. Sometimes what God says to us is just extremely personal, and we don’t feel like sharing that with others.
5. God’s presence is fleeting. I guess that He doesn’t want to overstay his welcome. Or it could be that He just wants to make a short yet powerful statement, such as the time when a grandmother heard of a chorus of harps as she was comforting her dying grandson.
6. God has a sense of humor. Johnny Hart, the creator of the comic strip “B.C.,” felt that God wanted him to do the comic strip as a way to share God’s humorous inspiration. Author John Eldredge shares God’s sense of humor in his book “Beautiful Outlaw” when, asking God why He doesn’t give John hearts anymore, God responds by having John come upon a dried piece of cow manure – in the perfect shape of a heart.

Thank you, God, for your amazing presence. I am still in awe.

I love Pat Robertson so goddamn much – A WTFaith Quickie

Every time Pat Robertson talks, it’s my birthday.

The above link is a CNN religion blog article about Patty Rob’s “Top 10” most controversial quotes. While I remember this one from my mis-spent pagan youth. . .

“The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”

. . . I got great joy out of some of the gems I was exposed to for the first time.

Like this one!

“Many of those people involved in Adolf Hitler were Satanists. Many were homosexuals. The two things seem to go together.”

Clealry this man is a master of social science. He has more facts that Xerox.

Read the article, then comment with your favorite Patty Rob quote, and why! And if you actually, non-sarchastically love Pat Robertson, could you. . . maybe. . . maybe explain that to me, a little?

Kisses!