We all have different pictures of Jesus in our heads. There’s White European/American Jesus who generally just creeps me out. And I have sweet Baby Jesus, who I admit, hasn’t done much for me spiritually, but did great things for my toy collection as a kid. But then there’s Human Jesus. Human Jesus changed everything.

I used to be afraid of Human Jesus. Not in the same creepy way as European/American Jesus, but because of what having a God-who-became-human might mean. Of course, I was taught to admit there was a Human Jesus . . . just make sure to quickly add that we all agreed God Jesus is what’s really important. After all, we had to admit Jesus was human, but that didn’t mean we had to like it. I mean, liberals, progressives, and even secular ego-driven, anti-god academics admitted to a Human Jesus. It’s God Jesus that really makes a difference. But in seminary, Human Jesus moved from being an embarrassment in my life to being a savior.

Human Jesus saved me at a time when I needed saving. I had come to the place where I was about to divorce God altogether. Once I started admitting to myself that Jesus didn’t make me a super-human, that most of the world couldn’t care less about theology, and that I was still just as broken (if not more so) than my non-Christian friends, God and I just didn’t seem to have anything in common anymore. He seemed too distant, so intolerably perfect and Stoic. I couldn’t even relate to Jesus, what with all his white clothes that never seem to get dirty, Buddhist monk-like poise and patience, and I-know-everything attitude.

I desperately needed a Human Jesus. And thankfully, while in seminary, I got him. And I’ve never looked back. Over the years, Human Jesus has helped me undo a lot of the fantasies I had constructed about Christianity. Here are a few things Human Jesus has taught me:

God gets that we are a mess. Jesus entered into the shit and the beauty of human existence. He was able to experience the love of his mother and the betrayal of his best friends, the beautiful sensuality of getting his feet wiped with the hair of a young woman and the tortuous pain of getting his feet nailed to a cross. It was through seeing Jesus as unapologetically human that I was able to see that God doesn’t want me to become superhuman, he accepts me for me. He doesn’t expect me to be anything but human and he demonstrates this by becoming human himself. Christianity isn’t a rulebook for how to be perfect like God, it’s a story about how God became like us. And that’s an important difference.

We have a very human-looking Bible. Human Jesus shows me we have a God who doesn’t mind “looking bad” for the sake of humanity. If the same God that came as Jesus also gave us a book, I would expect it to look very human. It would have to speak, as Calvin would say, in baby-speak — imperfectly, through language, culture, and customs we as very limited humans understand. Does it run the risk of looking, well, ordinary, unrefined, and altogether human? Yes. And that’s the point. My Bible looks a lot like Jesus.

Love is not about fixing people it’s about being with them. If you want to truly relate to and talk to broken humans, you run the risk of looking broken yourself. Get over it. The streak I see in Human Jesus and Human Bible is this: the One in power giving up that power to become one of us. It is not the rich “helping out” the poor, but learning to be with the poor. It is not the holy instructing the unholy, but the holy becoming so involved in the lives of the unholy that people are uncomfortable with how, from the outside, it’s hard to tell the difference. The God I see in Jesus is a God who threw caution to the wind in the name of love. Damn it all! For the sake of love I will throw off my royal robes, my power, and my reputation, and instead be called a glutton and a drunk, a nobody who dies without notice, a traitor to my state.

That Jesus saved me once and continues to save me almost every single day.

As some of you know, I am in the middle of finishing up my second writing project. The point will be to say that if we are going to be unified, as Jesus tells us is his vision in John 17, then we need to first understand what we mean when we talk about “truth” and then to let go of our idolatry around “Absolute Truth.” Part of this book will be to give voice to people who feel like they were shunned, outcasted, belittled, or shamed from their church because they held a particular belief that was considered “non-negotiable” by the church.

Over the past few days I have been soliciting stories from folks who have gone through this experience. It’s been a painful but eye-opening experience. I wanted to extend that invitation to anyone who reads my blog as well. All stories will be anonymous (having your name changed and no Proper Names being used) and not all stories will make it into the book unfortunately. But please let your voice be known.

The amount of stories might require another project soon, just to let everyone out there know they aren’t alone and they aren’t bad, not as corrupt as they were made to believe.

If you have a story to tell please email me. My email is jaredbyas [AT] gmail [DOT] com and can also be found under the “About” section of my website.

I’m not interested in a Christian message that says you’re worthless or one that says God’s plan for you is to be the next American Idol. They both seem damaging to human relationships, both caught in an economy of comparison & competition. I think the Christian message is that you’re enough & that we are called to love each other as human beings, not as people who accomplish, or do not accomplish, well, anything.

In the first message, where we are deemed worthless, we compare ourselves to others and find that we are not good enough. We are told that God has a better plan for us, that if we follow his guidelines, we will be winners, not losers.

In the second message, where we are destined for great things, we compare ourselves to others and find that we have won. We thank God for our win even though our thankfulness implies God is behind everyone else’s loss (see above).

So, when I win, God made me win and therefore God wanted everyone else to lose. Which means, when I lose, I’m not good enough for God to make win.

This cycle is endless. Every person who thanks God for a win is implicating God in the pain and loss of others. My belief is that the message of Christianity is not contained in individual accomplishment at all, but in the connections and relationships between individuals. That is, it’s not a question of winners or losers, it’s about playing a different game altogether.

Or, to put it more bluntly, I honestly don’t think God gives a shit about our accomplishments. He doesn’t care who wins the Super Bowl or the little league championship, who gets the raise and who successfully starts their own business. Against the backdrop of embrace, belonging, exclusion, and shame, I think our accomplishments are white noise, a figment of the American imagination, used more often to use people in the name of God than to support them.

The key word in this new economy is “enough.”

Enough calls us to love ourselves.

Enough calls us to love each other as human beings, not as people who accomplish.

Enough calls us to love greatly, not to be great.

I have a confession to make: my family isn’t busy.

We don’t have “lots going on.” You won’t really ever catch us “running all over town.”

Sometimes when someone assumes this and I respond with, “No, you know, we aren’t really busy at all,” I get a blank stare like I just said something in a foreign language. And sometimes I wonder if people think it’s because we are lazy or because we are hermits. But for anyone who knows us personally, I am not sure those labels apply. For us, it has been a very intentional spiritual practice.

A lot of Christians believe “keeping themselves unstained from the world” is found in not saying four-letter words, drinking wine, or listening to secular music. And I applaud such conviction and fidelity. But for our family, in a culture where being busy is not only the norm but also the get-out-of-jail-free card for any responsibility (e.g. “I’m sorry I haven’t gotten back to you, you know how it is, we’re just . . . so busy.”), we take seriously the call to make room for other people in our lives.

It was not always this way.

It was not long ago that I was, ironically, a pastor, expected to work 50 hours a week, leading two small groups and a worship band on top of that. It was not long ago that we ate breakfast quickly to make sure we all got out the door on time, rushing to grab last minute snacks and pacifiers as we raced to the car.

But then we decided that Jesus (and the rest of the Scripture), it seems, values hospitality. And this hospitality was not just about opening your physical space, but just being open. Open to people who want to come & celebrate. Open to people who need to come & cry. We wanted a life where friends do not have to put each other in the schedule and where each meal was an intentional time to connect with one another.

Like the person who would love to give to charity but can’t because they are in too much debt, we were slaves to our calendar and the busyness of life.

We saw that people always seem stressed out, frantically racing to find their purpose or happiness or whatever it is they are seeking. And we had the strange feeling that all that racing was a little ironic, that maybe purpose is not at the end of some task but in finding every mundane task meaningful by including others in it.

So we began the painful process of letting go of signing our kid’s up for 3 different time-bound activities at the local gym, letting go of small groups and bible studies, jobs that provide steady and comfortable income but require too much time away from our home. We began getting up early enough to make sure we have breakfast and morning tea together, making our meals together, and being willing to be open and available to others almost every night of the week.

And for us, that process was painful, as we let go of narratives that said if you weren’t busy you were selfish or lazy. Or narratives that said we were overreacting or that Jesus really only cares about saving souls not wasting time living out an open life. But over time, we have come to see this rhythm as an invaluable spiritual practice.  For us, we are enacting our very small, and very subtle, piece of the Kingdom.

If an award was given for “Most Obnoxious Cliches,” I think Christianity would win it every year, slightly edging out creepy self-help seminars. But apparently we are also in the running for “Most Unaware,” because we just keep slapping them on the back of our cars, front of our t-shirts, and on top of pictures of kittens that we upload to our Facebook pages.

But I’d like to reflect on a cliche that might also be harmful. It is the popular phrase “Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin.”

First, it assumes that our sin is not a part of who we are. If we grew up in the Church, we spent a lot of Sundays with coloring pages and Cheerios, learning about what actions we do are “sinful” and which are “Christian,” that is “things saved people do.”

As we got older and could understand more complicated concepts, we were taught that deep down we are “saved” but that we still do lots of “sinful” things.

In other words, we were taught that what we do doesn’t necessarily reflect who we are, “really are,” “deep down.” This is dangerous. Over time, we learned that bad behaviors were labeled “sinful” and we were taught to “try hard” to get rid of those behaviors. Good behavior was labeled “Christian” and they confirmed “who I truly am,” they confirmed that deep down I am saved.

The problem with this is that after years of this training, we get really good at creating an internal self (who I really am) that is distinct from our external self (the bad things I sometimes do). The good things get to be a part of my identity while the bad things are just “behaviors.”

So basically Christians, at least in the tradition I grew up in and am experienced with, spend years creating this identity outside of their sinfulness.

My first quibble with this is how we inconsistently apply this to ourselves but still judge others based on their behavior. When I lie, I give myself the benefit of the doubt to say that “deep down” I am not a liar, I just lie sometimes. But when I catch someone in a lie I am prone to think of them as a “liar,” as a part of their identity. That logic seems a little hokey and a little unfair.

But secondly I think this idea is thoroughly unbiblical, illogical, and psychologically unhelpful. By definition, sinners sin. I am my sin. At the deep core of who I am, I am a sinner. Now biblically we might say “In the eyes of God,” we aren’t sinners. But in the very simple and obvious sense, since I sin, I am still a sinner.

But instead of allowing Jesus to truly love me as I am, I spend years creating a false reality about myself. I end up telling myself that Jesus loves me just as I am because deep down Jesus has made me a good person (<– that’s kind of an oxymoron by the way).

But Jesus loved sinners as sinners. That is he loved all of them, sin and all. Because we are our sin. There is not some deep part of us that is quarantined, immune from brokenness. Jesus loves sinners to the core, not sinners who pretend not to be sinners at their core.

And, here is the kicker. If we don’t accept that deep down we are still sinners and that sin is a part of our identity and yet Jesus still loves us, then we will keep naively and unintentionally hurting a lot people. By definition, sinners have sin as a part of who they are.

So if you use this cliche, what you really mean is that I will love this part of your life but I will hate that part of your life. Or should I say, that’s often what people hear you saying. So don’t tell a drug addict, a person who loves money, a person who loves themselves, or (if you believe that being gay or gay sex is a sin) someone GLBTQ that you love them but you hate their sin. Or if you do, don’t expect them to understand and do expect them to be hurt by your words. Because what they probably hear is I will always love this part of you but I can never accept the whole you.

And don’t expect me to agree with you that such is the way of Jesus. We are all sinners. We are all sin. We are all loved. All of us.

 

*This is a re-post from last summer. Check out the comments of that post for further conversation.