Sunday, October 15, 2017

Sabbath Reflection

Revolutionary Jesus

Jesus is much more concerned about shaking your foundations, giving you an utterly alternative self-image, and thus reframing your entire identity.”
Richard Rohr

On my Facebook page, there is a constant stream of folks telling the world what Jesus stood for. Some seem to believe they're honoring him when they go into church on Sunday and condemn homosexuals as an abomination—as though Jesus would have agreed. Some churches are still teaching and preaching that mental illness is demonic possession, and that all that's needed is to accept Jesus into your heart and you will be healed. Some have the notion that the he approves and even protects their right to carry guns. There is a dictate in some religious circles that the man is always head of the household and must, therefore, be obeyed, even if he's brutal, feral and obscene. Others feel that women should not even speak in the church, much less from the pulpit—and somehow, they just know that Jesus would think as they do. Folks are free to believe whatever they want to believe, I guess.

I'll say this about Jesus—according to scripture, he always stood with the outcast and the poor. He represented peace and pacifism. “Peace be unto you. My peace I give you.” He practiced hospitality by feeding all comers. He provided healing for free and for anyone who showed up, regardless of their state of purity. He put his hands on prostitutes and lepers, went into the catacombs to heal a mad man, and blessed women as well as men. He said, “Let the little children come to me,” without parsing them into groups of boys and girls, clean and unclean, believers and unbelievers. Nowhere in the scriptures did he condemn anyone—except those who rejected the “least of these,” and believed that they knew the mind of God better than he. Those he called vipers.

Jesus was a revolutionary of the heart. He wanted to shake people awake, to change hearts from exclusion to inclusion, from cold and hard, to warm and yielding. He wanted to overturn the laws that bound people in ways they could not possibly overcome. We must not misrepresent Jesus' ministry by wrapping it in our own prejudices and narrow definitions. He does not belong to one religion or one nation; he is not wrapped in the stars and stripes and armed to the teeth, nor is he honored by our condemnation of anyone. He came to change our hearts by breaking them open so that light might shine into our darkness. May it be so.

                                                                  In the Spirit,
                                                                      Jane



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