Way|Truth|Life

The Princess Bride is one of my favorite movies (and books). For those 3 people in the universe who haven't yet seen it, there is a man named Wesley and a women named Buttercup (yes, that's her name) who fall into true love.


At one point in the film, Wesley dies from severe torture. He comes back to life thanks to Miracle Max, a loveable and very Jewish magician (played brilliantly by Billy Crystal - my favorite work of his).


Wesley makes it back to Buttercup, and she says to him, "I thought you were dead."


Wesley replied, "Death cannot stop true love."


I think this is so true of Jesus. Like Wesley, he risked life and limb to come after us, defeating the evil prince to save His beautiful princess bride. He desired not only to save us, but to spend every moment with us, because He is deeply in love with you and me and everyone. His true love for us is so powerfl that the grave could not hold Him.


And it is because of His true love for us that He will raise us from the grave. Because "death cannot stop true love."

When Christianity burst on the scene in the mid first century, it simply wasn’t a religion. By religion, I don’t mean beliefs about God, but an institutionalized system of worship rites, clergy, and buildings.


First century Christianity had no official worship buildings, because the people themselves together constituted a spiritual temple (cf. Eph. 2:19-22, 1 Peter 2:5) Instead, believers largely met in homes (c.f. Rom. 16:5, Col. 4:15, Phile. 2-3, 1 Cor. 16:19, Acts 8:3 ). Primitive Christianity had no official priests or clergy, but rather all Christians were considered priests, equal before God (1 Peter 2:5, 9). It had no hierarchical leadership, because Jesus was the only head of the church (Col. 1:18), and He told the Christians not to exercise authority over each other (Matt 20:25-28). Christianity had no set rites of worship, but rather meetings were interactive and spontaneous (1 Cor 14). It had no sacrifices, because Jesus had sacrificed Himself to do away with sacrifice (Heb. 10:10-12). (If you would like a further Biblical discussion of these points, feel free to email me).


Yes, early Christians had baptism and the Lord’s Supper, but the Biblical evidence shows that these were not followed ritualistically or ceremonially. The Lord’s Supper was taken as part of a meal around a common eating table, where believers ate and shared together in love and community. The dark communion ceremonies we see today in most Protestant and Catholic services are virtually unrelated to the first century Lord’s Supper.


Baptism was a means of entering the faith, but any baptized believer was free to baptize another believer. One didn’t have to be a clergy to baptize. And baptism was the initial step in the journey.


As Paul of Tarsus had made clear, all the religious formalism that had defined worship up to that point had been abolished at the cross (Gal. 4:8-11). Another early Christian, comparing the old system of priestly religion to the new reality of Jesus as High Priest, said Christ had inaugurated a “new and living way” into the very presence of God, so that no earthly priest or ritual or religious system was now needed (Heb. 10:19-22).


As Paul saw it, all the works of religion were an attempt by man to appease an angry God. But the problem is, what can we offer God that He doesn’t already have, or can’t fulfill for Himself? Can we really expect God to be appeased by weak human means? Paul said we are not justified before God by our works, but by faith in Him (Rom. 3:20, 28). We are justified before God simply by accepting the intimate relationship He desires to have with us.


Those who are in Christ are adopted as God’s children, to enjoy the same loving Father-son relationship that has for eternity existed between the Father and Jesus (Rom. 8:15-16, Gal. 4:1-7). It was this Father-child reality that fueled early Christianity, because it meant believers were free to approach God as children who were unconditionally loved by Him.


Early Christians had strongly-held beliefs about God, and real relationships with Him. But they didn’t have the formalities and superficiality of organized religion, which they saw as largely a human invention that man used to replace God with his own works. The acts of organized religion were a cheap substitute for the intimate relationship God has always wanted with each person. Early Christianity was about living in God's fatherly love, as demonstrated by Jesus Christ and communicated by the Holy Spirit.


What was the upshot of all this? Christianity spread like wildfire because people who had been abused, manipulated, and fooled by their religious systems found in Christianity that “new and living way.” They found the reality of the kingdom of heaven on earth, direct access to, and an intimate relationship with, God. They found a faith community of love and equality and acceptance.


So what went wrong? I could go through volumes of Christian history, but suffice it to say that somewhere along the way, people turned Christianity into a religion. The first thing to happen was the creation of a clergy/laity divide in the early second century. Once someone was given allegedly "divine authority" to enact his self-centered will on the congregation, Christianity was twisted into a tool for manipulation and self-interest. It became a device for political power. It became a means for some to gain wealth and influence. And all the while the average Christian was manipulated, robbed of his or her priestly privileges, and spiritually destroyed. Viola and Barna’s Pagan Christianity is an excellent discussion of how this happened.


Christians once again went back to what Paul called the "weak and beggarly elements" (Gal 4:9-10) of ceremony and formalism. They began to work to death for a human institution, rather than rest in the completed work of their risen Lord. They spent their lives and resources building physical structures, rather than enjoying the spiritual life in Christ. They rejected the free adoption as children of God in Christ, instead trying to appease God by their religious deeds and "good works."


For a time, the Protestant Reformation changed this. But it never got rid of the idea of a church building as "the house of God," or much of the formalism and religious liturgy. What's worse, it never did away with the clergy/laity distinction, the root cause of Christianity's downturn.


So what has happened? Richard Halvorson once wrote, “When the Greeks got the gospel, they turned it into a philosophy; when the Romans got it, they turned it into a government; when the Europeans got it, they turned it into a culture; and when the Americans got it, they turned it into a business.”


A great deal of world-wide institutional Christianity is funded and run out of the United States. This American "Christianity, Inc." has spread throughout the world, and many devoted Christians are guilt-tripped and pressured into giving their money, time, lives, and even their marriages, not for Jesus, but for the wealth and prestige of the institution. Commerce certainly has its place, but Jesus threw the money changers out of the Jewish Temple because that place isn't in the church.



To be sure, there are a great many wonderful, loving Christians in the institutional system. But usually they are not the ones in charge. After all, a business needs businessmen to run it, and as someone who works in business, I realize that a loving, merciful, and selfless person is usually not very good at business.


So why did I leave the system? It's because I can no longer accept what the machine does to people, and manipulates them into doing to themselves. Marriages are destroyed because one or both partners are guilt-tripped by leaders into spending dozens of hours every week in committee meetings and other religions functions, rather than with each other. People are broken by judgmentalism, burned by hypocrisy, and (like me in my youth) driven to mental illness or spiritual anguish by manipulative false doctrine. A lot of institutional Christianity has become centered on guilt trips, corporate imperialism, empty ceremony, hypocrisy, and domineering control.


Jesus and His apostles opposed all of these things. But the average Christian is usually kept in the dark about what Jesus and the Apostles actually taught in regards to church life (to be fair, most church leaders don't even know what they taught, because truly open-minded Bible study is discouraged with social pressure). A lot of people are told that they will go to hell if they don't devote every free moment to the goals of the system. In my former denomination, we were told that if we didn't do enough to build up the institution, and accept everything it taught us unquestioningly, we would receive the Mark of the Beast!


God tapped me on the shoulder and told me to leave, and to seek out the reality of New Testament faith community in what some call "organic church," or church as it is described by Jesus and His Apostles. Jesus said, "I will build my church," (Matt. 16:18) and I am taking Him at His word. I am waiting for "the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God" (Heb. 11:9-10).

It was one of my dumber moments. My friends and I were playing “war” across our rural Illinois subdivision, running in between houses and making bullet sounds with our mouths as we pointed plastic guns at each other.



My friend Buddy (I don’t know if I ever knew his real name) had all the best fake guns. So I borrowed one of his. When I realized it was quitting time, I told my friends I had to go. But I still had Buddy’s gun, so I had to find him. I turned around and shouted his name. “Buuuuudddyyyy!”



Then I realized he was right behind me the whole time. I felt pretty stupid. What’s the point of this story? Let’s take a little detour to consider a greater question: Is Jesus the only way to God, as some say He is?



I think that question depends on another one. Which God are you trying to get to?


If you are trying to get to a god that you must appease with religious works, monetary offerings, and good deeds, then Jesus will not get you to him. A sizeable portion of the religious machine that is modern American Christianity will get you to this angry god. In fact, most religious will suffice for this. But will they also get you to the loving, forgiving, and merciful God who is in Jesus Christ? Let’s discuss this.



Speaking of the final day, Jesus said, “Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’” (Matt 7:22-23) As Jesus saw it, those who try to come to God through a bunch of good religious deeds will not make it, because that isn’t the kind of God that Jesus was talking about. In fact, He calls it "lawlessness," or a life of instability and and rebellion. A lot of religious people like to condemn people outside the institutional church as being "lawless," but those same religious people are, in Jesus's mind, living lawlessly. Their position before God is still adversarial: They are trying to earn God's affection through their religious deeds, rather than accepting His embrace and abiding in His freely offered love. Law, in Jesus's mind, simply meant living in love (see, for instance, Matthew 22:35-40).



In constrast to the idea of salvation by religious works and lists of do's and don't's, Jesus makes a quite exclusive claim: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). It is not through works that Jesus said we get to the God He knows. It was through a person, Himself. It is a relationship that gets you there. It is trust in Jesus, not your religion, that brings you to God. That is the kind of God that Jesus was talking about. A God who says, “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice” (Matt. 9:13). A God who simply wants us to allow Him to love us fully and completely.



Many well-meaning people in the institutional machine likes to twist Jesus words in John 14:6 to “no one comes to the Father except through the machine.” Many reject the religious machine’s twisting of this message because of the arrogance it implies: “We have the power to get you to God, if you just do what we say.” Those who refuse to worship the machine are called pagans or heathens by good religious folk. Many who reject the machine think they are also rejecting Jesus, but they do not understand the difference between Jesus and the institutions that claim ownership of Him. Jesus is not saying we only get to God through a religion (that is, membership and service to an institution), but through Him. It is by accepting His embrace that we come to God.


For millenia before Jesus, moralists and philosophers had given mankind lists of ethical mandates. Jesus came to the Jewish people, who had the best set of ethical rules out there, because they were given by God. The problem has never been that humanity, in its most reflective moments, doesn't know not to kill or steal or hate or cheat, but that we have shown ourselves incapable of performing what we know to be right. How often, in our own lives, do we say or do things to the people we love the most that we knew to be wrong before we did them, and after?


But Jesus indeed offered something revolutionary. In comparing Himself to a grape vine, and us to its branches, He said, "Remain in me, and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me" (John 15:4).


The problem isn't that we aren't focused enough on right versus wrong. Our problem isn't, as some in the machine will tell us, that we aren't working hard enough to bear fruit to God. Many misguided people will say they know the exact fruit God wants you to bear, and usually that fruit is giving their institution more money, or getting more people into its doors, so those people can give it more money (This is not true in every institutional church. But there is indeed large and growing "corporate America" institutional church philosophy. When I was in the machine, I was involved in the back room financial discussions in which this money-hungry perspective was stated explicitly.)


Jesus didn't see humanity's problem as not working hard enough at the tasks of religion. Our problem is that we aren't focused enough on simply abiding in Him. No vine or true or any fruit bearing plant tries really hard to bear fruit. "Urrrrrrgggh! I'm going to strain my little tree muscles to grow as much fruit as possible." Rather, growing fruit is the inevitable result of being connected to the source of nutrients. If, as Jesus said, ethics only make sense as an expression of a deeper relationship of love with God, and if, as Jesus said, God is the source of all that is good, then being divorced from relationship with Him means we are divorced from the only context in which ethical living makes sense and indeed is even possible.


The relationship is first knit back by God embracing us in His love, and then, abiding in friendship with the Source of goodness, we gradually become transformed into goodness.


But there is more to this story. After Jesus said, “No one comes to the Father except through me,” He continued, “If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also; and from now on you know Him and have seen Him” (John 14:7).


Jesus was inviting His disciples to enjoy the love of the relationship He has had for eternity with His Father. This is what He meant when He said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.”



Can someone get to heaven without knowing Jesus? I’d say that there may be some who died before the Holy Spirit has introduced them to Jesus by name. God only holds us responsible for what we know, so certainly there will be some in heaven who followed what true things they knew, even if they never knew Jesus by name. Perhaps they would still get to God through Jesus, but they might not realize it until they stare at Him face to face. Perhaps they will be like the young Calormen in Lewis's The Last Battle, who winds up in Aslan's heaven even though his whole life he thought he was surving the false god Tash. But he was faithful to good and truth as he understood it.



But what if Jesus indeed is whom He said He is? What if He is indeed God Himself, dwelling in human flesh? This would completely turn our original question on its head. Because if it is true, then He truly desires to dwell among us, and with us, and in us, as He promised He would. And this life in Him is not something we earn, but it was given to us on the cross. It is something He offers to us simply by being in Him, by resting in Him and trusting His kind love.



So is there another way to God? The point of my previous story is this: If Jesus is who He said, then trying to find another way is like shouting for your friend when He is standing right behind you. No one flies to China to seek out a friend who lives next door. What if God is standing next to us, simply asking to be allowed to love us? What if He doesn’t need a our Boy Scout badges in order to convince Him to love us? Why would we seek to come to God through the impossible way of doing enough good deeds and religious works, when He is standing right next to us, asking simply for us to accept His embrace?

Throughout His life, Jesus repeatedly butted heads with a group of rabbis called Pharisees. These were theocrats who contorted the Law of Moses into an excuse to flaunt their own wealth and ruthless power, a means to oppress women, ethnic minorities, and the poor.



For instance, these men had so twisted the Law of Moses that they taught it was a sin to heal a blind person on the Sabbath by putting saliva in his eyes, even though Moses taught nothing even close to that. Jesus purposely rebelled against this shallow religiosity: He deliberately sought out a blind man on the Sabbath, spit in the ground, made mud, smeared it across the man’s eyes, and healed his blindness (John 9:6).



Jesus was a revolutionary. There is simply no way around it. He was a revolutionary of a different sort, a spiritual rebel with a cause. As one singer says, He was “a madman who died for a dream.” In fact, He was such a rebel that He even rebelled against the grave.



But the Pharisees could not rebel. They had placed themselves in chains of their own making. They lived out of fear and hatred. They would look for every excuse they could to destroy any person who had made a mistake. They would live lives of condemnation and anger, never lifting a helping hand to those around them or showing mercy to the downtrodden. They viewed anyone who had made a bad choice in life as “unclean” and vile, and anyone who showed love and forgiveness to such a person was considered equally disgusting. As Aslan said in Lewis’s The Last Battle, “Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.”



But Jesus simply would not be imprisoned by the rules of human hegemony and human money-lust and human self-righteousness.



Consider the story of the calling of the apostle Matthew, written in Matt. 9:9-13. Matthew Levi was a tax collector. To collect taxes, the Roman Empire would sell tax-collecting franchises. One would purchase this franchise and then have the military authority to collect taxes within a given region. Rome would specify how much the tax collector had to remit to them, but the rest the tax collector could keep for himself. There was no limit on the amount of tax a collector could charge in the colonies of Rome.



A Jew who became a tax collector was looked at as a traitor to his nation. He was a social outcast, and befriending him was a terrible offense. Perhaps it was the love of money had pulled Matthew into that lifestyle. And that greed had left its inevitable mark of spiritual emptiness and social alienation. Alone and broken, he heard the call of the Son of Love, and he immediately left his tax office and followed the Master, never to return to his previous life.



That there was no hesitation indicated something: Matthew Levi didn’t like what he was doing to people, but he felt trapped in that lifestyle. No one would embrace him, so he could not be pulled out of his prison into the love of God and a human community. He too was “so afraid of being taken in that [he] could not be taken out.” It was the embrace of Jesus that pulled him from his self-destruction into the “glorious liberty of the children of God” (Rom 8:21).



Matthew Levi was set free. Not free in a political sense, but at liberty in a deeper way. Jesus broke the chains of what one thinker calls “the tyranny of self,” humanity’s inability to live free of the worries of the world and the pressures of addiction and the need for human praise. After all, the Son of God had loved him. Him! A tax collector! He had been called into a brotherhood with the Divine Son. What else would he ever need or want?



After calling Matthew, Jesus committed what would have been the unpardonable sin to the 1st century religious fundamentalists: He actually sat down and shared a meal with tax collectors and “sinners” (prostitutes, the poor, etc.). In that culture, to eat a meal with someone was to extend a hand of love and acceptance. Even today, if a Christian dares to be kind to a prostitute or a drug addict or even (gasp!) a homosexual, religious fundamentalists will treat him or her with scorn. Likewise, the Pharisees would have none of this. So they said to His disciples, “Why does your Teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” (Matt 9:11).



Jesus was never one to let the downtrodden of society be bullied by the self-righteous, so when He overheard the question, He angrily retorted, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’ For I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance” (Matt 9:12-13). Jesus did not come to save the self-righteous, the pious. He did not come to save “religious people.” Jesus came with a revolutionary fervor, to break the chains of man’s self-made spiritual prisons and set at liberty the downtrodden, the rejected, the despised, the addicted, the broken.



Jesus quoted God’s message to the prophet Hosea: “I desire mercy and not sacrifice (Hosea 6:6).” A religious person will only give sacrifice, only give ritual and formalism and superficial piety. But God desires something that human religion cannot give: Mercy. James, an apostle of Jesus, contrasted the new Christian spirituality with powerless human religion when he wrote, “Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world” (James 1:27). Clearly, this is “pure and undefiled religion before God” that James speaks of is nothing like you would see even in most institutionalized Christian churches today, where human religion has been substituted for centuries.



Paul, another of Jesus’ apostles, wrote to the early believers in Rome, “For you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry out, ‘Abba, Father.’ The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Rom 8:15-16). Abba is the Hebrew word for daddy. When Paul refers to those who have been adopted in Jesus to be children of God, He is not merely speaking in some generic term of all mankind. Rather, he is speaking of such a degree of intimacy with God that the believer naturally thinks of Him as “Daddy.”



Jesus did not come to establish a new religion. He was a revolutionary who came to swallow up religion with relationship. He came to establish mankind in intimate personal “daddy-to-child” bonds with God, so we could feel the sweet eternal embrace of the Infinite Heart. Jesus told another “sinner” whom He loved, “The hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him. God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth" (John 4:23-24). God is not looking for formulaic and empty ritual. He is not looking for human tradition. The Father is looking for sinners who will worship Him from the depths of the heart, from their brokenness, from their delight at being truly and forever forgiven and freed from the bonds of addiction and anger and worry and bitterness. Meet Jesus, scourge of the religious, the “pious,” the self-righteous. Meet Jesus, the sinners’ revolutionary.

Lazarus was a friend of whom Jesus brought back to life after Lazarus fell sick and died. A modern writer—I do not remember whom—tells a parable about Lazarus, which I paraphrase/embellish. When Rome begins to persecute the early Christians, Caesar calls Lazarus before him. Caesar tells him, “If you do not denounce Christianity, I will have you killed.”


Lazarus looks at Caesar, and breaks out laughing. How can someone who has already been dead, and was brought back to life, truly be afraid of the grave anymore? He had been there. He had a friend who brought him out of it, and had promised to do so again.


Caesar says to Lazarus, “Perhaps you didn’t understand. I said if you don’t stop being a Christian, I’m going to kill you!”


Lazarus replies, “Caesar, haven’t you heard? Death is dead! Death is dead!”


When Jesus rose from the grave, he forever swallowed up eternal death for those who believe in Him. He will bring them back to life, and take them to be forever with Him. It is not paradise itself that seems to me so delicious, as eternity in His winsome and loving presence.


The point of this is that my aunt died recently. She was a formerly drug-addicted flower child who was rescued by Jesus from a course of self-destruction. To her, Christianity was not simply academic or theoretical. She had experienced the power of Jesus Christ in her own life. She had known the embrace that she didn’t deserve, but that was offered to her anyway.


She lay dying of cancer on a hospital bed, having to arch her back with every breath because of fluid build-up in her lungs. She was barely able to speak at all on her last day. But she knew Jesus, and she had made it clear to her family that she was was ready to face the grave.


As she was near death, a family member said to her, “Don’t be afraid.”


With what little energy she had left, with every ounce of strength in her, she took off her oxygen mask and said defiantly, “I… am… not… afraid!”


What is it that makes a disciple of Jesus able to laugh at death in its face? Why is it that someone like my aunt can shake her fist at the grave?


There are many to whom Christianity is simply a list of facts and a panoply of shalt’s and shalt not’s. This was not my aunt. Many Christians want a shallow faith, a superficial God they can put in a box and visit once a week. This was not my aunt. She had done virtually every dirty deed in the book, yet she had felt Father wrap His warm arms around her, and heard His gentle voice tell her, “I forgive you. I will never stop loving you.”


To her, Christianity was about a God who is so madly in love with His human creations that He would do whatever it takes—even die the most brutal death imaginable—in order to guarantee that they would share life with Him for eternity. He was not simply a God worthy of her respect, but a God worthy of her love.


Why wasn’t my aunt afraid of death? It was not because she had done all the right stuff. She was, after all, a former drug addict who had a rap sheet. Her lack of fear came because she had entrusted her soul to the One who loves it more than even she does, and who promised her He would never let it go as long as she left it in His care. She was not afraid of death because Jesus said to her:


All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will by no means cast out. For I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me. This is the will of the Father who sent Me, that of all He has given Me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up at the last day (John 6:37-39).

I recently finished reading the book unChristian, by David Kinnaman and Greg Boyle. The book both confirmed everything I had experienced when I was in the institutional church system, and served as a punch to the gut for my own self-righteousness and judgmentalism.


Kinnaman is a researcher for The Barna Group, a Christian polling and research firm focused on Christian issues within the popular culture. Boyle commissioned Kinnaman to do a research project on what people outside of the Christian community think of us Christians. The results were not flattering.


We Christians are seen as judgmental, hypocritical, sheltered, and religiously imperial. In other words, everything Jesus wasn’t. But there is a problem. Kinnaman dug deeper, and in polls and in-depth interviews with people outside “Christendom,” he found that the labels are largely deserved. He discovered that too many Christians aren't living the life of forgiveness, love, mercy, and compassion exemplified by Jesus of Nazareth.


Let's look at the charges:


Christians are seen as judgmental. This is simply a fact. I have seen it. I have been on the receiving end of it, especially now that I have left the religious machine to pursue life in Jesus as He wants it. There is no other way around it. A lot of Christians—perhaps not even a majority, but enough—are indeed judgmental. They are certain that they are perfect in God’s eyes, and that they are all-knowing and even commissioned by God to judge and condemn others.


But Paul wrote in the Holy Writings that Christians are not asked to judge people outside the church (1 Cor. 5:12). And Jesus specifically said He didn't come to condemn the world: "For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him"(John 3:17)


So why, despite the fact that the New Testament is overwhelmingly against judgmentalism, are Christians so judgmental? There are many reasons, but the biggest is that in somewhere along the way, people began to think Christianity is simply about a list of do’s and don’t’s, rather than about a tender Father-child relationship with God that flows out into love for others.


Jesus said Christians are here to love others, but Christians have begun to think they are here to tell everyone else what is wrong with them.


Why are Christians seen as hypocritical? Because we are. Hypocrisy is a general human problem. I think we all know that we want to be better to others, that what we do isn’t always right, but for some reason we find ourselves doing it anyway. The problem with Christians is that we are so blatant about it, and refuse to repent of it when we are confronted by it.


When Jesus was here, His biggest criticism was against “religious” people. He even called them hypocrites and told them their was chosen path was self-destructive. It is strange to me that Christians act like God’s wrath is primarily for the non-religious, when the bulk of Jesus’s anger was brandished against religious people.


Why are Christians seen as sheltered? Again, we are. I am particularly guilty of this. I realized recently the only non-church-going friend I have is my boss. Jesus didn’t hang out with the pious. He hung out with "sinners." Why? I agree with Phillip Yancey. I think He preferred their company.


But Christians have accepted this idea that they aren't supposed to be friends with people who don't share their faith. They have been taught by the religious machine to look at all non-church-goers as evil and dirty. There is a certain degree of pressure within the institutionalized system to stay away from the "unchurched."


Is this cultish? Absolutely. Is this the way Jesus an His apostles envisioned it? Absolutely not. Again, Jesus hung out with "sinners" more than with religious folks.


Why are Christians seen as religiously imperial? Again, because we are. Jesus never saw someone as His "project," as a conversion notch to be put in His belt. Over the past 100 years, leadership within the machine have unfortunately sought the goal of increasing the wealth and power of their institutional systems, rather than seeking to love God and others. When a pastor gets a lot of butts in pews, it earns him glory and power and--in some systems--a higher income. As a former church treasurer, I sat in on meetings where well-intentioned church leaders would say we were going to pursue outreach (i.e. trying to get more butts in pews) in order to "grow our offerings [donation] base."


Sad. But common. Even some of the most well-meaning leaders have been conditioned by the machine into this kind of imperial thinking. They only know what they are taught, because it is simply too scary to question all the false ideas you've been given since your youth.


The leaders put guilt trips on their congregations to go out and get people into the building, regardless of whether getting them into the building solves their problems or not. So you can't really be friends with someone who, for instance, has tattoos, green hair, and an eyebrow ring (even though none of these are wrong according to the Bible), but you are required to drag that person kicking and screaming into the church building.


It isn't that the leaders are intentionally destroying Christians with guilt trips. They just honestly believe that they are saving people from hell by guilting them into living for an institution and despising those outside of it.


This was probably the biggest reason I left the institutional religious system. I began to discover what life in Christ was like for the 1st century Christians. It was not about building up institutional wealth or power or prestige. They eschewed those things. They were outcasts, social and religious rejects.


Jesus loved them when no one else would. And He brought them together into tightly-knit communities of loving friendship. They met together primarily in the intimacy of each others's homes, not huge ornate buildings. First century Christianity was all about friendships--about relationships--not about building up empires.

Anyway, if you're not a Christian, I'm sorry for being such a jerk. Jesus never acts the way I have.

In the movie Notting Hill, the actress Anna Scott (Julia Roberts) comes rushing into the house of William, her non-Hollywood friend. Before she was famous, she had let someone take nude photos of her for money, but there was also a movie camera there. Years later, the London papers got their hands on the film, and displayed the stills for all to see. Anna felt awful. She felt objectified and de-humanized. Her friend William tells her to get a little perspective. He says, “I mean—today’s newspapers will be lining tomorrow's waste paper bins.”


Anna replies, “You really don't get it. This story gets filed. Every time anyone writes anything about me—they’ll dig up these photos. Newspapers last forever. I'll regret this forever.”


Our mistakes and regrets feel like that sometimes. Even if we don’t have newspaper to show us, we always have the memories that come back from nowhere to remind us of our most embarrassing, most shameful, most painful acts. And we repeatedly beat ourselves up over them in our minds.


Ever wonder why you can still feel shame for a screw-up, even though it happened years ago? Why is it you still feel embarrassed about it, even though cosmically speaking it really wasn’t a very big deal? Maybe it’s because something changed. Maybe you had a negative experience in yourself, a negative memory that you wish you could purge. You had a moment of heartbreak. Maybe you fear that a piece of that heartbreak will be with you always, until you finally die. You feel awkward around the person you wronged, as if this act put a gulf between the love you had before. You want to find a way to right the ship, to restore life to the reality of what it would have been had you not goofed, to restore everything so that the relationship you had with the person you wronged could be as perfect as it was beforehand. So how do you do that?


When Jesus’s friend John writes about his first encounter with the empty tomb of Jesus, he says something rather curious. He mentions the fact that Jesus burial clothes were lying in the tomb, but Jesus was gone. And not once, but twice he points it out: