I have this friend Ricky who lives in New Mexico and works on an organic farm. My story with Ricky reaches back about ten years though. Ever since I've known him, he's been an inspiration to me in what it looks like to practice what I preach. He wasn't always an inspiration though. About five years ago, he started going off on tangents about how things just aren't the way they're supposed to be. He went down a dark tunnel of the soul, and found that he was distancing himself from his friends, his church, and his family. He believed in Jesus and he loved him with everything he could muster, but couldn't see how the people around him, including myself, were so blind to the darkness around us. He started doing a ton of research on things like capitalism, free market economies, organic farming, sex trafficking, and fair trade. He started questioning the status quo of Christianity and found himself going down a rabbit trail, afraid he would never find his way out. He began devoting every essence of his being to manifesting what he believed in, and he fought for it. He didn't fight for it through politics or street protests, but fought for it in relationships and taking up practices that resonated with his beliefs. He grew stuff. He worked at a local smoothie store that used fruit from the community garden that he helped start. He played music with local talents. He invited people into his home to experience community and organic living.
Ricky had lost me long before he began practicing all these things. I thought he was crazy that he thought it was a good idea to see capitalism and the government overthrown. I thought he was crazy for searching for truth outside of sound Christian doctrine. He was losing his mind, and there's no way I was going to let him take him down with me. One day, I asked him to send me an email explaining what exactly he was doing. He did, and I read it.
It was hard to swallow. I felt like my faith was being shaken. The email he sent me was threatening all of the beliefs that I had held so strongly. What was most amazing out of all of it was the amount of energy and tangible outpouring he was devoting to this rearrangement of beliefs. The reason the email was so threatening was, he was challenging me to join with him in dropping everything I was doing and go to Puerto Rico to buy a plot of land. He not only wanted to recreate life as we knew it, but wanted to create a life that pointed back to the garden.
In today's passage for Lent, Jesus is quickly becoming Jerusalem's most notorious lunatic in the eyes of the Jews. He's claiming that he is the Son of God, that he's been around long before Abraham, and that "if we practice what he tells us we won't have to ever stare death in the face again."
The Jews obviously think he's crazy, considering Jesus is less than fifty years old, yet claims that Abraham saw him thousands of years prior. They ask, "If Abraham died as well as all the prophets, what makes you think that we can beat death? You're nuts man!"
The Jews get so angry that their beliefs are getting threatened that they begin picking up rocks to throw. They're ready to cleanse the temple of the obvious slander, but Jesus manages to slip out unharmed.
Not too long ago, the institution of slavery in America was accepted my nearly everyone, even the Church. Slavery was accepted as a necessary evil. It was morally and socially acceptable until a voice of change became loud enough to convince everyone that slavery was wrong.
Jesus continues to challenge the status quo of not only Judaism in Jerusalem, but wherever the religious arm has stretched over the world. Death is a very important topic for the Jews, and they believe that they're religious practices are saving them from having to face it. Day after day, they abide by Jewish law trying to become more and more moral and less prone to death. Death lingers like a black cloud over everything, waiting to find its target. For the Jews, death by stoning is a very common practice for anybody who breaks the big laws like adultery, stealing, or idolatry.
Jesus is saying here that the Jews never have to look death in the face again. They never have to experience death as a result of breaking the law. They never have to wonder if the black cloud of death will rain on them eventually. But what Jesus is saying is not enough to convince that the traditions need to take a back seat. Even with the possibility of not having to live under the same tyranny, they choose death over life.
As Americans, we also live under a set of laws. We have been told since we were children, that we can't be left to our own thoughts and motives. Therefore, the government steps in and creates laws that "bind" us from doing what we want to do. We have been indoctrinated with this idea that unless we are confined, the total of our intentions will always equal evil.
I don't believe the Jews trust themselves enough to think that they could possibly experience real life by letting go of their rules and regulations. Isn't this true of us today? Do we really believe that if we start following the voice inside us that brings up these seemingly crazy ideas, that we will find death?
Jesus is inviting the Jews in this passage to never even taste death again. It's absurd and makes no sense to them because all they know is the law. He's telling them that if they do what he tells them to do, they will not have to experience death again. Honestly, if he were sitting in the Starbucks that I'm in right now, I would have a prideful smirk on my face waiting for the punchline. Unfortunately, I think he would provide great entertainment, but not much more than that.
I've tossed and turned the idea of death in my head for awhile, both physical death and spiritual. I can't fathom the afterlife and I'm not willing to pontificate about it here. What I will say is this: I believe that when I practice what Jesus teaches, no matter how crazy someone thinks I am, I find life to the fullest. There is nothing else under the sun that I've found that gives me what I experience when I take just one thing he says and do it. The simplest way I know how to take all this writing and make it make sense is to constantly ask myself, "How much freedom do you want?" If I want more freedom, I open the Bible, find out what it means to me and not what it means to mainstream religion, and then I do it. It's that simple. Along the way, I lose my prejudices against the people I once considered wrong and start viewing them as people just like me, trying to figure out how to get more freedom.
We are invited to opt out of the systematic way of thinking that says, "You can't be trusted with your motives. You are inherently evil," and are invited into the journey of finding out for ourselves what Jesus is saying, and not what others say he says. When we find out what he's saying, we figure out what it looks like to put it to action - not everyone else's action, but our own action. We begin to find that the same heartbeat that the world was telling us couldn't be trusted, is the same heartbeat that leads us to lasting life, one in which we don't have to constantly stare death in the face.
Today's Action: Today we will do three actions to help someone else's day go better. We will do them in secret to make sure we're not doing them to feed our egos.
No comments:
Post a Comment