(click above to play “A King & A Kingdom” by Derek Webb)
there are two great lies that i’ve heard:
“the day you eat of the fruit of that tree, you will not surely die”
and that Jesus Christ was a white, middle-class republican
There’s nothing like the election season to remind me how we can use Jesus as a token sidekick. We wear him like a flag-pin on our breast that is supposed to be some great symbol of identity and character. He is like some Vice Presidential candidates, seemingly chosen only to expand the voter-base, a tool for the presidential candidate to achieve the office.
Candidates use him as a step up, and we complicate matters with our ridiculous assertions that Jesus affiliates himself with a particular American political party. But it’s not just a matter of politics. It seems we have a long history of Jesus being a token emblem in our lives to achieve certain status or power or self-satisfaction. And perhaps many of us, if not all, have a personal history of doing the same in our individual lives.
Is Jesus a token Lord? A token faith? A mere religion? A means of greater self-esteem and self-actualization? A sticker or a fish on a car? A stepladder for success and fulfillment? I mean, in terms of our current political climate, is Jesus our preferred Vice Presidential candidate?
Jesus has to be more than a token in our lives if we are going to ask other people in our culture to follow him as well. I suppose I tend to offer more questions than constructive solutions, but here it goes anyway: How do we do this? I mean, how do we live out an authentic, integral faith in a society so shallowly immersed in Christian superficialism?
WWRJD?
21 September 2008 at 4:11 pm
With two weeks to go in the presidential election, Vice President Brian Baxter is trailing in the polls by more than five points. Jesus
2 January 2009 at 3:01 am
[...] One simple application for this is that I keep finding that the words “christian” and “nonchristian” are becoming somewhat meaningless to me. I struggle particularly when the so-called nonchristians do wonders at loving others and living lives of conviction; at times, besides their active love, they seem to have more faith even than the so-called christians. Many of the christians, on the other hand, seem to be altogether unaffected by Jesus living lives neither of love nor conviction nor faith nor even repentance for their lack of all the other things. Moreover, I find myself all over the map at different times in my life where I sometimes feel I am truly following Jesus and at other times act like he’s a mere token. [...]
21 January 2009 at 6:45 pm
[...] One simple application for this is that I keep finding that the words “christian” and “nonchristian” are becoming somewhat meaningless to me. I struggle particularly when the so-called nonchristians do wonders at loving others and living lives of conviction; at times, besides their active love, they seem to have more faith even than the so-called christians. Many of the christians, on the other hand, seem to be altogether unaffected by Jesus living lives neither of love nor conviction nor faith nor even repentance for their lack of all the other things. Moreover, I find myself all over the map at different times in my life where I sometimes feel I am truly following Jesus and at other times act like he’s a mere token. [...]