I have been wrestling with something. Or rather I have been wrestling more with something as of late…
It’s that tugging in my heart of why are more people turned off by the term Christianity than they are comforted by it, why are people surprised when someone that loves Jesus is actually nice and loving to someone that doesn’t believe exactly what they believe, why do the broken feel more comfortable and loved in a bar with haunting odors of sweat and gin than a church with comfy pews and lingering floral scents ??
It just saddens me. It makes my stomach hurt at night. It pains me for a lot of reasons. One because it’s like someone has taken the most beautiful song in the world..for me that would be, Nina Simone’s Nearer Blessed Lord and handed it over to a person with a really debauched, off key voice and then asked that person to belt out that same tune. If you were to hear it sung from that not so musically inclined person, you would judge it. Shelve it. Spit the bad taste out. And decide that it was the most wretched song and should never be played again in fear of everyone’s eardrum exploding into a million pieces.
So it is with Jesus–He is the most breath taking song ever sung…full of notes of love ,compassion, redemption. And yet, all these people including me at times have stolen it…sung it off tune, sung it with chords of judgment, with chords of our own denomination, with chords of our own political views and that written His name at the top in big fat letters J-E-S-U-S…and then handed out discs to everyone and coerced them to listen or die. Nothing like guilt to drive someone to the heart of God…
We are left with a world that sees not that we are different but that we are not different enough as my pastor says. A world that can sniff us out by our scent of condescension. Our heavy aroma of classifying people, not loving people. And ironically our odor of lack of forgivness.
And what happens when these scents permeate the air??
We are left with broken, bruised and beaten—people that end up in a fist fight with religion because we finally concede we can’t bear the system. We can’t beat the weight of perfection. We can’t beat the affliction of pretending to have it all together. So we stay a good ten miles away from any church’s threshold just in case the condemnation gets some legs and decides to run us down. Then maybe..just maybe if we are having I haven’t –been-too-bad-kind-of-week.. we somehow muster up the gumption to enter that place with the big steeple ..that place where often everyone looks and acts the same. That place where supposedly perfect people rent out space and take up shop. Then we get scared—frightened that someone might have some leftover stones in their pockets at the front door, and we run back to our car with fear of rejection blanketing our mind… thoughts of “I don’t look like them,act like them, I don’t even have a bible!” And then that song begins to play. It starts out unobtrusively like background music..then it gets louder and louder. You can’t escape the internal turmoil it brings—like someone banging metal pans in your head and the volume control is stuck on high. You put your hands up to your ears. Cupping them because the sound brings on an instant migraine of I-am-not-good-enough. But you can’ t help but hear it..it’s blaring. And it becomes the anthem in your mind,my mind.
Why??
Because somewhere along the way, we have made it what it is not. A formula. A hanging-out –with –people that look and act just like you and me. A- you’re- a –good- person if you don’t cuss and a bad person if you listen to Led Zepellin. Holy if you go to church 4 times a month and filthy if you’ve never been. Or really filthy if you’ve been hung over. That’s like breaking all Ten Commandments at one time!!
But truth is Jesus didn’t come to save us through being in certain groups,using certain lingo,putting certain bumper stickers on your car, listening to this or that kind of music. He came to save us through His love. He didn’t break people up into groups, into political parties, into adulterers, non-adulterers, good or bad. It’s not like kickball games when you were a kid and He’s choosing you or me based on our ability or lack of ability.
No He came for all of us. Red,yellow,black, and white as I sung in Sunday School when I was little. He doesn’t have a sharpie pen that he pulls out of His pocket and marks people gay,straight, abused,abandoned,porn addict, prescription drug junkie, mentally ill or unwanted.
Nope, there are no labels. Just blood that writes out:
I love you unconditionally and I want more for you because I made you. I made you for more. You can’t do it on your own. My loves is enough to make the hopeless hope. The abused healed. The arrogant broken. The despised loved. The lost found.
Yes, the song gets ripped out of the book some of the time. Stolen. Hijacked. Misused. Abused. But somehow His love is greater than all the wrong notes we sing. His loves puts this world back in key.
And when the song is put into the hands of love, the world takes its hands off its ears…and starts listening.
What are you singing today and to whom?
