along La Belle Riviere

This afternoon I braved the somewhat-blizzard-like conditions to explore along the Ohio River down on Route 52. I pretended I was an 18th century frontiersmen, perhaps a land surveyor scoping out the newly-acquired Ohio shoreline. I must admit, I fantasized about finding a Shawnee skeleton, replete with tomahawk and musket, in the bole of a tree.

Is that weird? Sure.

Is it disturbing? I think that qualifies.

But it'd be an historical landfall.

As I paraded through the flooded grounds in my waterproof cowboy boots, I contemplated a quote from this morning's sermon at U.C.C.: "Jesus promises an abundant life to those who commit themselves and surrender themselves to him--not to those who commit themselves to the church, or a particular brand of theology, or a certain mode of living, or even Christianity itself."

That's something American Christianity often fails to remember. 

And, to be honest, that's something I often fail to remember. 

It's so easy to be committed, for example, to a certain systematic theology, to the point that you ostracize or even condemn those who disagree with you on various points. It's so easy to be committed to a certain denomination (Lutheran, Presbyterian, Anglican, Eastern Orthodox) or to a certain expression of the faith (right-wing Church of Christ is radically different than charismatic Pentecostals) that we experience a sort of "superiority complex" over those who are different than us. It's so easy to be so committed to a ministry that we can't envision our Christian life outside it. Indeed, it's so easy to be committed to Christianity, as a certain set of beliefs or as a worldview, that we come to see it simply as that. 

Come to Me, Jesus says, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. He invites the weary and burdened to go to him, not to church, not to a prepackaged theology, not to a spit-and-polished worldview. Take My yoke upon you, and learn from Me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. These are life-giving words, but we have become skeptical: "Life doesn't actually work that way," we say; "Faith doesn't even work that way!" Jesus says elsewhere, I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly. I think one of the reasons so many Christians fail to experience that abundant life is that they have committed themselves to something that looks like Jesus, something that may even claim to be Jesus, but not Jesus the Person. 

Jesus died and was raised back to life.

Jesus ascended to Heaven, and sits at the right hand of God.

Jesus is REAL, he is ALIVE, he is a PERSON. And he invites.

I'm a skeptic at heart. Sometimes that's a good thing, and I like to focus on all the "pros" that come with such a manner of examining and believing in this world. It has its "cons" too, of course, and I often envy those who can feel and believe. Yet for all my analytics, for all my skepticism, what has convinced me of the gospel truth more than anything else hasn't been fine arguments for the historicity of the resurrection or the existence of God, but the experience of the person of Christ. There have been moments in my life when I have felt him, when I have been at my lowest, on the verge of despair, and I have experienced him taking me by the hand and holding me up. There have been moments when tears of pure grief have turned into tears of pure joy. There have been moments when I've heard the voice of One speaking to me in a way I can't explain or reason away despite all my analytical faculties. I have experienced the real, risen, and reigning King, and those experiences have left me beautifully and wonderfully scarred.

Yet for all of this, I can be a dunce sometimes.

Well, let's be honest: a lot of the time.

A buzzfeed quiz told me I'm most like the Apostle Peter. I'm not sure how me choosing baby seals as the cutest animal factored into the algorithms, but I've often felt a sort of affinity for Peter, so I didn't retake the quiz (plus I started browsing baby seals on Google images, and that took up a lot of my time). Peter's one of the most human of the apostles, his weaknesses and failures showcased for all the world to see not only in the gospels but in the letters of Paul. To put it quite simply, he's a dunce. But he's a dunce who loves Jesus. Peter excitedly stepped out of the boat into the raging storm, and he took his eyes off Jesus and began to sink. Sometimes I feel I do the same thing, but not intentionally. Peter didn't take his eyes off Jesus and start looking at a half-naked woman standing on-shore; he took his eyes off Jesus because he was overwhelmed with the turmoil all around him. It was a reasonable thing to do. He was standing on water outside a boat in a raging storm. His eyes should have been on his predicament and how to get out of it. But the moment he began to rethink his plight, the moment he started focusing on the problem, his eyes went off Jesus, and that's when he began to sink. Likewise, I can so easily become absorbed by the "turmoil" around me, stress and anxiety so commonplace in life, that I focus on that rather than on Jesus, and I begin to sink. At other times I focus so much on theology, or on certain aspects of the faith, that my eyes begin to drift away from Jesus to peripheral matters of Christianity. Now, I'll admit: this paragraph is neither here nor there, and not at all where I intended to go. But sometimes that happens, and I'm learning to roll with it, rather than seeking to make every blog post somehow coherent. Coherency is not how my mind works.

The point of all this: we must keep our eyes on Jesus. Period. As Hebrews puts it, Let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.