Time for a Cage Fight

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At night, if I feel a divine loneliness

I tear the doors off Love’s mansion

 

And wrestle God onto the floor

 

He becomes so pleased with me

And says,

 

“Our hearts should do this more.”

          Hafiz via Daniel Ladinsky

 

We must face the fact that many different saviors can be smuggled in under the name “Jesus,” just as many different deities can be disguised under the term “god,” and vastly different ways of living can be promoted under the name “Christianity.”  Jesus can be a victim of identity theft, and people can say and do things in his name that he would never do.

          Brian McLaren

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When it comes to God

How do we behave?

 

Do we sit around in a parlor

Anointed with doilies, sipping Lady Gray

Engaged in polite conversation

 

Never straying into the unseemly or difficult?

 

Or

 

Is it time for an all-out rumble

A time for calling out (how long O Lord how long)

And being called out

 

Jesus is recorded as saying

Ἀκμὴν καὶ ὑμεῖς ἀσύνετοί ἐστε

 

He is talking to the disciples,

And is clearly frustrated.

 

In the King James Version, which tends to sanitise the Greek

to make it sound holier in English,

The words of Jesus are translated as,

Are you also still without understanding?

 

Even the New Revised Standard Version (updated) keeps this tone.

 

The New International Version translates it as

Are you still so dull?

 

But I like the way the Message puts it

Are you being willfully stupid?

 

Are we?

 

In another place, he calls the religious folk

Whited sepulchers

Painted tombs

 

Righteous on the outside

But rotten within

 

Part of our problem is that we love our comfort

We want to be in our safe zone

And so we define God, and then Jesus,

In a way that works for us,

Makes us “comfortable”

 

Sometimes that means we interpret God as

a King who dominates.  Who demands and punishes

 

Sometimes we make God ultimately irrelevant.

 

We make Jesus fire insurance,

Ignoring the call to be people who help the poor and fight injustice

He is just our ladder out of hell

 

It is not, perhaps, that we are stupid

As much as it is that God is beyond our understanding

Yes, Jesus, we are still without understanding!

 

And so we make shit up.

 

And when we come to stuff that doesn’t fit

The God, the Jesus we have created

We deflect, reinterpret, and avoid

 

What we need to do is wrestle.

 

Someone once said that “For every complex problem, there is a solution

And it is wrong.”

 

God wants engagement

God wants us to struggle with the big questions

Of right and wrong

(not legal and illegal, because some stuff that is legal is not right)

 

God wants us to struggle with his call

To be people of fierce love

 

What does that mean

When we are faced with people we want to hate

When we see people lying, hurting others, destroying the planet

 

How do we love our enemies?

What does that mean?  What does it look like, really?

 

It is time, perhaps, to move out of the parlor (pew?)

And meet God in some cage fighting

 

For perhaps there is really no other way.

To meet the One

Who wrestled with God

Chose to love all

 

And asks us to join him

in doing both