take this bread
When people ask me what I believe, and I tell them a word that always make some cringe, "Jesus", I always have a hard time explaining.
It isn't the church that I work for. Or the Religious Right that dominate the media and make bad names of what christians should be. In fact, I even hate using the word "christian", in which Rob Bell once said, "makes a great noun, but an awful adjective"...
I feel confronted about it, conflicted. What do I say that describes the struggle, the questions, the yearning. It isn't the Sunday school, or the new lucky charm I have and guess what, his name is JESUS!, kind of feeling.
I hate institutions. Or slow, organized entities. Historically, the church has been behind the curve in every sense of the word. But Jesus taught to treat others as equals. And he also said that when someone hits you, you turn and ask that if you're to be hit again, it's as an equal. You think creatively in situations to give people a choice.
Salon.com has an except from a book I've never heard of, "Take this Bread", by Sara Miles. She says something great. Something that explains it all for me in just three sentences.
"But the Christianity that called to me, through the stories I read in the Bible, scattered the proud and rebuked the powerful. It was a religion in which divinity was revealed by scars on flesh. It was an upside-down world in which treasure, as the prophet said, was found in darkness; in which the hungry were filled with good things, and the rich sent out empty; in which new life was manifested through a humiliated, hungry woman and an empty, tortured man."
It's so true for me.
It isn't the church that I work for. Or the Religious Right that dominate the media and make bad names of what christians should be. In fact, I even hate using the word "christian", in which Rob Bell once said, "makes a great noun, but an awful adjective"...
I feel confronted about it, conflicted. What do I say that describes the struggle, the questions, the yearning. It isn't the Sunday school, or the new lucky charm I have and guess what, his name is JESUS!, kind of feeling.
I hate institutions. Or slow, organized entities. Historically, the church has been behind the curve in every sense of the word. But Jesus taught to treat others as equals. And he also said that when someone hits you, you turn and ask that if you're to be hit again, it's as an equal. You think creatively in situations to give people a choice.
Salon.com has an except from a book I've never heard of, "Take this Bread", by Sara Miles. She says something great. Something that explains it all for me in just three sentences.
"But the Christianity that called to me, through the stories I read in the Bible, scattered the proud and rebuked the powerful. It was a religion in which divinity was revealed by scars on flesh. It was an upside-down world in which treasure, as the prophet said, was found in darkness; in which the hungry were filled with good things, and the rich sent out empty; in which new life was manifested through a humiliated, hungry woman and an empty, tortured man."
It's so true for me.