Did Jesus Sparkle? (Okay, twinkle)

A guy who writes a pretty good blog was writing about Jesus lately, and he said (I believe) that he pictured Jesus calling stuff bullshit, but with a twinkle, like a fond old grandfather.  This clashed with my own understanding of why people wanted to nail Jesus to things.  So I wanted to comment on that.  Because I'm like that.

After a perhaps somewhat sacrilegious phone exchange in which a friend and I imagined that some Christians (not blogger Dave, of course, he's smart and probably hates Twilight) might picture Jesus nowadays as being Edward from Twilight, having died, but now still living, going around without blood (having lost his own) and having supernatural powers and perhaps sparkling (or twinkling), we settled down a bit and some stuff came out.

The original blog posting David did was in response to this viral video that's out there.  It really seems to be drawing together religious and irreligious alike.  I haven't watched it, of course.  Because I'm like that.  I have always really liked Chris Tse's "I'm A Christian (I'm Sorry)"  when it comes to poetry about Christianity which reaches everybody in the way that Johnny Cash and C.S. Lewis seemed to be able, magically, to do.

Whenever anything draws us together that, whenever something makes us feel like maybe we're all the same, and that we're united, some people inevitably tend to feel their identities threatened and want to say "No!  THEY'RE just [the one dubious thing], but I'm [the right thing]!"  I think maybe David was doing that a bit, not that my judging yes or no matters in the matter. It is equally possible he wasn't.

He was saying that this video was creating a false dichotomy (and goodness knows that gets done all the time) between claiming some kind of connection to Jesus, and being religious.  He felt, understandably enough, that loving Jesus and being religious (according to the dictionary definition of the term) weren't mutually exclusive.  That's a popular opinion, but one that seems to not work for a lot of people, to judge by the success of this video. This stuff I was now thinking about connected (in my head anyway) to some other good stuff that other Facebook acquaintances have linked to, (looking at you, Brandon) mostly talking about the difference between simply believing something is a fact, and believing it in the sense of it changing your life in any way.  I don't think believing in Jesus is supposed to be like believing there is Australia.

But anyway, I did one of my things where I wanted to respond to his blog to disagree slightly, share different opinions, put our heads together and the like, in hopes of us learning stuff from each other and I commented, and the comment got so long I decided "this comment is long enough that it should be a blog entry, and I haven't blogged since last year, so..."

So (edited and added to it a bit.  There's stuff in there that I've said before):

I think at all times when people are differing vocally from one another, there are two things going on:

-a very up front 'us vs. them' thing, which in modern times has become less of a "I would die for our side" and more a matter of cheering for one hockey team or another.  Flag-waving.  T-shirt support.  Bumpersticker fealty.  "Like this link if you'd give your life for Jesus!", "Share this video if you support supporting stuff" stuff.  It always confuses me when your average everyday American republican or democrat voters fling nasty, spiteful-sounding 'we're it and you're shit' stuff at the other side, and then if you try to have any kind of serious talk about it with them, suddenly they kind of reveal that, to them, although they kind of claim to care about it, mostly it's just kind of a game to them.  Kind of cheering for our side and booing theirs.  It's maybe nothing more than childish name-calling without any desire, interest or even ability to discuss any of it, or back any of it up any more solidly than to look right.  Ideological competitiveness, satisfying itself with burning the other side or simply making them look bad, with dismissing them out of hand as not worth thinking about, let alone talking to.  They want to say "end of discussion" to make sure there isn't one, because they're not into comprehension and understanding each other, but just competing.  Us vs. them.

-a much harder to see, and in my opinion easily missed and very valuable thing.  A situation where understanding between two quite different human beings, and their very different ways of thinking and feeling about important stuff ,is pretty much waiting to happen.  Pretty much being handed to you on a plate if you get through a discussion without being sidetracked by washroom breaks, nutritionist appointments and texting.  It would be very worthwhile to make sure it does happen, I think.  I tend to think that connecting is The Point in a way that disagreeing, differing and "taking a stand against" stuff really just isn't.  It's natural.  If you're willing to stop feeding your ego identity with the labels ("*I'M* a Christian/an atheist, while you're just the OTHER thing, you loser!") you will see how much the same you are, and how much you agree upon, and how much you can connect and work together, so that when you do find things that you differ on, stuff you care about enough to discuss, you can have a working relationship together that supports a discussion and will tend to lead to growing understanding and learning from each other.

That being said, I think Jesus wasn't very twinkly all those times when he was going around saying all those things about what he thought was weak, self-righteous, fleshly, empty religious bullshit.  You know?  The stuff "they" wanted him dead over?  The stuff people were offended at?  I can't read the gospels without seeing someone who ranted and raved enough to upset people.  Very political, very acerbic.  Prone to biting rhetoric.  Not tactful.  Certainly not consistently "positive."  Like Christopher Hitchens.  But only toward religious stuff.  Not toward ANYTHING else.  When it came to drunkards, whores and extortioners, he'd either:

-not talk about their vices at all (he simply wasn't on earth to go around stopping people from doing these things nor making them feel guilty if they did them.  Not a whit more than we are here to do that either, for that matter) 

-or blankly mention it ("and the man you're living with right now is not your husband") if it was on topic and worth talking about for another reason.  Certainly not in the same ranty, name-calling way he is reported to have frequently used when publicly standing up and loudly attacking religious practices and figures like Pharisees and Sadducees.  He never called a whore a whore, let alone referring to her as a hypocrite, a white-washed tomb, from a generation of vipers or anything like that.  He called whores "Mary," or whatever their names were.  And he called the Pharisees "the Pharisees", generalizing boldly and without reference to any single men who were shining examples of being exceptions to the problems in that group.  He'd just say "Those religious guys?  Don't live like them.  It's not good enough.  It's self-serving hypocrisy."  We don't dare generalize like that nowadays.  Except when talking about Nazis.  Because who's going to have the nuts to stand up and say "I'm a Nazi and I resent the bigotry and insensitive ignorance seen in your comments"?

As to the difference between a connection or identification with Jesus, and with what we normally think of as "religion," the apostle Paul actually defines what he calls "true religion."  In writing.  For serious.  He was defining it to correct people's existing definitions.  He defines it as doing things that Jesus actually isn't documented as spending much time doing.  According to Paul, true religion wasn't showing up at synagogue/church and singing and praying and reading.  It was helping the widows and fatherless.  Jesus certainly healed the sick and handicapped, but we don't read of him turning the widow's two mites (coins) into "an hundred and twenty mites," nor making sure that the beggar's purse kept coming up with coins.  He only did the "coin in a fish's mouth" trick to handle taxes for his own sake, and more importantly, to make a point. He fed people if they were right in front of him, hungry because they'd followed him to hear him talk, when he hadn't asked them to, and was known for trying to get away from them.  We never read of him going around feeding the poor as a routine thing.  In fact, when a woman spends money on him and a "religious" dude (Judas Iscariot) lectures her for not spending the money on helping the poor, Jesus actually tells him off, stands by what she did and pretty much pooh-poohs the concern for the poor being presented as paramount.

So, given what Paul said, I don't think going to church or singing hymns or worshiping or bible-reading is anything we are encouraged by the bible to think of or call "religious."  That's personal stuff between us and God, and it's far too intimate and personal to be merely "religious practice."  True religion is charity work.

And we seem to need continually to un-confuse discussions which blur Jesus and church together.  Probably why that guy made the poem and the viral YouTube video.  There's for a very simple reason for this needing to be done over and over: in our culture, what we call religion (in direct contradiction to any biblical definition of religion) has become for many, what the bible would call idolatry.  Idolatry is a thing you do instead of directly dealing with the divine. It's a way of abstracting things, of inserting a series of buffers, or intermediaries between you and God so you dilute the intimacy of the connection.  Instead of talking to God and seeing if you think He has anything He wants you to know, feel or think about, you focus more on your singing about Him with other people.  Instead of feeling about Him, you sing about, read about, talk about and do PowerPoint about how you feel about Him.  And then in charity work (true religion) you spend huge amounts "raising awareness" of poverty, without having to actually talk to any dirty people.

Christianity as a practiced, idolatrous "religion" is mostly talk nowadays.  A propaganda machine endlessly selling itself to its own people.   An infomercial which lowers your self-esteem and increases your guilt, while always promising to fix that for you, if you do (or don't do) certain things for it.  It's reading the Cole's notes for a book without reading it, and then writing a blog about how much you like the book you haven't read from beginning to end. (trying not to twinkle while typing any of that)

I am what you would tend to call a Christian.  But I am really not very religious in any conventional sense of the term.  The amount of time I spend in a designated church building on a yearly basis is nil, barring weddings and funerals.  I am much more about wrestling with doubt than I am about singing happy songs.  If you made a list of Christian things to do:

-plastic fish on car (in case you don't know what that is, think a rainbow sticker for a lesbian couple)

-Christian music in my iPod

-retreat/camp/missions t-shirts

-spending a lot of my money on third world problems instead of paying off my debts

-taking one of my bibles around with me wherever I go

-preaching unsolicitedly 
-telling everyone how much I claim to love Jesus (find me any New Testament author who tells his readers that he claims to love Jesus, in those terms.  I dare you.)

-dressing business casual

-citing chapter and verse to look righter when referring to concepts and situation depicted in the bible

-giving any of my time to church committees, meetings, services or initiatives

and so on,

you would find that I just don't really do any of that.  Not really.  At all.  Am I really a Christian, then?  What Christian stuff do I do?  

A better way to word that, I think, is "What stuff do I do most weeks for reasons that have to do with trying to live a life which is influenced by Jesus Christ, perhaps even working as an agent for the now-departed person of the Godhead?"  

Here's the funny thing: because of my belief as to what Jesus wants/would want (depending on your views as to the afterlife), I'm generally going to avoid talking to anyone about that stuff.  Because it's personal.  Because I'm working it out.  Because I don't know you like that.  Because I'm afraid of ever using it to look or feel Christian in order to boost my self-esteem or self-righteous piety a little bit.  Because I think it's cheating.  Because I think Jesus gave some very specific advice to his disciples to the effect that they had to do the work of being his followers, and try to make that work, but they didn't get cred or props for it.  He didn't send them out, two-by-two, with matching t-shirts about their "outreach mission."  He didn't entice them with the suggestion that they could put their work with poor people in Guatemala on their resumes.  He didn't say they could go to bible school and then write letters like MDiv or titles like Rev. before and after their names.  He didn't encourage them to ask "What religion are you?  I'm Christian!  Wanna come to my church and watch me be Christian?!"  Because it's not a club.  And it's not the Klan.  And it's not the Montreal Canadiens. It's not about identity.  It's not about you.

I just really don't think it was ever meant to be like it is now.  And that's why it makes no sense to me. (Start of discussion. Only if you really mean anything you say you do.)