About a year ago, during Lent, while grappling with the dumpster fire that is the world these days, and its house-of-mirrors reflection that is Facebook, I was at a loss about what to post. I started simply posting the words of Jesus, from the Message version, in order, starting with Luke. Here’s what I learned…
When Jesus is healing or working miracles, he rarely says much. People around him talk a lot, but his words in those stories are usually just one statement or question, if any. Some stories he doesn’t talk at all. The healing, feeding, miracles speak for themselves.
Jesus never goes looking for his detractors. Plenty of people come looking for him to slow him down or challenge him. When they do, he doesn’t mince words. But he never goes looking for the authorities. In one story in Luke, disciples come to him to say that Herod’s looking for him to kill him. Jesus’s response is, “Tell that fox I’m busy. He’s just going to have to wait.”
Most of his words are teaching to the disciples. In Luke, he does lots of interacting with crowds, and some of his teaching is to the crowds, but not as much as you would think. Most of his teaching, his words, his stories are for those who are devoted to following him. And they are mostly stories about the stuff ordinary life that illustrate deeper realities.
What if the church looked like that?
A community teaching each other with storytelling, being taught by Jesus’s stories, finding signs of the holy in the ordinary.
A body devoted to healing and feeding and reconciling, whose actions spoke for themselves, with no need to gatekeep or explain or convert.
A collective doing such radically beautiful things that it threatened authorities, yet unconcerned about what the powers-that-be might think or do, all while being courageous enough to speak truth to power when Herod or his deputies get fragile and tricksy.
Indeed, in some places, the church is this, praise God!
I long for more of those places.
StarPilgrim Studio 