an apology

I like "apology". I need to do it a lot, at home. And here I need to do it, too. This is a place of relationship with you, dear reader (whom I pray God blesses with all the blessings bought for us on the Cross of Jesus). This is a place of meeting and mixing.

today, I'd like to form you an apology that will serve as a welcome and a reset. A welcome to new readers, helping them understand what madnesses they touch here. A reset to those who may have grown accustomed to me in a way that renders me perplexing when I deviate from any predominant form of thought...

First, let's get straight that i'm a christian. I'm not a "christ follower", as many who are ashamed of the prevalent apostate condition of institutional religion. I am equally, nay more, ashamed. Yet I retain the term "christian" because, well, that is what I AM. I'm one of those christians. I am grafted in to descent down a long line of believers. That great line snakes through history under the textbooks written by the winners. We are at the belly of the world, ground into the dirt beneath that great snake that masquerades as History. She snakes on, and we are lain in the dust behind her. She counts and recounts the scales of her beautiful hide. we lie awaiting Resurrection day.
I'm a christian, like so many untold stories before us, I cling to the One of whom creeds speak. I bury my face in the folds of His robe, as he carries me. From time to time I stand, speak, and act like Him, but only because He has stood for me, spoken for me, and acted for me on the Cross.
I don't know how you all define "christian", but in Antioch (acts 11) we were first called Christians... That text, so despised, is where our "history" left off... since then we have gathered beneath, together, to love and serve our master, who loved us so much that He served, and died and rose to show us the way of death to life.

I'm also a Pastor. That's what people call me... It means shepherd. I am a guy whose had a "calling", you could say. That calling has rendered me unemployable by institutional religion (thank God). To simply "make disciples, teaching them to OBEY all that [Jesus] commanded..." leads to a sharp divorce from that dominant form of religion that will teach ABOUT what jesus commanded...but dares not risk it's profitability on pushing obedience in it's definition of "membership". So as a "pastor" in my role and service in the church (which is a people, they'll tell you--even during the capital campaign) I teach that membership is about Jesus, obedience, confession, belief and trust. It touches on that desperation, the avoidance of which we craft lifestyles and career tracks. That blessed desperation of the soul that will cleave to the Cross of Jesus, forsaking all thought of self-sufficiency. "poor in spirit", Jesus called it.

...and I'm a Preacher. Preaching is something you can find me doing in a lot of places, whenever I must. You can catch me with my Bible open, sharing with neighbors, at home with friends and brothers and sisters, constantly sharing from this richness that the Cross has purchased me. I actually believe that I'm on a mission from God. Audacity.
And I believe in things like Hell, eternity, truth, the Bible...all kinds of things that desperation will drive you to.

Let's face it. This christianity--the one with the Cross and the Jesus of Eternity, one God forever and ever, amen--is for the desperate. You dear folks who aren't desperate don't need to like that. None of us who are desperate do, either. No person likes it. For Christ's sake (please get this), neither did JESUS. He sweat blood and looked into a plan B. REad the Gospels. jesus is our best friend. He knows desperation.
Desperation will give way, one day. I also beleive in the glory to come, that Jesus will actually come and take over the earth for a thousand years, win a final battle and establish an eternal city.

This desperation. This calling. This Jesus... lands me out there. Unemployable in the institution (again, thank God). of low esteem upon close scrutiny by the world, since my truest loyalty isn't to "doing good" or "making a better world", but to the crucified Jesus, risen Savior, coming King.

good gets done.
some changes happen, although a better world would have to be an-other world.

so consider this another installment of my ongoing "apology"... for now, I have to pay attention to the flesh-and-blood-ones around me here at the Sidewinder...

I believe that Christian people should become fascinated with Jesus, fueled by desperation and amazement at this LOVE that has overcome the Judgment. And I believe that the call to this fascination, this belief, this trust is my life's work. ...that my keyboard, my pen, my life, my guitar, my skateboard, all my posessions, are merely vehicles for the transmission of this one great truth that ransoms from all lesser claims: Jesus is IT for the desperate.

now, for the fattened soul--that common confusion of self-reliance, which is pride and a great crime in the universe--jesus is farcical. To that soul, to that mind, He is something to puzzle over, to mock.

So I tend to remain "out there". And "out here" isn't "out anywhere" to Jesus.