The Answer for Christians Might be Easier than We Think

(I did not edit this properly.)

I hail from a liberal mainline protestant church. Immediately this conjures up in the minds of some people a group of wishy-washy non-thinking liberals who put their own ideologies ahead of the gospel or at least substitute it with a gospel of their own creation. I can also talk to another group of people and immediately get pigeon-holed as some backwards thinking nabob with who also substitutes the gospel for a God that looks very much like the ideology personified (or perhaps deified) that I wish to serve. And I do this too. Baptists, Catholics, Lutheran Church Missouri-synod attendees, or people who go to the ELCA church automatically get pigeon-holed, labeled, and then placed on their proper shelf. If you are anything like me, you probably realize you do it as well. Its okay, there’s hope for you too as there is for me. And its called the Bible.
Now, I am not talking about the Bible that takes one verse and expands it to mean the entirity of the Bible. How would we like it if our entire lives could be summed up in one sentence or one word? How does Good Friday carry any weight without The Fall or Easter Sunday? How does love your neighbor mean anything if you don’t know what it means to be loved yourself?# To back up this point pick up a Bible (English or Greek) and you will find that many Bible verses are linked to other Bible verses. There is a theme here, but if we wish to boil the theme down to mere sentences, we risk turning it into rules and regulations and pulling it away from it being a relationship.
Who am I? Who are you? Do you want to know the answers or do you want to live your life and discover that? I am a barista, a brother, a seminarian, a son, an American, and on and on. Do any of these describe me fully? Would you want them to describe you fully? This is the gauntlet which the Christian religion not only throws down in front of the world, but in front of the church as well. To live together as individuals in community doesn’t mean that the rest of the community must follow what you believe or that you must acquiesce to the structure of the community. The question isn’t some sort of either/or because what the church demands of you is that you is to be in relationship with Jesus. And this requires us to really believe in Jesus, not just the Jesus of our imaginations. If we think about our friends and loved ones today we often get the impression of people to whom our own will is enacted. We see them as characters in sitcoms who are placed into a situation and react in set patterns. Yet if we truly were to think about how we want to be treated, we would realize this all wrong. We want to have the benefit of the doubt and for people to seriously think about what we say not just when it happens to agree with them.
Liberal Jesus, Conservative Jesus, American Jesus, Liberation Jesus, they aren’t the real Jesus. We hang them up on our walls, place them on our bookshelves, and even see their marks in our churches. But not one of them saves us. That Jesus was a real man and is the real God. That Jesus didn’t proclaim an arbitrary law but spoke of the Torah that had been written on our hearts. That Jesus didn’t give up on the people he loved, but died for all of them. It wasn’t because he wanted us to follow his teachings, but to be in relationship. There is a myth that the church is divided, but this is a myth fabricated by people who don’t understand relationships. The church is united in its love of Christ. God sees us not in our divisions or groups, but in our unity under the blood which is called simply “The Church.”