What Does It Mean to Be a Christian?

Love it!

That passage in John 13 was really opened up to me by David Sanford in his book “If God Disappears.”

We always hear, Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. But in his final hours Jesus said, “I have a new commandment. Love one another.” Sanford says he bets all the disciples were thinking – “uh yeah… we’ve heard that before.” But then Jesus says, “Love as I have loved you.”

Of course what did Jesus do – he died for us. That’s crazy love! Jesus loves us more than we love ourselves.

Now the question is – can we/do we love like that?

Thanks for that Steve.

I can’t even smile as I watch and agree with this. It feels like a disobedience I’ve participated in—pastored in—for so long, that it is just too hard to obey. I never would have imagined leaving the comforts provided by “ministry” would be God’s invitation to me—God’s way of saying “Come and die,” to me. But how ironic is that? Earthly “comforts” or “perks” for being a follower of Jesus? And here I am wondering.

Angst.

I grew up in a Southern fundamentalist preacher’s family, and as a 13-year-old declared that God had called me to be a preacher. But then, decades ago, I decided that I couldn’t possibly be a Christian if being a Christian meant being intolerant, bigoted, and hypocritical, if it meant being unconcerned about poverty and racism, disdaining the protection of God’s creation, and worshipping massive, organized violence in defense of a bloated and unjust empire. Now, I find myself looking back on my life, wondering if it was Christianity I opposed, or merely the behavior and practice of people who claimed to be Christians. The most powerful story in the Bible, threaded throughout, is the story of a God who hears the cry of the oppressed, of the poor, of the enslaved, of the left-out and the down-and-out, and who delivers them from bondage and from evil. Is God too big to be comprehended by any religion? Does the hypocrisy of Christians excuse me from following the teachings and the way of Jesus? Is the church a sanctimonious gathering, or a union of the human and the divine, the body of God in the world? Where is my church?

In order to undo the damage done to the image of Christianity by the hypocritical Christian Right we must reclaim the core agenda of Jesus:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

The hypocrisy of the Christian Right in its message of hostility, prosperity, and exclusion has become the dominant portrait of Christianity among those outside of the Church. We must actively, intentionally, and publicly begin to deliver the Good News in the manner and to the people Jesus intended – to the marginalized and excluded.

In the doing, hopefully we who deliver the message will be ever more fully converted to the mind of Christ.

I appreciate the video’s call to remember the poor. Jesus exemplified this fact and we all need constant reminders to love our neighbor.

Did anyone else, though, get the sense that the video was ultimately about PR? It opens with a montage of low opinions that outsiders have of Christians and ends with a call to live out Christ’s love “to change people’s perception of Christianity.” Could there be a more vain and self-interested reason to obey God’s commandments?

Good works are not propaganda (or, at least, they ought not to be).