The Cure

I have had an interesting summer. I spent the first five weeks of this summer traveling to different church camps. Since finishing that I have been living in and working at the church where I am a part-time youth minster. Sometimes late at night I catch myself wandering the halls singing to myself and my first thought is that I probably would look crazy to anyone else, and then I always think about how I'm practically a monk. But I have been so thankful to have a place to stay this summer. I think what has made my summer interesting has been the recurring thought that we try to "cure" people of all sorts of ridiculous things. We offer prescriptions to others on things as simple as the right way to dress, to as complicated as what it means to be a christian, from the right things to eat in your diet, to the right way to understand the theological significance of our favorite worship songs (or more likely for me, our least favorite), we prescribed the words that are appropriate for others to use, and the life habits that must be observed, all this in an attempt to help heal people. I mean we just want to give them a cure, right? What I've discovered this summer is this. We can't simply medicate Shaun and tell him to act like every one else around him. We can't tell him to be quiet and sit still, while we tell him about Jesus. It doesn't work for Shaun. Shaun's "hyperactive" mind, that is so troublesome for our regulated churchy activities, is so busy noticing and processing things I could only wish to notice, that he might fidget with excess energy, and maybe his "is this an appropriate time for this question" filter might be broken down. But man does Shaun love other people! And if Shaun applies himself to studying the scripture it won't be long before we all want to read his books to better understand what it really means to be a christian. But right now, Shaun doesn't fit in the seat we've designed for all christians to fit in, he's a little too weird for us, a little barbaric. What I've learned is this. It's all well and good to study and talk about wanting to live like Jesus, to truly live his words, that's great. But please when you come to specific thoughts about how that will look, just try to keep them to yourself. Because we don't know what to do with those words when they look at us and want to change us. The truth is we love verses that tell us things like "the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, able to divide between joint and marrow, soul and spirit." That is awesome until that two-edged sword is no longer in our hand pointed at others but we find it slicing us open to the core. That just isn't ok, it doesn't fit with our comfortable vanilla christianity, it hurts. It's a little barbaric. What I've learned is this. That it's even ok for us to speak a little crazy sometimes, I mean all we are trying to do is get people fired up about Jesus right? But when one of our students hears what we say and follows through we really don't know how to handle it. Our first thought is to run back to what we know is comfortable. But maybe, just maybe they have actually understood something fundamental about what we thought we understood. Maybe, it's time for people to not fit in the chair, to be a little weird. To be barbaric. Not to hurt those who don't understand barbarism. But to follow Jesus, to be real doctors. Instead of throwing out prescriptions to every one we thinks needs some medicine, maybe we need to just take them the cure. Jesus was barbaric. He didn't fit, he was weird. I mean he didn't have a nice clean building with nice chairs, and a comfortable office where he could answer the phone and write out prescription notes for people. Jesus was in the homes of the sick and dying (literally and metaphorically). When people tried to tell Jesus to sit down and listen, to keep his opinions to himself, to act like every one else, he simply said the healthy don't need a cure, the sick do. The sick need the cure, that is Jesus. They don't need a piece of paper that says "do this and don't do that." This world is searching for a cure, and we are manufacturing prescriptions. Maybe it's time for the church to stop looking like the waiting area in an airport, where we have TSA at the door preforming ridiculous life and background checks on those who come in the door. Maybe it's time for us to look like an emergency room, where we have people come in with drug addictions and missing limbs, I mean sure the carpet might get dirty from the blood and vomit, but I think I remember reading about a King who was gonna eat a meal with some people and after they sat down at the table he started cleaning their feet to prepare them for the feast of the kingdom. Maybe instead of standing outside the doors of our clean buildings with power washers, we sit on dirty floors with dirty people holding towels and bowls of water. So, it might be time to get weird, to feel uncomfortable. To love people so much that all their dirtiness ends up on the floors of the church where Christ is cleansing them. It's time to stop fitting in. It's time to stop prescribing and start curing. It's time to be barbaric.