planetoi

JMM: I grew up going to church. My dad, who is also one of my greatest influences, was and still is a Charismatic pastor. I actually enjoyed certain aspects of church when I was young. I liked seeing people and interacting with lots of other kids. I really liked the stories.

But as I got older something about the Christian culture just seemed to turn me off. Maybe it was the religious expectation or the lack of creativity in Christian environments but something just made me angry. I can’t give you one good reason for it but I became very angry at Christian people.

Even to this day certain aspects of Christian culture make me literally sick to my stomach, and I can’t tell you exactly why. I guess it’s because I’m really interested in the man Jesus and it seems to devalue him whenever people feel like they have to hype him up or help him out. Either he’s real or he’s a fairy tale. I think he’s real, and if I’m right then I don’t need to hype him up. If I’m wrong then no amount of hype in this world is going to make a difference. I think he’s an incredible person and most people would agree with me if they had the chance to be properly introduced.

So I guess you could say that things changed for me when I met the man Jesus as apposed to the idea or philosophy. There was a point when I told God that I wasn’t sure if I believed in him at all and that if he loved me the way people said he was supposed to love me, then to please make things clear or I was going to have to do something else. Not to give him some kind of weird ultimatum or anything. I just figured if there was any reality to what I said I believed then He would have to help me out.

God works in his own time, but things certainly changed from then on out. I think God was waiting for me to be honest with him and myself. He wasn’t offended. He already knew what I was thinking and far more about what was going on in me than even I did.

I think sometimes our idea of reverence can keep us from having a real relationship. As a whole, I believe that Christians have communicated very poorly to the rest of the world the real personality of Jesus. You can hardly have a conversation with someone about Jesus without insighting a riot because their idea of him is so skewed.

Unfortunately, I think its our fault. We’ve communicated Christianity as a performance-driven system of morality with a pretty superficial idea of reverence. I believe the major difference between Christianity and other major religions is the fact that it is not, in anyway, a performance-driven religion. I believe that the overall message of the Bible is this: being good doesn’t make you righteous. Abstaining from evil doesn’t make you righteous. On the contrary, we have been made righteous by the blood of Jesus. And only then, by realizing that he has made us righteous, do we have the ability to be good or abstain from evil. And even then it’s a process.

So I guess I realized that Jesus was not like the people who wore his t-shirt, but after that I was able to turn around and love those people too, even if I thought some of the things they did were a little silly. I do some pretty silly things myself.