The Cross and Jesus' Other Friends

The Christ asks his church to take up its cross and follow--him.

The Cross is his inevitable way. Not a pretty picture. Not prosperity gospel. Not good times all around always.

One cross is already visible, and we are tempted to drop it: a disenfranchised religion, struggling along into the post-modern world where most everyone is suspicious of any one who too strongly holds on to anything. Triumphalism is futile and foolish. A good worship service alone, as the prophets made clear long ago, is not necessarily pleasing to God.

The issue: to let go of our "life" in order to find it, that is, to actually receive the life of the Christ. Our illusions and delusions about our churchly life, our piety, our righteousness, our being better than "those others"--all this must go, because of course the worst kept secret in the world is that no one in the church--any church--is better than "those others."

Here is a hint for us. Christ is not captive to the church buts gazes upon us through the eyes of the panhandler, the homeless kids, the shy visitor to our congregations, the old person mostly forgotten in the nursing home, the stranger, the immigrants, the employee in the next cubicle over whose life, one overhears too many times, is clearly a living hell.

Those who would follow Christ must risk taking up the cross of non-judgment, welcome and mercy, and stumble after him right into the messy unfamiliar existences of his other beloved friends--our neighbors.

That's the issue for the church--Jesus' other friends. Seek, invite, and gather a community like that, and having our lost our life, we've found it.