Advance apologies

* This is much longer and more rambling than I'd originally anticipated. I didn't reread it or edit it; it's "as is". Mostly, it's a look at myself; me trying to process everything I've been thinking about both in and out of class. I'm not trying to offend or polarize - just thinking "aloud", if you will. *

I was trying to upload Boston pics this morning, to no avail. Blogger really needs a better system for uploading pictures - just saying.

In the meantime, I've been thinking about a lot of things lately, and one of them is how far the church is from the teachings of Jesus. This is something I've thought a lot about since I started reading the Bible for myself when I was in high school, but it's been compounded in the past five years, and this semester has me wondering about this all over again. Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that I'm an accurate picture of who and what Jesus is, just that I'm feeling really convicted by my inaccurate depiction of Him. Does that make sense?
I hate the "Christian" dichotomization of the spiritual and the mundane - there's a spirituality in the mundane, and an everydayness to the spiritual. There is no distinction, as far as I can tell between Jesus's spiritual, social, and physical healing. He repaired relationships, repaired people's sense of self-worth, went first to the untouchable and undesireables - and He preached salvation to them as He met their needs. Needs so deep they didn't even realize in some cases that they had them. I don't do this often enough, and neither does the church.
I was reading the Bible the other day and it struck me that Jesus looked out on the people and that His heart BROKE for them. Not just that it ached, but that it broke for them. My heart doesn't break that easily. It's one thing to say that I feel sorry for people - that keeps me on the moral/social high ground - I am somehow better than those people. But for my hear to break, there has to be a participation: the pain must become mine. That pain was Jesus's pain, and His heart and body broke for it. I don't allow myself to participate much.
In class today, we were talking about how the church would reject Jesus if He were to come today, Pharisees and Saducees that we are. We're so indoctrinated in "church culture", in the moral issues, in pro-life, anti-gay, creationism arguments; in buildings, in "ministries", in music. We've fallen away from the unbelievably inclusive revolutionary nature of the founder of our faith.
The truth is that if Jesus were here today, He'd be on the corners with the drug dealers and the addicts. He'd be talking to strippers, to homosexuals, to the mentally ill, to the immigrants, to the forgotten children in poor schools. He'd be embracing everyone the church has so neatly excluded - everyone I've excluded.
I was reading about the Kingdom of God being a whole new game in the middle of the old ballpark. It takes a special kind of crazy and a special kind of bravery to take the church to that level. Shoot, it takes all of that to get one person out there, playing tag in the middle of a play-off game. The book was talking about the church doing this in the middle of broader American culture, but I've been thinking about it in terms of people doing this in the middle of general church culture. I had this thought in class today, this phrase that popped into my head as we were talking about God's intentions for community and society as a whole as laid out in the book of Deuteronomy: "the unreached church". I'm not exactly sure what it means, but I wrote it in the margin of my notes.
There's a church that's complacent with the current systems: with exclusion, with injustice; with comfort, and riches, and big buildings. There's a church that's okay with saying that God is on the side of a particular political party, and that His will magically lines up with our own (that's rarely - if ever - the case, but that's a story for another blog).... Yes, that church exists, and it's huge, but there's another Church. It's a Church that wants its heart to be broken when Christ's heart is broken, a Church that can't be okay with injustice and oppression, a Church that won't use God to justify all kinds of ugliness. This Church, these people, must change the church.
I'm in school with all these amazing Christians - the kind you will never see on tv - who want to see this amazing Kingdom being played out, on Earth as it is in Heaven. Whenever two or more are gathered He is there; when we agree in prayer, there is power. This is revolutionary to me lately. I keep seeing myself as this tiny puzzle piece.
Have you ever done one of those gazillion-piece puzzles? The kind with the tiny, tiny pieces? Each piece looks like a whole lot of nothing. Sure, there are pretty colors, but you can't really make out the picture based on any one piece. So you start putting them together, and you have clusters spread out on the table: pieces of a tree over here, some river over there, a cloud in the sky... It's not quite finished, but these little groups of pieces are starting to make sense. And then you put them all together and it's amazing. This is how God works. He sees this great big picture, and all the little pieces of it. We have to start linking up with other little pieces to make this picture of a world where debts are forgiven and the alien is welcomed and the poor are provided for.
That's the good part, this linking up of the Church. Even so, it will not be easy. There will be a church to contend with and all of those outside who just won't understand. And that's okay. I mean, yo no soy monedita de oro para caerle bien a todo el mundo. These revolutionary words of Christ, the structure that God set up for His people won't make sense in the light of American individualism and the American dream (Turning the other cheek?! Cancelling debts?! Providing for the poor?!). The important thing is to stand with the Church and say that things are not okay as they are. And if makes people uncomfortable, that's kind of the point. I mean, it's making me very uncomfortable; I'm feelin' pretty convicted and challenged myself.

I was talking today to my roommate about institutionalized racism affecting education in low-income areas. I have my student seminar tomorrow, and I'm going to be talking about poverty and education. Here's the thing: it's impossible to talk about poverty in this country without also mentioning race and ethnicity. It's a fact that the levels of poverty among people of color are higher than they are among Whites. There are real historical reasons for that based largely on slavery and other exploitative systems (*cough* immigration and economic policies *cough*). It's so much safer to just refer to "the poor", though, without acknowledging that the poor tend to be black and brown. It's the way things are right now. I was vacillating - wondering whether I should take it there during my presentation - and I talked to her about it briefly. It made her uncomfortable, I could tell; as if she didn't want to think that the system that had worked so well for her (and to some extent, for me), could possibly be anything but empowering to all. Ah, America, land of opportunity and equality.... It occured to me as I was talking that if I'm afraid to bring it up because it'll make folks uncomfortable, it probably needs to be addressed. I don't think Jesus's heart aches when he sees these institutions, I think it breaks; that means that mine should and that the hearts of my classmates probably should break as well. That's something I'll be praying about as I'm preparing my presentation and actually presenting it. If y'all would pray, too, I'd appreciate it.

Oh, and if you're the praying types, I'd also urge you to sit down with a Bible and take a look at Deuteronomy and Matthew. If possible, pick up a different translation so that you're not just rereading the words you already know - sometimes that alone can give you that shift in perspective. I hope they challenge you as much as they challenge me.