I'm Back!

Hello! I've been away, actually just without a laptop, but I'm back!

I go to a group at church on Monday nights, we call it "Underground". We called it that because we began meeting in the basement, sort of a clandestine meeting...an underground revolution of sorts. A group of people that are truly wanting to know what it is Jesus said to do and a place to talk about how we do what He said. We're reading "Blue Like Jazz" by Donald Miller together. He is a great author and the book is really good, if you haven't read it.

One of the chapters that we read last night was about a Christian writer that he went to listen to that he felt was using popular buzz terms and quoting things just to be "trendy". He felt like this author might be cheating on Jesus in order to be more popular with the world. I'm going through that in my life right now...I feel like I've become more "tolerant", which has become a dirty word in evangelical circles...I'm not sure why. But, I'm not sure of my motivation. I think its because I've come to believe that we, in the church, may have been focusing so exclusively on some issues that Jesus never even addressed, at the expense of issues that were near to his heart, such as taking care of the "least of these". We pick and choose issues, even picking up our picket signs and petitions, that I'm not completely convinced that God cares about. We even pick out scripture references from Leviticus to write on our picket signs but ignore the rest of Leviticus...have you ever really read that book? Its crazy! If you are blind, a dwarf or have crushed testicles, you can't be a priest, just so you know!

Even in the New Testament, we do the same...We chalk up Paul's statements about women in leadership to the culture and site that Jesus acutally elevated the status of women, but we don't do that with other issues. I just don't get it. Jesus spoke very directly about divorce, saying that it is okay in only very few cases and then even goes so far to say that if a man marries a divorced women he causes her to commit adultry! I don't see anyone with a petition about that. And I don't want us to start...but why to we pick certain issues and not others?

I have to look at the overarching theme of scripture and see that it is a book about love. About a God who loves us so much and desires a relationship with us so much that He tried every means He could think of to reach out to us, including sending His own Son to live among us to show us how to love each other. I think that when it comes down to it most of us are actually going to be surprised by the mercy of God toward some issues and the judgement about others....Taking care of the poor is referenced over 2,000 times in the New Testament alone, I think it is an important issue. Can we say the same about some of the issues that we have taken on as important?