Benjamin L. Corey Quotes
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The version of Jesus that so many of us live out is something that fits snugly in our lives, existing in near-complete harmony with the culture around us. However, the radical message of Jesus was never intended to fit neatly into any culture—it was countercultural from the very beginning, and remains so today.
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If we want to rediscover the radical message of Jesus and experience a reorientation of our lives, we must become willing to let go of whatever else might be getting in the way—even if that’s a religious tradition named after Jesus—and return to the timeless invitation to simply become a follower of him.
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Orthodoxy and orthopraxy are both important and are both things that Jesus spoke to, but I no longer believe that either of these things belongs in the center of our circles. I think that spot should be reserved for the exact representation of love: Jesus. By erasing my central pursuit of orthodoxy and orthopraxy and replacing it with Jesus, the essence of love, I realized that perhaps Jesus was inviting us to pursue something even better than right thinking or right doing: he was inviting us to pursue a heart that is constantly increasing in is capacity to love.
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Someone once asked Gandhi for a sermon, and his reply was, “My life is my sermon.” In the same way, we see how Jesus chose to live his adult life as perhaps one of his most potent sermons of all. While our contemporary Christian culture places value on the unholy trinity of buildings, bodies, and bucks, Jesus—the wisest teacher who ever lived and central figure in human history—was a homeless man who instead lived his life investing in authentic community with twelve close friends. We see them wrestle with the radical nature of his message together, share meals together, serve the poor and hungry together, and share life’s burdens with one another.
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If there's one thing that moving beyond a fear-based faith taught me, it was that I wanted to be different, or rather, I began to see myself in my full complexity and realized that I was different--and I liked it.
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In this story, we are not God's enemies. We are God's image-bearers and the most precious thing he created. We are not sin but are oppressed by the force of sin. We need saving but not from God or even ourselves--we need saving from all of those many things that interfere with our ability to perfectly reflect and receive love.
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In biblical Greek the word "repent" comes from a military term similar to the command "about face." In...sermons, repentance is all about "turning away' from sin, and certainly repentance would include an element of that. However, the deeper flavor of his word is less about turning away from something and more about turning toward something. As much as the word "repent" makes many of us recoil, what if it is enjoining us to turn away from our fear of God and to turn toward the love of God? what if we simply confess that God is love, and then put a period at the end of the sentence? God is love. Period.
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When the opening verses of Genesis say that we were created in the image and likeness of God, it is helpful to remember that this means we are actually created in the image and likeness of LOVE. We were created by love. We were created to receive love. We were created to reflect love. Our entire purpose for existing is to love.
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Unlike the bounded-set approach where we're constantly trying to measure ourselves up to see whether we're in or out, the centered-set paradigm invites us to ask far more simple and profound questions: "Am I moving toward Jesus? Am I moving toward love?
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Like the religious elite of Jesus’ time, we are destined for a life of being barrier makers and line drawers if we insist on holding on to a culturally diluted version of Jesus. However, when we rediscover the radical message of Jesus—a message that consistently, from beginning to end pronounced inclusion for the excluded, and love for the outcast—we rediscover a divine invitation to become the people who flip the tables, erase the lines, and remove barriers. We are invited to join Jesus in practicing undiluted inclusion of the “other.” Let’s stop being the religious elites who focus on when and how to keep people out, and instead endeavor to be the loving, inclusive followers of Jesus who unrelentingly invite the outsider to come in.
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But what if there's really no such thing as a crisis of faith? ... What if it just feels like everything is going wrong, but really that instance is a moment when everything is about to go right? ... What if what we often call a faith crisis is actually a divine journey--not from God, or simply to God, but a journey with God?
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The Bible isn't a choose your own adventure book where everyone can just make up their own meaning.
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We can see that sin is simply anything that disrupts the way life is intended to be. Sometimes we are the ones who do the disrupting; sometimes it's done to us. But never does sin become part of our identity. We are created in the image and likeness of love, and nothing can destroy that.
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Justice is only achieved in beautiful fullness when the oppressed has been elevated back to their rightful place, and when those who were guilty of the oppressing have experienced repentance, healing, and restoration as well.--justice is only achieved in beautiful fullness when the oppressed has been elevated back to their rightful place, and when those who were guilty of the oppressing have experienced repentance, healing, and restoration as well.
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Through a lens of navigation, then, we can see that "keeping" isn't about having a perfect, linear or flawless journey; keeping is about having a focus point that you want to keep moving toward.
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From our earliest years, American culture reinforces the notion that we are all completely independent individuals. Sometimes we call it “personal responsibility” and other times we call it “rugged individualism,” which, in and of themselves, are not entirely negative concepts. Taken too far however, these cultural concepts lead us to believe we really are the captains of our own ship, that our primary responsibility is to our own selves, and that we can do this all on our own.
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Fear-based faith combined with groupthink subconsciously restricts our ability and willingness to consider answers that are beyond the limited, usually binary, options fear presents to us. False binary options tend to go hand in hand with tribalism, and breaking free from the latter will lead you to rejecting the former....and we ultimately want to break free from how the group thinks.
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What Jesus teaches in regard to violence is so radical that it almost doesn’t even make sense. When we serve an Americanized version of Jesus, we tend to subconsciously imagine that Jesus would have said something to the effect of, “Don’t use violence unless you really and truly fear that your life may be in danger.” However, that isn’t what he taught – Jesus repeatedly taught that those who actually “follow” him must adopt a position of nonviolent love of enemies. This new ethic of nonviolence was not what people were expecting; the Mosaic Law had established principles that justified retributive violence, condoning tit – for – tat responses to injustices. Jesus insists, however, that the Kingdom he came to establish was going to operate by different principles from anything they had experienced previously, and that the use of previously justified violence had no place in this new movement God was starting.
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The things that Jesus thought, and the things that Jesus did, were not a clean fit for those whose entire focus had been right thinking or right doing; Jesus was, and still it, altogether different and outside all of our camps and categories.
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Jesus is, and always has been, a person we can expect to be doing things we don't expect him to do, in the places where we don't think he'd be, with the people we didn't think he'd be with. His enemies were those who dedicated themselves to obeying every rule in the Bible. His best friends were sex workers, social misfits, and everyone else the religious leaders had declared were "out." I believe our spiritual journey gets much richer the moment we accept this, and accept that Jesus seems to have not just opted out of our boundary systems entirely, but is actually busy walking behind us and erasing the lines we've drawn.
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While it may be tempting to believe that GenXers and Millennials want less of Jesus, I believe the truth is that they want more of him. Those disillusioned with Christian culture simply long for a more authentic portrait of him. They just want the real Jesus.
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I was used to having stones in my hands, but I realized now I needed both hands free to get to work… On me.
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If we want to rediscover the radical message of Jesus, we must stop diluting it by focusing on power, peace of mind, and prosperity. Instead, we must embrace the truly radical message that invites us to find life through laying it down. Ironically—if we do this—we’ll actually find the life we’re looking for, unfamiliar as it may be.
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When we see God through a fear-based lens, we end up with an inaccurate view of ourselves.