Dan Kimball quotes Scot McKnight's call to preach Jesus and to do so whilst defending orthodoxy. All well and good. But I teach these 20 somethings as well in a much more secular setting. The notion of preaching is an outmoded, anachronistic, mostly useless, if not often offensive medium in which to reveal the Gospel. We can't preach this stuff. We have to live it. And the best way to evangelize is to gather people who need to live it as well, even if they don't know they want to – yet.
So what is "it"? It is to help God reveal the Kingdom of God which is a kingdom built on love. That love is from a God who suffered the consequences of a humanity gone wrong that would kill the very God that they claimed to worship, and in a political system that believed itself to be divinely ordained from another source that made the apparent suffering King of the Jews a mockery. God gave us life by spiting death. And the response to the gift of life is to seek justice, be compassionate, act with mercy, and love our neighbor and our God with service and a love that pierces through the thick veneer of egotism that our capitalist culture buttresses.
Jesus did not want the empty words of preachers to help his followers escape from getting dirty with the outcasts and the poor. This is not about preaching, this is about getting a generation or three off of their consumer driven, existentially secure, market idolizing asses to get dirty and love others passionately.
I have been the recipient of "evangelism" as the word has been handed to us from the various American hotheads from the 19th century onward who thought they had it absolutely correct. I have even tried my hand at it and it is bullshit. What changed me was when I saw Jesus in the eyes of the poor first hand and understood that the Kingdom of God is what they need and I was there not to give it to them, but to receive it from for the first time. We all need it, we all need to receive it together. Jesus is not about orthodoxy, he destroys it when it erects human boundaries that prevent God from having reign over us and our feeble systems. The Body of Christ, those who follow him in that new life, is God's techne, God's medium for getting the work of the Kingdom done.
It's pretty clear from prophet after prophet that we killed off to maintain our own systems of self gratification and aggrandizement, that God wants us to work first and talk later. It's not work for material reward like the late 19th century and early 20th century Calvinists believed. It is about work to lift people out of conditions where they can no longer receive the good anymore. It is about restoring the walking dead among us to receive a life they cannot receive without the body of Christ intervening on their behalf.
When those 20 somethings of our age stare into the eyes of Jesus in the poor, the lonely, the sick, the prisoner, the outcast, the recipients of injustice, all of those who have bore the sins of humanity on their backs and get whipped by their brothers and sisters in the human race every day, they will see Jesus. When they participate in carrying Jesus into the tomb, they can see new life emerge not only in the one they carry, but in themselves as well. This is not simply a part of what Jesus calls his followers to do. This fundamental obligation is what Jesus requires everyone to do.
We have to stop protecting ourselves from what offends us and what disgusts us, put down the Bible for a second, and use both of the hands God gave us to reveal the Kingdom. This has nothing to do with orthodoxy, good theology, doctrine, denominations, collection plates, exegesis, preaching, committees, voting, bishops, etc. This has to do with the obligation those who follow Jesus have to those who will die from the very conditions of their culture that Jesus would save them from. B Jesus cannot save them, because his body of whining, existentially secure grumblers in the desert is too worried about whether to evangelize or not.
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