Jesus is a Model for Living (If the Church Were Christian #1)

Ms. Anne Lynch

Scripture: OT Isaiah 25:1-8 :: NT Mark 7:1-2, 5-8

So it’s time I come clean and tell you. I can’t fake it, I’m done! I am not a Christian!

…Let me back up here.

Who here has heard of Maya Angelou? Right, so Maya Angelou is a phenomenal poet and author who has been through more than her fair share of suffering and, by sharing those sufferings to her readers, has become a national treasure. Anyway, there’s a story about Maya Angelou that goes like this: She’s at a book-signing event and a young woman comes up to her. The woman says to Maya Angelou, “I love your work! And like you, I’m Christian.” Well Angelou just looks at the woman and says, “Already?!”

See, to the woman, being “Christian” is a cultural identity, something you can inherit and grow up with, etc., and really, there’s nothing wrong with that. But for Maya Angelou, she understood “Christian” as what its etymology would imply, that is, to be Christian is to be “Christ-like,” and that is no easy task. To be Christ-like, by Maya Angelou’s standards in this story, requires a lifetime of discipline and hard work. This concept of a religious identity stands up to scholarly study. Karen Armstrong, a rock star in the field of comparative religious studies, writes in her magnum opus, The Case for God, “It is no use magisterially weighing up the teachings of religion to judge their truth or falsehood before embarking on a religious way of life. You will discover their truth—or lack of it—only if you translate these doctrines into ritual or ethical action. Like any skill, religion requires perseverance, hard work, and discipline.” (xiii)

In the winter of 2009/2010, I was privileged enough to participate in a service-learning trip led by fellow university students to the Thailand-Burma border to learn from and aid exiles and refugees from Burma. At the time, the democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi was still under house arrest (she’s currently touring the United States, and she just stopped at my alma mater to visit Burma activists there). A military junta still decidedly controlled the country (now it’s run by a military-dominated, nominally-civilian government reaching out to the money-hungry West). While we students were in the border town of Mae Sot, we met a Theravadan Buddhist monk named U Ashin Sopaka. He led us to a dump, of all places. Not some regulated American dump, by the way, but a Thai dump. It was right next to an algae-infested lake, stinking of rot, buzzing with flies everywhere (you couldn’t hear yourself think), heaps of garbage reaching 50 feet high, the dust and grime sticking to our sandal-clad feet and exposed skin in the heat of a tropical country. It was disgusting. Children greeted us.

A whole community of about 300 refugees, including kids, from Burma lived in the dump. See, by harvesting plastics and recyclables, a Burmese person could make three times the amount she would make working in a Thai factory: three dollars a day instead of one dollar or less. To them, living in this dump was far better than living under the fear and power of the Tatmadaw, Burma’s military. While we were there, two trucks dumped their garbage, trapping our group, and we witnessed with shock everyone running to the heaps, attacking them with large sickles and bags, even kids, like some apocalyptic farming scene.

And there was U Ashin Sopaka. He was talking to people, laughing, giving cookies to the kids, even helping a mother tend to an unhappy baby. In the midst of the chaos, I thought, “This is the most Christ-like man I have ever met.” Which is a weird thing to think, and not only because I was a practicing Buddhist at the time (yes, I’m a convert). But it’s weird! Growing up in a predominantly “Christian” nation—and a highly religious area of that nation, too—I had never thought of someone as being particularly “Christ-like.” Oh, certainly I had heard of JE-SUS! Jesus freaks! WWJD bracelets! Do you accept Christ as your Lord and Savior?! Can I sign you up?

…Pass.

I mean, I’m a practical person here. If you aren’t walking the walk, why should I? I’m not going to take your religion seriously if all you do is sing praises and focus on thinking the “right” things or just try to grab and drag people “in” but don’t DO anything! And that’s just me, if that’s your style, fine, it just doesn’t fly with me personally. See, if you ask a Buddhist monk, they’ll say Buddhism isn’t a “religion,” but a “way of life.” Which is amusing the first five or six times you hear it, but after 30 times you just think, “that’s what all religions are supposed to be like!” Christianity included!

As I’ve heard it said, our religion is what we do after the sermon is over. It’s how we lead our lives day to day, night to night. In the case of this particular religion, it’s about making Jesus a model for our lives, at all times, in every decision we make. When I read that portion of the Gospel of Mark we just heard, it honestly sounds to me like Jesus could be speaking to us today. “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.” Reading that, I feel convicted. I can just imagine Jesus being like: “Why are you putting pictures of me everywhere?! There are homeless children! The Earth itself is dying! What are we doing sitting around?! Why do we care so much about ritual purity (or perhaps for our case today, mental purity—having the “right” beliefs) and not this other stuff?”

Jesus confronted his peers for not taking the prophets seriously. Perhaps he confronts us as well, for not taking Jesus himself seriously. What is so hard about doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with our God?

Um… a lot, actually. Being Christ-like, are you serious? Christ kind of got nailed to a cross. And you know what? The people I can think of as being Christ-like tend to end up in a helluva lot of trouble. Martin Luther King, Jr.? Shot on a hotel balcony. Ghandi? Assassinated, stabbed. I mentioned Aung San Suu Kyi before: spent decades under house arrest, she didn’t get to see her sons grow up, she couldn’t even visit her husband as he died of cancer in Britain. Mother Theresa? Struggled with painful loneliness. Dietrich Bonheoffer, a great German theologian who stood up against his government under the domination of the Nazis? Executed in a concentration camp. U Ashin Sopaka, the monk I mentioned? He left the comfort of exile in Germany and even exile in Thailand, he protested the military regime in Mandalay, Burma last Autumn, and disappeared. Eventually he was found under house arrest in his home village. I don’t know what happened in the interim. And Jesus? Beaten, abused, executed in the same manner of thousands of common criminals and innocents. No wonder we don’t take Jesus’s command to follow him seriously. Jesus is trouble. Jesus is dangerous. Being Christ-like? Not safe.

But you know, Jesus was 30 before he started his ministry, by most estimates. Like Maya Angelou, I like to think that being Christ-like is a process, a way of life that is developed with time and discipline. More importantly, though, it’s not just me, it’s not just us, alone. God is with us in this endeavor. In the passage from Isaiah, we witness praise to God for God’s efforts to liberate all peoples!

“O Lord, you are my God, I will exalt you, I will praise your name; for you have done wonderful things…For you have been a refuge to the poor, a refuge to the needy in their distress, a shelter from the rainstorm and a shade from the heat. When the blast of the ruthless was like a winter rainstorm, the noise of the aliens like heat in a dry pace, you subdued the heat with the shade of clouds; … And [God] will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces.”

God has done this before, and God will do it again. Through us.

See, I like to think that God gives us choices, everyday, tiny to enormous. We can choose freely across a spectrum of options. We can choose to let God use us and make ourselves into Christ-like people, or we can say, “No thanks. I pass. Too radical and dangerous for me.” We get to choose. For me personally, if I’m going to call myself a Christian, I have to prioritize making Christ-following my way of life, body and soul, 24/7/365. 366 in leap years. And the fact is, no, I’m not as Christ-like as I’d like to be. I still get scared by the full implications of my allegiance to Christ, and confused by the times that my allegiance is challenged by not only society but the hypocritical church institution itself. Yet, as an imperfect person, I’m worthy. I am worthy of serving God, striving to become Christ-like. God can act through me and through anybody in this Creation! So maybe I am a Christian after all.

I want to share a simple challenge. The grandfather of Methodism, John Wesley, wrote a small prayer, or mantra, or motto, or whatever you want to call it, that I find helpful in remembering Jesus’s call to follow…and to actually do it, too. Wesley writes, “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” Amen.