matrix theology

It happened slowly – a revolution that took place at glacial speeds and with the same kind of momentum. A glacial ice sheet is so massive, so powerful that it changes the world by its existence. It is completely irresistable, but its power is almost entirely invisible.

In the atria of houses, in the courtyards of temples and the porches of schools – this unseen revolution was borne by simple people without agendas. There was no grand strategy or plan, no vision or organization.

The soldiers of this revolution were not armed with swords or spears or arrows. Instead, they carried love in its purest form as their only weapon – to protect themselves and others. Nothing but love. Love you; love others; love God.

They gathered, found acceptance and peace among others who shared their hopes and dreams. They celebrated Jesus in one another; they learned life and love from each other and shared it with people outside their gatherings.

These little communities of revolution were thriving, exciting and dynamic. The people came together over a mutual insanity – an amazing life they called anastasis, “resurrection”, and this amazing person who was/was not in their midst that they called christos and meschach - the anointed one, the chosen one.

He had been broken for them – his body shattered, his blood spent. He had given himself into the hands of death to “save” them; and his followers, this organism of many parts called ekklesia, or gathering, experienced not his death but his life in their lives.

They called this experience koinonia – the sharing, or the commonness. They lived Jesus, and in living as he had, they knew that he lived on. As they got further from the time of his life, they could not say with certainty that he had been raised from the dead. The only evidence they had that he still lived was that they lived, and they loved as he did.

They were risk takers and trend setters who changed their worlds by working together. They were unusual, unprecedented and yet they were madly successful. Thousands of little communities popped up all over the Mediterranean world. They were in every city and port, every town and village. People started putting their neighbors first, starting changing their priorities and altering their little pieces of the world. The church – it very slowly and steadily influenced communities and imperceptibly made the world a better place. Just as Jesus lived in obscurity and labored in the unknown, so too the church was an unseen force without advertisements or billboards or armies or political campaigns. It had no trappings of religion, just life and Jesus.

What is called church today is a faint, whispy shadow of these ancient Jesus people. If the church is meant to reflect Jesus, the reflection is fogged and murky. Over the centuries, politicians and demagogues and philosophers have tainted Jesus’ reflection with their organizations and doctrinal statements and theologies. They have tried to reduce the living One who is and was and is to come (Rev 1:8) to some kind of way of thinking, some kind of logical being. REDUCE Jesus to anything and he becomes just one of us.

Crusaders hacked Muslims to death; Inquisitions sentenced Jews to gruesome deaths. Church leaders crowned emperors; reformers massacred their opposition. Christians enslaved “pagans”, slaughtered the heathen. The church became an agent – not of love – but of hate. Jesus became a symbol of death and intolerance instead of shared dreams and hopes.

And it is in this shadow, and not the shadow of those ancient, beautiful Jesus people, that we live. Christianity, in all its varied colors and shapes, still lives as the bastard child of the medieval church and not those people who lived Jesus. Our vocabulary, our theology – we are tainted because when we take the name, we take the history.

This is a call for a radical change, not a little surface alteration. We must see our history for what it is. We do not need to reject all of it, as cults and Puritans might tell us. Even this most corrupted form of Jesus’ body has produced some most beautiful echoes of Jesus. We need to simply accept this history, this Christianity, and know that it is there.

Centuries of debris litter our “Christian” thinking. It is filled with castoff pieces of cultures and worlds that we have journeyed through. We cannot confuse this flotsam with Jesus. That mistake is what has made the church so useless.

Do I consider myself a Christian? This is a question I have really, honestly been struggling with lately. When I hear that word, sometimes it gives me the creeps. To me, Christians are introverted and, well, weird. They are consumed with their religion, to the point of selling it to friends and neighbors with sometimes attractive literature but usually tackyness and insincerity. They express love to people outside the church for the purpose of converting them and not for the purposes of love itself.

They walk around judging people for their hair or their clothes or their station in life. They set lines and boundaries for acceptability and they withhold true love from those who do not meet these standards.

So, if you mean by the word Christian, someone who is like that? No, I am not a Christian. I want nothing to do with that.

But if you mean someone who believes you can live in anastasis, that there is a living Jesus who was/is/will be in our midst, loving through us and being loved through us? If you mean someone who sees righteousness as relating to God rather than following the hop-scotch steps to heaven?

Then yes, I am. That is what I want to pursue in my own imperfect, tainted way.