Who Killed Jesus - according to Woodie Gutherie

It occurred to me some years ago that the people who orchestrated the crucifixion of Jesus weren’t the nasty Romans, indeed if you read the record you’ll see that the leading politicians of his day; Herod Antipas and Pontius Pilate both portrayed Jesus as an innocent man and reluctantly sanctioned his execution.
No, those who most enthusiastically called for Jesus’ death were the religious leaders. Why? Because his lifestyle and teachings threatened to undermine all they stood for. Their very identity was based on their strict adherence to the Law of Moses, while Jesus spoke of love, tolerance and mercy.
One of my sons sent me an email the other day, ‘Dad, listen to Woodie Guthrie singing a song called Jesus Christ.’ I did, and discovered that old Woodie was way down the road ahead of me, for here’s what he sang, 'If Jesus was to preach (now) like he preached in Galilee they would lay Jesus Christ in his grave.'
Do you think they would?

Out of Church Christians

Google, 'Don't want to go to church anymore', and at the last count there were over 70 million results. That suggests a hot topic for debate! But what does it tell you? Could it be that in today's world there are millions of people who go to church but don't want to and lack the courage to stop?

Or are there millions more who don't go and think they should but are put off because they misunderstand what the true church is about? Maybe it's a bit of both. In my case it took more years than I care to count, trying to make sense of the weekly pilgrimage before I finally said, 'You know what? I'm not going back!' And I didn't!

The result is that my understanding of what church is all about has radically changed, my relationship with God has been vastly enriched, and the deep inner peace that I spent almost half a century searching for fills my life every day.

Does that make sense?

Yes? Then tell me your story and be encouraged to tell others.
No? Then visit www.outofchurchchristian.com and tell me what you think.

A SONG AIN'T A SONG 'TIL YOU SING IT

I’ve discovered how to make myself invisible, but I’ll come to that in a minute. Meanwhile let me tell you about my favourite contemporary Christian writer; Brennan Manning. By all accounts he’s an odd character, perhaps in his mid-seventies. A Franciscan priest committed to serving the poor. Among his ‘callings’ he has transported water to rural villages via donkey and buckboard; he’s been a mason's assistant under the blazing Spanish sun; a dishwasher in France and a voluntary prisoner in a Swiss jail. Many see him as a mystic, an intensely godly man although not religious, and he struggles with alcoholism. He claims to have heard the voice of God audibly on an occasion when he spent six months living in solitary contemplation in a remote cave in the Zaragoza desert. Late one night as he gazed into the inky blackness of the sky he says he heard these words; ‘For love of you I left my Father's side. I came to you who ran from me, who did not want to hear my name. For love of you I was covered with spit, punched and beaten, and fixed to a wooden cross.’

Brennan later reflected, ‘Those words are burned into my life. Once you come to know the love of Jesus Christ, nothing else in the world seems beautiful or desirable by comparison.'

But it wasn’t until his collapse into alcoholism in the mid 1970’s that his writing began in earnest. He has since written fourteen books, among them my favourite, The Ragamuffin Gospel. Brennan has a gripping style; you either love him or you wish he wasn’t there. I was listening to him the other day as he was telling one of his stories about an old friend who was dying. At one point he grabbed Brennan by the arm and said, ‘I can’t relive my life, but you’re still a young man. Brennan, don’t waste your time doing things that don’t count.’ He opened a drawer, ‘I want to give you something,’ he said, and from the drawer he pulled out a picture with some text on it. ‘Read it for me,’ he said, and Brennan read; ‘A bell ain’t a bell ‘til you ring it. A song ain’t a song ‘til you sing it. And love ain’t love ‘til you give it away.’

The two men talked easily for a while until his friend died and Brennan tells how as he looked back over his own life most of it was a drab grey, with little peaks of brilliance poking through like church spires through a blanket of fog. ‘Those were the moments when I was giving of myself for the good of others. For the rest of the time I might as well not have been born.’

So, how do we make ourselves invisible? You sit on a wooden box at the bottom of Main Street with a handful of ‘Big Issue’ magazines on your knee. Few people will see you, those who do will side-step you, studiously avoid eye contact, and yet how we love to put on our pious Sunday best, we congratulate the pastor on another ‘life-changing’ sermon and we make our way home, oblivious to the screaming pain of hurting humanity to the safety of our respectable little bubbles.

We sanitise the words of Paul to the young church at Ephesus, ‘…live a life of love,’ but they can’t be sanitised, because love ain’t love ‘til you give it away,’ and you can’t do that at armslength.

SO, YOU THINK GOD IS RELIGIOUS?

Most people do. Perhaps because most religious activities are centred on places that people associate with God, or observing rules dreamed up by religious patriarchs. But take a minute and think about how Jesus related to religion and religious people of his day.

Firstly he broke all their rules; they said you shouldn’t heal people on the Sabbath, and he did. They said it’s wrong to pluck ears of corn and eat them on the Sabbath, and he did. And they taught that you shouldn’t associate with prostitutes and drunkards and social drop-outs, and he did that too. And there’s more. While he did go to the temple daily, it wasn’t always the same temple, so he didn’t ‘belong’, he wasn’t ‘committed’ to a particular group, or denomination, or assembly. And if the Bible is to be believed, he didn’t go to the temple to warm a pew, he went to teach his listeners that Moses’ Law was now obsolete. He said, ‘I’m giving you a new commandment: love each other… as I have loved you’ - that’s one pretty good reason why they wanted him dead.
He didn’t say that he was introducing another commandment; it was a new commandment, one that would render the others obsolete, one that placed relationship at the heart of his new way of life. For example, you wouldn’t steal from people you love as Jesus loves you, would you? And you wouldn’t commit adultery, or be envious, or kill, or lie, because love would be your life's guiding principle. But religion can’t handle that way of thinking, so religious people demanded his crucifixion.

And another thing, as I’ve just said, Jesus did go to the temple regularly, but there are only two occasions when his going was specifically reported, once he riled them so much they tried to throw him off a cliff, and the next time he wrecked the place, flexed his muscles, made a whip, kicked over tables.
So, do you still think God is religious? I don’t. And if he’s not, what is church all about?

Pornography or Adult Entertainment

Much has been said about Richard Timney, the UK's Home Secretary’s husband who doubles as her Parliamentary Assistant, downloading a number of what some call, adult movies. First off, let’s call them what they are, they are pornographic movies, pornography being defined as the use of images such as books, magazines and films to arouse sexual excitement. To describe pornographic literature as ‘adult entertainment’ is to normalise depravity. It’s to say, ‘What’s the problem? Isn’t that what adults do?’ But I strongly resent the suggestion that it is normal adult behaviour to seek sexual stimulation outside a stable, committed and loving relationship. It’s not normal, it’s a perversion.

So then, what is the issue at the centre of the Richard Timney affair? Is it the fact that the two pornographic movies that were downloaded were paid for out of public funds? Hardly, for it was obviously a simple accounting error that could easily have been missed in the murky waters of MP’s expenses claims. Or is the problem the fact that such movies were downloaded at all? Closer to the truth perhaps, but while we have no right to poke about in other people’s private lives as moral policemen, we are entitled to be concerned about the profound immorality at the highest echelons of state that places our very culture at risk of destruction.

And yet the extent of the public outcry in the wake of the event is surprising. I mean, if Mr Timney had downloaded and watched The Sound of Music or The Never Ending Story at the public’s expense there wouldn’t have been a word said about it. We might even have thought, ‘Aw, isn’t that nice?’ So, does our secular world have a conscience after all?
Maybe, but there’s something about this scandal that worries me; pornography is a social disease that is largely unrecognised. Like domestic abuse, another social ill, it’s rarely talked about in polite company, but it dehumanises both performer and observer. It reduces people who were created in the image of God to commodities; sex toys. It is devoid of love and respect, knows nothing of dignity and intimacy. It’s all about self gratification, it takes and doesn’t give, it demands; ‘What will you do to please me?’ There’s no willingness to sacrifice for the good of the other. It sees sex as a purely physical act with no emotional or spiritual attachment. Life and love are all about relationships and openness, beauty and acceptance; but pornography is secretive, deceitful and addictive. There is nothing positive about it, it does nothing for the individual’s self esteem. It encourages sexually aggressive behaviour towards women, and will ultimately destroy society’s moral values, corroding them from the inside out.

Now, on the contrary, take a moment and reflect on this wonderful picture of love, of how life should be, of how it can be. Allow it to wash over our souls that are so easily contaminated by the shabby and sordid world around us...

‘Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance’ (1 Corinthians 13:4-8).

CHRISTIANS: CHRIST TO THE WORLD

In his book, 'A Jew Without Knowing It', philosopher Mike Gold tells of his childhood in New York City. It was his mother's strict instruction that he should never wander beyond four certain streets. She could not tell him that he lived in a Jewish ghetto, nor would he understand if she were to tell him that he had the 'wrong kind of blood' in his veins, because children do not understand prejudice. People often point to early rebellious behaviour in children as evidence of innate human badness, but speaking of prejudice, Mike Gold believes, 'It is a poison that must gradually seep into a person's blood stream.'

In his narration, Mike Gold tells of the day that curiosity lured him beyond the four-street barrier laid down by his protective mother. 'Hey, kid,' called a group of older boys, 'are you a kike?' Mike had never heard the word before, so he answered that he didn't know.

'Are you a Christ-killer?' but again he didn't know what they meant, and then they asked him where he lived. His address gave him away, 'So you are a kike, you are a Christ-killer. Well, you're in Christian territory and we are Christians. We're going to teach you to stay where you belong.' And they beat the little boy and sent him away with the screams, 'We are Christians, you killed Christ, stay where you belong!' ringing in his ears.

When he returned home crying, with face bloodied and torn clothes, his frightened mother asked him what had happened? Who had done this terrible thing? But he could only sob and answer that he didn't know. So his mother washed away the tears and blood from his face, dressed him in clean clothes and took him into her lap as she sat on her rocker, trying to soothe him. Many years later Mike Gold recalled how he had raised his small battered lips to his mother's ear and asked, 'Mama, who is Christ?'

Mike Gold died in 1967. It is said that as a pro-Communist he drifted into obscurity during the McCarthy era in America when Communists were demonised. His last meals were eaten at a Catholic Charity house in New York City, run by Dorothy Day who once said of him, 'Mike Gold eats every day at the table of Christ, but he will probably never accept him because of the day he first heard the name of Christ.' And so he died.

What kind of picture of Christ do we project to our children, to a watching world, to neighbours and work colleagues? Do they see a gentle, forgiving and compassionate Jesus who died for those who hated them? Or do they see a harsh, demanding dictator who is prepared to trample the rights and feelings of others who think differently?

John Powell in his excellent book, Why Am I Afraid To Love? challenges us thus ; 'For better of for worse, Christ has taken us as his living symbols in this world. The world that is asking whether God is dead or not, the world that is asking who Christ is, can find its answers only in the Christian. For better or for worse, we are Christ to the world.'

GOD IS DEAD - LOVE LIVE NIETZSCHE!

I remember as a boy being told about a bad man called Friedrich Nietzsche. According to my teachers, he said things that were almost too terrible to repeat. Nietzsche, a nineteenth-century German philosopher was as the devil himself, he stood against everything we believed, he sought to undermine the very foundations of our Christian way of life, and preachers declared that this man was to be treated with utter disdain, a target of ridicule. Why? Because he proclaimed, ‘God is dead!’ 'How dare he?’ said the preacher man, and we all nodded wisely in agreement, for we were Christians, and we knew better.
Years later I read Nietzsche for myself and I made up my own mind. I concluded that he was right, and that he wasn’t a bad man. Here’s what he wrote; ‘God is dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives…’ Nietzsche was weeping for what the Christian religion had done to the true God.
Then I went to a different church and I heard another preacher say, ‘The Holy Spirit is here, we welcome him. But there are churches out there from which the Holy Spirit withdrew years ago and nobody has noticed that he’s gone.’ In a way, that’s what Nietzsche was saying; those churches had rejected the true God of unfathomable grace and love in favour of a god to whom they could pay homage once a week and then lock him up safely in the church building until next week.
Again Nietzsche was right, for he went on to say that when religious people put God out of their lives, they said, ‘What sacred games shall we have to invent?’ – and the traditional Sunday service was born.
The central character in Nietzsche’s book; ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ was called ‘The Madman.’ He ran from church to church making a nuisance of himself by asking awkward questions, and they threw him out, and the Madman said; ‘What are these churches now if not the tombs and sepulchres of God?’
And then I discovered something else. The pastor who berated the ‘churches out there from which the Holy Spirit withdrew years ago’, had also killed the true God of unfathomable grace and love, and replaced him with a demanding legalistic god, one who will forgive, but only if you forgive others, one with whom you have to keep a ‘short account’, one who loves you if… They did that because to control people you have to control their god, and you can’t control the true God.
Nietzsche died in 1900; he was way ahead of his time. He saw the direction in which society was headed. He understood that when people ditch God, as his did, and as ours has, no longer does society have accepted standards of morality, no longer do people have a sense of purpose, not longer do they have a moral compass; they don’t know right from wrong.
So if Nietzsche was right, how do we find this true God of unfathomable grace and love that religious people have murdered? The first step is to recognise that he wants you more than you want him. The second step is to stop thrashing around looking for him. The third step is take time to listen to the inner voice, and trust him, he will find a way to communicate, but be prepared for a surprise.