Your Own Personal Jesus

will the real Jesus please stand up?

Depeche Mode once sang to us…

Reach out, touch faith

Your own personal Jesus
Someone to hear your prayers
Someone who cares
Your own personal Jesus
Someone to hear your prayers
Someone who's there

If you have many conversations outside of your personal theological bubble, you have probably recognized that there seems to be a proliferation of “our own personal Jesus” in our North American Church culture. Somehow the evangelical emphasis on a “personal relationship with Jesus” morphed into a printing process where every “personal” copy is a variant of the original. Changing the story from an us/our to a me/mine relationship with God probably made this change inevitable.

I was listening to an interview with a pop star the other day. She was observing how her next-door neighbor growing up didn’t really care for her or have any good thing to say about her, especially after she came out as queer. But now that she has become a pop star and achieved a level of fame, that same next-door neighbor is always asking about her and talking as if they have always had the very best relationship. The hypocrisy makes her feel sick. When I hear people claiming their “own personal Jesus” but who live the opposite way of the Jesus in the four gospels, I feel about them the way the pop star says she feels about her old neighbor.

It's a tricky thing to work out.

Let me state the obvious. None of us have our theology worked out any better than the first followers of Jesus who kept adjusting their understanding of God based on the next things Jesus said and did. And it’s easy to get honest (or mostly honest – even relatively honest) people to admit they themselves are not morally perfect or walking perfectly in the way of Jesus. But when American political figures pray to Jesus and rejoice when their Jesus helps them do harm to other human beings – existentially or legislatively or both – then I feel like we need to make the distinction that their personal Jesus who they’ve credited with the success of their harmful ventures can’t possibly be the Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

I feel the same way about religious leaders, Christian leaders, who claim to have the seal of approval of their Jesus while doing measurable, demonstrable, receiptable harm to other human beings. I want to make sure that credit is given where credit is due and that their own personal Jesus should get all the kudos, leaving the Jesus of the gospels, the one John the Revelator sees seated on the throne looking like a lamb that’s been slain, doesn’t get spoiled by their claim. It’s not just a matter of opinion or no little difference to claim that the Jesus who said, “love your enemies” is not the same person as your “own personal Jesus” who approves your tyrannical leadership style or “blessed” you with a narcissistic personality disorder.

I can’t pretend anymore to find a way to reconcile the Jesus Mike Johnson worships and prays to with the Jesus I’m trying to follow. Or the one the Theobros exegete while saying horrible things to women in pastoral ministry.

Like the character in Green Eggs and Ham, “I would not, could not,” worship a Jesus that takes food from people’s hungry mouths and reduces their opportunity for necessary healthcare. "I would not, could not” follow a Jesus who is for tax breaks for the rich and make-work projects for the poor. And I don’t have to. I can commit myself to the Jesus of the gospels and stand with the prophets who condemn those who claim to have God’s favor while they exploit the poor and the immigrant. I will choose to be with the Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John who hangs out in the margins with those who are being used and abused, identifying with them in the nature of his own death – rather than act as if the “personal Jesus” that approves the blatant corruption of the Trump family is something other than greed and hypocrisy.

My intent is for this to be a theological post, not a political one.

The celebration of “your own personal Jesus” has left me feeling wildly disoriented. Having given about 40 years of my life to vocational ministry in the Church, I’m disheartened to find myself in an us vs. them world that seems more defined by our ideologies rather than our faith tradition or even the words of Scripture. I’ve been left reeling by evangelical theologians who clearly know the text of scripture and yet participate in a spin for the sake of their politics that would make the devil blush. I’m overwhelmed by grief from denominational leaders who know the good they ought to do and choose not to do it for the victims of abuse caused by their own system – even their own choices on how to respond to the stories of abuse.

In logic, there’s a fallacy called the ‘argument of the beard.’ The internet explains the fallacy like this: “When one argues that no useful distinction can be made between two extremes, just because there is no definable moment or point on the spectrum where the two extremes meet. The name comes from the heap paradox in philosophy, using a man’s beard as an example. At what point does a man go from clean-shaven to having a beard?” Sometimes I hear thoughtful Christians suggest that if people claim to be following Jesus, we really have no authority to say, “No, you don’t.” Their point often sounds to me like the argument of the beard – how much do you have to get “wrong” before you’re not following Jesus anymore? How much do you have to have “right?” Who are we to judge if someone is following or not?

You don’t have to keep two columns – naughty and nice – by which you calculate and measure how closely someone follows Jesus to see if it’s accurate to call them a follower. We have a general capacity to recognize whether the people in our lives are healers or hurters, truth-tellers or truth-obscurers, faithful friends or phony-baloneys. Mr. Rogers said it simply, “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’” We know who the helpers are.

We also have a description from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John to guide us. We have the practice of the early church to point the way. We have the prophets to describe what the free and independent God who refuses to be domesticated or controlled says and does in the world.

Abraham Heschel, in this book, The Prophets, talks about the people of God being forced into exile because of the egregious sin they practiced (greed, pride, self-reliance, a lack of hospitality) and Heschel answers this question, “Where is the grace of God in sending the people of God into exile?” And Heschel doesn’t hesitate to say that the grace of God is clearly made manifest by sending Israel into exile. Israel, Heschel says, was obscuring the face of God for all the other nations and God could not let their false image-making stand. As the people of God demonstrated they followed the “God of atrocities,” the people of the world – left unchecked – would mislead the world about the nature of God.

So exile in captivity in Babylon was the grace of God for the nations that knew not God so that they might come to know God as God is and not the defective copies the Israelites were producing.

We are living in times in which, if we are not sent off into exile soon, God is going to have a lot of explaining to do on the day of judgment to all the other nations. For the sake of all the “church too” survivors, for the sake of all the survivors of clergy abuse, for the sake of gay, trans and queer folks who’ve been condemned over a handful of questionable verses while we justify ourselves and each other for practices that are abundantly condemned in the clearest and most repetitive instances in scripture, we need to recognize that a lot of “our own personal Jesus” are being followed rather than the Jesus of the gospels and the story of the historic Church.

40 years ago, when I started following Jesus, there was a classic illustration we were given about counterfeits. The preacher/teacher would ask if we knew how people in banks were trained to identify counterfeit bills. Then they would tell us they were trained to recognize counterfeits by being exposed to the “real thing” and spending a lot of time with genuine bills, so much so that they wouldn’t be easily fooled by the counterfeit. It’s a nice story. But if you’ve tried to spend any large bills lately, you know that there are markers, special lights and several other systems employed to catch fake bills. Time with real bills turns out not to be enough as our capacity to fool each other and mislead each other has increased.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying that I have the final word on what Jesus is all about. I am not saying that my personal interpretation of Jesus is the measure by which all other versions should be judged.

I’m saying all this to confess to you that I’m feeling, in the words of Mugatu, like I’m taking crazy pills. I’m surrounded by a culture that makes claims about knowing Jesus like I do but in the wise words of Sesame Street, "One of these things is not like the others.”