Believing In Jesus: Proclamation or Practice?

A Dialogue

Wednesday, August 28, 2002

You must make a choice. Either this man was and is the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God.                                                           -- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Could it be that Christians have done precisely what Jews feared might be done, idolized Jesus of Nazareth? Have Christians supplanted God by deifying Jesus, which is actually the opposite of incarnation? Have Christians taken the way to God and made him a dead end, leading nowhere beyond himself? Has this been done because Christians refuse to live with the holy mystery that is God? Finding it so much easier to get our minds around this Jesus, have we settled for a sentimentalized version of God? Remember,   Jesus did not come to found a religion; he came to awaken faith in God.

                                                                                           -- Gene Owens, Confessions of a Religionless Christian

1. Do we “talk about Jesus” enough?

2. Respond to the statement:  “…I don’t ‘believe in Jesus.’ I believe in God.”

3. In the sermon I drew a distinction between two “confessions” in the Gospels. (“You are the Christ.” -- “My Lord and my God.”) In the sermon, these represented two very different schools of thought about Jesus. If the sermon left those on both the far left and the far right wanting, it did so because the point of the sermon was not to persuade anyone to move from one side to the other, but I “twisted” Jesus’ language a bit to ask a very contemporary question: “Who do you say that Jesus IS?”

Question: Is it fair to leave the doctrinal question hanging (Who was Jesus?), and deal only with the practical/personal/existential/individual question – Who is Jesus for you, today?

[Jesus is, ultimately,] “not simply a figure of the past, but a figure of the present. Meeting that Jesus – the living Jesus who comes to us even now – will be like meeting Jesus again for the first time.”

 -- Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time

4. Among what I, personally, believe about Jesus:

• I no longer simply equate Jesus and God, but I do regard the relationship between God and Jesus, and Jesus’ own life in God, as unique.

• I believe that the Gospels evidence some progression or development in their portrayal of Jesus…

• I consider the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ to be essential in my understanding and appropriation of faith.

5. What does it mean to be a follower of Christ?

 “In both Greek and Latin [to believe] means to ‘give one’s heart to.’ The ‘heart’ is the self at its deepest level.”[1] Believing is not just claiming something in our head, then, it is seeking to practice it in all that we do.  I do Believe in Jesus. I believe not because I proclaim what the Gospels say happened outside of Jerusalem some 2000 years ago as salvation. I believe in Jesus because I believe that in practicing his compassion, in practicing his commitment, in practicing his kind of Godly love, in knowing his mind and sharing his heart, like him, I can come to know what it means to be fully human. And they say, “Practice makes perfect.” May it be so!

6. Was the hymn used as part of the closing prayer confusing to the message of the sermon, or beneficial?

Jesus, Jesus, how I trust him. How I’ve proved him o’er and o’er. Jesus, Jesus, precious Jesus. O, for grace to trust him more.

“I Believe in God because I believe in Jesus. Or more probably, [without Jesus] God simply would not matter. The story of Jesus enables me to envision God as One who genuinely cares for each and all of us. In Jesus, God confronts the Darkness face to face, Incarnate, for our sake. Jesus is Light to the gentle face of God. The story of Jesus says that God laughs with us in our joys and weeps with us in our sorrow. God strengthens us in the helplessness of our hoping, God stands with us in the uncertainty of our believing, and God waits for us in our yearning to be loved. Ultimately the lonely companionship of Jesus in the suffering of his passion [makes] my painful journey a sometime story of faith.”[2]