It’s important to keep in mind that, in the beginning of my ruining, the Lord was bringing several things to a head, like a number of individual cars on separate roads all speeding toward the same intersection, destined to arrive at the same time. A collision was inevitable, but necessary.
A week or so before I had the conversation in the previous post, I remembered a Christian speaker that I had heard twice in my teenage years and had always liked. His name is Tony Campolo. I was trying to look up some of his stuff online when I stumbled upon a quote that he had made many years ago. This quote, unknown to me at the time, was going to be God’s divinely ordained catalyst that would ignite the ruinous fires of God’s revolution in me. Here’s the quote:
“I have three things I’d like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don’t give a shit. Third, what’s worse is that you’re more upset with the fact that I said shit than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.”
When I first read it, I thought, “Cool! That’s radical!” But, as I read it again and again, I found myself thinking, “That’s cool, what he’s saying and all, but really he should’ve said it more pastorally…or more like this, using this word instead of…”. It was in the middle of that line of thought that a shocking realization occurred: I was one of those people who was more concerned that he said shit than I was that 30,000 kids die of starvation every night! I am a Pharisee. In a divine flash, I could feel the pain of God over all those dying kids – and that it was intensified by my own cold, religious, pharisaic indifference! Jesus was grieved deeply and it moved me not! I can’t put into words what took place in me, except to say a deep, profound, foundational repentance. I was too stunned in my pride to weep, but I repented sincerely and deeply.
At that moment, I began to cry out to Jesus for his gospel and no other. I didn’t want to be a Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative, moderate, evangelical, charismatic, or even Christian (the American caricature of it, anyway) – I wanted to simply be a follower of Jesus. No one else, nothing else. I repented of Americanized Christianity and asked Jesus to accept me as his disciple and follower and to teach me his gospel. And, praise his name, he is doing just that. But even that has had a few surprises involved (but more on those later)…
One thing I realized early on was this: that I sit in an office in my clerics every day and do mostly the same things everyday. I rarely talk to anyone because we all have our duties and appointments and we’re all busy behind closed doors. And frankly, if people walked in off the street needing groceries or financial assistance, I would inwardly get pissed off and see it as an interruption! After Jesus ignited the catalyst mentioned above, I realized that I sit every day in the same office; I’m surrounded with people who dress like me, talk like me, look like me, use the same “church language” as me – I wasn’t having any effect on anyone! I was insulated from people inside and outside of the church. And sadly, in my arrogance, I was smugly satisfied with myself, fully convinced in my own mind that I was doing the will of God! I had become real good at explaining why Jesus didn’t mean what he was plainly saying; I was real good at getting out of doing things that I just didn’t want to deal with, but excusing myself in such a way that I appeared to be so righteous and spiritual and holy. (It makes me sick to think about it now.) I was numb and slumbering, all the while believing that I was one of the few who were feeling and awake.
Thank God for his mercy to me, a fool and a pharisee.
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