Keynote

     “In the last days,” God says,

   “I will pour out my Spirit on all people.

Your sons and daughters will prophesy,

    your young men will see visions,

    your old men will dream dreams.

 Even on my servants, both men and women,

    I will pour out my Spirit in those days,

    and they will prophesy.” 

-Acts 2:17-18 (NIV)

I’m looking forward, in just a couple of weeks, to attending the Pepperdine Bible Lectures. Before you say that a bunch of people talking about the Bible for 4 ½ days doesn’t sound like much fun, keep in mind that Pepperdine University is located in Malibu, CA, just across Pacific Coast Highway from the Pacific Ocean. The scenery’s beautiful, the weather’s nice, and the food at a little shack called Malibu Seafood tastes like it jumped right out of the ocean and onto your plate.

     Oh, and the speakers and classes should be pretty good, too.

     Actually, it’s one of the speakers particularly that I’m looking forward to. Her name is Sara Barton, and I was in college with her. After graduation, Sara and her husband John were part of a mission team to Uganda. After that, they both came to Rochester College, near Detroit, as part of the faculty. Now they’re at Pepperdine, where John teaches in the Religion department and Sara is University Chaplain. 

     At the Lectures this year, Sara will become the first woman to deliver one of the keynote addresses.

     I know that, in 2015, “first woman to…” do pretty much anything sounds a little strange, at best. But the Churches of Christ, with which Pepperdine is associated, like many churches, has historically struggled with the public role that women are encouraged to take on in the church. A lot of this difficulty, in our case, is due to biblical texts like 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 and 1 Timothy 2:11-14, which seem to limit women to roles in which they are not called upon to teach men. Some of it is likely due to traditional understandings of gender roles that have perhaps been allowed for too long to influence the discussion. A small percentage, very small, is probably due to lingering misogyny. 

     Few of our churches, including the one I serve, give women the opportunity to preach. A few more, but still not many, give women the opportunity to lead classes that include men. Some give women the opportunity to address classes on a case-by-case basis, and to address the church gathered for worship to ask for prayers or otherwise share what’s happening in their own lives. (My congregation more or less falls in here.) Some give women the opportunity to lead in other areas of worship, but not in preaching or teaching. 

     Most every congregation, though, gives women the freedom to speak in discussion-based Bible classes, which suggests perhaps that we know that when Paul says women are to be “silent,” he didn’t necessarily mean all the time, in every situation. In fact, in the same letter in which he says that women should “remain silent in the churches,” he also envisions situations in which women will be praying and giving prophecy.

     A woman is called a “diakanon” in Romans 16, the same word that we translate “deacon” in other texts and apply to a position of church leadership. A few verses later, a woman might be mentioned as an “apostle.” There are women who give prophecy and teach in the book of Acts. And Acts begins, on the day Peter first proclaimed Jesus to a throng of people in Jerusalem, with the ringing claim that in Christ the day the prophet Joel promised had finally come: that the Spirit of God was being poured out on everyone, young and old, men and women alike. 

     So the biblical witness itself sometimes seems divided. On the one hand, it can’t possibly be denied that, in Jesus, God has announced a new day, the coming of a new kingdom where old hierarchies and power structures are wiped away. The story of Jesus is the good news that the social distinctions that mean so much to us, including those between men and women, and the inequalities that are a part of those distinctions, are overturned. Honestly, there is no reason theologically for us to believe that there should be anything but equality of opportunity for women in the church to serve and minister in every way men do.

      Except that, in other places, the Bible seems to place those limits on them. And we don’t want to risk being wrong, even with the best of intentions. And so sometimes, in the name of biblical fidelity, we end up perpetuating stereotypes and inequalities that we’ve inherited from those who have come before us. So, in many churches, the work of the gospel to wipe away through the Holy Spirit the distinctions that human beings make between ourselves seems very much a work in progress — if it’s in progress at all.

     Yet, now and then someone says, “Hey, maybe the Holy Spirit is leading us toward something here. Let’s follow along and see what it is.” I’m thankful that there are folks like Mike Cope, the director of the Bible Lectures, among the little group of believers I love so much. I’m thankful that Sara is willing to place herself a little bit in the firing line, too. And I think it’s the least I can do, in the small way that I can, to affirm this effort to think in biblical, gospel ways and move all of us to consider the kind of church that we think the good news of Jesus creates.

     I don’t know all the answers. I do know, however, that there are women like Sara among us, called and gifted by God for ministry in ways that have traditionally been closed to women. I know that there are girls growing up among us who one day soon will wonder where they can put their God-given talents and gifts to work in the Kingdom. And I know that, as the church, we need to have a word of blessing, wisdom, and love for them. 

     I’ll say this: our children won’t put up with slipshod theology here. They won’t put up with rehashed interpretations of the text. If we ask them to resist the pressures of our world toward inclusivity in this area, we’d better have very good reasons for asking them to — reasons that we’ve studied and prayed about for ourselves, as communities of faith. If we don’t, they’re going to find it difficult to believe that the gospel we proclaim is authentic at all.

     May we be found faithful.

Cheering Section

    When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.” So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly.

-Luke 19:5-6 (NIV)

A lot of the kids at Gainesville (Texas) Juvenile Correction Facility are there because they don’t have anyone in their corner, no one cheering for them. When you come to believe you’re all alone, and on your own, you’ll do some things that society won’t tolerate, too. And you’ll wind up, if you’re not yet an adult, in a place like Gainesville.

    Let’s face it: call it a “juvenile correction facility” all you want, it’s still a prison. And life there is as limited as life in pretty much any other prison. One of those limits, of course, is that you don’t get to leave. For the term of your incarceration, all you know is the life of an inmate. And that kind of life, I’m guessing, doesn’t do much to change your belief that you’re on your own in the world. That no one is rooting for you.

    The kids at Gainesville, however, do get to leave for basketball games. Just the players do, I mean. No spectators. They get to leave to play games against private schools nearby — or, at least, the schools that allow them to come onto their campuses. It’s a privilege earned by good behavior, and any small infraction can cause a player to miss a game.

    I wonder how the players are treated at most of the schools where they play. Schools can be tough, kids can be cruel sometimes, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the players from Gainesville are often treated with a mixture of suspicion, fear, and hostility on the campuses of the private schools who are willing to host them. And, of course, Gainesville is always the visiting team.

    So, back in February, Gainesville was set to play a school in Waco called Vanguard College Prep. Shortly before the game, two Vanguard players, Hudson Bradley and Ben Martinson, went to their head coach and school officials with some concerns. Not concerns about the safety of their team and the other Vanguard students, as you might expect. No, their concerns were about the Gainesville team.

    Specifically, they were concerned about what it would be like for Gainesville to have no one in the stands rooting for them. Even the visiting team in a high school basketball game usually has some students and parents who make the trip with them. But Gainesville would have no one to yell when they scored, to cheer them on. And so Hudson and Ben had a plan: ask some of their own fans to form a cheering section for Gainesville.

    Once the idea took hold, it sort of snowballed. Some students made signs for Gainesville. Half the gym’s seating was reserved for Gainesville’s cheering section. Some Vanguard girls even decided to form a Gainesville cheerleading squad.

    So when the Gainesville team came out of the locker room for the game, it was into a gym half-full of kids and parents and teachers screaming for them. As they warmed up, and as the game started, they heard applause, probably for the first time ever. Every time they scored or made a good defensive play, their fans rose to their feet and screamed approval. That changed, of course, as the game went on.

    By the end, there was nothing but Gainesville fans in the gym. Because when a few people believe in someone, that belief can be contagious.

    “When I’m an old man, I’ll still be thinking about this,” said one of the Gainesville players.

    Because when someone believes in you, you don’t forget it.

    We tend to think people will change if we push them, force them, will them to be better. We tend to think that they’ll change if we just tell them what to do, hit them with a stick, withhold love and support until they earn it by behaving as we want them to. Maybe we learn behavior from the way others have treated us. We certainly don’t learn it from Jesus, though.

    Jesus went to people, people like Zacchaeus the tax collector, and showed them the love and acceptance they had been denied. No one respectable, I guarantee you, had asked Zacchaeus to his house for a meal in a long time. Much less had anyone respectable been willing to set foot in Zacchaeus’  house. Just look at the way the respectable people respond, and you get a glimpse of the can of worms Jesus opens. Never mind that Zacchaeus had brought some of the treatment he had received on himself. Never mind that he might have even rubbed his disrepute in the faces of Jericho’s Moral Majority. Down deep, he wanted to believe that someone like Jesus could like him, maybe even love him, maybe even accept him as he was. And by inviting himself over to Zacchaeus’ place, Jesus told him that he did. “I must stay at your house today,” he said, and in that one sentence said that Zacchaeus mattered as much to him as did any of the good people in Jericho with whom Jesus might have stayed.

    Never forget that we’re as much Zacchaeus as we are the good folks, shocked that Jesus could eat with him. There are, after all, places in our hearts and lives that are just as ugly as Zacchaeus’. If the Lord could treat us with love and grace and kindness, then there’s no one beyond his reach. It’s our job, then, to take the love and acceptance we’ve received from the Lord and share it, not just by talking about it, but by loving and accepting the people whose paths we cross. We’re not called to fix anyone. We’re not called to convict them of sin and hold the wrath of God over their heads and manipulate them into some sort of mourner’s bench moment. We’re called to love them and receive them in the name of God, and trust that doing so might just open their hearts to God’s Spirit.

    It certainly did for Zacchaeus. “Salvation has come to this house,” Jesus says. “This man is also a descendent of Abraham, truly one of the people of God.” But we never see Jesus tell Zacchaeus what he should do, or berate him for shady financial dealings, or threaten him with eternal damnation if he doesn’t give back any ill-gotten profits. Apparently, he just eats with him and accepts him as he is. And Zacchaeus starts to get the idea that God might just love him after all, and that he just might be able to be the person God wants him to be.

    I bet there are some folks like that in your life, folks who need to know God loves them and that they can change. And they may not ever come to that realization if you can’t find it in your heart to show them that you love them and that you’re on their side. So, in the grace of God, put away the stick for a while. Start a cheering section. Shower love on someone who’s had nothing but judgment, and see if salvation doesn’t come to their house too.

Denominational

     Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time; wait until the Lord comes. He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of the heart. At that time each will receive their praise from God.

     Now, brothers and sisters, I have applied these things to myself and Apollos for your benefit, so that you may learn from us the meaning of the saying, “Do not go beyond what is written.” Then you will not be puffed up in being a follower of one of us over against the other.  For who makes you different from anyone else? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not?

-1 Corinthians 4:5-7 (NIV) 

The publication of a new directory of the Churches of Christ, the fellowship of churches that me and my congregation are associated with, has revealed something that most of us have already known for a while:  Membership in the US is down. 

     It’s down, publishers of this directory say, by nearly 8% since 1990, from nearly 1.3 million to a little less than 1.2 million. In the same time period, the total number of US churches that identify with Churches of Christ has dropped from 13,174 to 12,300: a net loss of 874 churches.

     Estimates are hard to come by, but most suggest that American church attendance in general is on the decline. In the same 25-year period, the nation's total population rose to an estimated 320 million, up from 250 million in 1990. That's an increase of 70 million, or 28 percent. So, in a time when the population of America is rising, the percentage of that population that goes to church on a regular basis is declining. And Churches of Christ are experiencing the same sort of decline. 

     Here’s what I find interesting, though: Churches of Christ have always said we weren’t a denomination. We don’t have a headquarters, or a yearly convention. Local churches appoint their own elders and deacons, call their own ministers, and handle their own affairs. Some local congregations are friendly an cooperative with one another, while others choose to isolate themselves. There are universities and colleges and schools located with us, and facilities to care for dysfunctional families or elderly people, and even some organizations that help to recruit and train mission teams. But none are supported by a denominational office, just by individual churches or, increasingly, corporate and individual donors.

     And yet, there’s a directory that claims to be able, with some accuracy, to say how many of us there are. 

    I guess that’s fine. If nothing else, it helps people who are traveling (and don’t have internet access?) to figure out where they can find a church that will probably look and sound something like theirs. But how do the publishers know which churches are “ours” and which aren’t? By the name? There are some Churches of Christ that, for instance, use instrumental music. (Most of “us” don’t.) By our more distinctive practices? Then we’d need to include some other groups, even if we’re only talking about our most distinctive ones. 

     I know, I’m kind of being disingenuous. There are undoubtedly a number of criteria that the publishers use to distinguish “us” from “them.” And, in fairness, they’re not doing it for the purpose of judgment. Just for the purpose of naming “us,” as opposed to others.

     In other words, for the purpose of denomination. (That’s what the word means, after all.)

     Paul, writing to a church that was divided into groups that favored this teacher or that preacher, said that the problem they had was going “beyond what was written” to judge and attribute motives and try to win praise. They were “puffed up” by being, they thought, more “right” than those others. “What do you have that you didn’t receive?” he asks. Something that we should ask whenever we feel the denominational spirit rising in us.

     It seems so right, sometimes, to point out others’ flaws and shortcomings. We’re like Jesus’ first disciples, reassuring him that they had shut down an unauthorized exorcism. After all, the brand has to be protected, right? Can’t have folks who haven’t been vetted running around kicking the devil’s rear end. What if they don’t see eye to eye with us on how many cups you use for Communion, or whether it’s OK to sing Chris Tomlin songs?

     But Jesus tells us exactly what he thinks about that kind of denominationalism: “No one who does a miracle in my name can in the next moment say anything bad about me, for whoever is not against us is for us.” The Jesus movement was never intended to be institutional. It was certainly never intended to break apart along the fault lines we’ve created with our pride and arrogance. It is Jesus who draws us together, not human reflection on and interpretations of the things he did and said. As Christians, we follow Christ, and others who do the same are our sisters and brothers, whether we agree with them on some of the specifics or not. 

     And there is room for dissimilarity and even disagreement in God’s spacious kingdom. I believe, for instance,  that baptism is for believers, and that it’s by immersion. I’ve argued with other Christians over that very thing but that doesn’t make them less Christian. I think they’re wrong about that particular issue, but I’ve been wrong before as well, and there’s a slight chance I might be again, and I don’t think that puts me out of reach of God’s grace. So shouldn’t I give someone else the same latitude? What do I have that I haven’t received from the limitless stores of God’s grace and love? Why would I ever imagine that someone else shouldn’t receive it as well?

     Denominationalism only benefits those who hold power. It sees the growth of another group of Jesus followers as loss for its own. To a denominationalist, the kingdom of God is a zero-sum game. God’s grace and love have limits, and they are exactly equivalent to the boundaries of his denomination. 

     So my fellowship of churches in America is losing members. I’m sorry about that, and I want to do what I can to solve it. But there are churches in America, some of them in my fellowship and some outside, that are growing, and I’m thankful for that, even if I sometimes think that they might be compromising some important things to do so. Church attendance is on the rise in South America, India, and Africa. I can see that as a loss for the American church, or for my particular brand of church. Or I can see it as a gain for the Kingdom of God. And, begging your pardon if you think differently, I think that’s exactly what I’ll do.

     Whoever is not against us is for us. I think I’ll trust Jesus’ word on that one. The Devil rallies enough opposition to God’s work already; let’s not create it for ourselves. The church can splinter and divide into increasingly irrelevant bits over increasingly irrelevant disputes. Or, we can learn who our allies are, learn from each other, and take the good news of Jesus to a world that increasingly doesn’t know it.

Ugly

   Therefore, although in Christ I could be bold and order you to do what you ought to do,  yet I prefer to appeal to you on the basis of love. It is as none other than Paul… that I appeal to you for my son Onesimus, who became my son while I was in chains. Formerly he was useless to you, but now he has become useful both to you and to me.

    I am sending him—who is my very heart—back to you…. Perhaps the reason he was separated from you for a little while was that you might have him back forever—no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother. He is very dear to me but even dearer to you, both as a fellow man and as a brother in the Lord.

-Philemon 8-16 (NIV)

A typical 17-year-old in many ways, ten years ago Lizzie Velasquez was procrastinating from her studies, surfing online, watching some videos. She came upon a video with over 4 million views and, probably without giving it a lot of thought, clicked on it. The video was titled “The World’s Ugliest Woman.”

    Whatever she expected to see, she did not see it.

    She saw herself.

    Literally. The video was a few seconds of…her, posted apparently by a school acquaintance. And then there were the comments. Thousands of comments, most of them ugly and hurtful, unspeakable, unrepeatable. She reported the video to YouTube, hoping to have it removed for violation of terms of service, and received threats from the original poster.

     “When I saw it, my whole world just felt like it crashed at that moment,” she said recently. “I thought, how in the world can I ever pick myself up from this?”

    She said that, by the way, in an interview she gave People magazine. Just ahead of the SXSW premiere of a documentary called A Brave Heart. A documentary about her.

    Wonder if the poster of that video, or any of its thousands of commenters, ever had a documentary made about them?

    Lizzie, by way of background, was born with a syndrome so rare that there isn’t even a name for it. No matter what she eats, or how much, she can’t gain weight at all. She has 0 percent body fat, and at 26 years old has never weighed more than 64 pounds. Her bones break simply because there’s no fat to cushion them. She’s blind in one eye, and her sight in the other is compromised. And, yes, her appearance can be a little shocking.

    Lizzie is far from ugly, however.

    She has great faith in God. She’s full of joy and kindness and gratitude. She is, incredibly, not angry about her situation, nor about the bullying she’s had to endure her whole life. She says that if she met whoever posted the video, she’d hug them for helping to bring out of her something she didn’t know was there. It certainly helped to launch her new career as a motivational speaker and anti-bullying crusader.

    Oh, yes, that’s what she does now.  

    She started by posting her own YouTube videos: inspirational words, daily updates, even makeup tips. (Think about that one for a moment!) Then she gave a TEDx talk that wound up going viral. Almost 7.5 million views.

    Remember, her “World’s Ugliest Woman” video only had 4 million.

    Lizzie has written 2 books about bullying, with a third coming. And now her movie is coming out.

    We throw words around so carelessly, words like “ugly” or “useless” or “worthless” or “stupid.” We throw them around because we’re insecure, or irritated, or angry, or just thoughtless. Our world makes it easy to judge people at a glance, to write them off based on fleeting impressions and incomplete understanding. But every one of those people is God’s creation, loved by him, and, as far as he is concerned, full of potential. They can be all he intended them to be. He has made sure of it.

    Paul’s friend Onesimus, once thought of as useless, was recognized as useful when seen in a new light. The man Philemon would have ordinarily regarded as just a runaway slave was, from a different perspective, his family, his brother. And the new light, the different perspective, was Jesus.

    Give him some room, and Jesus will change white people or black people into brothers and sisters in Christ. He’ll change people you might ordinarily dismiss as “illegals” into fellow-citizens of his kingdom. Let him have his way and he’ll change estranged spouses into lovers, enemies into friends, adversaries into allies. He’ll give old people the energy and idealism of youth, and give young people the wisdom of age. He’ll change ugly into beautiful, useless into useful, slave into free person.

    And the changes he makes are just as likely to be to your heart as to other people.

    Because of Jesus, there is no one beyond hope, or redemption, or reclamation, and when we write someone off, make no mistake, it’s an act of faithlessness. It denies the power of God to transform that person, and it closes off part of our hearts and minds to his work.

    For that same reason, we must always be willing to see ourselves through the eyes of God’s grace and love. Often we throw around the words we do because we believe them to be true of ourselves. We call someone ugly because we believe, deep down, that we are too. We dismiss someone as useless because that’s what we’ve come to think about ourselves.

    But, oh, if only we could see how beautiful we are to our God, beneath all the scars, beneath the way his image has been warped in us. He sees, though. If only we could imagine the ways he can use us to partner with him in his work in our world. If only we could see ourselves as he does, then words like “useless” and “ugly” would never cross our lips again.

    So may we see others as God sees them: not without fault, but not without hope, either. And may we see ourselves in the same way, knowing that in spite of our faults our God knows our true beauty, and in Jesus has made it possible for us to show it to the world.

    For women and men like us, who are sometimes made to feel ugly by the world, that’s the best of news.

Betrothed

     I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy. I promised you to one husband,  to Christ, so that I might present you  as a pure virgin to him. But I am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent’s cunning,  your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ. For if someone comes to you and preaches a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached,  or if you receive a different spirit  from the Spirit you received, or a different gospel  from the one you accepted, you put up with it  easily enough.

-2 Corinthians 11:2-4 (NIV) 

Everyone says you don’t use math again when you get out of school. A man in northern India might have a different opinion about that today.

     The unidentified man was in the middle of his wedding ceremony this week when his bride-to-be in the arranged marriage, suspecting she had been misled by the groom and his family about his educational background, asked him what 15 + 6 was. The surprised groom answered 17, and the bride walked out. Walked out of her own wedding ceremony. Because her husband-to-be couldn’t add 15 and 6. 

     There may be some wives reading this who are wishing now they had asked their husbands a couple of questions during their own wedding (“How do you clean a bathroom?” “Where are the washer and dryer located?” “Do you know how to start a lawn mower?”). But to cancel your own wedding because of the groom’s math skills? I suppose, though, in fairness, her complaint was more that she’d been misled about his education level. 

     It’s still not as bad, either, as the other Indian bride who last month married a wedding guest after her fiancé had a seizure during their ceremony. 

     I suppose, for some people, one husband is as good as another.

     The New Testament compares Jesus and the church to a husband and his wife more than once. That’s probably because the same comparison is made in the Old Testament between God and Israel. It works for a couple of reasons. For one, it suggests the kind of love God has for his people. For another, it reminds his people that we have to be faithful, that our relationship is disrupted when we choose to love something else more. So when Israel served other gods, it was like breaking marriage vows. And when the church wanders away, in belief or practice, from the good news of Jesus, it’s like a wife betraying a faithful, loving husband.

     There’s a sense, though, in which the “marriage” of Jesus and the church hasn’t taken place yet. The engagement has happened, the plans are set, the invitations are sent and the reception is ready, but the marriage isn’t official until Jesus returns. That’s what Paul’s thinking of in 2 Corinthians — a church for whom he’s responsible when Jesus comes, a church in danger of forgetting her husband and uniting herself with something and someone else. Paul wants to be able to give this church away proudly to the Lord on that day. He’s afraid, though, that when Christ comes he’ll find a church that hasn’t been faithful. He’s afraid that by then the church  will have long abandoned devotion to the Jesus that was preached to them in the gospel and taken up with some other Jesus, some different spirit, some alternative gospel.

      “For you,” he says, “one husband seems to be as good as another.”

     We live in a world that says, basically, that religion is interchangeable. Whatever your convictions may be, so this philosophy says, they’re just your perspective, or the perspective of your family or culture or whatever, on an ultimate and ultimately unknowable Truth. All religions are just aspects of this truth, then, and none are inherently better than any other.

     While it’s certainly good to remember that none of us have God all figured out, Jesus makes something of a different claim about himself. Part of the Christian faith says that Jesus is unique, a revelation of God like none before or since. So the gospel, the story of Jesus, is always our story. And it’s decidedly different than other stories.

     It’s been said that the church now lives in a post-denominational world, and in part I believe it. Few Christians today could articulate — or would in fact care about — the differences in belief and practice between, say, the Methodists and the Lutherans. That’s good in a lot of ways. It helps us get back to the story that makes us who we are — the gospel. It helps us to see that many of the historical differences between denominations really had more to do with how the story was told, and what was emphasized, and how it was adapted to the world around us. 

     On the other hand, this post-denominational world has made it as easy as ever for people to proclaim other Jesuses, other gospels, other stories and get a hearing.

     We have been betrothed to Christ, and our lives and beliefs should bear witness to our faithfulness to him. There will be plenty of would-be suitors who’ll try to win us away to other gospels, other philosophies, even to imitations of Jesus himself. On the one hand will be those who will say it doesn’t matter if we believe in Jesus or not, or who don’t spend much time focused on Jesus at all. On the other hand will be those who tell us that only their limited perspective on Jesus, their narrow little gospel, is the right one. Some will tell us his resurrection and second coming are a figment of the primitive church’s hopeful imagination. Some will tell us that when he comes he’s looking for a sign on the door, or a specific understanding of Communion, or a particular translation of the Bible, or a strict definition of biblical inerrancy. Some will allure us with promises of wealth and prosperity, political power, even world peace. Some will urge us to be stricter in lifestyle, harsher in judgment, more sectarian in our beliefs. 

     Whatever, the answer is to remember the One to Whom we’re betrothed.

     What every false gospel has in common is that it comes apart when held up next to the real one. The way to identify imitation Jesuses is to compare him with the real one. It doesn’t take a theological degree, or a book contract, or a large following. It just takes us knowing Jesus. 

     So may our churches lift him up in worship, in liturgy, and in teaching. May our lives reflect him, may our words and actions imitate his. May we reflect on him in quiet moments, speak to him frequently, speak of him often, and love him more. May we give him thanks for choosing us. And may we be found faithful when he comes to take us home.