students of jesus

In his 89-year lifetime E. Stanley Jones published 28 books. Baltimore-born and Asbury College educated, the man gave his life to the King and his Kingdom. Jones was a confidant to Franklin D. Roosevelt and friend to Mahatma Gandhi. He wrote a biography of Gandhi that inspired a young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, Jr. to adopt the means of non-violent protest as a change agent. That’s a pretty good legacy.

Just before his death in 1973, E. Stanley Jones published The Unshakable Kingdom and the Unchanging Person, which proved to be his summary of life in Christ and how to live for the Kingdom. I found this book while I was still a college student--it charged me with a passion for the King and his Kingdom and ruined me for anything else.

“I’ve been shedding labels all my life,” he told a group of students in 1969. “I hope to shed them all except one: ‘he was a Christian in the making.’” Page after page of The Unshakable Kingdom and the Unchanging Person rings with wisdom and challenge. It’s the kind of book that should take a month to read and a lifetime to apply.

In an age when many believers have been inoculated against the Gospel of the Kingdom, Jones caught the virus like a man overcome with AIDS. The echoes of his voice have now died away. Few in our day have even heard the name E. Stanley Jones, and fewer still have been exposed to his contagion for Jesus. In my opinion every serious student of Jesus should catch the same Kingdom fever that consumed E. Stanley Jones. The Unshakable Kingdom and the Unchanging Person will infect you for life.

My poor wife--married to the same guy for more than 25 years, a guy who thinks telling the same joke over and over again somehow makes it funnier. Here’s one of my favorites: when we visit friends with a newborn baby I take the child in my arms and stare lovingly at the infant. Compliments ensue as I coo and chat with this fresh new life. But when I hand the baby back to its mother, I strike the most serious posture possible. “I’m so sorry,” my voice is filled with deep concern, “but I think your child is illiterate.”

Hysterical, no? In anticipation of the hilarity my wife has already headed for the car.

It gets worse. Not only do I think my comedic stylings rival those of Jack Black, I also think my philosophical depth rivals Kierkegaard. Each one of us is born fully human. Each of us has the potential for relationships filled with love, kindness, mercy, and grace. And each of us is born a complete idiot.

The potential of human life and relationship depends on what happens after birth. Every child needs love and attention, food and care, safety and security. Every child is born with the capacity for language, yet has no concept of sounds, words, sentences or meaning. Every child grows in its ability to learn, discover, and relate to others. The beginnings of life are finite, the potential is infinite. Coming into maturity depends not only on the child, but the family as well. And the neighborhood. And the society.

When Jesus suggested to a religious teacher “no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born from above” he was describing the beginnings of our life with God. In the last hundred years the evangelical church has made it the end of life with God. Jesus (the smartest guy in history) knew how to use a metaphor. He was pointing in the direction of life with God, a life that begins with new birth and carries infinite potential. Here is the challenge for North American believers: we have embraced the concept of new birth, but we have mistaken it for the end when it is merely the beginning. Spiritual formation is not an option for "serious students," it is reality that flows from the new birth. We are born into a new Kingdom, where the scripture itself refers to some as babes in Christ and others as mature sons and daughters.

All children grow. Some grow healthy and strong, others grow weak and die. Still others languish in a lifetime of unfulfilled destiny. Some develop into adults capable of healthy relationships, others develop into misshapen caricatures of human beings. Some take their place in society while others are stranded awkward and alone. Why do we think it any different in the Kingdom of God?

We encounter visions of God wherever we go. On the expressway I have a recurrent daydream about the greatness of God: I watch the endless stream of cars going the other direction. They flash by in an instant. Inside each car is another person, perhaps two—perhaps an entire family.

I try to imagine each one. Each one has a life. Each car contains someone going somewhere. Each person has a history, a story, a destiny. In but a moment I am overwhelmed by the vast numbers of people in the city. My mind cannot grasp the fullness of each life that flashes past me. Each person lives in God’s sight, and Jesus assured us the Father has numbered the very hairs on each head.

I am confident that God knows me and cares about me. He not only knows the circumstances of my life, he knows my thoughts and wants to dialogue with me every moment of my day. As I’m driving, I think, “How can God know each person? How can he keep track of it all?” In fact, he cares for each one. He loves them--he’s not just “keeping track of” them. He is infinite, yet personal. Transcendent, yet closer than our thoughts.

We are tempted think God is just like us, only bigger and better. As I watch the endless stream of cars going the other way and try to think of every person I realize God isn’t just a bigger version of me. He is something—Someone—completely other than me. The vast numbers of people in my city, my state, my country, worldwide only demonstrate his greatness. He knows and cares for every one of them. Here’s what the Father told Jonah about Nineveh, the great city of that day: “Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?” (Jonah 4: 11)

Do you want to be overwhelmed by God’s greatness? Why not consider this week that God not only knows you and cares for you, but for every person alive or who has every lived.

Which Jesus should we follow? The Jesus who for forty days denied himself food in the desert, or the one who provided 120 gallons of wine to keep a wedding feast going strong? The fundamentalist soul lives, as H.L. Mencken observed, in a “terrible pervasive fear that someone, somewhere, is having fun.” The freewheeling charismatic, on the other hand, lives as though God had in mind the inebriation of responsibility.

Gabriel Axel’s 1987 masterwork, Babette’s Feast, invites us to consider the counterpoint of asceticism and celebration among followers of Jesus. This subtitled Danish film tells the story of three women: two are devoted and reverent sisters. The other a foreigner, an outsider--and God’s gracious provision for those unable to hear the invitation, “Come, enter into the Master’s joy.”

The sisters, Filippa and Martine, have given their lives in service to their father, a stern sectarian minister. The women have given up on love, music, and beauty in order to express their faithfulness to a man who defined the Christian faith as a life of continual sacrifice. After their father dies they carry on the traditions of simplicity and tranquility while helping the poor. In their charity they take on a refugee from the 19th century conflicts raging in Europe. Babette, the refugee, offers to cook and clean, and in her gratitude learns life on the sister’s terms: straight, narrow, and devout.

Years later the hand of God intervenes when Babette wins a lottery of an astronomical sum. Instead of leaving the sisters, she offers to help them celebrate the 100th anniversary of their father’s birth by preparing a meal--under the condition that she can set the menu and make all the arrangements. The result is a feast of unparalleled excellence, unearthly delight, and guests who find themselves unsure how to receive such bounty. Babette is revealed to be more than a refugee: she is a chef of world renown.

The second half of the film is dedicated to the meal, a prophetic feast of the age to come. The guests are drawn into an understanding of their God previously unimagined. Old grievances are set aside, the warmth of their original devotion is restored, and each guest gains a glimpse of the marriage supper of the Lamb.

This movie is remarkably even-handed toward both Christian traditions: it does not demean one to exalt the other. Every character is impacted by the lives of others, and in community they discover the glory of God as one might see the night sky for the first time. Even the experience of watching this film requires both sides of our souls: The Danish film is subtitled in English, requiring our study and attention, while the transcendent visuals on the screen draw us from one world to the next.

In my opinion every follower of Jesus should sup at Babette’s Feast.

There’s a wedding in town this Saturday, so I have at least a fifty per cent chance of hearing someone read 1 Corinthians 13 out loud. You know the passage, right? “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. . . ”

This week I conducted a Twitter, facebook, WalMart, totally-unscientific survey. I’ve been asking, “Do you think it’s possible to live up to the kind of love described in 1 Corinthians 13?”

No one has been comfortable with a simple “yes” or “no” but everyone has an opinion: “Oh, that’s the ideal, no one could ever do that . . . Well, the Bible says ‘all things are possible’ so I suppose so . . . On our own strength, absolutely no. With God, absolutely yes.”

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

We want to believe these words. They fill us with hope. They remind us of what is best. They point to a life fulfilled. But we have also seen the worst, experienced the disappointment and felt the pain. Do we dare believe? When the scripture reads like poetry we are tempted to dismiss the revelation. When our life experience contradicts the good news, experience can trump the truth. Is it possible that faith, hope, and love really are the things that remain? If they remain, can we attain them? Receive them? Live them?

When I go to the wedding Saturday I will listen to the beauty of the scripture with a few practical thoughts also in mind. Perhaps they could help you answer my survey question as well:

“I will show you the most excellent way.” (1 Corinthians 12: 31) It’s easy to miss this verse because it's at the end of chapter twelve, but Paul wanted us to know from the very start that love is a way. It’s a path. With a guide we can learn the way. If we expect love to magically overtake our hearts and change our lives, we are taking to the whitewater of life--out of control. But if love is truly a way, we can learn from others how to navigate the river of life. Consider the people Paul first wrote--the church in Corinth was a confused mess of relationships and envy, debauchery and religion. Yet Paul said, “I will show you the way. You can learn how to love like this.” If the people of Corinth could learn the ways of God’s love, why can’t I?

Tongues, prophecy and knowledge amount to nothing apart from love. How many of us mistake personal spirituality, anointing or intelligence as the things that remain? No. In order to learn a life of love, we must first recognize what will last and what will not. Ministry is for this present age; love is forever. Ask any pastor, social worker or physician--you can minister to anyone without actually loving them. Yet when ministry is infused with love there is eternal effect. Anything else is smoke and mirrors.

Love never fails. These three words reveal the way things really are. “To align yourself with love is to align yourself with God,” songwriter Adam Russell observed, “because God is love.” To align yourself with love is to align yourself with victory, because love never fails. Was the Apostle Paul writing a Hallmark card or trying to explain the reality of God’s Kingdom? Are these words true, or just beautiful sentimentality? Do we sit in the wedding ceremony and hear these words as God’s promise to the bride and groom, or do we quietly think, “they will find out what life is really like soon enough”? Does our failure have the authority to nullify the truth? Here’s a meditation: what if it’s really true that love never fails?

Who can show us the way? Hidden within the crazy letter to the Corinthians is a deep truth of the Kingdom of God: there are some who have broken through the spirit of this age, and they can show us how it’s done. There are some who have learned a new way to live. “Be imitators of me,” Paul says in 1 Corinthians 11:1, “just as I also am of Christ.” We can learn God’s ways--including the way of love. Nor is it merely book learning. God’s wisdom may be found in the scripture, but it blossoms into life when we find mentors in the Kingdom. The Lord never intended us to go it alone: “Here’s the Bible. Good luck.” That just isn’t how he does things. Whatever demands the scripture may place on us are met with possibility there is someone who can help us make things real in everyday life. Ask God to show you the trail guide for your life. It’s called discipleship, and it’s the way of the Kingdom.

Perhaps these ideas are the reasons no one ventured a simple yes or no answer to whether we can attain the love in 1 Corinthians 13. We instinctively know it is true, while we instinctively know we cannot do it alone. We were never meant to: love isn’t meant to alone.