Nobody Loves Me

I don't know if you have ever read Charles Marsh. If you haven't (as I hadn't, until recently), I highly recommend picking up any and all of his books, especially The Beloved Community and, his most recent work, Wayward Christian Soldiers. Marsh is a professor of religion at the University of Virginia and has a firm grip on what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

I mention him, first, so that his readership might increase and, secondly, because of an amazing quote I read today in Wayward Christian Soldiers. Marsh states: "Evangelicals in the United States have tried so hard to become relevant that we have forgotten what it means to be peculiar."

Marsh isn't saying that the Way of Jesus doesn't have relevance or that it shouldn't speak to a cultural context (Jesus himself spoke in accessible parables about farmers and seeds and bread and fields), but that our end goal shouldn't be a desire to fit in.

And this is hard for me. Not because I'm overly enamored with the power and position that bowing to pressure might get me, but simply because...and I hate to admit this...I really want you to like me.

Singer/songwriter Derek Webb once wrote a song titled "Nobody Loves Me". In it's cry out to God chorus, Webb sings:

I don't care if nobody loves me...but You

Of course, what you hear in his voice is the same thing you hear in mine. I do care. I just wish that I didn't.

Again, not that my goal as a Christian is not to care, any more than it's to be irrelevant. But my goal is not to want the approval of others so much that I would sacrifice the weirdness of Jesus. The weirdness that calls for poverty as well as purity. The peculiarity that avoids drunkenness alongside violence. The kind of strange behavior that is bound to freak out folks on either side of the aisle.

I live in a city that places a high market value on its weirdness. But I'm not sure we're any more ready for Jesus than the Dallas suburbs are. Because His call is too out there. It sacrifices too much, hopes for too much, forgives too much, and loves too much. So much that I was once accused of teaching people to "love to an unnatural extreme". All I had done was teach a class on the Sermon On The Mount.

Of course, saying "all I had done" is like saying "Jesus just died on a cross" and that all He wants us to do is to take up our own cross and follow Him.

Frederick Buechner puts it this way in Faces of Jesus:
"If the world is sane, then Jesus is mad as a hatter and the Last Supper is the Mad Tea Party. The world says, Mind your own business, and Jesus says, There is no such thing as your own business. The world says, Follow the wisest course and be a success, and Jesus says, Follow me and be crucified. The world says, Drive carefully--the life you save may be your own, and Jesus says, Whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. The world says, Law and order, and Jesus says, Love. The world says, Get, and Jesus says, Give. In terms of the world's sanity, Jesus is crazy as a coot, and anybody who thinks he can follow him without being a little crazy too is laboring less under a cross than under a delusion."

This stuff is dangerous. It's peculiar. It's weird. And if we take it seriously, we should be prepared for those that don't like it, those that don't like us, anymore than they liked Him. We should know that His Way is a threat to all others ways, ways of war and greed and injustice and selfishness. That many people and the powers that be won't want Him around any more than they did 2000 years ago. That the people most receptive to our message may be those we least want to reach out to. That Jesus cannot make us cool, He will not make powerful, and is sure to make us weird.

And that's ok.

Because I don't care if nobody loves me...but You.