Greetings friends!
One of my absolute favorite things to do is to sit down and talk to pastors. There is something about this weird work, this endless string of Sundays that require sermons, the odd ways in which this job grants us permission to be a part of every aspect of a person’s life, whether it’s their wedding or their funeral or just a normal Tuesday, the way that we can work incredibly long and weird hours but the job is never actually done, and the only people that really understand the work on a deep level are those that are in the work themselves. And so I love to get together with my weird tribe.
You have to be careful here though. There are some people in our tribe who, when they get together like this, will only complain. They’ll complain about the long hours. They’ll complain about the person who said something rude or insensitive about the sermon they preached that week. They’ll complain about the bridezilla they had at their last wedding. Believe me, I can complain with the best of them about anything and everything. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about sitting down with someone to admire the beauty of our weird and wonderful calling. These are conversations that usually, at least one, someone at the table smiles and says “You know what I mean, right?”
I had one of those lunches today.
We talked about all kinds of things. Youth ministry. Seminary classes. Pastoral transitions. Coming up with a new sermon, and how we try to stay fresh. We were all over the place. But this particular friend and I share a penchant for theological dorkery. We love to read Barth and Lewis and Niebuhr and Bonhoeffer. We are those sick puppies who love to debate the mechanics of salvation, or the doctrine of the trinity, or the creeds our church has chosen to adopt. Round and round and round we can go.
I told my friend today that I had actually been reading The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning. I read this book when I was in college, and it smacked me square between the eyes with something so profoundly simple and unrelenting that it was hard to really believe it: That Jesus loves me exactly the way I am. This is important language to make sure we get right, because a lot of us will say that Jesus loves everybody, or that Jesus loves us, or that Jesus loves the whole world, all of which is true. But it’s another thing entirely to come right out and say that Jesus loves me. It’s different because I know me. I don’t know everybody else’s mistakes, I don’t know our collective shortcomings, and though I can see some signs of it I don’t exactly know what kind of trouble the world is in. But I know me. I know what I’ve done, what I’ve left undone. I know the ways that I’ve failed people. I know the ways that I meant to say one thing but wound up saying it exactly wrong. I know the look of pain in people’s eyes when I’ve gossiped and it gets back to them. I know me, and I know how messed up I am. And Jesus loves…me?
My friend and I had a great conversation around how we theologians love to outsmart ourselves sometimes. We talk a great game about the incarnation and transubstantiation and eschatology and soteriology (all of which by the way are big words that theologians like me use when we want to sound smart, and I just squeezed them all in to one sentence! Look at me go!). Even for me, when I’m talking about Jesus’ love I tend to take it to one of these places. I’ll talk about Jesus and how much he loves us by talking about salvation and the mechanics of that and who’s saved and how you do that. But what if it was really just this simple: Jesus loves me, and is willing to do whatever it takes to keep us together?
Here’s the good news: It really is that simple.
I know this will be shocking to long-term readers, but let’s think of this in terms of a bicycle. While I’m riding a bicycle, there are a lot of mechanical things going on even in a relatively simple machine. The tires need to have air in them, and a particular amount of air at that. The cables that run from my shifters to the derailleur need to have the just perfect amount of tension in them to make sure I can shift the way I want. The brakes had better have pads on them otherwise I’m going to meet an untimely demise at the bottom of the hill. And to be sure, as a bike-nerd I love to geek out over this stuff. I like to look online at all the different kinds of parts and upgrades and tips and tricks that you can get in to while riding a bike. My bike had better be well maintained, or it’s going to fail on me. So there is for sure a time for geeking out over bike parts, and there is a time for maintenance.
But…and this is something it’s easy to loose sight of…there’s also a time to just ride your damn bike.
There is a time for theology. There is a time for trying (key word: trying) to understand how God works in the world. There is a time for getting answers to some of the most deep and meaningful questions that humans have been asking since the beginning. There are times when we’re searching for answers to why questions that we know darn well will never come. There’s a time for all of this, and thanks be to God there are geeks like me who love to spend our time dwelling in all of that.
But today, in this wonderful moment: I want to just bask in the simple truth of it all.
Jesus loves me.
He always has.
He always will.