The Slow Way: Unsexy Jesus Will Save Us
The small way of Jesus has always been our salvation. And it’s the hope for the Church.
I watched the new FX series “The Secrets of Hillsong” over the past couple of weeks and—as I usually feel when forced to reckon with the abuse and destruction that the evangelical church seems to continually leave in its wake—my thoughts have been circling a loop around what I view as a growing crisis of the Christian Church. Or that is to say, the crisis of Christian-made wreckage in the world. As I watched I had a new-to-me realization:
The Jesus of evangelicals and the Jesus of the New Testament is not the same.
For years I’ve told myself that the Jesus I saw mass produced in mega churches, political stages, and trotted out as social capital by the Church-As-Corporation was just a confused version of Jesus. That somewhere along the line leaders had gotten their eyes all fuzzy when they read scripture so they missed some massive portions of teachings from the Son of God who started the whole shebang. But, friends, there was some clarity for me this week as I watched this Hillsong docuseries, which really didn’t say anything new. We have all seen how reckless power, immaturity, and self-preservation practiced in the context of religious authority literally destroys lives, particularly the lives of the vulnerable under the spiritual care of those immature and reckless leaders.
But this time as I watched this Hillsong series, I thought: Oh. They actually don’t love the Jesus of the Bible. They love a different Jesus.
Having read Kristin Du Mez’s wonderful book Jesus and John Wayne, perhaps I should have already made this particular realization. But, for whatever reason, this time it became clear: This evangelical Jesus is a figment of our Western cultural and social imaginations. It’s an American-made Jesus. A Jesus who loves the corporate idea of growth. A Jesus who only wants the people in the seats to sign on to a belief in his death and resurrection for the forgiveness of sins, to raise their hands and give him glory, and do a list of good things so as to be “blessed.” It’s an idea of Jesus that keeps Christians locked into a voting pattern that the far right controls. It’s an idea of Jesus that says America is God’s design and “family values” as we understand them is somewhere in that Bible (but don’t ask us to find it). It’s an idea that says Jesus’s teachings are nice, but not worth our time.
That Jesus that has been pumped out into the atmosphere of evangelicalism and it is toxic.
And there’s a reason false Jesus has taken hold. We are people who crave power, glory and proof. The Tower of Babel is scripture’s first metaphor of many of what happens when we try to play god. Healthy spirituality will always accompany humility, and that’s what makes the teaching of Jesus so profound.
The Jesus of scripture is not sexy. He is teaching a life of smallness, not mega-church growth. He is teaching that wholeness and flourishing are found in our grief and spiritual poverty, not in our “naming and claiming.” He is teaching that the work of forgiving and making peace within our small circles of relationship is the glory of the Church, not protecting the secrets of organization at all costs for the sake of “what God is doing there.”
See I believe deeply that the Spirit of Jesus is alive and moving in this world. And the Spirit not interested in money, power, outward signs of growth, or checking boxes of doctrine. The way of the Spirit is the long journey of downward transformation, becoming smaller, becoming slower, becoming more whole through the ordinary suffering and joys of our lives. There’s a reason every example of followers in Jesus’s circles suffered. Christianity has always flourished as the way of downward movement. And any corporate or political power claiming Jesus, any movement in which the rich and influential are given VIP seats and the wealthy get richer in the name of Christ? They forgot to read the Beatitudes, friends.
I sat with my friend T and ate a green goddess sandwich this past Friday telling her about the Hillsong show. We’re the same age and have found ourselves twenty years into adulthood, holding similar burdens for the reality of Christianity in America. The faith we’ve found in our forties is a far cry from the version of our religious selves in our twenties. We talked about the corruption of churches and the heavy weight of holding on to Jesus in a Christianity that appears to have left him behind.
“Do you ever look at all these giant church leaders and think, ‘Wait, maybe no one else really believes in Jesus and they’re all pretending? Maybe I’m the only one!” I said. “And that’s why it feels like none of them have a problem with any of this?’”
It’s enough to make us sick, isn’t it? Sexual abuse, spiritual abuse, emotional abuse. Amy Julia Becker wrote about the problem of “extraordinary” churches this week at Religion News Service, and I think she was on to something pretty profound. What Hillsong NYC was doing with its VIP seats, wraparound lines on the streets, greenrooms, and a super hot pastor ministering to the stars while wearing Supreme on a smoke-filled stage? That was extraordinary. It was supposed to be extraordinary. But, as Amy Julia so wonderfully reminds us, that’s why it failed. I believe that’s why evangelical Christianity just keeps on failing and failing and failing.
The good work, the faithful wisdom, the story of God’s redemption in the world? That is as ordinary as time, as the creative process, as the natural world. We humans were made to be ordinary, and we who seek wisdom will find that the spiritual journey is not one that moves up into the glory of attention, attraction, ease, and riches.
The Way Jesus preached was and remains the unimpressive journey of the downward pilgrimage, as Parker Palmer explained in his book Let Your Life Speak. True spiritual transformation moves through our interior darkness, a process of coming face to face with our false selves. As Palmer says, it takes courage to “ride certain monsters all the way down, explore the shadows they create, and experience the transformation that can come.”
I have no doubt that the evil things done behind closed doors by unhealthy church leaders occur because those leaders have been given power without true and healthy community, spiritual ideas without supportive practices, and surface-level religion with a guide toward internal transformation. They have been taught that claiming right belief is enough. But transformative faith, the kind of faith that moves slowly through us, reconstructing us down through our interior darkness so that we may love the people in our communities? That is real power.
Smallness is a gift because it actually does transform lives. Massive movements often give the appearance of changing lives, but they are actually only shells of transformation. People believe they belong until the church fails them and no one is left to care for them. They receive faith that sparks their imagination but there is no follow through to guide them to anything deeper and the spark dies. And the leader who has been set up as a god? A human can only handle being told they are a god for so long until they begin to believe it. And when they own that kind of power, they do anything to hide their darkness from themselves and the ones who prop up the power.
Smallness has always been our salvation. And it’s the hope for the Church. I long for the next generation to find a way forward out our wobbling attempts at Christianity in this world. But if they manage it, I don’t think they will find it in black lit, smoke screened thousand-seat theaters. The way forward is going to be in the awkward places, where people are a little bored, a little uncertain, and where there is enough space to recognize that beneath our boredom, doubt and vulnerabilities, the way of Jesus will always provide the gift at the core of the Christian story: community through love.
Maybe if we take our eyes off the celebrities, we just might let ourselves get small enough to see one another, serve one another, and begin to live into the ideas that got Jesus in trouble in the first place.
What an ordinary, beautiful thing we could do.
A Slow Practice
Today’s practice is one meant to remind us that becoming small is a practice of our faith. Of course we are people who crave power. We want a crowd to see us, value what we offer the world, and tell us that who we are is important. But the teaching of Jesus says that our value will never be found in what the crowds, or even the neighbors, say about our abilities. It will only ever be found in our belovedness.
This lesson sounds simple, but it is the lesson of our lifetimes. And it is part of the downward movement of becoming more and more the person God has made us to be—whole, true-hearted, committed to the dream of God in the world.
Today I want us to practice smallness. We’re going to do an imaginative prayer exercise. This is one you can do outside if you are on a walk and want to find a place to stop and sit. If you’re inside that’s okay too, though I find that the natural world always helps me get in a “small way” frame of mind.
Let’s start with a deep breath in. And a deep breath out.
When I was twenty-six, fresh out of graduate school with a masters degree in poetry and no plans for how I would ever be the published poet I hoped to be, I got a part time job at a construction company answering phones and filing. It was not a dream job. Somewhere along the way I came across a question in Zechariah, a small prophetic book tucked into the back of the Old Testament: “Who dares despise the day of small things?” the prophet asked the people when he spoke of the slow task of rebuilding the Temple in the fourth chapter. And I began asking myself that as well.
What about us today? These small things in our lives. Rebuilding, transforming. These are small. They aren’t sexy. They aren’t usually miraculous, shiny objects. They involve waking up, getting dressed, taking care of our very human bodies, listening to our own sadness and pain, and listening to the sadness and pain of others with compassion. They involve being honest with ourselves and God about the stories we tell ourselves about our own worth, and being honest with trustworthy people in our lives.
Today, friends, is a day of small things. Today is a day of transformation in the smallest of ways, a day of moving toward humility, a day of walking in the way downward motion of Jesus.
As you consider these things, open your eyes and look for something small close by. Maybe you’re near plant life and you can find a small seed nearby. Take time to notice all the details of that small thing. Imagine how it formed inside that particular plant. Close your eyes and picture the process of the plant making the journey the past few months from underground seedling to the beautiful petals before you. In your imagination picture each part of that movement.
Now I want you to imagine taking that tiny seed, lifting it from it habitat, and placing it in your chest. If you’re alone and you don’t feel too weird about it, you can actually lift your hand and pretend to take the seed and place it on your beating heart. Imagine pressing it right into your body. Imagine how God might grow something new and good and beautiful right there in the center of you, slowly, with no fanfare. But you know, as you imagine the seed growing, that you are transforming. And it is beautiful.
Take a moment to consider what you long for that seed to be. What is the transformation of your heart that you long for? What can you ask the Spirit to grow in you?
Imagine that good thing making its way inside you, transforming you. And as you do thank God that the most beautiful spiritual transformations are hardly ever flashy, but are always good.
In the name of the Creator, the Savior, and the Spirit. Amen.
Just lovely. Thank you for this gift of perspective. Unsexy Jesus is not popular, never was. But that is the Way and the freedom it brings is exhilarating.
I had the same realization a few years ago, while talking with a deconstructing friend who was (and is) working through her religious trauma. This is a false gospel. She wasn't taught and was never introduced to the real Jesus. And now, she is too terrified and angry to even think about knowing him. It is so awful. 💔