Raise your head, start living a Jesus-like life

Have you met the pastor of St.-John’s-by-the- gas-station church?

He was an irreverent, insightful alter ego of Dr. Halford Luccock, a preaching professor at Yale’s Divinity School in the 1930s and 1940s, in Luccock’s writings for Christian Century magazine.

One day, as the pastor greeted parishioners after the service, one man said, “Pastor, you were preaching over my head today.”

To which the pastor replied directly, “Then raise your head.”

That is what I ask you to do today: “Raise your head.”

It’s a vital mental and spiritual position to hold today when religious uniformity pretends to be unity, and when religious “beliefs” parade as doctrinal purity.

Religious control of others isn’t Jesus-like. These are not expressions of what Jesus called “the abundant life.” He promised much more.

In response to my last column about Jesus calling us out of our religious tombs, one reader asked: “Do you have any ideas on how the traditional church can discover the abundant life that Jesus offers?”

Here is one shorthand and incomplete answer to his question: Raise your head to honestly face your religious fears.

I believe many exaggerated fears are driving well-intended “religious people” into their metaphorical tombs so they can listen just to others who believe as they believe. Fear heard becomes fear owned.

Fear and judgment verses can take center stage while Jesus’ encouragement to not be “anxious for tomorrow” languishes elsewhere. “Cherry-picked” biblical literalism – where certain Bible verses are emphasized while others seem forgotten – fosters contradictions galore.

To practice what we preach is harder than it should be. Does that mean that Jesus’ message is too difficult to follow? Or that our interpretations are so shallow that even we don’t really believe them? Or …?

When we don’t raise our heads to take a longer and deeper view of life, our faith becomes shallow, even cheap.

Even so, Jesus is still outside our tombs calling for us to lay down our beliefs about religious life long enough to join him in the actual experience of life. In the tomb, orthodoxy (right beliefs) too easily becomes a substitute for doxology (grateful living).

Raise your head to focus more on an earthly today than a heavenly “tomorrow.” I still hear some people say about preachers, “They’re so heavenly minded that they’re no earthly good.”

Clergy and laity too often share this cartoon characterization. An over-emphasis on the “afterlife” disrupts our personal and social responsibility to live our daily lives with hope, determined effort and various degrees of joy.

I figure if I take care of living my life in what I believe is the spirit of Jesus, any afterlife will take care of itself. I don’t focus on the metaphoric heaven and its trappings, except to tell a “heaven” joke once in a while. My focus is getting out of the tombs where I live.

In another response to the tomb column, a retired clergy friend spoke of the heaven-earth dilemma this way:

“Another way to say it, ‘salvation’ … means (as John Wesley liked to say) we’re ‘saved, renewed, empowered and sent’ outside the tomb to help the world transform itself into a life-sharing and peacemaking community.

“We’re responsible for the transformation this side of death. What awaits us beyond our deaths is in the Divine hands, not ours – leaving us to trust the promise, but without being absolutely certain of its veracity, when the possibility of eternal life is discussed.”

Well said.

Traditions can serve us well, or we can serve traditions poorly. In the tomb, it is too easy to serve unexamined traditions.

Outside the tomb, we can more easily raise our heads and breathe the fresher air of God’s abundant life.