God, humanized: The hot mess of a post.

Sometimes I find it hard to corral the thoughts in my head, because I sense themes emerging out of seemingly unrelated brain items.

You know. Those random things that float through your consciousness at any given time, unannounced and apparently purposeless. Brain items.

Anyway. It’s been happening to me lately around the theme of messy humans. And the apparently unrelated stuff in my head, the things floating around in there are: The Broadway show RENT, the hot mess of people in the Bible, forgiveness and the church, Nadia Boltz-Weber and Fox News.

And there’s this: that so often outsiders look at the church and say we’re hypocrites. And I get that, I really do. We bring it on ourselves with the rather pompous marketing plan some of us adhere to. But the truth of the matter is that humans live here, in the church, and therefore, we are all screwed.

I’m at a place in life where I’m realizing that humans are a disappointing bunch. And complicated, too. It’s very hard, for example, to just all-out hate most people. Pedophiles I can hate. Animal abusers. Child murderers. But most people — even the highly annoying ones — are just not hate-able. I find it difficult to write them off.

Here is the thing I have noticed about grace: it’s supernatural. We speak a lot about forgiveness, but I’m realizing that forgiveness is more an act of will, a set of ongoing behaviors that is the result of a supernatural phenomenon called grace.

And when you get filled up with grace, it can be inconvenient, because you find yourself filled with compassion for people you’d rather just hate. Hate seems so much easier — so much more black and white. It’s much more comfortable, like a slightly scratchy sweater you slip on over your cold and bitter anger. Tight-fitting, it leaves no space for grace and grace is where things get really challenging. Sure, hate leads to things like terrorism and the Crusades, but sometimes, even those things feel easier than forgiveness and reconciliation.

I’m a runner, and I don’t mean the marathon kind. I do run for exercise, but I’m an even more accomplished emotional runner. Any time things get emotionally tough, I’d rather run for the hills and not deal. But this grace stuff — it requires me to stay. It requires me to dig deep past all my gunk to find that place where the Holy Spirit is hanging out, to let him out and take the reins for a while. Even if that means that I bear the weight of the silent treatment, or hostile glances, or the feeling of being surrounded by people and yet utterly alone. Even if it means I feel utterly sad at one moment, futilely angry another, ready to bolt at yet another instant. No matter what, I stay.

So let me get back to the brain items.

I am probably totally making this up, but once, during my time inside the God-closet (that would be the time between when I left my first church and was hiding from God, and where I am now, which is complete Jesus-freak) I went to see the Broadway show RENT. We sat behind a couple — and this is the part I may be making up — they had mid-western tourist conservative Christian written all over them. Who sent them to go see RENT, I have no idea, but I guarantee they got a stern talking-to when this couple got back home. During intermission, as we walked out to the lobby, they were ahead of us, and the man had his Playbill in his hand. They walked over to a trash can, where he held the book ceremoniously over the bin before slamming it into the garbage. Then they walked out, never returning for the second act.

I was, I have to say, disgusted by the display of judgment and arrogance. I’m partial to RENT — I love the music, I think the show is dynamic and explosive and highly entertaining, and most of all, it hits the core of my own humanity. When we think of our own mortality at the turn of the millennium, how can we all not relate? And whether you or I like it or not, homeless people and squatters, homosexuals and drag queens, drug addicts and people living with AIDS all exist in our world. In fact, they even exist in church. You can’t toss them into a garbage can and walk out the door to pretend they don’t.

And if you’re unwilling to see the beautiful, messy humanity in the midst of all that tragedy, you’re missing out on something wonderful. Something, in fact, that Jesus thought was worth dying for. Now, it’s not lost on me that I’m being totally judge-y of the assumed-Christians as I am accusing them of being. Which brings me to Nadia Bolz-Weber and this sermon, and how I realize I have to show grace to Fox news (God help me) and the conservative vitriol that plagues my Facebook stream on a regular basis.

I realize that I contribute to the great divide just as much as they do. That’s part of what grace does to a person — it takes your focus on others and places it soundly on yourself, highlighting your own immense need for the crazy Jesus kind of love and forgiveness.

Because for those of you on the outside of church, please understand that sometimes those of us on the inside are simply saying, “Wow. I suck. You suck, too. Let’s try to not suck so much together.” And then Jesus comes and does something amazing with his crazy Jesus love, and sort of like what the Marines do in boot camp, he builds you up to the higher places you never thought imaginable.

The other day, I was (just barely, because I really try not to) involved in a Facebook conversation about same-sex marriage. Atheists and Christians alike were weighing in, and I found both of them using the pronoun “they” a whole lot. And I realized that I get twitchy when that starts happening, because any time we start using “they” — and I do it, too, mostly about Fox news — we are beginning the slippery slope of dehumanization. And Jesus wasn’t about dehumanizing — in fact, the whole point of Jesus was just the opposite. The point of Jesus is God, humanized. And God humanizing himself is all about reconciliation. The whole Bible is the story of God chasing us humans down with a passionate, weird, crazy kind of Jesus love.

Talk about a stalker.

Then he just waits. He waits outside your window, with quiet confidence, waiting for you to look his way. He waits like he has all of eternity. And when you finally look at him, and you catch his eye and all that grace just gets poured all over you, suddenly you have to stay — you can’t run anymore. When you catch yourself judging Fox news and using the “T” word, you stop mid-sentence. You start to grow up and when someone is being a jerk — because they will be, the Bible is full of jerks, church will be too — you do the hard work of saying it to their face rather than just slinking off into the sunset to talk about them behind their backs. And you stay, even when you get death stares and awkward silences, you stay, and sometimes it sucks really, really bad. But God calls you to stay anyways. Because in the midst of it you find that crazy Jesus love inside you, and somehow it starts to take over the anger, or at least it hangs out next to it, maybe has coffee with it, and they talk for a while.

In that conversation I was trying not to have on Facebook, one of the atheists started pointing out all the really hard parts of the Bible, which usually has something to do with the jerks. Like I said, the Bible is full of them. Jerky people acting really badly. Wars and rapes and murders and all sorts of horrible, horrible stuff. All the stuff that we humans are capable of is in the Bible and it’s horrible.

And yet, God stays. He humanized himself and came down and let us do all the horrible stuff to him, and then when he left he gave us his spirit, this part of him that would stay with us, and make it all inconvenient to hate people. Really, it’s annoying sometimes that I can’t just hate some people and walk away.

So I stay. At least for today. I stay and I let anger and crazy Jesus love have coffee, and sit in silence and seek God’s voice, and try to demonstrate love, and probably suck at it.

But I stay.