Blessed are Those...

My clinical rotation today took me to Second Helpings in Lubbock. It is a ministry of the Methodist church on 13th Street, feeding the homeless and needy three times a week. As I was observing the crowd sitting down eating here is what I was thinking: These are Jesus' people. This is his crowd. Were he to be walking on the earth today this would be the group of people surrounding him. I don't think he'd come to visit our mega churches and crystal cathedrals; I really don't know he'd be comfortable there. Although, he might be angry. Starbucks?!? You have Starbucks in your church?!? I wonder if he'd overturn the cash registers and drive out the tall and grande dealers? Hmmm...
We have made quite the institution out of Christianity. So much so that it is often unrecognizable. We have our own industry; bookstores and music stores. (Don't we even have some amusement parks?) It's ridiculous. Do you really think Jesus came here to corner the market on fortune cookies with a positive message? What is wrong with us? Do we really believe that good contemporary worship music and a positive message is all there is to doing the work of Christ? 'I sat through church Sunday morning, clapped my hands to the songs and I even listened to the sermon; I've done my Christian deed for the week.' Sounds ludicrous but it's the attitude of so many of us Christians. (Maybe we should rethink what the word Christian means.) We have created a monster, really. Its a smooth operator, however. We call it church. Everything is tailored to our twenty-first century needs. I think if we are going to church to feel comfortable perhaps we should reconsider our motives. Not even perhaps; I really don't think God moves when we are not willing to. Yet we come to church each Sunday to beg God to move in our lives and spend the rest of our week standing still. Can you see the disconnect? Perhaps if we weren't so comfortable we'd be willing to change our churches. We'd be willing to kill the monster who has been blinding us, making us unable to see anything outside of ourselves. If we weren't so comfortable we'd be willing to move over and let someone we don't know into our church. Maybe even, (gasp), go outside of our four walls and help some people who desperately need it. I challenge all Christians to stop going to church if the only reason you are going is to ask God to do for you. Instead, have real church, outside of our monstrous, and oftentimes eerily empty, buildings. Make church in the streets, in the jails, in your neighborhoods; where ever there is need. Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the imprisoned; this is church, this is worship. The church shouldn't be a blinding monster and it shouldn't be a structure. It is you and it is I. We are the body of Christ!
I have said all of this to say that as the church, we Christians ought to live as Jesus lived. We ought to help the people he loved. We ought to look in that book we carry with us to our churches every Sunday. You know what? If you'll read about Jesus' life you will find that he was homeless. He had no place to lay his head. He was surrounded by the homeless, the prostitutes, the sick, the rejected and the mentally ill. This was his crowd; these were his people. Go figure; with all of the religious institution around him, with their fancy buildings and lucrative marketing, he chose the streets as his place of ministry. I am honored to have been in his presence this afternoon, amongst his crowd. I imagine, were he to come to earth today in the same fashion he did before, he might be sitting at one of those tables eating goulash off of a styrofoam plate.