- Popular author and HuffPost blogger
- Good for use by individuals or groups
- Popular author and HuffPost blogger
- Good for use by individuals or groups
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Overview
- Popular author and HuffPost blogger
- Good for use by individuals or groups
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781640650046 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Church Publishing, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2018 |
| Pages: | 128 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
All They're Going to Get Is You
Read Luke 17:5–10.
Don Armentrout stood tall enough to ride the big rollercoasters at Six Flags. His balding head formed a kind of natural tonsure, and he peered through eyewear that resembled twin magnifying glasses. When I was a seminarian at the School of Theology in Sewanee, Tennessee, Don delivered his Church History lectures at a torrid clip, frequently hiking his sagging khakis back up to his waist as he said, "You know what I mean?" We all struggled to keep pace with him in our notes and breathed a sigh of relief whenever he started in on one of his brief asides. One day, he said something like this: "When you get out there in your churches, people are going to come looking for Jesus. And all they're going to get is you. You better think about that."
I'm still thinking about that. And now I'm asking you to think about that. All sorts of people are looking for God. God took up flesh and moved into the neighborhood. God comes to meet us in Jesus. And here's the catch: since the Ascension and the descent of the Spirit, we are the only Body that Jesus has. People will come looking for Jesus, and they're only going to get us. And that's exactly how God designed it. To borrow from Sting's song "Every Breath We Take," every move we make, every breath we take represents Jesus to the world. God expects us to represent Jesus in the way he deserves. God's mission of reconciliation and restoration hinges on it.
All sorts of people felt welcome around Jesus. The handicapped, the contagious, and foreigners approached him without hesitation. His regular dinner companions included notorious crooks and women of ill repute. Jesus brought healing and sanity. He fed the hungry and forgave the people who wounded him. If you were down and out, flat on your back, or on everybody's scumbag list, Jesus was on your side.
People are looking for Jesus today. And all they're going to get is us.
Jesus as much as told his disciples the same thing. For instance, after wrestling with the condescending, judgmental religious leaders of his day, he took the disciples aside and gave them a mini-lesson in how to look like Jesus. To paraphrase he said, "Don't be a stumbling block to anybody else. Your thoughts, words, and deeds have a ripple effect. Whether you realize it or not, you can knock somebody else out of the boat. Hurt people hurt people. Jerks make jerks. You'd be better off having an anchor tied around your neck and being thrown into the bayou. Heal and nurture instead. Oh, and while you're at it, forgive. And keep forgiving. If the same boneheads have to apologize seven times a day every single day, forgive them. Sure, you'll start to think that their remorse is insincere. God will sort that out. Forgive them."
Squirming at what they were hearing, they said, "Increase our faith!" We're doing the same, I suspect. These expectations are too high. Nobody can live up to them. So give us the faith to accomplish what you ask!
You might think that Jesus would break out the gold stars for this response. But instead of a hearty pat on the back, Jesus gives them a verbal smack on the back of the head. He tells the disciples — and he's telling us — that we've completely missed the boat about faith. Faith is not something we have that makes us capable of remarkable things. Having a stronger faith has nothing to do with holding more tenaciously to our ideas about God.
Faith is a relationship. Jesus initiates and sustains that relationship by being faithful to us. He sticks by us and gives himself to us. Our faith is a response. It happens — and its contours change — one day at a time, and those days have a cumulative effect.
The various saints on our liturgical calendar show us that a faithful life amounts to a Jesus-saturated life. A faithful life is one in which Jesus does uncanny, unexpected, holy things. Saints don't accomplish things so much as Jesus makes things happen in and through them. Saints show us what it means to be the Body of Christ.
Plenty of saints never make it onto the Church's calendar. History will not record most of their names. But we recognize them when we see them. They are representing Jesus in a way that makes us say, "Oh! Right! That's it!"
For instance, about ten years ago we saw Jesus in the Amish community. Charlie Roberts walked into a one-room schoolhouse near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and opened fire. He killed five children and wounded five others. Then he took his own life.
Charlie's mother, Terri, will never forget that day. Her husband said, "I will never face my Amish neighbors again." A few days later, the Robertses buried their son in a small, private ceremony. As they came to the gravesite, they saw forty members of the Amish community approaching. The Amish enfolded the Roberts family in a semi-circle, extending forgiveness and sharing grief. In their sorrow, shame, and loneliness, the Robertses came looking for Jesus that day, whether they knew it or not. All they got was the Amish. And on that day, a small, wounded group of Amish were the real Jesus.
That's who we want to be for the addict and the parolee, for the lonely teenager and the disabled vet, for the cynical banker and the calloused farmer, for the streetwalker and the street cleaner. We want to bring healing and compassion and peace to overscheduled families and exhausted night-shift workers. To blue lives and black lives. To bow-tied professionals and professional slackers. We want to be Jesus to whomever we meet.
It saddens me when what some Christians say or do misrepresent Jesus as condescending and exclusionary. For instance, famous preachers have condemned Muslims for being, well, Muslim. Christian business owners have insisted on the right to refuse service to same-sex couples as an expression of religious freedom. Their words and actions portray Jesus as focused solely on a single moral or political agenda. As quarrelsome and scornful. As resentful and morally smug. We know, or at least we are supposed to know, that Jesus came not to condemn but to save. And yet all too often we forget how to embody the inclusive graciousness that is the sacred heart of Jesus.
God realizes that these infinite standards are too high for us injured, timid, fractious humans to meet. That's why God became one of us and lived in our midst and dwells in our hearts. We are not in this alone. We are the Body of Christ. People are looking for Jesus. And all they're going to get is us. Let's keep thinking about that.
Reflection Questions
1. What word, phrase, image, or idea in this chapter stood out to you? What ideas, stories, images, or questions did it suggest to you?
2. Does this chapter confirm, challenge, or enlarge your image of Jesus? Talk about how this is so for you.
3. Have you ever experienced a moment when you said, "Oh! Right! That's it!" Talk about a time when you learned something new about Jesus or came to know Jesus at a greater depth in the actions, words, or attitudes of another person.
4. Can you recall or imagine a time that someone else might have encountered Jesus in you? What do you think they learned about him?
CHAPTER 2
Keeping Our Word
Read John 14:23–29.
When our oldest son, Andrew, was about three, he loved climbing things. Ladders, trellises, trees — they all beckoned him to clamber up toward the roof or the sky. In the house, we found Andrew mounting our coffee table and leaping off. Not wanting him to mar the furniture or bump his head, we told him not to do that. Since this made no sense to him, he kept scaling the coffee table and leaping off, only to have us put him in timeout for a count of ten. Eventually, he got the point. At least, he got a point.
When he thought I wasn't looking, Andrew got on the table and jumped off. Before I could say anything, and without having seen me, he said, "Time-out!" He walked to the accustomed corner, counted to ten, returned to the table, and repeated the process a few more times. That wasn't quite what we had had in mind.
Sometimes I suspect that Jesus looks at his Church and, with patience and love, shakes his head and thinks, "That wasn't quite what I had in mind." Jesus had said, "Those who love me will keep my word." With all the best intentions, people have taken his words to heart. And gotten them completely wrong. They assume that Jesus means, "If you love me, you will follow the rules I've given you." Sincerely trying to follow Jesus, some people believe that Jesus' word — his logos — is a moral code. A set of dos and don'ts.
But let's do a quick review of Jesus' teaching in John's Gospel. Again and again he says, "I am." You know, like God speaking to Moses in the burning bush. "I am who I am." Jesus identifies himself as God incarnate. As God incarnate, he is Living Water, Bread of Life, Light of the World, and Good Shepherd. In other words, the subject matter of Jesus' teaching is Jesus' identity. And Jesus' identity is Love Incarnate.
Jesus teaches us who he is, so that we will know who we are. We are not just Jesus' followers. We are Jesus' Body. Like, really. Our hands and feet and faces are the very Body of Christ. Keeping Jesus' word means to remember who we are. And that is what Jesus is trying to get across in his very last teaching session.
Commentators frequently call chapters 14 through 16 of John's Gospel "The Farewell Discourse." After the Last Supper, Jesus gives his followers an extended teaching. Strictly speaking, Jesus is not saying good-bye for three chapters. Instead, he is preparing his followers to be the postresurrection people of God. To use Presiding Bishop Michael Curry's way of talking, he is inaugurating a new era in the Jesus movement.
To be sure, Jesus does prepare his followers for the crucifixion and for the ascension. Jesus tells them plainly that he is going away on numerous occasions. But they don't get it. The physical presence around which God has gathered the Jesus movement will be absent. Even though Jesus will rise with a spiritual body, he will ascend to his Father's house.
For those accustomed to seeing Jesus' face and hearing his voice and even smelling that Jesus-y fragrance in his hair and his clothes, Jesus will be gone. And even for those to whom the risen Jesus chooses to show himself, the risen body of Jesus will no longer be present. The Jesus they have known will be absent.
He is quick to say, "Don't be discouraged. Don't be afraid." Knowing Jesus as we do, we shouldn't imagine that Jesus tells them to toughen up and to stuff their very human responses into the cellar of their hearts. Instead, Jesus is telling them that he will be present in a new and even more powerful way. His presence among his friends was changing, not ending. And the way in which Jesus was going to be present with his friends changes them. Jesus will change them from being his followers into being his Body. The Body of Christ. Jesus is physically present to this world through our hands and our feet.
Our hands and feet are not metaphorically the Body of Christ just because we adhere to a set of principles or we're really nice people or we try to do lots of good works. We are the Body of Christ because the Holy Spirit dwells in each of us, guides each of us, spiritually molds us, and, crucially, weaves us together into one. As Paul put it, the same Spirit dwells in each of us. That's why we are many members of one body.
At Baptism, the Holy Spirit comes to dwell in each of us and to weave us into the Body of all the baptized. In the Holy Eucharist we participate ever more fully in the life of the risen Christ. We become what we eat and drink. The Body of Christ.
The spiritual challenge for us is to be who we truly are: to be the Body of Christ. And there is much at stake here. Although not what you may have in mind. Too many of the people of God have fixated on doing what we need to do to get into heaven and how to avoid going to hell. We've made loving Jesus all about getting our own ticket to paradise.
Think about keeping Jesus' word from a different perspective. What we know about anybody in this world comes through our senses. Yes, we intuit and use our heart and our imagination, but we know each other through our eyes and ears. And the world will know Christ through his Body — through you and me. The world will believe in Jesus to the extent that we are believable as the Body of Jesus. And we do not have the luxury of assigning one segment of our lives to doing Christ-like things while reserving the rest of it for all that worldly stuff we really like.
Jesus has marked us as his own forever. Every fiber of us. Whatever we do, whenever we do it, we do it as the Body of Christ. We are true to ourselves or we betray ourselves. If we devote our lives to pursuing accomplishments and status, then, when we repeat Jesus' words about dying to self, they will ring false. If we resist dispensing with material comforts so that others may eat and be properly clothed, it should not surprise us when people shrug indifferently at our call to love our neighbor as ourselves. When we seek to protect ourselves from harm by threatening violence against others, we should expect the world to respond with cynicism when we preach a peace not of this world.
Keeping Jesus' word means fleshing out the divine love already present within us in the Holy Spirit. Jesus put it this way: there is no greater love than laying down our life for a friend. And here is our challenge: any friend of Jesus' is a friend of ours. And Jesus chooses everybody as his friend. Simply everybody.
Reflection Questions
1. What word, phrase, image, or idea in this chapter stood out to you? What ideas, stories, images, or questions did it suggest to you?
2. Does this chapter confirm, challenge, or enlarge your image of Jesus? Talk about how this is so for you.
3. This chapter says that the world will believe in Jesus to the extent that we are believable as the Body of Jesus. Can you remember a time that someone else was believable to you as the Body of Jesus?
4. Can you remember or imagine a time that your actions or attitudes made Jesus believable to someone else?
CHAPTER 3
In Our Very Bones
Read Matthew 3:13–17.
If you're traveling north on US 165 from Lake Charles to Alexandria, Louisiana, you'll see the billboard on your left in Oakdale. A man engulfed in flames is turning his anguished face toward a heaven so distant that neither he nor we can see it. The sign reads: "People on earth hate to hear the word 'repent'! People in hell wish they could hear it one more time."
As I recall, the sign mentions neither a congregation nor a denomination. Whoever paid for the billboard seems to have thought that they were conveying the agreed-upon essence of the Christian message. Sadly, plenty of Christians and non-Christians equate the gospel with hell-avoidance. The hell-avoidance version of the gospel goes like this: Stop sinning. Believe that Jesus took the punishment for your sins. Go to heaven. Or, the alternative is to keep sinning. Reject or even ignore Jesus. Go to hell. Well, strictly speaking, even if you're a do-gooder like Gandhi or Anne Frank, you still go to hell if you don't accept Jesus before you die.
Well, this has always seemed a bit off to me.
I remember a conversation in my freshman religion class at St. Pius X Catholic High School in Atlanta. Our teacher — a nun whose name I've regrettably forgotten — asked us if we believed in hell. Could we reconcile the existence of hell with what we had been learning about the doctrine of God and God's infinite grace? Calmly and logically I suggested that since the all-loving God seeks connection with everyone, and that God is omnipotent, God will win over every heart eventually.
Like any Episcopalian, reason plays a crucial role in my faith. My fourteen-year-old mind still needed a lot of theological reading and lacked the rigorous logical training I would eventually receive. But I'm convinced that I was on to something. The beating heart of our faith is the transforming power of God's love. Fear of hell is at best a distraction, at worst a spiritual manipulation.
The perfect revelation of God's love is Jesus. In the pages of scripture, Jesus makes God's mission clear. He is bringing the Kingdom of Heaven to earth. Look, for instance, at Matthew's account of Jesus receiving John's baptism of repentance.
When Jesus emerges from the waters of the Jordan, the heavens open to him. A voice says, "This is my Son, the Beloved." In Mark's account, the voice is speaking to Jesus. According to Matthew, however, we're all getting that divine message. In Jesus, the heavens bend low not merely to touch the earth, but to saturate it. At the very beginning of his ministry, Jesus is already answering the prayer that he will eventually teach his disciples: "Thy kingdom come ... on earth as it is in heaven." Jesus is more than a gifted teacher and a bold prophet. Jesus is God incarnate. Fully human and fully divine. In the Incarnation God infuses the earthly with the heavenly.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Your Untold Story"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Jake Owensby.
Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction xv
Part 1 Reimagining Jesus
All They're Going to Get Is You 3
Keeping Our Word 7
In Our Very Bones 11
Jesus and Nietzsche Walk into a Bar 15
Jesus, Clark Kent, and Quentin Tarantino 19
Part 2 Retelling Your Story
Hearing Grace 25
Forgiving Yourself 29
Boiled Shrimp and Broken Toys 33
Restoring Our Sanity 37
Stretching Each Other 41
Part 3 Family, Friends, and Other Strangers
Being Normal Almost Killed Me 47
Ugly Love 51
Not Those People 55
Walk and Bridges 59
Claudia, Her Sisters, and the Ascension 63
Lies and Secrets and Funerals 67
Part 4 The Sense of an Ending
Even This 73
A Happier Place 77
Dirty Laundry 81
Until Morning 85
Appendix A Scripture Index 89
Appendix B Scripture Stories 91
What People are Saying About This
"Bishop Owensby is one of the finest thinkers and writers on today's scene, religious or secular. I read everything he publishes, and I learn something, think deeply, and am moved every time I do. This book is no different. You'll learn, think, be moved, and live a bit differently."
––The Most Rev. Michael Curry, 27th Presiding Bishop and Primate of The Episcopal Church
"With unmatched charm and disarming clarity, Bishop Jake Owensby invites us to be vulnerable to ourselves, one another, and our God. Be warned:
your life will never be the same after encountering Jesus in the stories told by Jake."
––The Rt. Rev. Todd Ousley, Bishop for the Office of Pastoral Development
"Your Untold Story is an invitation to sift through the libraries of our own spiritual narratives and see the hand of God at work in us––plying us, shaping us, loving us––into becoming our own manifestations of the Body of Christ. Bishop Owensby's book affirms that each of us is called us to reconciliation and restoration. One path to this wholeness is to connect our stories with the eternal, healing story of God. It is a path well worth taking."
––The Rt. Rev. Dr. Audrey Scanlan, Episcopal Diocese of Central Pennsylvania
"'We are all in the middle of our story ... and what has happened to us is still unfolding.' So begins this noteworthy narrative that unlocks memories, explores faith as one who has been 'in the trenches,' and consistently points to the way of Jesus as a guide for the reader toward the extraordinary love that God has for each human being on this planet. The consistent invitation to think about and tell one's own story in light of each chapter's theme is a particular strength and lends itself to strong discussion material for book groups. I recommend this book to you if you have a life story with which you struggle or one in which you wonder where God went. You will find a kind, compassionate and humble pastor in Bishop Owensby. One who has 'been there' and will help you discover a transforming path for yourself."
––The Rev. Carole Wageman, author of The Light Shines Through: Our Stories Are God's Story
"Drawing on his tremendous gift is a storyteller, Owensby uses his experiences as a guide to connect us to the deep truths that are held in our own stories. We are invited to look at the truths about ourselves that are revealed in our stories of struggle and brokenness, as well as in our stories of joy. From that holy place, we can begin to see with new eyes the places in our lives where God's forgiveness and love have been present. Connecting our stories to God's story, we are invited to grow in our understanding of what it means to be God's beloved."
––The Rt. Rev. Laura J. Ahrens, Bishop Suffragan of The Episcopal Church in Connecticut
"Bishop Jake Owensby is a consummate storyteller. In Your Untold Story
he recounts wonderful stories and arresting encounters in his own experience and then, in sometimes quite surprising ways, ties them to stories in the Scriptures. In so doing he not only deepens our appreciation of the biblical narratives that shape us, but he invites us to be tellers of our own stories, especially those still untold that need to be shared. An inspiring and fun read!"
–– The Right Reverend J. Neil Alexander, Vice President and Dean of the School of Theology at University of the South, Sewanee