Long conversations. . .

Inevitably when we talk to people about God they are by nature long conversations.  We think we have to deal with every reasoned objection, every curious detail, and every possible confusion.  We work so very hard to explain God to them as if God were, well, explainable.  I think this is because we truly do believe that we can reason them into the Kingdom of God -- no matter what Luther said about not being able to believe without the aid of the Holy Spirit.  It is a well intentioned fallacy.  Faith is not a deduction.  In fact, it is the other way around.  Everything else flows out of, from, and back to faith.  That, too, is the work of the Spirit.

In contrast, Jesus barely gave lip service to the objections or questions of those to whom He preached the Kingdom.  Most of the time His responses were designed to challenge the hearer more than convince him or her.  His conversation with the rich lawyer left the man unsettled and he left rather than pursue another round with Jesus.  On the other hand, it is remarkable how Jesus could simply bid people come and they did.  Without explanation or information, He called to the disciples, Follow Me, and they dropped everything to do just that.

The longest of Jesus' conversations were blunt -- too blunt for our world of bruised feelings and egos.  Take the woman at the well.  Jesus asks for a drink and she responds that He should have asked.  He tells her that if she knew God and His Word, she would have known to ask Him for a drink.  When she seems to come around, He asks about her immoral life.  "Go get your husband, oh, wait, you have had many husbands and the man you are sleeping with now is not your husband."  What pastor or Christian would try to woo and win a disciple for the Lord with such forthright but impolite statements?  Then in a shift to theology (always safer than morality), Jesus insists that she has it wrong there as well.  Oh dear, wrong move.  Or was it?

It occurs to me that we are still trying to be nicer than Jesus, more winsome, and more reasonable but it is not quite working.  We want to make sense of faith, of morality, of abortion, of sexual desire, of gender identity, of poverty, of illness, of death -- and everything else in between.  Jesus doesn't.  Why do we try and do what He did not?  I am at the end of my full-time life as a pastor and I am just not beginning to realize that I have wasted too much time trying to argue or debate or reason people into the Kingdom -- especially about things for which we have no answers except "Believe."  Maybe it is time we cut short our endless conversations and made them more like Jesus.  Follow Me....  Repent.... Believe...  Those do not seem to be the words on our lips today.  We end up talking more about us than Jesus, more about how wonderful our congregation is than even Jesus, and more about how God gives us answers rather than invites us into the mystery of His steadfast and redeeming love by faith.  So how is that working for us?