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jesus freak
Frederick Buechner has a little devotional reading do-jobby titled, Listening to Your Life. As though your life is telling a story, and you’re both a participant in the story and audience to it. So while you’re in the middle of living your life, listen to it as well. Because maybe God is in there playing hide and seek.
So this past week has conspired to get me listening to my life. A talk given at the Great Lakes Regional conference on the treasure buried in the field of Vineyard, one of those melt down experiences during a time of extended worship after one of the main sessions, some offspring and friends from afar coming in this weekend to celebrate the release of Jesus Brand Spirituality: He Wants His Religion Back.
All of which got me thinking about my earliest imprinting as a newbie on the Jesus path. Imprinting, like what happens to baby ducklings. There’s a short period after their birth when whatever they look at tells them what they are. More times than not, it’s their mommy duck and they get it straight: walk like a duck, talk like a duck, must be a duck. Species identity confirmed and secured.
I’m a Jesus freak. I got it from Brian Martin, a Jesus freak from my high school days in Detroit. One of the original Detroit Jesus freaks, back when the hippies and druggies and high schoolers of Detroit, city of, were discovering Jesus as if for the first time. Part of the Jesus movement in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Sandal wearing Jesus freaks with blue jean jackets and all that. He talked with me about Jesus of Nazareth, star of the gospels. Like he knew the man, which he did, if through a glass darkly. And I was moved to read one of those gospels and felt my first haunting from Jesus of Nazareth.
Brian put me on to a backyard Bible study happening in Detroit at the time. Nancy and I walk into this scene: maybe 75 or so young people sitting around on the grass in a smallish backyard, with a middle age Jewish guy named Haskell Stone, sitting in a lawn chair teaching from one of the gospels. While smoking a cigarette in one of those FDR plastic cigarette holders, I think, I remember, wondering now if I made that part up.
Listening to the guy, imprinting was happening without my knowing it. As follows: the center-piece of Christianity is Jesus of Nazareth, star of the gospels; the point is to find and follow him; the treasure buried in the field that Jesus wants us digging around in is the kingdom of God.
I thought at the time, it was the obvious center. But then as I mixed it up over the years with many other Christians, I realized it’s not so obvious. The Lutherans seemed centered on the book of Romans and Galatians and insisted that every sermon be structured around an explication of the law and the gospel. And the Presbyterians were centered, it seemed to me, and this may be unfair, on the sovereignty of God as demonstrated in their willingness to wade into the waters of predestination. And the Catholics seemed to be centered on the sacrifice of the mass. And all it was lovely in it’s way and good, properly understood, but I couldn’t properly understand it, because I had imprinted on this other center.
Through no fault of my own, I might add, and no credit either, but simply as a result of what happened during that window of time when a duckling imprints on her mother duck and forever after knows she is.
A Jesus freak, swept into a theological undercurrent called the kingdom of God. See, Haskell Stone, it turns out, after coming to faith in Jesus as his messiah–a step that cost him dearly, being Jewish, and remaining so, but unrecognized by his Jewish friends and family–went to Fuller Theological Seminary back in the day. And studied under George Eldon Ladd, who in turn was being influenced by Oscar Cullmann. Scholars who were dusting off the gospels and saying, “Hey! The organizing motif of the Bible is the theme of the coming kingdom of God! The “already and the not yet” kingdom of God. The treasure buried in the field that Jesus counseled us to sell all in order to purchase.”
Which is why a few decades into my following days, I heard John Wimber speak and said, “Oh my! This is what I’ve been missing!” Wimber was one of the first to popularize the work of George Eldon Ladd, and Wimber’s wake left a new association of churches called Vineyard. Something that feels a little different when it’s being itself. Because it has as it’s theological center, this theme: the kingdom of God.
And in time the church that started in Mark Kinzer’s dorm room (Kinzer was powerfully influenced by Haskell Stone) and moved to our living room, through a long circuitous route became a Vineyard church. And a seminary professor from the Ecumenical Theological Seminary in Detroit came to my office one day and handed me a paper that he had written in his own seminary days. It was a paper about the kingdom of God using Oscar Cullmann as it’s primary source. With tears in his eyes, he told me that he had been looking for a church that was centered on this understanding of Christian faith, and he could feel it in this church, the one I also attended.
Which made me feel incredibly good, when he said that. Because you just never know if the scent is strong enough in any church. This treasure seems to be buried deep most of the time, and you wonder how findable it is, sometimes. The gap between the pulsating presence of Jesus himself and the community that forms around him being greater than one would hope most of the time. And then someone like Brown Kinnard comes along with dirt on his knees from digging and says he thinks he found something. And you say to yourself, I knew this was real.
May 24th, 2008 at 6:44 am
Alone in my kitchen, unchurched at age 17, I sensed a voice telling me to just believe and the rest would take care of itself. I became a sheep who had recognized its masters voice. A journey began. It followed behind in the wake of many people you mentioned here, yet I never met most of them. But they influenced my course greatly. Phrases like, “jesus only, christianity and.. , be a voice, so send I you,” still sound in my head after many decades.
Somehow, God planted me in places that fed into my liturgical, bible thumping, charismatic, social justice, environmental, meditative and creative sides. I always knew each place was for a time and season. But all the while, I was longing. Retrospectively, I would say, that voice called me into the field and has kept calling. I wouldn’t say each step got me closer. I even tried to walk away. At the turning point however, that same voice just spoke my name. It held understanding too deep for words. So, I re-entered the field and in recent years it has said, “You are home.” Were it not for the other chorus of voices echoing from people like Haskell, Prentice, Dick, Oswald, Mark and Ken, leading and marking a trail, it would have been much more difficult. Sometimes I just weep out of thankfulness to be in a place like the Ann Arbor Vineyard because I can be the Jesus freak I have always been in the context of a community of faith that has its hands on the treasure. It all comes from and centers on Jesus. Yes, Brown is correct: We have something here.
The Voice– to quote Ken’s book
“We must be willing to speak up, to act, to stand for the truth, even if it means that in the process we’re crushed by the powers that be—” pg 164 JBS/Wilson. Ken, your book resonates in its bare honesty and courage. It is that voice calling out in a contemporary wilderness which will rock fortresses and solicit attack. But that voice will prevail because it is the voice of Jesus; clear as this mornings sun shining across the waters. Thank you just isn’t enough.