Uncarved Wood

Dave Brisbin 7.12.20 A friend makes the comment that being a Christian is really hard. I ask why. He says it’s hard to meet moral and ethical standards, understand theological and doctrinal concepts, and live the precepts of the church. Well, he doesn’t put it that way, but more or less what he means. He also says it’s hard to put up with the bias he sees in our media and culture and encounters in his own life. Is it hard to be a Christian, or more on point, to be a follower of Jesus? We’ve made our faith so complex in legal and theological terms: created rules upon rules and dense theological arguments trying to describe spiritual realities that cannot be described in words. We’ve tied our faith to the politics and levers of power in each age and generation to better impose and legislate our worldview on others, earning their enmity and prejudice against us. This all makes Christianity hard to be. But does any of this have anything to do with Jesus and his teaching? Jesus couldn’t be clearer: loving God and loving each other—two ways of looking at the same thing—are the twin commandments that contain all the rest. And loving each other in the manner Jesus loves us is the only way we will be known as his followers. Not complicated. While the hardest thing we will ever do is empty ourselves of everything we think we know and hold on to for support, once we do, the kind of love Jesus is modeling follows as night follows day. The Chinese symbol for simplicity literally means “uncarved wood,” the natural state of something before we work it into complexity. If we can’t find the simplicity on the far side of our own complexity, our faith will remain hard, and the freedom Jesus promises, elusive.