Jason’s Blog.

“‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand,’ says Jesus in Matthew’s gospel, not offering a new way of getting to heaven hereafter, but announcing that the rule of heaven, the very life of heaven, is now overlapping with earth in a new way–a way which sweeps together all the moments from Jacob’s ladder to Isaiah’s vision, all the patriarchal insights and prophetic dreams, and turns them into a human form, a human voice, a human life, a human death.”

I read this sentence in a book called Simply Christian by N. T. Wright. I love Wright’s appreciation of the kingdom of heaven coming down to earth, a part of Jesus’ story which most Christians seem to gloss over or just completely ignore. After I read this I was reminded that I haven’t shared my testimony over my blog.

I grew up in the church, and was surrounded by the church most of my life. I went to Sunday church meetings (in other words I “went to church”) and attended Sunday school every week. I was in the youth praise band when I was in high school and was deeply involved in most youth group functions.

After high school I followed my brother, I didn’t have much imagination at the time, to Point Loma Nazarene University. I wasn’t really happy there my first two years, but I stayed because I thought it would make my parents happy. I’ve always been a sucker for pleasing people. Throughout most of college I didn’t spend much time being part of the church. Somewhere around my fourth year at PLNU I got to know some people who were really involved in social justice and serving the poor and disenfranchised. I began to serve at soup kitchens with them whenever I could and to meet the kind of people who Jesus would minister were he physically living on earth today. I began to fall in love with homeless, the sick, the fed up, the ignored. I began to see Jesus in their faces.

I began to read my Bible and for the first time I noticed that the Jesus who I had been taught was not a tame Jesus who came to earth simply for the forgiveness of sins. I began to realize that Jesus cares just as much for the body of the individual as he does for the soul. Jesus did and does life with everyone. Rich. Poor. Diseased. Healthy. It was at this point in my life when I realized that the person of Jesus is everything that I wanted to mirror in my life. He loves and he loves and he rebukes (which is just another way of saying that he loves), and he shows us what it means to be truly human and to be brought into the kingdom of G-d.

I have my bad months and my good months and then my great months when Jesus confronts me with things I need to change in my life. It’s a journey and a relationship and a way of life. I’m obviously not perfect, but falling in love with Jesus has made me more truly human. And continues to form and shape me from day to day. To form me into a person who lives for the kingdom of G-d. To see a little bit of heaven here on earth.

I was talking a couple weeks back with some friends about what our lives would look like if we lived with what we need instead of living with what we want. All of us discussing the matter like the idea of living with only what we need, but when it comes down to it, when we are not intentionally seeking to live this way, the implementation becomes lost in the rigors of everyday life. This conversation was pretty rough on my brain for the next few hours and, since we talked about it during Jesus Time at 9 (Sunday School), I could not concentrate on anything but these thoughts during the church service that followed. My mind became consumed.

After the service I talked to one of the guys involved in the conversation and asked him whether he thought he could go 77 days without an impulse, or even pleasure buy. I asked him if he thought he could go 77 days with only buying the things that he absolutely needed. Food, paying bills, and maybe a little gas for the old Jetta (as if we really need to drive around this tiny town). He stopped to think, and like all good consumers began to list off the things that he would have to buy before he took the challenge. I will admit that this idea did rush through my head for a moment when I first thought up, or was given, this crazy idea.

Let’s get down to the chase. I am issuing a challenge to any of my readers, and I know they are few, to not buy anything that you don’t need for 77 days. This challenge begins whenever you read this post and not a day or even hour or half hour later. I know that everyone’s definition of need is quite different and perhaps this is a good time to revamp our definitions. Take this challenge with your friends. Take this time to truly own what God has given you already. Take this time to stop filling up your life with junk you don’t need. Junk which ends up owning you and all of your time. Give this extra time to spend with those you love, to spend with God.

I’m now on Twitter. We’ll see how long this lasts. Hopefully it will make it easier for those of you who want to stalk me. www.twitter.com/jasonmerino. Enjoy.

Christianity has had many different definitions throughout the centuries. I’m not even going to go into any of them because most of them are so far off that I think that we have lost most, if not all, of what it means to be a Christian. In a Christian nation where hardly anyone reads scripture and those who do gravely misinterpret it, this fact is made obvious by Christians who picket with signs which read “Jesus Hates Fags,” I would honestly doubt if 3% of the United States population truly understood what it means to be a Christian, a follower of the Christ. In all honesty I would think that 3% is a generous figure.

I don’t quite know how to say this as eloquently as I would like to. I’m not sure if my words will resonate with what you are feeling, but I know that we must re-define what it means to be a Christian. The Christian life is about reforming our lives around this crazy idea that there is a God who loves us so much what we are created in that very image. Jesus came preaching and teaching and healing with good news on his lips. Good news of freedom from sin. What does sin look like? Sin comes in packages of all shapes and sizes these days. Packages with brand new televisions in them when our television still works. Packages with newer and flashier technology. But sin also comes in packages that tell us that it’s good enough to do good things, we don’t need to know God.

There are so many things that I’m fighting against these days that sometimes it’s hard to remember what I’m fighting for. From time to time I will lose track of the necessity of knowing God. Knowing God’s heart and knowing God’s purpose. This knowing isn’t a knowledge that makes God subject to me, but rather, makes me far more responsible for my actions. As I get to know God I am pulled more and more into God’s story, and hopefully, God will change my life more and more.

I don’t know how many times I can say this without being too redundant, but I’m tired of living the average Christian life. This life that hardly suggests a knowledge or full realization of Jesus’ good news. Unless my life is completely changed by my reading of Scripture and my knowledge of God, I would go so far as to say that Christianity is worthless. Or, at the very most, worth extremely little.

In this way, I believe that we must redefine the Christian life, because the way it is right now doesn’t have me convinced. Let’s start the conversation.

Do you ever hang out with friends and start talking about someone who you all know, who is not very favorable in anyone’s eyes? These moments usually turn south quickly and make me question humanities ability to truly image God. I’m not going to pretend that from the beginning I don’t participate, because I usually do. I don’t know what it is that makes me act this way, to conform to the thoughts of the group, but it happens. After a few minutes I will usually try to steer the conversation away from the certain individual, who is unable to defend themselves, and who may not even know they need defending. I do this because by a few minutes into these discussions I am so sick to my stomach knowing that I have let this all go on so long and that I haven’t done anything about it yet.

I was talking with a friend very vaguely about this today and he mention that a certain individual, who is often the oblivious recipient of sour words in our group, probably isn’t nearly as bad as we make them out to be. I agreed that he was right, and that I don’t really know why we still seem to talk about this person in such a way, but after thinking about it for the last half an hour or so I can’t help but think about what a damage we are doing to the image of God. If we are created in the image of God, it would seem that our God talks to the angels within the heavenly realm about how weird humanity is then when we come around to talk to God in prayer God changes the tune drastically, or at the very least takes it down an octave.

Lately I’ve been thinking that a great deal of my notions of life and Christianity need reexamining and now I must add this to the list. I’m not content reading Scripture and ignoring the parts I don’t think practical anymore. I’m sick of picking sections of Scripture that work for me. If I’m going to even try to call myself Christian there’s so much changing that needs to be done. The average life of a United States citizen does not even vaguely resemble that of a Christian and I know my life is still dangerously far from what it should be. But I know that there is hope and there is grace where I fail. The existence of grace, however, does not mean that I continue in my current way. Rather, it means that I am thankful and fearfully respectful to the God who has so graciously bestowed this gift on me. My only possibly reaction could be rethinking my life, and reorganizing it around the notion of being created in the image of the invisible God.

As I contemplate the original problem here I wonder how it shows God’s love if we only love those who love us? I hear even sinners and IRS agents do this…