Philip Novak once observed that "...one must first know one is in prison
in order to work intelligently to escape." The implication is that we are prisoners, but don't know it, don't want to know.
This was what the movie "The Matrix" was all about. Neo—the Jesus figure in the movie—comes to set people free
from prisons they love. Ignorance is bliss. So also with the real Jesus. He called old pieties into question and tried to
re-imagine religion from the point-of-view of actual human need. He pointed out in how many ways the Emperor has no clothes—they
crucified him for his trouble.
"For freedom Christ has set you free." We have fallen for fake freedoms like
consumerism, or materialism, or superstition, or power politics. They are really prisons. They have kept the human race in
bondage to its very worst instincts for tens of thousands of years: bondage to greed, ignorance (often religiously sanctioned
ignorance), and to intolerance. All three are still alive and well in 2005.
What would happen if we humans laid these down and exited our self-imposed
prisons? What if we believed Jesus that God is love and that this means that the good life is really a very simple proposition:
treat other people the way you wish they would treat you; bear one another's burdens; love your neighbor as if he were your
own self? If we followed (discipled) Jesus in this simple gospel, how much poverty do you think there would be, how much war,
how much destroying of God's creation? Would we live in gated "communities" with armed guards and our individual MacMansions,
or would we live in actual neighborhoods, sharing life together? We've heard the African proverb "it takes a village to raise
a child," here's a corollary: it takes a village to be a human. God is love: that means that we are social beings who become
full selves only by loving one another.
One of you asked me recently what it means to be a Christian Pragmatist? For
some, pragmatism means surrendering principle for the sake of "reality." but this is what I mean by pragmatism: Jesus' gospel
is not otherworldly escapism. Jesus' gospel is a proposal for how life could actually be lived in this world right now, today.
"Now is the day of salvation." Christianity is not for saints in heaven, it is for sinners on earth. Jesus calls us to full
lives of love—lives lived toward peace, toward justice, toward the common good of all people. We think the MacMansion
is a palace; Jesus thinks it is a prison cell, squalid and fetid. He urges us to come out into the fresh air of God's universal
and unconditional love.
