“Many of these are fun. Some have the approval of important and powerful people. Some are wrapped in scripture verses. Many are surrounded by books or endorsed by ministers.

But at bottom, Jesus isn’t defining the God conversation. So the conversation is on the wrong foot and making a wrong turn. It may not be worthless, but it isn’t reliable.”

Amen and amen.

I’d only argue that it’s all worthless when it isn’t about Jesus. It is God who makes it about Jesus after all.

Here’s the irony to me. Outside of a few circles (such as some folks in Judaism), you’ll rarely find anyone who doesn’t like/admire Jesus. He’s a great teacher, etc, etc. But once we insist in Jesus’ Godhood, or once we insist on actually following his lead, people get turned off.

And that’s what I’m looking for… Jesus-shaped community. Jesus-shaped religion. Jesus-shaped life.

Thanks, Michael

The revelation of Jesus Christ was not so much in the name “Jesus” as it was in the very person of Jesus of Nazareth. He revealed the Father in his very being. There is great benefit in calling on His name, meditating on His name, as long as who you are identifying is the One who by His very nature and character revealed the Father. But religious and political leaders have used and are using that Holy Name to justify all kinds of bad policies and behaviors, twisting His message by misapplying Scripture and incorporating nonsensical dogma.

On the Mount of Transfiguration it was revealed that this Jesus was the One who was informing the the Law and the Prophets and not the other way around. Everything must be understood by what He did and said and His attitude behind His actions and words. There were times when He just came out and revealed Himself and other times when He ordered His followers “not to tell anyone” who He was or the miracles He had done. To make a blanket statement that every spiritual conversation must be forcefully turned to Jesus is not in keeping with the revelation of Jesus. It’s just not.

Is it possible that you are hearing in the this talk of Jesus something that causes you to imagine a big haired guy on the tube repeatedly saying JAEEEESUSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!! as if the name is a magic incantation that somehow validates whatever it is he is trying to sell that day. If this is what we are doing when we speak of Jesus, I’ll gag along with you.

I don’t find it necessary to say Jesus every 30 seconds when a conversation arises between myself and a non-believer. Eugene Peterson does an interesting take on this in his latest book “Tell It Slant”. He comments on the kinds of conversations Jesus has when he travels among those outside the “churchy” people between Jerusalem and Galilee. He points to the way Jesus seldom even uses the word God in his speech, but talks instead of farming and similar things that are familiar to everyone and part of everyday life. He reveals God to those he encounters in the most common elements of the creation. Of course, I think he has something of an advantage over most of us in that he is something of a genius in such things. But your point is illustrated in these passages of Jesus’ conversations in the book of Luke.

But something huge occurs in the personal realm when Jesus becomes the living center through whom God is made present to us. God is not made more real by how many times we say the name of Jesus, but as in Paul’s Damascus experience, our own world, understanding, and views of God is changed in ways beyond comprehension after an encounter with the living Jesus.

I spent a few days at the Little Portion Retreat Center this past fall. It is a Catholic-based monastic community begun by the musician John Michael Talbot near Eureka Springs Arkansas. I attended three or four masses while there. Each was led by a priest I assume to have been in his seventies. In each of the masses, he spoke in various ways of the personally present Jesus Christ. In the more formal Sunday Mass, he spoke sharply of his anger at his teachers who had never told him of this personal Jesus. Until whenever it was that he encountered a living Christ, he only knew of God as a distant and impersonal deity. His life was obviously deeply impacted by finding God in Christ. I was deeply moved by his testimony to a living God that is present and available to all in Jesus in Christ.

I’m not Catholic, and have no idea how this relates to your own experiences within Catholicism, but I’d find no problems becoming Catholic if I could be with a community like this hidden one within the Ozark mountains of Arkansas.