Lately, I have been asking people the question: “What is Christianity?” Other people’s answers help me sort out what I think Christianity is supposed to be all about.

I used to think Christianity was all about following the rules and being the good 21^st Century Protestant. Today I realize that I was missing the boat just a few years ago. And yet I was doing a lot of great things. I was a hard working bivocational youth pastor of all things. I was doing what God had called me to do. But I didn’t know Jesus. I was trying to share Jesus with two new suburban church youth groups in Denver, Colorado. Everyone said I was doing a great job. I was a shining light, a witness to the world. But I wasn’t happy. I grew disillusioned with Christianity. I thought it was fake. It wasn’t good news. It was a huge burden that I didn’t need. And I didn’t want it.

I fell away from the faith and fell into religious despair. Christianity was my life for 12+ years and then one day I woke up and thought and was convinced it was a lie. My world was falling apart. I quit my job. Couldn’t find work that made me happy so I started hanging out with people that were real. Not phony. They were Punks and Goths.

In the midst of all this bitterness, hatred, and rejection I found a new religion. A religion I could fall back on. Plan B. Buddhism. It was great. I studied Jack Kerouac the greatest American Zen Buddhist on the planet ever. I set out to travel. I went on a 21^st Century Pilgrimage traveling from Mexico to Canada and from New Mexico to Montana. I was a spiritual hobo. I lived as a Buddhist would. In absolute poverty and trying to do the right thing and make a difference in the world by acts of kindness.

But my deeper study and devotion to Buddhism led me to one man that wanted to shake my world. His name was Jesus. The Great Buddha. My Great Savior. Personally I was afraid when I first met Him. I didn’t want that phony religion of yesterday. I wanted a Buddha, a spiritual guide for a new and crazy world. What I got was a guy standing in front of me laughing at me. He said only 3 words. Those words shook my world again, and they shake it every day. He said, “Come Follow Me”. I said yes. Life hasn’t been the same since. I was looking for someone to follow to show me a better way. To give me a sense of belonging. And while the belonging is something I continue to struggle with. I have found the Way to live. The way that God lived when he roamed the earth. I have found my Kingdom that I wanted when I was a boy.

Jesus—the foolish God made poor, spoke in parables. He spoke of little children running big kingdoms. He spoke of a  Kingdom not of this world—entirely contrary to the prosperity and success of mankind...I was drawn to him by his awesomeness, by enchanted stories, and most of all by his mercy and justice. He was always there for me. I had forgotten the promises that he made to me when I was a boy. He helped me remember.

I was drawn back by his love and his grace for me. He was still the same. It was I who had changed. But my needs hadn’t. I was still that little boy in need of belonging, of love. I needed a kingdom where life was different. Where mercy and justice are its ruler. Where grace and lovingkindness are its prince. Jesus promised me this. If I live it out. Granting mercy and justice to the outcast and the rags of this world.  His little ones, his children. Jesus is the ultimate ragpicker. Always picking up what the world discards. Transforming them into treasures that he is so proud of.

Jesus is a teacher, a healer, and a leader. He proclaims contrary to everything this culture wants. He says that the heart is where it’s at. He not only affiliates but makes friends with the addicts, the dealers, the whores and sluts, the cheaters and hooligans and nobodies. He tells us stories, stories of a kingdom where we will rule, where my weakness will be my greatest strength, where my reasons for being outcast will become sheer greatness, where my lovelessness would become overflowing love. He doesn’t condemn me, neither my heart nor my action; instead he encourages me to change my ways and  be a child again. He attracts crowds and crowds of broken and outcast, all crowding to touch him, to have their lives and their hearts healed.

Religious types and priests are uptight as always. They heard him speak little about theology, about the rules of God, and about all the pious endeavors they had devoted their entire lives to. They attack when he loves; they whisper when he speaks boldly, they recoil when he answers them. Hearts hard with pride, they have no need for grace—perhaps this is why they strung him out to die. People expected a polished Messiah, they received a radical Christ. They had awaited a devout and orthodox King, they received a reckless and radical Shepherd. Jesus attacked their hypocrisy, their legalism, their ability to miss the entire purpose of every law, every commandment, and every promise God had ever handed them.

Children swarm this wandering Rabbi. The blind cry out from the sides of roads for his eye-opening embrace. The dead walk and sing and dance to life in his arms. The demon-possessed and mentally ill find themselves possessed with a spirit of new life and of love. The lame skip arm in his arm. Jesus has come to set the captive free, to proclaim Jubilee. Jesus isn’t what all the religious types want. He is homeless, a wanderer in a foreign controlled by strange rulers. Sleeping in ditches and fields, accepting the charity of the poor, seizing each opportunity for solitude, Jesus lives on in the lives of the outcast. And he is right. The world does reject us. But that can’t stop us from being the mini-Messiah’s He wants us to be.

Nothing has changed. 2000 years and counting has passed. It was the same then. It is the same now.

For his close friends, along with louts and losers, he chose twelve men. Men who whose greatest characteristic was there irresponsibility—each left job and possessions and family to heed the call of Jesus. Come follow me. I will make you fishers of men—whatever that means. And they left everything. Didn’t give it a second thought. Men who were numb in the head, hard in the heart, but who possessed at least a mustard seed of faith. They of all people didn’t get it. Didn’t understand the kingdom being proclaimed. Didn’t understand the point and heart and obscurity of the words spoken. Didn’t understand the power behind the healings. Still they followed. Maybe out of stupidity, but more likely out of some deep and passionate longing, a relentless craving for what they had gotten a faint taste of. So they wandered around for three plus years with this mysterious man.

He was in many ways like many men. Partied. Wept. Ate. Had friends. Talked back to his mother. Grew angry. Grew tired. Had dreams. Had fears. Endured loss. Smiled. Kissed loved ones. Socialized after dinner. And he was in many ways different from any man that ever did come or ever has come since. He silenced waves. He stilled winds. He made feasts out of crumbs. He walked on the seas. He raised the dead and decaying. He caressed lepers. He overpowered demons. He died and rose on the third day. He saw the world through eyes of pure love and grace and heartache, and offers for each man, woman, and child to join him, to do the same.

Jesus, the creator God, the great rabbi, the awesome servant, the lover of all, wandering from village to village. Crossing hillside with loads of children, misfits, and mongrels in pursuit—each overwhelmingly desperate for something they have seen, only if briefly, in Jesus. Words, laced with passionate authority, filled with grace, bound together with truth, presented in the weight and freedom of love. These are the makings of a kingdom, a kingdom where the king has declared that common sense be thrown out. A kingdom where the silliness of children is the rule of thumb. A kingdom where the lost are found, the rebellious prodigals welcomed, the orphans given fathers. With wide eyes they listen to him as he recounts of this kingdom in tales,parables, and fables. A kingdom where the desperate and outcast are the bright and shining stars…May your kingdom come.