Bruce Lee, dying & Santa Claus.

"Come Die with Us." How’s that for Church ad? I doubt you’ll see that on many signs in front of churches. Dying sucks. We like pregnancy; we like birth; we like new starts, but we resist death. Somehow in America we have turned Jesus into Super Messiah—a combination of Clint Eastwood, Bruce Lee, Marcus Welby, and Santa Claus?

But our scripture doesn’t say, "For God so loved the world that he sent Clint Eastwood or Santa Claus." Our faith says God sent Jesus. God incarnated. God becomes one of us. The Divine enters our stories and into the pain of our lives and our world. And he says, "If you want to follow me you gotta die; if you really want to live, then be willing to die." No wonder so few of us really want to follow this dude, or we’ve reduced it to some form of moral code of conduct: don’t drink, cuss, or smoke. No offense, but that is horse-crap. I often say, "I don't have the guts to follow Jesus so I settle for being a Christian."

I prefer the Abraham Maslow version of Jesus: the one who meets my security needs and helps me "self-actualize". It's all about me. How ‘bout you? What are you attempting to keep alive: Control? Pride? Fear? Maybe another way to ask this is where are you attempting to avoid pain? Or what part of yourself do you not want to let God touch?

Why follow a beat-up, spat upon, seemingly defeated Jewish Rabbi? Intellectually it makes no sense… it makes a lousy infomercial for Jesus, not to mention a poor strategy for church growth. Brokeness, vulnerability, and pain is scary... and leaves scars. My gut instinct and everything in me tells me to run the other way from Jesus; yet everything in my soul yearns for what the Christ offers: Life with God today in God's world. May we show each other our scars?

Today’s reading from Luke in The Message says, "Simply put, if you are not willing to take what is dearest to you, whether plans or people, and kiss it good-bye you cannot be my disciple. Are you listening to this? Are you really listening?"

As the church we are inviting people to die. Not to live comfortably in their suburbs, but to die to self and all that stands in the way of the Reign of God. Good advertising can sell a bad product once, but never twice. Are we really selling the Jesus message? Or are we using "loss leaders" to attract a mass?

Jesus’ true identity was revealed at the cross. And God knows that is where we’ll find our true identity—at our cross. We’ll never begin to emerge and experience the power of the Jesus’ message until we begin to see it as a gigantic contradiction of everything the world attempts to tell us about who we are. That is why Jesus stuns people, because he is a contradiction to the world’s way. "Kissing it good-bye" is where our fear and doubts and the threat of not self-actualizing are executed. Jesus doesn’t discard life--- he transforms life.

Every 12-stepper knows that it is only in dying to ourselves that we become truly alive with the Creator and Sustainer of Life… where we are resurrected. Do we dare die? Only if we want to truly live.