I know thousands of people who say they follow Jesus, and I see millions more who I know are just like them.
For the past two decades I’ve pastored them in small rural chapels and in suburban megachurches.
I’ve served alongside them in the streets of Center City Philadelphia and in the tin-roofed slums of Nairobi, Kenya.
I’ve led their teenage children on overseas mission trips and weekend retreats and spontaneous service projects.
I’ve been in their homes and they’ve been in mine.
I know what these people have seen, the work they’ve been a part of, the kindness they’ve shown others, the faith they’ve professed, the God they’ve read and sang about.
Which makes it all the more heartbreaking now, to admit that I no longer recognize them; the venomous words they share on social media, the hateful theology they now ratify, the blatant corruption they turn their heads from, the human rights atrocities they are stunningly silent on.
The only conclusion I can come to, is that we were never following the same Jesus—or at the very least we aren’t any longer.
They are following a Jesus who is foreign to me, a Jesus who builds walls.
It is not the Jesus I shared with them on all those Sunday mornings;
the one who touched the hand of the leper,
the one who fed a starving hillside multitude;
the one who preached the scandalous goodness of a despised Samaritan,
the one whose family fled political genocide soon after he was born,
the one who said he and the forgotten prisoner were one in the same,
the one who dined with both priest and with prostitute,
the one who lived off the kindness of those he met as he traveled,
the one who said our neighbors and enemies, deserve the same love we give our families and ourselves.
They seem to have no recollection of this Jesus anymore or have willingly discarded him—or maybe they never had interest in him at all and it’s only now that I can see it.
Stranger still, is that these people tell me that I’m wrong; that my Jesus of compassion and gentleness and mercy is one found in spiritual error. They mock me for this Jesus, saying that it is my bleeding heart that has led me far afield; that in seeking such empathy I have drifted into heresy.
I’m good with that—really good with that.
I am going to take my chances with a wall-breaking Jesus.
I’m going all in with a Jesus who errs on the side of loving people, of welcoming them and healing them and embracing them.
I’m betting that the carpenter Jesus, would have me make tables and set a banquet for every hungry, hurting, exhausted person who crosses my path, without caveat or condition.
I will not worship or preach or serve a Jesus who makes walls; whose ministry is one of separation and disconnection and segregation.
I have no use for a white privileged, gated community Christ, whose only concern is America.
I have no interest in a religion that manufactures outsiders based on their nation of origin, sexual orientation, pigmentation—or any other inherent part of who they are.
These Christians I’ve known in close proximity and the ones I’ve seen from a distance, are welcome to this God.
They can have a Jesus who makes walls.
I’ll stay outside here with my Jesus, setting tables and breaking bread.
