Chesterton and Claiborne

The quote that has been running through my head for quite a while is from something by G.K. Chesterton that I read in Great Ideas: "Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried."

As I look around me, and even at my own life, I realize just how true that really is. I see people unwilling to do things because they are too weak emotionally, or to unimaginative, or too steeped in the rhetoric of the "Christianity" that they grew up in to make their faith their own - or beyond that, to make it something lived out, not just believed.

I've been reading Shane Claiborne's The Irresistible Revolution (who influences much of the rest of this post) and it is a marvelous vision of what Jesus life lived out in today's world looks like, instead of what we are all too content to do and just believe in Jesus life. He talks about how easy it is to have your whole life together before truly encountering Jesus. He shows you how Jesus will take your life and screw it all up.

It's way to easy to be cool, to have your group of friends that you hang out with, to be a "good little Christian" without really doing anything different than anyone in the world does it; except that you abstain from pre-marital sex and alcohol or drug abuse, and maybe if you are really good you'll stay away from questionable media influences and keep from swearing. Really, how hard is that?

But is that really what it looks like to "take up your cross daily"? It's just like what Shane says, taking from Jesus - that's just what the world does. They all form their little "in-groups" and have their social mores and rules and norms that they follow, and ostracize you for not living up to that, and consider themselves morally and socially superior.

What if we took the life of Jesus out of the academic and out of the once- or twice-a-week church setting or out of the realm of belief and took him primarily into our social world?

What would this look like when it comes to the uncool, the losers, the people that no one likes to hang out with? Could trying to live Jesus life as our own mean that we continually love the poeple that we look at and see as weak, the ones that we have started to leave behind because all they ever do is complain? Or the ones that do nothing but criticize those around them? Or the ones that have habits and struggles and downfalls that are below such mature Christians as we are?

What if we took this out of the setting of what we have made our everyday lives and did something far more "radical"? What if we took what to us now is "radical" and made it ordinary? What if we started to really do what Jesus said to do, and that being caring for orphans, for widows, for the poor, for the sick, for the imprisoned, for the broken, for the weak, for the immature (?), for the people that no one else cares about? What if we slowly tried to work them into our social lives?

I really don't know exactly what this looks like, beyond the picture of it I see in The Irresistible Revolution. Or beyond Hobo Jueves. Beyond that, I really don't even know if I have the strength to try to live that life. I may be too steeped in a different Christianity, and I may be tied too tightly to my own "emotional stability" to try to break into living a new life, a different life.

To go from believing Jesus to living Jesus.
That's what people find so hard, and that's why they give up.