Jesus Rocks!
One of the reasons I remain in the Christian tradition is because I just don’t want to give up the idea of Jesus as being a manifestation of God. As much as I believe that God is everywhere and we don’t need intermediaries to talk to God, sometimes it’s good to just be able to relate to God as another human being. Jesus is one of the gang, one of the family, someone who gets it.
Now please don’t get all excited here and write me off as someone who believes that God can ONLY be experienced through Jesus Christ, and that, really, anytime anyone experiences the divine, he or she is experiencing Christ whether he is named or unnamed. I don’t believe that; that is a huge part of Lutheran theology that I couldn’t swallow when I was in seminary. But I do believe that God can be experienced through Jesus and that experience can be quite profound.
I’m a big believer that God can be experienced in nature and have had profound spiritual experiences while sitting on a rock by a river or lake, gazing at the starts at night, or just breathing the fresh, pine-scented air of northern Minnesota. I’ve experienced the presence of God through music and the arts. I would guess that there are as many ways of experiencing God as there are people. But sometimes I want to move beyond that general sense of the divine presence to something more concrete. I can go hug a tree and feel at one with universe, but a tree can’t share my human experience. Jesus can.
Even Oprah, with all of her weird beliefs about how God wants us to be successful in life and all that law of attraction stuff (to me that seems like another form of “blame the victim”) said that sometimes “you just want Jesus.”
My daughter told me one day that if God created “existence,” then God cannot “exist.” It’s a difficult concept to wrap one’s brain around but serves to highlight a problem with belief in a creator God. Certainly there are scientists who would argue that God does not exist based on physical evidence. Jesus gets around this whole problem by being born as a human, and “existing” within creation.
In my praying the Daily Examen these last few days, I’ve tried to included a conversation with Jesus. The other night it went something like this:
S: “Hey, Jesus”
J: “Hello Susan. How’s it going?”
S: “I’m really having a hard time tonight getting my brain to shut up.”
J: “It took me 40 days of being alone in the wilderness to get my brain to quit. Of course in my day we didn’t have the internet or Facebook to fuel the fire! Just work on turning it all off. It takes time.”
Yeah. Jesus rocks.