Jesus is the Answer

Have any of you ever given the “expected” answer?  That’s the one that you don’t necessarily know what the answer is, but you know what you’re “expected” to say?

Sometimes you’ll here me say that that is the “Sunday School” answer.  When I was a kid growing up, that was what my Sunday School Teacher expected us to say, whether we really knew it or not.  Generally it was something like, “Jesus and his love”

Those answers aren’t always bad either.  There’s a lot of times when we need to learn those answers before we really know what they mean…and that’s okay.  The trouble comes when that’s the only kind of answers we know, because then they start to pop up in all sorts of other places.

A number of years ago, I was introduced to another version of that answer called the “Jesus Juke.”  It comes from a blog that guy named Jon Acuff used to write called, “Stuff Christians Like” which was a humorous, and sometimes satirical take on contemporary Christian culture.  He describes where this comes from like this,

At another airport I went to, a humongous bodybuilder spent his time in the terminal doing ferocious push ups right beside me. I tweeted about it and folks told me to prove it with a photo. Not likely. One of my rules for twitter is never snap photos of people who can snap you. And this guy could have broken me in half like a thin blogger branch.

But in all the responses from people asking me questions about the terminal B2 bodybuilder, one stuck out. It was different than the rest, but is something I am growing familiar with.

I call it the “Jesus Juke.”

Like a football player juking you at the last second and going a different direction, the Jesus Juke is when someone takes what is clearly a joke filled conversation and completely reverses direction into something serious and holy.

In this particular case, when I tweeted a joke about the guy doing pushups, someone tweeted me back, “Imagine If we were that dedicated in our faith, family, and finances?”

Chances are you’ve experienced this. Someone pulled the Christian version of the Debbie Downer, they threw out a bit of Jesus Juke on you. If you have, or even if you haven’t, there are three things we all need to know about this particular move.

The point is, that a Jesus Juke is the answer we give when we can’t, or won’t, give a better one, because we either don’t know, or aren’t sure what a good answer is.  This is our Sunday School answer that we give.

I think this is important as we approach how we’re filling in the blank of "Jesus is ___" for this post. You can find other posts in this series here.

Jesus is the Answer.  

This was another one of the popular answers that I received when I asked folks to fill in the blank.  But if we say this, what kind of answer are we giving…is this the expected answer, because we think that this is what we’re supposed to say, or is it something more?

If we’re going to say that Jesus is the Answer, then what does that mean, and how do we live our lives so that others can see that in us?

On Ash Wednesday, we were reminded that Jesus is our Hope, because Jesus goes with us. Two weeks ago, we said that Jesus is Our Guide, and that we are called to listen for his voice and recognize it, and last week we said that Jesus is Our Friend and that being his friend means that we have to show our love to others, just as Jesus has shown it to us.

All of those things are things that we have to remember if we’re going to talk about Jesus as the answer in a serious way.  Our scripture passage for this post is John 10:7-10 

To often, we think of this as a small gate that for some reason is hard to get into, and to many of our answers that we give are set up, even if we don’t mean for them to be, to make it harder for folks to get to the gate. Somewhere along the way, we’re worried that if to many people get there that we might not be able to get in.

The thing is, that doesn’t hold up with what we know about Jesus and about what God is doing in the world around us.  What we see Jesus doing, and see God doing all throughout Scripture is like putting a big funnel right outside the gate.  God has set things up so that we can all be brought in through the gate, it’s not restrictive, but it is what we see God doing!  At the Early Service through Lent, we’re watching as God is doing this through the Old Testament.  This isn't anything new.

The answer we’re given through Jesus isn’t to keep people out, but to make it easier for them to get in.  The system is rigged in our favor, our answers shouldn’t make that harder.

Jesus doesn’t just want us to have eternal life, but to be able to live the best fullest most complete life we can here on earth before we get there.

For us as people of faith that means that we can’t get in the way.  If Jesus is the Answer, then we can’t go with the Jesus Jukes because those are things that get in the way.

They sound great from our point of view, because we either already know, or think we know what the answer is.  But what about the point of view from the folks that we’re trying to tell about Jesus, who could benefit from knowing what we know, from sharing in the answer that we’ve received in Jesus Christ?

If Jesus is the Answer, then we don’t have to have all the answers because that is Jesus’ job.  In a world full of answers (they’re kind of like opinions, everyone has one) our job isn’t to have the answer, but to be able to point others to it, and take them there.  So how do we do it?

Live a life that is real, authentic, full of mistakes, but not full of condemnation or judgment.  Show patience and humility.

Reinforce the positive of what folks are doing, and the ways that they are trying. Don’t focus only on the negative.

And help the weaker against those folks that want to tear them down, and don’t be someone who tries to tear them down.

Go out this week, and let go of the answers you want to give, and let Jesus be your answer. Don’t worry about meeting some sort of perceived expectations for what other people say you should be doing, but let Jesus draw you into the gate that he has prepared, and into a new world.  Go and do this in Jesus name, Amen.