This is an excerpt from my book, THE FEAST (chapter three, WRESTLING WITH THE REAL JESUS):

I wrestle with whether I’m an admirer of Jesus in that dream crowd or whether I’m truly following his radical teachings. I feel like Robert Jordan, the brother of the influential writer and activist Clarence Jordan. Clarence approached his powerful brother, a lawyer in Georgia, to help provide some protection for Clarence’s demonstration plot, the Koinonia Farm, which was created to be a visible sign that blacks and whites, poor and rich could live in solidarity. A radical project, especially in the early 1950s.

Clarence believed his brother might be able to provide some legal advice or protection to ensure the continuation of the vision that birthed the Koinonia Farm. Here’s one recollection of the conversation. Upon being asked for assistance by Clarence, Robert responded:

“Clarence, I can’t do that. You know my political aspirations. Why, if I represented you, I might lose my job, my house, everything I’ve got.”

“We might lose everything too, Bob.”

“It’s different for you.”

“Why is it different? I remember, it seems to me, that you and I joined the same church the same Sunday, as boys. I expect when we came forward the same preacher asked me about the same question he did you. He asked me, ‘Do you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ What did you say?”

“I follow Jesus, Clarence, up to a point.”

“Could that point by any chance be—the cross?”

“That’s right. I follow him to the cross, but not on the cross. I’m not getting myself crucified.”

“Then I don’t believe you’re a disciple. You’re an admirer of Jesus, but not a disciple of his. I think you ought to go back to the church you belong to, and tell them you’re an admirer not a disciple.”

“Well now, if everyone who felt like I do did that, we wouldn’t have a church, would we?”

“The question is,” Clarence said, “do you have a church?”*

The chief antagonists in this mini-drama were not the conventional bogeymen constructed so often in contemporary religious polemics: the “liberals,” “atheists,” and “homosexuals.” Christians were the ones who physically assaulted, shunned, and imposed economic difficulties on the Koinonia Farm. Baptist. Methodist. Presbyterian. Churches of Christ. It was the “Christians” who prevented the gospel from having its way in the Jim Crow South.

Every day I wrestle with my identity: am I a merely a spectator, or am I truly following? I stand somewhere between these two brothers—at times willing to lay down everything for the kingdom, at other times, doing everything in my power to preserve my comfortable life, career, and positions. I firmly believe that more than understanding Christianity as a “set of beliefs,” ours is a faith that demands to be seen as a “way of life.”

*I first encountered this story in Lee Camp’s Mere Discipleship.

During a Columbia class lecture a few weeks back, I jotted down the following as the big challenges local churches face in the coming ten years: consumerism, sexuality, sacred/secular, tribalism, technology, beliefs (epistemology), nationalism (not the same as patriotism), and busyness. Of course, there are other ways to say what I’m saying but sometimes I trust what pours out, then I critique it at a later point.

By “challenges” I mean, realities in American life that can either help the church embody the story of Jesus or significantly hurt the church’s mission.

I like these words from Lauren Winner.

Evangelical friends of mine are always trying to trim the corners and smooth the rough edges of what they call My Witness in order to shove it into a tidy, born-again conversion narrative. They want an exact date, even an hour, and I never know what to tell them. The datable conversion story has a venerable history. Paul, the most famous Jew to embrace Jesus, established the prototype of the dramatic, datable rebirth. He was walking on the road to Damascus, Luke tells us, off to persecute the zealous disciples of the newly dead carpenter when Jesus appeared to him, and Paul became his follower instead of his foe. Centuries later, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was attending a meeting in Aldersgate Street; listening to Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to the Romans, his heart was “strangely warmed.” At that instant, Wesley later wrote in his journal, he felt that he “did trust in Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.” Less notable personages have dramatic conversion stories, too. My high school physics teacher sat in her kitchen reading the Gospel of Mark one day when, in an instant, she knew that Jesus was God and had died for her sins. My friend Tim dedicated his life to Christ when he was four at a mission’s conference at Bibletown, in Boca Raton, Florida. He had seen a puppet show about Jesus knocking on your heart. So he opened it and asked Him to come in.

My story doesn’t fit very well with this conversion archetype. A literature scholar would say there are too many “ruptures” in the “narrative.” But she might also say that ruptures are the most interesting part of any text, that in the ruptures we learn something new. I had no epiphanic on-the-road-to-Damascus experience. I can’t tell my friends that I became a Christian January 8, 1993, or on my twentieth birthday. What I can tell them is that I grew up Jewish. I can tell them about the time I dreamed of Jesus rescuing me from a kidnapping; I can tell them I woke up certain, as certain as I have ever been about anything, that the dream was from God and the dream was about Jesus, about how He was real and true and sure. I can tell them about reading At Home in Mitford, a charming if somewhat saccharine novel about an Episcopal priest in North Carolina, a novel that left me wanting something Christians seemed to have. I can tell them about my baptism.

My close friend, Jonathan Storment, wrote this on his blog recently. I’ve heard about what Mark Moore is doing through mutual friends and I am excited to partner with him and this BIG DREAM.

For the longest time I’ve heard about a guy named Mark Moore. We had both graduated from the same school in Arkansas (although he did a few years earlier than me). We both had been mentored by similar people, and had a lot of mutual friends. And everyone who I spoke to about Mark said the same thing, “there’s a guy who’s going to change the world.”

And they were right.

I met Mark for the first time a couple of months ago. Since then we’ve met a few more times and after each conversation I walk away thinking, “This is possible. We can do something about the state of current world affairs.” And so can you.

Here’s how.

About a sixth of the global population deal with poverty and malnutrition. And the worst form of that is severe acute malnutrition. Now you’ve probably heard the statistics about this before. Every 3-4 seconds someone dies of starvation, and the overwhelming majority are children.

But I’ve never heard anyone say before that it doesn’t have to be like this.

Mark is spearheading a non-profit called MANA, or Mother’s Administered Nutritive Aid and the main goal of MANA is to stop people dying from severe acute malnutrition. And it’s got a chance to work. See MANA is a low cost peanut based paste that is high in calories and low in cost. It’s like Peanut Butter on steroids. It’s filled with vitamins and nutrients that can help back a starving child off of the cliff. It’s been called by experts a miracle food. Which is to say this is a bit more potent than JIF.

See before this paste the way that people helped starving kids was by putting them in a hospital, pumping them full with all the vitamins and food their body could handle. But it would take weeks to get their bodies back to some normal state, which took precious resources like hospital beds and medicine. And everyone knew in no time at all they would probably be back.

But with MANA it’s different. If a child eats MANA for 4-6 weeks, studies have shown that not only will they be helped immediately, but for the most part their bodies are in a place that can help them fend of starvation in the future.

It works like this. Since most of the malnutrition deaths occur among children, Field Doctors diagnose whether or not a kid is in trouble and then we distribute this miracle food to the mothers. Operating on the basic human reality that Mothers love their children, MANA gives the food to the moms of the malnourished kids, allowing them to care for their children with resources that can actually save their lives.

There are a couple of other similar products out there. But MANA is the only one that is a non-profit. They’re not trying to make money, their sole goal is to try and save lives. But since it’s not a business it operates off of donations. MANA has been working with UNICEF and several of the most influential church leaders in America to get this project off the ground. And that’s where you come in.

This is a great resource that can actually change things, but it needs money. It needs people with influence to talk about it to people with influence. Maybe you’re a church leader, a deacon, a shepherd or a church member who cares deeply about social justice and just don’t know where to start. Check out their website or their facebook page then get the word out. Donate your Facebook or Twitter status, write a blog or make a phone call.

This thing has got a real chance to make a difference, it just needs a tipping point.

If there’s one thing we know about God, it’s that He cares for the least of these, the people who are on the margins, the ones without any resources, and in the words of James’ this is the kind of stuff true religion always points toward. The truth is, I think God’s doing something here. I don’t think it was ever his intention for children to die from lack of food, and one way or another God is going to be active in feeding these children.

But the question is will we partner with Him in doing it.

This morning, many will gather in Dallas/Ft. Worth to lift up the families who’ve said good-bye to their precious daughter/spouse/sister/friend/mother. I know of no better song than Cohen’s Hallelujah.

Here’s a retelling of the Genesis account of Judah and Tamar (from The Feast).

Judah arranges a marriage between Er and Tamar. Er dies because he’s got moral issues. The writer of this story seems more comfortable than I am in ascribing death to God’s judgment. Regardless, Er is dead, and Tamar now needs a husband, according to Jewish tradition. This is a little part of Torah known as the “levirate law” (see Deut. 25; Ruth 3–4), which states that the next oldest surviving brother should marry the widowed sister-in-law in order to preserve the dead brother’s lineage and to give the widow a place in the social schema. Onan becomes the lucky guy to take on his brother’s wife.

Apparently he goes along with the arrangement publicly. But his private acts of nonconsummation (for lack of a better word) have earned him his own noun, “Onanism.” (Just thought you’d like to know that little factoid, if you didn’t already.) God is not pleased and strikes him dead. Two dead brothers, a woman twice widowed, and a whole lot of confusion. Judah, the patriarch and leader, looks around and does the obvious math: Tamar is the common denominator. To protect the son he has left, Judah sends Tamar back to live with her parents, sending the message to anyone watching that this woman is dangerous. In Judah’s eyes, she’s a pawn and a problem more than she is a person.

The story then reads “after a long time,” which in Scripture means the story is about to get really interesting. Judah goes through his own hard time when his wife dies, and he takes a buddy with him to Vegas once he’s finished his mourning period. Okay, it wasn’t Vegas, for those who read your Bibles carefully. It’s Timnah.

Somehow Tamar finds out about her father-in-law’s travel plans, and she decides that, if she is to get what she needs to survive and have any social value, she must take matters into her own hands. Tamar decides to play “the whore” (the Hebrew indicates) by wearing a veil. The veil points out that Tamar knows exactly what she’s doing: she’s seducing the man who’s denied her respectability all this time.

Judah must not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, because he does not recognize her upon approach, which could be a testimony to how drunk he is. (As an aside, this part of the story reminds me of Jacob with Rachel: after all that hard work, how does he not know he’s been given the wrong sister? How drunk are you when you are unable to distinguish between the hot sister and the one with “weak eyes”—a Semitic way of saying, “not as pretty”?) Or perhaps Judah’s failure to recognize Tamar is a testament to how little he’s paying attention. He’s treating Tamar not as a person, but as a thing to be consumed.

Either way, the story makes things pretty clear: Tamar is approaching this encounter as a business proposition. Judah is approaching it as a “boys will be boys” experience. Both know what they want, and both get it. Because Judah cannot pay Tamar for her services rendered, he leaves his drivers’ license and credit cards with her. Actually, the seal he leaves with her is his proof of identity encased in a cylinder he would have worn around his neck. Like Esau, he’s willing to trade a great deal for a moment of indulgence.

Three months pass. Judah finds out Tamar is pregnant and becomes incensed, demanding her punishment for misconduct in a moment of thick irony. According to Torah, she could be hanged, burned, stoned, strangled, or beheaded. One scholar reminds us of the seriousness of the moment: “Criminals who were to be burned or strangled had to stand in dung up to their knees.”¹ But Judah is specific: Tamar must be burned.

And then, Tamar sends a prophetic word back to Judah. Like Nathan’s conversation with King David, Tamar exposes Judah for the Torah violator he really is and not the public do-gooder he claims to be. Judah has made a mess of his role in the story. Tamar is not afraid to bring his transgressions to the surface, despite her own obvious sins.

Only the Bible would continue with this sordid story. Tamar gives birth to twins, a familiar twist in the Genesis narrative—one of these twins will be in the lineage of King David, and of Jesus.

The mess becomes the place for God to do God’s mysterious work. We still tend to think that God works best with perfect people, whose hair is cut just right, who know all the right language. But the Bible continually reminds us that God isn’t interested so much in people who look the part. God’s interest lies in people who make a mess of the part. People who, like Judah, are more interested in appearing virtuous than practicing virtue by protecting the innocent and vulnerable, granting justice to a widow who’s lost two husbands, abstaining from giving in to lust and physical longing that turns a woman into “the sum of her parts,” a far cry from the image of God that Genesis declares women to be. No matter how often we forget, God keeps working with lyin’, cheatin’, whorin’ jerks.

This story says something about power. Those who have power, like Judah, usually act quite different in public than they do in private. The narrative details of this story prove the point. Judah only deals with his misuse and abuse of Tamar once he is publicly exposed. People in power so often wait for a public shaming to become truly authentic in their real messes of sexual exploitation, gender bias, injustice, abuse of power, public persona versus private reality.

Enron. 9-11. Abu-Ghraib. Mortgage crises. But big messes occur when little messes happen in the midst of our daily choices and actions. Adultery, abuse, betrayal, gossip, and hate. The big messes and little messes cannot be separated. Recognizing this entanglement gives us a place from which we can begin rebuilding our faith. God is interested in the messes we’ve made. God decides to enter into the mess, and makes sense of our world.

Here’s another excerpt from The Feast.

“A writer, whose name I’ve since forgotten, once wrote that the two great religions in America are optimism and denial.”

—Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk

The soul of American Christianity is malnourished. We are in constant need of having our imaginations raised from slumber. Feasting together on the words and stories of Scripture is the way this happens. If I’m correct that America’s religious soul is starving, starvation is the symptom and not the problem. The problem is that many of us lack a diet of the Gospel in our lives. We fill our hearts and minds with the junk food of social pop-psychology and shallow entertainment. Our souls atrophy because we do not feast on the teachings of God’s story. The following chapters provide a few recipes.

The atrophy of Christian spirituality is ironic, of course, because the Judeo-Christian Scriptures are packed with “feasting” language and imagery. The prophet Jeremiah declares, “When your words came, I ate them; they were my joy and my heart’s delight,” (15:16). God commands  Ezekiel to eat the book he’s been given (Ezek 2:8ff). Jesus tells the crowd that real spiritual life is reserved for those who are willing to eat his flesh and drink his blood (Jn. 6). John the Apostle is instructed to eat the little scroll which will “turn your stomach sour but in your mouth will be sweet as honey” (Rev 10:9-10). Eugene Peterson inspired me to dig deeper into this image in Eat This Book:

Christians feed on Scripture. Holy Scripture nurtures the holy community as food nurtures the human body.     Christians don’t simply learn or study or use Scripture; we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all the world, healing and evangelism and justice in Jesus’ name, hands raised in adoration of the Father, feet washed in company with the Son.³

Digesting the teachings of Scripture is one way Christians can actually embody the good news of God in our chaotic world. In my own consumption of the Scriptures, I often see God as priest to the outcast and prophet to the religious. As I write this I live in the inoculated suburbs of Detroit. Scripture has proven to be a powerful remedy for indifference and apathy, prompting me to go into all the world as I try to heal, evangelize, practice justice, and raise hands in adoration to God, the Father.

* * *

As a collective whole the church has fallen short of this lofty vision, for more humans died violent deaths in the twentieth century, the alleged height of Christendom, than in all previous centuries combined. Genocide in Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia, Darfur, Northern Uganda, Rwanda, Kosovo, and Srebrenica, along with the devastation of WWI, WWII, and the Holocaust crushed the optimism that characterized the West at the onset of the twentieth century. By 1930, due to war and an unprecedented economic turmoil now known as the Great Depression, the spirit of progress began to give way to a spirit of disillusionment.

Modern Christianity did not fare well because it failed to feast primarily on Jesus and Christian Scripture. Many of the aforementioned atrocities took place in “Christian” nations or nations closely affiliated with the Christian religion (including Nazi Germany, which at the rise and reign of Hitler’s Third Reich, was overwhelmingly Lutheran).⁴ Or, in the words of one poet: “After two thousand years of [Christian] mass / We’ve got as far as poison-gas.”⁵

The following statistic reinforces my claim that American/Western Christianity is in a state of decline: according to Alister McGrath, though almost two-thirds of all Christians lived in the West in 1900, two-thirds of all Christians in the world now live outside the West. Hence the phrases in popular parlance regarding the seismic shift in religion as we know it—the United States is now post-Christian and postmodern.

In the last fifty years, Christianity shifted to the far corners of the world: China, South America, and Africa. Scholars now note that there are more Anglicans in Africa, for instance, than in all of Great Britain.⁶ The largest Christian congregation in the U.K. is Kingsway International Church, started by two African leaders, and Africa now boasts more Christians than the United States. Conservative estimates indicate that less than one half of one percent of China is Christian, though as one spiritual guide points out, “one half of one percent of infinity is a lot of people.”

My own religious tribe, Churches of Christ from the American Restoration Movement, has been slowly declining for the last three decades.⁷ This trend mirrors what’s happening in most of Western Christianity, which—with the exception of two major segments of Protestant faith, Pentecostalism and Independent/Community Churches—is in a season of stagnation and severe deterioration.

Yet just as so many are losing the faith that has been a source of comfort and direction in ages past, more chaos marks the twenty-first century global landscape. The devastation of America’s 9-11, the Indian Ocean tsunami, tragic earthquakes in Pakistan and Kashmir, the horror of Hurricane Katrina, and the latest surge of wars in the Middle East should cause Christians to ask two important questions: “Is God present and working in the face of such pressing evil?” and “How can Christianity be ‘good news’ for those who do not ‘believe’?” These two questions undergird this entire book. I’m convicted that Christianity’s real genius and power rests in its ability to bring healing, justice, and equality to all people. The real test of Christian theology is the result it brings for those who do not subscribe to the Christian faith.

* * *

The Feast engages the discussion of what Christianity, as a spiritual movement rather than an institutional religion, can sound and look like in a pluralistic society like the one emerging in the United States.