On a scrap of paper i rediscovered is written something which i guess i wrote while studying the life of Christ. i'm often troubled by the "look at me! look at me!" mentality that permeates the Body of Christ, the Church. I'also troubled by the frequent (and oh-so-acceptable) burnout, flameout, failure and filth smeared on Jesus' name by our inability to maintain our relationship with Him or with each other. It generally breaks down into fights, factions, divorces, embezzlement...but maybe it arises from the causes I wrote on that paper:

Jesus' example is Sonship. This yielded identifying with sinners and obeying the Father. The result was complete sacrifice--death on a cross--which then yielded a resurrection like nothing else the world has ever seen.
versus
Human nature (which in the olden days was called "the flesh"--doing things our own way). It creates not identity with but sympathy for, sinners, people in trouble because of their resistance to God. Sympathy then draws us to sacrifice for others, not out of identification or obedience to the Father but out of ourselves (the "look at me!" refrain that plays constantly in our heads when we are acting in "the flesh").

However, these sacrifices for others never yield the result required by our selfish need to be appreciated, recognized, patted on the back and glorified instead of God. So instead of calling it what it is--living in our own strength and doing our own thing--(albeit a "good thing") in our own way, we call it "burnout." Others sympathize some more and talk about how much that person has given and given and you have to love yourself first and on and on it goes, a paen to the "me-first" generations and the mishmash of spiritual crap they have left behind that we all have swallowed whole without ever thinking.

The truth is that when we act to help a person out of sympathy, out of our need to be seen and appreciated, we have already taken our way down the path to "burnout," for we will soon discover that we have no power to serve others without a whole lot of self-glorification being put into the mix. So when we get sympathy from those around us, telling us what great people we are to do such wonderful work...and how we should love ourselves and take time to recover, well, it just keeps on going around in a circle because we WEREN'T DOING ANYTHING REAL IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Remember how Jesus said, "Without Me, you can do nothing"? Is it possible that this is exactly what He meant? It's easy to generate a whole lot of smoke and heat and publicity for a cause of some sort. But if we were to do it WITH Jesus, FOR Jesus, in OBEDIENCE to Jesus, well, the uncomfortable truth is, no one would notice except the person for whom you were doing it. That is, none of the bean counters of goodness, the Pharisees of self-congratulation, would notice. Or they would think you were weird because, instead of sympathizing and empathizing and then GOING AWAY, you would be IDENTIFYING with the sinners, the homeless, the poor...hanging out with them like Jesus did. And what did He get for it? Killed by the good guys.

Did you ever think of that? Jesus wasn't killed by the bad guys, the desperadoes of His day. He was killed by the GOOD GUYS. The white-hat, certifiably spiritual, unquestionably God-loving people of His day. You see, identifying with sinners and obeying God to the point of death are NOT part of our "look at me"! self-congratulation method of being "spiritual" or "godly." No, these are characteristics that deeply unsettle all our niceness, the niceness that gives a quarter and then flees to the suburbs, that passes out a meal once a year or writes a check.

"Write a check instead. Let someone else do it. Hire a professional. Just don't expect me to do more than that, because i have a nice life and i don't want un-nice people mucking about in it and causing it to be messy, frightening, or otherwise unsettled." And that is the reason American "Christianity" stuns believers around the world for its hypocrisy.

What would happen if the Christians, the Christ-followers in just one city were to live in the uncomfortably obedient way Jesus did? Forget the cheap pewter bracelets (WWJD?) and the cheap sentiments we throw around in the place of following Christ. If we were to identify with the poor, the sick, the obvious sinners by living with them, helping them in ways we could, we would first be in the newspaper in the religion section once and then buried in the back pages under "unsolved crimes" a bit later.

No one who is really nice, really good, likes to see others obey God in this way. It's just far too disturbing, far too indicting. It upsets the commerce of our very commercial christianity-so-called and tipping that balance is absolutely the worst thing that anyone can do. For then the nice people will kill you in the name of their God and all of the institutions they hold dear. They will bury you in a hole in the woods and then will go out to dinner, congratulating themselves again that they have kept the world safe from radicals who made them look less than good.

This is what Jesus meant when He said that if you want to come after Him, you need to take up your cross. If you're not ready to die every moment, kindly, forgivingly, at the hands of the good guys, then you'd best stay out of it altogether--which most of us have.