"The Only Messiah You Will Ever Meet Is Standing In Your Shoes"--Bawa Muhaiyaddeen

The other day I posted an excerpt from Tony Hendra's "The Messiah of Morris Avenue" in which a re-incarnate Jesus returns to the world, confining his activities mostly to New York and New Jersey. At one point in the book, he preaches at Fort Dix and reminds the soldiers there that they are being taught to murder. I was so moved by this passage, I even posted it as a comment at one of my favorite music blogs, Music You Won't Hear Any Place Else. The proprietor, Lee Hartsfeld, has great taste and wit and I appreciate his brand of liberal Protestantism. But he hated the Hendra passage and chided me for sending it. His criticism: It was trite. But his real beef with it was as an ex-Navy careerist who felt condemned or cornered by Hendra's Christ. So here's my answer to him.

Maybe the What-If-Christ-Came-Back plot line is as old as boy-meets-girl. But it seems that's the only way we ever get to hear, or be reminded of, what Jesus originally did and said. You're an ex-Navy man. So maybe it's a little hard to accept the centrality of nonviolence to Christ's message and mission. But it's there. And for people like me it's there in greater strength than his crucifixion and the religions that have used that event to punish Jews and condemn every other religion as second-rate or satanic. I can't tell you how many preachers have told me that Christ is better than Buddha because he pulled off that Harry Houdini resurrection trick.

I think you will agree that to call yourself a Christian is to call yourself a follower of Jesus Christ--not a Catholic or a Protestant or a Jew for Jesus. And writers like Hendra who you find trite are just trying to re-enact what it is like to meet Christ as a fully embodied man and teacher and what discipleship means in light of that encounter.

Last night I went to see Michael Moore's "Sicko" at my local art cinema. And they had the gall to show a commercial for the National Guard. I screamed at the projection booth, "You have no right to play such commercials here and hold us hostage to the message of war." The whole theater burst into applause. Now maybe guys like you who are ex-servicemen will feel that's spitting on you. But the audience last night felt that commercial was spitting on them. One women cried out, "I hope my children never see this commercial when they are alone at home. It's war pornography."

You've had a bug up your hind hole for some time about atheists. But I think their critiques of our 'Rapture' culture are healthy and much-needed. Drinking Christ's blood, awaiting his return, all of those centerpieces of Christian ritual and mythology are barnacles over the ark he came to build--and we need to scrape the hull clean. Christ's teachings are all the blood transfusion I need from him.

In any case, I won't bother you again with depictions of Christ's comeback. But I will say that to ignore Christ's central message of nonviolence or to think it is trivial to hear it imagined as the cornerstone of his ministry is what is wrong with Christianity and the people who call themselves Christians. George W. Bush is NOT a Christian; just as Paul Wolfowitz is not a Jew. Have you ever heard the prayer said when the Enola Gay took off to drop an A-bomb on Hiroshima? I heard it when I was a kid. And that was my first run-in with cognitive dissonance. Who or what tremebled inside me then, Lee? I say it was our dear friend and savior, Jesus Christ. And I also say, that was the day I turned him away from using my life, as he is supposed to use your life, as a re-entry point into our world.