The eCrozier

Late last Sunday evening as I was driving home, I came across the above message on a church sign somewhere in southeast Georgia. It was dark and late and I wasn’t sure what I had read, so I stopped my car, turned around, and went back to be sure. Yep. Now, my hunch is that the person who came up with this message, however unaware, was using an old marketing strategy: Be timely and draw on the comfortably familiar to promote your message. It was, after all, Mother’s Day and the message related emotionally to a successful ad campaign for a peanut butter brand a few years back. Those two ingredients make the message work. Except. It’s horrible theology.

The idea that you or I or anybody else chooses Jesus is arrogant and gives us way more credit than we deserve. Such a claim presumes that a person has done her market research. She has tested all the other possible saviors or lords or gods out there, weighed their strengths and weaknesses in providing the value she desired for her and her family, and then she chose Jesus, because, of course, she only wants the very best for herself and her family. Jesus then becomes the choice she makes to maximize her return as the choosy consumer of salvation that she is. Like I said, arrogance.

Jesus says in John 15:16 that we didn’t choose him, he chose us. It’s arrogant for us to surmise anything else. As a disciple, I did none of the market research described above. I didn’t survey the salvation-market landscape and then conclude Jesus was the highest value alternative among the choices. What actually occurred was quite different. Jesus worked his way past my pride, my arrogance, my presumption that I knew best about my life, and met me in the truthfulness of my pathetic, sinful weakness. His grace on the cross gave me something I had no power in myself to give myself, namely, forgiveness of my sins. I didn’t choose God’s forgiveness. God forgave me in spite of myself.

Martin Luther, the great western reformer of the Christian faith, told the story of a man he heard going around bragging that he had chosen to accept Jesus as his personal savior. Luther purportedly went up to the man and said: “If I gave you a bag of gold coins, would you go around telling everyone how smart and clever you were to accept such a gift? Of course, you wouldn’t. You would just be grateful. You didn’t deserve the gift of the gold coins. All you did was accept it. So, stop with the bragging.”

Now, you may think I’m making more of a church sign than I ought. That’s fair enough. The person who came up with that sign’s message, I presume, only desired to be clever for the sake of our faith. Yet, I think such a sign manifests a larger cultural distortion of the Christian faith that syncretizes Christianity with modern capitalist presumptions about human behavior. It reflects the commodification of Christianity as just another transactional choice we make. But the Christian faith isn’t my own construction. In ways I may never fully understand, God in Jesus has laid hold of my life and has compelled me into a story I had no hand in writing. Any other claim is clearly arrogant.

+Scott