Messed Up By Jesus

An Unexpected Compliment

I received a surprising compliment on Linkedin recently. It wasn’t really about me, but I’m grateful I participated in.

Chris Allen was a second-grader in the elementary school where my wife and his mother were teachers when the family became active members of our congregation. I remember him as a quiet, somewhat reserved kid. As a teenager he was involved in the youth ministry, but his real focus was on football which resulted in a university scholarship. I was surprised when he responded to God calling him to ministry and went to Duke Divinity School. He fell in love with another seminarian who became his wife and both of them were ordained into ministry in the United Methodist Church. While they served local churches in Florida, he earned a MBA and is now serving as a Vice President of the United Methodist Foundation in the Virginia Annual Conference.

At a national gathering of Foundation leaders Chris and Erica met Ted Crass. He had a successful career in International business when he got involved at Hyde Park and began to feel called to ministry. I was amazed when he left his business career, went to Harvard Divinity School, served churches in the New England Conference, and is now the President of their Foundation. Neither Chris or Ted had known each other in Tampa. Chris wrote:

“We laughed at the shared thread in our stories — Hyde Park, Jim’s preaching, and the way he quietly disrupted comfort so others could live on mission. Twenty years later, those ripples are still moving, shaping leaders, churches, and the connection we serve today.”

Chris titled his post, ” Jesus messed us up by way of Jim Harnish.”

Don’t Miss the Subject

I am both grateful and humbled by the subject of the active verb in that sentence. (Chris evidently had good elementary school teachers!) It was Jesus who “messed up” their lives. I’m grateful that I was one of the people through whom Jesus “disrupted their comfort” and continues to be joyfullly at work in and through their lives.

In the gospels “messing up” people’s lives is evidently Jesus’ idea of a good time. In fact, the entire Bible is the surprising story of the way God meets otherwise ordinary people in otherwise ordinary places, disrupts their comfort, and begins to do extraordinary things in and through them.

Warning: If we take what Jesus did and said seriously, he will disrupt the comfort of some of the basic assumptions of our social, political, and economic lives. That’s why the religious and political authorities of his day nailed him to a cross. That’s why we don’t hear the folks who promote “Christian nationalism” quoting Jesus’ parables or demanding that we post the Beatitudes on public school walls. That’s why we often miss the Everyday Epiphanies that might surprise, enliven, and enrich our lives.

Perhaps being a person through whom Jesus messes up other lives is what it means to be a “saint.”

Disruptive Saints

The Church officially designated November 1 as All Saints Day in the 7th Century, though the tradition goes back the early days of Church history. John Wesley called it “a day I peculiarly love.” It’s the day we remember not only the “big name” heroes of the faith, but also the “ordinary” saints through whom Jesus continues to disrupt our ordinary lives. Peter Marshall memorably called them “saints of the rank and file.” Remembering the way they have “messed up” our lives is the opportunity for us to pray that he will mess up other lives through us.

As I wrote these words I found myself humming a children’s song that captures both our gratitude for saints in the past and our desire to be among them. You can sing along here.

 I sing a song of the saints of God,
patient and brave and true,
who toiled and fought and lived and died
for the Lord they loved and knew.
And one was a doctor, and one was a queen,
and one was a shepherdess on the green;
they were all of them saints of God, and I mean,
God helping, to be one too.

They loved their Lord so dear, so dear,
and His love made them strong,
and they followed the right for Jesus’ sake,
the whole of their good lives long.
And one was a soldier, and one was a priest,
and one was slain by a fierce wild beast;
and there’s not any reason, no, not the least,
why I shouldn’t be one too.

They lived not only in ages past;
there are hundreds of thousands still.
The world is bright with the joyous saints
who love to do Jesus’ will.
You can meet them in school, on the street, in the store,
in church, by the sea, in the house next door,
they are saints of God whether rich or poor,
and I mean to be one too.

How about you?

Jim