Earlier this week, I posed
a question on Facebook:
“For consideration: would Jesus have
been fun at cocktail parties? Yes/no.”
The first response was
from my church planting colleague, Bryan Berghoef who wrote: “If Jesus wasn’t fun, I’m out.” Almost
everyone chimed in similarly, including our own Barry Thomas who suggested that
Jesus has the kind of charisma that might lend itself to a viral YouTube video
being posted the day after the party.
And MANY people reminded me that Jesus turned the water into wine.
All of these responses
tells me I hang out with the right kind of people (on Facebook, if not in real
life.) But, for the past month, with Sermon-on-the-Mount-Jesus on my mind, I’m having
doubts. Parable telling, healing and
hanging with the disciples Jesus would be awfully fun, I admit it … although it
wasn’t HIS idea to turn the water into wine – it was his mother’s.
But the thought of taking Sermon-on-the-Mount-Jesus
to a cocktail party makes me more than a little nervous. One of my friends observed, “I’m not sure he was that good at small
talk.” And another imagined him “chatting up the caterer, bring(ing) the
homeless guy he just met.”
Because I can’t ditch the image
in my head of Jesus, standing in a small group at the party, leaning in to
listen and shouting a bit to be heard over the music. Then the music suddenly cuts out and Jesus ends
up hollering loud enough for everyone to hear “Anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery
with her in his heart.”
Wuh-whaaa! Like the old
Saturday Night Live character, Debbie Downer.
Sermon-on-the-Mount-Jesus + Cocktail Party = socially awkward moment. Something
like, “you know everything you own is
going to get eaten up by moths or corroded by rust or stolen by thieves … hm, what
a nice mini quiche appetizer!”
I’ve been imagining that,
if I brought Jesus to a cocktail party, I’d spend the whole night standing next
to him laughing awkwardly and offering asides like, “He’s not really from around here.”
Or lightly grabbing his arm and translating, “oh, I think what Jesus is trying to say is …”
And it certainly wouldn’t
be the first time a preacher has felt the need to translate and soften the hard
teachings of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, maybe trying polish him up, make him a
little less confrontational, a little more socially acceptable.
