Bare-Bones Christianity: My Creed

I’m a bare-bones Christian right now.  A lot of the peripheral stuff, I just could care less about.  Actually, let me take that back, because I love theology, so that’s not true.  It’s just that I think theology sometimes matters a lot more to us than it does to God. 

He didn’t seem to care about the correct theological practices of the Isrealites as they offered proper/godly/Biblical [insert pet word here] sacrifices while ignoring the cries of the widow and the orphan.  Nor did He seem to care about the proper theology of the goats who apparently knew all about Jesus, but never recognized Him in the prisons and in the sickbed.  Meanwhile I note that the sheep, who appear rather clueless in the parable, just seem awful happy to be with Him. 

It occurs to me that I probably resemble the goats more than I do the sheep.  That’s why I am becoming a bare-bones Christian.  I am getting whittled down in ways that hurt but also in ways that liberate.   

I do believe that:

• I was a lamb without a Shepherd until Christ came and called me into His flock.
• The work of Christ on the Cross was salvific, in that it threw off the veil and gave humanity the thick and unbelievable “right,” as it were, to see God face to face, as well as threw off the negative effects of sin and death (in ways that are real right now, in ways that we must work to make real right now, as well as in ways that will be fully made manifest at the end of days).
• Christ in me is the hope of glory, the treasure of the faith, the crux of the whole deal, the reason for this whole big epic drama. 
• God desires all the ends of the earth to be saved and that all humanity might see Him as He truly is.  
• That same God, in His sovereignty, gave us the right to have a will of our own and to choose Him or not choose Him, and in so doing proved His love for us.  He is not a God who rapes.  That’s how we can distinguish Him from the enemy.  God’s preferred tone of voice is whispering.   
• The choosing of Him is something done in the holy of holies of the heart, so to speak, not something done by way of saying the right set of phrases or espousing a certain set of intellectual propositions.
• Following Christ is a journey, not a one time legal contract.
• God is love.  For real. 
• His Life in me transforms me from the inside out, particularly as I cooperate with His whispers and promptings.  He doesn’t force.  But He does liberate.   
• I am called to be the hands and feet of Christ to a world that needs His love, but that “being hands and feet” business is a lot harder to do in real life than it is to put on paper.
• The fruit of the Spirit is to grow in me like apples grow on an apple tree, and that the Spirit’s fruit is more important than whether or not I have correct systematic theology or not—which is not to say that correct systematic theology is unimportant, but more to say that it doesn’t matter if I have all knowledge if at the same time I have no love.  Nobody really cares if the apple tree is full of fine looking branches that never burst into blossom in the Spring and weigh heavily with fruit in their season. 
• I am loved and cherished and have great worth.
• You are loved and cherished and have great worth. 
• Because I can rest in that wild love of my Jesus, I can also be love to others.  In fact, the more I comprehend the heighth, depth, and strength of that love and how great He truly is (and a lot of that greatness includes the fact that He’s so dang DIFFERENT than the fallen world is), the more love is freed up to come out of me.

Hat tip to the fine writers at White Washed Feminist, whose post on Creeds caused me to pause for a moment and quickly write down my bare-bones beliefs.  Obviously this list needs sauced and spruced up, to say the least.  These are what you call, say, brief thoughts from a woman taking a quick break from house-cleaning—who really shouldn’t be taking a break but needs more of the fruit of self-control.  Wait.  Did I say I’m supposed to cooperate with that growth?  Shoot.  More amateur theology after I scrub the toilets…  Speaking of which, I must add one more item to the list:

• Cleaning toothpaste globs out of sinks despite the fact that you know they’ll grow back in two days or less, hugging tired cranky little boys instead of whopping them, choosing paint colors with your husband without succumbing to the desire to start screaming and throwing paint brushes at eachother—these are all ways that we make the every day moments sacred.  Though there are hallowed moments where we fully direct our thoughts onto God, at the same time there are no moments that are not hallowed.  For the follower of Christ, every moment is sacred, every act is sacred, every situation a place to be a tangible gift to others of His smile, His warm embrace, His nail-pierced hand. 

Even when that Hand is in mine, scrubbing out blobs of toothpaste, picking up a pile of scattered hair clips, and wiping away runny dried up lines of pee going down the side of a toilet, deposited inadvertantly by a young boy who really wants to stand like his big brothers.     

Oh, God.  I really love Your Hands.

Iz and Ji in the tub...