What if “upside down” was really a bit of a misnomer? What if it’s our world and our kingdoms that are all a bit upside down? If everything I’m saying here is true, and I really hope that it is, then our way of being is the one that’s all out of whack. If we broke the world by trusting ourselves instead of God and we have the right to restore it as heirs of the Kingdom of Christ, then we’re heirs to a Kingdom greater than we ever imagined and our journey to get there is actually about re-orienting our lives so that we will be fit citizens.

Jesus shows us, in the most remarkable and backwards way, that our rights and responsibilities don’t always play out like we think they will. If we’re going to use him as our example, then we’re going to have to give up some of our rights, like those to being treated with dignity and respect. We’re going to have to take on responsibilities that we may think are beneath us, like learning something the long way around from someone we wouldn’t choose to learn from. We’re going to have to suffer the consequences of our actions, especially when we didn’t do anything wrong. Even though we have certain rights and responsibilities, we cannot walk around like we own the place. Jesus actually did own the place, but he certainly didn’t act like it, at least in the traditional sense.

I’m going to walk us through my thoughts on these topics in light of my experience in Radford and what I’ve learned on the other side. I hope to give you courage and hope as you deal with your own painful experiences in the church or faith communities. I hope to shed some light on the ways that evangelical Christianity is really invested in rights and responsibilities, but they’ve got the whole thing backwards, as usual. Finally, I hope that, with a look at Jesus, we can be empowered and encouraged to step forward into our rights as citizens of the Kingdom of heaven and put this place back together.

This is it for Jesus’ disciples. They said that they would die with him. They said they’d never deny him. But I don’t think they saw this coming. I don’t think they believed that the religious leaders would have the last say with Jesus. They’d seen too much. They not only knew, but really believed that they were following the Son of God around. How could he be arrested and convicted on false charges in a questionable courtroom? Much less, how could he be killed? The wages of sin is death, not the wages of righteousness. What was going on?!

I don’t know about you, but I find myself right here in this story. For context, Moses is out here in the wilderness because he ran away from Egypt as a young man after committing murder. He killed an Egyptian slave driver for mistreating an Israelite. He didn’t think that anyone saw, but they did. When he found out, he ran as far and as fast as he could and ended up in the wilderness for, he thought, the rest of his life.

I can almost see her now, cowering, coming out from behind whoever was her shield. We don’t know her name, but we know that she, too, was at Jesus’ feet. She fell down at his feet and the language here indicates that she told him not only that she had touched him, but her whole, sad story. She told him how she had been suffering from bleeding that wouldn’t stop for twelve long years. She told him how she’d been ostracized by her entire family, community, and society in general for being “unclean”. She told him how the very people who were supposed to help and heal her, in this case doctors, had taken all her money and left her worse than she had been before (sound familiar?? I’m still looking straight at you Southern Baptists).

She sat at his feet and told Jesus the whole story and, even though there was an emergency situation going on, Jesus listened. He didn’t stop her. He listened and he told her, “your faith has saved you. Go in peace.”

And the sooner that you realize that you can’t work or sacrifice your way into the Kingdom of God, the sooner you’ll realize how sick you are and how desperately you need a doctor to show you mercy. Then, you’ll go and do likewise.

God is not a God of rules. God is not a God of “us vs. them”. He’s a God of mystery. He’s a God of belonging. He made a freaking platypus. And supernovas. And trees that flower in the springtime. He loves beauty and laughter and rainbows and sun on the leaves. He loves you and me and the guy down the street without a home. And he wants us all, every last one, to trust him, not the rules.

The Bible, and, thus, the Christian faith, is chock full of mystery and grey area. Again, this doesn’t mean that there is nothing solid or unshakable. It means that the solid and unshakable things are so solid and so unshakable that they support the mystery and the grey area. You can stand firm on the essentials and allow for varying degrees of uncertainty in all else. You can even change your mind.

The reason that you, that I, struggle to follow Jesus is that deep down we’re uncomfortable with the fact that he is in control, not us. We’re uncomfortable with the fact that, as C.S. Lewis says, he’s a little bit wild. However, I also need you to know that it’s not all our fault. Many of us have been a part of households and communities of faith whose theology wasn’t much more than a golden calf. We have been part of churches that looked less like the Kingdom of God and more like a whitewashed version of the late-20th century American dream. They deified individualism, adventure, and “finding God’s will for your life”, but they didn’t consider that the God who rescued Israel from slavery in Egypt is kinda wild. He sent swarms of locusts and turned a whole river into BLOOD. You can’t box him into any kind of dream that you came up with on your own.