Micro-Church DNA Continued:Who is Jesus?

"The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the son of God." Gospel of Mark 1:1.  The micro-church is evangelical.  But it is not evangelical in the political, Americanized, televised sense of the word.  It is evangelical because it is formed as a result of the gospel announcement made by Jesus, embodied by Jesus, and concerning the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.  The gospel is the announcement about God's rule and its implications for all creation and especially humankind, a public announcement that occurred in 1st century Palestine/Israel through the ministry of Jesus.  The micro-church consists of people who have been captivated, inspired, changed, and called to act by and in response to Jesus.  The life of the micro-church is found in the story of Jesus.  That story is offered four ways, but four witnesses, four storytellers, four narrators. They tell unique aspects of one story.  Much of what each says overlaps and complements the other narratives.  Some differences give unique character and flavor to the stories.  These gospels are not biographies, so much as personal accounts of Jesus and the people he encounters along the way.  They are also theophanies, revealing or showing the world something of the divine or of God's identity and character.  Jesus and God the father are consistent characters in the narrative of the gospels.  To the gospel writers the God who is present and revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures appears in the work and teachings of Jesus.
For the micro-church, encountering this Jesus in the narrative of the gospels and in the unfolding of life's story, is a core part of who we are and what we are called to be and do as church.  Jesus is not an historical figure or a hero of faith or a martyr.  Jesus is God's son, the lamb of God, the good shepherd, the light of the world, and the resurrection and life.  Jesus is the way, to live and to die. Jesus is what life is about.  The meaning of life is the story of Jesus, who shows us what it means to live a full and complete human life in full and complete union with God.  Why is Jesus so central to a micro-church's dna? There are other things that shape modern churches, including human traditions, building designs, cultures and languages. Jesus is included in these things, too.  But to say that Jesus and the gospels were coopted for the purposes of Constantinian religion is an understatement.   More about that in a bit...
       

When I was a boy, my dad used to read the Good News translation of the bible to me at bed time.  I remember the funny little stick drawings of Jesus and lepers, Jesus and demoniacs, Jesus and the blind beggar.  Pictures of Jesus touching people somehow stuck in my sub-conscious as I was formed in Lutheran Christian faith. What was it about that Jesus, the compassionate Jesus, the merciful healer, that caught my attention?  And years later, how did those stories shape my understanding of Jesus of Nazareth?
In the 20th century, the historical Jesus movement emerged as a quest to demythologize the gospels and dig out a more pristine Jesus, free from later editing and doctrinal matters.  What emerges is a rather sage, liberal arts professor Jesus who seems to lecture about God, as opposed to bearing the identity and character of GOD in His person.  If you come at Jesus believing that he is not God and did not purport himself to be God, then the Jesus you find is human, compassionate and sacrificial.  But human.

In college, I began to explore questions of faith, including the person of Jesus as portrayed in the biblical narrative.  We have little to no extra-biblical record of Jesus, except the extra-canonical materials found in the desert in the mid-20th century which spurned the historical Jesus quest.  Like archaeologists searching for lost treasure, scientific inquiry and the social sciences began to piece together Jesus.  I followed their maps, putting together some of the pieces of the puzzle with them.  It helped that I was a religious studies major at a Lutheran university.  I was immersed in these grail quests, to find out which Jesus was the real Jesus.  First century Jewish Jesus, shaped by 2nd temple Judaism, Jewish apocalyptic, and oppressive Roman occupation?  Peasant Jesus, shaped by his social position as an illegitimate son of a young woman and a carpenter in a small Galilean village?  Revolutionary Jesus, shaped by zealots and prophets as an advocate for justice who was willing to die for the cause of freedom?
Jesus is, after all, depicted in the gospels.  The gospels are telling a story of salvation rooted in Hebrew Scriptures.  They are written by men who were inspired by Jesus to continue His ministry and teachings decades after Jesus was crucified.    Then, when the early church emerged it survived religious persecution and the negotiation for acceptance with Judaism and Paganism.  By the 3rd century Christianity had arisen to dominate the religious landscape.  The Emperor Constantine ratified the position Christianity had assumed in greco-roman culture. The state-church relationship and the issues with power that proceeded out of it would dominate Christianity until the 20th century.  Western Europe and North America were principally dominated by Christian religious culture, despite having been capsized by the age of modernity and its movement away from divinely revealed knowledge and toward empirical, self-centered ways of knowing and understanding life in the world.
But now, even as the church in the west faces an uncertain future, Jesus is popular.  From magazines to movies, postmodern culture is fascinated with the story of Jesus.  As doctrine and dogmatic statements that polarize and isolate become part of an abandoned past, many people are interested in getting to know the gospel narratives.  Jesus' death and resurrection provoke our attention, especially when we hear how our anxieties about meaning and death collide with the cross and tomb narrative.  Micro-churches will be full of people who are seeking to know Jesus and tell the story of how His story and my story and our human story transect to tell the story of God.