Visit your nearest art studio, and you’ll find painters and sculptors at work in their dimly lit or playfully bright caverns of creativity. Paint spatters. Hardened clay. Discarded canvases. Copper wires splayed akimbo, awaiting hands to guide into some recognizable (or perhaps unrecognizable) shape.
Mythologist Martin Shaw writes, “[Artists know] that art constructed in our parents’ house is often bland and rather untested.” Sometimes it takes a little weirdness, a little out of the ordinary to make anything worth contemplating.
If that can be said of art, it can also be said of life. It takes a little weirdness to make a life worth living.
For too long in the west, we’ve seen Christianity as a forgettable, quaint chapel. A place of stolid tradition, but not wildness. This is not entirely wrong. We’ve all taken rest in the church’s embrace, under the covers of her ancient books and well-trod liturgies.
But something can be two things at once. Christianity can be both priest and beast, something respectable and wild, a home for tradition and an artist’s studio. A place of weird and wild wilderness, where everyone exiled from the home-of-this-world can find respite. A home-of-the-next-age, if you will.
After all, who could be less at home in our secular, self-absorbed, materialistic, over-entertained, over-served, over-fed, frenetic, jilting, dislocated, dislocating, hyper-technological, always-progressing, earth-destroying, ancestor-hating, family-denying culture than a windburned rabbi who spent forty days in the desert wilderness without food, comforted only by the words of his ancestors, attended to by wild animals, taking counsel with angels, resisting the dark energy which animates the home-of-this-world?
Jesus was weird.
Just consider. He challenged the beloved rulers of our age: self-indulgence, love of money, self-absorption, love of power, over-consumption. He took all that material comfort and sent it packing so he could die naked on a cross instead.
Weird, right?
The home-of-this-world is rotten. There is mold in the walls. It has taught us one ignoble skill: how to want. How to want more, more, more. How to take more, more, more. How to be more, more, more.
More, more, more is the logic of cancer, not heaven.
If we want to live an artful life, a beautiful life, then we must abandon our old home and take up residence in the great studio of the spirit, with its paint spattered prayer caves and kilns that fire souls. At its entrance stands a raucous fountain of mad prophets and foolish apostles, whose spray of ink and water makes even the foulest man clean. On the walls hang canvases that sing,
Once the sun stood still. Once men walked through flames. Once children woke from the dead. Once angels spoke to virgins. Once demons dug their claws into the souls of men and a liberator set them free. Once, prophets heard the voice of God. Once, a bush burned and was not consumed and it spoke a name, ‘I am.’
As we pass them, we come to discover that once upon a time sometimes becomes today. If only you have a little faith and a little wildness in your soul. That’s why, if you walk these halls long enough, you’ll go mad. At least by the standards of the house-of-this-world. But that’s okay. Because the house-of-this-world is, in fact, a nightmare house. An Amityville horror. The kind of house that eats its young. Not with fangs but anesthetics. Our house is animated not by hot evil—masked men wielding chainsaws—but cold evil—poison apples that cause unyielding sleep.
In the Odyssey, Odysseus meets a cold evil. His crew lands on the island of the Lotus Eaters where men spend their days eating honeyed lotus fruit. Odysseus’s men see no threat in such innocent delights, so they join in. And once they start, they can’t stop. It’s an endless scroll. As they consume, they forget their pain, anxiety, and fear. But they also forget their homes. Their wives and children. Deep joy, belly laughs, and all that makes life rambunctious and good.
It’s trade-off few can refuse, which is perhaps why lotus eating is our culture’s dream. Sweet anesthetization. A dream of screens and substances that frees us from obligation, numbs us to pain, and delivers us into the heavenly everlasting comfort of entertainment and material possessions. But that new car never quite delivers on the promise. Nor the new clothes. Nor the night spent binging Instagram. So, the dream whispers: just a little more and you’ll finally live happily ever after. Like zombies we assent, and lift yet another poison fruit to our lips.
I for one, want to wake up from that nightmare. I want to leave the house-of-this-world behind. I want to find that grand cathedral of weirdness where disreputable exiles and starving rabbis talk to animals and angels. To do that, I must leave behind my respectable, American Dream vision of the good life and surrender myself to the man who said to those who wished to follow him, “Foxes have holes, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head.”
Jesus was a wild man. He slept in the wilderness. You know that, don’t you?
Becoming like him will not be like visiting a spa. It will be like bushwhacking for days and emerging from the woods with twigs in your hair, fur on your skin, and depth in your heart. If you want to awaken the unkempt, wild, holy man or woman inside you—the one you exiled long ago to have a respectable, comfortable, monster-house life—then there is no path but weirdness.
You must believe some strange things.
And do them, too.
You must lean into what makes us Jesus-following people weird. You’ll take some lumps along the way. By the end of a few years in Jesus’s hands you’ll find burrs in your soul’s socks, thorns in your side, cuts in your hands, and earth in your teeth. But you’ll be you. The you God made you to be, not the you the home-of-this-world groomed you to be—the you it plans to devour.
You’ll be the you who can laugh and play, and speak surprising words of wisdom, and give freely without gritted teeth. Your clothes will stink to high heaven with the smell of innumerable fires at Christ’s side in the woods of wild souls: the sacred smoke of sacrifice, his first and later yours. Breathe in deep. Can you smell the watch fire in the distance? That’s the smell of invitation. Of initiation. Of a threshold which must be crossed, so that one day you can return remade.
It’s impossible to follow Jesus and be considered normal. Why? Because Jesus was weird. He didn’t abide by the cultural norms or conform to people’s expectations. And his kingdom’s values don’t jive with our culture’s values. So how will you live in response?
Check out recent messages from The Crossing's current sermon series: Keep Christianity Weird.
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