El Bastardo

"...God is love. We always assumed that these three words were spoken directly to the four of us in our family and had no reference to the world outside, which my brother and I soon discovered was full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the farther one gets from Missoula, Montana." Norman Maclean - A River Runs Through It

I was working yesterday on the equivalent of the shipping docks for this company. Employees routinely walk through the docks, taking a moment's breather from customers. A guy walked through yesterday and said, "Man, there's a jerk in the footwear department and he's wearing a Jesus t-shirt. And James (named changed to protect the guilty) is about to punch him in the face." James is a fellow employee - smart, fast (a runner), and a cynic when it comes to matters of faith. He knows I used to preach a little and we joke every once in a while about church, etc. I took a moment and peeked into the footwear department to get a glimpse of the situation. Sure enough, some guy wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with big, bold "Jesus Disaster Relief Unit" on it was throwing his weight around about shoes; yeah, shoes. I listened long enough to be reminded that the farther one gets from heaven, be that defined as Missoula, Montana or somewhere over Jordan's stormy banks, the number of bastards does increase rapidly. And many of them have the outward trappings of knowing who Jesus is. They're wearing t-shirts with his name on them, driving cars with little fish on the back, or building homes and churches farther and farther away from a downtown area. Little did disaster relief guy know, but the person helping him select a pair of shoes has an extremely skeptical heart when it comes to anything religious and this could have been an opportunity for James to have experienced Jesus, via a person, in an inviting way. But rather than being someone who provided relief in a disaster, he was creating one by adding yet another layer of hide to a smart, fast, cynical-calloused heart. Stupid bastard with a Jesus t-shirt on. What was he thinking? Obviously, he was not. He thought the moment was all about buying shoes. It wasn't. Bastard.

I got pretty riled up seeing this disaster unfold and started to approach the guy (I was in plain clothes for the day; he wouldn't have known I was an employee) and tell him just what a bastard he is. And then I remembered Will Campbell's gospel-in-a-nutshell: "We're all bastards, but God loves us anyway." My working-on-the-docks moxie subsided a little and I backed up, a humbled bastard myself. Maclean and Campbell are right - God is love...and we're all bastards. And the more aware of that we can be, the better. That goes for the people who have fish decals on their vans and the smart, fast, cynics out there. And the stupid bastards working on the docks. But I can't join hands in the love circle and sing kum-ba-yah too quickly here, for I still believe that the onus is on those of us who claim to know this Jesus. We, in some way, are reflecting who Jesus is or at least we should be. Or what's the point? We've got to have our wits about us and remember that the day is not about a shoe purchase. It's a disaster out there, in here, and we need some relief - some "good news." Rome is burning. Soldiers are dying. Glaciers are melting. Marriages are crumbling. Fourth graders are doing crystal meth. You can't take Gatorade on the airplane. And James is getter faster, but more cynical. And we're griping about shoes. Stupid bastards.