The dirty Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life of the Father
Some more notes from Dangerous Stories - this time covering Daryl Gardiner’s input
Book titles I’ve thought of writing:
“Failures and stuff-ups of 25 years of ministry”
“Bastards that I have met” and the first chapter will be an autobiography. The second chapter is a mirror with the title “The second worst bastard.” Then the third will be titled, “Pharisees, Sadducees, Board members and pastors.”
When we look back at church history, we paint a pretty extreme and negative picture of Pharisees, when all they were doing was trying to protect the Jewish religious culture and keep the nation strong.
Do you know the most dangerous time to be a woman in NZ is Christmas. The woman’s refuge is overflowing at this time: filled with children escaping violent fathers and women fleeing abusive partners. The time we celebrate Jesus coming to earth, the time we organise the big christmas carols. This last christmas in the news was the ongoing story about a move to remove ‘Christ’ from the holidays. Instead of Merry Christmas, it would just be happy holidays. Naturally all the Christians got upset about this. It is a similar response to what the Pharisees would have said.
I would have to say: we don’t want Christ associated with Christmas, because women get abused. We don’t want people thinking that celebrating Jesus is about beating up women. Do you know what the nativity scene in front of your church has anything to do with Christmas?
My daughter asked me “What was Christmas really like? Didn’t the animals smelt?”
If you think about it, that first Christmas involved lots of itchy straw and shit all over the ground. A birth is very messy. There was probably lots of flies also. And remember Mary was a teenager, and there was no birthing units, and no epidurals.
I think the hero of the story was Joseph. Joseph hadn’t had sex with her, and probably hadn’t even pashed her. (He wasn’t a typical NZ guy). He’s about to marry her and Mary tells him she’s pregnant and… that she’s pregnant to God.
We have to de-sanitise church. People outside the church have lots of shit going on in their lives. In church we have a list of shitty things. But we often come across as a clean happy and perfect place and people.
Second thing, we know life is messy. Most Christian men particularly over 40s are perverts. They are because they have to pretend they are not sexually turned on. I’m the worst counsellor. Soon after a person starts talking to me, I go off to a happy land where they are not. But if a man comes to see me about an issue, and after a while of drifting off, I just say they are perverts, and they agree and I haven’t heard what they had to say at all.
We live in the sanitised Christian world. And sometimes we even think that Jesus doesn’t want to know about our dirty bits.
Occasionally you see on the news about Christian teens at big Christian band concerts. When they interview the teens, they generally give the same response: “Just because we are Christians, doesn’t mean we can’t be cool as everybody else.”
I don’t think Christians were ever meant to be cool. They were meant to be dangerous. When you are cool, you are constantly performing. It is very hard. You have to dress, and look and sanitise yourself to be cool, to ensure you are cool. Most young people know they have tried, and they know their lives are messy. But we still give them the sanitised stable.
The teens knows they can never be a sanitised people. But when I tell them about the shitty stable and how he continues to live with us in the shitty world, they get some hope. We are not the Brady Bunch, or the Crosby Show, etc.
In a lot of churches, we’ve replaced radical discipleship with easy socialisation.
George Thoroogood sang a song “Get a haircut and get a real job.” To be a Christian is to do the same. To not be messy. To be straight about your haircut and your sexuality and every other aspect of your life.
We have a whole culture of dishonesty in Christianity.
Recently in the news was the story about Ted Haggard, one of the key Christian leaders in the Evangelical movement in the US, and was often railing against homosexuality, who was exposed as having gay sex. I think the real scandal was that none of the other evangelical leaders recognised he had a problem. When he resigned, I reckon the others should have resigned. They were suppose to be supporting each other.
I was at a big Christian teen concert. At those events, generally almost all the young people answer the altar call, but two weeks later, they’re back in the same crap again. So it was clear what I had to say: “If you really accept Jesus, nothing else has changed. A little bit of you has. But you will continue to have the same problems. If you’re having problems with your girlfriend, that’s still going to be there.”
We love the sanitised story and Jesus, but we need to get back to the dirty Jesus.
Of course, Jesus was dirty. He was a carpenter, and he wandered around a lot on foot.
You’re looking at a dirty Daryl. And we are all struggling. It is time we went back to the real story.
Jesus who was born in a stable. He doesn’t want a sanitised Jesus, he like it that women get bashed on his birthday. He doesn’t want young people to be struggling two weeks later after they make a decision for him. He wants to be associated with those who are strugglign with their sexuality, and their dirtiness because he doesn’t live in a sanitised stable. He knows we are as dirty as we think we are, and he knows we are dirtier than we think we are. And he is slowly and surely empowering me to be the person I’m supposed to be, but not by myself. It is a lifetime process. So that I am a little better now than 27 years ago when I started this ministry.
If you have a sanitised clean home, you have to do so much to keep it clean, and it’s a lot of effort.
Dirty Jesus probably wants to get rid of the hierarchial stuff. The sanitised Jesus doesn’t exist in our world except in our churches and mission organisations that care more about not offending sponsors than focussing on the work of God.
There was a mission organisation that had a person recently appointed on staff from a different sexuality baackground. “You better not fall sexually as it will reflect badly on the rest of us.” I looked at the person that said that and thought to myself that what you really mean to say was “You hope that what you are like never comes out.”
The PR Jesus sanitised everything.
We can meet with the real Jesus. You can share with our communion on one, and only one, condition - you must be a sinner.
But by the power of Jesus, he can change us. We can hear good stories. I’m surprised at how boring most Christians are. When you talk to them they tell stories about the new kitchen, or the car; and everything in me wants to scream out, this is so bloody boring. Get me out!
The dirty Jesus enables you to have real stories, to have dangerous stories.
So, even if you have stuff-ups and you’re a bastard, you can still meet Jesus. In the end for me, I’ll be very happy if I can hear those words “well done, good and faithful servant” - actually I’ll be very happy to get there at all.
But when I get there I will be meeting a dirty Jesus, not a sanitised one. The dirty jesus connects with the marginalised. Samuel Marsden, the first pastor to the Maori’s, said that he wanted to civilised the people first, to sanitise them before they received the good news of Jesus. I think the dirty Jesus would have wanted to honour the original inhabitants first.
Let me end with a Maori chant:
The dirty Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life of the Father.