Confusing the Means for the End

Ever meet a guy who works in a pizza place?  Sometines, when you congratulate this fellow on his good fortune to have access to unlimited free deep dish, he replies, “Pizza?  I can’t stand the stuff any more.”

We do this sometimes.  I still like baseball an awful lot, but about fifteen years ago I got in way over my head.  I read every box score.  Could tell you the starting rotation for every Major League team.  Kept track of the top minor league prospects.  I started collecting the cards, and managed to put together a collection that included at every player who ever put on a Brewers uniform.  Calculated all the stats; I used to make a game of calculating the change in a hitters average after every hit or out.  I posted on the message boards, talked baseball waaaaaay too much.  And little by little, as I got more baseball stuff in my house and more baseball stats in my head, something unexpected happenned.  The more baseball claptrap I clouded my life with…the less I watched the games.

Had no idea that was going to happen.  But the tertiary items of the sport, with their lure of controllable ownership, choked off my affection for the game itself.  I’d miss a game on TV to go to a baseball card show.  I’d chase autographs instead of game tickets.   It really surprised me. 

Sometimes I see us do this with Jesus.  We have so much cool Christian stuff.  Take a look at some of the myspace pages linked on this blog and you’ll find list of some of my favorite Christian music.  Flip through my bookshelf and you’ll find Christian authors from Lewis to Miller.  I even used to have this cool “Jonah’s Surf Shop” t-shirt.  There is just so much Christian stuff that can overshadow Jesus.

It goes beyond the music, movies, books & t-shirts.  It can even get to the theology itself.  Like a golfer who gets infatuated with the clubs over the game, or the handyman who enjoys buying tools more than using them.  We can get so caught up in collecting correct theological understandings that we lose focus on who the object of the theology is.  It gets to where we jump headlong into the trap; where instead of worshipping Jesus, we worship truth.  The more pride we take in how much we understand the study of God, the less we may really know him.

I ended up cancelling ESPN.  I stopped buying cards, and gave a lot of them away.  Now my radio plays the ball games,  and I enjoy the actual game rather than all the officially liscenced merchandise.  We need to do the same with Jesus.  Can we still worship him if we aren’t singing along with Casting Crowns?  Can we still listen to him speak to us if we read the verses in our Bibles, instead of the extensive study notes?   I’m still listening to Larry Norman and Derek Webb, but only in an accessory type of fashion.  When we prefer our own books and our own music to his Word and a real worship of God, we fall victim to our own shell game. 

I worry that we invent a Jesus that really is no more than an amalgum of the merchandise we’ve collected and the grade we got in Theology 101. 

 Pray that we can know God for who he is.