Viva Jesus!

Thanks for all the birthday wishes. I have never in all my life been so inundated with phone calls and best wishes. By the end of the day I was swamped by exhaustion and collapsed into a post birthday coma. I have a family gathering tomorrow night around a spit braai (barbeque for those far off). My wife loves to stoke up a party if she can, but I suppose the ripe age of 40 deserves a thoughtful celebration. Got up early this morning, 4.30am, not so good with anticipating social events, picking up people from airports and all that kind of thing.

I was given Bonhoeffer’s book on Christology which I am plowing through. “For the working class world, Christ seems to be settled with the church and the bourgeois society. There is no longer any reason why the worker should encounter Jesus Christ. The church is all one with the fossilized sanctions of the capitalist system…. Up with Jesus, down with the Church.” He had his suspicions about the church being the purveyors of God’s way. The church too often bolsters up the status quo. It does this by stopping to ask the critical questions of itself and its new clothing. Why should we have any encounter with the risen Christ when our social world is idealized and classified as Christian. When we the church have ordained this society as good, why meet with the risen Christ? It is to hide with leaf and choice bitten fruit again. To run away from the shame of calling our way Godly and our systems ordained. Let Jesus rock our church, our world, our capitalist structures, not with worship bands but by the dismantled gloss and dross of our idealized world. To hear the revolutionary speech of the risen Lord, to undress, take off the uniforms of the world, and put back on our naked selves the clothing of Christ.