A couple of months ago I herd a sermon from Tony Campolo (famous preacher, author type guy). In it he told a very entertaining story of how he visited a church somewhere in America and when he went into the youth lounge he was shocked (and somewhat offended) to find a picture of Jesus on the wall that had been painted by one of the young people; the picture depicted Jesus as a black Rasta style guy.
Personally, I find that rather amusing (maybe I shouldn’t) but Tony wasn’t impressed. When he challenged the group with, Jesus wasn’t wasn’t a Rasta (or something like that) they responded with; no, probably not, but he wasn’t white either….
The point of the story was to ask the question; which Jesus is the Church ’selling’? He was suggesting that the Jesus of most evangelical churches in the U.S. was a white, middle class, republican. I’m not really in a position to comment on that observation but it is a question that I believe is worth asking.
Does the Jesus we worship, and the Good News we spread, match up with the Jesus of the Bible. Are we really sharing Jesus of Nazareth or, as Shawn of Low-Fi tribe drew to our attention, Jesus of Suburbia. Do we even know enough about the Jesus of the Bible to be able to make a comparison?
