Kingly Identity

I've been drawn to the story in the paper the last few days about a nurse's aid from Pennsylvania recently crowned king of a small country in Africa. Can you believe it?! One day you're taking orders from a boss, punching a time clock and the next day you're a king! You can read the full story here, but the parallel to the Christian story is remarkable.

Philippians 2 talks about Jesus "being in very nature God" but gave that all up to become a human servant. In other words, Jesus relinquished his rights to the Throne of the Universe to become a human servant of others. The Jesus story of Philippians 2 ends with Jesus re-assuming his rightful royal position but having left an example for us to follow. Paul put it this way, "do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit but in humility consider others better than yourselves... your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus." (Philippians 2:3-5)

The Jesus Way is full of upside down logic like this. Jesus says if you want to find yourself, you need to lose yourself. He says the last shall be first. In the Jesus Way the servant way is the kingly way.

Perhaps if I lived with a clearer inner assurance of my true identity as a royal heir of Jesus' kingdom I wouldn't feel so compelled to pound the table and demand my rights. Perhaps if I lived in the daily reality that I am a child of the King, I wouldn't complain so much when I don't get my way.

I suppose it won't be long until Charles Wesley Mumbere's story becomes a Disney movie. And when it does, I'll probably be one of the first in line. In the meantime, I resolve to live more kingly myself - right here in my real life now.

just a fad???

A friend of mine posted this video on his Twitter account today. As an immigrant to the digital world, I continually struggle to speak the language of social media which is native to my children. While I am grateful for the stabilizing influence the church can, and perhaps should, exercise within a dynamically shifting culture, there seems to be a disconnect between the burgeoning world just outside our door and the kinds of conversations we have within. For the last several weeks I've received angry comment cards from a beloved church member about why I still haven't capitalized the word "god" on my "if god twittered" sermon series PowerPoint slides. Before that it was an outcry week after week over why we were using the words "sin and sinners" in the Lord's Prayer rather than "debts and debtors." No wonder the church is increasingly irrelevant to people who haven't grown up within it. Why does the church always seem to be about five steps behind in the conversation?