Jesus verdict on the smug religious barons of his day

'Instead of giving you God's Law as food and drink by which you can banquet on God, they package it in bundles of rules, loading you down like pack animals. They seem to take pleasure in watching you stagger under these loads, and wouldn't think of lifting a finger to help. Their lives are perpetual fashion shows, embroidered prayer shawls one day and flowery prayer shawls the next. They love to sit at the head table at church dinners, basking in the most prominent positions, preening in the radiance of public flattery, receiving honorary degrees, and getting called 'Doctor' and Reverend.'
(Matthew 23:4-7 The Message)

Reading the letters between Adrian Plass and Jeff Lucas really makes me laugh out loud! That's something I don't get to do often, more a smile usually. But these two are also refreshingly honest about life on the Way of Jesus.


Jeff Lucas quotes this in one of his letters to Adrian Plass. They were discussing the forest of clichés, 'the verbal mazes that we create with our jargon and slogans'. Jesus must be more than a little irritated when we 'take what should be a pathway and turn it into a maze that would not look out of place at Hampton Court.'
Adrian speaks of the 'addictions and single-issue fanaticisms that men and women are prone to embrace.' Many of these obsessions can suggest quite laudable concerns with spiritual matters. 'End times, healing, miracles, praise and worship, tradition, language, styles of churchmanship, funny voices, human optimism; all of these things and many more can be used as substitutes for scary encounters with the God who functions as a genuine, unaffected, relaxed presence in environments where the fake uniforms and brassy bling of churchy rubbish haven't got a chance.'

These things lead us astray because they are not meant to be objects of our love. 'They are supposed to be the means by which we find our way into the presence of  this God who might actually exist(!) and be waiting for followers of Jesus to bottom out into being who they are, and truly, honestly, fearfully follow him into bus shelters and palaces and shopping malls and slums and wine-bars and launderettes and our own kitchens and sitting rooms, with no false armour, and somehow live with feeling so naked that we need him desperately.'
With our refreshed eyes newly opened we may see what he might do through us 'when we give up Christianity and follow him.'