"Jesus Weird" (Becoming Naturally Supernatural III)

Not only did John Wimber talk about taking risks, he also helped popularize the phrase “naturally-supernatural.” To be naturally-supernatural is to make present the Reign of God in down-to-earth ways, like praying for someone without using weird religious language that leaves them needlessly confused. And being naturally-supernatural is a further part of our practice of hospitality.[1]

As we create space for others, we inhabit a middle ground in which we don’t shy away from spiritual things. We remember, for example, that people of peace are probably attracted to us because of our spirituality. But at the same time, we attend to their sense of safety, posturing ourselves in a way that they feel included, not excluded, by how we talk about God. Even as we are generous in sharing our stories of faith or in how we pray for others, we don’t pretend that we have all the answers. We use normal language to describe spiritual life, and we listen to and learn from the stories of others. 

My friend Alex Absalom talks about the difference between being “religious-weird” and “Jesus-weird.”[2] Religious-weird is confusing or off-putting. It’s often marked by legalism or over-the-top excess in how we talk about God. It may be colored by an orientation toward being right but without the empathy, compassion, or emotional vulnerability that communicates Jesus’ presence. It is often branded with insider language, what some people call “Christianese.” 

Generally speaking, I consider the off-putting message of manipulative televangelists to be religious-weird.“Sow your miracle seed [translation: give my ministry money] and God will give you unending miracles.” Often, at the heart of religious-weird is some sort of formula that’s ultimately rooted in The Human Paradigm: if you “do” faith right (“sow your seed,” for example) you’ll be able to make God bless you. Religious-weird, at its extreme, turns God into a gumball machine and faith into a formula. Thus, religious-weird is ultimately not primarily rooted in empathy or relationship. I have been in many situations in which it seemed that the pursuit of the gifts of the Holy Spirit were more important than the Holy Spirit Himself, or where “spiritual” people were so arrogant that they had little room left for love or compassion. Pride is a covering for insecurity, and so is being religious-weird. 

“Jesus-weird” is different. It’s primarily relational, so that even when it’s uncomfortable or outside the norm, it’s still welcoming, an invitation to a spirituality anchored in love.

A few months ago I had to have a vulnerable conversation with one of my neighbors (also a person of peace) that began with me saying, “Okay, so I may be making this up, but it seems to me that you are mad at me.” Both my friend and his wife sort of blinked and looked at each other, because they had been pretending everything was okay, even though I could tell it wasn’t. It feels strange and a bit scary to engage in a conversation like this when everything in my play-it-safe ego screams, “Avoid emotional vulnerability!” But Jesus asks us to do uncomfortable things. My friends responded well to my bringing up the unspoken conversation, and I think they did because they sensed the love behind it, even though it was uncomfortable. Real relationship in Jesus’ name will always demand fierce, honest conversations, and that’s hardly ever comfortable. It’s weird, but it’s Jesus-weird, which is always good (even if it’s weird). When love is present, weird doesn’t feel weird, even if it feels uncomfortable. God-breathed compassion is always stronger than our human discomfort. I always tell people, “If people get that you love them and care for them, you can say anything, even if it’s hard, and it will be okay.” 

After all, Jesus asked people to do all sorts of unusual—and no doubt uncomfortable—things. He took great risks for others, putting them in uncomfortable situations, like spitting into the eyes of a blind man and even praying for people who weren’t healed.[3] When Zacchaeus had Jesus over, I’m sure it wasn’t totally comfortable for ol' Zach to have Jesus look deeply into his eyes, knowing that Jesus knew the deception that lay behind them. But it was also natural, done over a meal, a shared experience that was a normal part of their daily life. 

We get to pursue being naturally-supernatural—being Jesus-weird—for the people in our lives. It’s a posture of hope that we embrace as we seek to take risks in love. If you are focusing on caring for the person in front of you as Jesus was, you will be empowered to take risks in order to love well. When we talk about being “Jesus-weird,” we are ultimately talking about growing in empathy and compassion. 

Compassion can’t grow within us through our willpower alone, but we can open ourselves up to God through unhurriedness, prayer, and any other spiritual practice so that the Holy Spirit has space to work in our being, bringing forth the fruit of love.[4] This is what The Slow Life and The Grounded Life are all about. And really, a bit of weirdness is a welcome relief from the routine tyranny of the everyday-expected, because who wants life to be boring?

My wife and I were recently standing in our driveway when our neighbor Cindy came outside. We started chatting about the neighborhood and about her son’s new motorcycle and all the sort of wonderfully mundane stuff that neighbors get to talk about in our slow, sunset-infused cadences. In the course of our conversation, Cindy shared that her foot and ankle were really bothering her, and she was going to have to go see the doctor. I said to her, “Could we pray for your foot? I know this might sound strange, but we’ve seen all sorts of people get healed or feel better when they are prayed for.” I felt a bit nervous, wondering how she would take this. But she just said, “Sure, sounds good.” We placed our hands on her shoulder and prayed a very simple prayer: “Jesus, thank you for Cindy. Thank you for how you know and love her. We pray now that her foot would be better and that you would bless her richly in your love.” Or something like that. She said, “thanks,” and we kept on talking about mundane, everyday stuff. 

Even though she wasn’t instantly healed, I’m hoping that our willingness to pray for her communicated love and care, and that it perhaps touched her heart, even if the prayer didn’t heal her body. This is the posture Becca and I want to live into: we want to take risks in how we love, just as Jesus did. Like him, we want to become naturally-supernatural. 

For all of these readings in one place, order my book 'Learning to Live and Love Like Jesus.'

[1] See ‘Chapter 10, The Slow Life: Hospitality.’

[2] See, for example, a sermon given at Long Beach Christian Fellowship:

http://www.lbcf.org/sermon/luke-on-discipleship-naturally-supernatural/ [6/20/17]

[3] John 9:1-12, Mark 6:5. 

[4] Galatians 5:22.

The Holy Spirit Does Crazy Things (Becoming Naturally-Supernatural II)

The Holy Spirit also does crazy things. We should expect this as we seek to love in Jesus’ name. Here are two stories that I can tell, personally. 

When I was seventeen, I went on a retreat with a youth group and decided that what I was experiencing in my faith could not be what was meant by “having a personal relationship with Jesus,” a phrase I heard all the time and to which I had basically become inoculated. So I prayed, believing there was more to be experienced. I mean, if the God of the universe cared about me and you could have a relationship with Him, what did that look like? It certainly had to look different than my current life, a large part of which consisted of trying really hard not to watch pornography, then watching pornography, then trying really hard not to watch pornography. I was committed to not pretending anymore, because I felt like my Christianity didn’t run very deep, even though I sincerely believed in Jesus. I was already tired of trying to be a “good Christian” and of the failure and hypocrisy I felt beneath the surface. I needed to know that God was truly there. As I prayed, walking alone along the cold, neon-drenched streets of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, I said, “I know there’s more, God, and I know You are going to show me now. Because I can’t do this anymore.” My discontent anchored me into a prayer that was born, all at once, of dissatisfaction, faith, and resolve. And so I waited. 

A few weeks later, a friend took me to a Bible study, where I sat in the back of a room of fifty or sixty people listening to Joe, a Bible teacher unlike any I’d ever heard, talk about shame. At the end of the study, Joe had everyone bow their heads to pray. I dutifully did the same, as I had done a thousand times before. But suddenly, as Joe prayed, I felt something leave my body through the top of my head. This is hard to describe, but it was like a wave of energy being pulled like a handkerchief out of a pocket, followed by a sudden emptiness. “What on earth?” I thought with alarm, my body tensing. But right after it happened, Joe stopped mid-word in his prayer and said, “Wait, hold on. Someone was just delivered from a spirit of shame.” 

Okay, seriously… what? Joe couldn’t see me; I was leaning over on my knees in my chair at the back of the room, and even if he had, how could he know what had just happened? Somehow, he had sensed a change of spiritual energy in the room. But what in the world was a “spirit of shame?”[1]

I freaked out. Or I would have, if I’d had the time. Everything was suddenly moving in slow motion, as if all the adrenaline in my body had released. I could feel and hear my heartbeat pumping blood through my body, echoing in my ears. I had trouble moving, like a thick blanket was resting on me, or like I was stuck in Jell-O. I raised my hand and stopped the proceedings, saying, “I don’t know what’s happening, but…something’s happening to me.” 

Joe said, “Praise God!” and came over, laying his hands on my head before he started to pray for me. He spoke in tongues, which I had never heard before, and then he started praying in words I understood: “God has heard your prayer. He’s seen every prayer you’ve made, your desire for more. And He is your Father.” I started crying. And then (how do I describe this?), waves of energy coursed through my body. It literally overpowered me so that I had to get out of my chair and onto the floor. And I wept. Not because the encounter was so physically powerful and comforting (though it was), but because in that moment, I knew it was all true: God was good and real and loving. Every sensation in mind, body, and spirit was of pure, overpowering love. There was a reality behind all the Bible stories and all the doctrine and theology I had been taught. There was something—rather, Someone—True and Good behind it all. 

I wish that this sort of thing happened every week. But it doesn’t. I’ve never experienced anything quite like it, before or since (though it did open my senses to the Holy Spirit in a new way). But that night, that encounter changed my life.

When we read the New Testament, it’s clear that this sort of experience was completely normal. And normative. In the early church, regular encounter with the Holy Spirit was just “how it was.” Paul expected people to be filled with the Spirit in radical ways.[2] We, on the other hand, tend to view anything outside the norm as “too weird.” Furthermore, our expectation of encounter today is usually dumbed down by a general suspicion within Christianity (and certainly within Protestantism) of personal experience. There’s a fear that we're all going to start putting too much emphasis on subjective experience and not enough on Scripture. In a post-Enlightenment Christianity that’s supremely concerned with objective truth and with maintaining the undisputed authority of Scripture, this is a huge concern.[3] It’s easy to look at experience askance, as though it’s something not to be trusted and possibly something to be dismissed entirely. But the problem is, that’s not what we see in Scripture itself! Indeed, when we read the Bible, it’s full of people having experiences with God. Think of Paul on the Damascus Road: it was an encounter that transformed him in a way that Scripture never did, even though he knew the Hebrew Scripture as well as his most zealous contemporaries.[4] The Bible is full of similar examples of radical encounter. 

Perhaps, then, we should simply expect more? Perhaps expectation is part of the path to encounter? My experience with God increasingly leads me to conclude that we should expect the unexpected. Case in point: one more story, this one about my big toe. 

About a year after the encounter at the Bible study, I had an ingrown toenail that I could not get to go away. I was afraid I might have to have surgery because it was constantly infected. One Sunday, I went to a church gathering and the pastor said, “We’re going to do something different this morning. We're going to ask anybody in our congregation who has a sense of what we need to pray for to just speak it out. Because we see in the Scripture that the Holy Spirit will direct us what to pray for. It’s called a word of knowledge.” 

I sat there thinking, “This is weird, but at least it should be entertaining.” People started saying, “I feel like we’re supposed to pray for X. I feel like we’re supposed to pray for Y.” Then somebody stood up and said, “I know this is strange, but in my mind I keep seeing this picture of a big toe and I feel like we’re supposed to pray for someone’s big toe.”

I immediately raised my hand and said, “That’s me!”, my alacrity surprising even myself. The man walked over and put his hand on my toe and, in front of the entire congregation, prayed that my toe would be healed. And…

Nothing happened. 

Well, nothing happened right in that moment. But within two days, my toe got better. After twelve months, the problem simply disappeared. 

I don’t get this, truth be told. My mind has, at points, gotten completely knotted trying to understand this sort of thing. There are many things we pray for that don’t seem to get resolved, certainly not in the manner we would like or on our preferred timeline. There are starving children all around the world, for goodness’ sake. And here I am getting my toe healed? How does that make any sense?

And yet, God cares about my toe. I am reminded of Jesus’ words, “The very hairs on your head are all numbered.”[5] So while I can’t make sense of it in my brain, my heart is open to the reality of a God who sees and knows and breaks through in whatever ways He can (or that He’s allowed to break through), to bring life and wholeness.[6] I don’t understand all these things. I don’t understand how that particular prayer in Gatlinburg connected to my experience at the Bible study, when prayers I’ve prayed at other times with what felt like the same resolve haven’t been answered as clearly. But it pushes me into the place beyond words, where I don’t have all the answers and yet can simply sit before the mystery of God, knowing that He is good, giving thanks for the mystery which humbles me and opens me to Him, grateful for whatever experiences convince me that the heart of God is far more generous than I could have hoped.[7]

The point is simply that people need genuine God encounter, however it comes. Ourselves included. It doesn’t have to be a physical healing or even a physical sensation. It doesn’t have to be charismatic (whatever we mean by that word), but it needs to be real and authentic. I’m not talking about just chasing after experience, either; the point is to connect with who God is, not to have wild experiences. But again, when we read Scripture, it was normative for people to encounter God in wild ways. These sorts of “weird” things were just part of what Jesus did. The out-of-the-ordinary. The supernatural. And they are still a part of what He does. At the same time, the “weird” can also be quite normal and quite natural. 

For all of these readings in one place, order my book 'Learning to Live and Love Like Jesus.'

[1] There isn’t space in this chapter to explore the answer to this question, but for an interesting read, I’d suggest Richard Beck’s Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted. Fortress Press. Minneapolis, MN. 2016.

[2] Cf. Galatians 3:5.

[3] Post-Enlightenment, Protestants emphasized the authority of Scripture, whereas Catholics put greater focus on the authority of the pope, bishops, and Catholic tradition. Both did so in order to keep pace with Modernity’s focus on reason, science, and ultimate truth. 

[4] Philippians 3:4-6.

[5] Matthew 10:30, Luke 12:7.

[6] When I say “that He’s allowed to break through,” I am thinking, for example, of Mark 6:5, in which the unbelief of the crowd surrounding Jesus limits the ability of the Divine wholeness—the Kingdom—to break through. 

[7] See Psalm 131 as a grounding point for sitting in humility, trust, and mystery. 

R-I-S-K (Becoming Naturally-Supernatural I)

Being one of Jesus’ earliest disciples would not have been boring. Think of all the crazy things the twelve Apostles witnessed: the blind seeing, demons cast out, the dead raised back to life. And that’s all before encountering the resurrected Christ. Following the rabbi from Nazareth would have been an adventure, to say the least. 

Discipleship is meant to be the same: an adventure. Part of the value of identifying People of Peace, for example, is that ministry ceases to be primarily an event we schedule into our calendar or a trip to a third world country. Those are both good (and even great) things, but Jesus taught his disciples thateverymomentis a potential intersection with the Reign of God. A person of peace, for example, can P.O.P. into our lives (see what I did there?) at any moment. Each new day is a day for becoming grounded in ouradoption and focused on loving others as an ambassador of God’s Kingdom. Each new day is a day for asking, “Jesus, what are we up to together today?” Indeed, The Grounded Life, anchored in Scripture and prayer, is meant to keep us centered in these realities of adoption and a life of generous compassion. But a life of ministry—of learning to love and focus on others, transcending the natural self-focus which weighs down our lives—takes intentionality. Beyond that, it takescourage.

John Wimber,founder of the Vineyard movement, famously said that faith is spelled “R-I-S-K.”[1] In other words, we often practice our faith by doing things we aren’t entirely comfortable with. “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.”[2] Oftentimes, so does faith. Our natural human desire for stability and routine resists getting out of the boat of comfort; our ego does not want to be out of control. But we all want adventure, too, so we are caught between our desire for stability, which makes us play it safe, and our desire for something wild and exciting, which demands that we take risks. If tension is the only path by which we are transformed, well… risk is certainly full of tension and it’s often necessary for transformation. I remember an admonition, read on some inspirational quote board on the Internet: “Each day, do one thing you’re terrified of.” Personally, I’d prefer to make it each week, but it’s good advice if you care about transformation. Disciples are those who place the development of their souls above development of their comfort.

Indeed, we don’t grow unless we are pressing into the places we are tempted to avoid, the places we fear. It’s always this way with faith, which is why true faith is never easy, as Jesus himself says.[3] “Going to church” is very different than this type of faith; in fact, “going to church” can sometimes dissuade us from a life of faith.[4] It’s easy and common to be a part of a church without actually having to follow Jesus. If we do follow Jesus, he will no doubt call us to do things that are uncomfortable: having a conversation with a friend who’s offended us, engaging our own emotional wholeness with a counselor, crossing the street to meet a new neighbor, inquiring about the stories of a lonely person in need of an ear.For the sake of our thriving and our transformation, The Holy Spirit constantly calls us to do things that require courage. This is all so that we can live in the fullness of God’s Kingdom. And he will call us to risk in how we love others.

For all of these readings in one place, order my book 'Learning to Live and Love Like Jesus.'

[1]A phrase he used often. See Power Healing by John Wimber with Kevin Springer. HarperSanFrancisco, San Francisco, CA. 1987. Page 217.

[2]Seen on a magnet in my mother-in-law’s kitchen and often attributed to Neale Donald Walsch. 

[3]Matthew 7:14.

[4]If, for example, a church culture is more focused on teaching us to “be right” or “be safe” than to follow Jesus (which happens quite a bit).