I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t all that receptive yesterday to the idea that Michael Vick has now “found Jesus.” The first words out of my mouth when I saw that someone had said this on my blog yesterday, was “And so did Paris Hilton.” Now here are my problems:
First, we’ve all got a track record with those who have made such claims who show no sign Jesus was making a claim on them with anything like what we could call “effective.”
Second, most of us have enough postmodernity drilled into us that we know language like this is power and it could be interpreted as claim to get people to forgive him, hope for his rehabilitation, and come back to the NFL.
Third, something “we” haven’t yet announced is that for most of the summer “we’ve” begun each day working on a book we are calling Forty Days with the Jesus Creed. It’s a short book of daily readings that show how the Jesus Creed wasn’t just something Jesus said but something the earliest Christians worked out — so we explore how it impacted Paul and Peter and James and John.
Fourth, here’s the real problem. Here was the text I wrote about yesterday morning.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things (1 Cor 13:7).
How does a Jesus Creeder respond to statements like Michael Vick’s?