Turning the Head of Christ

A feature story in last Sunday’s Dallas Morning News brought back a flood of nostalgic memories. The article was about the famous painting of Jesus by a graphic designer named Warner Sallman in 1940.

I’m sure you’ve seen it. It was ubiquitous in the second half of the twentieth century; I remember it hanging a number of places in family members’ homes, as well as a few churches I visited. It’s a … shall we say, “pretty picture” of Jesus.

Jesus has flowing brown hair, a full beard, and blue eyes gazing off into the distance. His lips are slightly pursed, as if he’s about to say something calm and soothing.

The article speaks of the picture’s enormous popularity and quotes Billy Graham as saying about the work that it was “probably more satisfying to Americans than the more ancient conceptions which portrayed Christ as weak and emaciated.”

If by “weak and emaciated” Graham meant non-white, then he would have been spot on. Because this famous painting is nothing like the historical Jesus, of that we can be sure. The real Jesus was born in Palestine and was certainly darker than the famous picture, no matter that Sallman claims that he was inspired by a dream in which he saw Jesus.

Since we don’t have a clue as to what Jesus really looked like, the truth is that any drawing, painting, or sketch of Jesus tells us more about the artist and the person viewing the art than it does about Jesus.

Thus, this artwork and its subsequent popularity tells us a great deal about 20th-century American Protestant Christianity and all that was right — and wrong — about it. Sallman’s Jesus is a docile, submissive, and entirely-too-nice Savior of the World. He would have likely made a very good church member in 1950s Methodist churches. He might have even been a very good Methodist pastor, except for that long hair. The long hair is Sallman’s only acquiescence to Jesus’ essential strangeness. But the rest of this Jesus is entirely domesticated. This Jesus would never have turned over the tables of moneychangers, or challenged the High Priest, or told Peter to “Get behind me, Satan!”

It’s hard to imagine Sallman’s Jesus making too much of a fuss. Instead, he appears as a very loving, personable figure. And that is entirely in keeping with the Christianity of the time; Jesus was consistently preached as a sentimental figure who loved children and animals and would ultimately lay down his life so that those who believe in him would have their sins forgiven and live in heaven with him. This was the version of Christianity that was especially popular in white America at the time.

This was the Jesus that Americans wanted to believe in, and the fact that this Jesus was a Scandanavian-looking white dude made the whole idea palatable to the white church.

However, Sallman’s picture overlooks a vital aspect of the historical Jesus. The man from Nazareth spoke and acted in the tradition of the great Hebrew prophets, the rough-edged proclaimers of justice in the face of the world’s illegitimate powers.

In the midst of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and the subsequent anti-war drift, Protestant Christianity began to fracture between those who continued to think of Jesus in terms of Sallman’s vision and those who … didn’t.

I would argue that Sallman’s picture is sadly dated and largely irrelevant to our world. Not because Jesus’ hair is out of style, or that he is simply too white. But because what the world needs now is not a sanitized, BFF Jesus and pie-in-the-sky Christianity.

What the world needs now is more of the prophet Jesus who would be angry that children are being torn from their parents after fleeing from war-torn homes, who would be incredulous that children don’t have enough to eat in our cities, who would be outraged that we spend so much money on frivolous leisures, dangerous habits, and military hardware.

Now I’m not saying that Jesus wasn’t a loving figure, nor am I saying that we don’t find forgiveness of sins in him. I believe in life after death, too. These are all part of the Christian faith. However, they aren’t the total picture of the faith.

If we are to have a balanced faith, then we have to come to terms with Jesus the prophet, Jesus the troublemaker, Jesus the justice-seeker.

And a picture like that might not be very pretty.

Generosity Will Save Us

Before I became the senior pastor of KPUMC, the Finance Committee recognized that giving declined during the summer months, which caused an unfortunate cash crunch  somewhere around August. As a result, they started a fundraising campaign which asked individuals or families to “pay” $250 for one day in the month of July. 

The church would publish a July calendar with names of people who had “bought” a particular day of the month, and an invitation to buy the days which were still available.

After I got here, the committee agreed to tweak the idea a little, and now we celebrate Generosity July every year. We invite everyone in the church to set aside $5 per day to give to the church, above and beyond the amount people have already pledged. We still publish a calendar, but now each day of the month specifies a generosity challenge.

This has obviously helped church finances over the past couple of years. But even more importantly, it has forced us all to think about generosity every year.

A lot of us have been complaining about the general mood of the country lately. Recent current events and news bulletins have made us all crabby and cranky. We’re all a little on edge.

Unfortunately, when people are angry and distempered, we also tend to close themselves off from others. We end up clinging a little tighter to what is ours, and we get defensive and reactive.

This is precisely the time for us to practice generosity. I think that it might be the only thing that will save us in these perilous times.

For example, I wish we are all a little more generous in our judgments and conclusions of others. What if we gave more benefits of the doubt, and wished more people well?

I wish our government and society operated out of a posture of abundance and generosity rather than a posture of scarcity and austerity. And I wish our institutions and organizations adopted mission statements that had generosity as a core value and virtue.

Generous organizations and people are open-hearted, warm, and easy to get to know. We like them, and we want to be like them.

So why aren’t we generous year-round? What is it that keeps us from being generous all the time? I always ask myself this question in July, because generosity is fun! It’s a blast to give things away to, and on behalf of, others. 

Perhaps it’s because we find ourselves surrounded by a culture that teaches us the opposite. This is one of the downsides of capitalism; a capitalist economy stresses competition, teaches us that there are winners and losers. Advertising teaches us that what’s important is what we buy and acquire, not what we give away.  Even our politics is now a zero-sum game — everything is all or nothing. Compromise is a bad word, and there is hardly any generosity in governance.

The church is one place where generosity continues to be a virtue. In fact, it is one of our most important characteristics: God is generous, and God’s most generous act was the sending of Jesus Christ. Jesus was generous, and left behind disciples and apostles who were generous. Generosity was the primary ethos of the early church, after all. In the Book of Acts, we read that the first Christians ate together frequently and shared their goods freely among one another. 

Generosity July is supposed to be the prototype of all the other months of the year. It’s the time when we intentionally practice those small and random acts of giving that we ought to be doing all the time.

Because when we finally get it right, it’s generosity that will save us.

A Moment in Time

by Rev. Kay Ash

    It is likely that you did not hear about the small moment in time between a group of retiring clergy with their families and several children from North Texas Conference churches.  It was a small moment, quiet and unassuming.  Probably no reporters wrote articles about it, and there were just a few pictures taken.  If it was such a small moment in time, why was it important?

    Here is the story:  when a couple churches got together with support from the North Texas Conference several years ago to collectively and intentionally re-energize children’s ministries, we wrestled with how to begin and what to do.  What would be our best practices and how would we make those strategies available to a large and diverse body of churches?  From the beginning we had too many ideas and no focus.  We knew that we needed guidance, so, we looked in the scriptures.  What did Jesus do when he encountered children in His ministry?  The simple answer:  he blessed them (see Mark 10:16).  He insisted that the disciples allow the children to surround Him, He laid hands on them and He blessed them.  We found our focus in a hurry, and blessings became the foundation of a movement.

    Blessings are very simple – hold someone’s hand, look them in the eye and say: “You are a blessing!”  Some people use water or oil or Chap Stick to make the sign of the cross or a heart or a smiley face on someone’s hand or forehead.  Blessings are simple.  However, just because blessings are simple does not mean that blessings are simplistic.  From the very beginning we learned that blessings are deeply profound.   

    We started blessing children everywhere – Sunday School, VBS, Bridgeport Camp, during children’s sermons, at hospitals, at sporting events, at lemonade stands, in front of schools before State testing, everywhere.  The speed of change took us completely by surprise.  Parents chasing us down the hallways of churches asking for blessings took us completely by surprise.  The depth, the power, the split-second experiences of God’s bold and undeniable presence in the midst of simple blessings knocked us to the knees.  Blessings became and continue to be the foundation of our movement to re-energize children’s ministries.

    In June of this year at annual conference, the basics of what we have collectively discovered about children’s ministries were highlighted by the Center for Leadership Development.  In an effort to demonstrate what we have learned and what we hope to accomplish, a group of children from nearby churches took Chap Sticks and blessed our retiring clergy.  It was truly a small moment in time, yet a deeply powerful small moment in time.  

    This is what we have learned through several years of blessings:  God is always present; blessings are appropriate everywhere; and, all people of all ages are yearning for opportunities to experience intimate moments with God.  Most importantly, even small and simple moments with God are deep and transformative.  This is the reason it was important for children to bless retiring clergy on the floor of the North Texas Annual Conference of 2018.  This is also the reason why it is important that we bless each other at every opportunity here at Kessler Park United Methodist Church.  This is why we bless our children in Sunday School, during Wednesday Night Live, and during children’s sermons; blessings just might change the world.  

    Chap Sticks, looking each other in the eye, holding hands – let’s spend some small moments in time together, Kessler Park UMC; let’s change the world one blessing at a time.