Finding or Following?

This week's reflection from the Ekklesia Project compares abstract spirituality (have you found Jesus?) with living out a concrete faith in the here and now:

One of the great dangers and persistent temptations of the Christian life is abstraction and reduction, universalization and generalization. We like platitudes and principles, spiritual laws and high-sounding words like “love” and “grace” or “justice.”

But not with Luke. Not with the New Testament. At Christmas we run up against the Incarnation. Instead of timeless truth we get God in particular: a teenaged mother and young father with their baby in a cattle trough, trying to stay warm in a cow shed on the backside of a dusty overlooked town on the far side of the Roman Empire. We get the specific, the particular, the concrete. None of this “once upon a time,” timeless and eternal we get in fairy stories. This story can be dated – when Quirinius was governor of Syria. We can take a road map and follow Mary and Joseph’s journey from Galilee to Nazareth to Bethlehem. Not four spiritual laws. We get an angel calling Mary. God speaking to Joseph. God coming in the particularity of a baby. . . .

But when we stick with the story of the Incarnation we can’t make it anything we want. We can’t say “yes” to four spiritual laws and hate our neighbors and kill our enemies. We can’t ask an abstract Jesus into our hearts and ignore his life and the life he calls us to. We can’t be “spiritual” and not become a member of his contemporary body, the church. The miracle of the Incarnation says it is this Jesus born in the specifics of Bethlehem in the time when Quirinius was governor of Syria who called us to a particular way of life embodied in his church located in our time and place today. God is particular. Jesus came to be with us right here.

We live out our faith as a community in the world. And while we cannot earn our salvation we must surely participate in it. One of my favorite verses in Jame's epistle is verse 19 in Chapter 2:

You believe that there is one God? Good! Even the demons believe that -- and shudder.

Jesus did not say "find me". He said "follow me".