Odd Versus Same...01/06/05
"Someone once said, ' You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.' Whoever made that statement understood what it means to be a follower of Christ. Followers of Christ are odd. Oddness is important because it is the quality that adds color, texture, variety, beauty to the human condition. Christ doesn't make us the same. What he does is affirm our differentness. Oddness is important because the most dangerous word in Western culture is sameness. Sameness is a virus that infects members of industrialized nations and causes an allergic reaction to anyone who is different. This virus affects the decision-making part of our brains, resulting in an obsession with making the identical choices everyone else is making.
Sameness is a disease with disasterous consequences - differences are ignored, uniqueness is not listened to, our gifts are cancelled out. Life, passion, and joy are snuffed out. Sameness is the result of sin and does much more than infect us with lust and greed; it flattens the human race, franchises us, attempts to make us all homogenous. Sameness is the cemetery where our distinctiveness is buried. In a sea of sameness, no one has an identity. But Christians do have an identity. We are aliens! We are the odd ones, the strange ones, the misfits, the outsiders, the incompatibles. Oddness is a gift from God and sits dormant until God's Spirit gives it life and shape. Oddness is the consequence of following the one who made us unique, different, and IN HIS IMAGE!
In C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the White Witch has turned many of the inhabitants of Narnia into stone, but Aslan, the Christ figure, jumps into the stone courtyard, pouncing on the statues, breathing life into them.
'The courtyard looked no longer like a museum; it looked more like a zoo. Creatures were running after Aslan and dancing round him till he was almost hidden in the crowd. Instead of all that deadly white the courtyard was now a blaze of colors; glossy chestnut sides of ccentaurs, indigo horns of unicorns, dazzling plumage of birds, reddy-brown foxes, dogs and satyrs, yellow stockings and crimson hoods of dwarfs; and the birch-girls in silkver, and the beech-girls in fresh, transparent green, and the larch-girls in green so bright that it was almost yellow. And instead of the deadly silence the whole place rang with the sound of happy roarings, brayings, yelpings, barkings, squealings, cooings, neighings, stampings, shouts, hurrahs, songs, and laughter.'
Lewis's summary of what is happening in Narnia is a brilliant description of what the church SHOULD look like: 'The courtyard looked no longer like a museum; it looked more like a zoo.' It is the incongruence and the oddness of our disjointed spirituality that ought to characterize every church. For God so loved the world, that whosoever believes in him will, from that point on, be considered weird by the rest of the world, which means the church should be more like a zoo than a tomb of identical mummies."
~Taken from Messy Spirituality by Michael Yaconelli
Sameness is a disease with disasterous consequences - differences are ignored, uniqueness is not listened to, our gifts are cancelled out. Life, passion, and joy are snuffed out. Sameness is the result of sin and does much more than infect us with lust and greed; it flattens the human race, franchises us, attempts to make us all homogenous. Sameness is the cemetery where our distinctiveness is buried. In a sea of sameness, no one has an identity. But Christians do have an identity. We are aliens! We are the odd ones, the strange ones, the misfits, the outsiders, the incompatibles. Oddness is a gift from God and sits dormant until God's Spirit gives it life and shape. Oddness is the consequence of following the one who made us unique, different, and IN HIS IMAGE!
In C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the White Witch has turned many of the inhabitants of Narnia into stone, but Aslan, the Christ figure, jumps into the stone courtyard, pouncing on the statues, breathing life into them.
'The courtyard looked no longer like a museum; it looked more like a zoo. Creatures were running after Aslan and dancing round him till he was almost hidden in the crowd. Instead of all that deadly white the courtyard was now a blaze of colors; glossy chestnut sides of ccentaurs, indigo horns of unicorns, dazzling plumage of birds, reddy-brown foxes, dogs and satyrs, yellow stockings and crimson hoods of dwarfs; and the birch-girls in silkver, and the beech-girls in fresh, transparent green, and the larch-girls in green so bright that it was almost yellow. And instead of the deadly silence the whole place rang with the sound of happy roarings, brayings, yelpings, barkings, squealings, cooings, neighings, stampings, shouts, hurrahs, songs, and laughter.'
Lewis's summary of what is happening in Narnia is a brilliant description of what the church SHOULD look like: 'The courtyard looked no longer like a museum; it looked more like a zoo.' It is the incongruence and the oddness of our disjointed spirituality that ought to characterize every church. For God so loved the world, that whosoever believes in him will, from that point on, be considered weird by the rest of the world, which means the church should be more like a zoo than a tomb of identical mummies."
~Taken from Messy Spirituality by Michael Yaconelli
