This past week Ginger and I spent a few days at my uncle’s mountain cabin.
Whenever we go there, just as we start the climb up into the mountains, we pass by a place called Arrowhead Springs, a historic resort hotel that is, as far as I can tell, closed to the public now.
It was built in the 1930s, next to a natural hot spring, just below a massive natural formation on the mountain shaped like an arrowhead. In fact, that giant arrowhead points straight down, as if marking the spot where the water comes bubbling up out of the ground.
In its heyday, many famous movie stars spent time at Arrowhead Springs. People like Charlie Chaplin, Judy Garland, Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart. Esther Williams filmed some of her famous scenes at the Arrowhead Springs swimming pool.
I swam in that pool once, when I was a college student. By then, the resort was owned by Campus Crusade, a Christian ministry focused on bringing college students to Christ. Campus Crusade used the resort as their headquarters, and as a place to hold retreats.
I enjoyed my weekend there. The pool was beautiful. The building was amazing. The worship services, as best as I can remember, were full of wonderful music. And the preaching and keynotes we heard…
Well…
Let me tell you how I got involved with Campus Crusade.
I was a college student at Chapman University looking for ways to grow in faith, and in my knowledge and understanding of the Bible.
There was a campus ministry group, and I was involved in that, but not many of the other students involved in it were that interested in Bible study. A very nice Catholic nun who helped out did lead a weekly Bible study for students, and I attended, but it wasn't very popular, and sometimes I was the only student who showed up.
There was a Disciples on Campus group, but it was small and much less organized than it is today, and didn't really do much.
And that was about it. Until one day, I heard about a new lunchtime Bible study that had started up.
So I went, with my sack lunch, and was happy to find other college students who were eager to read and study the Bible together.
We were assisted by two… advisors? I’m not sure what their actual title was, but they worked with Campus Crusade. And they guided us along as we not only met weekly for Bible study, but also as we became an official campus club. Becoming a campus club meant that we had officers, and that we could participate in inter-club activities.
And I enjoyed hanging out with these people, these friends, reading the Bible, praying together, and taking part in fun activities.
They talked a lot about Jesus. And they talked a lot about “getting saved.” And when they talked about Jesus and about getting saved, it was almost - but not quite - the way I learned to talk about Jesus growing up.
On one occasion, they talked about the false theory of evolution. Another time, they talked about how homosexuality was a sin. Neither of these ideas of theirs seemed to me to be consistent with the idea of a loving God… but they sounded so sure.
Needless to say, I was confused. It didn’t make sense to me that God would consider it a sin to be just the way God made you, or that God would want us to ignore the knowledge that comes from the observations of science.
And they talked about the importance of making sure other people were saved… Getting other people “saved” was so important that, one day, one of our advisors invited me to walk around campus with him and “witness” to other students.
It was weird.
The way he did it made me think he had a little notebook somewhere, perhaps in his back pocket, and everytime he got someone to repeat a short prayer, he would pull out that notebook and make another tally mark.
He'd walk up to someone, with me beside him, and he'd try to get that person to recite that short sinner's prayer, and if they did, then it would be, "Yes! Another check mark for me!"
I'm exaggerating. But not much.
That’s what it was all about for him… adding tally marks to that imaginary notebook. And I thought: shouldn’t we try to “witness” to others by loving them? Isn't that what Jesus taught us to do?...And maybe not worry so much about all those tally marks?
So by the time I went on the retreat to Arrowhead Springs, I was already starting to wonder if the Jesus these Campus Crusade folks talked about was even the same Jesus I knew. The lectures and sermons I heard at Arrowhead Springs only reinforced this impression, that - even though we were reading the same Bible - we were following two different Jesuses.
Not long after that retreat at Arrowhead Springs, our club advisor came to me and said, “Hey, our club president is graduating at the end of the year. To remain a club on campus, we need some other student to become the club president, and we think it should be you.”
It was tempting to say yes. Because then I would probably get to go to more retreats at Arrowhead Springs.
But I had to tell him no. Because by then I knew that the Jesus Campus Crusade preached about wasn’t the Jesus I knew. We had different ideas about who Jesus was, and different ideas about what it means to be a Christian.
And no other student was willing to be president, either. I guess I'm not the only one who had been having these thoughts. The following year, there was no Campus Crusade club at Chapman.
I probably would have figured all this out sooner, except that I had never really been pressed to define who Jesus was to me. I had never been challenged to put into words just who Jesus was, and what Jesus called his followers to do. My experience with Campus Crusade, and the weekend I spent at Arrowhead Springs, helped me define just who, exactly, I believed Jesus to be.
Many years before, when I was baptized, I made my confession of faith that all good Disciples make, the same confession of faith that the apostle Peter made. I confessed that Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God.
And then I added, as we tended to do in those days, that Jesus was my personal Lord and Savior.
And I thought I knew what all those words meant, and perhaps my understanding was pretty good for the young person I was then, but I have come to learn so much more in the years since.
Who is Jesus? Who is Jesus to you?
At first Jesus asked his disciples, “What do other people say about me?” And they replied, “Oh, some say this, some say that…”
And then Jesus asked, “But who do you say I am?”
And that - that’s the question we all have to answer. Not just once. But over and over.
A few years ago, when I got together with several other pastors to lead a baptism class, one of the other pastors - Mandye Yates from First Christian Fullerton - introduced an activity in which the young people wrote a personal “I believe” statement. In that activity, they wrote a paragraph or so describing who they believe Jesus to be.
And when Adam, Rahail, and David were baptized, They shared their statements with the congregation.
I think that’s probably a good activity for all of us to do. Perhaps we should do it once a year: write an “I believe” statement.
Because it's important for us to have some idea of just who it is that we claim to follow. Our understanding of who Jesus is, is the basis for how we live our lives.
The Jesus I know and the Jesus you know - the Jesus witnessed to by scripture - is one on whom the Spirit of the Lord God anointed, to preach good news to the poor and freedom to the oppressed.
I didn’t hear much about freedom to the oppressed in those lunchtime Bible studies. And a lot of people today who say they are Christian preach no good news to the poor. They say they follow Jesus, but I don't recognize that Jesus they follow.
The Jesus I know and the Jesus you know - the Jesus witnessed to by scripture - is one who welcomed outcasts and those labelled sinners.
I didn’t hear much about welcoming outcasts and sinners in those lunchtime Bible studies. And a lot of people today who say they are Christian would believe it's more important to draw lines that keep people out, than it is to welcome them in.
The Jesus I know and the Jesus you know - the Jesus witnessed to by scripture - is one who “brings down the powerful from their thrones, and lifts up the lowly; and fills the hungry with good things, and sends the rich away empty,” as it says in Luke chapter 1.
I didn’t hear much about any of that in those lunchtime Bible studies. And a lot of people today who say they are Christian support policies that consolidate power in those who are already at the top, and they support taking from the hungry what little they have.
We have a very different idea of who Jesus is.
I’m not saying my idea of who Jesus is is 100% right. That’s why I continue to read my Bible, and study, and pray, and learn, and grow. And that’s why I continue to be challenged by the question: “Who is Jesus to you?”
And I challenge you to also wrestle with that question. Because everything - how we live, how we pray, how we treat others - derives from our understanding of who Jesus is.
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