Punk and the Christian ethos

When I was younger I was involved in the local Bay Area punk scene. I love reminiscing about it now because my behavior, logic, and rationale at the time were so warped. And it was so fun.  We drank, smoked, and engaged in lots of other rabble rousing activities expected from teenagers with too much free time, lots of questions about the world, and an upstart-idealistic outlook on life.  We even had our own band that played some pretty famous punk venues.  Those were fun, good times.  Fun, but empty. What started as youth striving to gain a voice in the vast mundane confusion of suburbia quickly evolved into reckless destructive behavior.   In the beginning of my immersion into  the punk way of life I was concerned with things like injustice in the world, bringing down capitalist greed, lashing out against prejudices and racism, and challenging pretty much everything about the way the world works.  By the end of my punk experience my passions shifted to things like getting drunk/high, having the right punk style (hair, pins, clothes, and taste in bands), and being more punk than the hot-topic kids.  It was the meaninglessness of these aspirations that were the catalyst for me to drop the leather jackets, charged hair, and F-you attitude.  My heart longed for something truly revolutionary, some sort of counter-world explanation of why the world sucks so bad.  It was this longing that drew me into the punk ethos, and eventually away from it.  

Presently I work with kids at a church and for some reason we tend to attract youth with a similar disposition as I had when I was younger.  The disposition I'm talking about is the desire to change the world as we know it, to give the middle-finger to the system and all of its oppressive depravity, to rebel against our societies' injustice.  When I come across students with this rebellious inkling part of my heart gets really excited.   And I just realized why.  

Punk students get me excited because I believe God is punk.  I believe when God looks at our world and his church and how we his children are exploiting, raping, murdering, and oppressing one another he gets pissed off.  I believe that the idealism and punk spirit that questions our world and its institutions, including the church, is a perspective that resonates closely with Gods heart.  Jesus himself has often been called a revolutionary.  He up-rooted the very institution of established religion, He spoke out for the poor and marginalized,  and He gave his very life for his cause.  

When I encounter students who are pissed at the world part of me gets excited because I think God is pissed about many of the same things, and its these thing that sucked me into punk, and later attracted me to Jesus.   Jesus' upstart heart was passionate and boldly obsessed about bringing healing to the broken, turning greedy hearts into giving hearts, breaking the chains that hold down the oppressed and enslaved, deploying justice to those trapped in exploitation, and the downfall of pretty much everything else evil. To join in a movement like the one Jesus started a requires a certain boldness and courage.  This is boldness and courage I see in punk kids who can't wait to change the world.  And its this why I love punk kids, because they have the heart that can really shake things up.  If these students realized that they share the same punk heart as God and joined in the counter-culture movement Jesus started they would be an unstoppable force for peace, justice, and love.  

Get Uncomfortable

This is something I wrote about a year ago, and I thought it would be a good way to start my blog.  

"If God is a God fully acquainted with suffering than it is in the lives of the hurting and broken that he exists the most.  If we want to know who God is than we must take on his nature an be in the lives of the suffering too.  God is not in our deep conversations and mundane suburban days.  God is in the starving of Africa, oppressed of Asia, and broken of the West.  True searching is not a conversation but an action. 

I think most of us Christians came to belief in God because some one exhibited love to us and shared His story with us.  It made sense, it felt right, and we believed.  After that I see many of us slipping away once our faith requires something of us.  We end up spending our days in living where God is not, in comfort.  To maintain relationship with the divine I think we have to be where God is.  And He is in the lives of others, mainly the suffering.  I think most of us have spent our days trying to pass time with our best entertainment options instead of with those who may be suffering.  Please be warned that Jesus will be found in the trenches of life bleeding for the people around him.  This is where he will be found because this is who he is.  We can talk about, celebrate, and explain his truths at church, the mall, in our homes, or on the net, but I am convinced Jesus is not understood, found, or truly known unless we live our days for the lives of others..."