“Also, the two boys were a werewolf and a zombie.”
“Awesome.”
He cleared his throat. “Once there was a werewolf and a zombie in high school who couldn’t get a date to save their lives. They were talking in the locker room one day as they cleaned up after PE class. Trying to be helpful, Zombie Boy said, ‘If you shaved your arms and back, I think the girls would flock to you.’
“‘If you wore some cologne, you wouldn’t smell like something that just died,” Werewolf Boy growled.
“‘Maybe if you plucked that eyebrow,’ Zombie Boy responded thoughtfully.
“‘Maybe if you picked off some of those maggots,’ Werewolf Boy suggested helpfully.
“‘The problem with you,’ Zombie Boy shot back, ‘is that you’re a monster. Chicks do not dig monsters.’
“‘At least I’m only a monster on the full moon!’ Werewolf Boy shouted. ‘You’re a monster every day.’ Then they both stormed off. Neither of them could help the other one.
“What do you think?”
I put my hands on my hips and stared at the pavement. “It wasn’t really a story,” I said. “I mean, no real plot. It was more of a vignette.”
“It was a parable,” the guy said, sounding slightly miffed.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “That sounds a little familiar.” I racked my brain, bringing my many years of Christian school training into action. Parables. The net. No. The Prodigal Son. No. Plank-in-the-eye. No. Wait . . . that was it! One of Jesus’ sayings to show that you should take care of your own problems before you judge your neighbor. My eyes snapped back up onto the man’s face. “Jesus?”
He threw his arms wide, laughing. He gave me a giant hug. “It’s about time, Matt!”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Portland + Jesus = Love
The next few weeks were glorious. Jesus and I rode our bikes through the forty miles of trails in Forest Park. I pointed out how much I loved the rhododendrons and Jesus laughed and said, “I made the entire Northwest a garden of rhododendrons!” The only things Jesus loves more than rhododendrons in the Northwest are blackberry bushes and moss. He loves moss. He’s always draping it on houses, trees, sidewalks, cars, slow-moving animals.
One day, we were eating dessert at the Pix Pâtisserie on Division. Jesus loves that place; he just loves the creative way that the people who work there turn dessert into art. “Edible art,” he called it and pointed out the Amélie, which is orange vanilla crème brûlée balanced on a glazed chocolate mousse with caramelized hazelnuts, praline crisp, and Cointreau génoise. It looked like a tiny hat with golden buttons. I had always thought Jesus would be a straight, simple dessert kind of guy, but no. He always pointed out the ones he thought I would like and encouraged me to try them. This Jesus surprised me at last.
“For hundreds of years,” he said, “people have had it all wrong. Thinking I was preoccupied with science. Thinking I was some distant, uncaring, robotic tyrant. Me! Can you believe that?”
“You don’t care about science?” I asked.
“I love science. It’s ultimately an exploration of my own mind. But not at the expense of art. Look at this place. Look at the yellow walls and those glass cases filled with beauty. And the way the chairs are all clumped together, forcing you to be with other human beings while you eat. I love this place.”
“What else have we had wrong?” I asked.
Jesus turned to see the menu on the chalkboard. “Handmade ice cream. You should get some right now. How have you people settled for store-bought ice cream when it’s so easy to make your own?”
“That is a great mystery,” I agreed. Although I never make my own, I prefer homemade. So I ordered a bowl, and Jesus smiled.
A waitress came over with my ice cream. I took a bite and savored it for a long time.
“Story,” Jesus went on. “You’ve become all about lecture, all about theology. Boring. You’ve vivisected the gospel, and then you wonder where all the life is. The Bible is meant to be interacted with, not cut up on a table.”
“I love stories,” I said. “I can’t always figure out what they mean, but I like them.”
“That’s another. You think you’ve got to have all the answers. Why can’t there be mysteries once in a while? It’s okay not to know the answer.” The door opened, letting in a blast of cold Portland air. “There’s a friend of yours.” Jesus tipped his head toward the entrance.
It was Shane. I would have asked him what he was doing, but it seemed obvious that he had come for the same reason we had—to enjoy the superior dessert. I invited him to sit down, and he pulled up a chair. “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?” he asked.
“You can see him,” I said. “Very observant! Shane, this is Jesus, Lord of the Universe. Jesus, this is Shane, head of the atheist club at PSU.” Jesus shook his hand politely and suggested that he try the Shazam! cake. Shane agreed to give it a whirl. “We’re talking about things the Western, modern church has gotten wrong about Jesus.”
“Sounds interesting,” Shane said. “I have some questions.”
“Shoot,” Jesus said.
“What is it with Christians and homosexuality? You talk about it more often than anyone I know, even gay people.”
The last comment made Jesus laugh so heartily that he knocked my bowl of ice cream off the table. His eyes started watering and he excused himself to get some napkins. When he came back he said, “I agree. There’s no reason to talk about that stuff. Someone’s feelings get hurt no matter what you say.”
“What about abortion?”
“Oh, we’ve talked about that enough in the last two decades. Give it a rest. Let’s talk about something we can all agree on, like eliminating poverty. It’s time to show some compassion, not just stand around shouting truth and never showing love.”
“That’s so cool,” I said, beaming.
“The other thing people get all hung up on is that my death on the cross was all about substitutionary atonement. Like the only reason I died was to take away the sins of other people. Does that even make sense? How does my dying make people’s sins go away? And what sort of loving father lets his son get killed? I mean, yeah, I had to die, but not because Dad was punishing me for something you did. It’s like, ‘Dad, Matt stole some cookies,’ and Dad comes down with the belt and I say, ‘No, no, hit me instead’ and God agrees to that? No way.”
I nodded, but Shane looked perplexed. “Explain that to me. Because as I was reading the end of John the other night, I saw where you said, ‘I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.’ I started looking at the cross-references and I came to this book in the Jewish Scriptures that said that the Messiah would be pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities, and by his wounds we are healed. That sounds to me like the very thing you are saying it isn’t . . . some sort of substitution in who is being punished.”
Jesus tucked his napkin in under his shirt. “Don’t get hung up on it, Shane. Let’s stop being so judgmental. Let’s work on community and learn to love each other. Let’s change the way the system works. Let’s eliminate homelessness and let’s worship with art and music the way we want to do it. Let’s allow people to come to church in an authentic way! Wear what you want, have dreadlocks if that’s your thing. Let’s be who we really are, not try to dress it all up Sunday mornings.”
Shane sat back with a skeptical look on his face, a bite of Shazam! halfway to his mouth. I couldn’t believe he wasn’t buying Jesus’ spiel. Shane looked like he was about to talk back to Jesus, and before he could put his foot in his mouth I tried to think of some way to make it clear that Jesus is always right, all the time.
“Let’s show Shane what your church is like,” I said quickly, before Shane could say anything.
“Okay,” Jesus agreed, and we left the restaurant and walked for a while until we got to a residential neighborhood where we found a narrow house with its light on. Jesus knocked on the front
door and a kind-looking woman let us in. This was a home group for a new church plant just south of Portland called Corbito Deo, which is Latin for “The Slow-Moving Merchant Ships of God.” It appeared that they meant to name the church Coram Deo and got confused. Anyway, inside we were greeted by several young families, some singles, and one old couple. Everyone was sharing food and laughing and talking about life and television and music and art and Jesus. Their kids all had great, creative names, nothing like the kids I had grown up with. The art on the walls had all been done by people from their church, and while it wasn’t earth-shatteringly good, it was warm and homey to see something made by hand on the wall. They were doing their best to be “green” and had all arrived in electric cars or on bicycle. They all recycled. They had all voted for change.
We talked about Corbito Deo for a while, too, and the amazing things it was doing in the community—and they truly were amazing. Their tiny group had a great reputation. They had completely painted one of the nearby public schools that had become run-down. They were helping out at the Portland Rescue Mission and a local shelter for runaways. One of the members was starting a new program to help people on meth get clean, sober, and off the streets. We had a great time and had some great conversations, and when we got out on the porch and said our good-byes, Shane seemed to have really enjoyed himself.
“What did you think?” I asked.
“I can see why you’re comfortable with this Jesus,” he said. I realized this might be the moment—the moment when Shane realized that he wasn’t an atheist at all, that he believed in God and wanted to follow Jesus. “He’s not the one I read about in your Bible, but I can see why you would like him.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Stupid Atheists and Their Stupid Insights
Shane’s comment hit me like a sack of bricks. “Not the Jesus in the Bible . . . What do you mean?”
He pointed in the window and I looked back at the smiling, wonderful group inside. “How many white people do you see in there?”
I paused. “All of them are white, Shane.”
“Well, 10 percent of Portland is Hispanic, 6 percent African-American, 6 percent Asian. Why do you think that group in there is white?”
I thought about it. “It’s probably more comfortable for Asian people, for instance, to go to an Asian church.”
“Because . . . ?”
“Because . . . I don’t know. Jesus, you want to help me out here?”
Jesus was standing on the sidewalk, watching us and smiling. “Oh, the Asian church is all about authority and our church is all about independence in community.”
Shane shook his head. “So the Asians go to an Asian church. And the African-Americans—”
“You know, there is an African-American guy at this church.”
“How many people in the church?”
“The home churches tend to be twenty or less, but they have a larger sort of association that’s about three thousand.”
“How many black people?”
“One.”
“And where are the rest of the black people?’
“At the black church, I guess.”
“And where are the Hispanic people?”
“The Hispanic church.”
“And Corbito Deo is the—?”
I dropped my head. “The white church.”
“That’s right. And why are the people there so fun to be with?”
“They’re like me,” I said. “They like cool music. They care about social justice and the environment. They’re young.”
“The culture of this church is not mainstream,” said Shane. “But it’s mainstream Portland.”
“Are you saying that this church is just a cultural modification of Christianity?”
“I’m saying your parents and grandparents were modernists and so they wore suits to church. They sang hymns in the fifties and praise songs in the seventies and now they are stuck in the eighties or maybe the mid nineties. And this church—” he jerked his thumb toward the house—“that you think is some new thing that’s going to change everything is really just you counterbalancing toward what you like and care about and believe. Some of it balances out the excesses of your parents’ and grandparents’ generations, and some of it is new errors that your kids are going to balance out. Your daughters are going to want to get dressed up for church when they grow up, I bet. They’re not going to want to sing the songs you love from the early twenty-first century.”
“But all the service projects and community outreach . . .”
“That’s today’s American culture. Movie stars flock to Africa. It’s hip to adopt. It’s cool to care about the environment. This church is more culturally flexible. You’re adapting to the needs of today, and that’s great. Our atheist club has some similar programs.”
“So you’re saying that this isn’t the real Jesus, either.”
“Wouldn’t he care a little more about people of other ethnicities and making them feel comfortable in church? You don’t have any. You don’t even have much age differential in the church. So much for diversity. And you do all this outreach in your neighborhoods, which is great, but as I understand Jesus’ instructions, he wanted people to go to other countries, reach other ethnicities, to get out there to people who are different than you. This Jesus doesn’t seem to care.”
“You have to admit the story part is good, though,” I said. “Wouldn’t it be great if someone wrote a sort of semiautobiographical novel comedy thing instead of a Sunday school lesson for once? Wouldn’t that be cool?”
“Of course,” Shane said. “Stories are great. Jesus told a lot of them. But he did lecture, too. You might have heard of the Sermon on the Mount. It wasn’t a story. And a lot of the times after a story, Jesus took the disciples somewhere private and gave them a didactic explanation. Jesus liked story, but he also taught in lecture. A good teacher doesn’t box himself into one mode of transmission. Deal with it.”
“I can’t believe I am getting schooled about Jesus by an atheist.” I turned and looked at Jesus, standing there under the yellow streetlight, a misty rain falling on his hemp hat and curly black hair. “As for you, I thought I told you to stay away from me. I don’t want any more imaginary Jesuses in my life.”
I stepped down toward him, and he had a mischievous look of pleasure in his eyes. “But you keep calling me back,” he said.
“Not anymore.” I took another step toward him. But before I could grab him, he bolted and sped down the road. I raced after him, and Shane ran alongside me. Jesus turned a corner into a dark alley and we darted after him.
Ten minutes later, panting and out of breath, I told Shane I couldn’t run anymore. We walked back to where I had parked my car near Division. “My . . . new . . . imaginary . . . Jesus,” I panted, “wears . . . Converse. Can’t . . . catch . . . him. Need . . . Jesus . . . with . . . sandals . . . next . . . time.”
Just then a white Honda Fit turned in front of us. Jesus was driving. “Hey!” Shane shouted. “Jesus hot-wired my car!”
“Into . . . the . . . truck!”
We leaped into traffic and followed Jesus. Jesus, always conscientious about traffic rules, politely turned on his turn signal, so he was easy to follow. He drove slowly toward downtown. He took a strange, meandering route, and we found ourselves right at the entrance to Chinatown. Then, unexpectedly, he turned left and headed west on Burnside.
“He’s headed for the highway!”
“He already passed a highway entrance,” Shane said.
As Jesus pulled up to the corner of Burnside and Tenth Avenue, he held his head out the window, as if carefully studying the giant kinetic tripod sculpture to our left. He almost threw us off, but not quite, because his blinker was still on and he turned right in front of Powell’s Books. Powell’s is the largest privately owned new and used bookstore in the world, taking up an entire city block, four levels and nine giant rooms. They’ve painted the walls of each room a different color and n
amed the room after the paint job. It’s the coolest bookstore in the world.
We followed Jesus down Tenth, but he abandoned Shane’s car at the corner of Tenth and Couch. (In honor of Portland’s slogan “Keep Portland Weird,” we pronounce this word “cooch” as in “coochie coochie coo.”) Jesus was on foot, running west on Couch. I put the truck in park in the middle of the street and ran after him.
“What am I supposed to do about your truck?” Shane yelled.
I ignored him and ran after Jesus. Jesus slowed for a minute when he saw the homeless man at the entrance to Powell’s, selling the Real Change newspaper. He pulled out a dollar and gave it to the man before ducking into the bookstore. I skidded up to the doors and flung them open, but Jesus had already disappeared up the stairs, and I followed him into the stacks of the Pearl Room. Powell’s is called the City of Books and it’s an apt description. Jesus had found a good hiding place.
I walked into the room and started up and down the aisles between stacks. Nothing. Art, music, drama, film. A few Jesuses loitered around in there. Dali’s distant and noncorporeal Jesus. Various Easter-movie Jesuses. I walked down the stairs to the Red Room and was immediately surrounded by a throng of clamoring imaginary Jesuses. I thought I saw mine slipping toward the health books. I ran down the aisle after him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Oh Yes, Jefe, You Have a Plethora
New Age Jesus came flying up alongside me and tackled me. “You left both my chapters on the cutting room floor,” he snarled, his purple haze burning my eyes with the scent of too much incense.
I pushed him hard and he rolled to the side. I jumped to my feet and assumed a defensive stance. “You’re nothing like the real Jesus. The whole New Age movement would be better off saying they don’t believe in Jesus at all. Just ignore him if you can’t explain him away. I had to cut your chapters because you were such an easy target you made me look like a jerk for attacking you.”
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