Preaching to the Minister

Whoever claims to live in God must walk as Jesus did. 1 John 2:6

I have quickly written down these thoughts as a compliment to what you’ve written rather than to throw a wrench in the works. They are late night thoughts – which are always risky – but these days have too few quiet spaces for reflection…
To me the topic of 'living like Jesus' must answer the question 'what is it about the way Jesus lived his life that we are meant to replicate?'
Thinking of your sermon last week and its emphasis on 'incarnation', I think that concept is worth repeating. Last week you powerfully made the point - the way Jesus looks to the world is the way we portray him in our attitude, nature, and demeanour. We are, as heady as it seems, meant to make Jesus visible to the world we live in.
This week you move from looking like Jesus to living like Jesus. Again we are taking about incarnation, but the incarnation we're talking about is 'active' i.e. doing as he did.  
Defining our future direction as a church, it is helpful to take stock of where we are and where we should be heading. If our church is 95% Christian, then the confession ‘Jesus is Lord’ is a near universal already. But for some reason many of us have learned to make that confession without it really impacting the way we live. What was once potentially life changing fails to affect us much. Like a ‘Hail Mary’ we say the words but they have long since defined the way we live.
How do we change that?
Repentance helps.
And by spelling out how Jesus lived and committing ourselves to living as he did. To reinforce what you’ve written...
We must live as Jesus did in deep relationship with His Father.
We must venture out, as he did, from the safe confines of the church, to where we’d otherwise fear to tread. We plead for the heart and courage to seek out our generation’s equivalent of the mad-man of the Gadarenes; we are committed to the people on life’s margins.
We choose to enter into the heartache of humanity and respond as Christ did to its sorrow, its injustice and its suffering. We choose to become fully present in the lives of those around us as Jesus was fully present for those he knew. We seek friendships with people of other faiths, of other races, of other socio-economic status. We are not waiting for them to show up at our door, we actively seek them where they are - the same way Jesus found Zacchaeus and Mary Magdalene and Judas Iscariot.
We are missional. As Jesus sent out the seventy, so are we waiting to be sent out. We are committed to being ‘a movement’ – actively ‘on the move’… initiating Christian community wherever Jesus is unknown.
We will put our lives on the line for others, because that’s how Jesus lived.
We are prepared to be maligned for the company we keep - as Jesus was.
We are willing to become poor so that others might be rich. We are committed to re-enacting that grace which makes Jesus truly visible in our time.
We will love our enemies, most especially the enemies we know regardless of looking like fools to do so.
We will forgive as he has forgiven us and accept others as he has accepted us.
We are committed to be no more the status quo than Jesus was.
We resist the complacency and slumber that would otherwise deafen us to the agony of injustice and the anger of inequity. Our Lord overturned the tables of the money-changers. We will, to quote Martin Luther King, ‘drive spikes into the wheels of injustice’; even if in doing so, it costs us privilege, reputation and rights.
We will give ourselves to prophecy and not flattery. We will not shy away from the hard words most especially when they are aimed at us.
We will seek peace and not war; unity and not uniformity, diversity and not conformity.
written to the minister of our church in January 2008