Mustard Seeds for Cynics

Pope Francis is Time's Person of the Year. Thank goodness. I can't imagine what kind of post I'd be writing if it had been Miley Cyrus, which was apparently a real possibility. I guess I'd feel the same way I did when Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for his slide show over Irena Sendler who rescued about 2500 Jewish children from the Nazis.

I'm not a Catholic so why is this my Christmas post? Because lately, my faith has been waning. Not necessarily my faith in God, but faith in Christians. (This is where well meaning believers point out to me that people will always disappoint, but Christ never will even thought the New Testament says that Christians will be known by their love.) My faith has taken a beating in the past couple of years. What with world views blown and all. My default position is now doubt. I hear people say that someone is a good man or has character and I say to myself "as far as you know." And  I'm embarrassed by what I hear come out of the mouths of my fellow believers.

I often wonder-- where's the love?

And along come a couple of people the world really needs right now. The Pope and Katie Davis. Two people with amazingly different backgrounds, my two examples that prove that the world recognizes and respects real Christianity when they see it. They know it doesn't look anything like the Westboro Baptist Church. Even if they don't subscribe to it, they know what it is supposed to look like.

It's supposed to look like Jesus.

That would mean it would detest hypocrisy and greed. It would never ask if you believe in evolution, or Noah's Ark, or gay marriage. It would be warm, welcoming, winsome. People would be drawn to the sheer kindness and generosity, grace and compassion of it.

The Pope is saying things that some of us have been thinking for some time, but aren't readily accepted in the Evangelical community. Radical things like, we spend way too much time discussing social issues and far too little time offering up unconditional love. He's the antidote to the Prosperity Gospel that has become firmly entrenched in church thinking.  Here's the thinking by behind his being chosen as explained by the editor of Time, Nancy Gibbs:

"Rarely has a new player on the world stage captured so much attention so quickly -- young and old, faithful and cynical -- as has Pope Francis. In his nine months in office, he has placed himself at the very center of the central conversations of our time: about wealth and poverty, fairness and justice, transparency, modernity, globalization, the role of women, the nature of marriage, the temptations of power...

He is embracing complexity and acknowledging the risk that a church obsessed with its own rights and righteousness could inflict more wounds than it heals... For pulling the papacy out of the palace and into the streets, for committing the world¹s largest church to confronting its deepest needs, and for balancing judgment with mercy, Pope Francis is TIME's 2013 Person of the Year."

Katie Davis is a fellow Tennessean who was Glamor Magazine's Woman of the Year in 2012. She eschewed her affluent life in a posh Nashville suburb to move to Uganda and care for hundreds of vulnerable children, adopting 13 girls herself. Her genuine love and humility reflects her personal beliefs in a way we rarely see. She is one of those people who is just going about her life in the most sincere way, but everything about her makes one wonder--What am I doing? 

I am not trying to imply that there aren't lots of other Christians who are living out their faith in powerful and dynamic ways. What makes these two notable for me is the fact that non believers are recognizing that there is something different about them. That people who claim no faith find them inspiring. That magazines full of advertising and consumerism are saying that there may be something else to aspire to.

Sometimes that mustard seed, no matter how small needs to be watered by a good example.

Merry Christmas.