Posted 48 days ago
Meeting Jesus in Lake City
by Peter Ilgenfritz, University Congregational United Church of Christ, Seattle
Peter tells this story to the group at the Friday evening plenary session. Photo by Anneke Geel
We met Jesus at the Lake City hobby store.
I mean, he looked just like Jesus that you see in all the pictures—long hair, scraggly beard. And there he was standing next to the counter at the hobby shop.
The five of us walk in.
“We are at a conference, and we have been sent out this afternoon to learn about various communities in the city…”
“What kind of a conference is it?” He asks.
“Well, it’s a…”
“What kind of a conference is it?” He asks again, this time more insistently.
“Well…” We hesitate, for we were told not to tell. “It is a conference of Christians who—”
“I knew you were Christians from the moment you stepped in here. I could tell by the way you walked and how you stood together. Just like you can tell a group of Green Peace activists right away.”
He went on. “I want you to know when people like me see Christians coming—I see my rights are about to disappear…”
“You will have a hard time cleaning up Christianity’s name; you have 2000 years of bad history against you. You will have to talk about the stuff that Christianity never has addressed and never wanted to talk about. You will need to wash away the extreme authoritarianism in Christianity so that we can eat off of it again.”
We just stood there and listened for twenty minutes. What could we say? I still don’t know.
But we did what we could do. We listened. We were another face of Christianity. Standing there, listening.
It was healing for us all.
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