"Today I Quit Being a Christian"

By Pastor Rey Diaz

Those were some of the most devastating words I ever heard as a seminary student.  Anne Rice, who had become a hero to me in high school and college, said them.  In her book, Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession, she shared her powerful personal story about her relationship with Jesus. She grew up in the church, but left as a young adult. In her fifties, she rejected her decades-long atheism and returned to church...for ten years. And then she made this announcement on her Facebook page:

Today I quit being a Christian. I’m out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being “Christian” or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to “belong” to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group.

Rice’s statement stirred controversy (and broke my heart), but let’s be honest: the idea that Christians can be quarrelsome, hostile, and disputatious isn’t exactly surprising. How is it that people like Anne Rice—people devoted to Jesus—sometimes feel driven from Christianity? Why are there Christians on all sides of cultural and political issues, arguing with non-believers and fellow Christians alike? Is this really what Jesus intended for his disciples? I don’t think so.  But somehow Christianity has been branded and associated with this label. 

But Jesus had something entirely different in mind.  In fact, Jesus tells us how his disciples should behave and he makes no mention of hostility or disputation. He says, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35). The distinguishing characteristic of a disciple was not to be knowledge, belief, or church attendance, but love.  When the early Church started they didn’t have anything except “love one another.”  They didn’t have the New Testament, they didn’t have big churches, they didn’t have videos, media, or technology.  But they changed the world.  Not by what they believed, but how they behaved.  How they treated one another.  The world was drawn into this Jesus community because they “loved one another.” 

By the end of the first century, the apostle John was the last of Jesus’ original twelve disciples still alive. He was an old man who’d witnessed great tragedy. Many of his friends had been killed for their faith. He’d seen fellow Christians persecuted and martyred by the Emperor Nero. He’d spent many years living in the city of Ephesus, taking care of Jesus’ mother until her death.

In the last years of his life, John wrote the following in a letter to young followers of Jesus. It’s his final reminder to them of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus:

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sin. Dear friends, since God loved us, we also ought to love one another.       1 John 4:7–11

He could have given these young Christians all sorts of advice, but he focused on love.  It was the thing he most wanted them to remember. The love that God demonstrated to us through the sacrifice of his only Son on our behalf obligates us to love others.  We owe it to God to love one another. 

What if we put love back at the center.  What if those of us who decided to follow Jesus, approached every person, every relationship, every situation asking ourselves – What does love ask of me?  That’s how we rebrand Christinaity.  If each of us make this our focus in our circle and our world.  What does love look like in the marketplace? In our families? In our marriages? In our friendships?

If we don’t love well, it doesn’t really matter what else we do. So try it. Focus on it. Meditate on it. This week, practice loving the people around you.

That’s what Jesus did.  We celebrate Palm Sunday as Jesus enters Jerusalem.  A few days later, at the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus begged his Father for another way.  Is there another way to save us besides the cross?  The Father told Jesus there was no other way.   So Jesus looked at us, you and me, and said “What does love ask of me?”