Ultimate frisbee with Jesus

Just about the only sport I ever learned to play well was ultimate frisbee. I did play on the junior high girls’ basketball B-team, but – let’s be honest – that was really more slapstick than sport. So it was something of a surprise to find out in college that I could both throw and catch a frisbee, occasionally while running.

Interestingly, when I first heard that I needed to have a personal relationship with Jesus – a concept I also learned in college – ultimate frisbee with Jesus was the image that came to mind. After all, frisbee was something I did with people with whom I had personal relationships, people who could chase down my errant throws and join me afterwards for a cup of coffee and instant replay of our best displays of athleticism. So “personal relationship with Jesus” evoked for me a lively vision of the Messiah hiking up his robes and deftly tossing the frisbee among the campus pine trees. 

Basically, the idea of a personal relationship with Jesus completely confused me.

Many of my college friends seemed to have this “personal relationship,” which, from what I gathered, meant they felt like Jesus was tangibly present to them, speaking to them, walking beside them, making them feel better about bad stuff that happened, cheering them on, etc., the way a real live human friend would. Feeling pressured to have one myself, I asked a lot of people about their personal relationships with Jesus, hoping to get pointers. Because I didn’t have what they seemed to have, I often felt like my faith was inadequate and incomplete, and I couldn't sing any of the prolific praise songs about Jesus’ familiar presence without feeling uncomfortable and disingenuous.

Now, almost two decades later, I still wouldn’t characterize my experience of God or Jesus or the Holy Spirit as a “personal relationship,” at least not in the way most people who use that phrase seem to mean it. As during college, I can’t wrap my brain around how relationship with Jesus is like a relationship with my actual friends whom I see in daily life and who have actual human bodies and voices and personalities. Truthfully, in many ways Jesus is more mysterious to me now than he was when I first heard about the “personal relationship” I was supposed to have with him.

By now, though, I have made my peace with the fact that I don’t get “personal relationship” language about Jesus. It’s just not my thing, and I’m cool with it. I follow Jesus, I call myself a disciple of Jesus, I believe in Jesus. And I occasionally play frisbee (and more often drink coffee) with actual, living and breathing human friends who show me who Jesus is through their love and care.

Earlier this week, I read an article in The Christian Century entitled “A friend in Jesus?” that got me thinking about the  “personal relationship” question again. (The article is here, but you can only read it if you’re a CC subscriber. For a similar article by the same author, John Suk, click here. The article was adapted from his book, Not Sure: A Pastor’s Journey from Faith to Doubt, published by Eerdmans.) The article makes a case that the language of a “personal relationship with Jesus” – largely a construction of American culture’s emphasis on feeling and experience as marks of religious piety – may be a sign of our inability to find deeper meaning amid the distractions of material plenty. Says Suk:

Our society is individualistic and competitive at home, at work and in the public square… Our society is also a materialistic one, full of cars and furniture and boats and clothes and toys… we are waifs when it comes to meaning… we look for it in endless miles of shopping mall corridors or computer game avatars. Since we have eternity set in our hearts, we want an epiphany: we want to experience God. And I suspect that that longing is enough for a lot of people to mistake just about any intuition or good thought or warm fuzziness as being Jesus. The bottom line is that the huge emphasis that contemporary evangelicals put on a great personal experience of and with Jesus has little or nothing to do with scripture and everything to do with taking from our culture what it thinks happiness is all about.

Suk isn’t against religious experience, but, he says, “I want to make sure that it is connected to our tradition’s deepest wells rather than to individual and subjective interpretations of feelings that are characteristic not of faith, but of our culture’s inability to delve deep or long.”

As I read through the article, I was of two minds; the first was to feel slightly protective of my friends who do use “personal relationship” language and are deeply intelligent, thinking Christians. But my second mind felt vindicated. At last, here was someone who, all these years later, was articulating reasons for my discomfort with a personal relationship with Jesus.

Suk made a lot of points that resonated with me, but high among them was this: faith is the language of belief without seeing, belief without experiencing, belief despite the evidence. I’m a minister for Christ’s sake, and I can count on one hand the number of times in my whole life I’ve felt God right in front of me, fully present and personal – and those times are moments of incredibly unexpected and inexplicable mystery, profound awe, and often fear at the hugeness of What There Is beyond the little world I inhabit. By contrast, my tangible, day-to-day experiences of ordinary transcendence are generally in encounters with other people, flashes of insight and wisdom and grounding humility, and a hungry sense that things much bigger than me might just be active for the good.

One of the reasons John Suk penned this article is the same reason I’m writing this blog entry: language of personal relationship with Jesus can be confusing, and it can cause doubt and frustration when people don’t experience Jesus the way others seem to – especially when they feel pressured to. There’s nothing wrong with feeling like Jesus is with you every moment offering comfort and concern and correction and direction. But there’s also nothing wrong with not feeling like Jesus is with you every moment. It’s okay – and even biblical – to feel like God might more often be distant than next door. It’s okay – and biblical – to feel like your relationship with God is probably the weirdest and most unpredictable one you’ve got, and with feeling like you go long stretches between really experiencing things that are extraordinarily divine. And it’s okay – and biblical – to not really see or understand God’s action in the world, but believe in it anyway. That’s what faith is for.

After all, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8).