John Hemlock had a somewhat non-evangelistic approach to evangelical Christianity: He wasn’t as concerned about convincing you to accept Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior as he was about recommending the resulting lifestyle.
And by lifestyle, he didn’t mean the traditional taboos like not getting drunk or not cheating on your spouse or not using colorful language – he was more focused on the idea of “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
John also completely ignored the stuff about “I am the way and the truth and the light – no one can come to the Father except through me.”
“Hey look, this what works for me; you can go ahead and try any other way of getting to the Father if you’d like, or no way at all if that’s your choice,” Hemlock said. “I’m just tellin’ ya that this seems to be the only one that really works in my life. And the most important thing is dealing with each other with an attitude of love.”
His best example of that attitude was the life of Jesus – a guy who was held up as the savior who was going to lead the revolution that freed his hometown of Nazareth and the surrounding countryside from an empire based 1,400 miles away. They wanted him to be some sort of military hero, but he had something else in mind: “Love your neighbor.”
When the empire came to arrest Jesus, his buddies grabbed their swords and went after the officers – lopped off an ear or two – but he told them to stop and went quietly.
Then he went through a kangaroo court and was executed brutally, all the while talking about forgiveness. There’s some disagreement about what happened after the execution (John insists in literally believing the resurrection story – “otherwise he’s just some historical guy and not still alive, which of course he is”), but there’s no question that he started a movement that’s still going strong two and a half millennia later.
Had he led a military coup and forced his way to freedom, he would have just been another long-forgotten imaginary revolutionist. By concentrating on an internal revolution, Jesus made a lasting change.
“A lot of people have been killed over the years in the name of Christ,” I said to John Hemlock one day.
“Oh, don’t get me started,” he laughed. “The guy laid down a pretty tough foundation when he said ‘Love your enemies.’ A lot of people decided he couldn’t have been serious about that. But he was. And if the guy in front of you is not some damn Earthian who’d just as soon kill ya – if he’s an individual just as deserving of your love as the guy in the mirror – that kind of changes your attitude.”
That internal attitude struck me as a much better – and effective – way to regulate my behavior than an external government. I began to believe a peaceful everyday life could exist without the amorphous, threatening entity we call The State, if we were just willing to try treating each other with love and respect. “Love your neighbor as yourself” became the first of my three Tenets of Common Wealth and the basis of the “real” revolution on Sirius 4.
Entry 39. Give more than you receive
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